Category Archives: Sociocultural

Writing for publication

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Researchers write all the time, writing is the means through which we work on and work out our ideas. We don’t just write up – we have not found a transparent truth which we then just put into words. Writing is a representation – we make choices and what we choose to write is a situated approximation.

In writing an article we are advancing what we know and also producing a representation of it. We are not just producing a text, we are producing ourselves as scholars — we are doing identity work.

Rhetorically, we are producing persuasive texts that persuade the reader that what we have done is a contribution to knowledge. The genre of the journal article is an argument. Research writing is dialogic. There are internal conversations which invite readers to make meaning. Don’t make it like a laundry list. Invite the reader in to make meaning. Encourage readers to make associations with other conversations (mainly through references).

When looking at a journal, consider the editorial board. Would you like to meet them and have a conversation with them? Look at recent issues. Which conversations are going on? Do you want to engage with them? Why do people need to know about what you are writing about – this gives a method of selecting a journal. What is the readership and what do they already know? This helps to create a space for your article. Significance is so what and now what? What’s new? What’s different? What does this add to the conversation? Don’t let other scholars do all the talking in your article. Refer to them, but don’t be overpowered by them.

The strongest papers usually have one point to make. They make that point powerfully, with evidence, and they locate that point within the orevious literature.

Can you do an elevator pitch on your article?

Continuing to talk the talk

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gerund.jpgIf you look at the list of sociocultural terms I listed a couple of posts back, you’ll observe that they’re not words which you’d expect to hear in day-to-day conversation. They also prove to be difficult words to use in a thesis, and I’ve been struggling to use any of them in my current chapter.

So instead I’m taking out the words which suggest that learning is a noun rather than a verb. To paraphrase Molesworth, ‘no place for gerunds in my thesis’.

I’ve just spent some time removing the word ‘fact’ from my chapter, and I’m now vacillating about whether to remove the word ‘decision’ or to replace it with ‘decision-making process’.

Talking the talk

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My supervisors pointed out that, if I’m writing my thesis from a sociocultural perspective, I need to use the appropriate discourse.

I do start off doing this, and then I start to use synonyms to stop it getting bland and repetitive. But, of course, the synonyms aren’t exactly synonyms and, before I know it, I’ve wandered off towards a completely different metaphor for learning, in which ideas are things to be completed and transferred, rather than ongoing processes.

In order to help me pin my use of vocabulary down more successfully, they’ve set me to reading an article by Roger Säljö, specifically so that I can identify the appropriate sociocultural language. So the following are terms you can expect to see in my thesis 🙂

Appropriating concepts, appropriation, competence, conceptual constructions,  conceptual framework, conceptual resources, constituting a phenomenon, cultural resources,  discourses, discursive community, discursive nature of human knowledge, discursive patterns, discursive practices, dominant metaphor, enculturation, how individuals are positioned in relation to specific social practices, how individuals are able to identify the situationally appropriate referential meaning of a concept, how reality is constituted in social practices, linguistically mediated knowledge, linguistic tools, mediational means, mediated nature of human activity, paradigm, situatedness is fundamental, socialise, social practices, sociogenetic, transformation.

Going around in circles

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In the last month my entire thesis has undergone a radical rethink, as I have moved completely away from community, to consideration of temporality in the context of asynchronous dialogue. I think this is the right move to make – I’ve got excellent data to support a study of temporality, and it fits in with lots of my other interests – from history to English language, it all has the potential to jigsaw together.

 BUT… I’ve only got six months to go. Six. Count them. And they include the summer holidays and the Easter holidays, and the inevitable period when my thesis is out being reviewed by someone as yet unidentified. And temporality is a huge field to be taking on – especially when no one really seems to have dealt with temprality in the context of asynchronous dialogue.

Time for analysis

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Not so much a blog post, as a thinking process.

When I pointed out in my lit review that a key thing about asynchronous dialogue was, um, it was asynchronous, I didn’t realise I’d then get tied up in a whole new debate about time scales, and learning trajectories and how you study the temporal aspect of classroom talk. This is scarily wide ranging. The article I’ve just read goes from the nano second (chemical synthesis, on a scale of 10 seconds to the power of minus five) to the 32-billion-year time scale (universal change, on a scale of 10 seconds to the power of 18). The semester, should you be interested, is fairly central in this scale (10 seconds to the power of seven, or four months in regular speak), Actually, the course I’m studying ran from November to February, which puts it about midway between chemical synthesis and universal change. Hmmm, I think I need to narrow my focus 🙂

The Martini affordances of asynchronous dialogue – any time, any place, anywhere – tie in with a temporal analysis, because people tend to claim that you can do it any time. But, of course, you can’t. In fact, my groups are all weaving together extremely different timetables. They’re in different timezones, they’re at work from six till midnight, they’re out pumping iron, they’re leafing through the articles in their lunch hour, they’re online while the baby is asleep, or in the few minutes before the library closes, or before they collapse for the evening with a glass of wine. This in comparison with the F2F residential school, where everyone has dropped everything to spend a week on a group project. So, in the background, is always the regular routine – the things which people just can’t get out of doing, especially when they can go online anytime.

Then there’s the several-year timescale. They’ve done one or more other OU courses, they’re probably signed up for a few in the future, they’re training for a career, they’re looking forward to further qualifications. This course is a small segment of the time in which they become psychologists.

There’s the course timescale, or the section of it I’m focusing on, the first few days when they meet for the first time and put together their project proposal.

And there are the individual postings – the pieces which are put together to make up the project proposal.

And there is the Project Proposal Form, the improvable object which they move through those few days, changing it a little or a lot, focusing on finishing it and getting it to the right place at the right time. I think if I justfocus on that as the improvable object, I miss something about the group as an improvable object. They start with  a number of individuals, who have been put together on a list, and they end the few days as a group working together. I think perhaps I’m interested in both of those. And, indeed, if I look at the things that students and tutors set as goals, some of them are things like, critique the last version, or add final details to the PPF, but some are things like get to know each other’s strengths or just, enjoy the weekend.

And, of course, the postings also carry forward through time, and they are also developed and improved as people copy them and quote them. Hmm. This might be where part of my typographical analysis comes in. So I might focus on improvable objects, and I might set the timescales section as background description rather than as analysis? And I have to keep making sure I’m linking back to asynchronous dialogue (AD). How does AD help with this, and how do these improvable objects support the learning with AD? Would they be possible or similar with F2F or synchronous dialogue?

Vygotsky and squirrels

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vygotsky.jpgI’m reading the Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky and trying to make sense of my notes on Boris Meshcheryakov’s chapter on Terminology in Vygotsky’s writings. Here’s my version of his explanatory chart (which I can’t persuade WordPress to render legibly) – and a worked example involving squirrels.

Natural form of behaviour. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, smile, go back to my computer.
Sign-mediated/social/primitive. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny photo that Gill took of a squirrel, smile, go back to my computer. (There’s a mediating sign, created by another but neither of us considered using it for this purpose).
Sign-mediated/social/higher. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny photo of a squirrel that Gill took to make me smile, smile, go back to my computer. (Gill has used signs to influence my behaviour).
Sign-mediated/individual/primitive. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and go back to my computer. (One of my signs unexpectedly mediates my behaviour.)
Sign-mediated/individual/higher/external. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and go to look for pictures of squirrels on Flickr. (I use a sign to modify my behaviour and thoughts.)
Sign-mediated/individual/higher/internal. I look out of the window, see the squirrel, think of a funny picture of a squirrel that I took, smile and start to devise in my head a funny card about a squirrel that I could create for Gill.
So that is six situations in which externally I do exactly the same thing (although my return to the computer is delayed in the final case) but my mental function is different.

Community or community of practice?

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I’ve run into a real problem with the idea of ‘comunity of practice’. What is the difference between a CoP and a community?

Lots of people just take the CoP idea as is, and run with it. People who critique the ideas seem to do so in terms of thinking the model through – do people really move from novice to expert, what does it mean to be marginalised or excluded?

Lave and Wenger developed the idea when thinking about apprentice-based learning. Now, there seems to be a fairly clear distinction between learning by doing and learning by studying, so they were looking about learning by doing – and, of course, it was more complex than it looks at first glance. And this led them to the communities of practice model, which makes a lot of sense.

And, largely in response to this, people developed the idea of a community of learners or a learning community. Because, if learning is social and situated, then the non-vocational learners must be doing it as well, mustn’t they?

But has anyone really taken this back to the notion of community and asked how these subsets are useful?

There seem to be two literatures. First there is the virtual/physical community literature. This looks at communities and asks whether they are possible without a physical basis. And the answer is generally yes, except for the people who feel that network is a more useful term than community in an online context. Then there is the community of learners/community of practice literature. This explores these concepts, but relates them to learning rather than to community. So, if you think along sociocultural lines then you use these models and if you think along other lines you either ignore them or haven’t really noticed them.

But nobody seems to be saying – once you take away the geographical criterion for a community – then all communities are communities of practice. And, if that’s the case then the ‘of practice’ bit becomes redundant. And it particularly becomes redundant because it’s almost impossible to uncover what ‘practice’ means in this context, because it seems to mean everything that a community does and all the resources which it draws on. And a community that does nothing and has no resources isn’t a community in my book.

I think Lave and Wenger have held on to distinction which is not valid at their level of analysis – the distinction between book learning and practice-based learning. Once you have a definition of learning as a collaborative situated process then that applies equally to all learning – and it is a feature of a comunity. I think then, the appropriate distinction is between communities which intentionally focus on learning and those which do not. What is more, I think that those learning communities are invariably sub-sets of other communities.

CAL Monday noon

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OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work. 

Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth
See also: Kelly, Peter (2006) What is teacher learning? A socio-cultural perspective. Oxford Review of Education 32 (4)


Peter distributed a draft copy of the related research paper. This has an excellent bibliography, which is really relevant to me. All the right keywords: asynchronous written discourse, identity exploration, online community of practice… 

He has carried out six case studies in an online community of prractice related to an education MA. The students were able to immerse themselves in problems brought to the comunity by their tutor (I’m not sure I’d relish the opportunity to immerse myself in problems 🙂  ) Peter explores the success of the community in supporting identity exploration and transformation. participants describe tensions between their professional identities and the identities ascribed to them by their professional circumstances.

There is an interesting section on the key role writing plays in promoting and developing lifelong professional learning, which we should reference in our blogging article.

The paper focuses on three areas:

1 the influence of their relationship to the technology on students’ participation in the online  community
2 identity exploration and change
3 The quality of the asynchronous written dialogue.

FirstClass as a tool

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Reading Guy Claxton on ‘Learning to Learn’. He’s taking a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) approach. He says that the student is:

‘learning in the context of, and with the aid of, a host of culturally constituted tools – books, symbols, computer graphics – which afford or invite certain approaches to the learning task and preclude others. The settings in which people find themselves – especiall those which they inhabit recurrently – thus channel the growth of their minds.’

Something to consider in the light of FirstClass, and of SecondLife.

Sociocultural perspective (7.2.06)

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‘According to the sociocultural perspective, human learning cannot be fully undestood without understanding human activity. In studying learning, therefore, one should focus on how tools, mental and material, are used in human activity and how humans construct knowledge and understanding by the use of tools. Moreover, the physical and social environments are considered integral to the learning activity. This conceptualisation of learning implies that it matters where the learning occurs.’ (Ingvill, p5)

Ingvill takes this to mean, from the point of view of ICT, that the important things are how it influences communication and how information is organised, stored, retrieved and interpreted. But also important, for me, is how identities are established. I think this is also true for the sort of classroom use of ICT that Ingvill was examining – the children who identify as expert users, or competent users, or unwilling users, or the ones that never get a chance to use the keyboard.