[this is the earliest version of the paper "On knitting and goats: Education, not learning, in one family" that should be consulted instead. This is only of historical interest.
What might happen if Lave & Wenger's "community of practive" (1991) was taken, strictly, and in research practice, as a model for the social structuring of a particular type of social interaction, the one I label "educational"?
Lave & Wenger, of course, present their model as a model for learning as a social process with practical participation as the key. By their very definition, the model is also a model for teaching as they emphasize and explore the "relations between newcomers and oldtimers" (1991: 29). Lave & Wenger, often my implications, but necessarily, emphasize the modes of control that, first, place a thereby acknowledged "newcomer" into a peripheral position, and then, second, through any number of practical activities, move the never-more-a-newcomer into a position of "full" participation--that is the position of an oldtimer. Fundamentally, this model makes it about impossible to separate "learning" from "teaching" as separate processes (though perhaps not as temporary positions within an interaction -- more about that later). By contrast the model, which I take in the sense Lévi-Strauss argued we should (1962 [1952] : 279) , requires the analysts to pay close attention to properties of a social interaction that may be in hidden in the more usual accounts but can then be shown to be most powerful on precisely the matter of general concern.
Sp, what might happen if Lave & Wenger's model is taken as a model for education as the mutual process through which people who are thereby made extremely significant to each other control--differentially--their life careers?
I present here two sequences taken from the everyday life of a family in the hope that they can help us begin to specify further the interactional properties of educational (mutual teaching/learning that leads to change in the position of the protagonists) encounters. Both sequences were pratically produced by a proud father (me) documenting moments in the life of his daughter (8 at the time). They were not produced as "research" but, on watching the sequences again 20 years or so later, they made me think further about instruction, interactional movement, pedagogy, curriculum, etc.--all matters that a full theory of education will have to address.
Initially this looks like a classic case of the teaching (by a grandmother), and the parallel learning (by a granddaughter) of a skill (knitting) outside of schooling. It would probably be classified by academic common sense as a matter of "informal education" and, less common sensically, as an instance of a kind of apprenticeship for which Lave & Wenger's is generally taken to apply most directly. We would have here a person-who-knows teaching a person-who-does-not-know but who, after a while, might get to know. One person (the teacher) would not change. The other (the learner) would. Such accounts may in fact reflect at least some of what is happening, cognitively, in the head of the participants but they obscure the social process. As I explained elsewhere (1999), theories of interaction must start with an assumption of ignorance about what is to be consequential in an environment--if only to deal with the possibility that what is to happen is (possibly dangerous) "play" or based on multiple lying (Varenne and Cotter 2006).
There is no evidence of lying in this sequence but there the overall frame may be closer to "play" than to "being serious." Eight-year old Kate had been introduced to knitting in her school, but this was vacation time; she had initiated the knitting at a time when grandmother happened to be present; it was not part of a regular event and, as far as I remember, this is the last time Kate ever knitted. The taped sequence starts well into the "knitting lesson." The two bodies have been holding the position for a while and stay in the same position, structurally, throughout. What I want to emphasize, however, is the continual movement of the two as they actually continually change what must be done next in order to remain within the constituted frame.
Specifically, almost all the instructing is done deictically and continually focuses on the physical movements Kate is making with her hands. This instructing includes both evaluations ("don't do it that way!" or "you are gettingit !") and general statements ("hold the needle like a pencil"). Above all, the instructions are changing in parallel to the changes in Kate's knitting. This is essential as it takes the interaction fully outside the realm of chitchat, exchanges of information, or school teaching. Grandmother is not giving Kate a "learning lesson" through any versions of the famous QAE series (Mehan 1979). At every stage, grandmother is tailoring her next utterance as acknowlegment of learning, hypothesis about new ignorance, instruction about clearing this new ignorance--while at the same time encouraging Kate along. The sequence might be one that goes
There is no evaluation (in the school sense here), no "failure"--but of course, a lot other matters that remain to be elucidated.
Obviously, for the model of education I am developing here, it does not matter whether the "teacher" is an adult or a child. The model acknowledges a constituted assymetry between the protagonists. In the goats sequence, the assymetry is established by Kate who constructs her father as ignorant about various facts of goats life, in general, and in the particularities of the particular goats they are going to see. As I remember it, father had not asked for a lesson. He just set up a sequence when Kate would show him the goats with whom she had spent time. This was to be a "family video."
Kate begins with a warning ("I may not be able to find the baby") followed by a general explanation ("because they always run around."). Father, unaware (uninterested?) that he is being educated gives acting directions ("call the dog"). Kate acknoledges these directions ("Fanny") but then goes back to what her father may not know ("they are always wondering if you have any feed") and is to be specified.
One facinating matter about this sequence is that it proceed much less diactically than the knitting one. One might say that it proceeds in terms of a set of mini-lectures. The statements are meta-instructional and, to the extent that they often refer to accounts of practical activities, they are a matter of meta-pragmatics. The issue is not only to instruct someone but to instruct them about possible further instructions (or impossibilities to instruct). In a certain way, one approaches the world of humanistic schooling before the School was given the task to evaluate merit. That is, if you approach someone who knows about goats and ask them to tell you about goats, they will "tell" you about goats--even in the absence of goats. What you then do with these statements is not a matter of direct concern except perhaps in a specific matter that ties all this to what we have learned about conversation from ethnomethodologists but may not have been quite pushed as hard as it might have to be. A "next utterance" within a conversation must in some way acknowledge the utterance to which it is "next"--as well as prefigure a possible further utterance. What I am emphasizing here is that this acknowledgment involves a multiplicity of changes: changes in the shape of the utterance from what it might have been if it did not have to acknowledged the one it is next to; changes
Note that the sequence is a bilingual one but that there is no specified educating about either French or English. The sequence is about goats (and sheep and rabbits). They are the matter of local consequence. Knowledge and ignorance about them is what is accountable. The most that can be said about the linguistic relationship between Kate and her father is that it does not change in any way that the participants might mark during this sequence.