Ray McDermott and Jean Lave once told me that they asked Rancière whether his writing influenced his teaching. As they tell it, he looked surprised and answered something like “not at all!” A reader of Successful Failure once asked me whether I still gave grades. Besides stuttering, I said something like: “I am required to (by my university and New York State)” and/or “students would not accept my not giving them grades.”
Category Archives: apprenticeships
about the various consequences of approaching all forms of education as apprenticeships
Instruction, uncertainty, and meta-pragmatic repairing in medical education
When I teach Lave and Wenger’s (1991) altogether brief introduction to “legitimate peripheral participation,” I do not teach it as a theory of learning but as a model for social structuring in Lévi-Strauss’s sense (1962 [1952]). But Lévi-Strauss was seeking to model a moment in the organization of a people while Lave, in a major development, seeks to model movement through social structurings when everyone and everything involved in the movement constitute this structuring as it will be available for the future. By an implication that remains to be developed, Lave also opened the way for a modeling of culture change.
In brief, for those who do not know the background to this approach, Lave asks us to move from imagining participation in any position as dependent on earlier learning to imagining this participation itself as producing some personal learning. Thereby she argues that a personal movement into a position is dependent on mechanisms other than learning (or socialization/enculturation). These are the mechanisms that make the initial positioning “legitimate” and authorize the acknowledgment of movement. Wondering about legitimacy and authorization leads to searches for the interactional, political forces that establish legitimate participation, authorize certain forms of leaning, and thus of course, refuse participation, does not acknowledge learning, etc.
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When the young teach the young, what is the emerging order? Where are the controls? How would we find out?
A while ago, I found a way to keep my sanity at the AAA meetings: play “session roulette.” I recommend it. The rules are simple: walk down any corridor and, without paying attention to any signs about the title of the session, or the timing of presentations, enter the room, seat at the back, listen for a while, and then leave before frustration or boredom overwhelms. Playing this (not very deep) game, I have sometimes made wonderful discoveries: Chuck Goodwin reporting on a conversation with his aphasic father about importing California oranges to Florida (“No!”), hot disputes around the “Eve hypothesis” (one of the rare times I actually heard anthropologists passionately argue with each other during a session!), or, this year, wonderfully detailed accounts of “liturgical dancing” around the world (I actually stayed for the whole session: I could imagine myself as Marcel Mauss reading ethnographies of ritual performances!).
But mostly, I listen to the courageous efforts of young women and men (mostly women actually) who tell other young women and men (same caveat) “giving” a paper. I am sure the association someplace has the statistics about the relative seniority of presenters. My altogether not random sense is that they are mostly at the very beginning of their career. Since I have the privilege to teach quite a few of the presenters, I experience the pressure all actors (stakeholders, those entangled in this web, or caught by the spider) are under: individuals have to build up their curriculum vitae, professors must advise them to present early and often, professional associations (journals, etc.) must provide the opportunities for public displays.
Continue reading When the young teach the young, what is the emerging order? Where are the controls? How would we find out?
given arbitrariness, then instruction…
Fieldnote:
Professor fiddles with computer in full view of about 30 graduate students. Complains audibly that he can’t get rid of something on the screen. One student (or more) suggests clicking on what seems the offending screen overlay. Professor clicks there, and then clicks somewhat wildly on various options. Apparent success. The overlay shrinks. But now the cursor is wrong. A(nother? Or more) student suggests something like “click on the ‘x’ in the upper right corner. Professor complies and is satisfied with the result. Professor then uses the sequence he has thereby ended as an example of “distributed cognition.”
And now I, the professor expands on this discussion in the context of the class discussion about arbitrariness and culture. As we move from identifying the properties of a social field (culture, semiotic system, etc.) to acting within this field, the essential question then becomes: how do human beings deal with the arbitrariness of their world, including the ongoing evolution of new forms of arbitrariness. This, for a social scientist is an empirical question. For an anthropologist inspired by conversational analysis, this is also one that must be answered through examining closely instances when, arguably, people face arbitrariness in the midst of a collectivity. Thus the exemplary usefulness of the above example.