Review of John Lucy, \u3cem\u3eLanguage Diversity and Thought\u3c/em\u3e

In this volume Lucy provides an incisive review of American literature on the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and a provocative reformulation of it. Lucy is comfortable in each of the major disciplines relevant to the language and thought debate - anthropology, linguistics, and psychology - and he provides a comprehensive reassessment. He also provides clear, balanced discussions of the difficult issues involved

Heterogenously Distributed Cognition

Advocates of distributed cognition argue that cognitive accomplishments rely in part on structures outside the individual mind - structures located in other minds or in artifacts that we think with. This paper argues that, in some cases, interactional structure can also make essential contributions to cognition. The data are transcribed classroom discussions, in which teachers and students use language to establish both referential and interactional patterns. The analyses use techniques from linguistic pragmatics, to uncover emergent interactional structure in the conversations and to show how this structure might make essential contributions to the cognitive value of those conversations

Mapping Deictics: A Technique for Discovering Teachers\u27 Footing

This article presents a systematic technique for uncovering interactional patterns in conversation. While an indefinite number of verbal and paralinguistic cues can potentially establish interactional structure, one type of form often plays a central role. Deictics systematically index aspects of the context, and these forms often sketch out the framework of an interactional event. This article discusses and illustrates the methodological usefulness of one type of deitic in particular - participant deitics, or personal pronouns . It analyzes five minutes of a classroom conversation, and shows how systematic attention to participant deitics helps uncover the interactional dynamics. The paper ends by considering the limitations of this methodological technique

The Heterogeneously Distributed Self

Recent work in distributed and situated cognition has moved away from psychological structure as the primary explanation for human understanding. Instead, structures at various levels of explanation - at least the linguistic, social, cultural, interactional, and mental - together constitute successful cognition. Analogously, this article argues the self is not primarily a psychological entity, but instead emerges from structures at various levels of explanation. The article focuses on the level of interactional positioning in conversation to illustrate how non-psychological structure can partly constitute the self. It focuses on the interactional positioning done by narrators as they tell stories about themselves and describes the interactional functions of autobiographical narrative discourse. Bakhtin\u27s theory of language\u27s interactional functions is drawn and applied to one life story

Curriculum as a Resource for the Development of Social Identity

This article describes how categories from the curriculum can play a central role in the interactional construction of students’ identities. Drawing on data from one ninth-grade English and history class across an academic year, the article describes an adolescent who was assigned and came to enact the identity of a disruptive outcast from the classroom community. It then describes how this student’s identity development was facilitated by discussions of a curricular theme. The article traces the student’s trajectory across the year and then analyzes one classroom discussion in detail, showing the interactional construction of her alienation from school and how this construction was mediated through curricular categories

What Does Philosophy Have to Offer Education, and Who Should Be Offering It?

In this review essay Stanton Wortham explores how philosophy of education should both turn inward, engaging with concepts and arguments developed in academic philosophy, and outward, encouraging educational publics to apply philosophical approaches to educational policy and practice. He develops his account with reference to two recent ambitious projects: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, edited by Harvey Siegel, and the two-volume yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE), titled Why Do We Educate? edited by Gary Fenstermacher (series editor), David Coulter and John Wiens (volume 1), and Mark Smylie (volume 2). These two projects initially appear to be opposed, with the Handbook emphasizing elite philosophy and the Yearbook emphasizing public engagement. Wortham argues that each project is in fact more complex, and that they are in some respects complementary. He concludes by making a case against a simple hierarchy of basic and applied knowledge and calling for a more heterogeneous philosophy of education

Gender and School Success in the Latino Diaspora

More and more Latinos are moving to areas of the US where few Latinos have settled before - a migration that has been called the new Latino diaspora (Hamann, 1999; Villenas, 1997). This paper describes an isolated community of about two hundred Latinos, located in a small rural Northern New England town that I call Havertown. When I knew them in the mid-1990s, almost all community members were Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans who had lived in or passed through South Texas, whose families had at some recent point been involved in migrant agricultural labor, and who came from rural working-class backgrounds. Over the prior ten years they had been recruited to Havertown to work at a local meat processing plant

Students and Teachers as Novelists

Colleoni High is a large three-story brick building that occupies an entire city block. Although the custodians work diligently - so that the tile floors often shine and the bathrooms are clean - the physical plant is deteriorating. Paint peels off the ceilings in most hallways and classrooms, and the building feels old. When it was built about 50 years ago, Colleoni High enrolled primarily Catholic children from Irish and Italian backgrounds. Now the neighborhood has become predominantly African American, together with smaller but growing populations of Latino and South Asian immigrants

Review of Jean Quigley, \u3cem\u3eThe Grammar of Autobiography: A Developmental Account\u3c/em\u3e

In The Grammar of Autobiography, Jean Quigley makes a claim that one often hears nowadays - that the self is constructed in autobiographical narrative discourse. Two things distinguish her analysis of narrative self-construction from many other treatments of the subject. First, she offers a genuinely interdisciplinary account, drawing on functional linguistics, theoretical and developmental psychology, and accounts of language development. Second, she studies a particular category of linguistic forms, modals, as the key to narrative self-construction

Review of Robert W. Rieber and Aaron S. Carton, \u3cem\u3eCollected works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volumes 3 and 4\u3c/em\u3e

Since it branched off from philosophy in the 19th century, psychology has had a troubled, dual nature. Some have envisioned another natural science, one that offers causal explanations for behavior. Others have envisioned a humanistic science, one that offers context-specific descriptions of meaningfulness in human experience. The first group reduces behavior to natural mechanisms. The second insists that humanity be described in intentional or spiritual terms. Writing in the 1920s and \u2730s, Lev Vygotsky claimed that this split within psychology had created a crisis because it had prevented the field from gaining wide acceptance like the natural sciences. Although progress has been made over the past 70 years, Vygotsky\u27s description rings uncomfortably true today