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Dear Mr. Yun Sangyeong:
You don’t know what you missed! We had a glorious sprinter-time OT in the cold countryside; the winter sunrise through the acacia trees yesterday morning was even better than the beer and 삼겹살 the previous evening. (And it was probably a lot healthier too!)
Your new classmates and your old ones (especially Ms. Choe and Ms. Yi) enlivened the beautiful scenery with good conversation. So did Professor An. She gave a marvelous presentation, one that raised some really VERY important issues (e.g. is good teaching REALLY about good teachers? If so, are good teachers REALLY about experience? If so, is experience mostly about UNCONSCIOUS knowledge or is it conceptualizeable? If it is conceptualizable, are CLT concepts like “learner centred” and “communicative” really scientific concepts or are they more like everyday concepts?).
Above all, Professor An showed us all that sociocultural, interpretive, qualitative research is really NOT an easy option; it’s messier and more complex and above all more theoretical than a lot of the quantitative, positivistic, comparative research being done.
The theoretical background is not simply frosting on the cake. In good qualitative research, the data doesn’t “generalize” statistically; we can’t and we don’t calculate the probability of an overgeneralization or an undergeneralization the way you can and do with a t-test or an ANOVA.
Instead, qualitative research illustrates a qualitative theory, and the theory rather than the data itself is what gives you the power of generalization. So instead of being an “easy option”, it turns out that qualitative research is, if anything, the hard option. The data gathering is hard. And the theoretical part is harder still.
That’s a very important point, but it’s also a somewhat DEPRESSING one. It means, I’m afraid, that qualitative, ethnographic research is great for Ph.D. candidates, and it’s even possible for the “on leave” teachers (e.g. Teacher Bak Eunhi, whose presentation was included in the conference programme). But it’s pretty tough for in service teachers, and really tough for YOU, Mr. Yun, because you are very busy (too busy to come to OT?).
Now, as it happens, Professor An’s main theory is the same as ours—it’s Vygotsky’s theory of learning and development, which is sometimes called “socio-cultural” (in the USA and UK) or “cultural-historical” theory (in Europe, South America, Africa and especially in Russia).
To tell you the truth, I don’t really care what we call Vygotsky’s theory. I just call it “Vygotsky’s theory”, and I think everybody who is really interested in it should read the new Korean translation of his last book 생각과말, done by one of our own students, Mr. Kim Yongho (Class of 2006) and see what Vygotsky himself said about it.
I also think Vygotsky would not have liked the term “sociocultural” because:
a) it seems redundant. I never heard of a society without a culture or a culture without a society. It seems to me that society and culture are like body and mind, and I hate terms like “embodied cognition”, which imply that somehow you can have cognition that is not embodied.
b) “sociocultural” has no obvious role for history, and I never heard of any change (learning OR development) that does not involve TIME.
And I think Vygotsky would not have liked the term “cultural-historical” either, because:
a) it seems to me that culture is the product of history, and not the other way around, so it should really be historical-cultural. Society and culture are the way they are because they do what they have to do, but they do what they have to do because they have been what they have been
b) neither culture nor history (nor biology) is what we want to study. We want to study development and learning!
In 2010 a number of papers from the Vygotsky archive were published for the first time, and one of them shows that Vygotsky never really decided what to call his psychology. He knew that he did NOT want to call it “Marxist” psychology.
Vygotsky was a Marxist, of course. But he wasn’t a party member, and he was rather suspicious of party members who tried to get money and favors from the government by yelling about “Marxist psychology”.
Besides, he didn’t believe in a “Marxist psychology” for the same reason he didn’t believe in a Darwinian sociology.
Of course, culture and history form the BACKGROUND to development and learning, in much the same way that biology and evolution from the background to culture and history. But what about the FOREGROUND? I think that the foreground for Vygotsky was development.
But for us, development is the background. The background is important, but it’s not what we see in data. What we see in data is not development, but learning, and neither Darwin, nor Marx, nor even Vygotsky will explain our data to us.
That, Mr. Yun, is where YOU and Ms. Choe and Ms. Yi come in. Vygotsky gives us the background to learning: Vygotsky helps us understand how the concept of the “cycle” develops as the years go by. But YOU have to find out exactly what happens moment by moment.
So I guess I would not call our approach “socio-cultural” or “cultural-historical” but rather “onto-microgenetic”; we are concerned with the way in which learning leads development, and development forms the background to learning.
Now that means that we will be gathering data on learning, and trying to link it to the developmental background in some way. So on Thursday, Ms. Choe is going to bring us some data on the AFFECTIVE COLORATION or the EMOTIONAL TONE of classroom language in Korean and in English.
It’s not a very precise idea, for the simple reason that emotions are not really ideas, and are not always very precise. But we need to be able to operationalize it some way; to make it measurable, or to link it something describable.
We decided to try to link it to intonation, and in particular to the intonation that you often hear in classrooms in response to ASTONISHMENT or SURPRISE, “와!” The idea is to find what “structure of feeling”, what exchanges, produce this kind of response.
We can imagine that pleasure, distaste, and surprise are often linked to pre-linguistic and paralinguistic features. So once Ms. Choe has recorded her data, she may need to use some of her CA skills to be able to transcribe them and interpret them.
Now, in some ways, Ms. Choe’s study forms the developmental BACKGROUND to Ms. Yi’s study. On Thursday, Ms. Yi will bring us some data on a word game that we invented. She’s interested in children’s ability to use verbs, first in composing a sentence, and second in “defending” the sentence, justifying it conceptually, by using the word “because” in answer to the question “why”.
First, Ms. Choe is going to be looking at the “because” relationship. Now, “because” is an interesting relationship, but in some ways it’s not the relationship YOU want. YOU are going to be describing life cycles—and for that, we want TIME relationships.
Try taking a look at THIS data. How is TIME expressed in it? Can you talk about it on Thursday?
T: Everybody, look at the screen(.)
Let's read together. repeat after me(.)
Pine trees(.) have a(.) life cycle(.)
T: Pine trees(.) have a(.) life cycle(.)
T: pine tree가 뭐였어요?
Ss: 소나무
T: HAVE?
Ss: 가지고 있다
T: 가지고 있어요? What?
Ss: 한 살이, life cycle
T: Let's look at the step.
First step(.) What's the first step.
Ss: CONE
T: How do you spell?
Ss : C(.) O(.) N(.) E(.)
T: First step is what?
Ss: CONE
T: Next step is(.) What's this.
인재: cone
T: 여기 떨어지는 거 보여요?
아영 : needle
T: 솔방울 보이고(.) 작은 가루가 떨어지는 거 보이지요?
Ss: 꽃가루?
Where, and how, does the teacher talk about ? The teacher is using a DIAGRAMME, of course. And when teachers use diagrammes of cycles, time is really represented by space.
Do you think the children understand “first” and “next” as the concept of TIME or do they simply understand it as a way of pointing to spaces? What could the teacher do and say to make sure that the children understand the words “first” and “next” as TIME words and not simply ways of pointing out and listing?
See you on Thursday, Mr. Yun!
dk