Review_Author: Oliver Yanwei Zhang
Book_Author: Jean Lave
Book_Title: Cognition i practice
Date: 4/10/99
Time: 9:04:41 AM
Remote Name: 128.175.50.11
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Lave
In "Cognition in practice", Jean Lave tries to demonstrate the validity of and convert us to what Geertz calls "outdoor psychology" or to what she calls social anthropology. This move out can be realized in several senses: "out of the laboratory, out of the head, out of a confusion with a rationalistic 'culture', out of conflation with conventional 'knowledge structures', and out of the role of order-producing, primary constraint on activity in the world" (189).
The major study Lave has conducted to justify the above theoretical move is the Adult Math Project (AMP), an observational and experimental investigation of everyday arithmetic practices in different settings, although the design of the project suggests such a theoretical orientation is presupposed. What makes AMP a break from the cognitive researches in what she calls the functionalist tradition includes, among others, the study of the real situations (grocery shopping in supermarket and kitchen practice of Weight Watchers); the tasks NOT ENTIRELY based on normative model; and a close look at the ethnography of subjects. Basically there are three implications out of the results of the AMP.
First, a correlative analysis of the arithmetic performances of subjects in the actual and simulated situations of practice and in school math tasks, as well as the correlation of such performances with the ethnographic data, show that school math is not a predictive factor in the success or failure of everyday arithmetic practice. Therefore there is apparently a lack of learning transfer across different situations based on the discrepancies in success rate, type of errors, and procedures of problem solving. On the one hand, the project has been cleverly designed to maximize the difference of everyday situation and school setting. On the other hand, there seems to be a problem with the author's treatment of the routine nature of everyday practice. This routine, in my understanding, may have transformed the everyday practice in such a way that the initial impact of schooling (school math in this case) has been concealed, a point that can be clarified only when the initial state of practice (like first time grocery shopping) can be recorded and analyzed. In other words, before judging transfer or non-transfer one needs to deal more carefully with questions like what can be transferred and what cannot, what is transferred and what is not, and most importantly, what kind of transfer do we expect.
Rather than answering these questions about transfer, a topic taking almost half the space of the first part of the book, Lave puts them aside and raises other questions more appropriate for her reasoning. "And we shall ask instead how activities come together and shape each other on different occasions, and what are the processes which generate qualitative differences among arithmetic activities. And we shall ask what structuring resources are brought to bear in a given situation to give quantitative relations their form and meaning"(97). My thanks to Eugene who lets me read Wenger before Lave so I at least know what is structuring resources -- Lave does like defining terms, as in the other article of hers we have read. What she basically finds or assumes include (not in the order of the chapters): the real object of analysis is neither cognition nor culture but the activities of persons-acting in settings; problems are born from dilemmas which in turn are born from conflicting principles of social constitution; in actual practice problems are not always solved but frequently resolved or managed or dissolved (let's drop this quantitative question because I have other qualitative concerns); context needs to be replaced by arenas (constraining) and settings (constructable relation between acting persons and arenas); math as a reified object is not an end in itself, what counts is the proportional articulations of structuring resources which happen to include math in those situations; etc.. Unfortunately, what my poor mind can find, in spite of or because of all these excitements, is not much more than an interesting account of what is happening in shopping trips and diet meal making. Unlike Rogoff who restrains herself from quick judgements and generalizations, Lave moves more readily towards conclusions often over-generalized. By the way, Capon and Kuhn's studies fall victims for the failure of generating genuine situations of practice, a failure in fact shared by the AMP, only to a less degree.
Third, and one also making me uncomfortable, is Lave's attack (though speculative) on the status and meaning of rationality in practice based on the result of the AMP. "[T]he concept of rationality has no general scientific power (being ideological) to account for more or less powerful forms of cognition, the efficacy of schooling, or anything else", and the universality of rational model of good thinking can no longer be used as a scientific yardstick with which to evaluate situated cognitive activities. While these claims may stand on their own, I don't think they can be induced from the Adult Math Project per se. Rationality has nothing to do with using or not using math, or with using what kind of math, or with whether people show commitment to school math. What I find in the conversations between the subjects and the observers are completely rational decision-makings bases on the subject's awareness of the situatedness of their action. Such awareness is even intensified by the presence of observers in this "natural" investigation.
On the whole, I would like to say that Lave's book is both inspiring and confusing. She makes some bold and original theoretical moves towards a social theory of practice and activity, though without bothering to make them very comprehensible (her account of the dialectical relations inside the model of activity is much less clear than that found in Wenger). On the other hand, some of her conclusions drawn from empirical data are over-stretched and sound more like assumptions. I will recommend this book to those who are seasoned in the situated learning and social-historical tradition. For beginners, including me, better start with another book.