Saljo (2007).
Lecture on the occasion of the opening of The Oxford Centre for Sociocultural activity theorey Research, Deprtment of Education, University of Oxford, March 14,.
Studying learning and knowing in social practices. Units of analysis and tensions in theorizing.
Congruence ( or lack of ) between object of the enquiry and the unit of analysis cites
• nonsense syllables in the context of memory research i.e. nonsense syllable designed to be neutral for previous learning.
• Piagtian designed tasks p1 ‘When considering what the children were engaged in from what Wittgenstein refers to as a first-person perspective, the difficulties children experienced seemed to have had much to do with the extent to which they were able to share the situation definition and establish some kind of intersubjectivity with the experimenter.’ Rather than be indicative of a stage of cognitive competence .
From a socio-cultural perspective, the object of analysis deviates from other perspectives.
take one example, the notion that learning and knowing are “situated in human practices”
but has it being misinterpreted?
a claim that there are no regularities in human behaviour or that the individual and his or her background when engaging in an activity play no role. Thus, a claim of this kind is often understood as saying that all human action is relative to context, and that people in this sense are merely responding to whatever they encounter. This brings the notion of situatedness quite close to a behaviourist epistemology, as some have pointed out. People are seen as behaving rather that acting. The reason for this interpretation is at some level easy to understand. Scholars in the behavioural sciences are so habituated to the individual as the unit of analysis that it is difficult to see how objectives of research such as generalization of knowledge and testing of hypothesis could be achieved otherwise.
Important insights and years of empirical research risk being silenced by the way in which representatives of the two perspectives construe each others’ positions with respect to the definitions of the object of inquiry and a relevant unit of analysis.
‘the fact that our interpretations of how to conceive of learning and other cognitive activities differ is precisely what we should be able to profit from when looking at the relationships between objects of inquiry and units of analysis. Thus, we should learn that different traditions could develop increasingly sophisticated understandings, but that they do this within a particular framework with certain premises. Neither is studying the privileged, most real, version of whatever we are attending to.’
‘In rationalist and idealist traditions, for instance in mainstream cognitivism and in differential psychology, the notion of the correspondence between what is in fact studied and what is conceptualised ( according to S a dualist perspective) has always been deeply problematic, although it may not have appeared so.’
Furthermore, quite often such general objects of inquiry as learning and memory are reified and come to be grounded in an object-like and biological or pseudo-biological conception of what is studied (Säljö, 2002). The schemas, the mental models and the various kinds of memory systems soon appear as reifications with specific characteristics that can be measured in objectivist manners.
This tendency to reify psychological processes represents an attempt to gain clarity, and maybe even respectability, by connecting learning and other cognitive processes with the biological substrate of the human mind, or, nowadays, even the brain. This implies that what is being observed and attended to as the unit of analysis is taken to be indicative of how the brain works in some specific cognitive sense. This attempt to ground cognitive phenomena in biological structures is evident in some of Piaget’s work. For instance, his argumentation in relation to the concept of “structure” attempts to provide such links between meaning making and biological structures. In his discussion of “logicomathematical structures”, he argues that these “structures essentially involve relations of inclusion, order, and correspondence. Such relations are certainly of biological origin, for they already exist in the genetic (DNA) programming of embryological development as well as in the physiological organization of the organism” (Piaget, 1970, p. 706). Thus, the “origin of these logicomathematical structures should be sought in the activities of the subject, that is, in the most general forms of coordinations of his actions, and, finally, in his organic structures.” (loc. cit.). Another sign of this reification of the object of inquiry is to try to measure it as in the case when the size of long-term memory has been assessed or when one asks how many memory systems or intelligences there are (Gardner, 1983; Landauer, 1986; Tulving, 1984). In our time, in the context of the growing success and influence of the neurosciences, this interpretation of the link between the object of inquiry and the relevant unit of analysis is very evident. What we see is to some extent a return to some of the features of localization theories of human functioning that have been strong earlier in history.
The socio-cultural alternative
As we all know this is what Vygotsky struggled with in many of his writings. One of his consistently explicit and implicit questions was: How can learning and development be understood as genuinely human, i.e. sociocultural, phenomena? In what sense is the sociocultural line of development of the child different from the biological one? (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986). What are the intellectual tools we need to document and analyse such matters on a level so that the specific features of the mediated nature of human language, thinking, reasoning, interaction and aesthetic experiences are preserved. An important part of the problem of achieving this lies in the choice of units of analysis that correspond to the objects of inquiry as understood in this tradition.
Already in his theorizing Vygotsky pointed to many observations that indirectly tell us that there is something deeply problematic with the notion of the unit of analysis that was used in testing children’s competences. For instance, the much discussed concept of Zone of Proximal Development immediately implies that the unit of analysis for understanding human knowing cannot be the restricted to individual performance. The child, when engaged in co-operation with ‘a more capable peer’ is able to solve more difficult problems than when working alone, as the definition of the ZPD goes. This implies that the object of inquiry requires a different unit of analysis in order to be interesting from a sociocultural perspective. This unit of analysis must be incorporate interaction and joint meaning-making between people.
as Linell (1992) has demonstrated, our actions are contextualized in a double manner, both in the context of the local activity we are engaged in, and in the on-going institutionalized activities of which this local practice is an established constituent. This double contextualization is also the reason why we need a concept of culture and a cultural-historical understanding of human learning.
On externalization of cognition
‘So, what we are experiencing at present is how technologies transform learning practices and the division of labour between people and tools. Why is this interesting in the context of the issue of the relationship between objects of inquiry and units of analysis? One reason for addressing this issue is that it is becoming increasingly interesting to ask the question: Where is the knowing? As I have argued, it is increasingly in the coordination between people and tools, and through the externalization of what was previously human thought processes, carried out step by step and often on the basis of learned algorithms, we engage in activities without anything near full mastery of the procedural work carried out by the tool. When appropriating such tools we can often learn to use them for practical purposes in local practices, while at the same time be more or less ignorant of how they operate. In sociocultural terms this can be understood as an appropriation of a range of representational systems and technologies that come together in one piece of technology which has an interface which is relatively easy to learn. However, my insight into each of these may be very limited, in fact I may be more or less ignorant. But can I navigate? Yes and no! With the GPS, I can do it, with earlier technologies such as compasses my skills may not be sufficient. But with Wittgenstein’s criterion of understanding and knowing where he argues that “understanding is like knowing how to go on” (§ 875, 1980), I certainly know how to go on with the activity of navigating if I have the GPS navigator around.’
And therefore his argument against units of analysis and a positivist approach
‘Rather than repeating what is already there, learning has become the ability to put previous insights and experiences to use in relevant manners; it has become future oriented.’ We learn, but we learn differently from previous generations. A consequence of this is that in research we can subsume less and less of our understanding on such traditionally very general notions as learning and remembering, and more and more will have to be an understanding that is relevant to activities and activity systems.
Säljö, R. (2002). My brain's running slow today-the preference for "things ontologies" in research and everyday discourse on human cognition. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21(389-405).
