Chapter 24

Can We Afford Theories of Learning?

Ray McDermott

Learning . . . is fond, and proud, of what has cost it much pains; is a great lover of rules, and boaster of famed examples . . . learning inveighs against natural unstudied graces, and small harmless inaccuracies, and sets rigid bounds to the liberty . . . Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)

If American culture were an Internet, the domain name learning would be owned outright by the testing services that use it to feed the yearnings of parents and their schoolchildren. The bell curve of learning guides and legitimizes the differential distribution of resources and opportunities across generations. From yearning to learning to earning, selection has become less about the best person for the right job, and more about the most credentialed person for the highest paying job. Given current alignments among the social classes, the institution called learning competes with banks, health care and pension benets as candidate domain names for injustice. Schools and testing services claim ownership of learning in the name of the upper classes that pay tuition and tutoring fees for system deliverables one lled-in bubble at a time. This is an unfortunate development. Learning is such a nice word. I cant go to bed until I have learned something bookish. Todays entry of useless knowledge is that Herman Melville liked to ask people walking on Gansevoort Street in Manhattan how the street got its name (Hardwick, 2000, p. 11). His pleasure and eventually Hardwicks, then mine, and now yours was that the street was named for his mothers family for reasons no passers-by could recall. Thats cool learning: arbitrary perhaps, but fun, particularly if it is not confused with knowledge that makes a difference. It does not belong on an examination that makes a difference what James Joyce called our exagmination (Beckett et al., 1929, front cover). Random knowledge should not feed the system of exaggerations that take answers to arbitrary questions as a measure of real learning.

R. McDermott (B) School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA e-mail: rpmcd@stanford.edu 403 T. Koschmann (ed.), Theories of Learning and Studies of Instructional Practice, Explorations in the Learning Sciences, Instructional Systems and Performance Technologies 1, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7582-9_24, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

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In a proper society, there would be little need of tests not tied directly to the performance of important tasks and no need for theories of learning to explain and modify the results. Most societies not only do without tests, they rarely develop theories of learning. It is no accident they have developed together, genuinely and/or invidiously, in capitalist democracies that promise equal opportunity and mass schooling under conditions of great inequality.1 It is a species constant that members of Homo sapiens learn, but the institution Americans call learning the institution dening learning as knowledge displayed on competitive tests set against a background of myths of inherent intelligence correlated with race and class borders is but a century old.2 Institutionalized learning sets the agenda, and learning theory and practice report for duty and demise. How did exacting examinations get such sway? Note the word, exacting: literally, out of the action. How did learning get isolated and separated from conditions of possible use? Given the disconnect between school learning and the uses of learning in the world, why should we be culling theories of learning for better ways to study the practices of classroom instruction? Can we afford the word learning without retaking ownership and restoring it as a way to talk about what happens when people do something perhaps interesting enough to allow new ideas to enter the local community? While eschewing direct answers to these questions, I press political considerations for rethinking theories of learning and instruction in ways not explicitly developed in this book. I proceed in three brief sections. The rst offers an inspiration from an earlier time when William James suggested we retire another friendly word for another useful aspect of human activity, namely, consciousness. The second section compares Jamess effort to the three position papers that lead this volume. Together the sections target the intrapsychic control system version of cognitive theory as the demon against which the papers in this volume marshal some resistance. A third section points to specic lines of inquiry contrary to mainstream policy assumptions for which a restricted use of the word learning might be safe. The conclusion gives a tentative answer to the question of whether we can afford theories of learning.

Does Learning Exist?

I believe that consciousness, when once it has evaporated to this state of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing all together. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among rst principles. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism

In 1904, William James wrote Does consciousness exist? to question the analytic utility the generalizutility of the word, consciousness. His answer: consciousness of course exists, but not as taken. It exists not as an entity, but as a function in the organization of experience. Jamess answer works equally well for learning: both consciousness and learning exist, but not as things, not as substantives. It is better to build on consciousness and learning as functions in the organization and interpretation of experience. They are dimensions of sequences of activity and do not exist

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on their own without recursive relations to emergent and precarious environments. They are conceived, invoked, and performed in relation to multiple orders of activity and to redene them we must examine the desires that fuel the terms and the consequences that ow from their use. James discarded consciousness from his list of rst principles, but he knew he must still provide in some way for that functions being carried on (1912, p. 4). For James, as for most twentieth-century philosophy: no more self-stuffed rst principles. Called into use in schools made up of individuals reduced to learning by themselves and for themselves, learning has become as misleading a term as consciousness was to James. It might be better to do without them. The goal of analysis has become not just understanding consciousness or learning, but confronting better the arrangements among the people using the terms. In an introduction to Jamess radical empiricism, John McDermott offered a ne line clarication:
The dualism of thought and thing is what we do to experience, not what we nd as ultimate conditions of experience. (1976, p. xxxiii)

Jamess message was difcult in 1904 and no less so now.3 The simple dichotomies James and Dewey tackled still mislead. The intellectual gymnastics around thought/thing, subjective/objective, organism/environment, and individual/social have all moved and morphed into the central divisions discussed in this book: cognition/engagement and individual learning/social participation. The way of speaking that says learning, like consciousness, exists in the head, as a thing, is mostly a bad way of speaking. A better way of speaking would tackle how learning functions in the organization of activities across persons in transit, across emerging environments, and over time. A better way of speaking would take into account how learning and doing have been pulled asunder into separate phenomena. Ray McDermott on learning restates John McDermott by changing only two (underlined) words:
The dualism of learning and doing is what we do to experience, not what we nd as ultimate conditions of experience.

To clean house in psychology in 1904, James had to attack consciousness. To clean house in education in 2010, we have to attack the mainstream version of learning as isolated, measured, supported by a century of experimental ndings, and institutionalized for public consumption. Because we are guardians of children, institutionalized attention to learning is more than in our way.

Yes, Learning Exists, But It Is Difcult to Talk About How It Works

Certain it is that words, as a tartar bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1623)

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James set a prescient standard for bracketing the troublesome substantive entities that have dominated twentieth-century educational psychology: skill, ability, identity, competence, self, decision-making, strategic maximizing, reex answering, and self-esteem hoarding all as characteristics of stand-alone, stand-still persons neither in the world, nor of the world, and ex-actly so. These are distinctions people do to each other and not primal conditions of existence. Run of the millgood for the tillpsychology and education have institutionalized them into realities. Like James, the main authors in this book are trying to translate learning from a language of autonomous entities to a language covering activities, particularly discourse, with locatable consequences. Greeno, Wertsch and Kazak, and Clancey move learning into the worldGreeno into social interaction, Wertsch and Kazak into mediating devices, and Clancey into organism/environment transactionsalthough it always struggles to return, as if from a tarter bow, back into the head.4 James Greeno is a complete study on the play of thought and things in contemporary learning theory. He has been an innovator for 50 years. Trained as a behaviorist, he turned in the 1960s to cognitive research (Greeno, 1980). In the 1980s, he added thicker environments to the experiments he found good to think with and the wider world to which he was, with the help of interviews, expanding his results (Greeno, 1995). In the 1990s, he shifted focus to social interaction in classrooms (Greeno, et al., 1999). We can trust him to write with honesty and wisdom about where he has been and where he is going. He always makes progress and progressive progress. Greenos paper uses classroom data to study the mutual consequences of cognition and learning in interaction not cognition and learning in interaction with each other, but cognition and learning both in social interaction. His agenda requires both a psychology and a sociology of living organisms interacting in real time in simultaneous retrospect and prospect.5 His psychology employs an interactional language of persons thinking in activities concerted with emergent environments, but his social vocabulary invites a more substantive image of identities in xed positions. Like James a century before, Greeno can win his argument, but lose to the compulsions of language that make consciousness, learning, identities, roles, statuses, and positions into things. Greeno conveniently reduces his argument to a chart.6 His rst column views facts about learners through a cognitive psychological lens, for example: performing procedures, search[ing] in problem spaces, . . emergent understanding, . . expanding effort toward accomplishing goals . . . [and] conceptual growth. These are organized from bottom to top according to increasing layers of thought and reection, with performing procedures at the bottom and persistence in learning practices at the top. The terms cover increasing connections with complex activities, from routinized responses on the bottom, to well staged, multilayered, planned lives at the top. The second column shows an equivalent list of terms developed by a situated perspective in the explanation and enhancement of cognitive practices, from mutual attention . . . [and] conceptual common ground on the bottom, to change of discourse practice, . . . [and] positional identities in school with mutual engagement and productive agency in relation to a communitys joint enterprise of learning on the top. The second column offers a productive summary of concerns for anyone

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Can We Afford Theories of Learning? Table 24.1 Greenos levels of analysis of cognition in activity (simplied) Achievements to be explained (4) Conceptual growth, commitment to learning goals, persistence in learning practices Situative analysis

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Changes in discourse practice Intellective identities regarding learning, academic learning, and learning specic subjects; positional identity in school and classrooms with engagement Practices of problematizing, reconciling, and positioning students in disciplinary discourse with competence, authority, and accountability Negotiating different interpretations or mutual understanding Problematizing, reconciling, and positioning in interaction Conversational contributions to mutual attention and understanding of propositions and reference Conceptual common ground and shared repertoire of schemata and procedure

(3) Expending effort toward accomplishing goals

(2) Emergent understanding

(1) Routine comprehension, conceptual understanding, and problem solving

worrying about more ecologically tuned ways of approaching cognition. As Macbeth says, the chart is done very well (endnote 3, p. 100). The chart nicely reverses the preoccupation of mainstream psychology on the lone organism the eunuch of analysis and establishes instead a focus on the activities of persons dealing with the pushes and pulls of the social world. William James would have been proud that the situative column gives simultaneous agency7 to participants and their environments, but it can also be read more mundanely (as by Collins). In the bottom box, shared, common, and mutual are key terms that focus on behavior between persons in on-going concerted activities. Analytically, this is exactly what is needed or its opposite. Sharing, holding in common, and mutuality can undermine the case if they postulate two independent centers that engage and share.8 Seeing learning and development as an acquisition of traits and competencies leaves mainstream educational and psychological thought undisturbed. Seeing learning and development as an acquisition of persons by contexts reexively organized for differential displays of skill across a social order is one radical alternative. Greeno recommends the second, but carries enough of the rst to call for their marriage. This delicate balance requires an interactive language that can inhibit a return to the head as the executive site of learning. Macbeth summarizes:
On this account, interaction is the constitutive eld of the cognitive discourse, and though Greeno says further that his project aspires to a theory that is primarily about interaction in activity systems, I think he subsequently thinks better of it. In the end, the appropriation seems to work from the other side: Concepts are appropriated from the situated perspective and rendered as aspects of interpersonal systemics and informational semantics. (p. 79)

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The term cognition carries centripetal power. Even as the dependent variable, cognition can bring phenomena back inside the head; instead of being accounted for, it can do the explaining. In his thoughtful response, Greeno acknowledges the tension between a situative approach transforming cognitive theory (his want and wont) and a situative approach dragging along a cognitive theory that ultimately consumes the social (wanton words, like a tartar bow). He suggests the tension is productive if it allows analysts to turn in and turn out and to be explicit about their analytic bets. While turning in, Greenos learners are still cognitive. They problematize, negotiate, solve and resolve problems, take on identied positions and positioned identities, and gather up their self-esteem, and then the afterthought analyst gets to how the participants have had to borrow, beg, and steal their busy cognitive lives from others. While turning out, no one gets to negotiate or resolve on their own grounds, and the analyst has to with a description of the environments participants use to negotiate and resolve things together. The in-and-out tension leaves a potential analytic power but, if read incorrectly, a political danger: that social interaction gets treated as only a context (the con surrounding the text) for what really counts institutionally, namely, individual behavior leading to individual learning. Turned-inside decisionmakers and command center learners, negotiators, identity-grabbers, and explainers do well in the market. Cognition sells, but can we afford it? Wertsch and Kazak move learning from inside the head to heads and hands engaging the world, but with more attention to the hands to the literal handling of thought and thing. Drawing on Vygotskian tradition, they have less to recover from than Greeno. They are not dogged by the conceptual excesses of twentieth-century American psychology: from an early half-century of mindless behaviorism to the later half-century of overly mindful no-action subjects of cognitive psychology (see Bredo, 2006, for a relevant history). Wertsch and Kazak focus on persons using the tools available to solve problems the world has delivered. Like James, Husserl, and Marx before him, Vygotsky resisted easy dichotomies that could erase analytic efforts to make sense of human ingenuity. He wisely critiqued the seemingly neutral spaces between dichotomies:
[any] attempt to occupy a middle ground between two extreme perspectives . . . fails to gain a position above the other two and assumes a position between them. To the extent that it overcomes the extremes of one perspective, it assumes the extremes of the other. It rises above the rst false theory by yielding to some extent to a second which is equally false. It overcomes the extremes of the second by yielding to the rst. (1934/1987, p. 197; for fun with false forced choices, see McDermott & McDermott, 2010)

Can we stop analytic terms from attacking themselves in an endless cycle of paradoxical moves, like Batesons (1972) double-binds, by which either side picked is less for not being the other side, and the excluded middle neither side A, nor side B eats away at whichever side grabs attention. Greenos solution, remember, is to engage the tension and to keep track of it. Wertsch and Kazak instead try to by-pass the problem by locating the materialsboth rubber and roadin which thought and thing engage each other. Following Vygotsky, Wertsch and Kazak take the world to be a system of signs with persons and things as mediating devices within the organization of signs. With

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all the things one could have examined in a classroom mathematics lesson, they focus on the graph paper the teacher distributed for modelingand muddlingdata. They offer little justication for their choice,9 but it works nicely for their point. The graph paper is suggestive enough that, as the children muddle along with helpful questions from playful (withholding) adults, their ideas take on the shape of graphs. We can always do more with others than by ourselves, said Ralph Waldo Emerson,10 and we can do more with graph paper than without. Language, math, Wikipedia, etc., are roads in the transportation system making, serving, and constraining minds in action. So where is the learning? Not just in the head, not just in social interaction, not just on the graph paper, but in all these as they have been constructed in a social history. Vygotsky is famous for stressing the primacy of the social world in a childs learning, but he also talked about its gradual internalization. Hood, McDermott, & Cole (1980) suggested that internalization is overrated and that mental functions starting in social relations should be treated analytically as if they stayed in social relations:
People learn about themselves and about each other by the work they do constructing environments for acting in the world. And this is how we must come to know them as well. (p. 158)

Wertsch and Kazak return to the mind through mediating devices, but there is a price to pay. In exchange for analytic clarity, it becomes difcult to talk about teaching and development as anything more than manipulating an environment. Imagine the exhortations: Teachers of the world, uhhm, mediate well:
Given that the goal is to socialize students to use socioculturally provided and sanctioned semiotic means, the issue is how to engage them in a way that will lead to increasing levels of expertise. (p. 164)

It is difcult to imagine William James getting excited by the instructional practice brought forward by Wertsch and Kazaks bland advice. It almost invites a return to an institutionalized pure cognition complete with its dual (and dueling) social function: the documentation of those who know more and those who know less on tests. Two points for anyone knowing about the street named for Melvilles mother. Remember that James gave up on consciousness because it estranged people from the ow of experience. A focus on mediation delivers more environment perhaps, but not much sensuousness or experience worth having.11 We can afford this version of learning, but dont expect a rush of buyers. If Greeno had to dance carefully to keep his analysis from focusing solely on what people know, Wertsch and Kazak have had to remove the people from their analysis.12 If Greeno tries to out-maneuver the tartar bow of cognition, Wertsch and Kazak leave the arrows in the quiver. What hard work for all of them. What kind of society makes it so difcult to talk about what children and teachers can do together? The social functions of school credentials and measured learning wont go away. When it comes to learning theory, what shouldnt sell namely, isolated heads lling up with knowledge and intelligence just in case they might be useful someday sells all too well. What should sellpeople engaged with each other and emergent

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environments in productive social settingsdoesnt sell at all. Learning theories deserve a better political environment in which to work. So do their children. The balance point between thought and thing becomes more volatile with Clanceys focus on the biological aspect of cognition. Fifty years ago, neuropsychologists (Lashley, Luria, Pribram) were ahead of mainstream experimental psychology in articulating an activity theory of thinking and learning, but the present function of MRI-driven brain talk (in no way Clanceys fault) puts the world completely inside the individual head. If the tartar bow of cognition can draw Greeno and even Vygotsky (if not Wertsch and Kazak) into an executive head, imagine what it can do to a neuropsychological inquiry. Clanceys difcult balance pits the transactional language of Dewey and Bentley (1949; see Garrisons commentary) against an executive brain. The vast vacuum between them is left unobscured by his analysis of classroom interaction. For units, Clancey appeals to (sub)consciousness, intentions, norms, single speakers with consequences before next speakers respond, and assumptions about what each participant knows and feels. Here is his interpretation of laughter following a mistake:
The reaction is quick and subconscious. Overall this laughter suggests a good rapport between the teacher and the class, and afrms a norm for handling slips, which are unintentional mistakes in someone presumed to know better. (p. 261)

This discourse analysis relies on reading each utterance/mutterance without recourse to either retrospect or prospect. It relies on an omniscient native hearer interpreting each persons talk one speaker at a time without a transactional, or even interactional, account of what speakers and hearers might be doing together.13 A transactional position is difcult to state, and a transactional analysis is difcult to sustain. Both tasks pale before the task of getting mainstream educational and psychological researchers to understand. Can Clancey afford a theory of learning under such conditions?

Special Circumstances for Focusing on Learning

A century of learning theory can still be used to positive social purpose. Much of it can be used to celebrate the learning people do in the world while mastering languages, sports, trades, difcult situations, and nuanced performances of all kinds. There is no activity without learning. One needs the rst half of a sentence to know how to say the second. Learning is ubiquitous to any sequencing of behavior. This position is better than its seeming oppositethat learning does not existbut I am willing to entertain each one depending on the circumstances to be confronted and reorganized. Deciding for or against a theory of learning is a political act. Some settings seem well organized for theories of learning to grow without risk of heightening social inequalities. The most important thing about them is that they keep no norm-referenced records no le cabinets lled with names attached to numbers consequential to gaining admission to next institutions of high, higher, and highest learning. These settings claim less about changing the whole world than

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I would like, but, given the present situation of education in the American political economy, they allow a rediscovery that children are always learning complex things and that theories of learning, when not restricted to the concerns and measures of school, can offer insight and encouragement to those who would like to learn. Learning has been so invidiously incorporated into social structure that a mere existence proof, the mere display that those said not to be learning are constantly learning, becomes difcult and rewarding work. Even if school systems have disconnected learning and teaching from situations in which knowledge might be useful, settings can be organized where learning and inquiry can join together without forcing concerns about misappropriation and mystication. The promise best covers small educational programs: individual classrooms with great teachers, alternative schools, and, most popularly, after-school programs (Cole & The Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006; Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005). This is also true in less controlled, but collectively more invigorating ways of the digital worlds popular among children of all ages. After a century of theories about how hard it is to learn to read, a new generation of phone-messaging teenagers have invented new literacies without a theory of differential learning in sight. If we can save the word learning for events like these, we might have something to work with and work for.

A Tentative Conclusion
Oh, dear! What have I talked myself into now? Should we really question the utility of a favorite word? No way I am giving up the fun of learning about the Melville familys street, but I am willing to relinquish its claims to status. Democracy and education are under duress, and learning has been getting deployed under invidious conditions. Can we afford theories of learning to help us organize more school success and less failure? The answer: Not under present conditions. Since the end of WWII, children and teachers have been abused by theories of learning designed primarily to document what they do not or cannot do. Researchers, in turn, have tried to theorize ways to make things better without considering either why they have been invited (even paid) to do so or how institutional conditions might twist their theories into new versions of established hierarchies. Do we need the papers in this book to squeeze best new versions of learning theory from videotapes of experimental classrooms at work? Of course we do, but not without confronting political circumstances. Joining theory and practice in a school system that pits all children against all children and allows success only in relation to the failure of others is a cruel joke. Under better circumstances, teachers would know what to do, and so too would parents, and so too researchers, at least sometimes, and maybe even policymakers. The problem facing teachers is not that they do not know what to do, but that they are asked to do so in a system that requires every child to do better than every other child. The problem facing researchers is not that they do not know how to tweak the system creatively, but that they must do so in classrooms where teachers have to commandeer more success for some and less

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for others. Under better circumstances, parents and community workers would also know better, and policymakers would superuous. If theories of learning feed ctions to the convenience of those who have what they need, then we must take a stand. If theories of learning feed factions and are enforced by those with access to resources against those without access, then we must take our stand forcefully. The stand: analytically and social structurally, learning does not exist, at least not as theorized in America education. The common sense assumption that learning exists as a thing, inside the head, and available for display on tests, comes with a downside: that we get the schools we already have, with the price that we fail the masses and recreate students as badly divided in school as the rich and poor are divided outside schooland with the same individuals at the bottom and top. Inside this functional order, it might be better to say: learning does not exist. This position is rhetorical and political. If taken seriously, it confronts injustices allowed by three easy and nasty American assumptions: that people with education know more, as different from only knowing more of this, but not that; that intelligence accounts for differential success, as if regardless of differential opportunities; and that social structure is a worthy measure of how things inherently have to be rather than a measure of access to power. Without a theory of differential learning, complaints will be loud. What then of schools, know-how, credentials, licenses, expertise, mastery, genius? Can we nd more democratic ways to talk about such things? No one wants to give up getting serviced by whatever wisdom is available. Its all we have. With governments claiming knowledge not from science, but from inspiration, conviction, and the invisible hand of god and/or market, we need to treasure whatever learning we can get our hands on. Note the phrasing. Getting our hands on learning is more than getting learning into our heads. Getting our hands on learning means getting knowledge close to the action, in the fabric of life, well-distributed, and literally at hand. Without learning as the stuff of privilege, we must still produce the best knowledge: that which best serves the people. Inquiry must start with the people. Dewey (1927) stated the goal:
A more intelligent state of social affairs, one more informed with knowledge, more directed by intelligence, would not improve original endowments one whit, but it would raise the level which the intelligence of all operates. (p. 210)

Learning, the one we want to talk about, the one we want to existas much of it as possibleis best understood not in terms of what one person or another knows, but in terms of what is collectively known, who has access to it, and what is being done with it. In the twentieth-century, most disciplinary psychology has serviced an oligarchy, and it has become difcult to restate Dewey without sounding foolishly romantic and/or unduly radical. Psychometricsnotice the term psychometric: literally, crazy rulershave become the Joe McCarthy of learning; they measure pink on the faces of kids at the top of the class the way McCarthy measured pink in the politics of their grandparents. The papers in this volume challenge 50 years of oligapsychology in the name of learning for all. They insist that the best pedagogy has

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to serve community more than isolated students, and they allow the hope that good research can alter the politics of researchers as much as the situation of those being researched. It shouldnt have to be this hard, but it is. New learning theories must confront current injustices more directly.

Notes
1. A millennium of Chinese civil exams developed according to criteria quite different, but no less strange, than our own (Elman, 2000). 2. Anthropologists working in traditional societies rarely had to study learning as an institution separate from other activities. Consider the ne account from Africa by Meyer Fortes: If children are allowed to be present at the activities of adults, they are assumed to be interested in and to understand what is being said and done . . .with ordinary skills and interests of daily life, they expect children to want to know such things. . .Heaven teaches them, they say, or as we should put it, it is perfectly natural. (1938, p. 37; see Lave & Wenger, 1992) 3. James (1911) claimed 20 years of doubt about the usefulness of the term consciousness, and Dewey (1940) identied three stages: from Jamess essay on stream of consciousness in 1884, through The Principles of Psychology in 1890, to Does consciousness exist? in 1904. As for learning, James (1899) mentions the term only 10 times in Talks to Teachers, mostly to refer to memorizing. Dewey uses it only 800 times across his 37 volumes: about 400 in passing and many more modied rote, mere, and school learning to contrast with growth. Dewey denes learning mostly as what happens while people are doing something else: Learning is the product of the exercise of powers needed to meet the demands of the activity in operation. . .a necessary accompaniment, the more so as being largely the unconscious effect of other acts and experiences. (Dewey, 1937, p. 238) James and Dewey care about how people coordinate heads, hands, and hearts to engage environments creatively, not about what goes into their heads. The reappropriation says less perhaps about the authors than about how they are interpreted by the people building and proting from American education. In contrasting the authors, I have worried more about addressing public issues and abuses than the nuanced arguments of their papers. Although they are now associated with ethnomethodology, James used these terms in a 1904 essay: . . . we live prospectively as well as retrospectively (1911, p. 42). Greenos original chart (Table 3.1) has three columns, one each for learning achievements, the psychological processes behind them, and a translation into interactive terms. For ease of discussion (and with his permission), I present only a simplied version of his rst and third column. Agency: not another word for individuals, but for persons actively, artfully, and reexively involved in making the environments that invite their next moves. See Garnkels (1967) devastating critique of sharing as an analytic term in the study of social behavior. Compare, for example, Goodwins (1994) high energy analytic moves around the same medium. Emerson: this thrill of awe with which we watch the performance of genius, [is] a sign of our own readiness to exert the like power . . . we are entitled to powers far transcending any that we possess (1894, p. 49).

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

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11. In Wertsch and Kazaks defense, other peoples classroom videos are a hard place to nd life. 12. Because even Vygotskian learning can be melted into cognition, Wertsch and Kazak might be right. Witness the reduction of zones of proximal development into a word for teachers scaffolding ignorant students to new knowledge. A better formulation would focus on environments from graph paper to the Internet that would allow children and teachers to rearrange their mixed skills into momentary competencies. 13. For more transactional analyses, see Ericksons commentary, Schegloff (1988) on Goffmans miscourse analysis, Sacks (1974) on laughter, and Klemp et al. (2008) on mistakes.

References
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