AERA: Sunday 1

Cultural Historical Activity Theory

Teatro, Play and Imagination: The Creative engagement of Social Life
Shirin Vossoughi, Octovio Estrella (UCLA)
Theater of the Oppressed

• Play, imagination, social analysis
  
• Vygotskian notions of play
• "children can become a head taller than themselves in play" - Vygotsky (?)
• how do we re-invoke a sense of play in highschool student
• Can Teatro humanize the world?
• Form theater

1. Creating space, setting boundaries
2. Rule-bound play
3. Relationship between play and real life (creative forms of nonviolent action)
4. Invitation in the subjunctive world of teatro

• Jim Wertsch talks about schools being text-based realities
• Hope nourishes and pushes us to act

takeaway: Like the performance aspects of this type of play-based learning

Gail Richardson -- Steinhardt School of Education (NYU) Russian Math Curriculum works in New Jersey

• ("Measure Up" 120hour course)
• Elkonin-Davydov Mathematics curriculum
• Pre-numeric Vygotskian
• Concepts of Quantity, equality, transitivity
• (Russian) Multiplicative Learning = content x tool x reality
• (American) Additive Learning = content + tool + reality
• content is quantities -- use everyday objects, instead of numbers
• removes the divide between whole numbers and real numbers
• length is not a measurement, it's a quantity.
• (very cool)

takeaway: I want to do learn math this way!!!

J. David Betts "Mutlimedia Arts Education Program"

• Activity Theory as a design tool
• Post-typographical world (reinking, 1998)
• Contemporary texts often consist of different interrelated modes of communications (Kress, 2003)
• Used "retrospective analysis" in an examination of the Activity System
• Asked "what were the best ways to devlop school-to-work connections for students? What were their perceived self-efficacy in tools and etc.
• After School setting as third Space?
• Get his CHAT Macromedia Director diagram (triangular representations of systems of design, exchange, activity system, activity setting, etc.)
• Can't pu tyour foot in the same river twice -- outcomes and goals continue to change, as do interactions with people and tools etc. -- dynamic learning systems.

takeaway: Engestrom's AT triangle is a very useful starting point for AT as a Design tool!!

Jayson Seaman - Project Adventure Inc. "An Adventure in Analysus: Examining Contemporary Adventure Education in Historical Context"

• What is Adventure? (uncharted, curious, explaoration, situational, etc.)
• Adventure Ed = "folk pedagogy" focuses on individual
• Collaborative, creative, develop compassion for others
• "How is experience constructed in a facilitated, small group adventure setting?
• Project Adventure is the largest rope course company ($10 million?)
• High degree of kinesthetic involvement
• Engestron, 1987 triangle model of actiivity as a unit of analysis
• Tyndall, in McFarlane, 2003 "there is assuredly morality in the oxygen of the mountains"
• Outward Bound courses "less training for the sea than through the sea" (Miner, 1990, p.59)
• Division of labor is interchangeable and non hierarchical
• Artifacts are institutiona;;y situated and negotiable; regulate individual participation in div of labor; mediate div of labor

takeaway: Interesting start. Wish it were a bit "deeper"

Pilar -- Discussant

• Loves Kozulin 1998
• To be literate in today's society (Leu, 2002) means to (get rest of quote)

takeaway: so much energy!