Théories et pratiques de l’apprentissage situé (18/101)

déc. 16, 2017 Christian MARTIN Apprendre, Apprentissage, Education, Formation 0 comments

Cognition in Practic (3/n)

Introduction

Dans un premier billet de cette sous série de la longue série consacrée à l’apprentissage situé, je vous ai présenté les intentions la structure du livre de Jean Lave « Cognition in Practice – Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life » puis dans un second billet l’impact d’une première lecture de l’ouvrage sur mes propres représentations en matière d’apprentissage.

Dans ce troisième billet, je commence un travail systématique de synthèse/ résumé de l’ouvrage.

Cette introduction étant très dense, et pouvant être considérée comme une sorte de pré-requis pour une bonne compréhension de ce que la théorie de Jean Lave remet en cause, je vais prendre mon temps et restituer son contenu en deux billets.

Elements de l’introduction (partie 1/2) (pages 1 à 27)

INTRODUCTION : PSYCHOLOGIE ET ANTHROPOLOGY I

« Le problème est d’inventer ce qui a été récemment surnommé « La psychologie de plein air ». Le livre est une enquêtes sur (inquiry) les conditions qui rendraient cela possible (…)

« Le projet, est une « anthropologie sociale de la cognition » plutôt qu’une « psychologie de la cognition » car il y a de fortes raisons de suspecter que ce que nous appelons « cognition » est en fait un phénomène social complexe. »

Les premières phrases du livre (re)donne le premier élément clé de la théorie:

La cognition, dans la pratique quotidienne est distribuée – étendue entre, et pas divisée entre l’esprit, le corps, l’activité et des « settings » culturellement organisés (ce qui comprend d’autres acteurs).

Cette théorie a trouvé un soutien dans l’exploration de différentes pratiques mathématiques. L’auteur présente ainsi le rôle clé joué par le « Adult Math Project » (AMP).

Adult Math Project

Elle nous dit:
It began several years ago with simple descriptive questionsabout arithmetic practice: How does arithmetic unfold in action in
everyday settings? Does it matter whether it is a major or minor aspect of ongoing activity? Are there differences in arithmetic procedures between situations in school (e.g. taking a math test) and situations farremoved from school scenarios (in the kitchen or supermarket)? To search for answers we undertook a number of closely related studies.

Jean Lave présente l’organisation des expériences et nous donne des exemples de problèmes posés aux participants
et nous indique que l’objectif était « d’obtenir une perspective différente de celle que l’on a dans une école ou un laboratoire sur la manière de résoudre des problèmes »

« We began with participant observation, analysis of the settings for their activities, and description of the organization of the activities within which we hoped to catch glimpses of arithmetic in process. All were interviewed, observed in action, and asked occasionally to vary their everyday activities in specified ways. And we asked them to endure our experimental and test-like attempts to learn about their current knowledge of school and other arithmetic procedures. »

A cette fin, ce que l’auteur appelle le « setting *» est varié d’une expérience à l’autre.

Note : * Setting (cadre/environnement) qui pourrait être décrit peut-être par une configuration subjective et personnelle de l’environnement (y compris humain) dans lequel se situe l’action. Cette défition ne doit rien à Jean Lave, c’est l’idée que je me fais du concept.

Plus loin dans son livre, Jean Lave, distingue les concepts « d’arena » et de « setting », distinction que nous avons déjà évoquée dans un billet précédent. L’arena (arène) étant l’espace physique, concret, objectif, déterminé par des règles d’agencement sur lesquelles l’usager n’a pas d’influence, est opposé au concept de setting qui lui est personnel à chaque usager.

Et, nous donne dans l’introduction les résultats des études et le projet du livre

Résultats :
« les mêmes personnes diffèrent dans leurs activités mathématiques selon les situations d’une manière qui défient les frontières théoriques entre une activité et son cadre, entre les formes cognitives, corporelles et sociales de l’activité, entre information et valeur, entre problèmes et solutions. »

Projet du livre
« (Faire) la caractérisation empirique et théorique d’une activité cognitive, spécifiquement située – ce qu’elle est et pourquoi elle est – est, pour cette raison le projet central de ce livre. »

L’auteur nous explique aussi longuement les raisons pour lesquelles les mathématiques ont été choisies :

« Briefly, arithmetic is an accepted topic for research within cognitive psychology, hence observational research in settings other than laboratories offers opportunities to compare results and raise questions about the ecological validity of experimental studies. Arithmetic is a sympathetic « medium » for the researcher who wishes to study activity in open-ended situations, for it has a highly structured and incorrigible lexicon, easily recognizable in the course of ongoing activity. »

Le dilemme des dilemmes partagés

L’auteur aborde ensuite, dans une section intitulée « le dilemme des dilemmes partagés » les rapports entre la psychologie cognitive et l’anthropologie cognitive, et les hypothèses fondamentales sur la culture, le monde social et leurs relations avec la cognition.

« Très brièvement, la société est caractérisée par un ensemble de macro structures en place, un « fait accompli » (en français dans le texte) qui doivent-être intériorisées par les individus qui vivent en son sein. Le consensus – les normes partagées, les valeurs et la culture de manière générale – est le socle de l’ordre social. Les degrés de consensus définissent les limites sociales de différents niveaux d’inclusion. La transmission culturelle, ou socialisation, est clairement centrale dans l’atteinte d’un tel consensus. Une dualité de la personne est inhérente à ce point de vue. Articulée clairement par Durkheim,, Durkheim et Mauss,et Levy-Bruhl, c’est implicit dans la logique des études de la cognition aujourd’hui. Ainsi, la pensée a une composante émotionnelle, sociale dans son origine, et une composante cognitive-rationnelle, individuel. Leur poids dans la personne reflétant le degré auquel la vie collective domine l’individu. »

Citations / extraits – morceaux choisis (pas nécessairement dans l’ordre d’apparition dans l’ouvrage)

A dilemma of shared dilemmas

Cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology have elaborated the study of how people think on the basis of, among other things, fundamental assumption about the nature of culture, the social world, and their relations with cognition. There may be no reason to review these assumptions unless the main task, the investigation of cognition, is hampered by their conventional formulations. The latter situation has developed in the last 15 years, as some psychologists have begun to doubt the ecological validity of experimental fmdings and to ask what thinking is like in the pervasive contexts of people’s lives (Bronfenbrenner and Mahoney 1975; Neisser 1976; Cole, Hood, and McDermott 1978; Bronfenbrenner 1979). For their part, cognitive anthropologists have long expressed concerns about the psychological validity of their analyses of cultural category systems (e.g. Burling 1964; Romney and D’Andrade 1964), and more recently have questioned the conventional uses of linguistic models for cognitive anthropology in general (Dougherty and Keller 1982). Assumptions about cultural and cognitive uniformity have been questioned as well.

(…)

Cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology more broadly, share assumptions about culture, cognition and their relations too strongly to offer each other solutions to the dilemmas they face. It appears, indeed, that major dilemmas as well as assumptions are common to both. The shared position (assumptions, forms of explanation, and even, in
broad terms, method) is a functionalist one:3 very briefly, society is characterized as a set of macro structures in place, a fait accompli to be internalized by individuals born into it. Consensus – shared norms, values and culture more generally – is the foundation of social order. Degrees of consensus define social boundaries of different levels ofinclusiveness. Cultural transmission, or socialization, is clearly central to achieving such consensus, and is the crucial relation between society and the individual. A duality of the person is inherent in this view. Articulated plainly by Durkheim (1915; Durkheim and Mauss 1963) and Levy-Bruhl (1910), it is implicit in the logic of cognitive studies today. Thus, thinking is said to have an emotional component, social in origin, and a cognitive-rational, individual one; their weighting in the person is a reflection of the degree to which collective life dominates the individual. On the face of it this proposition may not be immediately recognizable as a feature of cognitive theorizing, perhaps because its corollaries are more salient than the original proposition. Today, forexample, it is likely to be assumed that if ongoing activity consists of problem solving -:- « individual, rational, cognitive » – it is not necessary to address the possibilities that it is culturally and socially structured, primarily expressive of feelings, or part of socially contextualized experience in ways that require theorizing, empirical description,

(…)

I shall use the term « functionalist » for the core theoretical formulations of cognitive psychology though I have seldom heard it used as a self-designation (but see Flanagan 1984). For the contemporary conceptualization of mind is. arguably, a direct analogue of the conception of society in functionalist theory; both are conceived as self-perpetuating, closed, input/output systems. Many other parallels follow from this. But I have chosen to characterize their commonalities for present purposes at a less profound level. where substantive propositions about the functioning of mind and society are caught up in relations with methods for investigating these same propositions…

(…)

More specifically, functional theory treats processes of socialization (including learning in school) as passive, and culture as a pool of information transmitted from one generation to the next, accurately, with verisimilitude, a position that has created difficulties for cognitive psychology as well as anthropology. Neither discipline appears to be theoretically equipped to elaborate a theory of active social actors, located in time and space, reflexively and recursively acting upon theworld in which they live and which they fashion at the same time.

(…)
Cognitive psychology accounts for stability and continuity of cognitive activity across settings through the psychological mechanism of learning transfer. That is, knowledge acquired in « context-free » circumstances is supposed to be available for general application in allcontexts, widely transportable but relatively impervious to change in the course, and by the process, of travel and use. The central role of learning transfer reflects the functionalist assumption of literal culture transmission that informs broad conceptions of socialization and morespecifically, the conceptualization of relations between school and everyday practice. In sum, even this short survey of the general functional model of cognition, culture, continuity and the social world confirms that there are strong, common theoretical assumptions incognitive studies in psychology and anthropology. A discussion of their contemporary dilemmas will also show common patterns of concernacross disciplines.

(…)

Cognitive anthropology has traditionally applied linguistic models, notably classical formal semantics, to classificatory paradigms of general cultural knowledge (e.g. kinship, plant, and color terminologies), an interest with direct roots in early twentieth-century functionalism. This theory came under critical analysis when cognitive anthropologists raised questions about relations between cultural knowledge and actors’ cultural practice, one aspect of the problem of intracultural variation.
Pelto and Pelto (1975) argued that:

« The concept of cultural uniformity reflects functionalist assumptions about society as a consensual order, and cultural transmission as a process of homogeneous cultural reproduction across generations. It has served as a mandate to treat culture in cognitive studies as ifit were a constant, as if nothing essential about thinking would be disturbed if its effects were controlled experimentally. This is surely one means by which cognitive psychology has kept within the bounds of the division oflabor between the study of the individual and anthropological studies of culture and social organization. For such a strategy legislates away major questions about social diversity, inequality, conflict, complementarity, cooperation and differences of power and knowledge, and the means by which they are socially produced, reproduced and transformed in laboratory, school and other everyday settings. (These same questions are more difficult to avoid when the arena of investigation is the lived-in world.)

(…)
The responses within both anthropology and psychology to uniformist dilemmas and those of research validity have been mildly reformist, at best.

(…)

A different logic seems more appropriate, and indeed, timely, for there appears to be a growing legitimacy for alternatives to a functionalist/positivist theoretical position. There are numerous general critiques of functionalist (e.g. Giddens 1976, 1979; Jarvie 1968; Warren 1984) and a growing body of serious critiques of cognitive theory (e.g. Dannefer 1984; Danziger 1979; Dreyfus 1979; Samelson 1974; Sampson 1977; Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, and Walkerdine 1984). The critical literature on functionalist sociology of education is notable: (e.g. Apple 1979; Bourdieu 1973; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Collins 1979; Giroux 1981; Hum 1978; Willis 1977). Others have argued against isolating theorizing about cognition from analysis of the activity of which it is a part, in the social world of which it is also a part (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Minick 1985; Mehan in press). In short, a virtual functionalist consensus in the social sciences 20 years ago has dispersed (though notably less incognitive studies than in many other arenas in the social sciences).

(…)

While to cobble together a theory of cognition and a theory of culture, or « a psychology » and « an anthropology, » requires specification of what theory of cognition and what theory of culture first – they are no longer all compatible with one another.

A suivre

Dans le prochain billet, nous explorons la fin de cette introduction, dans laquelle l’auteur pose la question suivante : « Où sont les alternatives et comment je propose de gérer les difficultés mentionnées ci-dessus ? »

Citation

Cognition and synthetic social theory
Where lie alternatives and how do I propose to cope with the difficulties envisioned above? It seems useful to look to recent social theoretical syntheses for a theory of the social actor in action in the li ved-in world as a basis for developing a more adequate model of cognition in cultural context. …