the central narrative of CHAT has focused on internalization and idealization, on the gradual move from externalized
practice to interiorized practice, from external regulation of behavior (by environments and other people) to self
regulation (by inner speech)… ESSP’s highlight people’s situated agency, their tuning to and of environments, their
making of artifacts of all kinds. Critically, the ESSP’s that we detail here not only involve externalizations, but
externalizations meant to regulate thought and affect, to channel attention and action…ESSP’s, the ways writers tune
their environments and get in tune with them, the ways they work to build durable and fleeting contexts for their work, are
central practices in literate activity. They call for attention to the agency of actors, to the production of environments, and finally to consciousness itself as a historied practice. (228)
They also make the following points:
- Methodologies: “The drawing, in other words, is for us a means to another end—a thick description of literate activity. The combination of texts, talk, and drawings, of participants’ accounts and our perceptions, supports a triangulated analysis of these writing processes” (185)
- “any experience at any time or place might become salient in some writing process” (193)
- “The chains of invention and inscription these writers represented involved much private time…Yet, this private time was never the whole story. Each reported seeking out other people for ideas and support…Writing in these cases then emerges as complex dispersed activity that is, across time and space, both intensely private and intensely social and collaborative” (205-6)
- “it is important to see these writing practices not only as the production of a built symbolic environment, but also as regulated patterns of action and attention” (225)
- “Furnishing is more than just an additional way of forming space; it fills it with meaningful objects. They are meaningful in a double sense: first, they channel and support action within the room and second they symbolize mental contents of significance to the inhabitant…. Thus, space becomes place” (229)
- “What we would foreground in relation to these discussions of embodiment are ways that acts of writing are themselves issues of managing a body in space and that embodied literate activity is woven out of profoundly heterogeneous chains of acts, scenes, and actors oriented to diverse ends” (230)
- “In this model then, a literate act, say reading a newspaper, is both localized in the concrete acts, thoughts, and feelings of the reader(s) and sociohistorically dispersed across a far-flung chronotopic network—including the embodied acts of writing the story, almost certainly spread across multiple chronotopic episodes of individual and collaborative composing; the histories of journalism and the genre of the news story; the actual embodied worlds being represented and their textualized representations; the reader’s histories of reading papers and of earlier events relevant to those represented in the story; and so on” (186-7)
- “Leont’ev’s (1981, 1978) model of activity [theory] analytically distinguishes three levels: “sociohistorically developed activities with their associated collective motives, individual actions driven by conscious goals, and equipped operations with unconscious goals. This model offers an analytical framework to decompose acts so that we can consider their heterochronicity (Hutchins, 1995) and their varied modes of being. Leont’ev (1978) asserted that activity is always multimotivational….work activity is socially motivated but is directed also toward such motives as, let us say, material reward” (206)
- Sense then is rooted in the chronotopic interface of the embodied and representational, the social and the personal. It foregrounds subjects’ consciousness without making consciousness an asocial, neoplatonic realm. In fact, meaning becomes in this view simply a stabilized field of sense, centripetally formed by cultural-historical forces. 209
Key Terms
- literate activity: “consists not simply of some specialized cultural forms of cognition—however distributed, not simply of some at-hand toolkit—however heterogeneous. Rather, literate activity is about nothing less than ways of being in the world, forms of life. It is about histories (multiple, complexly interanimating trajectories and domains of activity), about the (re)formation of persons and social worlds, about affect and emotion, will and attention. It is about representational practices, complex, multifarious chains of transformations in and across representational states and media (cf. Hutchins, 1995). It is especially about the ways we not only come to inhabit made-worlds, but constantly make our worlds—the ways we select from, (re)structure, fiddle with, and transform the material and social worlds we inhabit” 182-3
- chronotopes: “Bakhtin did not conceptualize chronotopes as some abstract, decontextualized Cartesian time-space coordinates, but as human(ized) worlds filled with historical and social significance, places with expected and unexpected characters, activities, and moods” (186-7)
- chronotopic lamination: “the simultaneous layering of multiple activity frames and stances” (187)
- environment selecting and structuring practices (ESSP’s): “the intentional deployment of external aids and actors to shape, stabilize, and direct consciousness in service of the task at hand…ESSP’s include the goal-oriented searches of already structured environments that are made during inquiry, the structured reading, observing, and making that people engage in, sometimes with serendipitous results…ESSP’s involve not only setting up a context, but also the ways the writer inhabits and acts in the space” (219-22). ESSP’s include furnishing of space, bodily practices, controlling ambience environments (noise, lighting, music), and the production and use of certain textual artifacts