Index
to 'Across the Scales of Time'
What’s happening to a student in that classroom? What kinds of changes are taking place, and on what timescales?
Schooling is supposed to facilitate certain changes in the
behavior patterns of students. Both educators and their critics wonder how
lasting these changes are; how far do they carry beyond the walls of the school?
On what timescales do we imagine that personal identities change significantly?
or habits of critical reasoning? ways of reading, coping with quantitative
problems, or interpreting the natural world? attitudes toward potential careers
or value choices?
Do such changes occur in the course of a 40 minute lesson?
Even if we imagined that such a change did take place in some ‘breakthough’
moment, would we still count it as a change of the kind I’ve just described if
it disappeared the next day? Or the next week? The formation of identity, or
even fundamental change in attitudes or habits of reasoning, cannot take place
on short timescales. Even if short-term events contribute toward such
changes, it is only the fact that they are not soon erased, do not
quickly fade – that subsequent events do not reverse the change – which
makes it count. It is the longer-term process, including the effects of
subsequent events, which determines for us the reality of basic human social
development.
So how could events on the timescale of a
conversation or an experiment or reading a story even contribute to identity
development? What is the system, or network, within which a notion of
‘identity’ can be defined? It is surely not that of an isolated organism
taken at a single moment of time. At the very least, identity must express
itself, and that expression in action takes time. An organism as such is not
even alive in a single instant of time; its constitutive processes require
finite time to occur, and taken as a whole, from its molecular level to its
organismic level of integration, it is a multi-timescale dynamical system. From
the viewpoint of physics, an organism is alive only across a time interval that
necessarily extends somewhat into the future. It can only be observed to be
alive across some finite interval of time, and each of its characteristic
dynamical properties has some minimum timescale for possible observation. In
fact, the self-organization processes which constitute the living organism as
being more than the sum of its nonliving parts have a minimum timescale,
biologically, of something not much less than a second or two.
Moreover, beyond that second or two the organism only stays
alive by interacting with its environment. It has to release heat constantly and
waste chemicals eventually, it has to take in oxygen steadily and nutrients
periodically. It would never have come to exist in the first place without
having developed in a supportive environment that supplied exactly the
conditions that evolution had led its development to depend on. If we think
about the organism as such a dynamical system, we need to revise our ideas of it
in at least two fundamental ways. First, it is not definable or viable apart
from its operating as an element in a larger system, some minimal ecosystem.
Secondly, it is not definable at a single instant in time, but only over finite
time-intervals, and in fact ultimately only as a trajectory-entity developing
and individuating through its interactions with its environment over the whole
lifespan course from conception to decay.
An organism is a biological unit of organization. Its
definition says nothing about semiosis, about how it responds to a material
environment in ways that depend on its interpretation of things as signs as well
as on its direct interactions with their material properties. What is the
minimum timescale on which we can observe a dynamical system to be a person?
What is the minimum time, and the typical time, for actions that indicate both
that sign-interpretation is playing a role, and that the sign-interpretation is
recognizably that of a social persona? A system with a self-conscious
identity?
Just as in the case of our revision of the notion of an
organism to both situate it always within a larger-scale system and to look at
it over all its relevant timescales (i.e. as a developing trajectory through
time), we must do the same thing, for the same reasons, in the case of the
definition of a person. A human is not a person apart from social interactions
within a community, nor on timescales less than those on which a sense of
identity or habits of sign-interpretation develop and are used. Meanings are not
made by organisms, but by persons, and they are not made within organisms but
within an ecosocial system that minimally includes other persons and the things
they make meaning about, and that minimally operates over timescales sufficient
for a developing person to come to engage in socially meaningful interactions
with others and with the nonhuman surround.
So what then is a self-conscious personal identity? We
might say that it is a semiotic articulation of a person’s evaluative stance
toward interactions. It is what we are inclined to believe or doubt, desire or
dislike, expect or find surprising, etc. (cf. Lemke 1998 for the semantic
dimensions of evaluative stances in language), cast in the romantic
folk-language of ‘who we are’, what social types or categories we identify
with on the basis of shared values. It is a very complex construct, not usually
explicitly articulated; in fact it would be reasonable to say that people do not
have stable, unitary identities, but rather than we all learn to interpret
certain persistent evaluative stances toward action in these terms and
articulate the relevant pieces ad hoc from situation to situation, and
not necessarily consistently. We can also construct some ad hoc
consistency if we have to, but we don’t usually bother.
Thus ‘personal identity’ may not be as long-term a
phenomenon as we imagine. Like most everything else, it too requires integration
across timescales: across who we are in this event and that, at this moment or
the other, with this person or another, in one role and situation or another.
Nevertheless, evaluative stances or dispositions do develop and change on
timescales much longer than that of
a classroom lesson. In his extensive research on evaluative dispositions,
Bourdieu (1979) finds that they are created by our participation in the typical
activities of a local social community over timescales of a decade or two, and
change more slowly as we grow older. He finds significant social class
differences, tied specifically to education and to economic life-prospects, and
comes close to proposing that social class itself be redefined in terms of the
differences in ‘habitus’ or dispositions to action produced by different
trajectories of socialization.
Every developing biological system develops partly uniquely
(individuation of the trajectory) and partly as a typical member of its kind
(type-specific, equifinal trajectory). The latter effect is due not just to
common genetic heritage, obviously, but to similar epigenetic circumstances
eliciting gene expression. In fact it is easy to imagine the effect of much of
that epigenetic information as just an internalization of the landscape we write
with our lives. Each of us leaves some imprint on the world, if only in the
bodies and memories of those we interact with; and those imprints, as semiotic
mediating artifacts, provide informational input to the development of others of
our kind. It is the larger-scale social system, obviously, that persists from
generation to generation and tends to make one person in a community grow up to
act somewhat like others of his or her time and place and class and gender and
age.
The classroom then is no different from anywhere else in
our world of social artifacts. Its developmental input is there not only on the
walls but in the very fact that there are walls; not just in the words in the
textbook, but in the existence and use of textbooks. But it is first and
foremost in those respects in which the classroom is exactly like the rest of
the social world that it contributes to the formation of identities and habits
of action that are formed across the longer timescales we also spend in other
places. It is not what is unique about classrooms that contributes to our
identity development, but what is the same about them compared to many other
sites in our culture. Identities develop over long timescales, during which the
trajectory of the developing social person takes him and her from classroom to
classroom, from school to schoolyard, to street corner, to home, to shopping
mall, to TV worlds. The timescale for sampling all these worlds that is relevant
to identity development is the long timescale, one that sees the sameness of
patterning across all these venues. The little differences between them are
blips in this long, slow process. Of course we also learn those differences, and
the appropriate roles for classrooms and other places, but our more general
dispositions are necessarily a function of their commonalities.
The most amazing feature of developmental processes is that
each step along a developmental trajectory changes the way the system interacts
with its environment at the next step. There are no ‘shortcuts’ in
development; you must pass through each step in order to be prepared to take the
next one, because at each step you become a dynamically different system.
Different dynamical possibilities are open to you. You have also extended your
trajectory to a new timescale on which there are emergent phenomena, in you and
in your interactions with a larger-scale environment. In biological organisms
like ourselves, the developmental pathway is extremely long and complex, and
each critical turn could easily go down some other path; the message from our
genes is a roadmap for the paths followed by our most successful ancestors. Our
ontogeny recapitulates their phylogeny, up to a point. But only up to a point,
and less so as developmental pathways come to be guided more by social
interaction and culture-specific semiotic information supplied after birth.
Everyone in that classroom was experiencing a different
lesson, was interacting with the teacher and the semiotic artifacts of the room
and with each other in ways that depended on their trajectory-up-to-now (and
now-in-progress). No matter how much we homogenize classroom groups -- by age,
by social class, by gender, by culture, race, or dominant language – for the
classroom processes at each timescale there will be considerable differences in
affective engagement, in evaluative dispositions, in relevant knowledge and
skills, in resources for integrating the events of the moment into patterns that
will persist on longer timescales. The very act of homogenizing defeats the goal
of long-term results: the world outside the classroom is not homogenous in any
of these ways, and every difference between the meaning organization of the
classroom and that of the rest of life means that much less long-term and
wide-ranging persistence of what happens in the classroom. (For similar
arguments about identity issues and the role of real-life apprenticeship in
learning, see Lave & Wenger 1991).
Nonetheless, some contribution toward identity
development is taking place all the time, including during classroom lessons.
What’s happening?
Again it is useful to analyze on multiple timescales. On
each timescale each student is participating in some ecosocial processes and
taking on relevant roles. Students interact with one another and with the other
available semiotic objects in various intersecting activities, and these
activities are recognizable and repeatable and usually repeated. In this
participation we learn to do differently and to be different. We engage with a
person or an artifact in a particular way, typical of that activity, and now the
system in which our persona exists and functions changes. Dynamically, we
are what we do, and we are now creating ourselves as personae in interaction
with new others and artifacts, which means that the current, and perhaps
temporary, ‘I’ is the one that exists in the ‘loop’ of efference and
afference, of ‘differences that make a difference’ in a kind of complex
feedback circuit (in the terms of Bateson’s 1972 cybernetic version). There
are longer-term Selves already engaged in on-going longer-term projects and
activities, and the shorter-term Selves of current activities, some of which
contribute to longer-term projects and some of which may not. As we interact
socially at the human event scale, we ‘identify’, if not with the Other as
such (cf. Van de Vijver, in press), at least with our agency and participation
in each emergent new activity whole, always taking place in a larger-scale
system than our former, or more isolated Self. In fact we can even take a
reflective perspective in the activity and see our own role in it, that is we
can frame a separated ‘me’ from the viewpoint of this new dynamical ‘I’.
Reflexivity is itself an instance of heterochrony.
But all such activities come to an end. What then of the
dynamical ‘I’? is there a longer-term residual effect of our participation?
Perhaps only a weak one, for now we are asking about quantitative matters of
degree. Will we re-engage in the same activity with the same persons or
artifacts? How soon? How often? Will we re-constitute some
features of the former activity: the same person in a different but similar
activity? or the same artifact in a new activity? the same type of activity but
with other participants? And in each case how much of an ‘impression’
will be made on the organism and in the larger system that enables the organism
to reconstitute its emerging identities by getting these activities going again,
or interacting again with the same persons or artifacts, or ones it considers
similar for this purpose? How strong will the affective engagement
be? How positive will the identification be, evaluatively? And above all,
how long will the sequence of activities last across which the same
identity features are being reinforced?
The person we become for a moment with a new stranger for
whom we have no strong feelings and whom we never see or remember again may be
transient indeed. The person we feel ourselves to be when interacting with
someone we feel strongly about, again and again over the course of a lifetime,
is an essential part of who we are. The Self I am when I am writing, or
teaching, or doing those things that mean something fundamental to me, and that
I can do over many years, is basic to my identity. Even the Self I am when I
read a particular book, hear a particular kind of music, play or sing or dance
to that music, if I feel strongly enough about it, can become basic to my
identity. When I teach, or write, or have conversations with colleagues, I am
often working to recreate activities and senses of Self that are basic to my
identity. I am seeking to keep an identity-constituting process going on a
longer timescale and across a wider range of settings and participants. If my
identity’s dispositions value aggressiveness, I may seek activities and roles
in which aggression is socially acceptable, or I may make use of other
activities in ways that support this identity need. It is likely in our society
that gender identity needs are very strong in many people, particularly males,
and that the conduct of many life-activities, from driving a car to writing a
scientific paper, may be entrained in the service of these needs, and so be a
very different experience for males and for females, or generally for those
constructing different kinds of gender identities with different degrees of
intensity. (What I say here of gender identities will also be true in general of
age-, class-, and more broadly of all subculture- and culture- specific identity
patterns.)
It is somewhat ironic that classroom education and the
formal curricula that are supposed to create more long-term continuity from
lesson to lesson and unit to unit (though not, after the earliest years, from
hour to hour in the same day or from year to year in the same subject) are
narrowly focused on informational content which is more or less unique to school
experience, when the major developmental processes of these years appear to be
about the formation of identities that fit large-scale social models for
gender-, class-, age-, and culture- specific patterns. Students are mainly going
about the business of learning to be six-year-olds or twelve-year-olds,
masculine or feminine, gay or heterosexual, middle-class or working-class,
Jewish or Catholic, Irish American or Jamaican American, or any of the many
dozens of sociotypical identities for which there are identity-kits available in
a particular community (cf. Gee 1992). Whatever we offer up in the classroom
becomes an opportunity to pursue this longer-term agenda of identity building;
our primary affective engagement is with this agenda, with becoming who we want
to be, not with learning this or that bit of curriculum, except insofar as it
fits our particular agenda or insofar as ‘being a good student’ or ‘not
falling for that bullshit’ fits it. Perhaps late in schooling a few of us are
also working to form, within these larger identity projects, specific partial
identities as ‘future scientists’ or ‘future teachers’. (How many? How
intensely? On how long a timescale? How integrated with the more general
identifications like gender?)
Nor of course does this picture change very much ‘after
school’ (in either sense). In our paid employment, as in our family and
leisure life, we are often still involved in the long-term project of
maintaining and enhancing, and perhaps occasionally revising, who we are. We
integrate each event into this longer timescale project in many ways: in our
body hexis, in our habitual ways of talking, in our retrospective narratives
about ourselves, in written diaries, in titles on bookshelves or inscriptions on
trophy walls, in photographs of children and friends, in collections of
videotapes and knickknacks.
But it is not easy to study lives over the timescale of decades and lifetimes.