I don’t know about you, but one of my favourite things to do is to go into an old-fashioned candy store (you know, the ones that are decorated in bright colours and carry candy for $1.75 each that you remember paying $0.10 or $.25 for as a child) and take a look at the trading card packs they have on offer. Do you remember these? Each package contained 5 – 10 small cardboard cards featuring pictures and information about a particular TV show, or movie, or celebrity (apparently there are also trading cards for sports teams, but I wouldn’t know about those; I am strictly a connoisseur of the fine arts variety of trading cards…). What stands out in my mind about these cards is the way in which the cards were numbered, so you could easily tell how many cards you may be missing from a complete set. If you were lucky enough to collect all the cards, the last one you usually got was the card that was exasperatingly difficult to find (as an aside: please contact the author if you have the snake-pit card from the “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie trading card pack).
This nostalgic moment actually helped me find a way in to the thoughts I wanted to share in this week’s blog, so bear with me so I can make the connection clearly.
In The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Tomasello, in discussing joint attentional skills – where a human infant recognizes that beings outside itself desire things/can act to realize those desires, and interacts with objects and others to redirect attention – has neatly elided the consequences of exclusion from this interaction. What happens to an infant’s cognitive development if, for instance, an adult is not sufficiently present (that is, on a regular basis) to have these interactions with? Or when the adult is present but does not engage with the infant? What if the infant’s attempts at joint attention result in tense or emotionally unstable reactions (i.e., the infant points to a pet, which the adult then chases from the room)? These situations emphasize examples of exclusion, a concept I think is well defined as follows: “Social exclusion is a blend of multidimensional and mutually reinforcing processes of deprivation, associated with a progressive dissociation from social milieus, resulting in the isolation of individuals and groups from the mainstream of opportunities society has to offer” (Vleminckx and Berghman 1995: 46, cited in Roehrer Institute, 2003; italics mine). I fault Tomasello for not following his argument through to its conclusion: if an infant is deprived of social interaction (i.e., cannot carry out or is traumatized by failed efforts for joint attention), is cognitive development (read: learning ability) impaired?
The reason why the question of exclusion and learning arose (let’s face it: I had a lot of questions while reading Tomasello) was because the same themes appeared in this week’s reading, chapters one and two of Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (1998). Wenger starts from the position that we are constantly involved with multiple communities of practice, including our relations, our workplaces, our education, our hobbies and any other type of “active engagement in the world” (Wenger, 1998, p. 4). Chapter 1, on “Meaning”, looks at the ways in which we make meaning; but, just as Tomasello did, Wenger sidesteps the question of exclusion. If “human engagement in the world is first and foremost a process of negotiating meaning” (Wenger, 1998, p. 53), then what happens to those people who aren’t engaged to the extent Wenger describes, the ones who are excluded from communities of practice? Are those who don’t have wide social circles, or pursue hobbies, also exempt from learning? And then we have to consider people who are involuntarily removed from their communities of practice: homosexual children forced out of their homes, workers who are laid off, or hobbyists whose skills are not longer welcome. Surely their exclusion – from engagement in that capacity – doesn’t affect their ability to learn. Yet that would be the logical conclusion of Wenger’s argument.
And now, let us return to the point of this blog: my highly prized “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” movie trading card pack. Recall that I said numbering the cards meant you were certain whether your set was complete or not? Well, as I remember it, missing a card from your pack meant that you went wild trying to find it, that one card that you didn’t have. Its exclusion from your pack meant that you gave it an even greater value, because of its rarity. In not discussing exclusion in either of their theories, I think both Tomasello and Wenger are constraining how learning happens. Regardless of whether it is through human infants’ cognitive development, or in communities of practice and their meaning-making processes, learning may be explained by a theory, but it is unlikely that that theory can account for all instances, just like the trading card pack didn’t give you exactly the card you needed every time. Indeed, for some, the chase of finding the missing card was far more exciting than opening a new pack to reveal exactly what you wanted. And just because you didn’t have that card – in my case, the precious snake-pit card – didn’t mean you threw the pack away. You held on to your collection of cards, and waited until that elusive/excluded card – the one that made your collection complete, just like the learning that lies outside of a constrained theory – appeared, at which point you grabbed it and kissed it and painstakingly added it to the full set of cards.
…. Or, perhaps, I just have a thing for trading cards.
References:
Roeher Institute. (2003). "Policy approaches to framing social inclusion and social exclusion: an overview. Retrieved 25 January 2012 from http://www.philia.ca/files/pdf/SocialInclusion.pdf.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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