Educating communal agents: Building on the perspectivism of G.H. Mead

Educational Theory

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 435-452

  Martin, Jack ^a  

^a SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249110364     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2007.00267.x     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Gavriel Salomon, "Reflections on the Field of Educational Psychology by the Outgoing Journal Editor," Educational Psychologist 30, no. 3 (1995): 106.
2. Examples of the use of Vygotsky's work by educational psychologists include Vera John-Steiner and Holbrook Mahn, "Sociocultural Approaches to Learning and Development: A Vygotskian Framework," Educational Psychologist 31, no. 3-4 (1996): 191-206;
3. and Mark B. Tappan, "Sociocultural Psychology and Caring Pedagogy: Exploring Vygotsky's 'Hidden Curriculum,"' Educational Psychologist 33, no. 1 (1998): 23-34.
4. Examples of the use of Dewey's work by educational psychologists include Eric Bredo, "Reconstructing Educational Psychology: Situated Cognition and Deweyian Pragmatism," Educational Psychologist 29 (1994): 23-36;
5. and Richard S. Prawat, "Misreading Dewey: Reform, Projects, and the Language Game," Educational Researcher 24, no. 7 (1995): 13-22.
6. As to those who have advanced conceptions of collective agency that, at least in theory, go beyond the sum of individuals that make up the collective, see Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York: Freeman, 1997).
7. Bandura, Self-Efficacy, 6.
8. For a recent review of work on student self-regulation of learning, see Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs, eds., Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications (New York: Guilford, 2004);
9. and for an example of participation models of social psychological development, see Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Cognition: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
10. Of these, personal perspectives are the most local and individual, with cultural perspectives being the most temporally and spatially abstracted and collective. Both societal and cultural perspectives are enshrined in formal and informal conventions and practices, especially relational and linguistic practices. Although, in general, societal perspectives tend to be more codified and immediate than cultural perspectives that have evolved through successions of long-standing historical practices, there is considerable overlap in social and cultural orientations to situations and interactions. I therefore sometimes employ the phrase "sociocultural perspectives" to capture both social and cultural perspectives. Interpersonal and personal perspectives both are constituted within sociocultural perspectives and are more specific to particular others and locales.
11. Social and developmental psychologists who recently have championed Mead's approach to selfhood and agency as emergent within sociality through processes of social positioning and perspective taking include Alex Gillespie and Jack Martin. See Gillespie, "G.H. Mead: Theorist of the Social Act," Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 35, no. 1 (2005): 19-39;
12. Gillespie, "Games and the Development of Perspective Taking," Human Development 49, no. 2 (2006): 87-92;
13. Martin, "Perspectival Selves in Interaction with Others: Re-reading G.H. Mead's Social Psychology," Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35, no. 3 (2005): 231-254;
14. and Martin, "Reinterpreting Internalization and Agency Through G.H. Mead's Perspectival Realism," Human Development 49, no. 2 (2006): 65-86.
15. More traditional interpretations of Mead as a symbolic interactionist are well exemplified by Harold Blumer, "Mead and Blumer: The Convergent Methodological Perspectives of Social Behaviorism and Symbolic Interactionism," American Sociological Review 45, no. 3 (1980): 409-419.
16. Mead's address to Section L-Education, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston, December 1909, is reprinted in Andrew J. Reck, ed., Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 114-122.
17. The first three quotations may be found on page 122 of this work, the last on pages 116-117.
18. George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of Education (Chicago: The George Herbert Mead Papers, Archives, University of Chicago Library: Typescript of Student Notes by Juliet Hammond, 1910/1911 [196 pages]), 187.
19. Paul Renger III offers a similar interpretation in an article entitled "George Herbert Mead's Contribution to the Philosophy of American Education," Educational Theory 30, no. 2 (1980): 115-133.
20. Many others have commented on this same point concerning Mead's use of the phrase "being in the perspective of the other." See, for example, Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 79-80;
21. and D.L. Miller, ed., The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Work of George Herbert Mead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 17.
22. George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 115.
23. As one reviewer of the initial manuscript of this article noted, Mead's claims concerning the reality of perspectives sometimes go well beyond what is said here to include the possibility that the multiple perspectivity that defines sociality may be embedded in the natural world itself. Mead's Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2002), is the best source to consult for readers who might be interested in this aspect of Mead's more speculative philosophy. In this work, Mead obviously was influenced by the emergentist theorizing of Samuel Alexander and Lloyd Morgan, and even more powerfully by the relativity theorizing of Alfred North Whitehead. However, for current purposes, it is sufficient to emphasize the sociocultural realism that grounds Mead's perspectivism, without entertaining what most contemporary interpreters tend to regard as his more contentious naturalistic speculations.
24. This point is emphasized in Charles W. Morris's introduction to Mead's book Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), xxi.
25. Gillespie, "G.H. Mead: Theorist of the Social Act."
26. Mead "Address to Section L-Education," 244.
27. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, 135.
28. Ibid., 255.
29. Gillespie, "G.H. Mead: Theorist of the Social Act," 27-28.
30. See George Cronk, "Symbolic Interactionism: A 'Left-Meadian' Interpretation," Social Theory and Practice 2, no. 3 (1973): 313-333.
31. Cronk provides compelling reasons for interpreting Mead's generalized other as a plurality of generalized others. As Cronk points out, much critical concern that Mead's social psychology is overly conservative and privileges traditional power differentials evaporates when Mead's conception of the generalized other is expanded pluralistically in this way.
32. Gillespie, "Games and the Development of Perspective Taking."
33. Martin, "Reinterpreting Internalization and Agency Through G.H. Mead's Perspectival Realism," 71.
34. For a recent review of such work, see Jeremy Carpendale and Charlie Lewis, How Children Develop Social Understanding (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
35. Martin, "Reinterpreting Internalization and Agency Through G.H. Mead's Perspectival Realism," 72.
36. Mead, Philosophy of the Present.
37. For a similar interpretation, see Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, "What Is Agency?" American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 962-1023.
38. For a recent review, see Aaron Schutz, "Teaching Freedom? Postmodern Perspectives," Review of Educational Research 70, no. 2 (2000): 215-251.
39. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997).
40. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist.
41. For a recent review of such attempts, see Jack Martin, "Social Cultural Perspectives in Educational Psychology," in Handbook of Educational Psychology, 2d ed., ed. Patricia A. Alexander and Philip H. Winne (Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 2006), 595-614.
42. Again, see the analysis by Schutz in "Teaching Freedom? Postmodern Perspectives."
43. For more complete accounts of Mead's perspectival realism, see Martin, "Perspectival Selves in Interaction with Others: Re-reading G.H. Mead's Social Psychology," and "Reinterpreting Internalization and Agency Through G.H. Mead's Perspectival Realism."
44. See Renger, "George Herbert Mead's Contribution to the Philosophy of American Education."
45. George Herbert Mead, "Natural Rights and the Theory of the Political Institution," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 12 (1915): 141-155.
46. Also see Hans Joas, G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), chap. 6.
47. Mead, The Philosophy of Education, 81.
48. Renger, "George Herbert Mead's Contribution to the Philosophy of American Education," 148.
49. The interpretation of Mead's theory of educating communal agents that is presented from this point onward fuses interpretations of Mead's perspectival realism, as summarized earlier in this article, with the author's reading of Mead, The Philosophy of Education, but also makes use of readings of this same source by Renger in "George Herbert Mead's Contribution to the Philosophy of American Education," and by Gert J.J. Biesta in "Redefining the Subject, Redefining the Social, Reconsidering Education: George Herbert Mead's Course on Philosophy of Education at the University of Chicago," Educational Theory 49, no. 4 (1999): 475-493.
50. Renger, "George Herbert Mead's Contribution to the Philosophy of American Education," 149.
51. All of these quotations come from Mead, "Address to Section L-Education," 117-119.
52. Renger, "George Herbert Mead's Contribution to the Philosophy of American Education," 155.
53. Vasily V. Davydov, Types of Generalization in Instruction: Logical and Psychological Problems in the Structuring of School Curricula (Reston, Virginia: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1990).
54. Ibid., 251.
55. In addition to Renger, "George Herbert Mead's Contribution to the Philosophy of American Education," and Biesta, "Redefining the Subject, Redefining the Social, Reconsidering Education," also see Raf Vanderstraeten, "Education and the Condicio Socialis: Double Contingency in Interaction," Educational Theory 53, no. 1 (2003): 19-34. Interestingly, and in contrast to the perspectival interpretation of Mead's theory of education offered herein, Vanderstraeten finds it necessary to add insights from Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann to the basic framework he takes from Mead, in order to arrive at a view of pedagogy highly consistent with that drawn in this and the immediately preceding paragraphs.
56. Salomon, "Reflections on the Field of Educational Psychology by the Outgoing Journal Editor," 106.
57. See Jack Canfield and Harold C. Wells, 100 Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 1994), 125;
58. and Sandy McDaniel and Peggy Bielen, Project Self-Esteem (Austin, Texas: Jalmar, 1990), 156.
59. Philippe Meirieu, Lettre à un Jeune Professor (Paris: ESF Editeur, 2005), 72.