Modeling Change: The dynamics of place, time, and identity

Jay Lemke University of Michigan

Ethnographies of Change What is the contribution of ethnographic, discourse, and media- based research to: The study of educational change, systemic reform, school and community renewal? Understanding successes, failures, and differences from one local case to another? Providing a reliable basis for local adaptation of programs-from-elsewhere?

Critical Research Questions How do moments add up to days, years, and lives? How do actions add up to institutional change? How do slowly changing phenomena (e.g. cultural norms and values, linguistic and semiotic resources for meaning, etc.) provide support and constraint for more rapid forms of change? How are the actually emergent patterns of re- organization of institutions and communities selected from among all the possible patterns that the affordances of their constitutent action-repertories permit? What are the local conditions of sustainability of institutional change?

Description and Dynamics 1 Ethnographic description: local, specific, phenomenological, multi-perspectival How things are – thick descriptions What they mean to whom and when – semiotics of culture, social linguistics How they fit together – structuralism and functional models, heteroglossia

Description and Dynamics 2 Complex System Dynamics: multi-scale; local- global and semiotic-material integration How things change (dynamical models) Role of meaning and meaningful signs/artifacts in system change at various levels, timescales – heterochrony How change on various timescales is integrated – semiotic artifacts, circulation

Complexity and Timescales N-1, N, N+1: nested timescale dynamics Ecologies, emergence, self-organization Heterarchy, heterochrony, traversals Crossing sites, timescales, institutions Trajectories, development, and identities From learning to development Niche production and sustainable change

Timescales and Chronotopes What are the characteristic timescales of educational processes and systems? How are they embedded in those of larger communities? What are the typical chronotopes of education and educational ethnography? How do we follow actors/actants across multiple sites and timescales?

Chronotopes Places, as sites of typical activities and practices, have associated temporalities Characterized by: pacing, linearity, cyclicity, interruptedness, resumability, start-and-end (terminality), closure/completion, expectations, sequencing, change, etc.

Chronotopes Old and New Classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, yards: schools as institutional units with traditional modernist temporalities The chronotopes of control: single focus, Fordist pacing, fixed timescales (periods, bell-schedules) Emergent chronotopes: multi-focus,emergent pacing, flexible timescales Movement across sites and situations, traversals and timescales: school, street corner, home, after-school center, shopping mall; travel and relocation, multiple residence, diasporic communities Timescales: episodes, lessons, units, semesters, years; change scales for teacher-student pairings, peer group memberships, family relocation, curriculum change, community change

Identities across Timescales Momentary identity evoked by immediate situation Typical identities performed in recurring situation types Shifts in identity performance with changing features of immediate situation Shifts in typical identity performances over biographical- developmental time; cumulation of age-typical identities Artifact, actant and situation support for continuity of identity performance; long-term learning Retrospective construction of sociotypical identity-types Identity performances and “accidence” (superfluity, causal depth) – uniqueness and change

The Global in the Local Why history never ends … Open-ended evolution and niche production Accidence: material dynamics overflows semiotic description and functional effects The specificity of the local grounds emergent change across timescales