Language, Literacy, and Power

Making Sense of Figured Worlds and Identity How I am making sense of figured worlds After reading Holland et al. (1998) Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, I find myself seeing the world of academia, of which I am currently immersed, as a figured world in the truest sense. According to the authors, "figured worlds rest upon people's abilities to form and be formed in collectively realized "as if" realms" (p. 49). Their question of "What if there were a world called academia, where books were so significant that people would sit for hours on end, away from friends and family, writing them?" really resonated with me.  Academia is a figured world, created by those who positioned themselves as more knowledgeable than others and therefore capable of researching, scrutinizing, criticizing, and then writing about others in comparison to themselves and those whom they esteem. Holland et al. (1998) talk about the figured world as "a socially a...

What is Activity Theory? It is my understanding that within Activity Theory there are tools which are examined as being situated within actions, discourses, and activity systems (Bomer, 2003). Bomer utilizes a Vygotskian Framework to determine the affordances - intended and unintended - of the varied concrete tools the teacher placed in the classroom. Specifically, Bomer looked at how the tools were used to mediate culturally sanctioned states of mind. In laymen terms, classrooms and other environments are full of tools and how our students come to understand and utilize these tools - intended (what/how we/teacher would like them to use the tools) and unintended (ways that we/teacher didn't necessarily think of using the tools) - is both contextual and socio-culturally situated. Bomer (2003) states that the use of a tool - or learning to use a tool is nested in many layers of cultural and historical context" (p. 224). Vygotsky's Theory calls for the use of media or tool...

My Identity Exploration: Christina U. King