The traditional problems of (educational) psychology are surreptitiously repro- duced in the ways in which documentary evidence of interesting phenomena are collected and used in the production of data and analyses. The reverse is also the case: the reigning epistemology grounded in the self-actional approach and its extension that produces the interactional take are the ground for transcribing video in the way that this is commonly done. Most transcriptions appearing in research journals reduce events – lesson, interviews, or problem-solving sessions – to the transcription of the words said, augmented by ethnographic descriptions of actions and context where necessary. Moreover, the words are not taken for and by them- selves but rather as indices pointing to something else not directly present: “mean- ing,” “conception,” or “idea.” It is precisely these two strategies that lead to the separation of body and mind and lend themselves to neo-Kantianism and other con- structivist theories. Transcribing videotapes by using only words flattens the observed events into language. The ancient Greek originally used the term logos for language and word; they later also used it to denote reason, a use that has survived to the present day sedimented in the term logic. By transcribing events into words, we obtain a representation thereof where everything that exists is named and, being in the form of words, is reduced to the form of intellect and reason. In the philo- sophical critique of metaphysics, this tendency to reduce everything to words and reason (i.e. logos) has come to be denoted in certain circles by the term logocen- trism, which is but a synonym for intellectualism. Logocentrism is a way of thinking about the event of being that has its origin in the ancient Greek culture and has shaped the Western way of relating to the world. That is, the idea of rational thought apart and independent from the material world, metaphysics, is bound up with the practice of reducing complex situations to words and verbal description.
To produce transcriptions of this first type requires little else than playing a video and noting the words heard, which are then transcribed directly into a word process- ing program. Where transcribers hear someone speaking but without being able to make out specific words, question marks are used to indicate the approximate num- ber of words (e.g., <??> to indicate two words). Verbal descriptions of actions are inserted where appropriate or necessary (e.g. turn 1 below). Transcribers also tend to insert punctuation following common grammatical practices even though speak- ers hardly ever make reference to punctuation – unless they “air quote” or says something like “the situation is like this, period.” That is, where the transcriber hears a question, a question mark will be inserted at the end of the sentence indepen- dent of the fact how participant listeners have heard the current speaker as evi- denced in their subsequent turns. When they have trouble ascertaining a phrase in some way, as statement, question, or order, they tend to use what happens later to explain what happened earlier. That is, in placing a question mark even though the speaker has not said “question mark,” the transcription not only has already become interpretation but also has come to adopt the self-action approach.
Consider Fragment 1.2 as an example of a transcription, which was produced from a videotape shot in the same second-grade mathematics curriculum from which the preceding fragment derives. The episode is discussed in further depth in Chap. 5, and also features in the proposal for alternative descriptions to be used in a transactional approach presented in Chap. 11. The exchange occurred in a discus- sion about the shape of a mystery object in a shoebox that could only be perceived by means of the hand entering through a screened opening. The children were tasked to represent the object in the box by means of plasticine. In the episode, Melissa has shaped her plasticine into a cube, but Sylvie and Jane have shaped their plasticine into flat rectangular solids (slabs). Every now and then, the research assis- tant (Lillian) recording the three girls is also contributing to the exchange.
Fragment 1.2
1 M: ((after putting her hand in the box for a while)) I still think it is a cube.
((The whole group pauses.))
2 S: Let me check ((puts her hand into box)).
3 L: Why do you think it is a cube?
4 M: Because it’s the same; it’s the same ((turns her model over in her hands)).
Characteristic of this form of transcript is the removal of temporality of all dimensions of participants’ action, not only regarding the production of their talk but also regarding their physical behavior (e.g. gestures, body position, transactions with physical object/s, and gaze orientation). As readers can see, the transcript pre- sented above is reduced to the order in which words have been pronounced. In fact, the sense-experience is that of sounds, which are heard as certain words unless there are some problems, and transcribers may never figure out what had been said or indeed whether some sound was actually produced by a human. The verbal descrip- tion of the hand/arm movement no longer renders the temporality of the movement and is not coordinated with the temporal unfolding of the speech. Because tempo- rality has been removed, the forms of thought said to be “behind” the utterance are taken to be relatively constant over the length of a typical lesson or interview. Such a description, by and large static, facilitates making claims about “conceptions” and
“conceptualizations” that a student “has” and that can be sampled unproblemati- cally in an interview, where it is read out by means of an objectification into words or other signs. These conceptions or conceptual frameworks may be represented – by the student or by the researcher based on a clinical interview – using concept maps (Fig. 1.3). Concepts and conceptions are stable things that come to be related into structures that again have the character of thing (rather than event). To get there, researchers tend to make no difference between some word used at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of an interview. If we pushed hard, however, to get at these stable things, “this immobile substrate of mobility … would withdraw to the same extent as we tried approaching it” (Bergson 1911, 34).
Researchers interested in learning tend to take such transcriptions and infer
“meanings” and “mental structures” that somehow are in the speakers’ minds and
that have led them to say what they said. For example, a mathematics educator inter- ested in my work concluded from the fragment: “Melissa (initially) conceptualizes the mystery object as a cube. She bases her conclusion on the tactile observations she makes by turning the object over and ‘checking the sizes’ of its faces.” Here, the verbal articulations and descriptions of movements become indices for something that is not directly available. Melissa is saying, “I still think it is a cube,” and on the other the researcher claims, “Melissa (initially) conceptualizes the mystery object as a cube.” The relation between word and thought (mind) is taken to be as a rather simple one, the former providing access to the latter. Thus, in learning research, verbal transcriptions of interviews and classroom videotapes are regularly used to find out what and how students think, how they solve problems, or how they “con- struct” their mathematical mental structures (or, conceptions, representations, or even identities). But of course, this requires an inference, for all those theoretical entities are hidden from view and only expressed in the talk that led to the interview and its transcription. These are not just hidden from view but they are inherently mental and thus non-physical. When saying “cube” while pointing to or touching the physical thing Mrs. Winter placed on the floor (offprint in turn 1, Fragment 1.1) makes a link that can be witnessed without requiring special methods, the transla- tion that occurs between witnessable acts of speaking and the non-physical and hidden world of thoughts, meanings, and ideas is tenuous and thus requires a care- fully articulated method. That is, researchers have to specify how they get from interview talk to a representation of the conceptual structure such as exemplified in Fig. 1.3. How anyone could learn what a thought, meaning, or idea is, if it is always hidden, remains unspecified.
The transcription lends itself to the extension of the self-action approach to inter- action. Each turn is attributed to the person and represents an action of a certain kind – like treating turn 1 as a “claim” and turn 3 as a “question” of which Melissa and Lillian are the respective owners. The fragment presents completed phrases, one after another. It appears as if one action followed another, and the assumption tends to be made that Melissa made a claim (turn 1), Lillian asked Melissa for a reason (turn 3), and Melissa provided a reply (turn 4). That each participant is speaking for the other – so that the language has to be such as to be understandable on the part of the other – rarely, if ever, is questioned.
Fig. 1.3 Concept map that a student might produce, or that a researcher creates based on an interview concerned with the identification of student conceptions
At the end of his life, Vygotsky was on the verge of creating a new theory, where the relation between word and thought no longer was direct. Thus, he wrote that thought is not merely expressed in words so that “the structure of speech is not a simple mirror image of the structure of thought” (Vygotsky 1987, 251). All three – speech, thought, and the relation between the two – are processes, that is, events.
The key to the theoretical shift proposed here is to understand events as events, not as a process where some outside force acting to turn a thing into another thing. With respect to talk as it might occur in an interview setting, we do not see any evidence for a conceptualization, unless simple word use is taken to be synonymous with conceptualizing something. Instead, in my research I have learned that students and adults (teachers, pilots) often talk about phenomena even before they ever have thought about and reflected upon some idea (phenomenon, topic), and, therefore, could not have formed (i.e., “constructed”) a concept-thing. Thought therefore is the consequence of speaking, comes to existence through speech through an abstraction that indicates an event by means of a characteristic, which may be an object-thing.
Whereas it might be appropriate to say that Melissa “turned over the cube,” the simple description of this action in words may overstate the issue. For Melissa may have turned the cube in the way we walk or scratch an itchy spot: it does not require our conscious intentional thought. We also do not know whether Melissa was inten- tionally “‘checking the sizes’ of its faces.” Rather, we observe her using the thumb and index of the right hand in apparently the same or slightly changing configura- tion along three different edges of the cube while articulating that some “it” – which we do not know whether it is an edge, a face, her cube, or the mystery object – “is the same.” That is, as soon as something is articulated in words, it is moved from the realm of events and Being, presence, and presentations into that of beings, presence of the present, and re-presentations (Dewey 1929). In this realm of words, it is sub- ject to transitive verbs that inherently embody intentionality and causal reasoning.
It is precisely in this move that the reduction from transaction within a whole to interaction between parts occurs (Ricœur 1986); and this move is the source of all philosophical errors that come with a thing-centered epistemology versus an event- centered epistemology (Nietzsche 1922). In other words, the epistemological prob- lems begin when we make statements such as “the lightening flashes,” for we attribute an event to a self-identical subject-thing (i.e. the lightening) to which we attribute an action by means of a verb (i.e. to flash) that brings something about.
Transcripts of the kind exemplified in Fragment 1.2 are consistent with a con- structivist approach, which, at least since Kant, is concerned with abstractions and abstract thought. In Piaget’s theory, we find this approach in the development from concrete operations that lead to formal thought as embodied sensorimotor schemas are abstracted and become the pattern for logical thought. Thus, whereas it is evi- dent that we would not characterize a person as consciously placing feet in walking, there is a tendency in educational psychology to use an intentionalist discourse when it comes to describe what people do in the situations that we observe them:
“construct meaning,” “develop conceptions,” “acquire knowledge,” “position them- selves,” “construct identity,” and so on. Interestingly, though, both embodiment and
enactivist camps make use of such transcriptions, thereby retaining the very Cartesianism that they intend to overcome (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 2009).
All of these terms refer to things; even actions are things that are external causes for something else that happens afterward and for the effect. But these things do not connect other than by means of other things that mediate between them, including forces external to the things. In our everyday experience, however, there are not disconnected things and forces that make for causal connections but all the events – seeing, hearing, feeling – are “obscurely drawn together and mutually implied in a unique drama. Therefore, the body is not an object. For the same reason, the con- sciousness I have thereof is not a thought” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 231, emphasis added). The living, animate body therefore cannot be reconstituted after having dis- sected it into pieces to get a better idea of how it works. It is because of the gathering capacity of the drama that I propose in Chap. 12 a psychology in terms of drama. It will not attempt to reconstitute human conduct and psychology from decontextual- ized bits and pieces: like I cannot reconstitute life by replaying the photographs on a reel fast enough so that they give the semblance of movement.