Responding to LCHC’s polyphonic autobiography: Studying rocks in a landslide and the creation of new, more humane forms of LCHC’s own activity

Doing social science … is like being a geologist who studies rocks in a landslide.

– Roy D’Andrade (as cited in Cole, 1995, p. 190)

The acid test of the theory is its success in guiding the construction of new, more humane forms of activity.

– Michael Cole (1998, p. 293)

This special issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity, entitled The LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography: Extensions, Connections and Dialogue, is a collection of articles on and/or additions to an important, “live” document. Members of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), at the University of California, San Diego, assembled a detailed record of the research conducted by and at the lab over the past five decades, from the international context in the 1960s, through the lab’s formation in the early 1970s, until around 2013. Entitled The Story of LCHC: A Polyphonic Autobiography, this chronological narrative is on a website (https://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu) that includes “portals” providing information on central concepts, people, and projects and allows the autobiography to be open to future authors who might enter the document and make their own contributions.

The articles

The 11 articles in this issue enter into dialogue with, extend, correct and enrich The Story of LCHC: A Polyphonic Autobiography, continuing the autobiography’s project of reflecting critically and constructively on LCHC’s long trajectory of investigation and metamorphosis. Martin Packer, Natalia Gajdamaschko, and Jennifer Vadeboncoeur were the initiators and curators of this special issue, and one of their original intentions was to bring the autobiography to our readership’s attention. As the issue grew to completion, the website Cultural Praxis (http://culturalpraxis.net) also came into being, and we are very pleased to be able to welcome more responses to the autobiography from others who find the work compelling. We can now invite all of you, dear readers, to submit your thoughts for publication on this MCA companion site.

Such a recursive process – with subjects and means of study traveling at different speeds, colliding off one another, often changing each other’s characters and courses – is, of course, fitting: LCHC has always been engaged in an effort to work with and develop theory that can guide the construction of new, more humane forms of activity, including the forms of activity that LCHC has co-constituted. One thing that The LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography shows us is that LCHC has consistently endeavored “to place culture and activity at the center of attempts to understand human nature” (LCHC’s most recent mission statement), including attending to the culture and activity of the researchers, themselves. This attention to process – a genetic method of laboratory development – has taken many forms over LCHC’s many decades, and appears in most, if not all, of the following articles.

The first article in this issue is entitled The LCHC Polyphonic Autobiography as a Wiki: Why Not a Book?, and this article is a good introduction to the autobiography for those who have not yet read it. The author, Katherine Brown, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the choice of the Wiki format for the work. Brown considers alternative modes of publishing, peer production, and social filtering processes, and inquires how and by whom LCHC’s polyphonic autobiography will be used.

Brown’s exploration concludes with the assessment that the story of LCHC is too unwieldy to capture in or reduce to a book; but that a book is both supported by, as well as susceptible to, disciplinary “silos” and other institutional supports. The results of the authors’ initial efforts to remedy the limitations and exclusions that books inevitably produce are, as of yet, unknown. However, Brown rightly notes, “contextual information, space for commentary, lists of references and concepts under construction and the overall unfinished nature of an open-ended online resource feels quite familiar to those familiar with LCHC.” LCHC’s Polyphonic Autobiography, like LCHC, has been and is being designed to invite growth and change, and to support the diverse needs and goals of its many users.

In the second article, The New Mathematics and an Old Culture, John Gay gives an autobiographical introduction to this seminal work of his, which he undertook with Michael Cole and Bill Welmers, and then tells something of the research itself. He states: “I want to believe that the tests we designed were sufficient to demonstrate that Kpelle people could do well at tasks which built on their own previous experience, but were less good at tasks which seems culturally irrelevant or out of place.” The contribution of this research to the now well-supported conclusion that “intelligence can only be measured within a community that is sufficiently uniform to allow honest comparisons” was an auspicious early contribution for LCHC.

In the third article, Musings on Ecological Validity (with a Little Help from my Friends), Lois Holzman places LCHC within “a broader intellectual movement seeking to overcome the intellectual-philosophical dualistic divide between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in human psychological functioning.” Holzman notes that LCHC participants are inspired by Vygotsky’s writings, methodological insights and empirical findings, “not as abstract psychological concepts, but as applicable to current socio-cultural-political life conditions.” In addition, she returns to Wittgenstein to appreciate “the pitfalls of causality” and this is one of the reasons that we place this paper near the start of this issue: LCHC, as the polyphonic autobiography describes, has never been solely concerned with the work of any one scholar or school of thought. In this spirit, Holzman discusses how Wittgenstein, like Vygotsky, “pointed the way to creating an ecologically valid psychology.”

Holzman goes on to describe what she calls the “social tool-and-result activity,” which she finds in the Fifth Dimension and Playworlds, two well-known LCHC projects, as well as in some of her own work in the All Stars Project. Using poetry and her own, characteristically accessible and elegant prose, she emphasizes: “what we do is not separate from how we see and understand what we do.” Finally, we also chose to put Holzman’s contemplations near the start of this issue because she offers a constructive criticism of LCHC. We especially appreciate this contribution because it helps us in making a concerted effort to avoid rose tinted glasses despite the nostalgia that our appreciation for LCHC lends to our perspectives, and despite the fact that the call for this issue naturally attracted scholars, researchers and activists with a desire to celebrate LCHC. (For another contribution toward this effort, see commentaries/articles by Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, and Alfredo Jornet, Ivana Guarassi, and Antti Rajala, in this issue.) Holzman concludes that when she looks back at the body of work produced by LCHC “without the experimenters’ lens,” she often sees “things hinted at but not taken very far in the articulation of what was done.” We hope the future generation of LCHC-ers will be able to respond to this challenge.

In the fourth article, The Fifth Dimension Play and Learning Environment: Prototype to Practice, Honorin Nocon describes how the Fifth Dimension (5D) emerged as a prototype in 1982 from earlier research of LCHC that was exploring the role of computers in equalizing or stratifying education. Work with the 5D prototype, which combined research and teaching within a social justice orientation, focused specifically on the role of the school context in constructing children’s success or lack thereof in school. Nocon also mentions how much she values the intellectual and cultural openness of LCHC, as an intercultural, international and interdisciplinary laboratory with a willingness to both test theory and to engage with different theoretical perspectives.

In the fifth article, Following the Trail of the 5^th Dimension: Learning from Contradictions in a University-Community Partnership, José L. Lalueza, Sònia Sánchez-Busqués, and David García-Romero look at the historical trajectories of their research group’s set of action research projects, collectively called the Shere Rom network, which were inspired by LCHC’s 5D projects. Lalueza et al. examine the sustainability of these projects as “experiment(s) by design” and discuss the development of three sites in the greater metropolitan area of Barcelona over 12 years. The authors argue that these sites have constructed a “‘third space’ in which the university and the school community pursue their respective goals.” The emergence of the Fifth Dimension, and sites inspired by the Fifth Dimension, demonstrate both the effectiveness of the model and the ability of researchers across the globe to use the model in culturally responsive ways.

In the sixth article, On LCHC Internationalization: 1983–1987, Four Years that Originated the Spanish Connection, Alberto Rosa, Ignacio Montero and Juan-Daniel Ramirez identify the role of LCHC in the international dissemination of the psychological approach originated by Vygotsky and Luria. LCHC accomplished this feat by hosting researchers from many different parts of the world and creating a geographically broad academic network. As with other articles in this issue, these authors recollect their visits at LCHC and their professional trajectories and educational practices outside of the US. The description of academic and technological contexts of the times are of interest in this article, as are the specifics concerning the combination of intellectual passions and human caring that produced living networks of human scholars – a topic further developed by Jornet, Guarrasi and Rajala and their notion of LCHC as distributed bio-geographies. The authors detail a profound, multifaceted impact of LCHC culture on visiting scholars, as in Ramirez’s recount: “Remembering the time of my sabbatical in the lab, I can say that the experiences lived in it radically transformed my intellectual life and, paraphrasing Flaubert, my sentimental education.”

The seventh article, Cultural-Historical Perspective in Spain and Portugal: Developing Theoretical and Methodological Approaches, by Manuel L. de la Mata, Luisa Aires, Andrés Santamaría, M. Ángeles Rebollo-Catalán, Mercedes Cubero, and Rafael García-Pérez, discusses current Cultural-Historical approaches in Spain and Portugal, focusing on four lines of research. These include “1) sociocultural activities, mental actions and semiotic mediation, 2) education in schools, 3) education beyond schools, including educational practices in community-cultural contexts, and 4) identity construction in (other) sociocultural settings.” Their article is not autobiographical, per se, but it does narrate some of the ongoing work of the coauthors as they develop research and scholarship that they refer to as the “Seville Human Activity Approach.” This work begins with the first ISCAR (International Society for Cultural and Activity Research) in Seville in 2005, when ISCRAT (International Society for Cultural Research and Activity Theory) and SSCR (the Society for Socio-Cultural Research) combined. The authors provide a fascinating example of LCHC-originating contributions as a few, albeit critical, voices that are put into dialogue with many and diverse other voices (including Piaget’s).

Focusing on ecological validity, the eighth article by Greg Thompson is entitled, Race in the LCHC Autobiography: Past, Present, and Future. Thompson considers the role of race in the history of LCHC and in relation to LCHC’s autobiography, asking in what ways more recent LCHC participants find themselves to be concerned – as were earlier LCHC participants – with racial inequality and ways that social scientists “misunderstand” the problem of social inequality. Thompson notes that LCHC’s consistent focus on ecological validity remains relevant today and, like Holzman in this issue, Thompson is proposing a critique of much LCHC participants’ work. He suggests the following: “Thus far, we have seen how the conceptual tools and methods that the LCHC has employed in the past can be particularly useful for social science researchers working in the present historical moment, with all its similarities to moments past. Since deficit theories are once again commonplace, the LCHC’s approaches and methods are once again particularly relevant.”

In the ninth article, entitled The Psychology of Schooling and Cultural Learning: Some Thoughts About the Intellectual Legacy of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, David Preiss describes his own experiences with the work of LCHC in order to consider LCHC’s legacy. Preiss highlights Michael Cole’s work and claims that one of the main legacies stemming from the Cultural Psychology tradition that LCHC advanced is “the realization that cultural learning is a richer and more elaborated process than schooling.” Preiss looks to Cultural Psychology to inform and support nothing less than our future understandings of “what it takes to imagine alternative cultural arrangements that may increase our chances of surviving the new socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene era.”

With the tenth article, by Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur and entitled Inviting Social Futures, Imagining Unicorns: A Commentary on The Story of LCHC: A Polyphonic Autobiography, we move to a more detailed focus on the future of LCHC. In this article an acknowledgment is made that the autobiography’s Chapter 6, The Future is currently unwritten. Drawing upon the concept of prolepsis – defined as building from and transforming the past to act toward possible social futures in the present – Vadeboncoeur emphasizes that moving toward social futures that are more accessible, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable requires both acting as if these futures are possible and holding space for the anticipated and unanticipated to arrive. She compares three literary examples of prolepsis: two that are lived by a character named William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, and one that is described in Rainier Maria Rilke’s Sonnet 4 in Book II of Sonnets to Orpheus.

While the first exemplifies what is possible when proximal futures are instrumentally crafted, the second exemplifies the limitations of imagining in the present given the ways in which histories of erasure (intentional and unintentional) have reduced what is visible. Thus, “[w]hile actions are taken toward social futures as if they can be brought into being, simultaneously spaces must be created and held for contributions that have been erased, misrecognized, and/or manipulated, as well as the expected and unexpected.”

The third example of prolepsis is a description of how collectives may work to invite particular social futures. As parallel to Rilke’s description of believing in a unicorn and feeding this belief with love and possibility, more equitable social futures are more likely to emerge when, in addition to love and possibility, space is held for historical exclusions – such as cultural voices, knowledges, and interpretations – and acknowledgments are made that present narratives are partial, positional, and incomplete. From this perspective, perhaps it is not surprising that Section 6, The Future is unwritten: it “is an invitation waiting to be lived, rather than filled, and likely to be lived in ways only visible in hindsight.”

We conclude this issue with another look toward the future of LCHC and its diverse proleptic paths, or imagining of social futures through past and present actions. The final article of the issue, LCHC’s Expanding Bio-geographies: A Glimpse to the Future(s) Through the Re-generating CHAT Project, by Alfredo Jornet, Ivana Guarrasi, and Antti Rajala, takes up several of the threads started in other articles in the issue and discusses LCHC as a research organization that expands and grows across locations and through people’s biographies. It uses the empty room displayed in Section 6, The Future, as an anchoring point to provide a “genetic analysis” of how two recorded moments in which that room (not exactly the same room, but a meeting room in San Diego) has been populated can be understood as representing two different moments in the development of the lab’s unfolding life.

The first moment, recorded in December 2003, was a meeting on occasion of a conference on Vygotsky in Moscow. The other moment was a meeting in 2019, part of the Re-generating CHAT project, which the authors consider to be “one of the ways in which LCHC continues to exist as distributed bio-geography.” Jornet et al.’s discussion revolves around purpose, or motive, as the most defining characteristic of any organization, and “identify a progressive and critical orientation towards social justice through academic work as the primary motive that binds people together in that intermeshing knotwork that is LCHC.” Through their analyses of the lab’s history, as embodied in the two meetings, the authors describe constitutive dimensions as part of how this motive materializes, and how these dimensions are changing as sociohistorical contexts also change.

Three additional pieces posted on cultural praxis

We highlight three additional pieces that are not contained in this pages and are instead linked on the Cultural Praxis website. The video of the 2003 conference on Vygotsky in Moscow, to which Jornet et al. direct us,¹ is one of three key pieces of this special issue that are not contained in its pages. The second is also on the same Youtube channel, a trove of explanations and anecdotes that Natalia Gajdamaschko collected in a series of interviews with Michael Cole, all of which relate closely to the history and future described in the autobiography and discussed in this issue. The third is key to understanding some of the aspects of LCHC, LCHC past and future(s), which is posted on the Cultural Praxis site: A 1983 letter that highlights certain general principles or approaches that foreshadow the development of LCHC, and which can be noted throughout the autobiography and this special issue.

This letter is from Michael Cole to Vladimir Posner and a chronology of the context in which the letter was written can be found in “Moscow Calling”.² Posner is a journalist who had used satellite video links while acting as a Soviet spokesman on the US ABC network, and Cole had met Posner 20 years earlier while an exchange student in Moscow. The letter illustrates a part of the history of our scientific field; it is a foundational story for all of our work.

We have included the letter to stress the collective effort involved in accessing and making Vygotsky’s research available in the US. What was needed was complicated work to foster the exchange of ideas and create collaborative research and scholarship. Specifically, people from outside the Soviet sphere had to be brave enough enter the Soviet sphere; to make contacts with people, many of whom would become close friends; and to learn. The letter tells an authentic story about the difficulties of cooperating within academia under the surveillance of totalitarian state and the Cold War: It has elements of a great spy novel. The letter also adds to our understanding of LCHC’s later contributions to the field, in part by showing the organizational finesse required to pull together the necessary elements and to establish the international connections of such a program. We believe that the letter and the videos will be compelling as historical artifacts.

We also think that it is important to mention the long personal history of collaboration of Michael Cole with Dr. Gita Vygodskaya (Vygotsky’s daughter) (May 9,1925 – July 13, 2010), and Dr. Elena Kravtsova (Vygotsky’s granddaughter) (April 26, 1950 – March 28, 2020). Since the creation of the Institute of Vygotsky in Moscow, more than 20 years ago, Cole routinely participated as a keynote speaker on the institute’s early Vygotsky’s Readings via telebridge. Thus, the tradition of collaboration that Cole started many years ago and described in the letter to Pozner, continued in recent decades with Vygotsky’s Institute in Moscow. In fact, the 2003 meeting described in Jornet et al.’s article in this issue, was chaired by Elena Kravtsova. We hope that such enduring, personal, international collaboration will continue to shape Section 6, The Future of The Story of LCHC: A Polyphonic Autobiography.

Concluding remarks

In closing the introduction to this special issue, we start by highlighting the following qualities of LCHC across its diverse members, places and times, as demonstrated across the commentaries in this issue and the materials posted. When the first author was a graduate student at LCHC, she was taught by Michael Cole and Peg Griffin to read the first field note of a research project in search of the final foci, arguments and even potential contributions. A good example of such proleptic development in research is an early Fifth Dimension project in which the researchers returned to audio tapes of the planning meeting recorded at the start of the project and could, from their future vantage point, hear the future of the project in the initial discussions (Cole, 1996). The letter to Pozner remained for years in the LCHC archives but, with hindsight, we can see much in the letter that foreshadowed what we have found while reading the The Story of LCHC: A Polyphonic Autobiography and gathering these commentaries and materials. For instance, we have noted the persistence of LCHC’s:

• commitment to bringing diverse people and perspectives together;

• ability to build networks of diverse people, in varying roles, who are oriented toward a common or shared vision/collaboration;

• commitment to bridging differences and also valuing differences;

• healthy skepticism of psychology as neutral, and the ability to see the political where it is not evident;

• sensitivity to outcomes of certain perspectives on the lived experiences of people and on material conditions;

• concern for mediating understandings between international researchers, and a concern for how the ideas of each group of researchers will be “heard” and taken up by others;

• interest in creating new theories, methodologies, and solutions for ongoing issues;

• commitment to including and respecting differences, and a concern for educating all children/people, both of which are based in an equity orientation;

• commitment to advancing science over ideology, with a healthy awareness of how ideology works to affect science; and

• recognition of the ways in which material conditions constrain scholarship, and how in each new age scholarship must respond to evolving conditions.

Certainly, there are several ideal or imagined LCHCs that sit alongside the LCHC that was historically, socially and culturally located, with these LCHCs always in complicated relation to each other, driving their development. This multiplicity exists across various places, times, projects and perspectives in part through the people who participated and advanced the scholarship of LCHC. While LCHC was built with equity-oriented intentions at its foundation, as a developing collective, it was also informed by the affordances and constraints of the times and, as a result, it was in some ways complicit in perpetuating some of the injustices it worked so hard to address. These included perpetuating the continuation of psychology, a discipline with violent ideological roots, and the exclusionary mechanisms built into school and university structures, particularly systemic racism and misogyny. Indeed, LCHC grew and expanded from the participation of academics and researchers across the globe, many of whom were able to contribute because of their own various privileges. The LCHC of today and the future will need to work more diligently and wisely to create spaces for the significant theories, voices, practices, and forms of participation that have been and continue to be systematically excluded from society more generally and from LCHC, if it is to continue to endeavor “to place culture and activity at the center of attempts to understand human nature” (LCHC’s most recent mission statement). The emerging self-awareness and self-critique of LCHC is evident in the creation of spaces for continued dialogue, including The Story of LCHC: A Polyphonic Autobiography itself, as a space that invites the contributions of new authors. We also look with hope to the many LCHC-related projects mentioned in this issue, which reach out to meet and work with potential sister laboratories, such as the Re-generating CHAT project and Cultural Praxis.

We conclude with a story of one person, the first author, becoming a member of LCHC. Beth arrived at LCHC in 2003 with a commitment to making meaning with young children and preschool teachers, having been introduced to the research of LCHC through the scholarship of Vivian Paley (1986), a preschool teacher/scholar who contributed to this journal in it’s pre-MCA form. What made her want to stay at LCHC – for the formative immersion that many authors in this issue describe – was not only the support that this methodological commitment was given, through various theoretical contributions and methodological practices of LCHC members and projects, but also, and even more importantly, her immediate and crystal clear perception of several principled commitments of LCHC that partially but essentially constituted these practices.

From the moment of arrival in the LCHC “meeting room,” Beth was unforgettably welcomed by then-postdoctoral researcher, Sonja Baumer, and introduced to practices that paralleled – as in preschools – the attempt to care for and grow people (including graduate and undergraduate students, professors, visiting researchers, office staff, families of LCHC members, teachers working on LCHC projects, and the children in these projects) to realize their full human potential to participate in the world as is and as if it could be more just. LCHC then held true to this introduction, attracting so many people who supported each other with both genuine interest in difference and with respect, as full people, as scholars/teachers/students and as humans, and this support was fostered for two reasons: out of concern for LCHC participants as members of joint activities and also as unique human beings contributing to life and lives in many arenas; and as essential to LCHC’s collective commitment to produce innovative research “with a particular focus on the sources of, and solutions to, problems of social inequality” (LCHC’s most recent mission statement). In this sense, LCHC is not a group of people or an institution or a place, but a method of living – or a genentic method of generating – a genetic method.

Mind, Culture, and Activity is one component of LCHC’s expanding bio-geography. We offer this special issue of MCA as a contribution to the ongoing legacy of LCHC’s landslide (D’Andrade, as cited in Cole, 1995, p. 90, see above), a collective effort that has been and continues to be of interest across the social sciences. For all who constitute LCHC as a distributed bio-geography, this issue reflects one small part of the collective work undertaken thus far to learn from the past and create new, more humane, forms of research activities.

Notes

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwHuttdFtWa6dDQoHOy6LiA/videos.

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiF4SwTmVBw.