Re-Generating Chat 2.0: Toward a Utopian View of the Future

• In Event: From Global Warming to Increased Violence and Inequities: Cultural-Historical Thinking for the Anthropocene's Crises

Abstract

This paper elaborates a new project organizing around a proleptic view of the world as it could be. The Re-generating CHAT project is designed to push, to re-mediate five decades of a cultural historical activity theoretical (CHAT) approach to learning and human development. The aims of the project are summarized succinctly in Cole’s question: What kind of person are we raising, with what kinds of capacities and dispositions must such a person have to thrive in what remains of the Anthropocene (Cole, 2019)? This has become an urgent question for scholars across the disciplines who take a critical approach to understanding human activity and its ecology, as CHAT, although increasingly popularized in educational scholarship, has lost much of its critical transformative character and has, in many instances, become “domesticated.” The paper examines the imperatives, principles, and commitments of what a re-generated
CHAT might be, including how CHAT might become more relevant for work with nondominant communities, including what a CHAT, informed by key texts and just-oriented community partnerships by scholars of color and those interested in a more just world, might look like.

CHAT was influenced by American pragmatism and European critical theory; however, in the U.S. context, the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC), under the direction of Mike Cole, took an interesting and much needed turn in conceptualizations and instantiation of the theory. Actually, the seeds of such work began even earlier, but for sake of this paper, we will say the work of the Rockefeller Center in New York and certainly the work of Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole were key influencers. The LCHC in its earliest inception became a site where international scholars and a group of young scholars of color (e.g., Moll, Diaz, Simmons, Boykin, etc,) made issues of race, culture, and diversity more central. A second generation LCHC (including this author), continued to collaborate with LCHC to build on these contributions in ways that made CHAT more relevant to communities in the U.S. and beyond.

As the paper will detail, new projects with new methodologies (e.g., Social design- based experiment), that were more ecologically oriented sought to co-design learning ecologies with relevant partners in mutual relations of exchange in which learning was made equitable and consequential for youth from nondominant communities. I discuss several of these 5th Dimension programs (Cole & the Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006), organized around an utopian ideal and methodology (Brown & Cole, 2001) as exemplars of imagining and designing an ideal ecology committed to a new set of principles—work that is a step toward addressing Cole’s question of the Anthropocene.

Author

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley