Identity and Language

I like the idea or concept of figured worlds as I delved into this week’s reading Holland, Lacicotte, Skinner, & Cain (1998). The first understanding of figured worlds was right from the first page of the third chapter when nationalism was restated as participation in an “imagined community”. An immediate example that came to mind was of my country Ghana. It is country of about 72 languages, and very diverse culturally and linguistically. Because of colonialism from the 1700s to the 1950s, and European imperialism power marking up territories in Africa, different groups of people were put together into one political entity. As a result, you would find ethnic groups in Africa divided into different countries. By independence, even though Ghana was made by of different ethnic groups who spoke different languages, “artifacts” like our shared history, educational systems, oppression from colonialism become pivots in creating our new figured world, our new country. On a broader scale,...

While doing this week's readings and thinking about the questions we had to reflect on, for a long time I was not sure I knew how to really define activity theory so hopefully, my explanation makes a bit of sense. 1. What is Activity Theory? From the first reading Bomer (2003), I realized that activity theory is not a theory that tries to predictive phenomenon but it tends to be more descriptive of various means, subjects and processes happening at the same time to make an action occur. So take Bomer's (2003) analysis of various tools the children were using the class as part of learning for example. There were rules that governed how the tools had to be used properly, although Bomer (2003) noted that some tools were not used according to the rules given by the teacher. Bomer (2003) also discussed that tools are not just the material objects in the classroom such as scissors and pillow, but conversations, gestures, concepts are also tools that facilitate the learning proces...