A very brief tale. In After Virtue, Alasdair McIntyre argues that the language of morality emerged from conditions and relationships formed between people within specific social contexts. Virtues did not arise to describe some ideal, contextless world. Rather they arose to describe people and relationships in specific historical circumstances within the social world. Virtues were not simply qualities of individuals, but qualities of social relationships. 'Courage,' for example, in Homeric Greece where we first find the virtue articulated in writing, was closely connected to friendship and "a wry sense of humor" (1984, p. 123). Speakers used virtues to extend, reward, and encourage each other's efforts to fulfill social roles within a historically-specific context.
 

Then McIntyre describes the present day. Our language deceives us, he says. Because we have words that are apparently similar to those used in earlier times, we assume we can use them to accomplish comparable tasks. The conditions and relationships, of course, have long ago changed leaving only fragments of the language. We have forgotten the disparate and often radically incompatible origins and purposes of these fragments. The commonality of our language within an objectionist, rationalist perspective towards reality, deceives us into thinking that it reflects a consistent ordered state of affairs that is true under any circumstances. In denying the specific context and purpose with which these virtues arose, however, McIntyre claims we have eliminated the means by which we can settle moral arguments. Thus, though unintentionally, we have created a situation in which moral arguments are unending and inescapable.
 

John Shotter (1993, 1990, 1984) and Kenneth Gergen (1999, 1994, 1991, 1982) tell a similar tale of deception regarding psychological language. The conception of the individual as an independent, rational, unfettered decision-maker justifies and directs all of the social institutions that shape our lives, including our systems of justice, economics, health, welfare, and education. Like the language of morality, the origins of the psychological language with which we construct our everyday life, even though much more recent, have been obscured or forgotten. The discrepancies between our expectations for the outcomes of these systems and the products that actually come out of the systems have made it apparent that this psychological language is bankrupt. Literary theory (Derrida, 1976; Bakhtin, 1986, Fish, 1980) and social psychology (Antaki, 1981; Gergen, Hepburn, and Comer, 1986) now argue against the idea that our thoughts and words could reflect an autonomous self-sufficient individuality. Family therapists and developmental psychologists (Boscolo et al, 1987; Bruner, 1990; Caplow, 1968; Reiss, 1981) dispute the claim that each of us is ultimately and solely responsible for his or her actions. And further if each person is self-contained and rigidly bounded (Bellah, 1985; Etzioni, 1981; Sarnoff and Sarnoff, 1989) we are unable to account satisfactorily for communities and the value of working with others. The social constructionist perspective offers a fuller, more coherent means of understanding ourselves, and consequentially a more useful, productive approach to teaching and learning.
 

In this article, I will focus on what both authors identify as one of the central 'fallacies' that our discourse perpetuates. Namely, that the fundamental starting point for understanding all human language, thinking, and action lies within the individual. This assumption has become so embedded in the way we think and talk that it is virtually impossible for us to see all the ways it constraints us. Our language itself, our only resource for 'looking,' perpetuates this central bias towards 'seeing' the individual as the originator of all behavior and cognitive events. Wittgenstein recognized this dilemma: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeated it to us inexorably" (1953: paragraph 115).
 

The fallacy of the ultimately responsible individual works in close connection with a second: that within each individual resides a mind. Richard Rorty (1979) calls the metaphor at work here "the mirror of nature" but as Shotter notes, explicitly using Rorty's arguments, it is not at all clear how the contents of a 'mind' could reflect an outer world. Indeed, it is not all clear what kind of entities we could possibly be talking about that serve as both containers of ideas as well as agents for conducting mental processes. We urge our students to explain what they have got in their minds and yet at the same time to use their minds well.
 

Beginning with a study of language, Shotter and Gergen dispute both assumptions. We will never understand the human thinking that goes on in our world, they argue, if we continue to focus on the individual. We will never cultivate the productive imagination we need in a multicultural society, nor the effective resourceful problem-solving we need to grow together, nor appreciate the rewards of intimacy and mutual engagement, if we continue to assume that a detached, self-sufficient control center called 'mind' resides 'within' separated individuals. If we continue to uncritically accept individuality as the starting point for our education programs, we will never have the kinds of teachers and schools we want: teachers who understand how to move students and in turn be moved by them and schools that respond imaginatively and sensitively to communities and cultures.
 

From these two social constructionists, we find what, under the right circumstances, may seem an obvious truth: that learning is a social process, not an individual one. The tale of the fundamental, separate individual is the tale that Piaget and the constructivists tell. To take social constructionist views seriously will be an intricate and unsettling task for individualism, like any ideology, pervades our familiar modes of thinking in more ways than is at first apparent. We will have to change not only the ways in which we think on an explicit level but also the constructions of thought we find it difficult to attend to, including those of language. As for the field of education, we will have to rethink some of our most cherished, most unassailable, most foundational conceptions and assumptions. We must aim to recognize and enhance those social forces that create meaning, forces already at work in education and schools, forces that allow us to become the kinds of selves we become as members of groups.
 

Language in the Constructivist and the Information-processing accounts

At least in one respect, the cognitive, information-processing view of learning fits well with the constructivist view popular among many teacher educators today. Both understand learning as an individual construction within an autonomous mind. For Piaget, to whom the current constructivist view is often attributed, learning is a matter of accommodating the individual mind to an exterior reality and assimilating within this mind the actual principles by which that reality operates. While this accommodation and assimilation can be furthered or obstructed by others, essentially it is an individual process and thus not dependent upon others.
 

The information-processing view smoothly supplants and augments the constructivist view by not disrupting this focus upon individuals. In this view, learning is depicted as information coming into an isolated brain in the form of an electrical impulse that upon repetition inscribes a neural pathway and may eventually develop a new synapse which constitutes a form of storing the information. Multiple brains create a parallel series, each profiting substantially but nevertheless individually from the working of the others
 

It is important for appreciating Gergen's and Shotter's arguments to notice that the information-processing and constructivist views depend upon a referential conception of language. These traditions' views grow out of traditional theories of language such as those offered by Locke, Pierce, Frege. These conceptions see words as containers for ideas (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The electrical impulse that excites and bridges a neural synapse connects the sight of the word, the hearing of the word, and the sight of the picture in somewhat the same way as the sign-speaker-referent triangle Charles Pierce used to explain meaning. Words refer to actual objects, actions, or qualities in the real world; their principal function is that of reference. We can see the metaphor at work here by picturing a young child learning to recognize printed words. She says the name or label associated with a picture, such as the word 'cat' below the drawing of a cat.
 

Further, when decontextualized, words do not have clear unambiguous referents. We need a context and an apparent purpose to find out what a speaker or writer 'really' means. What we often react to with outrage, with affection, with sorrow, with acceptance are the relationships words are used to create, as these clearly can be offensive or not. Consider an example that teachers face quite regularly but which the referential conception cannot handle effectively. Two black boys are jostling each other playfully, and one calls out affectionately, "You, Niggar." The relationship that continues between the two is likely to be strikingly different from that which emerges when a white boy calls a black the same. Once we assume meaning inheres in words, the next step is to judge some words has being in and of themselves offensive, and others as inoffensive. Mistaking the source for the power of an utterance to lie in semantics rather than the rhetoric and pragmatics of the expression encourages us to downplay the importance of relationships and overlook our continuing and active role in the development of meaning. Often we use it as a way of evading responsibility, a way of disempowering ourselves and others.
 

Or consider how far the idea of reference gets us if we attend to pronouns, which are often taken to have the clearest referents. In an earlier study (1998), one of the questions I asked when interviewing basketball players was why they shot when they did. A common reply was "When you go to the corner, you have got to shoot." And sometimes they would strut comically, mimicking Popeye, "I yam, what I yam." What are the references for the pronouns in these two comments? What is the reference for the 'you' that means 'I'? What is the reference for 'I' when the words are borrowed from another, indeed from a fictional character? Such questions lead us to doubt that reference leads to meaning.
 

The referential conception of language leads us to rely on the individual's decisions or choices. We are told to "choose our words carefully." When we use a word that does not mean what we intend it to mean we choose a new word or elaborate the picture we are envisioning of the word. We teach this view of language when we conceive of what we do as helping students as students and as future teachers develop their decision-making ability. We justify what we teach as helping students to see [the word's picture] clearly, to gain a clear perspective on reality, and to make wise decisions. But do we really make the countless separate decisions that would be required in this view? Or do the decisions we make come more in the form of monitoring ourselves in the course of our actions, making adjustments and corrections periodically as needed—as needed to generate the kind of reactions from others we want. Shotter and Gergen point us to the latter possibility.
 

In education, possibly in an attempt to limit the uncertainty that might come from abandoning the referential conception of language, we have come to focus on the individual as the site of knowledge, motivation, character, and intention. In my own department at Western Michigan University, one of the recent proposals for reorganizing our curriculum was "The Self as Learner." While learning may be expanded, understanding broadened, and motivation heightened through group work, ultimately learning is a solitary affair. The lesson either gets into the student's head or it doesn't.
 

All our talk about group processes and collaborative learning hasn't shifted our emphasis from the individual. When we as educational theorists or practitioners talk about education "for all," we often are not intending reference to any kind of collectivity. Indeed the phrase "for each and every one" would work as well. We work, we claim, with the minds that we "see" within our students' heads. We strive to educate, that is improve perspective, clarify vision, enhance the insight (such descriptors betray a continued use of Rorty's problematic metaphor of the mind's sight into the 'real' world of our students and subsequently, their students).
 

Our understanding of learning and thus of teaching, relies heavily upon this referential view of language because we tend to see real learning in all the "academic" subjects (and many of the other areas of study) as occurring in and through language. Because we see words as containing meaning, we think they can contain truths. In the case of successful learning, we envision these words become lodged in the brain or mind. Subsequently, this perspective has led us to look within individuals to see and assess learning.
 

Towards a relational view of language

Shotter and Gergen dispute the view of language put forth by the cognitivists and constructivists. Meaning is never settled nor stable as suggested by the referential conception of language. Rather it is a social achievement, achieved through constant negotiation between speaker, listener and environment, subject always to historical forces and contextual influences, as temporary of an achievement as the shape of a sand dune on a beach. Meaning is always a temporal achievement; the meaning of an utterance in one context provides clues, but never the whole story of its meaning in the next utterance. Every subsequent utterance emerges in another context at another time. Spoken words and, less obviously written words can only be understood as clues inviting one to see what the speaker or writer sees. Words work as tools for constructing relationships between the parties, and tools for carrying out these relationships, that is they are the primary means by which we influence one another.
 

Shotter argues that by themselves words do not have meanings, nor in fact can sentences express clear and unambiguous meaning. Like Bakhtin (1981), he asks us to consider the making of meaning in the course of speaking, not after all negotiations are finished and understanding is reached. One only has to recall the countless senses that can adhere to a word or sentence: metaphoric, ironic, caustic, affectionate, humorous, serious, or melodramatic. Because the sense in which a speaker intends an utterance, of course, is often not the way a recipient takes it, the two conversants must continually check and recheck their taking of their own and each other's utterances. Indeed, the recipient's reaction, or even just the saying of a comment aloud, regularly leads the speaker to perceive senses, tones, and possibilities in his or her previous utterance that he or she did not, perhaps could not, realize before. Inherent in all conversation are the elements of a truly interactive, relational, mutually creative life. Meaning is not inherent in the words, the intentions of either conversant, or the external situation in which they find themselves.
 

Both authors cite Vygotsky as a pioneer in the effort to understand learning as an essentially social process. Vygotsky, of course, taught teacher educators to see the zone of proximal development thereby acknowledging the social nature of the learning process. His project was to show that "all higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals" (Shotter, 1993:41, Vygotsky 1978: 57). Vygotsky shows that thought and language are interrelated because intellect and affect are interrelated. Shotter reminds us that this artificial separation we have come to believe in helps to further our cultural emphasis towards individualism.
 

But rather than achieving a wholesale transformation from an individual to a social conception of our view of learning and knowledge, we have largely fitted Vygotsky into the traditional cultural way Westerners have seen the world and themselves. Interactions in the zone of proximal development aid the individual acquisition of knowledge. We still see the final product of learning as an individual achievement and possession created through the collected but essentially separate efforts and isolated desires of autonomous individuals. The nature of knowledge and human beings remains unchanged.
 

Shotter stresses the embodied, practical character of most communication between human beings. Conceiving of communication as an exchange of ideas profoundly misunderstands what happens in communication and mischaracterizes the function of language: Shotter's "third, extraordinary form of knowledge." Our first type of knowledge is derived from the objectivist, rationalist approach utilized so compellingly by science and emphasizing the third person stance towards the object of study. A second type is that expressed through first person, such as is found in hermeneutical and phenomenological studies. This third approach to knowledge starts from inside a relationship in which the I and you (plural and singular) are inescapably intertwined. Such a starting point enables us to see the linguistic, sensuous, and physical connections between people, the quality of callings forth, and the directed, partial and connective quality of responses. It is a non-representational, embodied practical-moral knowledge that allows people to influence each other in their being, rather than just their intellect. That is, we move each other rather than just give each other ideas. The meaning of utterances emerges within a realm of joint action.
 

The Realm of Joint Action

Shotter wants us to see the critical realm between the realms we normally focus upon: between the self and the other. This is the realm we miss that allows the person and the external social/natural world to interact. This is the realm we miss when we focus on the individual or the other for it is a realm not fully constituted by either person but can only be characterized, in Shotter's terms, as the realm of "joint action," a realm fully dependent on the jointness of their interaction. Shotter calls this realm that of joint action. It is this realm that allows the self and person to be autonomous and efficacious not because the self acts upon the other or the external world, but rather because he or she responds to and initiates further responses from the other or within the external world. It is through negotiations within this world of joint action that selves become selves, others become others, and the external world is experienced at all. It is these negotiations that, to use Garfinkel's happy phrase we "don't notice that we don't notice".
 

For Shotter, the representational conception of language, this rather neat view of discourse, this perspective which cleanly separates listener from speaker, mind from world, intent from action, misses what Shotter calls the sphere of meaningful activity, the unordered hurley-burley or bustle of everyday social life. When we see the world as one of individual actions and reactions, we miss the world we have jointly created by responding to others' callings out and in turn calling out their further responses. We miss the social world we live within, a world neither one of us intended, a world that did not come about through the decisions of individuals. Ours is, in fact, a world in which decisions are only occasionally the cause of actions. Rather our actions and utterances mesh. Each speech act partially delineates what meaningful speech the discursive parties can make in each subsequent speech act.
 

Because we must jointly create this world with live within, it does not come about through either of our individual intentions. Neither of us is separately responsible for its emergence. Nevertheless, this world has an intentional quality to it. It is a world constructed of meanings for all the socially significant dimensions of interpersonal interaction are formed here.
 

Perhaps the hardest part of their argument for many to swallow is that 'mind' has linguistic reality, not essential or ontological reality. Much like Dewey claimed, the human mind is not an individual possession but rather a social and linguistic construction. Mind is one of our most powerful linguistic constructions for it allows us to do things together, but nevertheless, it is not a 'thing' and in fact, is best thought of as a adverb not a noun. 'Mind' consists of the words we use to carry out relationships with each other and we carry out these relationships mindfully and intelligently, or not. To access what we have come to think of as another's mind requires us, though we rarely acknowledge it, to enter into one of a variety of specific relationships with that person, including serving as the recipient of their descriptions, their explanations, their justifications, in short, their words and actions.
 

It is tempting to say we need a new language that can identify, describe, and assess knowledge as it is created among people through their interactions with each other. And yet such a new language would be sterile, unusable. We would not know how to live it. Again Wittgenstein seems to anticipate us: "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life" (1953: no. 19). We can not simply create language out of whimsy or desire and then construct our life around it. Rather as Gergen and McNamee (1999) point out "we may profitably regard words as by products of social interchange and their meaning secured by participating in specific games of language" (p. 4). What the social constructionist project calls for then is a rehabilitation and the drawing out of the largely unrecognized social dimensions already found in our language. We must find where the language we already use begins to reflect back upon its pragmatic, relational, emotive, practical and performative functions. This is the project Gergen begins in his latest effort (1999).
 

One place we might turn to for help in developing the dimension of language we seek is athletics. Athletics has struggled with the problem of describing the joint action of team members. Coaches have had to explain why, without changing any players, a team can go from playing superbly to playing disjointly and poorly from one season to the next, or even from one week to the next. To encourage, incite, and prepare each other to respond to each other's callings out, players have had to talk about their mutually reinforcing and intertwined actions. As a result, it has come up with a jargon that includes 'chemistry,' 'gelling,' ' being in sync,' 'developing a rhythm,' and 'tight teamwork'. Those outside athletics frequently find this language too imprecise, somewhat irrational and one they cannot readily follow. This language does not clearly discriminate between one occasion for its use and another where its use is inappropriate. It is primarily performative, metaphoric and descriptive, not referential, predictive or analytic. I am not clear whether the discomfort many serious scholars feel stems from the source of this language (people—i.e. jocks—who are regularly characterized as not being analytical, critical, and careful enough in the use of language) or if the emphasis on the social processes of the group (that is, the imprecise, embodied, and irrational callings out and callings forth) is so foreign to our individualistic and carefully rational ways of thinking that it seems profoundly misguided, perhaps even ardently non-serious.
 

Once we begin to look, we can find many other joint endeavors struggling to develop language to guide them. Athletics is just the arena with which I am most familiar. Music, dance, and drama seem to me to provide other familiar realms from which we are called to expand beyond the limits of our individualistic language.
 

Learning

The view Shotter and Gergen articulate has far-reaching implications for how teacher educators might understand learning, motivation, assessment, and the old behavioristic, though still not yet completely abandoned concept "transfer" of knowledge. It promises to disrupt what novice teachers have come to expect of themselves and from their students. At the same time, it offers great enrichment of the perspective we will use to see the environment we find ourselves within. It offers substantial help for our efforts to create qualitatively improved communities within our classrooms as well as outside the walls of the school building. It argues strenuously against the kinds of selves and the kinds of communities we create through the packaged curricula and standardized testing that comes so readily out of the individualistic constructivist model of human beings. Here both teachers and students can attune themselves to recognizing, promoting, and evaluating productive collaborations. We will develop more nuance to our vocabulary that enables us to see previously hidden relationships. And we will began to attend to the ways we are called out and can call out responses in others.
 

We will move beyond the idea that learning is a process of embedding knowledge within the body. Certainly this is the idea perpetuated by current brain research and the cognitive revolution. Rather than looking at the brain as the storehouse of knowledge, we will reconceive the body's role in learning by focusing on other parts, particularly those parts of the body that symbolize for us interactions with others: the hands, the feet, the lips, and various other parts. Perhaps our vision may then begin to change so that we might see the profound interconnections with others we initiate and develop through our bodies. We might then, to repeat Garfinkel's words again, "notice what we don't notice that we don't notice." In fact, as long as we see the body as a noun we will continue to be tempted to concentrate on the individual. We will continue to look solipsticly inward. But if we can come to see the body as a verb, as a moment in a continual process of collective construction, we will begin to see and appreciate our interconnections with others and with our environments. We can begin to see learning as participating in circles of others, as a matter of creatively and constructively shaping our responses to other's callings out.
 

How far athletic language can take educators remains untested, but one place athletics can surely provide a helpful model is in the form of assessment. In team sports, one does not regularly envision assessment in terms of what an individual knows or what an individual can do. Rather it consists of how well the team plays together. If viewed in terms of learning and assessment, athletics may provide an alternative to the incorporation/excorporation (expression) understanding of the body that makes the body a driving force towards individualism in conceptions of learning. Athletic knowledge is not in fact knowledge until the players put it into practice. It is a verb not a noun.
 

Such considerations ask us to dramatically rethink all assessment procedures. Within the social constructionist view, a student cannot own knowledge. Nor is knowledge a commodity with which a student might walk out of the classroom. Knowledge created through personal relations 'remains' there between the individuals in the character of the social space created among them. Rather what a successful individual student 'has' is experience in creating meaning, the disposition to invite others into collaboration and perhaps an inclination for engaging in certain embodied and linguistic practices that the right relationship can call out. On the one hand, the personal relations that create knowledge in one situation cannot, of course, ever be fully replicated in another situation, even one constituted by the same parties. On the other hand, such knowledge is never fully forgotten nor discarded, and if truly worth the evaluation 'knowledge,' it continues to actively, although often imperceptibly, structure further relations including those which future understandings will call out.
 

Final Remarks

Gergen's and Shotter's social constructionist views return us to the argument that teaching is fundamentally an artistic endeavor. It is a dialogic, rhetorical activity that we can only understand and appreciate aesthetically. In many ways, the web of responses and responses to those responses found in the classroom grows even more intricate than the web found outside the classroom and teachers must learn to appreciate more fully the beauty, the strength, and the generative power of this web than we have yet done. We must cultivate our ability to be affected by it. Effective teaching is effective not because the teacher has some unique or valuable character or the students have within them particular gifts of intelligence, disposition, and culture, but rather because the relationships developed between them are productive, nuanced, and engaging. It comes about when teachers decline to control and thereby limit students' attention, when students refuse to work alone while among others, but rather when all involved respond to and call out intelligent practices in each other. The interactions that occur in such classes cannot be adequately predicted prior to their development; they cannot be wholly directed so as to yield that sense of control that so comforts us; and they can never be satisfactorily measured. Effective teaching comes about from riding the process of learning, an art somewhat analogous to rafting in whitewater.
 
 

References