Beliefs

Still, all of us intuitively know that this communal view does not render the richness of human communication. And indeed, some distanced themselves from the sharing perspective in intersubjectivity presented so far to suggest ideas such as taken-as-shared beliefs to describe communication among children participating in successive social activities designed to promote learning. For Cobb et al. the term taken as shared “…leaves room for the diversity in individual students’ ways of participating in these activities”. But if these beliefs are, as posited by definition, subjective and not necessarily mutual and not shared by the community, how various social activities in which divergent views emerge may lead to new understandings, to new meanings? If Cobb is right, then he leaves room for diversity but also for mystery, as it is difficult to understand how communication can be maintained when nothing is necessarily shared. An additional sense of the notion of intersubjectivity was necessary. To make clear this sense, Matusov (1996) observed a succession of discussions on play craft among elementary school children mediated by a teacher. Matusov showed that in the disagreements some students raised no idea or no opposition to any idea. Rather, although a fierce disagreement arose among children, the disagreement for some turned around ownership of the play crafted while the other students thought it was motivated by a better play craft. Matusov concluded that a new sense of intersubjectivity should be elaborated, a process of coordination of participants’ contributions in joint activity. For Matusov, not only agreement, but disagreement is at the basis of social activities if it is shared (and in this sense, it differs from Cobb’s stance). Matusov gives examples for which understandings emerge from the coordination of contributions without any common belief. In those cases, an observer can extract from the social activity a thread of compatibility of actions, that is, an interpretation encompassing the goals of each participant, and which is coherent. In Matusov’s terms, “The participatory notion of intersubjectivity as a coordination of individual contributions to the joint activity allows researchers to incorporate both participants’ understandings and misunderstandings of each other, and their similarities and differences as the participants are simultaneously in agreement and in disagreement”. Matusov considered other situations in which meaningful communication can be maintained — situations in which teachers or students care for others and help them understand, develop, or own what they already master. Communication in this case is maintained but calls for another sense of intersubjectivity, that of agency to features concerns by teachers (or students) that are shared by the ones about which they care