History in Person - Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave

A chapter on social practice theory

"We begin with the tenet that the political-economic, social, and cultural structuring of social existence is constituted in the daily practices and lived activities of subjects who both participate in it and produce cultural forms that mediate it."

"In practice, material and symbolic resources are distributed disproportionally across socially identified groups and generate different social relations and perspectives among participants in such groups. With their impetus from the past, historical structures infuse and restrain local practices...Historical structures also provide resources for participants and their practices and leave traces in their experience."

"history in institutional structures and history in person are never simple equivalents...Instead...the two come together, again and again, in conflicted practice undertaken not only in the face of changing material and social circumstances but also in the changing terms of culturally produced forms."

The chapter discusses "intimate self-making" alongside the participation in contentious local practice which is defined per the title - history in person

A theory to remind educators that the students we encounter in our classrooms are forming, generating, their own subjectivities through and with, and perhaps against, social, cultural, historical forces. The discussion suggests that identity does have an inner "I" but that even that subjectivity is relational: "never only "in" the person, never entirely a matter of autobiography nor, on the other hand, entirely reducible to membership in culturally, politically distinctive groups or social categories"

How can we as educators locally realize the complex manifesting subjectivities in our "local" classroom contexts? How can we assist in the shaping of those subjectivities? What kind of practice can teachers embody, as a point of connect between the student and the establishment?