Relishing the riches of Russia

Beeping above the family farm, Sputnik fascinates James V. Wertsch, launching a liftime of studies across many disciplines

James V. Wertsch, Ph.D., chairs the Department of Education in Arts & Sciences, holds appointments in four other departments and three major programs, and works with students across the campus.

On a crisp October afternoon in 1957, in the heyday of the Cold War, 10-year-old Jim Wertsch was working alongside his father in the barnyard of the family's central Illinois farm. Without any particular alarm, young Jim's father paused and pointed skyward. "Sputnik is up there, beeping," he said.

"It didn't frighten me so much as it just really intrigued and impressed me that somebody could do that," James V. Wertsch, Ph.D., says now of the Soviet launching of the world's first artificial satellite that fall. "Of course, it was shocking and worrying to a lot of people in the United States. It went against our usual story that if anybody could do it, it would be an American."

That 184-pound metallic mass, hurtling 550 miles above the soil that his father and grandfather and great- grandfather had long tilled, launched Wertsch's five-decade fascination with Russia. Wertsch, who has served as professor and chair of the Department of Education in Arts & Sciences since his arrival here in 1995, now stands as an international expert in issues of Russian thought and language.

But gaining intellectual exposure to Russian culture was a difficult task growing up in a conservative Midwestern town during that tense duck-and-cover era. "My parents were always very supportive, even giving me a subscription to Soviet Life magazine -- which I'm sure put me on somebody's list in Washington, D.C.," he said with a laugh. "I never felt threatened, but people did ask things like, 'Do you believe that it's better to be Red than dead?'"

Exactly 10 years after peering up toward Sputnik, Wertsch made his first trip to the Soviet Union -- a 10-day tour of Leningrad and Moscow after his sophomore year at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. But it was his second visit, on a 1975 postdoctoral fellowship, that fundamentally changed his professional life.

During the mid-70s, Wertsch worked with the great neuropsychologist Alexander Luria studying Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), a teacher and mentor of Luria and an innovator whose work has tremendous influence on issues of language and thought in education.

It was through the ideas of Vygotsky that Wertsch gained a longstanding interest in how children are socialized into society through schools. "When you enter school," Wertsch said, "you have to be willing to live with what are called 'instructional questions.' These are questions that people ask and you know they know the answer. You ask a two-year-old, 'What color is this?' Well, you damn well know what color it is. In certain segments of our culture, we ask tens of thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of those questions of kids by the time they get to school. But in other segments, we don't do that.

"The point is, if you cannot participate in that kind of initiation-response-evaluation -- 'When did Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation?' '1862.' 'Good.' -- then you cannot get along in the classroom," he continued. "You can't be socialized into the middle-class ideal of what it means to be a good student. But some kids come to school and find those kinds of questions really offensive -- like they're power trips for the teachers. It's not so much that they don't know the answer. It's that they can't believe you're asking them. Or they resent the fact that you're always testing them.

"So Native Americans in the southwest are often times diagnosed as 'nonverbal' in school. Black kids, for a long time, were 'nonverbal.' But you go out to the playground and see them talking. So it means that they're not verbal in 'our' patterns of speaking. Now you start to see that language is involved with cultural power and politics."

Collective memory

"I'm particularly interested in a form of collective memory that nation-states try to get people to have," said Wertsch, who spearheaded a successful pitch for a soon-to-be-filled Luce Professorship in collective and individual memory and also is in the midst of a book on the subject. "It's really striking. The state, as any nation-state, has strong vested interest in equipping us all with the same story so that they can depend on us to have what is sometimes called 'cultural literacy.' But it means, in doing that, that you've privileged one story as 'the right one.'

"In our class on History and Identity, for example, I've had discussions with Native Americans who, when we start talking about the origin story of the United States, roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, yeah. When it gets to be late in the fall and my kids start coming home and talking about the pilgrims, I've got to start up a whole second curriculum at home.'

Rewriting history

Wertsch said that while there will always be collective memory, the extent to which the state controls it is shrinking. Orwell's dark vision in "1984," for instance, with the Ministry of Memory and Winston Smith throwing things down the Memory Hole, is less and less possible. "States no longer can control collective memory," he said. "Maybe North Korea can. But that's on a short fuse, too. And, as a result, you've lost one of the most powerful tools you have for creating and maintaining loyal citizens, through national identity."

Wertsch (left) with mentor Alexander Luria in Moscow in the mid-1970s.

The academic dynamics of collective memory studies underscore Wertsch's poster boy-like status for interdisciplinary work. "He's everywhere!" said Edward S. Macias, Ph.D., executive vice chancellor and dean of Arts & Sciences. Indeed, Wertsch has some kind of major or affiliate status within education, psychology, linguistics studies, Russian studies, anthropology and the programs in American cultural studies, social thought and analysis and philosophy-neuroscience-psychology.

"The key elements to making collaboration work are that you're interested in other people's knowledge and point of view and that you're willing to take at least your fair share of the work," said John R. Bowen, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and chair of social thought and analysis. "And Jim certainly does both those things. He's always interested in the larger picture, in making whatever it is you're doing together work. He's very, very willing in his overall orientation of the world to step back and take someone else's point of view."

That skill, undoubtedly, has been honed by serving as chair of three different departments at three major universities -- linguistics at Northwestern University, psychology at Clark University in Worchester, Mass. and education here.

Interdisciplinary ethos

To be sure, Wertsch's primary appointment in the far-reaching education department greases the skids for cross-University connections. But it is much more than a means to an end. Wertsch is fiercely proud of the "small but excellent" department that features 13 faculty members and graduates between 45 and 55 undergraduate and graduate students, including 35 certified teachers, each year. "We do a fantastic job in the department -- and I'm really speaking more about other people in the teacher education program than myself -- at turning out the best and the brightest in the profession, the leaders of tomorrow," he said.

Said colleague Mary Ann Dzuback, Ph.D., associate professor of education, "He's very smart, he's very congenial, he's open. Jim's a person who possesses both intellectual rigor and a kind of expanded intellect. He's rigorous and open at the same time. Sometimes openness signifies to people some sort of democratic mediocrity, but in Jim's case, that's not what's going on. Plus he's just a really nice guy, and he's committed to education. Jim may have connections to other places, but he's in this department. This is his home."

Biggest joy

But, yes, Jim Wertsch concurs, Washington University is an ideal intellectual home. "The most important thing for me is finding a way to take on new intellectual challenges and having the institutional context that will allow you to do that. That's why I love being at Washington U. There's space to do that."

And with Wertsch, there's always something up there, beeping.