Re: Our focus on language

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Thu, 12 Oct 95 21:07:46 EDT

Isak Froumin's message reminds me that it is perhaps worth making
a distinction to avoid a confusion of purposes. Asking a student
to re-state an understandin 'in your own words' is not exactly the
same act as insisting that words alone are legitimate means for
proving that the student understands. In the first case, we are
asking the student to translate, or interconnect, between a colloquial
language and everyday experiences on the one hand, and a technical
language and artifactual experiences on the other. I have often seen
this done in science and math classes in which the student's response
made full use of a demonstration apparatus or a symbolic exposition
on the chalkboard, and many gestures, or a visual figure in front
of the class (map, diagram) as well as language. It points to a
different problem: the commensurability of the everyday and the
technical.

Quite different I think is the insistence early on in education,
when students seem to naturally construct their meanings with
more use of drawings and gestures and acting out relationships,
that _only_ the verbal expression has value in the school setting.
Similarly, that the sources of information that are considered
most valid are the words of the teacher and the words of a text,
and not visual images, direct observation of nature and social
activity, experiments, or even technical graphical representations.
That this is true in the teaching of science is particularly
disgraceful, but very characteristic of the continuing contradiction
between the status of the humanities as purely verbal-mental and so
essentially upper-middle-class, vs. technical occupations of a
lesser status, and the rising status of science (which is at heart
far more technical and practical than is good for it in the
intellectual marketplace of high-brow mental laborers).

This contradiction is resolved within science by the separation
of theoretical science from experimental and applied science
(a purely ideological separation as is easily demonstrated,
e.g. by Latour's early work), with higher status accorded the
former. And also by the 'verbalization' of science (or should
we say its 'textualization') not only in teaching methods, but
even in the emphasis on algebraic mathematization, which is
far closer to verbal-language semiotically than is the equally
valuable, and less taught, geometrical-spatial-graphical mode
of scientific representation. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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