> The way that I interpret these episodes, education gets no respect except
> as a space for colonization. This is a dynamic I struggle with. It's one
> thing not to buy into the values made manifest through these episodes, and
> through much more explicit collegial discussions where people make no bones
> about the generally poor quality of work coming out of schools of education
> (at least, here in the USA--generally speaking, the closer a discipline is
> to a client, the less respect it gets, and the closer a person is to a
> client, the less respect s/he gets, so nobody listens to teachers, but few
> people seem to have much trouble hearing other "experts" sound off about
> what's wrong with education). Dealing with the consequences of it is quite
> another.
Gee, Genevieve, your message popped across the screen
just as I was reading Bourdieu and also wondering about a collection of
research papers I have that were done by twenty-seven elementary school
teachers in my school.
In part I was thinking about Bourdieu writing "Academic
interrogation inclines him (Bourdieu's definition of the 'him' is: An agent
who possesses a practical mastery, an art [which is how _I_ consider
teachers.], whatever it may be....) to take up a point of view on his own
practice that is no longer that of action, without being that of science,
encouraging him to shape his explantions in terms of a theory of
practices that meshes with the juridical, ethical, or grammatical
legalism to which the observer is inclined by his own situation."
Reading the research I was struck by the number of
teachers who have 'learned' what research has been saying for many years,
but teachers have rejected. Why the research has been rejected, I'm not
positive about, but, Genevieve, I think that it is because of the
'colonial' aspects of educational researchers to teachers.
I think it is also due to a fault in our epistemology of
how teachers actually learn. The present premise is that workshops,
teacher training, formal classes, etc. etc. is the means how teachers
actually learn.
Teach teachers about Vygotsky, and how students
_construct_ knowledge, but tell teachers what to do, based on a research
priviledged list of 'effective teaching strategies and methodologies'.
Yikes! Does everyone by teachers learn by _constructing_
knowledge?
I ran across a paper written by a woman whose names I
can't remember - I'm hoping Michael Cole can help me here - who wrote
about the child development class given at UCSD where students
participated in working with children in the Fourth(?) Dimension. What
struck me was that while on the face of it the college students we to
'learn' about child development, and 'help' children work on computers,
in actuallity, the college students were actively constructing an entire
realm of knowledge about child development that they never would have
gotten from a lecture, discussion, textbook class. They may have known
the knowledge, so that they could repeat it, but I don't think that the
knowledge would have been internalized into a practice.
And, sorry I'm taking so long to get to my point, but in
one research paper a kindergarten teacher with 25 plus years of teaching
now states categorically, "Children learn to write before they read."
I have been reading this in research for years. So has
the kindergarten teacher. However, she now has it as part of her
practice because she researched it in her classroom. She constructed it.
I think Genevieve is right. Educational practice has
certainly been colonized by others. And it was/is because of an
epistemology that believes that information can be transferred from one
person to another merely by telling them and that then the person told
will put it into practice. And it also has to do with the belief that
the university practioner is a more qualified expert.
phillip
pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu