These sorts of questions keep me up late at night.
I'm pretty sure there are no value or paradigm neutral
criteria for judging "better". Unlike the evolution analogy
I used to illustrate the prescription/proscription distinction,
educational forms and methods have a life of their own
relative to the theoretical context that spawned them. I have
yet to meet an advocate for a particular method that did not
present an enthusiastic case for its virtue. In a 1984 paper
Skinner, describes a classroom where the students are so
intensely engaged with instruction on their "teaching machines"
that they don't notice when the teacher tries to distract them
by jumping up and down on his "teacher platform" at the front
of the room. Jim Popham is always an articulate and persuasive
advocate of instructional objectives and systematically designed
instruction. And so on.
If we approach education from the point of view that there is
one or a few best forms, then somebody has to be right, and
somebody has to be wrong. Our research will eventually
converge on the best forms and we will discard those that
do not survive the inquiry process. Alternatively we could say
that method is relative to paradigm and the purpose of our
research is divergent, opening up new possibilities, rather
than settling the issue of which is best. Choice of method
also becomes an ethical decision, in which the choice is
evaluated against its compatibility with the values embedded
in the theory.
I think this maps back to the pro/prescribed distinction
in that a convergent approach would tend to lead to
prescription and a divergent approach to proscription.
I'll have to leave this half-baked. Duty calls. In my
present administrative role, I'm not allowed to think.
djc
On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Mike Cole wrote:
>
> Don-- The prescription/proscription distinction seems helpful, but
> does that solve the problem I began with (proximally speaking). 90%
> of classroom run the recitation script as the norm with the lot that
> it carries with it as a cultural form. A lot of people on this list
> seem to feel it is not an optimal educational form and push for alternatives
> of a child/activity-centered variety. Presumably they do so on the
> grounds that the latter are, by some criteria, "better." But on what
> grounds does one from the betterness?
>
> With what bracketing or in what framework?
> mike
>
>
Don Cunningham
School of Education
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
Phone: 812-856-8540
Email: cunningh who-is-at indiana.edu
Homepage: http://php.indiana.edu/~cunningh