I do not have the answers to Ana's question, but it seems to me that there
are multiple ways of talking about phenomena that have their own internal
logics. In my own experience of teaching statistics to social science
students, I was aware that there were several "languages" in which I could
"teach", for example, regression. There was the "practical", follow this
formula as a set of steps, language. Many students liked that. They could
learn the steps and do the problems. There was the "mathematical" in which
the formulae were derived from each other. students with mathematical
backgrounds found that satisfying. And there was the "interpretive" in
which I tried to relate the numbers to what they were saying about the
human performance/relationships they were intended to represent (e.g. what
are you saying when you say that performance on this test has the
correlation r= +0.76 with a measure of father's occupational status).
I am not sure which of these languages is more 'theoretical' or which is
more 'practical', which I think takes me back to Jay's descriptions of the
ways language work in his book on science teaching and to Gordon Wells'
description of 'understanding' as being able to translate from the
description in one language into the description in another language. The
Bahktinian notion of multiple discourses.
But then the language of Ana's story is, in itself, enormously rich in
multiple meanings and interpretations. As is any good poem or novel.
I know this is not leading anywhere conclusive, but it seems to me that
somehow this issue of the theoretical/practical/ multiple languages is very
close to the heart of good teaching - of the kind that stimulates the
student to go even further than the teacher in exploring/expanding the
thing being taught.
I hope this doesn't cut across anything that Gordon said earlier on "the
place of theoretical knowing in the contemporary human intellectual
toolkit". That seemed like a very important statement in itself.
Graham
Graham Nuthall
Professor of Education
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone 64 03 3642255 Fax 64 03 3642418
http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/educ/ultp.html