>(Gordon wrote,Sat, 22 May 1999) The problem, in my
>view, is not so much the teachers' lack of vision as the constraints
>imposed on them by the wider social context, in which the dominant values
>are efficiency, productivity and profit and in which many of the reforms
>prescribed for public education are based on a totally inappropriate
>application of the business principles of late 20th century capitalism.=20
My guess was that you have likely had enough experience in your own
institutional life to understand that educational systems are generally
used by governments as one of the "levers of power" for manipulating
society in accordance with the ideological beliefs of those governments.
Don't forget that governments write "curriculum guidelines" which teachers
MUST follow in the construction of curriculum. The discussions on xmca,
recently, about the educational idiocies taking place in California and
Texas and Ontario should serve as a reminder how common constraints of this
kind are, and how they work.
Your speculations about meaningful educational activity being
"problem-based learning" is quite reasonable. Such problem-based learning,
I believe, is quite common in N.A. education, certainly in the Ontario
educational system. In fact, we have a name for such experiences: "project
work". The only difficulty with your suggestion is that it can only
account for part of the curriculum activity in a school. You cannot use
problem-based learning to learn the intricacies of discipline-specific
theoretical models because there is simply not enough time. What often
happens in a secondary school (in fact it has the status of a classic
instructional pattern) is that one delivers as efficiently and quickly as
possible the theoretical model, and then sets up a project to allow
students to explore and critique the potential and limitations of the
model. There are all sorts of possibilities for really interesting
learning activities during this project phase, limited only by the
imagination, experience, knowledge, wisdom and time of the teacher AND
students.
I would go so far as to suggest that anyone who does not accept the need
for this kind of balance between direct instruction and project learning is
simply not living in the real world, or has spent too much time teaching in
a university -- which often seems to me to amount to the same thing. This
is why I sometimes get rather exasperated with some of the more idealistic
speculations on xmca about what is and isn't "authentic" learning. I would
suggest, likely along with Gordon and possibly Jay (in his more practical
moments), that any single school experience is probably a shifting
kaleidoscope of "authentic" and "inauthentic" actions, all happening
simultaneously, depending upon which goal by which participant(s) is being
referred to at the time during any particular experience. My view of an
authentic learning experience, of course, is that any experience consistent
with the overall motive of the educational activity system has the
potential to provide "authentic" action. Whether it is "interesting", or
not, to any particular participant at any given time is an entirely
different matter having nothing to do with authenticity.