>One issue I had w/ the study concerns the student population; I
>assume the demands on educators are different when classroom
>discourse is more (sociolinguistically) heterogeneous. I also assume
>that, by viewing students as 'in control of their learning' when
>learning by doing, you lose some contextual information -- that is,
>whether listening to the teacher or learning by doing, issues of
>agency are more problematic than you imply.
Hi Judy, one of the things I see seldom addressed in this respect is
the question whether it makes sense to teach a particular knowledge
aspect of a subject domain or whether it would make more sense to
have a more open notion about what children learn. The notion of
'agency' is centrally linked to this problem, for in the traditional
curriculum, students have little opportunities in making choices
about the activity-system defining objects, and in making decisions
about whether or not they subscribe to the (socially and societally)
mediated motivations of a particular activity.
We know that if students engage in activity without the opportunity
of learning culturally specific ways of using tools or perceiving and
talking about the material world, students learn all sorts of things,
but there is only a small likelihood that these things will map onto
existing ontologies.
In part, related to choice is that the educational literature seems
to make the assumption that all students have to be competent in all
of a range of practices. Yet all we have to do is turn on television
to see that people working in the same place or playing the same game
are quite varied in their competencies.
So what we have been doing recently is introducing kids to
environmental problems as these were presented in their local
newspaper and then asked kids what they wanted to do about it, or
find out about it, and then left them the choice to do/ represent
their findings in the ways they wanted. We invited them to consider
making available their work to the local community during an Open
House organized by an environmental activist group. What we see are
activities and representations among the kids that resemble those
that we also documented in the community and among activists, but
which differed considerably from what you might find in a regular
classroom. In the context of science, you get film, interviews,
historical studies, correlation, naturalistic studies...
Well, I have been almost 10 hours here in front of the machine--got
to take a break on my bike...
Michael
------------------------------------------------------ Wolff-Michael Roth Lansdowne Professor Applied Cognitive Science MacLaurin Building A548 Tel: (250) 721-7885 University of Victoria FAX: (250) 472-4616 Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4 Email: mroth@uvic.ca http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/ ----------------------------------------------------
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