Hi Tina.
The confusion your are experiencing can be interpreted from a
crossdisciplinary perspective. Your goal of getting students to "begin to
think like an historian" is, in crossdisciplinary terms, enculturationist
in nature. You want to have students develop certain culturally specific
dispositions of the historian. Generally, the pedagogy that supports
enculturation is to "work" the classroom microculture so that it gradually
comes to resemble historians culture with respect to the target
dispositions. This does not require "some kind of conflict or disharmony
for participants to reflect and "look outside the box."
Rather, the creation of cognitive conflict is part of a constructivist
pedagogical strategy for promoting students' conceptual development. The
important thing to remember, from a crossdisciplinary perspective, is that
there is no unitary pedagogy that accomplishes these diverse learning
intentions. My experience is that pedagogical formulations that attempt to
capture this kind of diversity are incoherent in their internal structure.
They elide the node points at which priorities must be set, thus they can
handicap teachers who are trying to use them to guide their teaching.
So the bottom line is you can choose to aim for enculturation in which case
there is coherent pedagogical guidance available, or you can choose to aim
for conceptual construction in which case there is coherent pedagogical
guidance available, or you can choose to try to work these agendas together
in which case you need to be prepared to juggle priorities and make many
difficult trade-offs. I think all three options are viable pedagogical
strategies.
Hope this helps.
David Kirshner
PS. If you're interested in pursuing these ideas further, I think my
crossdisciplinary paper is still up on the XMCA webpage.
_______________
Tina Sharpe said:
I viewed Professor Engestrom's video yesterday on the expansive cycles
in Learning 3 and wondered if someone could help clarify a point for me.
I am researching the role of the teacher in supporting students'
conceptual development. The students are junior high school history
students. Before watching the video I thought the expansive cycle was a
natural stage in development and students could, through dialogue with
the teacher and other students, co-construct knowledge about the nature
of history and historical methodology - ie begin to think like an
historian. Now it seems this expansive cycle needs some kind of conflict
or disharmony for participants to reflect and "look outside the box". If
this is the case then in the classroom situation I have described,
students do not engage in this expansive cycle.
I would really appreciate some clarification on this point.
My second question is the use of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary
and crossdisciplinary. If, as a teacher researcher I am drawing on
linguistic theory (SFL) education theory, sociology and cognitive
psychology to consider learning in the classroom within a social context
is my work multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary?
I am not sure of the fine points related to these terms.
Again any comments would be appreciated.
Tina Sharpe
PhD student
University of Technology
Sydney, Australia.
_____________________
David Kirshner
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803-4728
(225) 578-2332 (225) 578-9135 (fax)
dkirsh@lsu.edu
http://www.ednet.lsu.edu/tango3/coedirectory.taf?
_function=detail&Faculty_uid1=135&Users_uid2=135&_UserReference=59F4B47FBE3415E138CD68B2
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