First to Jay's response. I like his description of how we try to create
instruments that sample something like knowledge, learning or work: "We all
know how we construct these similarities," he wrote. "You build a ladder of
abstraction, categories of similarity built on various principles which are
salient because the theory we use makes them salient, until you reach a
point where descriptions of the two activities can be mapped one-to-one
onto each other." This sounds right to me -- that's probably what the
Amtrak carman test felt like to the people who were writing it.
Then Jay describes what the test-takers have to do: "They have to do a lot
more than we do. They also have to climb back down the ladder of
abstraction, and we all know that is a lot harder to do in practice because
of the number of unspecified choices to be made along the way."
That sounds right to me, too -- that's what my student seemed to be doing
when he talked the answers to me while I read him the questions off the
test.
But here is where we come out on the narrow ledge from which things spill
off in many directions.
One of these cascading issues has to do with adult education, as compared
with the education of children. (Backing down the conceptual ladder: adults
do not have empty space betwen the rungs.) Second, the ownership of
knowledge -- the political economy of knowledge. (All these stories about
testing and work raise this issue.) Another has to do with research about
that knowledge -- the political economy of the knowledge about the
knowledge. (To know what someone knows is power; as technologies change,
unions find themselves trying to bargain working conditions that may go
obsolete before the end of the contract.)
Then Pete Farruggio picked up on what was lacking in my ability to judge my
student's answers, to sense elements of the student's knowledge that were
also likely to be lacking from the test:
"Your sample question example started in the right direction, but you cut
it off by saying that he gave a global description of the yard, and
approached the right answer without exactly hitting it. Maybe you don't
know enough about rail yards to qualify as a good judge of his thinking,
but I think that's where good
research should go in order to get out of the "hall of mirrors." . . . I
have had many different jobs in which I realized that abstracted slices of
reality don't quite capture the nature of the whole. Many safety
procedures break down under the vagaries of real life happenings...for
example, the high incidence of alcoholism in the railroad industry might
make the prescribed safety procedures insufficient, and workers concerned
with safety might need to take additional measures that could cost money in
order to ensure real safety (like shutting down a section of track so that
the worst fuck-up still can't touch the cars
you're working on). Add to this all the cost cutting measures and
deregulation abuses that have occurred over the past 20 years, and see how
valid a company test is."
Pete is right: I didn't tell the student's whole answer. I couldn't
remember it, actually. But I also really don't know enough about railroad
yards. And the test clearly wasn't trying to sample all that knowledge
that he refers to -- the knowledge of how likely co-workers are to be
drunk, etc., the state of disrepair.
But we still have the problem of the incommensurability of 1) the test, 2)
my one-on-one interaction with my student and 3) the work. The test does
not sample the work because the work involves much more than the test can
reflect. My question and answer process cannot sample what the student
knows because I do not know the work well enough.
However, I don't want to leave it here. We could just say, it's hopeless,
right? The test is a filter, not a measure. I don't want to do that. We
could say, well, it's trivial, since the context is school and we can't
really know what actually gets taught or how in something as complicated as
a school context (although the Fifth Dimension projects are counterexamples
to that). I don't want to say that it's either hopeless or trivial. I
want to say that it's interesting (interesting enough to keep me
interested) and that, using some of the concepts that Mike (and many
others) have dragged up onto this ledge, possibly not hopeless.
Mike points out the scientific/spontaneous concept distinction underlying
these problems:
"In Helena and Peter's questions about ecological validity of test questions
for different folks, and questions to get under the surface of people's
responses, it appears to me that the distinction between everyday
and scientific/hypothetical concepts/ways of thinking, makes its appearance.
So a knot of issues emerges, in which questions of transfer, context-
specificity of knowing, and ecological validity come together. Is that
right?"
Yes, exactly -- the "unspecified choices to be made along the way" that Jay
noted are the branches up which the test-makers climbed, using
scientific/hypothetical concepts, and the rungs down which the test-takers
have to climb in order to get back to their experience are the "everyday
concepts." This is a piece of Vygotskian learning theory that I will
subscribe to cheerfullly at any time.
I realize that we are climbing cliffs, ladders and trees all at once.
Now, Pete gives an example, taken from a story told by Ray McDermott, about
exterminators working in housing projects and what happened when the
Housing Authority wanted to "professionalize" the jobs at higher pay by
using an exam.
Pete wrote: "The choice was pass the written exam and get a good union job,
fail the exam and lose the job. The union hired Ray's colleague to help
the men pass the exam. After trying a more standard night school approach
unsuccessfully (high rates of test failure), he hired workers who had
recently passed the exam to be the teachers, and these people managed to
increase the pass rates of the test takers."
I actually had heard this story before;the assumption is that the workers
who had recently passed the exam would be better able to connect the test
to the work than the teachers had been. This approach is not unusual in
the labor movement. But what does "connect" mean in this case? How did they
work back down the ladder of abstractions? Yesterday I talked with a woman
in West Des Moines who has been setting up a mentoring program between
youths in school-to-work programs and workers recruited by local labor
councils. The first segment of this mentoring project involved working
with the mentors -- electricians, operating engineers, carpenters, printers
-- to help them make explicit what they had learned over decades in their
workplaces. How did she do this? She worked them back down a ladder of
abstractions -- but at the top of the ladder was not a test. At the top of
the ladder was a list of skills that are usually cited as the goals of
workforce development -- reading/writing /computation; problem solving;
communication; flexibility and adaptability (see Building a Quality
Workforce put out by the Depts of Labor, Education and Commerce, albeti 10
years ago). She gave them this bunch of concepts and asked them to work in
groups of three and develop examples of how they used or did all these in
their work. She assumed -- they assumed -- that they had these skills;
what they had to learn to make explicit was what each of them referred to.
They then used this as a basis for teaching the high school kids.
An essential, in fact constraining feature of this specific instance is
that the "knowledge" developed through this process never leaves the
relationship between the mentors and the students they have agreed to take
under their wings. The ownership of this knowledge is something that the
people involved are extremely aware and protective of. This has to do with
the third issue I mentioned above.
To summarize, let me contrast the two sets of situations in the light of
the three issues I have raised. I will contrast them in terms of what
mediates the learning in each of them. These situations are common --
think how often you hear the phrase "workforce development."
Issues:
1.The people involved are adults; their abstraction-ladders are
complex, not empty;
2. Their knowledge has a tight relationship to their economic and
social status;
3. Knowledge about their knowledge also has an effect on their
economic and social status.
The situations:
1. An individual student, a middle aged African American male,
needs to be able to show a certain knowledge upon which a promotion from
one level to another working for Amtrak depends. He shows it in three
different contexts. The outcome of each of these is different. These
contexts are:
a. Doing the work in the rail yard among co-workers,
b. Taking the written test,
c. Talking the answers to the questions on the test with his
English teacher in a community college classroom.
2. Experienced electricians, rubber workers, operating engineers,
printers (probably more) have to be able to show knowledge of their work
because they are going to mentor high school kids in school-to-work
programs. They show it in two contexts:
a) Between each other, in facilitated discussions in a union hall,
prior to meeting their mentees;
b) With individual high school mentees.
In 1a, the way my student does the work (during the scheduled workday, with
other people, using a set of work tools) is generated by his construction
of the knowledge of the work. At present, his knowledge of his work as he
constructs it is sufficient for the tasks of the day, but he knows that he
will have to adopt the knowledge as "owned" by the testmakers in order to
be promoted, which will mean that he will earn more money and have higher
status, both of which he wants.
In 1b, alone with a stack of pages and a pencil, with a clock ticking, he
is shown that he does not own the knowledge of those who have passed the
test. Under these conditions, his abstraction ladder fails him; he does
not select from his experience the choices that pass the test. Furthermore,
that knowledge is not "unknown", as some knowledge might be to a
researcher; that knowledge exists,is owned by others, and is not his.
In 1c, he is again away from the worksite, this time talking to a female
teacher in a classroom, trying simultaneously to interact with her as
student to teacher and to orally reconstruct the knowledge of his work in a
way that will convince her that he really knows the answers.
In 2a, experienced workers are talking with each other. The workers
encourage each other, even boast, supply specific words, comment on,
clarify and expand each other's descriptions of their work. They do this
in a union hall where there is no reason to suppress portions of the
knowledge about work (for example: how to carry out a heavy physical job
year after year so that you don't get injured) that may not be management's
business. There is no mediator, no teacher, but each participant knows
what he or she is trying to accomplish.
In 2b, the worker is talking to a high school student. The student is
considering what kind of work to go into, so the conversation has a deep
horizon: "What is a life doing this kind of work like? What do you think I
should do with myself?" In this situation, the "knowledge" that took the
form of performance in 1a, multiple choice in 1b, Q&A in 1c, and
conversation among peers in 2a, becomes a communication about a life --
"What did a life doing this work mean to you?"
At the very least, aren't these different cognitive acts?
Helena
.
Helena Worthen
821 Dearborn Street
Iowa City, IA 52240
319-337-4639
worthen who-is-at soli.inav.net