But, Nate, whoever said that teaching is a form of everyday conversation?
The situation calls for some set of special interaction and the question is
what role should the teacher play within this interaction? Why would it be
more authentic to tell the students what they need to know?
> In a more Foucaultian framework such approaches of the "students need to
> learn" is seen as the use of power through decenterism. My problem
> with PBL is not so much the practice in itself, but the ideology and
> assumptions about learning behind such an approach. It is actually
> ideologically very congruent with Socrates. A belief that education
> is simply an unfolding of universal, innate cognitive abilities. Such
> an approach it seems would also convey a teacher as observer rather than a
> participant in learning.
It's not the same epistemology at all---knowledge is not treated as
resident within the learner, but rather as something created within the
joint effort of understanding the problem at hand. Everyone (including the
faculty member) participates in this process, and all are learning all the
time. To construe the faculty member's role as merely observational,
therefore, would be very misleading.
> For me an good educational context is one where its difficult to
> distinguish what part of the activity is teacher centered or student
> centered.
>
This statement is confusing to me. Did you mean by this, which part of the
activity is organized by the teacher and which part by the student? Maybe
this terminology of "teacher-centered" vs. "student-centered" is simply
getting in the way here. I was using the term to mean a method of teaching
in which the student is responsible for deciding what needs to be learned.
This is, for me at least, a critical feature of what we have been talking
about. If the situation you describe in your math class was like PBL in
this respect, I guess I fail to understand how the students would respond
to it as a form of "mind game". It's only when the policy is implemented
as a facade in which the faculty member has already decided in advance what
will be learned and sits back and waits for the students to finally "get
it" that a sense of being manipulated begins to arise.
If I am slow to follow up on this discussion, please don't take it as
reflecting a lack of interest. I'll be away from the office for a while
and I have disconnected from the XMCA list. I'll try to pick this up again
when I get back. (If you want to catch my attention in the interim, copy
your responses to me directly). ---Tim