I think Mike asked a very practical question:
"Eugene-- How do you propose to implement your ideas about group
based actiities in the state of california where a back to basic
movement says scrap previous experiments in non-traidtional
reading techniques?
In general, how does one confront this issue productively?
mike"
And Edouard, I think your reply is right to the point, but you sound like an
"angry young man" :-) with your answer: there's no common ground for
discussion between these two groups of people at all!
Oh well, as someone "from the East" (not necessarily "wise" at all) :-),
I've seen this "back-to-basics" pressure growing in Canada, and in North
America in general. I must say I'm a bit sad to see this happening; and
what I would like to offer is a picture of what has been happening in my own
home country: Hong Kong, where the curriculum cannot be more
market/exam/skills/knowledge... -oriented; there is a price for economic
succes, which Hong Kong children are paying dearly, especially the
working class children.
To make my point more clearly, I'm attaching below a summary of a paper
I've been working on; hope it may arouse some discussions.
Best,
Angel
*****************************************************************
Angel M.Y. Lin
Doctoral Candidate
Modern Language Centre
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada
E-Mail: MYLIN who-is-at OISE.ON.CA
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Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When ... we stand face to face in the cyber space? ...
--Adapted from: The Ballad of East and West, Rudyard Kipling
*******************************************************************
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Humanizing the School: Sociocultural and Existential
Perspectives on Dialogue, Human Connectedness, and the
Teacher-Student Relationship
Copyright (c) Angel M.Y. Lin
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
1995
Summary:
Education in both North America and the rest of the world towards
the 21st century is facing ever-increasing pressure from the
globalized economy to turn schools everywhere into primarily
training grounds for the labour market. The pressure, for
instance, is increasingly felt in Canada, where talk of the
greater integration of the school system into the economy is
gaining popularity among educational policy makers (e.g., Royal
Commission on Learning, 1995).
While increasing the accountability and capability of the school
system to "produce" graduates to meet local and international
standards of skills and knowledge that can enable them to succeed
in the future job market seems to be an urgent goal in face of
mounting global economic pressures; there is, however, also the
danger of reducing schools to dehumanizing factories producing
labor market products when a society is too anxious to cope with
global economic pressures.
This paper approaches this problem by examining what has already
been happening to some schools in the highly industrialized,
commercialized, and capitalist society of Hong Kong. Hong Kong
has a very competitive economy in the world market: it ranked
eighth in the twenty-four "high-income economies" listed in The
World Development Report 1992. However, this paper will examine
an important facet of the price of an overly job-market-oriented
educational system, under which a school easily becomes a place
that dehumanizes both students and teachers.
The paper draws on the theoretical resources of both the
sociocultural and existential traditions: in particular,
Bakhtin's and Buber's different but complementary perspectives on
dialogue and human connectedness. To Bakhtin all utterances are
dialogic in the sense that all utterances are derived from
cultural and historical traditions, and "any utterance is a link
in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances"
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 69). However, simply co-participating in talk
and activities is no guarantee of any satisfying sense of human
connectedness; it is here that we find the existential view of
Buber on "dialogue" complementary to the cultural-historical view
of human existence. While both traditions have a firm belief in
the social interconnectedness of humans, it is Buber's
existential view that stresses a distinction between two
fundamental types of relation: the I-Thou relation and the I-It
relation.
The "primary word" I-Thou points to a relation of person to
person, of subject to subject, a relation of reciprocity
involving "meeting" or "encounter", while the "primary word" I-It
points to a relation of partial person to thing, of partial
subject to object, involving some form of utilization,
domination, or control. Authentic human existence--the dialogic
life--is existence in the I-Thou (Herberg, 1956), and "all real
living is meeting" (Buber, 1958, p. 11).
This paper focuses on the everyday classroom life in two Form 2
(Grade 8) English reading lessons in two schools. They serve as
exemplars (from a larger set of classroom data collected from
seven schools in Hong Kong) of what an I-Thou and an I-It
teacher-student relationship may look like interactionally. The
analytical methods of conversation analysis are drawn upon to
analyze the micro-level classroom interaction data to come up
with two close pictures of classroom life. After-class informal
interviews (audiotaped) of small groups of students from the two
classes provide supplementary information about their perceptions
of classroom life and their relationship with the teachers.
Analysis of the data shows that in Classroom A, where the teacher
seems to be following closely the official curricular (and
examination) guidelines of helping students to learn "to extract
information from texts" in reading lessons, students look like
lively beings trapped in a task-dominated lesson cage. And yet,
despite the many constraints, from time to time, their
communicative, creative attempts to relate to the teacher as
person to person find a niche to burst out.
In Classroom B, on the other hand, where the teacher seems to
have departed from the official curricular guidelines, students
and teacher are engaged in spontaneous conversations and
discussions about the reading texts as well as personal
experiences.
Bakhtin's interest in the communication of experience and
thoughts and their sympathetic, comprehending receipt thereof,
and his concerns with the heightening of an affective
interpersonal sensibility (Bazerman, 1995) are in line with
Buber's interest in seeing education as a dialogue, a meeting, an
encounter between person and person, and person and intelligible
forms (e.g., art, texts) (Herberg, 1956; Murphy, 1988). However,
a job-market-oriented curriculum often distorts the education
process and reduces it to merely the acquisition of "examinable"
and marketable skills and knowledge, with the role of the teacher
being a knowledge-dispenser and a skill-trainer. The present
study shows the dehumanizing pitfalls of an overly market-
oriented curriculum, and shows how students, despite all odds,
from time to time artfully seek out ways of relating to the
teacher as person to person, and not as containers to dispensers,
or parrots to speech drillers.
The paper would have the following educational implications: (1) How
lesson activity organization and classroom discourse formats
can be changed to facilitate a more dialogic (person-to-person)
mode of human communication between teacher and students, which
makes it more likely for an I-Thou, instead of an I-It, teacher-
student relationship to develop; (2) How ways of approaching
cultural, historical and artistic artifacts (e.g., texts,
knowledge) can be reconceived and changed so that students can be
encouraged to approach them dialogically and not just as a dead
"thing" simply to be acquired. The paper concludes with a
discussion of why marketable skills and knowledge can still be
learned (and will be learned better) in a humanized dialogic
classroom.
References:
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bazerman, C. (1995). Dialogicality. Message sent to the
electronic mail discussion, XLCHC, May 14.
Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou. (2nd. edition). New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.
Herberg, W. (Ed.) (1956). The writings of Martin Buber. New York:
Meridian Books.
Murphy, D. (1988). Martin Buber's philosophy of education.
Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
Royal Commission on Learning. (1995). For the love of learning.
Ontario: Royal Commission on Learning.