In a way this reminded me of the theme of my AERA roundtable with
Gordon Wells (which should have included Eugene and a couple
others as originally planned), which was, for my part, that the
agendas of genuinely collaborative activity are much more unpre-
dictable than we might like to imagine, and more at variance with
the predictable/controllable models of curricula/outcomes that
our middle-class culture thrives on (and many other cultures do
not). In a separate session, Wolf-Michael Roth presented an anal-
ysis (my paper was based on some of the same data) that proposed
that middle-class students lose much of their inherent cultural
advantages when school tasks are open-ended and extended, rather
than having some hidden solution-key (algorithm) that leads to
the 'right answer' and which they are usually better prepared to
'discover' (i.e. culturally reconstruct).
In much the same way, I think, academics are the super-middle-
class students in academic-teacher collaborative projects, and we
too often prefer somewhat predictable responses on the part of
teachers -- we call it being cooperative and professional, when
it is really just being junior versions of ourselves, effacing
any genuine Otherness that their different experience and
positioning may lend them. We probably even tend to select
teacher partners on such criteria. I have consulted on several
projects of this kind, and in most of them there were one or more
teacher 'rebellions' against the academics -- even where the aca-
demics were as liberal and pro-teacher as you could ask for. Even
when the teachers were constantly invited to give 'input' to the
project, and constructed (at least in principle) as 'partners'.
These experiences have led me to see a certain inherent conflict
between teachers' culture and our own. We do not share common in-
terests or viewpoints, or experiences, or social positions, near-
ly to the extent we (academics) like to pretend we do. I think
that we prefer to ignore the differences and conflicts, to con-
struct them as somehow marginal or irrelevant, to brandish
slogans about our common agendas to 'improve education' or 'help
the kids' -- when these goals really mean very different things
to them and to us in any case where we really get specific and
practical.
This was also the conclusion of my roundtable paper: that shared
goals are often merely useful illusions, born of the productive
ambiguity of abstract semiotic formulations of these goals (which
are correspondingly vague enough, like the language of diplomacy,
to conceal real differences), and that as activity develops un-
predictably toward specificity of realization of goals, that the
hidden conflicts emerge and must be dealt with. Where there are
sufficient power differentials, often they are not dealt with:
the powerful pretend they don't exist, the subordinate know they
do exist but find it easier not to push, and collaboration un-
ravels into a sham. (Don't we see this between teachers and stu-
dents in many classrooms?) Even in successful collaboration,
where all parties undergo unpredictable and mutually interdepen-
dent changes in their orientations and agendas, semiotic vague-
ness plays a necessary role in making us think that we agree more
than we do, that we have a better idea where we are going than we
possibly could have, and so ennabling us to undertake collabora-
tive activity under the illusion that we share a goal and are
going to get there. Without these illusions, we would probably
not even begin.
[The need for the illusions itself raises fascinating questions
about our middle-class culture of control and predictability,
about ends-means rationality, about masculine fears of loss of
control, etc.]
I wonder what others', especially teachers', perceptions are of
the relations between teachers and academics attitudes and cul-
tures? and what any of us may know about cultural, social class,
and gender/sexuality differences in attitudes to sharedness of
goals, specificity of goals, control vs. unpredictability of the
course of collaborative activity? Surely these are important is-
sues for the potential success of efforts at bring research and
practice together in education. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 06:06:42 -0700
From: BPenuel who-is-at aol.com
Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 09:06:08 -0400
To: xlchc who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu, xedu@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: teachers, us, collaboration
Hello Jay and everyone else-
Jay, you mention the different cultures of teachers and university
researchers, and one of the striking differences to me between the two
cultures is the fact that rarely, perhaps even in collaborative settings I've
observed, do university people identify themselves as teachers. And yet many
(if not most of them) teach in addition to conducting research. I wonder
what consequences this has for the possibilities of collaboration?
Bill Penuel
Department of Psychology
Clark University
950 Main Street
Worcester, MA 01610