What kind of relationships foster a linking of personal with academic abstract?
(personal being situated knowledge, contextually based, multiple meanings;
academic abstract being generalized knowledge, relatively context-free,
focused)
I'm in the thick of my dissertation on elementary math ed. in which I
investigated the linking of students' personal out of school experiences
with classroom math lessons. (as opposed to more typical practice of
explaning a math concept by going to the board and writing numbers or in
making up fictitious story problems to illustrate the concept). While
most teachers did not link in math, these same teachers consistently linked
in language arts classes. I can see how the cultural view of math as
abstract and sequential with one right answer is at work in the differences
between disciplines but within math, the relationship of teacher with
student seems critical. For want of better terms, the only teachers who
did link in math did so in a" familial" role - as a parent sheparding the
children into the community of mathematicians. Those who most clearly did
not link were acting in an "authoritative" mode of dishing out the
necessary math knowledge to fulfill obligations of transmitting academic
math knowledge to empty student vessels (vassals another good term). The
discourses in the two extremes are quite different - those who link are
using conversational discourse whereas nonlinkers use the IRE discourse
Courtney Cazden describes (teacher initiation, student response, teacher
evaluation).
What is at work here that some teachers would have one role and others
another? So far, I'm only finding glimmers of explanations in some
articles in economic anthropology on long term and short term exchanges and
in some literature on community building in Jean Lave's work. I'm open to
thoughts and references from any disciplines. ANY IDEAS OUT THERE?
Jacque