Gary Shank
copyright 1996, Gary Shank
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This is a very brief follow-up to my earlier essay on the
O-Ring failures in the Challenger space shuttle, looked at as an
allegory of our public educational system here in the USA. I
received many interesting notes and responses, and many of them
offered the same challenge: what would you do to make things
better?
When problems as fundamental as those which plague schooling
come to awareness, two directions immediately suggest themselves.
They are; 1) pendulum-swinging, and 2) going back to square one.
Pendulum-swinging works when the problem is a balance problem,
and going back to square one works when things need to be re-
conceptualized from the ground up. Which of these two strategies,
if either, is best used here?
The pendulum-swing in this case would be to say that the
problem is that students have no power over their lives while they
are in school, and so we have to restore that power. I think a
bit of pendulum-swinging is actually called for, but I don't think
the problem is one of mislocation of power. The young need to be
guided in their learning -- pedagogues from Socrates to Vygotsky
knew this. Instead, we have to go back to square one and look at
the situation and seek a new direction. I cannot map out or suggest
those directions for teachers, students, administrators, government
officials, parents, or other advocates or interested parties. I
can challenge those of my own peer group, however. What should we
educational researchers do?
Educational research is one area that comes under particularly
harsh scrutiny in my approach. This is because if my O-Ring analogy
is sound, then we in educational research have no way of knowing
whether or not our findings are valid, since they may all be due,
for all we know, on the preservation and educational instincts of
children, and ultimately have nothing at all to do with our pur-
ported changes and improvements.
How can educational researchers get back in business, and
back to business? I want to suggest that we make it our chief
priority to use our empricial skills, and particularly our emerging
qualitative skills, to pursue the following questions: what does
school and schooling mean to students? parents? teachers? people
who are smart? not so smart? who live in poverty? who live in
cities? the suburbs? administrators? and so on....
School and schooling clearly has complex meanings, and
divergent meanings, to these and other groups. We have never
researched these meanings in any serious or comprehensive way.
As a model, I suggest we look at that classic of the 1970's,
Working, by Studs Terkel, as a model for the picture of meaning
we need to build in order to really progress as educational
researchers. This is the sort of square one that could benefit
us all.....