the power of engagement in education
Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Sat, 20 Apr 1996 13:46:23 -0700 (PDT)
In the unfolding discussion on coercion and power in education, I have
been trying to frame how to put my two cents in.
The underlying issue is student engagement, involvement,
commitment--not only to maximize student focus, but to encourage them to
draw on and integrate the learning with as many resources, concerns, and
sites of problems--all three internal and external--as possible.
The problem with coercion and other forms of milder manipulation
is that they only draw on shallower forms of cooperation or fraudulent
quasi-cooperation from most people. Lecture and other forms of
presentation distant from students' worlds often have similar problems,
except for the few students whose own interests are well aligned with the
lecture, who have the means to attach the information to their own
concerns and prior knowledge and anticipated action, and have the
cognitive and behavioral dispositions to engage in lecture and text-book
like interactions. If those (and perhaps other similar) conditions are
met, then lectures and textbooks and the like work. And similarly
prepared and predisposed students will even be attracted to teachers who
would simply seem coercive demons to those students not prepared and
predisposed.
The problem is not that some more experienced or more
knowledgeable people might not have some good ideas about what might be
useful for most students to learn (even though the match between the
shape of students' lives and knowledges that may be useful for any
particular life remains important and to some extent can only be
identified locally by the person looking out). After all, literacy is
usually a good idea. competence with the numerical system is potentially
useful for most people. history and geography of one's region and others
(with ever more awareness of the globalized world which is now
immediately present in a way it never has been previously) are generally
good ideas, and so on down most of the plausuiuble items in the school
curriculua designed to draw students into competence within and
understanding of the available worlds around them.
The problem is how to get students most engaged and committed and
most totally involved in the worlds around them and the tools and
information we have (and are often only too willing, boringly willing,
dominatingly and coercively willing) to offer them.
For those of us who have a socially located view of the world and
ourselves the concern with individual difference, individual creativity,
individual understanding may seem to be peculiar, if after all what
individuals are doing is learning to engage in social practices and to
participate in social activities and systems. The temptation is always
to look for a direct inoculation of socialization. But the paradox is
that each separate human being as he or she develops must individually
become bonded to a social world that seems rewarding. Each of us makes
choices about how we engage in the world and "make up our minds" about the
world as we go along finding our way. The richest and most satisfying
social worlds are those made up of the richest and most involved and
creative engagements of its many participants, drawing as deeply and
broadly on themselves and the opportunities of the world as possible.
Lectures and coercion and intimidation have at times gotten me
going, but only when I was ready to take those burdens on and attribute
value to them. At other times I found them just stupid and boring and
painful and stunting. Similarly I have often wished that those more
knowledgeable had clued me in or given me guidance about some part of the
world I just had to stumble my way into and through, and I have regularly
gotten excited when I felt that somebody has been able to show me
something new, that I did not know about. But a lot of time (a real lot
of time) people
have lectured me on the same old, same old or (sometimes) on things I just
wasn't concerned about then.
So, to repeat, perhaps rather than wondering about how much we
dislike coercion or whether lectures were good or bad for the mind or
whether some people should be guiding others, we might wonder about what
gets students involved and engaged and mentally growing, and more
particularly how do we get them involved in the rich and useful domains
developed by many people previously who founds those domains rich and
rewarding.
Chuck Bazerman