But it occurs to me that perhaps someone on xmca can help me with a
problem. We're trying to set up a set of potential "foci" for our
three-course interdisciplinary first year program folks to
investigate, and I'm trying to find an instance or occasion or
dispute which would raise for the students certain kinds of issues
about learning and its contexts -- specifically, the assumptions
lying behind the long-standing conflict between a set of ideas we
might loosely call pragmatist/progressive/constructivist/whole
language, and another that we might even more loosely call
transmissionist/behaviorist/back-to-basics/phonics-centered -- the
sort most of us on xmca are concerned about. The program's theme is
"Truth in Society: How People Come to Believe What They Do."
The way it works is this: we make available to students boxes of
documents (photocopied texts, videos, whatever) about some specific
incident or occasion when people's fundamental beliefs have been
challenged -- in the past, we've used, for example, the Scopes trial,
the Salman Rushdie affair, the Salem witch trials, Galileo and the
church, and so forth. They decide on three to investigate in detail
and the three teachers involved find ways to introduce the
fundamental perspectives and ideas of their disciplines, and to help
the inquiry stay focused on coming to an understanding of the focus
issue or incident _in order_ to work toward an understanding of how
beliefs are negotiated, changed, defended, etc.
My problem is that I can't seem to find an incident or focus that
raises a set of issues I'd like to invite the students to work on --
independent construction of learning vs. acquisition of knowledge, or
disposition to read and write vs. testable ability to recode written
language, progressive vs. traditional education, whole language vs.
fragmented language. I've thought about the recent & current
controversy in California that Ken refers to; I've thought about the
attacks on progressive education in the 40s and 50s; I've thought
about A. S. Neill and the freeschool movement, or the alternative
school movement in the sixties and seventies . . . but none of them,
as far as I can see, allow the sort of focus that would enable first
year students (with me and a couple of colleagues loitering about in
their zones of proximal development) to investigate the details and
construct enough understanding of the specifics to begin to build
models of how people's beliefs are driven or shaped by factors going
beyond or beneath rational argument and acknowledged motives.
(If you want to know more about the program I'm alluding to here,
there's a fairly substantial amount of documentation on my web site,
under "The Aquinas Program.")
If anyone has ideas or suggestions, I'd be happy to see them.
Ideally, the focus should be one on which there's enough accessible
or popular work published that a first year student could at least
begin to get a sense of what the issues were in a week's work. It
might be best to send suggestions directly to me rather than the
list, as I don't think this is a question of all that much general
interest.
-- Russ
__|~_
Russell A. Hunt __|~_)_ __)_|~_ Department of English
St. Thomas University )_ __)_|_)__ __) PHONE: (506) 363-3891
Fredericton, New Brunswick | )____) | FAX: (506) 450-9615
E3B 5G3 CANADA ___|____|____|____/ hunt who-is-at StThomasU.ca
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