The aim of this symposium was to explore the relations between
professional practice in technical and scientific communities and
the educational activities that are supposed to prepare people to
participate in them.
I. Reed Stevens
The strongest point of this presentation, apart from the
intrinsic interest of connecting professional and school
practices in applied mathematics, was the emphasis on students'
appropriation of and resistance to school science practices, and
their openness to professional practices. (The work of M
deCerteau can be useful in this connection.)
There is a tendency to assume that it is precisely to the extent
that students are docile consumers of the science and mathematics
curriculum, or 'dupes of the textbook' , that they succeed later
as technoscientists. It is equally possible, and in my view more
likely, however, that future technoscientists, as well as other
students, find their insights into technical practices during
their school years by non-canonical means. The habitus of inquiry
is not really fostered by much science curriculum, and its roots
in counter-curricular or extra-curricular practices need much
more emphasis and investigation.
It would be particularly interesting to get oral retrospective
recounts by practicing technoscientists of how they actually came
to understand key scientific concepts or adopt useful scientific
stances, attitudes, strategies. While such recounts cannot always
be taken at face value, they can point to resources and practices
that need further investigation.
The presentation also argued rhetorically for the need for better
sociological accounts of the developmental trajectories of
students and technoscientists in order not to leave such accounts
purely to psychology, which elides the social and cultural
contexts that seem to actual determine the development of the
trajectory per se. Increasing sophistication in the use of
cultural practices can hardly be a purely endogenous story.
There is however a need to (a) look at the possible fruitful
articulations of developmental psychology research and its
findings with those from social-cultural studies, and (b) to more
fully theorize the issue of integrating the time-scales of
learning events with those of longer-term individual
enculturation and individuation of identity.
See also notes on Rogers Hall.
Rogers Hall.
In conjunction with Reed Stevens' paper, this presentation lays
out a quite original research program that not only compares but
directly connects professional applied mathematics practices (in
architectural design) with school practices centered around
architectural design -like exercises. In this work there is a
chance to really see how these networks of practices differ,
resemble one another, afford opportunities for development of
cross-context skills and strategies, and directly interact with
each other when practices from one network are introduced into
(and transformed within) the context of the other.
Again there is the problem of integrating across time-scales.
This work is exemplary in the way that it compares across sites
and settings, and even creates a new spatial scale for the ad hoc
network linking the professional and school sites and practices
together. But it is not yet prepared to do what its professed
ambitions seek: to show us how school practices prepare for and
lead on into professional ones later along the life trajectory of
technoscientists. This is of course methodologically very
difficult, whether by longitudinal approaches or retrospective
ones. Some radical re-thinking here is probably called for.
On the other hand, what I find really original and exciting in
this work is that it goes beyond formal comparison (which it does
well, but see below) to create hybrid settings in which the
architects and their practices are introduced into the classroom,
and to some extent vice versa. These hybrid settings, which are
outside the usual networks, provide for unpredictable learning
opportunities and appropriations of practices from both sides.
They also, through their outcomes, to some extent provide a means
of validating the categories used for the formal comparisons.
The categories of formal comparisons in this work are very clever
and prima facie convincing (the forms x functions), but it is
always a bit of a distortion to create an etic grid over two
quite different systems of emic practices (also a concern in Jean
Lave's commentary?). The solution, I think, is to explicitly
introduce the culture and practices of the researchers into the
analysis and account. Now there are three interacting networks,
one of which may in some sense be catalytic for the hybridization
of all, but a certain symmetry is also restored and the need for
a distorting, privileged perspective somewhat obviated.
Naoki UENO
Naoki Ueno and his colleague Yasuko Kawatoko (later in the day)
described their work in Japan on the coordination of technical
practices by machine-lathe operators and others in a metal-parts
fabrication center. Most interesting in this work was the sense
of the coordination of practices as simultaneously production and
education. Less experienced workers learn as the assist more
experienced workers and supervisors in trouble-shooting problems
as well as in setting up more routine, but always unique and
individualized procedures for forming different precision metal
parts.
Through meticulous observation and analysis, and careful
selection of revealing cases and instances, this work shows us in
great deal just how 'standard plans' function in the sense of
Leigh Star's 'boundary objects' -- material communicative means
that become translated and transformed in function in the work of
various sites among which they circulate. The knowledge and
experience to be gained by novices is less present and on display
by the senior workers and more co-constructed by the junior and
senior workers together (with the assistance of the sometimes
malformed parts and the working machinery).
It would be very interesting to hear a more general
conceptualization of this model for learning-through-
participation. It is both clearly correct, undoubtedly quite
common and generalizable, and radically different from most
common models of teaching and learning. The standard model has it
that what happens is a transmission from knower to learner. The
Vygotskyan model is much closer to the reality Ueno describes:
knowledge is constructed in the collaboration of senior and
junior partners. But even the Vygotskyan model, I think, at least
as applied in the U.S., often still assumes that the knowledge to
be transmitted pre-exists, rather than that it is created for the
first time in the interactional event in which it is learned, in
a sense by both junior and senior partners. What the senior
partner brings is experience, not knowledge, that is, experience
of what has been done in the past in similar situations. What is
learned is the new and unique experience of what happens in this
particular new event, and this new experience will be carried
forward by both senior and junior partners, adding a little to
the former's repertory and a lot (proportionally to the
accumulation of the past) to that of the junior partner. This is
truly a model for the generation of practical knowledge, rather
than one of the transmission of theoretical knowledge. To the
extent that theories like that of situated cognition are correct,
and theoretical knowledge is of much more limited value and use
in practice than academic culture assumes it to be (because each
situation is unique and theoretical knowledge must be adapted to
it by difficult new work), it may be the case that most useful
knowledge is in the form of additions to the repertory of useable
experiences, each generated anew in a new unique learning
situation.
I look forward to hearing further reports of this interesting
research program.
J Lemke
The next presentation was my own. I was originally asked to be a
discussant, then to contribute a paper, and finally to do both.
It does not seem quite fair to write of my own work either as a
reporter or as a critic. What I presented was a general argument
for the necessity of treating the networks of technoscientific
activity across time as well as across sites, including viewing
human bodies, inscribed with the habitus and experiences of
events in one time and place, as 'boundary objects' that
propagate information and become translated and transformed in
how they function from sites of professional education to sites
of professional practice, over time. I argued, extending Jean
Lave's notions of apprenticeship through legitimate peripheral
participation in communities of practice, that some societies so
arrange things that not everything you need to know to be a full
member of the professional community can be learned (in any
efficient way) on-the-job, but needs to be learned as a pre-
requisite in some sort of school, or initiatory activity. I made
the analogy of ritual secrets disclosed only in the initiation
ceremonies, which make one fully able to see the meanings in
other rituals, even public ones, elsewhere in the doings of the
community. To the uninitiated these public displays may have one
meaning, to the initiated quite another (or more). To be able to
know how to fully participate, especially when improvisations are
required, you need to see with the eyes of the initiate. Such
esoteric knowledge is not on display in the ceremonies and cannot
be learned by any amount of direct participation. It must be
disclosed, and that takes place elsewhere in time and space.
Many scientific practices in my own analyses of science discourse
and use of inscriptions require considerable 'unpacking' of their
meanings. They are black boxes nested within black boxes. The
explicated meanings are the ones needed for full participation in
the community, especially in special or improvisational
circumstances. But the knowledge needed to do this is not on
display in the laboratory or the scientific conference, it is
taken for granted in those contexts. You need to have been
through at least some aspects of a formal scientific education
(or be self-taught through the same tools, such as textbooks) to
have acquired the 'secret decoder ring' needed to make sense of
what is going on as the initiated natives do.
My paper also takes up, more cursorily, the issue of just what
sorts of circulation of information and meaning occur between
school science and professional science practices. Anyone who is
interested can request a draft of the paper from me by email.
II.
The first paper of the second session of the symposium, by
Michael Flower, introduced quite new themes and became central to
much of the later discussion. His concern was the basis of
scientific and educational ethics, and he drew on the work of
Levinas and Caputo in formulating a notion of Obligation in which
all human activity involves obligating others and being enmeshed
in obligations oneself, to the degree that it is impossible to
fulfill all obligations. But there are obligations and
Obligations, the latter, more privileged in nature, are those
generated by human suffering and which create our obligation to
do something about it.
Flower's work is in an early stage of its analyses, but it
stimulated a great deal of discussion, including the issue of
whether there are not also obligations that ought morally to be
refused or resisted, and whether academic and scientific projects
do not necessarily impose on all of us some obligations which we
ought not accede to (such as complicity with monological
theories, ideologies, harmful technologies, etc.)
Gary Downey is an engineering educator who has been creating a
unique new curriculum (see www.cis.vt.edu/hst/2054/ ) that takes
a reflexive and critical look at the enculturation trajectory of
the usual engineering curriculum, at what it means to become an
engineering professional, and how students are to some extent
manipulated unawares by the courses and procedures of the
curriculum. Downey reported that many students are very grateful
for insights into what is happening to them in their own
educations and participate actively in constructing these
insights for their own life and learning trajectories. The course
is growing in popularity.
What was of greatest general theoretical interest here, I think,
was Downey's view, the product of his work with students in this
course, that Engineering as a general curriculum and initiatory
trajectory is trying to fit all students to some dominant model
of the Ideal Engineer, and that individual students find it very
distressing that they do not live up to, or sometimes wish to be,
that specific kind of professional. Downey introduces in its
place a more symmetrical model in which students ask how
Engineering can be fit to their needs and goals, how they can
transform and individualize the practices of engineering to
become the kinds of people and professionals they wish to be.
This is a very empowering perspective, and it applies I think to
all monological projects of enculturation (and even to many
polyphonic ones). In Flowers terms, these projects of making a
new generation in the image of the old's ideals (never its
realities, of course), seek to impose obligations on students,
ones that should probably be resisted in the name of our
humanity. I think a lot of graduate curricula could stand some
self-examination in these terms. I have no wish to be a
Physicist, or an Educator, or even a Semiotician or Social
Theorist. I only want to appropriate useful practices from these
traditions to be me and do what I think is worth doing. I
recognize that my values and desires, as well as the available
and valuable traditions are thoroughly social in nature -- but
what I do with them is necessarily unique. Education, as I have
often said on xmca, is too often covertly coercive, seeking its
own ends and not seeking to serve the needs of the student.
Susan Newman, the organizer of the symposium, presented her own
paper on the logics and contradictions of corporate software
design activities. This was a very subtle and thoughtful analysis
that contrasted real working practices with the idealized 'closed
world' problem-solving so dominant in software engineering
curricula. What she showed was that solutions to problems emerge
from complex interactions of a variety of stakeholder viewpoints
and interests, represented in teams and discussions by their
representatives (human and nonhuman). In the actual ethnographic
data of her studies it was clear that no problem exists in a
vacuum, and that no solution is judged solely by isolated,
decontextualized criteria of logic or efficiency. Indeed the ways
in which problems come to be posed and generated, and re-
formulated and changed, through many cycles, reflect the multiple
social, economic, political constraints and interests at stake.
The skills taught as decontextualized rubrics for standardized
problem-solving or software design are only the smallest part of
the actual, situated, contextualized process.
The implications here for education are rather profound. They
follow those of Jean Lave's well-known critique of theoretically-
based education and its cognitive psychology foundations, but
offer new and different kinds of evidence and argument for more
practically situated learning.
If we think back to the Ueno paper, and its model of accumulating
unique and useful experiences, each contextually situated, but in
total a repertory that becomes a tool for future action (cf.
Levi-Straus on bricolage), we can see that Newman's work may also
imply that learning-by-doing must take into account more
realistic contexts. This does not necessarily mean a return to a
pure apprenticeship model. A mixed model seems wisest, with a
gradual shift from more emphasis on initiation into disciplinary
basics to more time spent in gaining real-life experience. It may
be that the missing element pointed to by Stevens and by Hall,
between official school knowledge and apprenticeship to
professional practice in science, mathematics, or architectural
design, is just students' reaction against the overly abstract
curriculum and their seeking out real-life experience in one form
or another.
Yasuko Kawatoko extended the Ueno discussions by looking at
coordination of work in the lathe-operators domain as the
organization of multiple visions. In this original and useful
metaphor, each member of the working collaboration helps other
members to see what is happening and what needs to be done or
resolved in ways that share more than one viewpoint. This is
accomplished in many ways, not least through the use of various
boundary objects that translate a vision from one angle
(customer, inspector, manager, senior operator, junior operator)
so that it can become helpful in refining and extending the
vision from another angle.
In this model, collaborators are accountable to one another for
making visible to others what is important from their own angle
of vision, so that this may be taken into account in the seeing
by the Other. Learning here is again the participation in
networks of social practice of this kind, with this sort of
accountability and means. If we complete the connection to Ueno's
paper, we can see that Kawatoko is providing us with a way of
seeing how, for example, junior and senior operators can jointly
produce a problem-solution, and so a valuable experience for both
of them to carrry forward, by coordinating their visions with one
another -- in a framework in which they are each accountable to
the other's vision, and to enabling the other to see in part with
their own eyes. I find this a quite wonderful model of
collaborative learning.
III.
The third and final session of the symposium began with a report
from Mike Lynch and Doug Macbeth of their joint analyses of
television science popularization programs.
This genre of 'informal science education' is very revealing both
about science and about popular culture. Taking a somewhat
historical perspective, they chose American programs from the
1950s (Mr. Wizard) to the present (Bill Nye -- the Science Guy;
Beekman).
Most intriguing from the science side was the emphasis they
placed on science's historical concern with 'demonstration' as a
mode of activity distinct from investigation or even from
hypothesis-testing experimentation. Demonstration speaks to the
validity of scientific knowledge from the perspective of the
public, rather than the other modes which speak to its internal
validity within the scientific community. We see here something
of the evangelism of science, its face to the world, rather than,
as in most science studies, its internal practices. I thought
back to Shapin's renewal of the old charge that science is a
religion in disguise, and a direct competitor to Christianity,
sharing many of its characteristic features (as competitors tend
to do over time). Here the corresponding feature would be
Witnessing, the public demonstration of faith, if not the
performance of Wonders (less emphasized after the early days of
Christianity). Lynch and Macbeth, while looking at the apparently
innocuous material of TV science, are reminding us that inner-
directed visions of technoscience as are incomplete as
internalist ones. It is not enough to look to the role of the
social context of science on science's internal practices; we
also need to look at the way those practices belong to a larger
system or network which includes practices that look outward
beyond the science community to the public whose support of
scientific work has always been necessary, is more critical in
democratic polities, and has lately been much in question.
The material itself is quite rich and wonderful. I could not help
but make two immediate observations about it.
First, that the role of the TV scientist, whether as nerd or
madman, is always a very strongly masculine role and one not
easily occupied in terms of cultural norms and stereotypes (and
realities) by women. One could imagine the possibility of a
Margaret Mead type of post-menopausal matriarch (Mead's term, not
mine) in the lead role, and how the character of the whole
presentation would have to be different to fit the entailed
cultural associations. I think some serious gender analysis of
this material would show a lot about how popular images of
science, and science's images of itself, enable the typical
scientist to enact his masculinity through his role as scientist.
The implications for exclusionary images relative to women are
obvious enough.
Second, that over the decades the changes in the programs
formats' and styles reflect as much the changing dominant
concerns of popular culture and cultural elites as they do
anything about science as such. I think a historical approach to
this material, looking at what changes with time, could be as
revealing as one that looks at what is invariant about the image
of science portrayed.
There is also a basic implication here for the programs of school
science. One of the constant criticisms made of school science
curricula is that they focus entirely on the products of science,
the stories and accounts of the how the natural world is, and
neglect the processes of science, how and why these accounts get
made. I believe that the majority of scientists think that the
prevailing emphasis is perfectly appropriate: to them the output
of scientific work _is science_ and the rest is merely _about
science_ (and so belongs in the history or sociology curriculum).
Why do scientists see the products of their work, rather than the
work itself, as being the reality of 'science'? I think that this
is so only when they are thinking about the presentation of
science to non-scientists, to 'laymen' or laity (a religious
phrase). If you ask them about the training of scientific
researchers, they will tell you how important the learning of the
processes are, that what matters is 'thinking like a scientist'
and that the details of a particular scientific model are easily
acquired after a little reading and some practice in a lab (once
one has the fundamentals). Here again, I think, are the two faces
of science: on inward-looking and focussed on the generation of
new knowledge, the other outward-looking and focussed on
'demonstration' to the world of the truths of science. As
researchers and mentors to future researchers scientists are
Workers; but as teachers, they are Witnesses. In other metaphors,
they are proud fathers showing off their progeny (and prowess),
or proud Artisans showing the handiwork of their Craft. What
scientists _value_ about their work is its _results_, not the
process itself, which is seen as purely instrumental. What they
want to Show to the world is what they value, what they have
Made.
Mimi Ito presented her studies of a Fifth Dimension site where
students played at educational computer games after school. She
highlighted the dialectic and dilemma of cultural reproduction
and student resistance, showing that even when students
transformed the significance of an activity by 'cheating' (i.e.
imposing their own rules rather than conforming to rules imposed
on them), many cultural norms were still being reproduced in
these activities. Ito had an explicit concern for gender issues
and for power issues that was refreshing to hear. She has turned
the Fifth Dimension site into a laboratory for studying the kinds
of 'consumer' resistance and appropriation of mass culture
foregrounded by deCerteau, and made explicit use of his analysis.
I think this also has implications for student response to the
normal curriculum, and her notice that the results can still be
replicative of dominant cultural values may also lead us to see
that in school as well, resistance may be another pathway to the
same endpoints. I do not see this pessimistically; it should not
and cannot be easy to radically transform culture or for the
individual to escape the meaning systems of his/her time and
place. But we need to understand that resistive and appropriative
pathways may in fact be successful pathways within the culture;
that deviance may as often lead to success as to failure. It may
be docility that leads nowhere, and docility may in fact be quite
rare.
Chris Ritter gave the last formal paper in the symposium, a very
carefully researched historical argument that the Didactic (cf.
Witnessing, as well as culture-transmitting) function may be
fundamental to the evolution of science even seen in terms of
what is important for scientific practice internally. The
essential point was made by a series of examples which showed
that the survivability of a particular form of scientific
representation depends, among other factors and often crucially,
on its teachability. In some cases strong philosophical arguments
for one form of representation over another were dominated by the
practical effects of superior pedagogical effectiveness of
another representation. The most telling examples here were from
the history of chemical symbolism and notation, but the same
story could be told, I know, for much of the history of
mathematical notation in the early 19th century.
Textbooks and teaching curricula shape the next generation of
practitioners. What makes sense to the knowledgeable professional
(able to unpack the most arcane notation) can be completely
opaque to the novice. Some forms cannot be easily remembered,
others cannot be easily manipulated. Where there is no
alternative, people struggle along. But where a pedagogically
superior alternative is available it has often won out even over
forms back by greater scientific prestige and formal arguments.
One also sees in Ritter's work a good example of the meeting of
time scales. The historical here meets the developmental. We see
the influence of historical shifts on the life-trajectory of
scientists-in-the-making, and vice versa. We also see the
critical importance of mediational means, not just for work, but
for education; making science _visible_ is essential to the
scientific project in many respects, both for witnessing and for
working and enculturation. My own work has noted the importance
of visual, as opposed to purely verbal representations in working
with the quantitative variation of natural science phenomena (and
the consequent role of mathematics in bridging between
conceptual-verbal and quantitative-visual representations). I
look forward to seeing much further development of Ritter's line
of analysis.
Jean Lave led off the formal discussion with extensive and
detailed notes on half the papers (as we had divided this labor).
She had to highlight these notes and even so did not quite have
time for the full discussion. She has kindly since sent her notes
to all of us in writing. She emphasized the role public education
plays in stabilizing the networks that sustain various ideologies
about science, something more work needs to be done on. She also
noted that typically scientists are also teachers in one capacity
or another and that we need to understand how this dual
experience of practice affects both sides of their role. This is
particularly salient in the university, she noted, where we
should be concerned (as I was above) about how research and
teaching might find different relationships to one another than
they have so far had.
My own formal contribution to the discussion is pretty well
evident I think from this report already. I emphasized the
'problem of time' -- meaning the issues of integrating studies
across significantly different time-scales, and the 'problem of
trouble' -- meaning the role played in educational experience of
what we learn when things do not go according to plan, including
what happens in unusual hybrid settings.
I hope this report is useful to some of you, and I invite
inquiries or further discussion on any part of it, to me
individually, or on xmca. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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