Listening to holiday music of the season, colored lights aglow, even the
background image on my computer screen changed to a home-made holiday card
design -- I take a few minutes off to review email and among many
interesting messages to xmca found Nate Schmolze's on Vygotskyan projects
in US schools sponsored by the Best Practices program of the Greve
Foundation. I read the attached description and surfed around BP's website,
very much impressed with their simple concept of exchange of educational
methods and materials between US schools and those in other countries
(Denmark, Scotland, Australia, etc. as well as Eastern Europe).
Surely a profound sign of the globalization of 'markets' in the broadest
sense, as Bourdieu might use the notion to span the social-economic
'fields' in which value is assigned to all sorts of practices, from
production to behavior to consumption. Perhaps also the beginnings of a
sign of the waning of the US superiority complex which has so long blinded
us to anything of value originating outside our own borders, at least in
culturally sensitive areas such as Education. I can dimly imagine a time in
the future when in many nations, in many communities irrespective of
nation-states, people will seek out ideas and practices from other
communities with different histories.
Impressed as I am with some of the (believable) claims about successes of
other educational practices in domains where US education has been notably
weak (e.g. math & science education), and knowing something of the success
of at least one Australian innovation (the genre literacy teaching
approach), I have two questions about these efforts to import radically
different approaches to teaching.
First, although there seems to be no reason why students should not
immediately respond to many of these approaches, especially the youngest
students -- teachers' adaptiveness seems to present quite a different
problem. How easily can we expect teachers, especially those with more than
about 5 years experience, to adopt methods which may require radical
changes in both practices and philosophies of education? My experience
suggests that as eager as many teachers are for 'methods that work' with
their students, it is not at all easy for experienced teachers to adapt to
the spirit, as opposed to simply the procedures, of radically different
approaches.
Second, and perhaps related, is the question of WHY such different
approaches have evolved in different cultural-historical traditions? That
the dominant Russian approach to the teaching of mathematics, say, vs. that
in the US are vastly different seems quite clear. It is an across-the-board
difference, from focus and priorities to methods of assessment of
achievement. While I know these other cases less well, it also seems to me
that teaching about society in Scandinavia is also radically different from
the US approach. There is a tendency, perhaps racist, perhaps only a
continuation of exoticization, in the case of Japanese (and more broadly
Asian) success in many areas of education, to attribute differences purely
to cultural peculiarities (say Japanese consensus-orientation, or
effort-toward-duty, as Westerners imagine these traits stereotypically). In
the case of cultures with which we identify more closely, our explanations
tend toward historical specificity (a Vygotsky in Russia, a Grundtvig in
Denmark), if equally inconsistently (LSV's influence in the USSR seems to
have been minimal; Dewey's in the US likewise).
Turning the logic around, I wonder what we can learn about the dominant
cultures and the political-economic orders of various nation-states by
looking, through the lens of comparison, at their educational practices?
Is it true, for example, that many striking educational successes around
the world depend on recruiting to the teaching profession people with a
higher relative standing in their societies than is common in the US? and
that the kinds of teaching approaches which produce these successes depend
critically on teachers who are confident in their conceptual fluency in
their subjects and at ease with ambiguity, uncertainty, and
unpredictability in the moment-to-moment and day-to-day development of
their subjects and their students?
One of the problems with making learning theory the center of educational
thinking is that it can lead us to forget that we have built the entire
system not around the learner but around the teacher. Equally educational
practices have to be conceived of more adequately as teacher practices, and
seen not as importable commodities to be delivered to students without the
mediation of real teachers. I know this is not the view in most of the BP
programs I scanned, but neither did I feel confident that sufficient
attention was being directed toward teachers. There is no doubt also a link
here to the vexed issue of the relationship between new educational
technologies and the role of teachers ... but the Christmas cookies are
calling to me.
So, to all, a Good Night! JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
---------------------------