yes, this fits with what i know, both as a teacher in an
elementary classroom and a teacher in the university classroom. it is
what i was somewhat awkwardly attempting to illustrate in my story about
the third grade girl whose teacher mistook her report paper as evidence of
learning.
as Mike wrote in "The construction zone" (1989/93) "In an
important sense, the tutor and the teacher were treating the child's
production _as if_ it were an attempt (sometimes poorly executed) to
achieve an agreed-upon goal. In education, such assumptions may be a
useful way of importing the goal into the teacher-child interaction and
from there into the child's independent activity. Our original coding
scheme also treated many of the children's productions _as if_ they were
the products of poor strategies for getting all the pairs. In psychology,
such overinterpretations can be dangerously misleading. Children are
scored as doing poorly when in fact they are not doing the task in the
first place"(p. 56).
or in the case of the third grade girl, children are scored as
doing well, when in fact they are not doing the task in the first place.
it seems as if the artifact can not be mistaken for the learning.
> Having used formal tests, I keep coming back to the informal interview as
> the best way to "assess" learning. It is an activity in which you can
> encourage a child to talk with you about their experiences and
> recollections and understandings. Depending on the level of trust, and
> sensitivity and willingness to be surprised, and wonder at what you are
> told, you can get a sense of (or sample from) the "learning stream" that is
> flowing through the child's mind.
this has certainly been my experience - and in Wertsch's 'Mind as
Action' it is through his interviews with Estonians that he's about to
bring to light through a palimpsest of social activities appropriation and
resistance.
> Hope this is helpful. It assumes that we are "permitted" these days to
> build sophisticated and logically coherent models of learning experiences,
> learning processes, and learning outcomes that do not contain test results
> or numbers or passing or failing.
this is a daily struggle i find myself in. but i find that
placing myself in the role of subject in my research within the activity
of teacher research that i can construct some sort of a model that helps
me understand what it was that the learner learns.
phillip
phillip white pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu
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A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated,
is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not
as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that
is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency.
Michel Foucault / Discipline & Punish
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