I have just spent a frustrating couple of hours in
our local library trying to find education-related materials
as Sheila and I prepare to tackle the revision of Ch13 of
Cole and Cole. Frustrating, because I can't find much in our
local !#$ who-is-at #@!#$ library!
With a little time to stew, I thought I would comment
on the comments on the schooling chapter so far. Some of
the comments provide me very specific places to tackle short-
comings and for that I am really grateful, but by and large,
I thought everyone was being far too easy on us. We have
three reviews solicited by the publishers, two of whom are
by people more or less sympathetic to the range of perspectives
we encounter here on XMCA, and the reviewers were generally
a lot tougher than you-all. I thought I would toss out some
of their comments to see if I couldn't stir up more discussion.
I won't identify the sources, but they can if they like.
First, the official reviewers, like some of you, comment on
the disconnect between the schooling chapter and the peer
interaction chapters. In part this results from the structure
of the entire section, which begins by asking why it is that
around the age of 6 (+/- a year or so) societies around the world
start putting their kids in new contexts with greatly reduced
supervision. That is followed by a chapter on biological and
cognitive changes which deliberately ends inconclusively by saying
that without looking at the contexts kids are placed in, its
difficult to reach any conclusions about what is going on
developmentally. Then two major contexts/domains of activity
are each the subject of a chapter-- schooling and peer groups.
After which we return to the questions of stages, etc for the
section as a whole.
So, yes, of course, social, cognitive, biological, cultural aspects
of development are all always co-occuring. Language however, has
this nasty linearity to it, despite some looping mechanisms, so
some mechanism for separating and recombining is needed and this
is the one we came up with, for better and for worse. No chance
it will change in its macrostructure, but no reason not to make
all interweavings possible while retaining some semblence of
readability. All suggestions for how to accomplish this within
the current word count gratefully accepted!
Second, the schooling chapter is, by and large, very conservative
in that it focuses on literacy and numeracy and in that it does not
highlight contemporary research that tries to break the 1/30 face
forward recitation format kind of education. The instrumentality
of schooling is priveleged (in a relatively narrow way) over
expressive and social/relational aspects of schooling. Issues of
gender and schooling get short shrift. The material on school
in the communit is outdated (although I sure would love to see
a current replication of Rutter's work in England on differential
school effectiveness).
Suggestions here would also be very welcome. The chapter is focused
on schooling in middle childhood, which introduces some restrictions.
I am busily following up leads to newer, incorporatble materials.
The treatment of language and schooling is out of date or perhaps
unrepresentative at least one reviewer suggests, and the historical
treatment (a la instrumental focus) does not bring in the functions
of literacy in classical Greece or the Renaissance, which are
more humanistically oriented.
No reasonable treatment of motivation or peers in school settings
(perhaps this could be woven better into ch14 than currently is
the case).
So, there are some critical points to consider. The discussion
of different sociocultural approaches raised by David and Ellice
are at the top of my current agenda as we start to bring the
chapter "into the 21st century." Gasp, argh, blech.
Comments and suggestions p-l-e-a-s-e.
mike
ps- reminder, chapter (minus a few essays in boxes which can
be posted on request) at www.communication.ucsd/MCA under
papers.