Nate,
It's very ironic my proposal has generated a concern about dichotomizing the
teacher-student interaction (as it occurs in the classroom or wherever)
since the model itself was born out of thinking about activity theory in
relation to Clifford Adelman's model of "academic capital" that is currently
a hot item among institutional researchers in higher education. Designed
to predict "academic success" Adelman's model focuses on what the student
brings to the college or university and totally ignores any possible
transformation that occurs in the process of education at that level. On
the basis of a combination of instructor surveys, action research with more
than 30 English instructors and an equal number of math instructors, and an
extremely sophisticated transcript-based student tracking system we have
been able to demonstrate quite clearly (statistically significant and all
that) that student outcomes reflect what the teacher brings to the classroom
as well. The model was developed to provide a coherent way to talk about
the dual character of the encounter.
We are looking at the kinds of factors that influence the instructor's style
(genre if you want to use that term loosely) and these are to be found in a
variety of places not least of which are the organization of the colleges,
the community of teachers (AFT, specific academic communities, etc) all of
which pertain to activity systems in which the student doesn't figure at
all; similarly, on the students' side we can show that the student's
background -- which can be analyzed in terms of "communities of reference"
with their own activity systems -- similarly influences how the student
understands and uses the academic/educational resources available at the
community colleges
The instructional unit simply isn't the same thing for the student and the
instructor on a whole range of dimensions that determine concretely what it
turns out to be in practice -- ..
As to your specific questions: I don't really take a position about whether
the commoditization of the teaching-learning process is good or bad in any
absolute sense. Sort of the way Marx didn't see capitalism as good or bad
absolutely although he certainly did descry the consequences of its
functioning. His attitude was sharply contrasted to that of the "Utopian
Socialists" who passed moral judgments about it; he saw it as the outcome of
a historical process and believed that its inherent contradictions would
lead to its transformation and the elimination of the consequences that he
deplored. I share that attitude and believe that the effects of
commoditization in education have quite de-humanizing effects but see its
development as a process that can't be resolved by changing the classroom
practices without changing the entire institutional structure of education
which in turn would require a radical alteration of the society as a whole.
Oddly enough I once listened to Derrida lecture about a famous suspension
foot bridge at Cornell where many undergraduates committed suicide. So my
answer to your question about the inevitability of the commoditization of
education is simply: Yes it is inevitable in capitalist societies including
State Capitalist societies such as the Soviet Union, the People's Republic
of China, etc. Do I personally like what it produces? Not at all. Can it
be changed from inside? Well you know that old story about a house divided.
I guess at heart I still agree with Freire concerning liberation education
and the transformation of situation limits. I wonder if anyone has every
compared Freire's position on "overcoming of situation-limits" with
Engestrom's proposal concerning "collective expansion" in relationship to
education--this would certainly require a future-oriented, dynamic model of
the contexts of education.
In diagram 4 I should change the text: "complete educational goal" to
"complete educational program" since these are really different things.
Most 4 year colleges never ask a student what their goal is, they simply ask
for the major which is the educational program. In community colleges,
especially open cc systems like in California, only a small percentage of
the students ever complete anything that resembles a major as the
institution itself defines them. Consequently, we collect data on student
goals which can cover such things as: job improvement, personal interest,
transfer with associates degree, other (!!!). That "goal" refers almost
always to something that is not part of the offerings of the community
college itself (about 14% of the cc students in California list AA degrees
or vocational certificates as their goal) . Even in baccalaureate granting
institutions the "motive" of getting a degree is related to the object of
careers in the "real world". The courses a student takes (one level of
instructional unit) are simply tools used to attain those objects.
When you ask whether it is dynamic I'm not totally sure I understand what
you're asking. It is dynamic in several senses: (a) from the instructor's
perspective as producer of the object it changes in response primarily to
the professional community that the instructor belongs to, that is, his or
her profession (english, psychology, auto mechanics, art, etc.), (b) it
changes in the institutional forces affecting the division of labor in the
instructor's activity system. In this sense, the dynamics influencing the
content and form of instruction don't respond at all to the needs arising in
the instructional unit itself when the student is taken into account as an
element of that unit. Students influence the production of the
instructional unit primarily through their demand for specific content --
empirically we see that students influence very little "how" instructional
units are produced, ie, teaching style, use of this or that educational
technology, etc.
As to what is included, think of instructional unit as commodites, almost
anything can be included since it simply specifies a relationship between a
buyer and a seller, thus an instructional unit could be reduced to the
minimal lesson on which a quiz resulting in a grade contributing the the
successful completion of a course but in general I think the "course" is the
minimal instructional unit. In the economy the different branches of the
social division of labor, that is agriculture, industry, etc, and the
technical relations of production in each of these determine what and how
much is produced in general; e.g., so much iron necessary to produce a
certain amount of corn, and thus setting up proportionalities of production
between the different branches. The form and content of the instructional
unit clearly responds to similar parameters when education is seen as a
branch of production of the social economy as a whole.
As I said at the outset of the message, the model really arose out of a
desire to provide some kind of theoretical basis to the practical issue of
bringing "assessment" practices (e.g., evaluation of "academic capital")
into question. All of this likewise is cast against the big question for
community college IR people: why do the cc students fare so poorly? why do
specific ethnolinguistic groups do far better than others? why aren't
clearly effective teaching practices instituted in the classroom to improve
the outcomes of the disfavored groups? I think the model gives a different
and useful perspective and approach to these questions. But *here* I'm
pushing the theoretical side far beyond what my practical application of it
requires because it has led me to being able to organize a range of other
issues into a systematic whole as well as generate illuminating questions
such as "What is the origin of the curriculum unit, as in Chem 101 = 5
units, English 1 = 3 units?" Not surprisingly this measure came about in
relation to the hours of class time but that measurement in hours itself
wasn't used in colleges at all until the 19th century and appeared about the
same time that "electives" and "substitutable courses" for a specific degree
"requirements" came into existence which, naturally, ties us back into the
question of commoditization, abstract labor time, etc. The logical
structure of the concrete universal is also its genetic structure.
Paul H. Dillon
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