Bill, engineering is an attractive metaphor for education and has actually
dominated it on numerous occasions. But I tend to take a more "organic"
view, where instead of prescribing method we take a more "proscriptive"
approach. IF community is a powerful way of teaching and learning and it
arises more or less naturally from purpose driven situations, then let's do
all we can to nurture and support the process and proscribe anything that
might disrupt it. Kind of like organic gardening. I don't think its alchemy
- it takes a lot of understanding of these "natural" forces to be able to
work with them and to avoid disrupting them.
I think I was ruined before I ever really got started in this business of
studying teaching and learning by reading a book by J. M. Stephens, _The
Process of Schooling_ (1967). In a devastating review of the "scientific"
literature purporting to identify the most effective and efficient methods
to teach or construct instructional materials, Stephens reveals the
constancy of schooling across these variations. In other words, the sources
of effective schooling are not to be found in the research that seeks to
treat learning as a physical phenomena, decomposable into input and output
variables that are independently manipulatable. I think the same basic
critique is relevant today. Instead Stephens proposes that learning and
schooling are processes as natural as breathing and our principal action as
educators is to nurture them, to avoid practices that interfere with them.
I'll paste here a copy of a summary of Stephen's argument I wrote a number
of years ago. Delete now if this isn't relevant to the conversation:
*********************
In his book, Stephens speculates on the very existence of schools, on the
forces from which they arose and that account for the characteristics they
possess today. According to Stephens, schools did not arise from any
planned, deliberate decisions of any group or society. Rather, schools arose
from some primitive, spontaneous tendencies for survival that emerged as
mankind developed. To survive, any species must attain proficiency in
certain behaviors and any group that is successful in nurturing these
behaviors is more likely to survive. Human groups that neglect to inform
their offspring of the dangers of playing in the traffic or touching power
lines, for example, are unlikely to survive very long.
One mechanism that has evolved to facilitate the acquisition of certain
behaviors is the family. Typically the family is responsible for nurturing
those behaviors that have urgent survival value such as eating, bodily
elimination, safety and so forth. These behaviors are those that arise
automatically in the course of interacting with the child and for which
parents seem to give automatic expression. Other behaviors that the child
may emit, those that Stephens characterizes as "playful, manipulative
tendencies," receive less parental concern and attention: skipping stones on
the water, drawing pictures in the sand, playing with one's fingers, etc.
While these behaviors may have no "immediate* survival value for an
individual, Stephens argues that "groups* (e.g., societies) that nurture
such frivolous behaviors are more likely to survive than those that do not.
Thus, while "fooling around" with numbers or words or pictures is unlikely
to influence the life expectancy of an individual, the long range benefits
to the survivability of the group may be enormous (e.g., Goddard's rocket
experiments).
Schools have arisen to nurture just such tendencies. Whether a child can
sing, write a poem, or even read and write would be of less urgent concern
than whether the child could negotiate the basement stairs. Parents may feel
some remote or indulgent concern over reading and writing and even undertake
to instruct the child in these but, in the main, responsibility for such
behaviors has been relegated to the school. Stephens holds that all or most
societies that have survived have evolved something akin to a school and, in
fact, the school has contributed greatly to the survival of those societies.
However, schools did not emerge from a rational decision making process
within the group. Rather, schools are the outcome of the evolutionary demand
of blind, automatic forces present in human beings, a bit more in some
people than in others.
Stephens proposes two categories of these automatic forces that may have
played a crucial role in the emergence of schools. First he proposes a
category of playful, manipulative tendencies in humans that might be called
exploratory or curiosity tendencies. These behaviors are usually devoid of
any immediate utility but often occur in preference to more utilitarian
behavior (e.g., witness the recent video game craze). Second, Stephens
proposes an "extremely powerful but unpremeditated tendency to communicate."
Manifestations of this tendency include our spontaneous, seemingly
unthinking attempts to tell others of our interests and to react to others
who tell us their interests (witness the behavior of the participants at
scholarly meeting, for example).
Societies that have survived across history are those strong in these
tendencies and it is out of these particular tendencies that schooling has
emerged. For Stephens, the essence of schooling is that it nurtures playful,
manipulative tendencies in humans that may have long range survival value
for the society. This nurturance is accomplished by placing children in
contact with adults who possess a high degree of communicative tendency, who
enjoy expressing their interests and reacting to the interests and
experiences of the children. A teacher interested in geography and possessed
of strong communicative tendencies will presumably interact with students on
these matters and induce some reaction on the part of the students. It
matters little what particular content is communicated or the form that this
communication takes. What is important, what schools "afford" is the
engagement of learning, of the interaction between students and highly
communicative teachers about interesting, if nonessential, ideas. Whether
that interaction concerns geography, gypsy moths, leprosy or semiotics or is
presented via lecture, textbook, computer assisted instruction or on
opposite ends of a log is of little consequence relative to the fact that
communication takes place among inherently curious people.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 11:32 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: impenetrable communities
> one. Too often an interpretation is turned into a method........
I think i just heard an "ouch" echoing up from CoPsville. Maybe from
elsewhere
too -- yet, by analogy, interpretations of physics into methods has yielded
electrical, optical and mechanical engineering, and those of chemistry into
chemical engineering, and so on... technology upon which western culture
stands
in part. Perhaps in these times of (what i consider) educational alchemy,
some
interpretation is sorely needed for informing method...
This could just be a passing fancy...
But this is meant, that is, I'm trying to make it mean, without it being
mean,
in the sense of neither negating nor refusing the point, but rather seeking
to
qualify it.
educational alchemy? Probably read it somewhere, or I am about to. Eh??
Know
a similar term?
I have not been able to dissect the phrase "community of practice" to any
smaller unit as "community". But that is perhaps simultaneously the
strength
and weakness of CoP -- that "practice" is the sole category, that it is of
primary importance?
=====
Bill Barowy
"Everything is a becoming, without beginning or end"
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail!
http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 11 2002 - 09:22:33 PST