Eric,
Your idea that
"achievement of success in a goal oriented activity system can only be
measured by the person achieving the success. Therefore, the student can
truely only be the measure of what is successful in the classroom"
is misguided. Yes, the locus for analysis of the success of instruction is
the student. But this is not the same as saying that the student's
judgments are all that are relevant. Students may participate in "a goal
oriented activity system" with little understanding of the goals and
intentions of the teacher who has designed that activity system. It is
teachers who need to (and fortunately do) make continual judgments about
the success of their instructional practices.
Now I recognize that your concern that
"Learning does not always follow instruction as you pointed out in your
paper regarding the 'inadvertant' learning that takes place"
is not really about accountability, but about the effectiveness of
instruction. That's also the point of crossdisciplinarity. In my
experience, programs that bank on inadvertant learning tend to flounder.
Here's a for instance:
Let's suppose an instructional approach organized to stimulate students'
independence and creativity (an enculturationist strategy that relies on
giving students a great deal of autonomy in their investigations) happens
to produce inadvertent conceptual development. If the teacher accepts this
as lagniappe (extra benefit) and continues with the enculturationist
agenda, all is well. But if the teacher is banking on PARTICULAR concepts
being acquired or addressed, then the very feature of autonomy so important
to the enculturationist agenda becomes an obstacle. Often, the result is
that teachers find ways to disguise their control of the learning situation
to give the students the illusion of autonomy while actually controlling
the direction of their investigations. The point, of course, is that even
if the students are taken in (fooled) by this ruse, the benefits of
enculturation are largely negated. This does not mean that enculturationist
and conceptual goals cannot be balanced and coordinated. But in such cases
the learning is not inadvertent, it's planned.
David Kirshner
______________________
Eric's Message:
In a message dated 2/21/2002 11:56:15 AM Central Standard Time,
dkirsh@lsu.edu writes:
The point of highlighting this is that very
different principles go into designing instruction toward these different
forms of learning. If one aims instruction toward both conceptual and
enculturationist goals, one needs to expect to encounter node points at
which priorities need to be set with one of these agendas winning out at
the expense of the other. Thus crossdisciplinarity is different from other
theorizations of pedagogy in which "good teaching" is reified as a unitary
construct or goal.
David,
All due respect to your thinking regarding curriculum but I have a hard
time believeing that 'best practice' is the goal. The achievement of
success in a goal oriented activity system can only be measured by the
person achieving the success. Therefore, the student can truely only be the
measure of what is successful in the classroom.
If one is to provide proff of successful teaching the only meaure worth
anything is the actual student arriving at the concusion that the
instruction was beneficial or not. Learning does not always follow
instruction as you pointed out in your paper regarding the 'inadvertant'
learning that takes place.
Tying this in Yro. I see the double bind as a nice metaphor but having
spent a great deal of time I must say that 'expansive learning does not
adequately provide the methodological structure that LSV so greatly
emphasized.
I beleive Valsiner's Zone theory (ZFM/ZPA dichotomy that can lead to ZPDs,
anybody else familiar with Valsiner's approach to Bateson's Double Bind?
Valsiner of course does not promote it as a solution to Bateson's double
bind but in keeping with the Yro discussion I thought this the best way to
introduce Valsiner into the conversation.
Always a little off,
Or is it the road less traveled?
Eric
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