Nate Schmolze asked:
"David, others
I found a little time and read through the paper and was somewhat puzzled.
Am I understanding you correctly in argueing for a strict thought / content
dualism?
I guess part of my puzzlement is give me an example of a large scale
constructivist pedogogical project that did not include a large degree of
enculturalization."
Nate,
Thanks for your interest in my crossdisciplinary paper.
Enculturation is a ubiquitous aspect of all social interaction, in and out
of schools. Perhaps conceptual construction also is ubiquitous, as people
spontaneously struggle to make sense of their world. But students'
acquisition of specific cultural dispositions or particular concepts may
become an explicit objective of instruction in schools.
The point of crossdisciplinarity is that very different sorts of
structuring resources go into designing instruction toward these very
different sorts of goals. One can attend to one or the other goal, and
accept learning benefits in the other domain as lagniappe (an extra
benefit), which is fine. But when one wants to address instruction toward
specific concepts and specific dispositions, simultaneously, one needs to
recognize the divergent nature of these pedagogical enterprises, and the
inevitability of having to subordinate one goal to the other at certain
node points in an unfolding lesson.
Crossdisciplinarity is a response to what I see as a widespread and
debilitating failure for teachers to recognize this necessity; to think
that there is a unitary reform teaching method that seemlessly meshes
together all learning goals. Often this "unitary reform vision" of teaching
is realized in instructional practices that are incoherent from the
student's point of view, and that address none of it's goals effectively.
Unfortunately, I see the dissemination of integrative theories like
situated cognition theory and social constructivism (and perhaps
sociocultural theory) as implicated in the perception of a unitary reform
vision in the world of practice. Crossdisciplinarity is intended to
function as an interface between academic and pedagogical discourses to
enable integrative theorizing and research to progress while protecting
education from the premature conclusion that such theoretical syntheses
already have emerged as a viable guide for educational practice.
Hope this helps.
David
_____________________
David Kirshner
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803-4728
(225) 578-2332 (225) 578-9135 (fax)
dkirsh@lsu.edu
http://www.ednet.lsu.edu/tango3/coedirectory.taf?
_function=detail&Faculty_uid1=135&Users_uid2=135&_UserReference=59F4B47FBE3415E138CD68B2
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