RE: [xmca] Learning Sciences / Science of Education

["Duvall, Emily" <emily@uidaho.edu>]

Hi Tony & David,
Thank you for the response Tony. I think you might find that there are
voices in the neuroeducation movement that are indeed grappling with
formation/production issue. The two seem as one for me (is that heresy?)
much as other dualisms....

Might I suggest taking a peak at the following text: 

Brain Literacy for Educators and Psychologists by Berninger & Richards

They do a very nice job of articulating Luria's functional systems
approach in the beginning. It is a bit more on the neuroscience side,
but it offers solid research and interpretation (IMHO) focusing on the
reading, writing, and computing brain... until you get to the part near
the end where Berninger references Barbara Foorman - a great piece to
tackle, though, from a political perspective! Always some cronies in the
backroom!

If there is any room for neuroeducation in working  with these various
conceptions of learning I'd enjoy being involved.
~em



-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Tony Whitson
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 4:29 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: RE: [xmca] Learning Sciences / Science of Education

David,

Your message is powerfully corrobarative.

It arrived as I was preparing documents for inclusion in the web page
I'll 
be posting in response to this thread. One of those documents is a 
very slightly expanded version of a proposal for AERA this year on 
Learning Sciences / Science of Education as a hegemonic project.

In terms of HOW PEOPLE LEARN, Piaget, Vygotsky -- and how Dewey, Lave, 
etc. get contortedly forced into that framework, see my "Curriculum &
the 
post-(cognitivist) synthesis,"
at http://wp.me/p1V0H-1O . (If you vaguely remember having seen this 
before, it's because I skipped ahead to this page when you appeared in
my 
classroom a couple years ago.)

I find this article very helpful for understanding what's happening
here:

Lave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. In L. B.

Resnick, J. M. Levine & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially 
shared cognition (1st ed., pp. 63-82). Washington, DC: American 
Psychological Association.

I will include that in the page for tonight.

Emily, my own answer (obviously not speaking for David) is that David 
nails the problem with his reference to the production model. The 
difference between production and formation is absolutely crucial. I
think 
Cognitive Science is generally oblivious to that difference. Some Cog
Sci 
is clearly productionist. There's nothing to preclude Cog Sci from 
recognizing formation as distinct from production, but often in its 
obliviousness it remains equivocal and ambiguous at best. Given that in 
U.S. English discourse education as formation has pretty much
disappeared 
from the language, writing must be done deliberately to preclude texts 
from being read as productionist texts, and I don't see that happening
in 
the Cog Sci literature, even where the author(s) might be themselves 
thinking that they're writing about formative activity.

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009, Duvall, Emily wrote:

> David,
> When you stated:
> " So the text is largely a promissory note for how a cognitive science
> approach encompasses all of these rich traditions, whereas inspecting
> the actual contribution of cognitive science research leads to little
> more than an unpacking of how
> skills develop through repetitive practice."
>
> Is the latter part of the sentence (from 'whereas' on) your comment on
> the text or on cognitive science in general?
> In either case, it seems to be a very narrow view on 'all' cognitive
> science research. I assume it is based on some works in particular?
> ~em
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of David H Kirshner
> Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 3:45 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Learning Sciences / Science of Education
>
> Tony,
>
> I'm co-PI on a grant to replicate the University of Texas secondary
> teacher education program, which is largely focused on the learning
> sciences literature. This semester, I'm teaching an intro course,
> Knowing and Learning, that uses How People Learn as its main text, and
> presents the orthodoxy of production systems as the organizing
framework
> for thinking about learning and teaching--at the same time extolling
the
> need for group work, project based instruction, and the like. What
> becomes increasingly clear as I go through the literature is the
> hegemonic character of the learning sciences, at least in relation to
> educational matters. The insights into learning extolled in the
> literature derive in large part from Piagetian constructivist research
> and from Vygotskyan sociocultural research. So the text is largely a
> promissory note for how a cognitive science approach encompasses all
of
> these rich traditions, whereas inspecting the actual contribution of
> cognitive science research leads to little more than an unpacking of
how
> skills develop through repetitive practice.
>
> The sociological process of hegemonic discourse is itself an interest
of
> mine at this time. I'm recalling our discussion of a couple of years
ago
> about the possibility of a new edition of our situated cognition
reader
> organized as a response to the dissipation of situative perspectives
> within the learning sciences. I'm increasingly interested in
> understanding that process.
>
> David
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of Tony Whitson
> Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 3:07 PM
> To: mcole@ucsd.edu; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [xmca] Learning Sciences / Science of Education
>
> This is something that I'm very interested in. I'm planning a paper
for
> a
> narrow audience this winter, and a more ambitious paper for a wide
> audience in Winter 2011. If others would be interested in a 2011 AERA
> symposium, let's talk.
>
> I'll see if I can put together a post tonight with some fragments &
> bibliography that people might be interested in.
>
> Meanwhile, I think there is a short answer, which of course is not the
> complete answer:
>
> I think a good deal of the impetus behind "Learning Sciences" comes
from
>
> the political hostility to Education faculty in favor of
positive(istic)
>
> psychology, as in Reid Lyons' statement that "If there was any piece
of
> legislation that I could pass, it would be to blow up colleges of
> education".
>
> This has created an environment in which an Educational Psychologist
> (like
> John Bransford, for example) would lose out in the funding for
> competition
> to a Learning Scientist (like John Bransford, for example).
>
> Folks in Seattle, Nashville, etc. see little cost in a name change
that
> keeps the dollars flowing. I'm not concerned about the name change, so
> much, but I have continuing concerns about the enterprise in general.
>
> On Tue, 15 Sep 2009, Mike Cole wrote:
>
>> Thanks Em-- And I googled Goswami neuromyths. Also very enlightening.
>> Goswami did early work with Ann Brown, former collaborator with us at
> LCHC.
>>
>> Now if we go back a step and look at the people who created the label
> of
>> learning sciences, and their backgrounds, the shift from
> "developmental
>> psychology" to developmental sciences, the appearance recently of the
>> handbook of cultural developmental science, ......... what a tempest!
> Must
>> be a teapot in there somewhere. Simultaneous, fractilated paradigm
> shifts?
>>
>> Does anyone have the luxury of being able to organize a science
> studies
>> interrogation of these movements? Seems really worthwhile.
>> mike
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Duvall, Emily <emily@uidaho.edu>
> wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks Mike... :-)
>>>        In general I like Goswami's work; I find her discussion of
>>> neuromyths compelling and have had my grad students do additional
>>> research on some of them. I am also particularly interested in ways
> to
>>> try to negotiate across different fields. I've attached my favorite
>>> Goswami and a nice intro to neuroeducation.
>>>        As a side note: Monica (Hansen, who frequently shows up on
the
>>> list serve and is one of my doc students) and I took a neuroscience
>>> journal club/ seminar last spring and found ourselves trying to make
>>> sense of the work that is done with regard to education. We are
> taking
>>> another seminar right now and some of the folks who were in last
> year's
>>> class are presenting journal articles in their field, but are trying
> to
>>> make the links to human experience, particularly education. It's
been
>>> interesting to discover how open minded the students and faculty
> are...
>>> one of the computational neuroscience faculty has taken up some
> Vygotsky
>>> reading as well as neuroeducation... of course Luria's work is a
door
>>> opener and a point of mutual interest.
>>>        ~em
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
>>> On Behalf Of Mike Cole
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 9:41 AM
>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Neuroscience connections to learning and
> relearning
>>>
>>> No one picked up on your interest in neuroeducation, Emily. A lot of
>>> what I
>>> read in this area strikes me as almost entirely without any
> appreciation
>>> of
>>> education, or human experience, as a culturally mediated,
> co-constructed
>>> process. Do you have a favorite general ref you could point us to
> that
>>> you
>>> resonate to??
>>> mike
>>>
>>> On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Duvall, Emily <emily@uidaho.edu>
> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I thought some of you might one or both of these article summaries
>>>> interesting. The first really speaks to the new field of
>>> neuroeducation
>>>> with regard to cellular learning... the nice thing about the
summary
>>> is
>>>> it gives you an overview of learning at the cellular basis... very
>>> clear
>>>> and easy to understand. Plus an introduction to astrocytes... :-)
>>>>
>>>> The second piece actually discusses re-learning, which has been a
>>> topic
>>>> lately.
>>>>
>>>> What I personally find so interesting is the role of experience in
>>>> learning and relearning... I found myself thinking back to Shirley
>>> Brice
>>>> Heath's work... it would be fun to go back to her work and look at
> her
>>>> study through a neuroeducation lens.
>>>>
>>>> 1. Star-shaped Cells In Brain Help With Learning
>>>> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090911132907.htm
>>>>
>>>> Every movement and every thought requires the passing of specific
>>>> information between networks of nerve cells. To improve a skill or
> to
>>>> learn something new entails more efficient or a greater number of
> cell
>>>> contacts. Scientists can now show that certain cells in the brain
--
>>> the
>>>> astrocytes -- actively influence this information exchange.
>>>>
>>>> 2. Forgotten But Not Gone: How The Brain Re-learns
>>>> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117110834.htm
>>>>
>>>> Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform
tasks
>>>> that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are
only
>>>> just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain
>>> when
>>>> it learns or forgets something. What we do know is that changes in
> the
>>>> contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these
>>>> structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it
is
>>>> much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn
>>>> something completely new?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ~em
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Emily Duvall, PhD
>>>> Assistant Professor Curriculum & Instruction
>>>> University of Idaho, Coeur d'Alene
>>>> 1000 W. Hubbard Suite 242 | Coeur d'Alene, ID 83814
>>>> T 208 292 2512 | F 208 667 5275 emily@uidaho.edu |
> www.cda.uidaho.edu
>>>>
>>>> He only earns his freedom and his life, who takes them every day by
>>>> storm.
>>>> -- Johann Wolfgang Goethe
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>> _______________________________________________
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>
> Tony Whitson
> UD School of Education
> NEWARK  DE  19716
>
> twhitson@udel.edu
> _______________________________
>
> "those who fail to reread
>  are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
>                   -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
  are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                   -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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