That survey of education faculty and teacher beliefs and attitudes was
certainly constructed with a degree of bias, as partly noted by Peter
Smagorinsky, that could only have been intentional (not the result of
incompetence). While I have great sympathy for the need to understand
conservative views and motivations about education, there are a number of,
let's call them right-wing to be properly pejorative, organizations that
rather deliberately and knowingly mislead and misrepresent issues to the
public. I don't consider that to be morally acceptable even in politics,
and my postmodern tolerance of legitimately Other viewpoints does not
include knowing efforts to do evil. (Yes, some left-wing organizations also
do this sort of thing, but for some reason they don't seem to have the same
access to the media that the right-wing ones do these days.)
That said, I am not particularly confident, after 25 years in teacher
education, that the average education faculty member is very realistically
in touch with actual school problems ... or that the typical fashions for
educational reforms very often address really fundamental problems. To be
quite honest, our profession basically carries out practices which are of
purely internal value; their relevance to schools is often only quite
tangential. Even many well-meaning projects which can count some
'successes' seem to me to represent only surface shifts in traditional
patterns. When I walk into most school today I see nothing basically
different from when I was a student (rather too long ago). I certainly
don't see radically more educated or sophisticated students graduating,
more critical thinking, more skillful teachers, a much higher percentage of
students being successful by ANY criteria. I will refrain from saying
things are worse ( I think they inevitably look worse as one gets older and
realizes there will not be time left to do much about it), but an awful lot
of effort and research and innovation has been done in the meanwhile, with
little effect. This would seem to me to indicate that we serve ourselves,
not teachers, students, or schools. Perhaps this is not at all surprising
in sociological terms.
At the Social Studies of Science meeting in Tucson, where I was very happy
to meet some xmca friends, I and others in the symposium I participated in
on the relations of science education to professional science, began to
wonder about the actual sorts of 'boundary objects' that flow between these
two rather independent and increasingly unrelated networks of practices.
One such 'object' I argued, is the body, inscribed with the habitus and
discourses (verbal and nonverbal), of the scientist-who-was-once-a-student.
There is also a reverse flow of the bodies of students of scientists (in
universities) who flow back to become science teachers. The strange and
wonderful thing about boundary objects is that not only do they participate
in more than one network of practices (thus forming the interface or
boundary between them in one sense), but they are transformed in their
functioning when they are 'translated' from the contexts of activity in one
network to those in the other. For me, the mystery here is to figure out
what remains from one context in the other. And to understand the problem
of the multiple time-scales involved in these flows.
There is an analogy here, I think, to my pessimism about the links between
education as a research discipline and the activities of schools. What sort
of boundary objects circulate between them? how are they actually linked in
any way? what are the scales of the linkages? how are the translations
effected? and what can be expected to remain invariant across these
so-different contexts? I know some very dedicated educators who have worked
tirelessly to establish genuine collaboration with teachers, to try to
fashion hybrid networks, activities, spaces meaningful to both. Very few
succeed except in the most special of circumstances. The very fact that it
takes such superhuman efforts to bridge betweent these worlds should be
telling us something important ... perhaps something we would rather not hear.
JAY.