I was most interested by the "Confused In ..." threads, growing out of Best
Practices, and by the "Theoretical Knowing" thread and related discussions
about teaching practices.
In a way these are all of a piece. Mike wanted to know why, if there are
better ways, they aren't much used. Many of us agreed that what's better
here may not necessarily be better there, and that in any case it takes
more than a declaration of what's good and how it works to get practice to
change. And, democratically, and according to AT or ecosocial theory, it
_ought_ to take more (e.g. grass-roots reflection and emergent practice,
adaptation to local conditions and to wider networks and constraints,
etc.). And of course we quibbled a bit about whether 'better' could be
satisfactorily defined.
In an interesting side stream, swam the idea of prescriptive reform vs.
proscriptive reform. And here I heard the germ of a dialectic, since there
was something to be said about the NOT. If prescription tells people what
to do, we can expect it to fail and it usually does (because people don't
like being told what to do, and because they can't just do whatever we tell
them to). Proscription only tells people what NOT to do (i.e. bans worse
practices) and leaves the rest of the universe of possibilities open. Ken
Goodman, alas, reminded us that historically, there is a tendency to
proscribe innovative methods that are subversive of someone's ideology,
i.e. to eliminate just the methods teachers may actually WANT to use,
leaving them with a rather empty universe of desirable choices, and in
effect prescribing the only known alternatives: the older conservative
methods. I think here also of internet censorship: the only sites adults
propose to keep kids out of are just the ones the kids clearly want to have
a look at.
There is a third possibility of course: minimal prescriptions. If you just
prescribe a few outcomes, or a bit of method, and leave most of the rest up
to the participants, you have a better chance of getting results. But you
have less control over what those results will be, and none at all over the
hidden curricular agendas that really matter to society (see below). Give
someone the power to prescribe and they will never use that power minimally.
On the other hand, the logic of this dialectic can also lead us to ask what
schools today are in fact good at and succeeding in doing. I think this is
a sort of negative of the discussion about efficiency as a value: it is
valued that schools are effective at producing certain other valued
results. But what are those?
For instance, apprenticeship. If one consistently, and in fact a bit
over-literally, applies a Lave-like model, then the only thing that
students can learn to do by apprenticeship in a classroom is to act like
teachers. There is a fair bit of evidence I think that they do learn this
quite well, and without any actual 'practice'. Ask any student in any class
at any age to get up at the front of the room and act like a teacher, and
you will get something from a deadly accurate parody to an astonishingly
paradigmatic performance. Of course students also learn very well how to
play the role of student. In my studies of classroom discourse I saw time
and again how adept students are at playing the classroom discourse game;
they are masters of these genres and can often individually, and almost
always collectively, force the teacher to abrogate a game students have
played masterfully by the rules and resort to pure power to regain his/her
objectives. Schools teach participants the activity genres enacted within
them, what Fran Christie has called 'curriculum genres' and I have called
'classroom activity-types'. Schools are well organized and very effective
at teaching this primary curriculum.
There are some other things they are good at in respect of the nominal
curriculum: not, for instance, teaching students to understand science
concepts, say, but convincing them that science concepts are too hard for
them to understand. And too boring to be worth the effort to understand.
There are a few other hidden agendas, such as teaching that science confers
powerful expertise which should be respected, but this is less successfully
taught. There are obvious parallels for other subject areas.
Schools are also fairly good at caste warfare. They offer the dominant
caste culture (upper-middle class, eurocentric, masculinized, etc.) a
platform from which to propagandize and proselytize Others. They are fairly
successful as institutions to recruit the 'talented' and 'disaffected'
young of other castes as potential converts to or adherents of the dominant
culture. (They have other functions internal to the dominant culture such
as creating academic records by which to justify denying opportunities to
the mass of unconverted students, but this is not a 'teaching' function in
that it does not directly contribute to students' developing particular
sociocultural practices -- 'learning').
So I would say that there is at least a reasonable case to be made that
schools do in fact implement 'best practices' for achieving these outcomes.
Mike's confusion may be a confusion regarding the functions of schooling
rather than regarding the adoption of effective practices. Of course this
"confusion" over functions is widely shared by most participants in our
society.
We are taught that the function of schools is some combination of the
transmission of valued cultural practices and preparation for innovation of
new and valuable ones. This may be the case, but the issue is just which
practices are on the institutional agenda, what it is that schooling
practices are in fact well adapted to lead to in the way of outcomes. We
imagine that the outcomes are supposed to include knowledge of basic facts
and concepts of the canonical academic disciplines, basic tool skills (esp.
symbolic tool skills), and habits of critical and creative 'thinking'. But
hardly anyone actually uses most of the facts and concepts in the
curriculum, and they and society get along quite well without their having
done so, so that sort of content seems to be only the pretext for the more
basic agendas. The tool skills do usually get learned up to the end of
primary education, and are more or less useful and necessary in society, so
there is serious worry if literacy and numeracy rates dip too low, even
among the disenfranchised, and especially among the exploitable classes.
But even these are not learned or generally needed beyond that at the level
taught in secondary education (e.g. algebra, or essay writing). As to
critical and creative thinking, that is a long story, but in the shortest
possible version, such habits preceed schooling and elude its efforts to
colonize or quash them, except among the core middle class which trades
them in for good-paying jobs, and for marginal elites who are encouraged to
develop them to high levels just in case society should need them, but are
otherwise sidelined where they will do the least potential damage to the
status quo.
So, all in all, I can see only two areas where there is a real issue of
lack of effective practices: basic literacy/numeracy education, and the
teaching of specialized technical skills. For the latter, our methods seem
to be just barely adequate (in the U.S., elsewhere often better, I think),
and my guess is that the historical level of efficiency here is a function
of the the low level of competition. There is certainly a lot of investment
in improving this sort of education, for a small percentage of the
population (again the minimum needed), and it is improvable ala Gagne I
suspect. For literacy/numeracy the simplest theory I can offer is again
minimalism, together with historic lag: our methods have evolved to
effectively teach the minimum percentage of the population (starting at the
top and counting downwards in privilege) needed to keep the system going.
The needed percentage has rather suddenly risen (on the time scale of
evolution of institutional practices) and we are still stuck with methods
that were never supposed to work for everybody.
Which brings me, sort of, to 'theoretical knowing', by which the group
turns out to have meant know-how integrated with genuine conceptual
understanding, and the tacit theory here is that theoretical discourse is a
useful part of know-how. Of course it usually isn't; it's normally just
window-dressing and status symbols. It is only really useful when we have
to creatively critique or invent, when things go wrong or need to be
changed, and even there, as Naoki Ueno insightfully reminds us, it's a bit
overrated relative to the complete activity-and-participant complex within
which problems really get solved. But it does have its value, provided that
we can do the work of re-inventing it, re-integrating it with specific
practice-situations. Theory never applies itself; it is always just a
starting point, not a machine-for-solutions. People often confuse
theoretical discursive technologies, like mathematical problem-solution
algorithms, with genuine use of theoretical discourse as an integral part
of non-algorithmic problem-solving (including problem-posing, generating
alternatives, critiques, etc.). I omit its role as an autonomous art form.
So why don't students like to learn theoretical discourse? and why aren't
school practices adapted to successfully teach it and inculcate a habitus
for using it? Because we don't expect teachers and students in classrooms
to engage in the kind of activities in which it is genuinely needed and
useful. No one is solving real problems, creating new mathematics or
science, critiquing society, inventing alternative political economies,
etc. (Almost no one, that is.) The contexts are far removed (really the
schools are effectively isolated), the material means are often lacking (as
Naoki notes, it takes more than access to a discourse), the status is
lacking, the sense of power and responsibility is denied to students and
teachers, formation of the relevant identities is discouraged (except among
the elites), ...
Some people claim that the Soviet educational system produced a lot of good
mathematicians because students were encouraged to tackle real mathematical
problems rather than textbook exercises and a lot of them got to enjoy
success at this. Mathematics is a peculiar case here, I think, because of
its looser dependence on material infrastructures. Less is missing that is
needed to succeed.
Of course there will always be a few students who take to theoretical
discourse for its own sake; we call them intellectuals. It's a disposition
with interesting and undetermined origins (cf. Lave on the role of
identities in learning). Some teachers can, through interpersonal
relations, promote this disposition in some students. It's a rare
phenomenon I think, but this capacity _is_ structurally built into current
schooling practices and does effectively produce (or select) the miniscule
numbers of intellectuals needed for or tolerated by our present social
order. Maybe the new information economy is going to require more
intellectuals and almost certainly more artists and creative writers ...
there's another lag effect in store.
So the whole system is working perfectly, for the world of 1963. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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