And the issue raised here by the query about programs to help students
succeed academically regardless of social background fits with two recent
lines of worry I have -- about the new U.S. national science performance
standards (and the similar ones now for most subject areas), and about the
needs and resources of particular populations, in the US mainly
African-American and what we call "Hispanic" (mainly Puerto Rican in New
York, Mexican elsewhere in the US) in relation to educational policy.
The usually stated goal for the education of those who do not as often
"succeed" (whether in science and mathematics, or in overall academic
record) is to make them just like the anglophone-born, middle and
upper-middle class, euro-Americans in their measurable academic
achievement. You can substitute the local "low-performing" social groups in
your own part of the world, and the economically and politically dominant
group, respectively. In the case of, say, study in physics, one could also
substitute females vs. males. We face a fact of difference, and we want to
make it go away. In many cases, though for different reasons, the
"low-performing" group also wants to change these facts.
I place quotation marks around "low-performing" to remind us of the
relative arbitrariness of the measures of academic success. Arbitrary in
decisions about what knowledge and skills should be measured, and arbitrary
in the forms of the measurement procedures. I know of no academic
curriculum or standardized test which is actually based on empirical
studies of which knowledge and skills are in fact useful to people outside
academic institutions. I think we know that answers to such questions tend
to be task-specific or job-specific when they are concrete enough to yield
a basis for instruction, and they are generic across situations only by
being so abstractly defined (e.g. logical thinking, problem-solving,
critical literacy, etc.) as to be useless as the direct basis for a
specific program of teaching. We also know that correlations are relatively
low or meaningless between measures of knowledge or skills that require
entirely different concrete practices and contexts as the basis of the
measurement procedure (e.g. oral vs. written tests, fixed-response items
vs. open-ended tasks, paper tests vs. laboratory or field performance,
etc.). In these forms of arbitrariness there is more than enough room for
gender, class, and cultural bias to insure that some groups will
consistently perform poorly relative to others, far beyond any meaningful
practical differences in their ability to succeed in the non-academic
activities of work and social life.
The contents of our curricula are biased toward abstraction, formalism,
isolated facts, conventional cultural narratives (including standard
scientific explanations, accepted historical accounts, etc.), innovation,
individuality, risk-taking, speed of production, and a host of features
that clearly represent the cultural biases of American culture, more
generally modern eurocultures, and most specifically their upper-middle
class and masculinized dispositions. Likewise for our usual methods of
assessment. But to what extent is it true that success in these forms is
necessary to success in our society? APART FROM the extent to which the
power of dominant groups insists that this is the way you must act/be in
order to gain access to opportunities?
A variant of this question is the basis of a debate that will appear in our
journal, Linguistics and Education, in the next several months. An initial
Focus Article disputes Pierre Bourdieu's contention that the valuation of
linguistic capital is an arbitrary effect of the market, dominated by those
with the most power. The dissenting author points out that some linguistic
capital may have intrinsic value, or at least an objective value in
Bourdieu's terms: objective in relation to prevailing social conditions,
technologies, practices. Both views are correct, though not to the same
degree in each possible case we might analyze. Some responses to the focus
article take issue with its recommendation that we ought to simply teach
the valuable/valued practices outright, because these other authors worry
that contestation will be lost or weakened if educational institutions do
not critique and oppose the arbitrariness of the hegemonic practices. And
support some contrary practices.
The view I am coming round to is that these are in some sense quantitative
matters. That is, it is the DEGREE of arbitrariness (and of
dominant-interest-serving bias) that should determine the DEGREE to which
education ought to try to reproduce dominant practices as resources for
success in the now-world vs. the DEGREE to which we ought to try to support
alternative practices for possibly better future worlds. What is
particularly complicated about taking such a position is that the degree of
arbitrariness/bias has to be measured relative to a local standard, and a
changing one at that. For students who will seek _some_ opportunities in
their lives, for communities for which certain opportunities are more
likely to be sought and used successfully, we may make assessments of the
arbitrariness/bias (or of the effectiveness/necessity) of particular
dominant practices relative to those opportunities/situations/activities.
But we might come up with very different assessments for the
effectiveness/necessity of these same practices relative to some other life
activities. And effectiveness/necessity in relation to human activities
_is_ to some degree always the product of what people _have made_ necessary
(the sedimented effects of history, not easily changed on the timescale of
a human life), and this itself is subject to constant, faster or slower,
change.
Consider two examples. Dialect forms in written language; and abstract
conceptualization in scientific engineering.
You can express most complex meanings perfectly well in a minority or
stigmatized dialect. This is Bourdieu's prime example. There is a high
degee of arbitrariness and interest-serving bias in the market for
valuation of written texts in many institutions, and this bias corresponds
solely to the profit of a dominant dialect group at the expense of others.
A political revolution could reverse the valuation of (mutually
intelligible) dialects overnight.
There is also a considerable degree of bias in the historically dominant
modes of scientific engineering; they favor highly abstract scientific
theoretical modes of reasoning over more seat-of-the-pants, practice-based
alternatives. In some possible world, these alternatives might well be just
as effective -- but the existing machinery of textbooks, technology
manuals, software, relevant research literature, and well-honed practices,
discourses, and genres for design, for collaborative communication, for
defining standards, for testing reliability, for formulating exact
specifications, etc. has all been long developed under the influence of
these biases and could not be replaced overnight with an equally effective
system that had little use for abstract conceptual scientific discourses.
But just as arbitrariness/effectiveness is a matter of local degree, so
should our reasonable educational response to it be. All matters of degree
are both/and rather than either/or. It is not a question of Do we promote
nonstandard dialects or the dominant/standard one only? it is a matter of
to what extent do we promote both. It is not a question of Do we teach the
traditional abstract-masculinist view of science or do we promote radical
alternatives? but of the degree to which we do both (given the timescale of
possible change which we envision relative to the lifetimes of our students).
So far as specific practices are concerned, what is most sedimented in our
society are its most complex material technologies and the discourses and
associated practices needed to produce, operate, maintain, and
incrementally improve them. At the present moment, many
class/gender/cultural biases that were formerly sedimented mainly in the
habitus dispositions of dominant individuals and narrow classes of texts
are now becoming more fixedly sedimented in the emerging technologies and
practices of our information society and its software and hardware.
Computer-based technology is the newest domain of colonization for
hegemonic, exclusive practices, though it is still a bit difficult to quite
understand the relevant timescales (some practices seem able to change
faster than before, others more slowly than before). This bears careful
watching and more than an ordinary degreee of contestation, especially as
we seem to be in a formative period whose historical outcomes may be
sedimented into longterm futures.
How much of what many women, masculinization-rejecting men, working class
and underclass people, and people acculturated into cultures and
subcultures that conflict with dominant values and dispositions, reject
about the teaching of science and technology, or the nature of science and
technology as produced by dominant viewpoints, how much of what is rejected
is part of the more necessary aspects, without which one simply could not
run a technological society satisfactorily, and how much of what is
rejected is merely the less necessary or unnecessary biases that are made
to appear natural and necessary but in fact are not? How much of the
difficulty that such people experience with learning standard forms of
science and technology comes from simply not having developed the required
cognitive /semiotic dispositions, and how much of it comes from not wanting
to do so because the standard forms conflict systematically with their
culturally positioned identities? (that being no accident, but itself a
systematic effect of social macrostructuring processes).
If we insist, as the new US national curriculum (anathema by name, but now
trying to be born) in science and other fields does, that everyone learn
the dominant forms (and by the dominant teaching methods, results to be
tested by the dominant procedures ... or new variants that still preserve
the old biases), what other outcome can there be except that the lines of
social cleavage will become more stark? yes, a higher percentage of those
with access to the appropriate culture/class/gender dispositions will do
better, but all the Others will be even more effectively excluded. I see no
sign in any of these reactionary curricula that they are willing to
entertain the notion that alternative contents, oriented to alternative
class/culture/gender dispositions, could have any place at all, even as a
matter of degree. Perhaps, in those areas where arbitrariness is extremely
high (e.g. the canon of literary texts or artistic works), there is some
movement ... but I doubt that the kinds of questions asked on tests, that
the kinds of valued performances in relation to these works differ much
from those prescribed by the dominant values of the dominant caste (as
Bourdieu insists). The Other students may enjoy some of these texts more,
may identify with and understand better their value in terms aligned with
those of their authors, but they will probably not do much better when
asked to falsify these values and create a value for the texts that has its
basis in the dominant value system instead.
Educational inclusion cannot be a one-way project of assimilation. Dominant
practices and values must be willing to share the curriculum/assessment
space, to varying degrees, with alternative practices and values. The
reason is not simply a moral one. The structured diversity of dispositions
in our society is sedimented far more deeply, and subject to change at a
far slower rate, even than the biases of our complex technologies. Projects
of assimilation will increase social inequalities. The only material basis
for assimilation is accomodation. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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