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Hi Bill and everybody--
Thanks a lot, Bill, for your great summary of Tom Popkewitz' work! I found
Tom's critique of constructivism (or better to say, some of its versions)
very powerful. I also share Nate's observations on the Holmes project (this
is my first year of participating in it).
I think that institutional control is not being challenge by these
"prescriptive" or "methodological" forms of constructivism. It is
interesting to do a sociological and enthographic analysis of constructivism
movement (something like Latour did with science). From a conceptual point
of view, I see several major problems with the described constructivism:
1) Separation of method of teaching from its content. Many professors who
teach constructivism do not use it as form of their own teaching. For
example, many of those who preach teachers to use portfolio method of
learning assessment do not do it themselves. Those who do, often do not
make it a part of communication with other professors as it supposed to
according to constructivist theories. I asked who uses portfolio assessment
as a way of communication of their students' learning to other professors on
the recent Holmes project meeting at Boston and found that nobody does that
(or at least nobody said that he or she does it). (I'm myself against
portfolio assessment, but it is another story).
2) Peaceful co-existence of constructivist practices and traditional
educational institutions. It is often constructivism that is co-opted by a
traditional institutional control and reduced to another "teaching method"
serving the same old institutional goals of control and
transmission/reproduction of dominant culture. Constructivism pushed to its
authentic limits is risky business or, as Louis Holzman would say,
"revolutionary practice," confronting, transcending, and destroying
traditional ed. institutions. Safe constructivism meeting somebody's
"standards" is a contradiction of terms and another, smarter, version of
institutional coercion like "team management." It is scary to do this type
of constructivism -- hey, I'm untenured and have a family!
3) In the theory of the zone of proximal development, the teacher's zone of
proximal development is rarely (with exception of Mike Cole and his
colleagues) considered as a part of student's zone of proximal development.
Teacher's zone of proximal development is guided by the students. The
notion of development itself is often taken as non-problematic, i.e.,
existing "out there" rather as being a social construction, like history (as
Diane so nicely described). Authentic or "critical" constructivism, unlike
"prescriptive" constructivism, considers a negotiation of what is
development (i.e., value systems) as open and legitimate for all members of
the community.
4) Prescriptive constructivism is often ahistorical. It simply is not
interested in history (or in sociology) but in a better way of teaching for
a better cause. In my view, this is already a way of monopolizing
negotiation of the value system.
5) My $69.99 question is whether prescriptive constructivism is erosion of
traditional system or its new form or both?
Although I appreciate very much what John (Dewey) and Lev (Vygotsky) did for
us, I agree with Tom's critique of them. I also agree with Nate that both
John and Lev probably worked for socio-cultural-historical projects (in
Jean-Paul Sartre' terms) different than we do (what are they?). Do not
forget, please, that Lev Vygotsky proposed his concept of the "zone of
proximal development" as a more accurate (than IQ) intelligence test for
better tracking kids in (trad.) schools. Yes, we have done a big job of
reinterpreting!
What do you think?
Eugene
----------------------
Eugene Matusov
School of Education
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
Office (302) 831-1266
Fax (302) 831-4445
email ematusov who-is-at udel.edu
Website http://ematusov.eds.udel.edu/
-------------------------
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@lesley.edu]
> Sent: Monday, February 22, 1999 6:55 PM
> To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Popkewitz paper precis
>
>
> It takes more to write less, so rather im-precis-ly, but quickly,
> here is a
> take on the Popkewitz paper, with some OCR mediation.
>
> Dewey, Vygotsky, and the Social Administration of the Individual:
> Constructivist Pedagogy as Systems of Ideas in Historical Spaces
>
> Thomas S. Popkewitz University of Wisconsin
>
> Abstract
> Current constructivists' pedagogies draw on the writings of early 20th
> century Russian psychologist Vygotsky and the American
> philosopher/psychologist Dewey. This occurs without examining the
> historical spaces of the past and present in which that knowledge is
> socially constructed. This emptying of history in systems of knowledge is
> odd for an intellectual project concerned with cultural-historical
> theories. To address this omission, the writings of Dewey and Vygotsky are
> examined as part of the turn-of-the-century human sciences. They
> functioned
> to bring the new democratic political rationalities into the governing of
> individual conduct. Contemporary pedagogical theories that draw on Dewey
> and Vygotsky maintain this function of governing conduct, but with
> different narratives and images. The differences are made visible when
> comparing the "problem solving individual" in education with the images of
> the individual inscribed in social theory, state policies, economics, and
> the military. My moving between the past and the present and between
> education and other social practices directs attention to the shifting
> terrain that relates school knowledge, power, and problems of social
> inclusion/exclusion.
>
> Popkewitz summarizes: "Contemporary research captures a populist,
> democratic appeal. The reforms are posited as strategies to make schooling
> more democratic, more progressive and socially responsive through the
> making/remaking of the teacher and the child.." He discussed the
> "homologies between pedagogical reforms, social theory, the political
> governance of education, the economy, and the military" and claims that
> "the contemporary governing patterns are different from those
> which existed
> at the turn of the century when Vygotsky and Dewey wrote.."
>
> But Popkewitz' primary critique of pedagogy seems to be with the
> constructivism of math education that has a foundation in the work of
> people as Paul Cobb, Les Steffe, and Marty Simon, who can variously be
> associated around the radical constructivist and the cultural-historical
> theories. Popkewitz refers to dated problems the radical constructivists
> had grappled with, such as the conceptions/misconceptions split that
> emerged when disciplinary knowledge was considered to be static and to be
> internalized by the neophyte, a subsequent split between knowledge and
> process. Popkewitz does not acknowledge Cobb's latest article in Mind,
> Culture, and Activity -- it may have come out too recently -- in
> which Cobb
> attempts to reconcile his constructivism with a cultural-historical
> theories. "When the words community, zones of proximal
> development, and so
> on appear in current reform texts, these words have no meaning outside of
> the set of relations in which the words are located."
>
> Popkewitz argues "that educational research needs to pose the concepts of
> inclusion and exclusion as mutually constituted. Within the systems of
> inclusion are their opposite, as what appears to be a widening of
> opportunities simultaneously functions to divide and normalize." Drawing
> from Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, he recognizes the 'unequal playing
> field" (that I think Jay has termed heteropraxia), and draws a contrast to
> the constructivist math-ed vision of a flexible, problem-solving
> individual, seen also in the descriptions Popkewitz provides of the modern
> worker and soldier. He raises some interesting points about power and
> curriculum, but with a limited discernment between categories of
> theory and
> genres and levels of performance as specified within those categories.
>
> "If we recognize that we do live in an unequal playing field... we can
> thinkn of constructivism as taking particular, local knowledge
> (habitus) of
> certain groups in the social field and treating that knowledge as the
> global principles of reason and problem solving related to school success,
> achievement, and capabilities. The apparently universal norms are brought
> back into the particular interactions and practices of classrooms as the
> norms to judge and differentiate among children. This selectivity is not
> intentional but subtly embodied in the distinctions and
> differentiations to
> order and divide the things that are talked about as cognition, problem
> solving, and affective development. Educators and researchers refer to
> problem solving, community, and zones of proximal development as if they
> were universal processes rather than socially constructed norms related to
> habitus.... I argued that constructivism remakes the problem of
> inclusion/exclusion through its focus on seemingly universal dispositions
> and the problem-solving capabilities of the child. But the
> capabilities are
> not universal. They inscribe norms that disqualify certain children at the
> level of their being, rather than through their subject positions--group
> categories of race, class, or gender."
>
> His summary:
>
> "At this point, I return to the earlier paradox and irony of modernity
> which reappears in current educational reforms. The social administration
> of freedom was to produce a particular type of disciplined subject who was
> free from external policing. The situating of Dewey and Vygotsky in
> contemporary reforms points to the reconstitution of that paradox and
> irony. The universalizing of reason in constructivism is to produce a
> greater range of possibilities for teachers and children. But
> ideas are not
> merely logical principles to insert into discourses of research
> and reform.
> They also produce systems of exclusion as well as inclusion.
>
> My arguments about the pedagogical discourses in which Dewey and Vygotsky
> are read are intended to historicize the systems of reasoning
> through which
> the teacher and child are constructed. As education is a central
> institution for the production of self-regulating individuals, the
> discursive principles inscribed in educational research require critical
> analysis and historical interpretation. Further, while the governing
> principles in pedagogical discourses are necessarily neither bad nor good,
> they cannot be taken unproblematically in a paradigm that argues about the
> social construction of knowledge."
>
>
> Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
> Technology in Education
> Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
> Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
> http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
> _______________________
> "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
> and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
> [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
>
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