Judy,
I'm not sure if we do differ in our reading of Freedman. When I made the
point about representing school as fairly dysfunctional, I was alluding
(vaguely) to the same preference you're noting, that schools should move
ever closer to workplaces. And I agree with your later point, that schools
(though very problematic--yet which alternative social organizations of the
past were free of problems?) have a critical function in producing the
kinds of societies most of us live in (fairly global, complex, rapidly
changing, fairly literate and technological, full of serious games intended
to create personal and social change). I actually think many people do
learn things in school that help them in learning other things outside of
school (and vice versa for that matter). I also think that school is
actually a critical social prototype for an expansive development of
tertiary artifacts. Rereading Luria's Uzbekistani data as well as Scribner
(another co-thread here), I am really struck by how much the non-schooled
responses are simply refusals to play the game the experimenters proposed
they play.
And your comments (re: polar oppposites) on what is useful also make sense
to me. Representations and rules *may* be useful in the learning process
without being sound theoretically or without totally accounting for the
fully embodied practice. They are presumably tools for regulating
practice, for channeling attention and managing affect and the like. For
example, the usual school definitions of paragraphs are fairly obviously
wrong or useless, yet I can see that for students who bring the right
literate experiences to those rules they can help with the writing of
common school genres. On the other hand, they do nothing or worse for
students who don't bring those experiences, and I don't see any such value
in many of the rules and representations, and (as Rand Spiro has suggested
in some interesting studies) there's always the question of how to balance
immediate clarity with an eventual need for messy complexity, which is
actually a key thread of Dias et al's argument. I guess the question then
is how to determine the immediate and longer-term consequences of such
representations and rules.
>Paul, My reading of Freedman is apparently not quite yours -- Her
>representation of the "Sydney School" version of genre pedagogy is indeed as
>you described her view of classroom teaching in general -- explicit, "do as
>I say", ungrounded in practice. But my reading derives from her sometimes
>expressed sometimes implied preferred classroom instruction -- that it
>should be much more like work settings, that genres are acquired, like
>language, from immersion in practice, etc. My point re: schools admits more
>of a role for explicit guidance. I should say that I appreciate your
>rejection of the binarisms (?) -- explicit/implicit; declarative/procedural
>-- in favor of a more complex mix of what any teaching/mentoring; any
>learning is about.
>
>Nevertheless, I think a continuum of polar values is useful for teachers
>developing a pedagogy. Pedagogically, don't we have to continually answer
>for ourselves the question of what activity context to set up, what to say,
>what experience to build in to tie abstractions to, when to talk/how/to whom
>-- when to use students' peer talk; when to direct their attention to
>critical issues, etc. I'm extremely conscious this year when I'm teaching
>all undergraduate courses how different they are from graduate seminars and
>how the pedagogical genres (if you wilL) for the 2 types of courses changes
>me/ the way I think/ what I think about... But that's getting onto another
>tangent.
>
>Re: declarative/procedural knowledge of substance and form.... I'm more
>sanguine than Freedman and Mike C. about the function of schools, at least
>in the modern world they're part of. In a world underpinned by critical
>abstractions, how can the cognitive development over generations of practice
>be communicated? In the span of one generation, the logic must be learned
>through a highly truncated and fundamentally different form of practice. I
>think of genre as a practical logic -- knowing the sort of thing that needs
>to be accomplished in a kind of situation, knowing how to go about it. I
>can't think of a more powerful rubric for teachers/ prospective teachers
>than one that directs their attention to the substantial and formal
>requirements of getting a kind of thing done, enabling them to build
>appropriate scaffolds.
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