Mike certainly makes a good point that there are some socially valued
practices that are learned, and given the way practices are organized in
our society probably only can be learned, through schooling. My own example
in some discussions with Jean Lave and others a few years back was learning
complex scientific theories, which are not on display for apprentice
participants in the communities of practices where they are used (e.g.
scientific laboratories). Our social division of labor is organized so that
some settings (laboratories) presume that their participants have already
passed through other settings (schools) en route. Societies do not HAVE to
be organized this way, and some are not, but technologically complex ones
seem to be this way. Literacy may be historically one of the first socially
valued skills to be learned primarily in settings distinct from those of
its main social uses, though this probably emerged in interesting ways (did
apprentice scribes once learn literacy from their master scribe and his
older apprentices as part of the scribal activity as such? before schools
for scribes came to be seen as more efficient, with an increase in the
scale/demand for scribes?)
Nevertheless, in a recent preliminary statement I was asked to draft for an
upcoming conference on classroom research (in my favorite role of
provocateur), I tried to make different case that we do still overestimate
the role of in-classroom teaching for the most important things that
students learn over the long term. My main point was that we too often
ignore non-classroom and out-of-school factors and that we can't really
understand what happens in-classrooms if that's the only place we look in
our research. Just as some other settings (e.g. professional activities)
presuppose experience in school settings, so school learning presupposes
much that takes place outside school, but which our theories elide,
minimize, or relegate to residual factors (e.g. 'motivation' 'learning
readiness').
The full statement is meant as a response to one of the conference's
organizing questions: How close are we to understanding the links between
teaching, on the one hand, and learning or development, on the other? It's
short for a statement on such a big topic, but long for an email message,
and rather dense to read. If there's interest, I may put it on my website
for people to look at. I append a few bits from it, though the surrounding
context probably does matter ...
JAY.
[Opening section is about how I view development and learning in general.] ...
This said, the principal mysteries of the first conference question turn
for me around the place of "teaching" in a social-developmental model of
learning. I would like to propose for purposes of discussion that we need
to challenge our own usual cultural models about teaching, specifically its
importance in guiding or controlling learning and its positive valuation. I
do not think we can understand the role of teaching, or curriculum, or
instructional texts and technologies, in developmental learning, unless we
first question the twin modernist myths that (1) teaching is the primary
causative agency in learning and (2) that teaching is inherently good for
the learner and for the community.
...
Studies of the importance of teaching tend to focus on the early years of
learning and neglect the later years. They emphasize the positive
scaffolding by which the young are shaped to fit an existing social and
cultural order: its language forms, its norms of behavior, its structures
for the imaginable. If we focus instead on the adolescent years and after,
I think we would be more likely to say that the most important lessons of
life, those which produce the greatest and longest-lasting changes in our
basic ways of viewing the world (other people, events, policies, ourselves)
are not the result of being taught, but of unpredictable emergent
developments arising from the convergence of myriad factors, and similar
from individual to individual mainly to the extent that there are common
social and cultural experiences and milieux (cf. Bourdieu on the formation
of habitus). But is this not also true at earlier ages? Are we not somewhat
blinded by the scaffolding role of signficant others, and the cultural
importance attached to school learning, to the fact that far more important
and long-lasting learning is taking place accidentally (even within
scaffolding interactions) and through general life experience outside the
schooled curriculum?
Few people today would argue that teaching causes learning. The dominant
paradigm is that teachers provide cultural input to developmental
processes, guiding and shaping a natural tendency to learn. But each
significant learning, i.e. each learning that significantly changes how we
look at the world of people, things, and events and that persists over long
timescales in our lives and is renewed again and again, whether a teacher
and curriculum is involved or not, depends just as much on a myriad of
other factors in our present and past life, which are trivialized by being
lumped together under the headings of such residual factors as 'motivation'
'background knowledge' and 'learning readiness'. I would like us to
consider that it is teaching which is more often the marginal factor,
sometimes a critical catalyst for learning, but most often merely one among
many inputs and usually not the most significant one for the most important
learning experiences and persistent changes in our lives.
We are also mislead by our narrow view of outputs. If we test only for
schooled knowledge, we will see an exaggerated influence for teaching and
curriculum. If we assesss instead students' significant belief systems,
social attitudes, values, general problem-solving strategies, ways of
making meaning in non-school contexts, etc., I think we will find much less
correlation with schooling in general. The exception to this, as is well
known, is the influence of the charismatic teacher, who may exceed on some
timescale the influence of parents, siblings, or close friends and peers.
This influence however is usually quite separate from deliberate teaching
or from the school curriculum. It is based on a personal relationship or
the student's reading of the interaction as a personally significant one.
And what determines when and how this happens? Clearly many factors well
beyond the interaction itself or any qualities of the teacher. ...
[continues]
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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