Dear Andy and everybody-
I want to comment only on one point out of many that Andy made:
Andy wrote, "So even where, say, a kid may come into the classroom from a
home with no computer or internet connection, and teaching by keyboard
itself poses a barrier - so would a book most likely. The anecdotal evidence
I hear is that young people know how to use screens almost from whatever
background they come from ... because they have to. I think this is implicit
in Carol's article, but I think it is a justified assumption."
For last 7 years I've been working with kids who often do not have computers
at home and do not have access to computers at school (or their access is
minimum and very restricted). I observe many of those kids learning
computers for the first time. In my non-systematic observations, I did not
find that it is true that "young people know how to use screens almost from
whatever background they come from ... because they have to." However, I
found true, at least, for kids whom I observed in the afterschool communal
environment to learn rather quickly computers and software when conditions
are right. But right conditions I mean conditions described in Jim Gee's new
book "What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy."
Just one illustration of "right conditions." For years LACC (Latin-American
Community Center) officers tried to promote teaching kids typewriting. For
some reasons, they thought that typewriting would open the kids the world of
computers, eliminate digital divide, and improve kids' grades in school.
This is a bit of a caricature in my re-voicing but it is essentially
accurate and carries my own irony about such beliefs in a bottom-up approach
common in pedagogy for disadvantaged children (see useful Mike's article
1988 for more discussion of this phenomenon). The LACC kids hated
wholeheartedly typing lessons and often were super disrespectful to the
computer instructors who came and went so frequently that I could not learn
their names and faces. The situation has dramatically changed when we got a
pedagogical genius "Mr. Steve" (Steven Villanueva) that was hired by the
LACC as our site coordinator. Mr. Steve introduced chat groups to the kids
and. the kids asked him to teach typing. Mr. Steve organized Typing Club
that allowed only three kids initially because of "lack of computers" (not
true). He used old software for learning typing but now the kids were
motivated by chat rooms to type quickly. Very quickly the kids from Typing
Club who rapidly advanced in typing started teaching other kids (often
younger) how to type. Now for several years already we have "an emergent
typing culture" where typing instruction is a part of what means to be at
LACC.
Read the following article Delhi
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1502820.stm> children make play of the
net (or http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1502820.stm ) describing another
example of "right conditions."
I wonder if this example fits Carol's Cultural Modeling. It probably does
but from another side. In school, the teacher often faces with a need to
teach certain pre-existing curricula to kids (e.g., "Beloved" novel) while
at LACC Mr. Steve is more concerned with addressing kids' needs (e.g.,
introducing chat rooms because they can be fun for kids, teaching typing
because kids want it, engaging kids in assembling computers because having
computers at home is fun and cool for the kids, teaching kids how to think
critically about Internet ads because Mr. Steve is concerned about kids'
safety and well-being).
Modeling involves interaction of at least two contexts and a certain
isomorphism that the model provides as a translation between the two
contexts. Carol seems to focus primarily on using kids' experiences for
teaching them academic canons (e.g., "Beloved"). Mr. Steve seems to use
modeling in a reverse way: he primarily uses existing cultural academic and
non-academic tools for helping kids in their lives (often referred as
"having fun" but actually it packages a lot of important aspects of kids'
lives). So, in their Cultural Modeling, Carol moves from familiar to
unfamiliar (from familiar everyday oppression and racism to historical
slavery depicted in Beloved) while Mr. Steve moves from unfamiliar to
familiar (from unfamiliar chat rooms to familiar interaction with each
other). In both cases, cultural isomorphism is used: as Carol demonstrated,
students used their powerful language devices developed in their local
communities to "crack" Beloved; while, Mr. Steve employed multiage peer
guidance and unequally distributed skills - common in LACC kids' culture -
as organizational principle of his Typing Club.
It is also interesting to note that despite similarity, Mr. Steve used
clearly very different instructional strategies that ones presented by
Carol. Although I think Mr. Steve builds "text rich environments" at LACC he
does not use all aspects listed on Carol's Figure1 (p.50) (e.g., structured
questions for scaffolding, visualizations) but also uses different aspects
that Carol does not have (e.g., volunteer character of participation,
helping other people as establishing status in the community). This brings
Andy's question about how much Carol's framework is institution and culture
specific.
What do you think?
Eugene
_____
From: Andy Blunden [mailto:ablunden@mira.net]
Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2003 7:13 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Dialectical materialism / Nature
At 09:28 AM 8/11/2003 -0800, you wrote:
Mike said: I am not sure about phlogiston, Andy, ... well it's a pretty
convincing idea actually, much more convincing than the idea of stuff
combining with oxygen and blowing away on the wind, while onlookers are
heated by electromagnetic radiation.
Mike said: I'll be interested in your thought on Carol's ideas.
It's 25 years since I taught school Mike, and in those days I knew
absolutely nothing. I simply couldn't grasp the fact that the ghetto kids in
London that I was trying to teach math to had no idea what I was talking
about. Pity I didn't read this article then! Pity also about the New Maths
that was fashionable in those days which really made the job impossible
anyway. But I notice that Carol places no confidence in Nature as a source
of knowledge rather than cultural artefacts such as images, narratives and
language.
I am inclined to reflect on a couple of things not squarely dealt with by
Carol: (i) the extent to which the operation of computer screens is itself a
culture-specific activity, (ii) the extent to which the physical environment
in which the learning activity is located can/ought to be treated in the
same way, (iii) the fact that urban classrooms are usually (in Oz anyway)
*multi*-cultural rather than *other*-cultural, (iv) the idea of canonical
texts vs culturally-specific texts.
(i) Carol seems to take it for granted that placing, for example, the story
of slavery in a hypertext environment takes a step forward, relative to say,
a story having its roots in colonialism being presented in a hard copy book.
I am inclined to think that this is justified (as an amateur I can only
guess). In a sense, the computer screen is becoming a kind of "canonical
text" in itself. Everyone, whether from the dominant cultural group, from an
excluded minority or in a far-flung part of the world beyond the world wide
web, needs to gain access to the talk going on through computer screens, in
exactly the same way that the old classical education gave people access to
the Greek and Roman classics, in order to be able to participate in the
dominant discourse of the day. So even where, say, a kid may come into the
classroom from a home with no computer or internet connection, and teaching
by keyboard itself poses a barrier - so would a book most likely. The
anecdotal evidence I hear is that young people know how to use screens
almost from whatever background they come from ... because they have to. I
think this is implicit in Carol's article, but I think it is a justified
assumption.
(ii) the physical environment is not touched on by Carol but partially
implicit in the use of computers, and it is the part of the picture which is
my professional area. Eugene Matusov is the only person I have heard of (I'm
sure there are others) who has tackled the issue of the cultural
preconditions to learning implicit in the classroom design. The challenge is
to kind of re-write Carol's text inserting the relevant point about physical
environment in lieu of the point about the learning artefacts. Let's take it
that enabling the use of culturally-variable artefacts are a good thing,
that such artefacts should be used in classroom interaction, and can be
facilitated by use of computers in the classroom. One could look at the kind
of interactions that are normal in different cultures and the physical
design necessary to support them. The conclusion would have to be that if
computers are going to be used, they have to be made as unobtrusive and
"optional" as possible. I don't know. This is difficult. The other train of
thought is the need to investigate how kids use computers together when they
are out of school. They too are limited by the same physical constraints
built into the computers, but how do they try to collaborate with computers?
Computers aside, I guess the implication would be to have classrooms that
resemble street corners and cafes, wouldn't it? I have always assumed that I
should try to make classrooms really, really, attractive places, that kind
of say to the kids: "We really care about your education, so we've made your
classroom as well appointed as the principal's office". I wonder, is that
correct? Some people say "This classroom is just like the cafe down the road
where you hang out". How can the physical environment foster critical or
meta-cultural thinking? Maybe just having architectural designs which are
really off-beat and in some way give a physical/architectural expression to
the learning activity being organised in the room, encourages kids to
reflect on their own activity? I don't know.
(iii) The fact that a 30-seat classroom may contain representatives of 20
cultural backgrounds is challenging I guess for anyone. I don't know if this
is the circumstance that Carol had in mind. What is the upshot of giving a
group of Cambodian kids a text about slavery in America? Isn't there also,
though, an element of trying to get away from the unitary definition of a
single dominant culture, whereby maybe teaching Cambodian refugees about the
slave trade and its cultural impact in the US does help, but for different
reasons than those outlined by Carol?
(iv) This is the argument about whether the purpose of education is to
introduce people to critique of canonical (classical) texts, or to introduce
people to "world literature", the problem, if you like, that Shakespeare
wrote in Elizabethan English not AAEV, and even speakers of Urdu want to
study Shakespeare. I am inclined to side with Carol. People have to first
get up to the point of thinking about their own thinking before they can
begin to critique Shakespeare. Critiquing Shakespeare is not necessarily the
best route to gaining an insight to one's own personality. I actually really
liked the point in Carol's article about what a wonderful thing it is for a
kid when they, for the first time, get an insight into the way they think
themselves. This is something that is only available to them through the
literature of their own culture. After that, access to the literature and
ideas of other cultures is available to them.
Andy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Dec 01 2003 - 01:00:11 PST