Smelly Knowledge

Two related posts came across my RSS reader esthis morning, both written by scholars connected the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

David Weinberger writes about how a Google Image search for “Michelle Obama” brings up a clearly racist image as the first result in a post entitled When the crowd is racist at Google. He writes that he is torn by this as he recognizes that,

On the one hand, Google is taking a principled stand by not inserting its own political/cultural views into its engine. It’s also avoiding an endless squabble if it were to start hand-manipulating the results.

On the other, he recognizes that Google’s search algorithm for ranking results, which is based on links and clicks, must be flawed to provide such an unnecessary and not useful result as the first one in the list. In the end, however, he “…admire(s) Google’s consistency and transparency about it.”

danah boyd, who is also with Microsoft Research down Mass Ave from Harvard, wrote about her experiences as speaker at the Web 2.0 Expo. Unable to see her (real, not virtual) audience and unable to find her rhythm, a live Twitter feed projected behind her turned ugly, even objectifying her as a sexual object, until the conference organizers decided to shut it down. This, in turn, caused even more of a buzz in the audience. She found that many in the audience was not able to concentrate on the thought-provoking comments she was bringing them, but instead focusing on the crude comments scrolling by in huge letters behind her.

These two cases highlight that, as a society at large, we still have plenty to work on when it comes to racism and sexism. But it also raises some questions in the realm of education. I have in the past critiqued online social networks in education, such as Facebook and Myspace, from a specific angle. As I stated in that post, it’s not that these technologies should be ignored or denied in education, but instead treated seriously, carefully, and with plenty of thought. The same goes for the use of “crowd-powered” communications tools such as Twitter or search tools like Google (albeit acknowledging the underlying logic of the mysterious algorithm).

Much of the pedagogical approaches in the technology in education movement tends towards the progressive end of things as heralded by John Dewey, although much of what can be found there is probably more consistent with Thomas Kilpatrick’s project method. These approaches favor a child-centered approach, allowing learners to explore what interests them, in ways that are engaging, hands-on, and creative. Yay to all that. Seriously.

What can happen–and does happen occasionally–is that the “Guide on the Side not Sage on the Stage” approach degenerates into a more complete backgrounding of the teacher, as the teacher trusts the technology to foster the exploration and dialogue and trusts the students to carry on as they will. Of course there are many teachers who are very well-informed as to the purposes and very skilled in the methods of progressive education and do it very well. But it can also turn to the shallow and unthinking use of technology in the classroom, allowing little room for learning or growth.

But besides the cognitive aspects, there is another potential path. Hannah Arendt, in her essay “The Crisis in Education,” provides a powerful critique of progressive education (not just of progressive education, but much of her critique can be found touching upon the underlying assumptions of progressive education). I will be delving into these critiques in more detail in a later post centered around an exploration of the much-discussed 21st Century Skills (I promised Dr. Shirley I would), but suffice it to say, as a self-described “political theorist,” Arendt was concerned with questions of authority.

The first assumption of progressive education she highlights, which has been easily translated into the “Guide on the Side” language used to justify the use of information and communication technologies in the classroom, is “…that there exist a child’s world and a society formed among children that are autonomous and must insofar as possible be left to them to govern.” Now, Arendt assigns terms such as “world” and “society” with very specific meanings. I won’t get into them right now. But this is where she sees one of the dangers of this child-centered autonomy in the quest for a durable and pluralistic world:

Therefore by being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority. In any case the result is that the children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups. They are either thrown back upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of which they cannot flee…

Of course, this seems a bit dire. And the reports of David and danah point to the fact that the world of adults–or rather, the society of adults–is not always a paragon of reason and an expression of plurality.

But, this reminds us of the necessary role of the teacher, more than just the nominal role of “Guide on the Side.” The teacher brings with her wisdom, judgment, and experience. With the use of technology in education, these attributes are more than just “critical digital literacy skills.” So, let’s celebrate the teacher and acknowledge her authority in the face of her dual responsibilities: to her students, and to the world she brings them.

And before I am criticized for knocking progressive education, I am realizing that one of my emerging goals as an educator and a scholar is to help save progressive education–and I use the term loosely–from itself. Progressive education has a great deal to offer, but when it is reduced to slogans it loses its power and tends to present the world as a wholly malleable object without roots or history where the current and fleeting needs of making a living in it–or better yet, competing in it–trumps all. Education is so much more than that, and we owe it to our world and to our children to resist such a way out.

The exploration of meaning in education is something that is very near and dear to my heart, especially as we, as a culture, move further and further into the realm of things. I can’t say it much better than Dorothy in her most recent Cat and Girl comic strip:

“Surrounded”

I can’t get enough of Cat and Girl, and its intellectual goodness…

Tomaz Lasic has an interesting post on teachers banned from contacting their students over online social networking sites in Queensland, Australia. I sympathize with his argument that education is an inherently social activity and that online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are ways to encourage this social mode of learning. I agree that “banning” much of anything (without first putting in place some guidelines) is probably not the best way to explore what the potentialities of something are, for better or for worse.

He does note the “other side,” however, that keeping kids safe from “online predators and abusers” (most of whom are not teachers) is very important. I think that positioning one’s argument against such an extreme is usually counterproductive.

In my view, there are much more immediate and subtle effects of using social networking sites to communicate with students, blurring the boundaries between “teacher” and “friend” and out-of-school and in-school learning. Reading Axel Brun’s commentary on Trying to Remain Faceless on Facebook and Social Networks on Ning: A Sensible Alternative to Facebook (Dr. Brun hails, ironically, from Queensland) and Anton Steinpilz’s Thesis #3 in Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress are some takes on this idea. Not that I think that there shouldn’t be some overlap between “teacher” and “friend,” but it’s more complicated than Facebook makes it out to be.

But my argument can best be put by danah boyd, who warns us of a combination of technological utopianism and determinism which is so easy to slip into:

…[W]hen we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife. Take social network sites as an example. You use this for professional networking; teens use it to socialize with their peers. Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you’re polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful.

Her post, some thoughts on technophilia, is not long, and well worth the read for anyone who is concerned about education, technology, and students. If educators are insistent on using online social networks–and there are some good reasons to do so–I wonder if following Axel Burns’ advice is the way to go, setting up a Ning, or better yet, a Moodle on the school network (if such an option is available), dedicated to the class or a specific project, maintaining stricter boundaries between school work (and yes, it is, in so many ways, work) and friendships.

I am making a big historical jump here (although not necessarily a philosophical or narrative jump), but I am now reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, and found this paragraph in a section of the book where she lays out her distinctions between work and labor (concepts I will return to later):

Viewed, however, in their worldliness, action, speech, and thought have more in common with each other than any of them has with work or labor. They themselves do not “produce,” bring forth anything, they are as futile as life itself. In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things–into sayings, of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfillment and… the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. (emphasis added; Arendt, 1998, p. 95)

Most of the time, we think of students learning something new as opposed to learning as a process of recalling or remembering (as Socrates also viewed learning). This idea of learning something new places the teachings as subject to the learner rather than having any objective place in the world.

I have had in my mind a critique of the concept of “inquiry learning” in science for quite some time–or at least how it is often carried out–and Arendt’s writings have given me a language to express it. In inquiry learning, students are expected to discover anew what is already known, but the idea that it is already known is often forgotten: by the curriculum, by the teachers, and of course the students, who probably didn’t know it in the first place. It is tacitly assumed that through their own observations students will experience perturbation and their cognitive structures will reorder themselves to make sense of their observations.

The scientific principles and concepts that the students are supposed to be discovering or recovering are removed from the arc of history and are often denied their transformation into a tangible state. Extending Arendt’s theorizing (as I read it), whatever students do uncover through science inquiry runs the danger of becoming a fleeting intangible and forgettable “thought” rather than “patterns of thoughts or ideas.”

Please do not misread this–inquiry-based learning is a great strategy for developing curriculum and for teaching. It is important, however, to place such inquiry within a tangible context and allow for the reification of ideas and thoughts in inquiry. This means more than just placing these scientific principles within the world of concrete things and phenomena (in which inquiry-based learning excels), but also remembering that the principles themselves are found within a larger historical context of human understanding and making explicit that the students are remembering what has been taught before.

References:
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This past weekend, for the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, we packed up our family and went to the Negev Desert in the south of Israel. We spent several hours at the Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater), a really beautiful and dramatic part of the country. In Israel in general it is difficult to escape history, but especially so at the Makhtesh; just below the Visitor Center is an archaeology walk, with structures from the Iron and Bronze Ages. That is to say nothing of the evidence of the geologic time that can be found in the crater walls.

But this post actually has little to do with huge craters in the ground, but it does have something to do with history. Against this backdrop of a very concrete reminder of time, I read that Steve Hargadon will be interviewing Dennis Littky of Big Picture Learning as part of the Future of Education series. Intrigued, I went to Big Picture’s site and found a notice for an upcoming event they are sponsoring on “Disruptive Innovation” with the curious tagline “First Different, Then Better.”

I say curious because it seems to me–granted, there is very little information about the event itself–that educational change only for the sake of change (”First Different, Then Better”) is counter to what we would want for our schools and makes a number of assumptions about what we are changing away from, the nature of educational change itself, and what the ultimate goal of educational change looks like. I certainly don’t know much about Dennis Littky or his organization, and I am sure that they certainly have the best intentions in mind. I just worry about the unintended consequences of an educational change philosophy like this; we might end up somewhere that we don’t necessarily want to be (like, say, NCLB). However, since I’m reading some historical philosophy for my independent study, what might others say about this take on education? It should be noted for historical accuracy that when these thinkers did their thinking the modern conception of “education” did not exist. I also have to make a disclaimer that I am neither a philosopher nor a historian, but I will do my best to not rip these writings too far out of their historical contexts to learn from them for contemporary times.

The Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text of Hinduism, may seem an unlikely source here, but I was able to find this:

Action… is far inferior to the devotion of the mind. In that devotion seek shelter. Wretched are those whose motive to action is the fruit of action.

This statement is interesting in light of the concept of disruptive innovation, “whose motive to action,” it seems, “is the fruit of action.” Instead of action for its own sake, it seems that the Bhagavad Gita is counseling instead a mindful devotion to greater purposes. In education, can we define what those purposes might be?

Speaking of definitions, I will now jump to Greece. In Plato’s classic The Meno, Socrates is approached by a young man named Meno. Meno asks a deceptively simple question: does virtue come from teaching, from practice, or in some other way. Socrates response is also deceptive:

A sort of drought of wisdom has developed, and it seems that wisdom has left these parts for yours. At any rate, if you want to ask one of the people here such a question there’s no one who won’t laugh and say: ‘Well, stranger, perhaps you think I’m some specially favored person–I’d certainly need to be, to know whether virtue comes from teaching or in what way it does come–but in fact I’m so far from know whether it comes from teaching or not, that actually I don’t even know at all what virtue itself is!‘ And that’s the situation I’m in too, Meno. (emphasis added)

The Meno is a wonderfully rich and classic Socratic dialogue in which Socrates helps Meno develop a sense of virtue by asking questions. It is not an easy process, and Meno likens Socrates to the torpedo fish as Meno, who was so certain of his line of questioning and expecting a direct response, is stunned into a stupor of uncertainty. It is through this uncertainty–a disruption of certainty rather than a disruptive innovation–that both Meno and Socrates grow, plumbing the depths of their own knowledge as well as seeking out new limits to their understanding:

…we shall be better people… by supposing that one should enquire about things one doesn’t know, than if we suppose that when we don’t know things we can’t find them out eiter and needn’t search for them….

Note that this disruption and perplexity leads to inquiry into the nature and understanding of concepts and things and a consideration of their value and meaning. “First Different, Then Better” does produce a perturbation, but with little thought to the contingencies and consequences of this change; this would be little different than throwing a stone into still water and watching the ripples. We have no idea as to whether or not this is a “good” change for “good” reasons. My supposition, however, is that “disruptive innovation” assumes that change by its very nature is “good,” an assumption in dire need of a torpedo fish.

The last words belong to Confucius:

The Book of Songs says: ‘In hewing an axe handle, the pattern is not far off.’ Thus, when we take an axe handle in our hand to hew another axe handle and glance from one to the other, some still think the pattern is far off.

Here Confucius is referring to the idea that when making something new we need not look to some distant place, some place far off in the future. We can look at what we have already and learn from it. In the way that I am reading it, he is not saying that there is no room for any change, but instead we need to look at what we have for we may learn from it.

A “lessons learned” strategy to educational change seems to be one way mitigate change for the sake of change, but such a strategy usually draws upon a limited set of empirical research that point to efficiency or a particular definition of success and leave out the “why” and “what for.” Such research is important, nor am I advocating for a form of historical determinism, but such research is a small sliver compared to the collective inquiry and understanding built up over the course of human history.

A progressive and humanistic approach to education and educational change needs to be in dialogue with the long arc of the human narrative rather than working hard to slough it off. We need to be mindful of the wealth of human understanding throughout history and consider the meanings and value of where it is we want to go rather than just perturbate the system for the sake of change.

References:
Commins, S., & Linscott, R. N. (Eds.). (1947). From The Bhagavadgita: The Way to Purity. In Man and Spirit: The Speculative Philosophers, The World’s Great Thinkers (pp. 107-125). New York: Random House.
Confucius. (1947). The Wisdom of Confucius. In S. Commins & R. N. Linscott (Eds.), Man and Man: The Social Philosophers, The World’s Great Thinkers (pp. 321-355). New York: Random House.
Plato. (1994). The Meno. In J. M. Day (Ed.), J. M. Day (Tran.), Plato’s Meno, In Focus (pp. 35-72). London: Routledge.