Hi folks!
I hope you’re all keeping warm and dry wherever you are in the world!
It’s pretty stormy out there in Ottawa.
We actually had to bring in cushions for our chairs 'cause
the wind was blowing them around on the balcony earlier today.
And I'm hoping my microphone doesn't pick up the rain and wind,
but I'm not super optimistic there.
So this week we’re starting our module on Authentic Education,
which is the second moment in Engaging Minds.
And as many of you have experienced in your own teaching and learning,
schooling today is still largely entrenched in the industrialized sensibility that we saw in Standardized Education.
For example, we still have grading structures, lessons plans,
standardized textbooks, similar looking buildings and classrooms.
And CBC recently published an article in their kids section about how classrooms
haven’t changed all that much in the last 150 years.
And this permeates different levels and areas of education.
So consider this picture of a classroom from the early 1900s.
How does this classroom compare to your own educational experiences?
For me, there’s a lot of really striking resemblances here between the classrooms I was in
in elementary school, high school, and even nursing school.
Now, despite some of these similarities that we may see,
we have seen quite a few changes.
Take surgical education, for example.
So both of these images here are of operating rooms in St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto taken 90 years apart.
The picture on the left is from 1924 at St. Mike's.
And here we can see nurses observing a surgery.
And the picture on the right is far more representative of what education occurring inside of an OR looks like now
- in my experience, at least -
although this can look very different depending on the specialty, procedure, hospital, etc.
So take a moment to consider these two pictures.
What are some similarities between teaching in these images?
And what are some differences?
What learning theories or terms would you use to describe teaching and learning in these images?
By the early 1900s, people were beginning to question what the purpose of school was.
Was it about technical proficiency?
Or conceptual understanding?
And indeed what should schooling be about?
Should it be about imposing standards of performance?
Or nurturing individual strengths?
So we're going to look at a few different ideas that explore these questions.
First, we’re going to talk a bit about vocational education,
namely education for social efficiency and education for democracy.
And we’re going to talk a little bit about John Dewey here,
who was a very important philosopher and educational reformist.
And then we’re going to go to our epistemology tree
and take a look at the paradigm shift that was beginning to occur at this time.
And then we’re going to conclude by doing a re-cap of constructivism,
which is a really important take-away for this course.
So back in Standardized Education,
we talked about how prior to the industrial revolution schooling was very much for the elite.
And because of the industrial revolution,
there was a real need to create a literate workforce.
And this is when we really begin to see this push for introducing vocational – or industrial - education into schools.
And this is all part of the manual training movement in schools,
which was described as a way to stimulate a child’s constructive ability
and creative force.
So this could be activities like clay modeling, needle work,
mat weaving, and bent wire work.
Now, they believed that by introducing more vocational education into schools
that this would make schools more meaningful and encourage children to spend more time in school.
This was also thought to create a better educator and more skilled workforce,
with the ability to earn more income.
And have an indirect and positive effect on the aims and methods of general education.
Furthermore, it was thought to result in better teaching and learning
by employing “learning by doing” and not mere book learning.
And we can describe there as being two major models of vocational education
in the early 20th century.
There was "education for social efficiency"
which we talked about a bit in Standardized Education.
And this was largely associated with David Snedden.
And "education for democracy," which is associated with John Dewey.
So Snedden saw vocational education as more about specialized training.
And while he was a proponent of education for all,
he thought liberal education and vocational education should be separate tracks within public schools.
He divided vocational education into five areas:
"Professional Education," such as doctors, engineers,
teachers, the clergy, military personnel.
"Commercial Education"
such as bookkeepers, clerks, stenographers, and business leaders.
"Industrial Education"
such as bricklayers, machinists, shoemakers, metal workers.
"Agricultural Education."
And "Education in the Household Arts"
such as dressmaking, cooking, and management of the home.
And while there are a lot of variations on this model of vocational education,
the goal was really to fit the child for the job within the present social system.
So it's more about habit, rather than thought.
And Snedden certainly wasn’t the only one to embrace this sort of idea of vocational education.
For example, in 1889 the President of Princeton College
noted that schools needed to prepare students for earning for a living.
And in 1908, the President of Columbia University
wrote in the New York Times that he felt that upon completing six years of elementary school,
children should start receiving vocational training.
And this could be in lieu of general secondary school.
And Andrew Draper, the New York State Commissioner of Education in 1908,
arguably had a bit more of an extreme view, which is described here.
So Draper lamented that elementary schools did not train students
for industrial employment but just for secondary schools.
He wanted to create new types of schools:
factory schools and trade schools.
The goal was to train better workmen
“so they may earn more bread and butter."
And this was something John Dewey was really against.
While he was a proponent of learning by doing,
he argued for activities that are genuine and that the learner can relate to.
That is, activities that are meaningful to the learner.
To Dewey, knowledge is an action and not a noun.
And Dewey didn’t think we should have this sort of divide between liberal or cultural education
and vocational education.
He was also concerned that this could strengthen class divisions,
which could be dangerous to the future of any democracy.
Dewey thought this dualism should be removed from schools,
instead integrating cultural education and vocational education.
And his idea of vocational education was different.
He thought individuals should be politically astute, and not docile workers.
He believed in insights and understandings
rather than being able to complete a task under direction of others
or memorizing a lesson.
He also thought we should consider the needs of society
rather than the needs of businesses.
And we should be training children to enrich themselves and not the system.
And this really boiled down to calling for educating people to think intelligently.
It’s also important to note that to Dewey, education was more than just schooling,
and the two were not synonymous.
To him, education was more about development and growth.
And he argued that education should be rich and have immediate value to the learner,
while the continual reconstruction and reorganization of their experiences will multiply its meaning,
impacting their ability to fulfill their potential contribution to society.
So which of these approaches do you think is more popular today:
education for social efficiency or education for democracy?
Defalco (2016) argues that our view of vocational education
really hasn't move that much closer to Dewey's vision,
and this idea of "learning for earning"
is still at the top of the vocational education agenda.
And we still see arguments in schools that students need more
preparation for fields with better employment opportunities.
As you can see, here we have some pretty dramatically different opinions on the purpose of schooling.
And we can understand these differences by looking at epistemologies.
So what’s going on here philosophically?
Well, to understand that we need to go back to our epistemology tree.
So in our last module on Standardized Education, we covered the entire metaphysical branch,
which is about half of the "Inventions of Teaching" book.
We were feeling pretty ambitious last module!
And for these last three modules, we're just going to be climbing the Physical branch.
So for our modules on Authentic Education and Democratic Citizenship Education
we’re going to be looking at the Intersubjectivity branch.
And then we'll be looking at Interobjectivity in Systemic Sustainability Education.
Now, if you remember from our last module
the metaphysical branch was talking about this idea of there being an ideal realm out there,
and that there are these universal truths out there to be discovered.
And learning in this realm of thought
happens through spiritual and mental (or logical) effort.
And we start to see a shift in this sort of thinking, particularly around the turn of the 20th century.
Critiques of the metaphysical approach began to emerge
from within and outside of the sciences.
So a really important influential thinker here was Charles Darwin.
Darwinian theory had a really revolutionary impact on scientific inquiry.
And modern science as we knew it at the time
– including the assumptions about knowledge and knowing put out by Descartes and Bacon –
started to fall under scrutiny from theorists in philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.
And when his ideas were applied to the history of science,
it became evidence that “truths” are constantly evolving.
So we began to see a paradigm shift.
And we can see this big shift in this thinking on the Physical branch.
And Physical comes from the Greek word for growth and nurture.
And here the universe is seen as being messy and changing
rather than being finished and pre-planned,
which is a stark contrast to the metaphysical branch.
So rather than talking about discoverable truths that are out there,
knowledge here is understood in terms of adaptations and temporarily viable constructions.
So it’s about coherence rather than
correspondence with some objective truth.
And the Physical branches off into intersubjective and interobjective.
And for the next two modules, we’re going to be taking about the intersubjective.
Intersubjectivity is focused on humans,
including the language and other symbols systems we use,
culture, and personal identity.
And on this branch, truth is no longer seen as something that is out there to be discovered.
And here theorists began to look more at how people construe reality.
Intersubjectivity has two branches:
structuralism and post-structuralism.
And when we talk about structuralism here,
we’re talking about it in a biological sense rather than it being about buildings or architecture.
And we aren't going to talk too much about structuralism here,
since it isn’t super important to our course.
But what I will say is that structuralism looks at the meaningfulness
in our language, beliefs and social systems.
And structuralism is concerned with how knowing and truth emerge from dynamic,
relational structures among people, words, ideas, and practices.
And here teaching is understood as being more about “facilitating”.
Now, what is really important here for the purposes of this course is constructivism,
which would be a leaf on this branch.
Social constructivism would also fall under structuralism,
but we’re going to be discussing that in Democratic Citizenship Education.
Jean Piaget, who is discussed quite a bit in Engaging Minds,
falls under this structuralism epistemological umbrella.
Although Piaget himself probably would have defined himself as a constructivist
rather than a structuralist.
And Engaging Minds talks a lot about Piaget’s work,
but what I really want you to take away from this course is specifically his work on constructivism.
When we talk about Piaget’s constructivism,
we’re really talking about radical constructivism.
Piaget thought that learning should be compared to the growth of living organisms,
rather than the mechanical metaphors of learning we talked about in Standardized Education.
So here learning is really about personal sense-making,
as each person construes the world their own way.
And as discussed in Module 1,
constructivism is really about connecting new knowledge to pre-existing knowledge.
So in constructivism, learners are understood as reorganizing their mental representations of the world
(or schema)
to adapt to their circumstances.
When new experiences align with an existing schema,
it is assimilated.
And when it doesn’t fit an existing schema,
the schema has to be changed.
And this is accommodation.
And within this, Piaget argued that it’s important to consider
a learner’s history of experiences
because the sense that the individual makes about an event or new information
is really contingent on their history.
This reorganization of their web of beliefs (or their schema)
is always a subjective construal based on their biological and experiential history.
Now you may be wondering, Rachel,
people can’t possible just construct the world however they like.
And you're right.
For example, there are physical constraints that exist in the external world.
I can’t suddenly walk through walls or fly
because in the world I’ve construed in my mind I can do this.
There is a world beyond what we construe in our minds.
So this is about constructing a reality that fits our context.
You may also be wondering what this means on a more social, collective level.
What does this mean for collective knowing?
Well, constructivism doesn't ignore this.
And in constructivism, we acknowledge that the tapestry of our perceptions
may be woven from entirely different experiences.
But having identical interpretations is not what’s important here.
Rather, it's a matter of whether these different perspectives are compatible.
So within constructivism, learning and knowing is what
fits with their current social and physical experiences,
not how accurately it matches the external, “objective” world.
So here we’re talking about coherence with the external world
rather than correspondence with it, as we discussed in Standardized Education.
Now, I want to take you back to our question from the very beginning:
What do you think the purpose of school is?
What did you think it was in Standardized Education?
And how would you describe it within Authentic Education?
What are some similarities and some differences that you can see here?
We're going to talk more about these questions and the practical implications for some of these ideas
in my next video on Authentic Education.
Specifically, we're going to talk more about what this means for teaching and learning.
Please feel free to ask questions and comment.
And as always, I will see you all online!