Pedagogy and Middle Ground

Adapted from Flickr cc image by yewenyi

Having begun reading Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and Tougher Standards (1999), with its trashing of the “Old School” pedagogies, I posted a tweet this morning:

not happy with the lack of middle ground between the PLE/open “individualized exploration” and the LMS/data-driven “rote content” arguments

Then, following a tweet from Dave Cormier this morning, I discovered George Siemens‘ slides from the Africa presentation he’s giving today, apparently. Here’s Slide 15:

I noticed that if you took out the text in the middle, the process is very much the same as what I’d call Good Traditional Learning. Certainly as a historian, this is what I do. In fact, there is even more interplay between aspects of the prospect, if you’ll forgive my doodling:

As a historian, I naturally assume that ideas are not really new, but just a revision due to circumstances. And certainly, in my various discussions of connectivist theory, I hashed this out last fall.

During the class and again today, I’ve observed the polarization of educational ideas. On the one hand, you have the “Old School” hardliners, the “back to basics” folks, the ones pushing accountability, Student Learning Outcomes, data-driven models, etc. Industrialized education. Enlightenment social science gone mad.

On the other are the highly innovative ed-techies who say schools are failing because we are failing students, unempowering them to learn. Kohn’s book, constructivist and connectivist learning theory, promoters of blogs and wikis and Personal Learning Environments. Edupunks (I’m proud to be one!), learner-centered, wired. Those who claim today’s students are different (you can put the technology horse before or after this cart), so they need different methods to learn. Some even claim to be going back to a pre-industrial model, as in this article claiming that the grading system was created as a lazy and inappropriate way to assess learning. Many in this crowd don’t like Marc Prensky, with his idea of digital natives and digital immigrants, but others start with his ideas. For those not familiar with this view, Michael Wesch‘s classic video should help:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&w=425&h=344]

The Middle Ground seems to be somewhat different, and I intend to explore these ideas further. I see a number of elements working against the polarization of educational viewpoints:

• Student skills
  Students today are technologically savvy only for social interaction, not academic work (see analysis of the ETS ICT report from 2007, among others)
• Student use
  Students are not particularly avid users of Web 2.0 technologies (Kennedy et al, 2007)
• Workplace conditions
  The conditions of the educational workplace require most of us to teach industrial-sized classes, making individualized approaches impossible unless they are almost completely student-led. (I have often been astonished by the failure of the “new” crowd to acknowledge this simple problem and deal with it on anything other than an “overthrow the system!” kind of way.)
• Retraining
  Creating constructivist or connectivist learning environments involves re-training instructors in areas far beyond their disciplines, and such re-training is not supported by compensation in any form.
• Student expectations
  In keeping with the cultural movement toward self-esteem boosting, open access education and reality-show social interactions, students now expect to be entertained and “engaged” in their classes. They do not particularly value self-motivation, organization, or the abundance of content available to them.
• Anti-intellectualism
  Many also don’t value the development of knowledge, which requires reflection. The tendency toward multi-tasking and mashups of content encourages superficiality of intellectual process in a world already too accepting of snap judgements and “fly over” assessments of data.

Yes, there are certainly problems. Some students are disengaged, and today’s iPod is yesterday’s comic book or television. Some students who would succeed better in vocational education are now put through General Education, and consider a passing grade (not just equal access) to be a civil right. Many wish to be entertained, are restricted by instructors in their approach to material, and want to break away.

Some Middle Ground approaches might include:

• Subversive innovation
  Tech-savvy, constructivist and/or connectivist instructional methods can be implemented (at least at the college level) inside the restrictive data-driven environment. This has been my solution for many years.
• Acknowledging skills deficiencies
  It is foolish to assume that students know all the web tools, or how to use any technology (textbook, video, internet) for learning. Like the skills for a discipline, these must too be taught if we’re going to use the tools. (I don’t mean the technical skill of how to make PowerPoint slides, but rather the methods for creating new content through deep understanding of the old content.)
• Professional development focused on pedagogy
  This would ensure that the instructor’s strengths are the focus of any method, rather than the latest trendy technology.
• Supplemented assessment
  There are many types of success, and some, as I mentioned in my last post, have nothing to do with completing the class or earning a passing grade. To these mandatory manifestations of student success should be added “assessment” of potential and contribution.
• Independent/alternative study
  Any independent options available to instructors could be used, including independent study, alternative assignments, and credit for outside work.
• Thinking creatively.

No need to throw out the baby or the bathwater Flickr cc image from Pfau

None of these is new. All are techniques used for many years to provide instructors with approaches to respond to changing populations of students. There is no need to push the Hegelian dialectic to envision a synthesis of traditionalism with Edupunk, since a similar balance has been struck by good instructors for years. I’m sure you can think of at least one elementary or high school teacher you had who did these things. I personally recall my junior high English teacher, who let a gang of us write, rehearse and produce a play based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” instead of sit in class. We did all the standardized testing, fulfilled the curriculum, she just thought a little sideways. As a result, I always saw school as I environment I could change to fit my goals. Empowerment did not require a complete rejection of tradition, just a middle ground between extremes.