AUSSIE

Blog entry posted May 24th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

Here’s a quote on our recent theme of seeing, which I stumbled on since my last blog post: “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” It was uttered by impressionist impresario Paul Cezanne. One of his methods was to look with both eyes, as it were. Instead of painting objects as resolved by the brain into one picture, he superimposed the two slightly varying perspectives of each eye, thus kicking off his own carotene revolution. Picasso and Matisse agreed with his innovator’s stature when they labeled him “The Father of Cubism.” Vegetables have never shimmered the same again.

Given the interdisciplinary zeitgeist that animated the times just before, during and after Cezanne’s work, which popped up in the natural sciences with Darwin and Wallace’s discomfiting explanation of how we got here as a species, Freud’s provocative demonstration of how the unconscious just might have something to do with the way be behaved ourselves, and Einstein’s dizzy linking of time with space on a continuum illuminated by a beam of light, I wondered, was there a similar revolution in education?

Ignoring, for the sake of argument, Socrates, Arcesilaus and Montaigne (who “made first their scholars speak, and then they spoke to them,” as Montaigne put it in his essay “Of the Education of Children”), Tolstoy (who rhetorically wondered if “Are The Peasant Children to Learn to Write from Us, or Are We to Write from the Peasant Children?” as he put in his essay of that title (see Tolstoy as Teacher from Teachers & Writers), and John Dewey (who, echoing Einstein, framed the child’s “continuum of experience” in his Experience and Education), along with every parent and babysitter’s modeling for every child how to eat with a spoon since spoons were invented – and that is a lot to ignore, I know – one could claim that education’s turn came with “the cognitive revolution” in psychology.

The best byte-size digest I’ve found of this revolution and its implications for the classroom can be found in Michael F. Graves’ essay “Theories and Constructs that Have Made a Significant Difference in Adolescent Literacy” (from the book Adolescent Literacy Research and Practice, edited by Tamara L. Jetton and Janice A. Dole). Graves conveniently identifies and describes, by section, “Theories Worthy of the Name,” “How to Teach,” “What to Teach,” and “Motivation and Engagement: The Sine Quan Non of Learning.” He seems to have done here for education what Einstein wasn’t able to do for physics, i.e., create a grand unified theory. Of course it might be a little harder in physics, we’ll give Einstein that, so he’ll definitely get an A for effort.

Graves’ short essay is worth reading in its entirety, and has the potential to resolve a lot of arguments between good educators about, for instance, which is the best way to teach, through inquiry or direct instruction. (A couple of friends nearly came to unnecessary blows over that one just last week.) But let’s just take a quick look at his theories section, since it’s of theories that revolutions are made, after all. I bullet them below, along with some pithy notes relevant to application. (Note that while Graves discusses his theories in the context of reading, I think they are able to be generalized.)

• Schema Theory: reminds us, praise Aristotle, of the importance of background knowledge in learning…but in trying to build multiple bodies of knowledge – one for each child in every subject area, for goodness’ sake – have we neglected to teach the common body of knowledge we need to actually communicate with each other?
• The Interactive Model of Reading: reminds us, praise Montaigne and company, that meaning is made by blending both the text and the reader’s schema in the whirling Cuisinart of the brain…but have we neglected the text lately by focusing too much on the learner’s response alone?
• Constructivism: reminds us, praise Piaget, that the text’s the blueprint and the reader’s the builder, and all houses constructed from the same blueprint don’t look alike…but have we forgotten the fact that some texts need to render the same meaning exactly for every reader? After all, we don’t really want imaginative variation in how after-market manufacturers make carburetors, do we? Oops, my bad, nobody makes carburetors anymore. Make that CPU’s.
• Reader Response Theory: reminds us, praise Rosenblatt, that imagination does need to be brought to texts with no single correct interpretation – “efferent reading”…but are we including enough informational texts in the classroom so students can become proficient in “informational reading” too? (I know this point closely resembles the previous one, but Graves repeats himself, and I’m going right along with him.)
• Sociocultural Theory: reminds us, praise Vygotsky, that (1) Students’ social and cultural backgrounds, as well as their modes of learning and thinking, have a huge impact in the classroom; (2) Much learning is social, and even though students may spend a lot of time in side-talk about the Beatles – oops, make that Taylor Swift, when they do get around to a discussion of chemical bonding, they actually learn more when they can gab face to face; (3) The classroom itself is a social context different from, say, the sanctuary, the street corner or the mall…BUT (and you knew this was coming, didn’t you? Now that you’d built up your schema?), in an attempt to cater to everybody’s background, are we losing our ability to share something in common while we appreciate each other’s idiosyncrasies?

So much to discuss here! Are we down with E.D. Hirsch or Edward Hirsch? Allan Bloom or Harold Bloom?

Here’s my answer: neither.

We are going to stop spinning our academic whirling basket and rest our focus on a real live student, a brilliant, struggling scholar from the Bronx and see what the consequences of the cognitive revolution are on her.

Next post, though, as I’ve waltzed well past my word limit here. (Sorry, Gina, that’s what happens when you walk out of the room.)

I did cleverly drop a bucketful of big names in this one, though, didn’t I? Boy did I enjoy that!