Constructivist Pedagogy

In her paper Inclusivity and alignment: Principles of pedagogy, task and assessment design for effective cross-cultural online learning, (McLoughlin 2001), Catherine McLoughlin proposes that "assessment tasks need to be aligned with learning outcomes and teaching approaches".

Without intending to sound admonitory or in any way reductionist, why in hell's name would any sane educator plan their teaching strategy in any other way? I note that Associate Professor McLoughlin makes this statement way back in 2001, so perhaps I'm feeling cross without reason, and that in the last eight years, pedagogy has evolved beyond the need to restate the blindingly obvious.

When watching the video (Constructive Alignment, http://www.daimi.au.dk/~brabrand/short-film/trivia.html ), I experienced a number of reactions. Irritation that there's still a need to consider such a practice optional; annoyance at the deadly tedious narration of Richard Raskin; disbelief that competancy-training might still be perceived as something beyond the pale of universities, and relief when the dreadful video ended.

Additionally, I reject the notion that there are only three types of teacher (A, B, C) and would argue for at least one more form (D), which builds upon the strengths of the previous three but which also mediates between the learning objectives of the subject material and the reality of a world in which such material is likely to be put into use.

Being a teacher today is not simply someone who stands up and yaks 200 students into a coma while collecting 17% super and the title of 'Aspro'. Being a teacher/academic (whatever job title one uses) means that we have the responsibility to not only make our efforts relevant, but to keep them effective both in the classroom and in the real world.

Anything less is an abdication of one's vocation and the culprit should go work in local government.

p.s. Argh!

Reference:

McLoughlin, C (2001). Inclusivity and alignment: Principles of pedagogy, task and assessment design for effective cross-cultural online learning. Distance Education, 22(1), 7-29

The Importance of Unrestricted Curiosity

I found John Medina's seminar on 'Brain Rules' quite stimulating. To some extent I suspect we've all been a little guilty of what he calls 'neuro-astrology' (I may have to steal that term), and that we permit change to fall into the too-hard basket more times than we should. But it's only when you listen to some of the empirically-proven data John discusses that the importance of these things start to hit home (Medina, Brain Rules, http://www.brainrules.net/).

Listening to Mr Medina reminded me of Tony Buzan www.buzan.com.au for whom I have enormous respect. I've been a follower of Buzan's methods since the 1980s, and find that he and John Medina have a significant amount in common. I have been incorporating Buzan's methodologies into all my classes where possible (such as using mindmapping [radiant] structures as well as linear ones), and find that once I get past a student's learned reserve, they are happy to try new things with enthusiasm.

John speaks of the natural structure of our thinking abilities and goes on to illustrate how the way we work (in modern cubicles, sedentary and alone, often manacled to routine and boredom), and the way we learn/teach (routine followed by more routine and severely channeled), are almost guaranteed to debilitate our individual effectiveness.

Working in what John terms a "captive prison state" virtually ensures the way we think and use our capacity to learn is reduced and becomes less and less effective. It was also interesting to be shown how stress, or "learned helplessness" has a toxic potential to prevent us from even trying to find a different way.

 And I guess that would be one of the two main points I garnered from John's talk:

1. we learn to forget there are different ways of doing things
2. curiosity is the greatest of natural teachers

These two things have reinforced my belief in the way I teach. Though I am required to provide my students with identical materials, information and instructional standards as any other class on any other campus, I am not forced to think the same way as any other teacher. If I can discover even one way of communicating information is a 'different' manner and if I can engage my students through the force of their own curiosity, then I am improving their chances of success. Not only that, but it keeps my teaching fascinating for me - every time I work with a student to overcome a learning issue, I am also learning from them.

However. An increased awareness of this potential also brings with it increased problems. If we know and believe that the way we currently teach/learn harks more to 19th-century isolationist Britain than to 21st-century globalised Australia (or anywhere, really), then HOW are we going to get our respective education systems to change? Do I need to leave academia and enter politics, get into the Senate and then pass an oodleplex of bills to ensure such change occurs?

Knowing that the current system is deeply flawed, and having some insight into potential change is one thing. Actually making that change take place is something entirely different.

How can we change the system from within?

Shakespeare Meets Cognitive Load Theory

Aristide and Lorenzo discuss cognitive learning

Aristide, A teacher, sighing.
In learnéd question am I taken with the measures of the mind. There seems too little space for musings brief as well as recall's lengthy histories. In close embrace such elements must joust, and find their mettled patinas dilute. Be it that the mind’s a finite store which cannot bone-cased walls extend? Is it but a cup scarce saved from overflow as drop by drop each thought brims full?

How does the white-beard sage full 'membrance of his greener follies keep? That one so aged can peer through Chronos’ veil and call on learning’s distant countenance? This query deep and murky lies, I cannot see beyond my eyes.

But sooth, Lorenzo arrives. Perchance he may bear a fresher crop from wisdom’s ancient grove. Greetings, Lorenzo. How goes the day?

Lorenzo, also a teacher
By heaven’s will, all is well, Aristide. I see by visaged shades you mourn the passing of the light. A good day?

Aristide
Fair, though trouble’s snatching fancies bind my brow with strangest thoughts. My mind unloosed seems cast upon a darkened sea of toothéd waves. My very breath is caught.

Lorenzo
Unmesh thy pounding brow, brave Aristide! There is a simple truth beyond the gloom of apprehension, pray, lighten your mind and share with me the burden of your detention.

Aristide, shaking her head
Wouldst thou might take this discomfort from my lacking wits and haul it, wrap’d in scholar’s silk and so enfeebled to Carlton pool wherein to sink it fathoms deep, for I am lost.

Lorenzo
But hist! Speak not such calamies! Perforce must I demand as jury that your penanced thoughts be set in greater light. Tell me what troubles you.

Aristide, thinking about learning techniques in her undergraduate class today.
Remember then t’ was by your own desire that on this subject will I speak, nor bind me not to silence when thy own thoughts cry folly in the echo of my words. (pauses, marshalling her thoughts)

How does the puling babe from out his mother’s learnéd womb decant the ways of men? And when are dimple-cheeked young maids full cognisant of older miens, that change and flow in keeping with the time? There is no rule, nor can be by accord, for all must come to learning by and by.

And by the rising of each searing sun will knowingness be scorched within, until the very thoughts of action and of chance be rendered into deepest charring ruts. There seems no rule to this but that of common visitation.

Yet should knowledge fruit full flavour only in the presence of its own, how doth the seed remember itself a tree? Upon what branch does memory take up the rein, or is each leaflet grown anew each day until the wearied sap of life descends into the earth? How does the morning’s leaf recall the evening’s bud?

Are memoried phantoms built within a place of chance, or chance a place where phantoms rest in thought? What unseen practice wraps the crumbs of whole experience as one? I cannot beckon every modest fact, yet hold an entire vision in a thought. How does this resolve?

In composition’s art do we recall, associated scenes bound by learning’s cabled vines to other views of worth.

In place of prior claim shall I givest this a name and call such fellowship schema, for by schemes are all great stories told.

Am I amiss, Lorenzo, or does reason balance such an argument?

Lorenzo
Yup.

Mark Pesce’s ‘accidental revolution’

Listen to Mr Pesce (‘Technological and Generational Factors’) for a little while and his natural charm and evident enthusiasm lulls you into agreement by soft-sell. Oddly, since I am already a huge advocate of moving our educative systems into the future, you’d think that listening to Mark would have me smiling and nodding in happy concert with his innovative vision.

And I was, but there’s a ‘but’.

He had me ticking all the “yes, must do this” boxes with his identification of the ‘new’ normal, and the fact that people (both children and adults) are either living with or adapting to constant and exponential change. His enunciation of “co-presence” is clear; his Theory of Hyperconnectivity, and even the notion that those of us conceived before the Web are mutants and dinosaurs, is comprehensible. All this and more was a soothing canticle to the already converted.

Even when Mark started his damning dissection of the contemporary classroom, I was still hooked. His statement that students were forced to ‘unplug’ when they come to class resonated strongly as only yesterday I had to ask a student to choose whether to be in my class or to answer his constantly ringing mobile.

I think it was when Mark talked about the “hidden curriculum [which] is implicitly denying the new reality” that the first discordant note sounded, not that I actually disagreed with his statement, but because that comment struck me as provocation for its own sake rather than to instigate a change in the mindset of educational policy-makers. It was around this point I remembered Mr Pesce is a ‘consultant’ and it is in his professional interest to be as convincing as possible in order to maintain his potential market.

This being so, I listened to the remainder of the discussion with a little more objectivity and, while a great deal of what Mark was saying scored a bullseye, I was also aware of a growing sense of his reckless disregard for today’s reality. In his fascination with everything of tomorrow, his firm belief that today’s education system will go the way of the Dodo if it doesn’t change revealed a depth of naiveté that even I found jarring.

His argument that we are all change-agents is difficult to contest, and I am already one of those people who agree with the cliché that ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. BUT there are ways and there are ways, and Mark’s headlong rush into the reality of the new was missing one very important feature: a transition.

I may be maligning Mr Pesce unfairly as I am not familiar with the body of his work, but if the rest of his material comes from the same stock as this talk, then he appears to be abdicating the responsibility of managing change while demanding its occurrence. In leaving the sticky bits to other people, Mark Pesce is giving us only fragmented wisdom. I can see why he condemns the education system, and agree that it’s not in a good way. I can also see the future he argues for, and I can’t disagree with that either. But what I need from him now is a serious examination of the concrete steps we have to take in order to accomplish the change from today into tomorrow.

How are we going to make such a change? Incrementally, by educational sector? By institution? State? Do we begin in the home where all social movement must be embraced in order to succeed? What about State and Federal politics and politicians? This change is going to cost, so who will pay? Voting for such a major evolution in education is akin to asking State politicians to vote themselves out of a job. I never thought I’d be demanding answers to such proletarian questions, but I am. Mark Pesce is playing Devil’s Advocate and that’s just not good enough in this kind of situation. I really like what he says, but find myself annoyed at the things he’s left out.

In the movies, such change would only need a neat fade-in on a rising sun, but as we are dealing with a monstrous systemic machine, a deus ex machina won’t cut it.

Yesterday's Tools for Tomorrow's Work?

I was in class yesterday and we were discussing the change in mass-media since the beginning of the 20th-century and how this change related to social evolution in general. It was clear that, while the group had no prior knowledge of the differences between Mode 1 and Mode 2 societies, the students had an instinctive awareness that there was a real and important difference. Not only that, but (after something of a history lesson), they were convinced that the transitional period between the two forms of social structure lay between 1918 and 1945. Significant dates indeed.

I asked them why they felt this time was so critical in the transition and we spent a good 10-minutes throwing ideas and counter-ideas around the room, narrowing down the possibilities as we went. The students (all international students, so their conclusions are doubly informative), found they could reach consensus on the following points: 

• the advent of modern technology as evidenced (for example) in the development of the atomic bomb
• the complete social upheaval caused by women entering the industrialised workforce and thus emerging as a new economic force
• societies can never go back[wards]

Needless to say, I was really chuffed that my group felt able to articulate these points, and I'm sure it will stand them in good stead for the remainder of the term. However it was only after I watched the three videos about pedagogical change that I can see an even better way to illustrate the differences in social organisation.

Greg Whitby's discussion of 'pedagogical DNA' (Whitby, 21st century pedagogy) offers a concise but telling analysis of the exact difference between Mode 1 and 2 societies. M1 (yesterday) is hierarchical, rigid, and informed by grand narratives. M2 (tomorrow) is fluid, transitional, more a matrix than a solid form and consists of multiple levels all working independently as well as interdependently. This difference is so clearly visible in the way we teach today.

The second video (great soundtracks, BTW), was a short film from Tom Woodward and one which raised my eyebrows again as it was uncannily close to the ideas zooming around my head while watching the Whitby segment. Woodward examines (in brief) what he calls 'education translation' and with visual clues points out that we are still teaching the way our grandparents were taught, yet we are teaching students who may be working in jobs that have not yet been invented. How absurd is that? Though no recommendations were presented, the film was clearly admonishing the current educational and pedagogical systems.

The final piece of video (which has been doing the rounds for some time) was a fascinating ethnographic case study of a Kansas State University class (subject unknown). These young people had gone to a lot of personal effort in order to self-survey and construct a 5-min commentary on the divergence between academic 'reality' and real-world truisms. One example that resonated in particular was a girl who said that while she would read 8 books that year, she would also read several thousand web pages and a huge number of Facebook pages. This shows that our students are not troubled by the prospect of absorbing masses of information, but rather it's the format of the information we expect them to absorb which is troublesome.

I grew up with books, book and more books. The idea of having to spend my time learning from social networks and mobile phone downloads would drive me nuts. I'm not sure I could even do it. Yet by sticking with archaic pedagogical forms, I am demanding my students do exactly what I would most dread: being forced to absorb and learn in a format with which I have a limited tolerance. This cannot be the best way to teach for tomorrow.

Melbourne Cup Day

Hello from Melbourne. I write this on the afternoon of the big race where I and a few diehards are holding the campus safe from marauding Visigoths while the rest of the City parties at Flemington.

Yesterday I found a fabulous site - you have to go see this: http://www.wordle.net/

I think we should do this for all the important things in our life. I just input my CV. Wow.

Cool for Cats

Shock horror.

I have taken the enormous adult step of enrolling in another university course. You'd think this was no biggie, but actually, for a teacher who thought her study days long gone, it's a bit of a departure from the norm of simply being a "teacher". I'm the one who's supposed to do the teaching, dammit.

Now that I come to analyse my decision, I'm pondering the possibility this may be my version of a mid-life crisis. While some men go out and blow it all on a ridiculous Ferrari or a 22-year old with sparkly lip gloss, and some women go out and splurge on the latest Salvatore Ferragamo frock or three days in the Blue Mountains with Sven, classic masseur and local Nordic god, it looks like my descent into madness comes with an annotated bibliography and a small but perfectly formed reading list.

Clearly, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous hormonal tantrums is insufficient for my inner masochist: I must now parade my senile moments in full public view and secretly hope for absolution in the form of an HD. Less than that and I may be drummed from the regiment. Like all the best heroes in narrative, I will endure my failings and temporary insanity in the hope that at some point before the sun sinks in the West, I will have beaten the baddie, located the treasure and saved the world. With appropriate Harvard referencing, naturally.