Dialogue and dialectics

Is Bakhtin facetious here? It makes me think he did not have a high opinion of dialectics or the role they might play in human interaction. Is this because he saw them removed from the day to day meaning making of social language?

Or is he differentiating between the theoretical discourse of dialectics – the stripping away of human emotion and intonation to reveal the construction of propositions or opinions – from dialogue, which would be about the formation of propositions or opinions through interaction. Dialectics would be arguing to establish a supreme or reductive truth, dialogue would be a process of engaging in revealing or constructing multiple truths.

Reflections from EPSE 317 class

I need to get the title of this class from the syllabus. Then I can write a short intro for this series of posts.

Issues of power

If we are going to understand the formation of resistance, opposition or acceptance of teacher educators, teacher candidates and teachers, to the use of digital technology in education, we need to understand issues of power that are embedded in making the transition from a pedagogic and a technological perspective. The privilege of dominant educational discourse needs to be investigated, deconstructed and reconstructed. These are complex relationships and there will be no single answer, method, or curriculum that will resolve it. Instead, it is going to be an ongoing process of inquiry, negotiation and discursive practice about meaning, representation, and the acquistion of knowledge. There are early indicators that these issues and opportunities are being discussed toward the formation of productive engagement. Concurrently, there are forces that seek to shut down or harness digital technologies in education, so as to perpetuate conventional notions of education, academic success, and the socio-economic sieve these practices enact. It is here that much work is needed, in the formulation of policies, practices and positions, that can truly change our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the ecological and cultural environs within which we live and work.

Multivoicedness of meaning

Bakhtin asked, “Who is doing the talking?” There is a deeply ideological implication in this question. In education, this question challenges the hegemonic notions of the identity of the teacher, the construction of the learner, and the relationship between these two roles. There will always be those who occupy positions of privilege in society, who feel threatened by those who do not share those positions. This is an irrational fear, based on the idea that ‘there isn’t enough to go around’. Somehow the success of others, the movement from deprival to contentment, is viewed as an encroachment on historical, cultural, and institutional conventions of occupation. Who gets to sit where on the bus? The real revolution that is underway in education is a contest for location. The threat and defensiveness arises from a belief that the status quo is ‘fair’, that the education system treats everyone with ‘equality’. My argument is that the system is patently unfair. When a grade 3 student has not mastered the alpha-numeric skills to make the transition from ‘learning to read’ until the end of grade 3 to being able to ‘read to learn’ starting in grade 4, that student is enduring a biased education system that has been shown to privilege students based on the socio-economic status of their families. Efforts to address alpha-numeric literacy are striving to shore up the inadequacies of the system in an effort to retain more of the students who are incapable of keeping up with external dictates of student development and ‘progress’. Digital technologies enable education, as a system, to re-conceive knowledge construction and learning beyond the printed page. They provide the capability of producing content knowledge that draws on a variety of voices, social languages, speech genres, and dialogicality. The boy who drew a detailed picture of a helicopter and described it to his classmates in a presentation, with the picture projected on a large screen for everyone to see, has demonstrated his knowledge of helicopters. He wasn’t able to write out his description, which was part of the assignment. He was ashamed of his lack of writing ability, and beginning to withdraw from the school community because he could see that he wasn’t ‘keeping up’ with his peers. He was beginning to act out in class, angry because the institution within which he was thrust for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, was a place that tortured him with his sense of inadequacy. His story is the story of the formation of the underclass, which is embedded in education. There is no good reason for this to continue. The use of digital technologies could give students, such as this grade 3 student, the ways and means to express themselves, to maintain engagement with their peers, to feel proud of their contribution to building knowledge in the class, instead of feeling ‘less than’. I guess this is what drives my passion to make a difference.

IRE – Initiate, Reply, Evaluate

This entry is an extension from the previous discussion of translinguistics. An example of discursive practice in education is the use of IRE as a model for designing instructional practices and learning activities. This practice embeds a univocal perspective, constructed by the teacher and transmitted to the students. Academic success, for the students, is being able to accurately demonstrate to the teacher that they have remembered the content of the lesson. Evaluation is based on a measurement of that accuracy. The use of digital technology in education does not guarantee an interruption of this system. In fact, it is being shown to reinforce transmissive teaching practices, if that is what the teacher wants to do. I think the disruptive force that digital technologies are bringing to the field of education does not have to do with how teachers choose to use digital technologies in their teaching practices, but the formation of social and individual identities that are occurring outside the classroom, which the students bring into the classroom with them. Authoritative, passive, static educational practices will not work on students whose experience of learning outside the classroom is informed by collaborative, active, dynamic knowledge building. One difference that digital technologies make in teaching and learning is the ease with with collaborative, active, dynamic learning activities can be facilitated in classroom contexts. Cultural, historical, institutional, social and political uses of digital technologies in students’ lives are affecting their mental functions as individuals. The cultural, historical, institutional, social and political instructional approaches that rely on students willing to comply with authoritative, passive, static learning experiences were constructed in a different time and place – industrial, modernist, hierarchic social systems. Those approaches are not going to work in a digital, knowledge-based economy because the needs of the participants – to be able to learn, construct knowledge, implement new practices responsive to changing conditions – are no longer in synch with those anachronistic structural systems.

Translinguistics

I think Bakhtin’s writing on linguistics and discourse analysis is going to be helpful in my effort to theorize the use of digital technology for teaching and learning in elementary education. One of the issues I am constantly facing is the relationship between pedagogy and practice with regards to the use of digital technologies. For example, two education instructors use digital technologies in their design of learning activities. Instructor 1 uses a powerpoint presentation in every class to provide notes, diagrams, pictures and short video clips to support the one hour lecture. That is the extent of the use of digital technology in that classroom setting. Instructor 2 gives the teacher candidates a variety of inclass activities that use digital technologies, including collaborative online resource collection, the use of digital video to collect data for presentations, the use of digital photography to explore concepts, and the use of digital audio for sharing knowledge. In an interview at the end of the term, both instructors will answer ‘yes’ to the question: Did you integrate digital technology into your teaching practice? In practice, yes, they did. From a pedagogic perspective, they used the digital technology resources in very different ways. For Instructor 1 it was used to maintain a transmissive / passive instructional approach that maintains the Instructor’s authoritative role and renders content as static knowledge. Instructor 2 used digital technology in a collaborative / active instructional approach that co-constructed teaching and learning roles. Instructor 2 facilitated teacher candidates’ research into content knowledge. The Instructor was no longer the authority of the content knowledge, and the content was represented as dynamic and uncertain, depending on the perspective from which it was presented.

Now, what I would like to do, is be able to reduce this concept to a simpler, shorter representation that would infer the complexity without embodying too much complexity itself. Is that possible?

Genetic domains

I have trouble with the use of the word ‘genetic’ in understanding these domains. I keep thinking of genetic code, which implies an architectural certainty, a scientific conception. This sets up an internal experience of cognitive dissonance, because the essence of the theory is that we are in states of flux at any given moment. Our perceptions and perspectives are informed by a dynamic processing of external stimuli and internal meaning-making. I don’t mind thinking of the domains themselves, the word ‘domain’ does not carry a reductive certainty. In my mind, domains transition, they don’t abruptly end with a well defined boundary. These domains are all about developmental phenomena, which are overlapping and intersecting. Perhaps I am reading the wrong meaning into ‘genetic’. If I think of it as genesis, or generative, rather than DNA, does that make a difference?