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I like teaching. I think that that’s important to state up front for this post. I also enjoy working with students, like reading, and think that a classical education remains an optimal way of developing the analytic skills to approach the environments we are set withing. I also think that I have issues with how ‘literacy’ and ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Education 2.0′ are thrown about because these terms seem to have become unmoored from their historical anchoring points without clear attempts to re-anchor them.
The Role of Education
What is education for? I don’t necessarily mean that in a deeply philosophical sense (though my reply will certainly be encompassed by various educational theorems), but in a fairly direct sense - why do we educate ourselves and others? I want to pass away from an economic reason, and instead move to a slightly deeper level - I want to suggest that we learn in order to survive, to comprehend our environment, and (depending on the paradigmatic time that one’s finds themselves) for fulfillment and enjoyment.
Ordering the World
Educational systems find their origins in ancient Greece, where students were taught to exercise the mind and the body - honing both was essential to becoming an educated person. In the process, students were immersed in philosophical theories that were intended to explain substantial facets of the world, even where that explanation was a “we can understand X through the lens of Y”. The theories that dominated this period of time, and until fairly recently, were comprehensive, insofar as they provided full metaphysical systems that were intended to capture literally everything of any and all value. Even that which was valueless was caught by these systems, because the systems were capable of explaining the lack of value of those objects. As an example, when Christianity genuinely rules the metaphysical roost of the Western world, it was possible for a priest to make sense of, and respond to, the question “why did my husband die” in final terms that held meaning beyond the material world.
As more and more information was collected and converted into knowledge, it came to pass that certain things were labeled as not important, dangerous, wrong, or a host of other deviant names. The education system that was developed after the printing press’ inception, the system that the contemporary school system is predicated upon, placed high value on reading and ordering literary information. The role of literacy was to provide students with instruction on how to approach art and science and comprehend these increasingly complex systems. The catch, however, is that humans have been persistently adding to their knowledge-repitoire, to the point where it is now impossible for any one person to know everything about the world. This difficulty, as it relates to the present persistent accumulation of knowledge, (at least in part) stems from the transition to digital technologies.
Becoming Digital
With the rise of the electronic counting machines that made processing the America census more efficient, the West has becoming more and more infatuated with possibilities of the computer. Without IBM mainframes the Nazis would have been far less efficient in monitoring their death camps, banking would be a tiresome process that was more cumbersome for banks, and the Internet would lack much of the technology governing its routers. This said, without the digital database it would have been more challenging to collect and find as much information as one can now - whereas we once enjoyed privacy by obscurity, that obscurity is falling away from us like the scales of a great serpent, and as a result we need to analyze and process data, both about us and that affect us, much more rapidly than ever before. The collection of that data into ethereal data clouds that are separate from us, physically, but surround us, practically, have lent to the need for our students (and ourselves!) to develop sophisticated understandings of the technological superstructure that surrounds us all. Literacy, in this digital era, has taken on the connotation of ‘digital’ literacy - students need to know how to navigate search, how to find and process information, how to write on electronic media, when to avoid topics, etc.
The problem that has arisen, and the problem that I continue to find with much of the education literature of blog conversations that I watch, is that the narrative of digitality involves ‘efficiencies of comprehension’ - students need to learn how to process information. What most discourse on ‘efficiencies’ lies upon, however, is the capitalist metric that perverts what it touches when unrestrained by a constituted ethic. What ethic, in this age of seeming moral relativity, should guide the process of education? Surely we cannot impose any particular religious creed - doing so would threaten to disenfranchise the members of alternate creeds - just as turning to all-encompassing metaphysical claims similarly are insensitive to social difference.
Skills vs Philosophy
When a student is taught how to upload videos to YouTube, or how to create a ‘mash-up’, are they really being ‘educated’, or are they learning a set of useful skills? Clearly an educating environment sees the teaching of particular skills, but those skills ought to be in the service of something more substantial - skill-based learning alone isn’t enough, should we want to retain the notion of education as a transformative process. I think that the focus of education ought to align more closely around a conception of self-valuation, valuation that is guided by the teacher and can be approached through the lens of (in contemporary cases) digital technology. At the same time, I worry about the techniques that are often referred to - writing on a blog, creating videos, using social networking.
It’s not that drawing on any of these techniques is necessarily bad - far from it - but rather that instead of just allowing a technology into a classroom one needs to reflect on its implications and try to divine good reasons for deploying it. Is the aim to enhance communication for communication’s sake? Is it to do something ‘cool’, whereas another technique might have a stronger, though somewhat more ‘boring’, effect? Are core skills being given up to the alter of the new?
Literacy Has Transformed
I get somewhat unsettled whenever I hear an educator use the term ‘literacy’ in pretty well any sense. This isn’t because people don’t use it with a particular intent, but rather that the term itself is relatively archaic, and is commonly conjoined with the terms ‘digital’, ‘cultural’, or ‘media’. These aforementioned words are conjoined with ‘literacy’ whenever educators feel a need to differentiate what they are speaking about from ‘historical’ literacy - literacy now entails more that a simple scientific or literary comprehension and awareness. The concern that I have is that literacy was born from an ordering philosophical position - literacy campaigns were designed around the need to order media in particular ways - whereas it seems to me that contemporary ‘literacies’ aim to provide exposure to, rather than an understanding of, new environments that students find themselves in.
Let me take ‘digital’ media as an example, if I may. Briefly, my understanding is that digital literacy entails teaching students how to use a computer and, more substantially, how to search and find information and then create their information cells and nodes. This said, to teach students what are and aren’t appropriate sources of information, and what are and aren’t appropriate search methods, and what are and aren’t appropriate things to create things about, necessarily rests on an epistemological stance that is intended to order the knowledge available to students. This epistemological stance needs to be highlighted, not because it demonstrates a bias (which it almost necessarily will), but because it shows that a universalizing meta-principle of value remains behind the literacy campaigns of the present. ‘Digital literacy’, should mean nothing more than extrapolating that epistemology to a new environment, but what more often happens is that students are taught the skills used after realizing that epistemological position, rather than the position itself.
Thinking Smaller
The most obvious response (which I don’t buy, but that’s another post entirely) is that students aren’t able to grasp broad epistemologies, and our teachers aren’t capable of explaining it. I think that this is blatantly false (students aren’t dumb, and teachers aren’t inept fools), but lets suppose that the position is as fair as I’m told it is.
Were we to think ’smaller’ than epistemological foundations, then perhaps instead of teaching skills (i.e. how to use blogging software) teachers should focus on why we use particular environments for particular things. This has the advantage of teaching the epistemological stance through action, rather than through verbal communication. Moreover, it means that students aren’t learning ‘locked’ skills, or skills that are rooted to particular applications, but instead begin to think of how media can be use for best effect. This effect, however, shouldn’t be read as ‘the most efficient means of communication’, but as in ‘most personally transformative’. Under this metric, students would learn that a live performance holds differeny resonating effects in comparison to blogging, writing on the board, and creating digital music.
Smaller, in this case, means action - the explicit intellectual understanding of the epistemology is put at arms length from ‘action-based learning’. Action-based learning ensures that students remain engaged with what they are doing while developing and sharing present-day skill sets that satisfy the requirements for ’skill-based learning’. Skills are fine, so long as they are clearly in the service of a higher purpose which, in this case, means education’s transformative character.
What are your thoughts on teaching? What is the epistemological stance that informs learning, and do you think that it continues to have the ordering capacity of the past? Should it, and if not, how does one even conceptualize of education in a contemporary environment?
Technorati Tags: pedagogy, philosophy, epistemology
