Book: The Power of Pedagogy

Leach, J., & Moon, B. (2008). Pedagogy. In The power of pedagogy (pp. 1-7). SAGE Publications Ltd, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446212158.n1

https://sk-sagepub-com.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/books/the-power-of-pedagogy/n1.xml

Ch1

[Maria] Montessori … became convinced that many children who were labelled as ‘low ability’, or even ‘unteachable’, could, given the right pedagogic setting, achieve much more than societal expectations suggested. 

In North America, … John Dewey was beginning revolutionary work that was a reaction against the traditional US educational framework of memorisation and recitation. Education is not the preparation for life, it is life itself, he argued.

For Dewey, the role of the teacher was not to impose on children irrelevant tasks that would be potentially useful a decade later, but instead to identify each child’s interest, organise learning activities around its immediate and proximate use, and then step by step move the process in the desired direction. All so-called ‘traditional’ subjects such as reading, writing, history, spelling, arithmetic and science, were connected with one another. 

We start with the premise that good teachers are intellectually curious about pedagogy. Such curiosity requires an examination of values and beliefs as well as the strategies and techniques the teacher deploys.

…any understanding or theory of pedagogy must encompass all the complex factors that influence the process of learning and teaching. … Pedagogy is more than the accumulation of techniques and strategies, more than arranging a classroom, formulating questions, and developing explanations. It is informed by a view of mind, of learning and learners and the kinds of knowledge and outcomes that are valued.

… learning is a social process and thus it follows that any attempt to influence learning has to go beyond the characteristics of any individual learner to embrace all the influences that impinge on learning in their social settings.

… the development of knowledge is inseparable from the process of participating in a culture of practice.

…Pedagogy, …must build the self-esteem and identity of learners by developing their sense of what they believe or indeed hope themselves to be capable of. 

Chapter 2: Settings

Authentic pedagogy is always explicit about vision, values and educational purposes and addresses ‘big ideas’.

This unique learning environment that Beverley Caswell³ created in a primary classroom attached to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto evolved over many years.

Beverley also drew profoundly on a framework of ideas – a touchstone of ‘deep principles’⁴ – that both informed the decisions she made and the way she viewed her pupils and their huge potential for learning. These principles weren’t arrived at in a random or solo way. They were inspired by participation in an educational reform programme called Schools For Thought (SFT),⁵ that had been designed to apply research findings about the active and reflective or ‘constructivist’⁶ nature of learning to classroom pedagogy.

…any understanding or theory of pedagogy must encompass all the complex factors that influence the processes of learning and teaching.

… ideas about pedagogy – like knowledge in general⁸ – are shaped by those who devise them and the values they hold. 

We have found Lave’s¹¹ definitions of ‘setting’ and ‘arena’ helpful in creating this notion of a pedagogic setting. An ‘arena’ she defines as a physically, economically, politically and socially organised space in time. In this sense a school, college, hospital, home or workshop is an arena: an institutional framework existing independent of, yet encompassing, the individuals who work there on a daily basis. For those same individuals – for example the midwife in her training hospital, the pre-school child at home, the teenager following a physics course at his local college or the physics teacher responsible for that same course – the institution is a ‘setting’, a ‘repeatedly experienced, personally ordered and edited version of the arena’.

So while the principles of the Schools For Thought programme were originated by a community of university researchers, authentic pedagogy was being created by teacher participants and their learners through the redesign, over time, of their own classroom settings.

Any innovations that you, as a ‘proper’ pedagogical theorist, may wish to introduce will have to compete with, replace, or otherwise modify the folk theories that already guide both teachers and pupils. Your introduction of an innovation in teaching will necessarily involve changing the folk pedagogical theories of teachers – and, to a surprising extent, of pupils as well.¹²

In Bruner’s curriculum framework, knowledge is not in the content but in the activity of the person in the content domain, namely the active struggling by the learner with issues is the learning. Thus it was important for Bruner to begin the MACOS curriculum with the unknown as a means of stimulating children’s curiosity – in this case, it involved the study of baboon communities and the culture of the Nestlik Eskimos. This unknown was then related to the known: the child’s familiar culture (family, school, and so on) in exploring tool making activities, language, social organisations and the like, as a mechanism for understanding both the unknown and the known. Instructional methods included inquiry, experimentation, observation, interviewing, literature searches, summarising, defence of opinion, and so forth.¹³

The difficulty came in the acceptance of an inquiry-driven curriculum that did not ‘cover the basic content’. Some teachers expressed concern that there was a neglect of traditional skills, and there was a fairly widespread public concern that the students should actually be exposed to diverse perspectives and involved in inquiry that examined the basics tenets of US culture. 

Exploring pedagogy can embolden teachers, teacher educators and learners to act in ways that make a real difference, inspiring them to new levels of social and cognitive achievements often deemed impossible. Authentic pedagogy regards complexity as fun, ambitiously seeks adventure, and provides a vision to tread where no one else has gone before.

No one recognised the importance of context and the demands of the real world in creating new pedagogical theory more than the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire. Freire is one of the most influential thinkers about pedagogy of the late twentieth century.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) articulates the distinction between ‘banking’ education and ‘problem posing’ education. In the former by using the metaphor of ‘banking’ education, with students as empty bank accounts waiting for the teacher to deposit knowledge, he argues that the relationship between educators and students is ‘narrative’ in character. … By contrast, ‘problem posing’ education demands dialogue and the relationship between educator and learner becomes one of critical co-investigation.

Freire’s pedagogy has been influential in part because of the way it places individuals’ prior knowledge and experiences at the heart of pedagogy. Although this work has become known as ‘critical pedagogy’, Freire himself frequently referred to it as a ‘pedagogy of knowing’, for this radical pedagogy encourages the abandonment of traditional distinctions between knowledge and beliefs.³²

 Scholar teachers understand that pedagogy needs to be responsive to students’ needs and their lived contexts. ‘You can’t be a teacher if you don’t know anything’, Freire wrote candidly. ‘What the hell are you around for, if you don’t know anything? Just get out of the way and let somebody have the space that knows something … No teacher is worth [her] salt who is not able to confront students with a rigorous body of knowledge. That is not to endorse a banking education but to support the idea that teachers often provide students with knowledge that students then react to, reject, reinterpret, analyse and put into action.’³⁴

It is from this perspective that we can formulate two more characteristics for authentic pedagogy.

• Pedagogy acknowledges teachers as intellectuals
• Pedagogy is a complex interplay between theory and practice

• Pedagogy requires teachers to be researchers of their own settings
• Pedagogy seeks to bring out learners’ best selves, working with – rather than despite – institutional barriers such as race, class and gender.

Exceptional pedagogic frameworks always emerge out of the ‘double-bind’ of challenges and problems faced. Teacher educators at Fort Hare had the vision to transform rural education, yet the reality they faced was that a great many teachers were unqualified and were also working in challenging and remote conditions. They realised that in order to effect change they would first and foremost need to build teachers’ self-esteem and offer them a professional vision – that they could achieve highly, despite desperate circumstances. 

The growth of teachers’ confidence that they could be real agents of change, even in the most vulnerable communities, suggests two further characteristics of authentic pedagogy:

• Pedagogy acknowledges the intimate relationship between learning and learners’ identity
• Pedagogy must be relevant to all possible contexts

In this sense pedagogy provides concepts and a coherent discourse about learning, together with new ways of thinking and acting. It also provides a framework of techniques and procedures by which practice can be newly and objectively appraised: a toolkit for teachers and learners alike. But no two uses of such a toolkit will ever be the same. 

Chapter 3: Minds

We are all born into cultures and communities that harbour, often unspoken, ideas about the world around us. 

 An important segment of the dispositions we bring to a pedagogic setting is created by assumptions about the nature of the mind, and the way these influence the forms and limits of learning.

The question-and-answer style of interrogation of issues that is often termed ‘the Socratic method’ goes with the grain of contemporary ideas about the importance of learners verbalising their ideas. 

A deeper knowledge of the concept of mind, and in particular the implications for learning, would seem a central concern for teachers. We believe that an intellectual curiosity around the brain, the mind and learning should be part of the professional development of all teachers. We are cautious, however, about some of the claims now being made for the ways in which such knowledge could be incorporated into thinking about pedagogy. 

The extraordinary capacity of the brain, in particular our ability to think into the minds of others, to process and store intricate, overlapping shoals of knowledge, to retrieve information that has lain inaccessible for decades, is a product of the process of what has been termed ‘constructive evolution’.⁸

One of the leading analysts of the relationship between brain science and education, John Bruner, published a seminal article with the title ‘Education and the Brain: A Bridge Too Far’⁹ in which he argued that we simply do not know enough about how the brain works to draw educational implications from changes in synoptic morphology.

Through the first half of the twentieth century in Britain, the USA and Europe, the process of mental testing became increasingly influential. In Britain a number of key figures drove this movement. Francis Galton, the progenitor of the eugenics movement, believed strongly that natural ability like physical characteristics could be seen to follow a normal curve of distribution and those most eminent in society had the highest measure of such ability. Galton also maintained that such ability could be inherited. His work had a profound influence on people such as Charles Spearman, who was the first to suggest that intelligence as a whole could be represented by something he termed the ‘g’ factor which could be measured. His work in turn had a strong influence on Cyril Burt (who succeeded him at University College London), who in the 1920s and 1930s developed a range of tests that sought to measure innate ability and would therefore anticipate academic potential.

We now know that some of Burt’s research was based on falsified data,¹⁵ particularly where he used studies of twins separated at birth to propose the overriding importance of innate ability over subsequent nurture. However, at the time the perceived science of mental testing was hugely influential in the development of the school systems.

Perhaps most significantly for an understanding of pedagogy, the exercise of intelligence is not just seen as something that happens inside the head that can be contained within the individual. Rather the function of intelligence, the operation of any ability, crucially takes in social context, not least the network formed by friends and colleagues within which our lives are played out. In this conceptualisation our development and use of abilities need to take account of these wider factors in promoting individual growth – hence the recent use of terms like ‘distributed’ or ‘socially shared cognition’ in recent writings in this field. This socio-cultural approach will inform our exploration of pedagogy.²¹

One recent publication has examined the term ‘neuromyths’ in order to identify some ideas that appear to have overstretched the boundaries of evidence.²⁴ We think that three such myths are particularly relevant to teaching and, therefore, need rethinking. The first is the idea that the brain is divided into left and right, with the left holding more logical, problem-solving functions and the right the seat of more creative actions.

A second myth of particular importance to education and life-long learning is that our brains have optimum moments for development and that missing these can seriously distort mental and educational growth. There is some evidence that for specific areas of our sensory systems (sight, for example) there may be periods of rapid change. Looking at behavioural rather than neuroscientific evidence we have been able to discern a critical period for phonology (beginning with infancy and ending at around age twelve). There is also some evidence to suggest that the knowledge of syntax develops rapidly up to the age of 16. There is no evidence, however, for similar periods in respect of vocabulary. The acquisition of new vocabulary continues throughout our lifetime.²⁶

…third myth: that brain science points to the importance of ‘enriched environments’, for example in early childhood. as a means of encouraging synaptic growth and (by much extrapolation) subsequent educational achievement.

The Future: Can Education, Neuroscience and Psychology Work Together?

Some neuroscientists have even suggested that education might be considered as ‘a process of optimal adaptation such that learning is guided to ensure proper brain development and functionality’. This sense of increasing mutual interest underlies calls for a two-way dialogue between neuroscience and education that could helpfully inform both areas.

First, the brain’s baseline state is plasticity. Learning something new changes our brains. This plasticity is not confined to childhood and, among teachers for example, supports the notion of continuing and career-long professional learning. Second, the brain becomes ‘fine tuned’ by experience. And third, in a linked way, the long drawn out development of the brain depends upon a variety of environmental influences among which education can play an important part. All of which tends to give credibility to socio-cultural and social constructivist perspectives on learning, an important point we return to in Chapter 4.

…ability is not a fixed, singular concept, and potential rather than being seen as finite should be viewed instead as flexible and expandable. 

Distributed Intelligence

It’s useful to think of intelligence as distributed in three ways:

Physical We rely on physical artifacts as simple as note pads and as complex as computer-aided design systems and beyond to do various kinds of remembering and computing for us.

Social We do not typically think solo but in teams where different people bring different abilities to the mix and patterns of collaboration move the general enterprise along.

Symbolic We do not think in bare thoughts but thoughts clothed in symbol systems, including natural languages with their rich vocabulary of thinking-oriented terms and a variety of notational and graphic symbol systems.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for teaching today is to create institutional and pedagogic structures and settings responsive to the unpredictability, creativity and endless potential that the workings of the human mind bring to education.

Chapter 4: Learning

In the culture of classrooms (broadly conceived), whatever the setting, it is teachers’ and learners’ implicit, everyday habits and beliefs about learning that bed particular pedagogies down, that make them appear natural and inevitable and turn them into spontaneous reflexes and responses.

The main focus of ‘in the head’, or what some call the ‘symbol processing’ view of learning, is the individual’s mental processes, or a symbolic representation of the mind. Such a view separates the learner and the learning process from the environment by solely focusing on internal cognitive mechanisms. ‘Social’ perspectives, by contrast, view human development as being inseparable from the physical world and interaction with others. The main focus of this approach to learning concentrates on the social structures of the world and how these constrain and guide human behaviour and development. 

Imitation required that individuals develop pre-ordained, discrete skills and abilities, rather than an in-depth knowledge and understanding. Rote learning enabled students to uncritically acquire a canon of knowledge…

This approach also takes an acquisitional view of learning. Freire calls this ‘banking education’;²² Bruner, ‘computational’ or ‘information processing’.

Learning is seen to exist in the conditions that bring people together. In this sense it does not belong to individual students, but to the various conversations of which they are part.²⁶ Individually students may spend time trying to learn things, but this phenomenon pales before the fact that, however hard they try, they can only learn what is around them in the culture to be learned. This approach takes a ‘participatory’ view of learning. Freire calls it ‘conscientisation’. Bruner, the ‘socio-cultural view of learning’.

Some see this complex antinomy between symbolic and socio-cultural cognition as presenting educators with a ‘pedagogical dilemma’.²⁸ We suggest that these apparently paradoxical views, far from needing to do battle for supremacy, both play a role in our understandings about learning.²⁹ Indeed Bruner argues that symbol processing is crucial at different points in the learning process (for example, preceding and following interpretative meaning making) and that categorisation systems as the outcomes of such learning are essential to human development. 

In fact it is still rare for institutions or individual teachers to share explicitly a rationale for their particular approach to learning with students and their communities in the way that Fenway does. Research suggests³¹ 

f we believe that knowledge consists of pieces of information stored in the brain, then it makes sense to package this information in well-designed units, to assemble prospective recipients of this information in a classroom where they are isolated from distractions, and to deliver this to them as succinctly and articulately as possible. If, on the other hand, we accept that learning is primarily a socially situated practice, these traditional models do not look so promising. What might look more promising are inventive ways of engaging students in meaningful practices, of providing resources that can enhance their participation in a range of practices, of opening horizons so they can place themselves on learning trajectories they can identify with, and of involving them in actions, discussions and reflections that make a difference to the communities that they value.³²

Expectations

Acquisitional views of learning are frequently coupled to the notions discussed in Chapter 3 – that human ability is pre-wired, fixed, innate. Theories of innate intelligence, as we have seen, propose that individuals differ in the extent of their ability to understand complex ideas, learn from experience and engage in various forms of reasoning. From this perspective the human capacity to learn is implicitly denied, since each individual is seen to be endowed, as it were, with an engine of a given horse power: fixed, unchangeable and measurable, irrevocably setting precise and definable limits to learning and hence to expectations.³⁴ 

A major study of creativity shows that ‘all people are capable of creative achievements in some areas of activity, provided the conditions are right, and they have acquired the relevant knowledge and skills’.³⁸

Factors such as technical practice, persistence and motivation³⁹ for creative learning are largely ignored, factors that in turn depend on supportive learning communities that have high expectations of their members. Achievements in the field of music, for example, have been shown to flourish with encouragement, the personal ownership of musical instruments, early pleasurable (musical) experiences in one’s own family or with peers, and the approval of others (either peers or adults). 

If education cannot promote cognitive growth,… its whole purpose or direction is lost. We agree with Simon that pedagogy needs to start from an opposite standpoint – from what individuals have in common as members of the human species. This common feature is the human capacity to learn, what Amartya Sen calls human ‘capability’ and Bruner refers to as ‘agency’.⁴⁵ Research, scholarship and evidence, such as are discussed in the following sections, together underpin this view. Such a view makes it possible to have high expectations for all learners and to envisage a body of general principles for learning that are relevant for the majority of individuals.⁴⁶ The evidence therefore suggests that you can actually build better brains by the kind of intellectual learning they participate in.⁴⁷

Constructivism

Beverley Caswell acknowledges that constructivism, the theory underpinning the Schools For Thought programme she studied, strongly influenced her view of how students learn. This understanding significantly influenced and changed her practice. The notion of constructivism with its deep roots in ancient philosophy has been informed over time by a wide range of theoretical positions.⁴⁸ Jean Piaget and John Dewey were the first major contemporaries to develop a clear idea of constructivism as it might be applied to childhood development and classrooms.

At the heart of this process is discovery, and understanding is built up step by step through learners’ active involvement.⁵⁰ To understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with if in the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition. Thus Piaget placed activity and self-directed problem solving at the heart of learning.

From both a Deweyian and Piagetian perspective it is the nature and quality of learning activities and their impact on mental processes that are particularly important. Their work emphasised the need for learners to participate in problem solving and critical thinking about a learning activity that they find relevant and engaging. 

Although constructivism embraces many theoretical perspectives on learning and does not of itself suggest a particular pedagogy, it has nevertheless been influential in foregrounding the importance of ‘learning by doing and exploration’.

Problem solving and higher order thinking skills are deliberately facilitated through the careful selection of activities mediated by range of physical and cognitive tools.

This approach to learning impacts strongly on views of the teacher role. By emphasising the interaction between the learner and the activity, the focus moves away from the teacher and the content to learning mechanisms and learners’ cognitive processes. From a constructivist perspective, teachers need to adopt the role of facilitator,⁵⁴ with the critical goal being to support learners in becoming effective thinkers. Rather than assuming a didactic approach which aims to cover selected subject matter, the teacher as facilitator helps learners to reach the level of understanding. This dramatic change of role implies a totally different set of skills: from the teacher telling, to the facilitator asking; from the teacher lecturing from the front, to the facilitator supporting from the back; from the teacher giving answers according to a set curriculum, to the facilitator providing guidelines and creating activities designed to support and challenge learners’ thinking⁵⁵ and to arrive at their own conclusions. 

Their role is not to dispense knowledge but to provide students with opportunities and incentives to build it up.’⁵⁷ 

Intersubjectivity

Social constructivism largely emerged out of the work of Lev Vygostsky⁶⁰ and his colleagues, who emphasised what was at the time a radical and controversial idea: that learning was primarily a socio-cultural process.⁶¹ Meaningful learning, they argued, only occurs when individuals are engaged in social activities. Individual consciousness is built from the outside through our relations with others. From this perspective higher mental thinking is seen to develop through interpersonal communication mediated by shared psychological (language, sign systems and gestures) and physical tools.

 Learners, he argued, need to work with a more skilled and knowledgeable partner in joint problem solving within a ‘zone of proximal development’ (namely, the gap between learners’ unaided achievement and their potential achievement with the help of a skilled partner). Learning then occurs as learners internalise shared cognitive processes – by socially constructing meaning. 

Social constructivism has been translated into pedagogic principles that are highly varied in practice. Nevertheless, this view of the importance of inter-subjectivity and culture provides a singular take on the interrelationship between learning tasks and learners. The context in which learning occurs, the social knowledge learners bring and the nature of their dialogue and collaboration become critical. 

 This pedagogical approach requires active student participation and the perception that all participants’ voices will be taken seriously – something often denied to female students. 

When disagreements arise, instead of smoothing them over or simply dismissing them, further energies must be spent exploring why they exist. 

Participation

This radically different view of learning has become highly influential over the last decade, particularly through the joint work of social anthropologist Jean Lave and her colleague Etienne Wenger, who began his career as a teacher and then became a computer scientist 

 In some communities we are core and active members, in others we remain on the margins. When we intensively participate in activity with others this can be an empowering position. If we are deliberately kept – or indeed place ourselves – on the margins of a particular social group, this can be disempowering and inhibit learning in that setting. 

 In reality, however, a focus on social practice requires a very explicit focus on the individual learner, as person-in-the-world, as a member of various socio-cultural communities. Such a focus promotes a view of knowing as activity by specific people in specific circumstances. It looks at the whole person. It implies not simply engagement in discrete activities, but a relation to social communities. It implies becoming a particular kind of person.⁷⁶

A number of pedagogic principles can be derived from the vantage point of a participatory view of learning, …

• Learners take charge of their own learning.
• Teachers are model learners.
• The school embraces learners’ other communities, rather than setting up conflicts of identities.
• The curriculum builds on diversity and is embedded in meaningful activity; there are no artificial boundaries between subject matter and the social contexts in which it is useful.
• The curriculum is transparent; learners know where the curriculum is going and why, what there is for them to learn and what they will be able to do with it.
• The curriculum supports a view of learning as ‘deepening’, rather than accumulating, understanding.
• Grouping is according to task; ‘class’ size has no meaning in the abstract, since different activities call for different size of groups.
• Community resources for learning are taken advantage of.⁸¹

Distributed Learning

Research shows that today’s most successful communities – be they businesses, hospitals, marketing projects or English departments like Lucy’s – have one thing in common. They know how to transform individual expertise into collective knowledge. They are places where each individual contributes their particular expertise to a shared learning history. The creation of new knowledge is everyone’s most important work: joint learning leads to innovation and growth as well as creativity and the development of self-esteem on the part of individuals. Researchers often refer to this as distributed learning.⁹⁰ Indeed, Chris Dede predicts that distributed learning and knowledge-building communities will be the new paradigm of twenty-first century education.⁹¹ It is an integral aspect of a socially-situated view of learning and is our fifth theme.

Place

We have noted that participatory views of learning depend on the location and agency of learners in their local, overlapping communities. In this sense the location focuses on the quality of social structures that enable the learner to feel central or marginal, active or passive, empowered or disempowered, in the various groups to which they belong. From another perspective the importance oflocation, in the sense of physical places for learning (places that generate a sense of belonging) is key. 

In Maori pedagogy a child’s learning is seen as being at the centre of life and culture – a series of multi-faceted dimensions that need to be understood each in relation to the other. As indicated in the visual diagram above the unique life force and creativity of the child (Tamariki) are at the centre of the Maori pedagogic model, surrounded by radiating wheels integrating wide ranging local family, educational and cultural practices encompassed by the broader world and the universe (Te Aorangi).⁹⁴ Maori pedagogy emphasises that learning depends on these interlocking experiences and understandings being in balance – but such experiences must always be outward looking, moving the learner well beyond the familial and local to other experiences and new forms of cultures and expertise. ‘The university of ancient Hawaiiki⁹⁵ is the universe. Education in this context knows no boundaries’ This concept of learning environments as having limitless physical and intellectual boundaries is common to the practices of many settings described in this book, where learners are encouraged to participate in an ever-broadening trajectory that takes them well beyond the immediate physical classroom, enabling exploration of a wide range of possible worlds, knowledges and identities.

Paradoxically the importance of specific, local, physical places with clear boundaries is as integral to the Maori model of pedagogy as their concept of borderless learning. Specific places for learning include Kainga (the place of abode), the homestead where children’s early learning in families takes place; Whenua (the placenta or land⁹⁶), where children learn about their obligations to care for the environment and pass it on intact; Hui (congregate), the communal meeting place; Turangawaewae, an ancestral place where the child stands as of right, where her roots are deep; and Wharekura,⁹⁷ a building or area in which the learned impart knowledge. Teachers working in the Wharekura are seen as specialists accountable to the community they serve, always aiming at excellence and perfection. In contemporary New Zealand Wharekura is used in the Aoteoroa state system to denote ordinary state schools.⁹⁸

Social theorists in the Western hemisphere have made detailed analyses of the interaction of physical setting and learning. Numerous research studies, especially in the field of architecture, provide illustrations of how the physical elements of settings not only influence but also generate learning.⁹⁹ Three planes of analysis were identified in one study of schools:¹⁰⁰ the official school, including curriculum teaching materials and methods; the informal school, including the interactions in all areas of the school; and the physical school. 

Reggio Emilia’s philosophy of learning pays great attention to the quality of the immediate physical environment that learners experience and this is considered as a ‘third teacher’. In any planning of new spaces or the remodelling of old ones, the integration of each classroom with the rest of the school and the school as a whole with the surrounding community is always paramount. 

An important question about the learning places we create is ‘What does this environment teach?’

Narrative

The role of narrative as a mode of thought and meaning making has been an important strand in the view of learning held by thoughtful literacy teachers and specialists in literary theory, anthropology and history for more than half a century.

Such ideas became influential as a result of the work of Barbara Hardy, herself a literary theorist, who published a provocative essay on life and narrative in the early 1960s. This work was an early attempt to approach narrative in cognitive terms: narrative skills were seen ‘as a primary act of mind transferred to art from life’.¹⁰⁴ ‘What concerns me are the qualities which fictional narrative shares with that inner and outer storytelling’, she wrote, ‘that play a major role in our sleeping and waking lives. For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.’¹⁰⁵

Western conceptions of narrative implicitly assume forms of linearity, with beginnings and endings … narrative, however, can be conceived from different perspectives. 

 Certainly, as Bruner has pointed out, we would appear to organise and manage our knowledge of the world and to structure our immediate experience in two broad ways: through logical scientific thinking (an analysis of physical behaviour) and narrative thinking (an analysis of people and their predicaments).¹⁰⁸ No culture is without these approaches, although they clearly privilege them very differently. 

The transposability of narrative is useful in supporting students’ literacy development. For example, Romeo and Juliet can appear as a play in the theatre, or as a ballet, a cartoon, a musical, or a film – and in all these guises can still maintain a recognisable identity as a story about two feuding families whose respective children fall in love. Narrative, then, is not media specific. 

Affirmation

 The notion of affirmation … emphasises the importance of a positive approach to the process of assessing learning, while underlining the role of public endorsement of such an assessment.

 A key concept within traditional Xhosa culture is ubuntu, a concept that encapsulates a view of learning and development as being inherently social and community-centred rather than individualistic. It takes seriously the view that we are social beings and reflects a world-view that might be best summarised as humanness: a person is a person through other persons. This notion of ubuntu serves as the basis for a morality of co-operation, compassion, community (spiritedness) and concern for the interests of the collective and for the dignity of personhood, all the time emphasising the virtues of that dignity in social relationships and practice. As a result the Xhosa people have a powerful tradition of democratic debate that always impresses newcomers.

 Performance assessment demands that learners exhibit what they know and what they can do with what they know in a real time dimension. At its best it is also an important opportunity to validate, affirm and celebrate learning. To teach for performance is to believe in the capacity of learners to create and construct knowledge and to assign meaning and praise for what they have learnt and experienced. This approach to assessment for learning has also been called ‘teaching for understanding’. The importance of the approach lies in its potential to enhance students’ abilities for problem solving, critical analysis, higher-order thinking, or flexible understanding of academic subject matter.

Four key concepts include: Generative Topics,¹¹⁵ Understanding Goals,¹¹⁶ Understanding Performances,¹¹⁷ and Ongoing Assessment.¹¹⁸ This framework, in reflecting con-structivist beliefs about learning, assumes that teachers have a deep knowledge of their subject as well as pedagogical knowledge. It also assumes a knowledge of the learner and presumes new strategies of classroom interaction.

Authentic student work possesses three qualities. First, it involves the production of knowledge in the form of discourse (conversation or writing), the production of things (objects), or performance (as in music, dance, athletics, or other public demonstrations of competence). Second, authentic work relies on disciplined inquiry, namely the use of a prior knowledge base, in-depth understanding, and the integration and use of information in new ways. Finally, authentic student work has value beyond evaluation as it possesses aesthetic, utilitarian, or personal value for the student.¹²⁰ The ultimate value of authentic student work and assessment is that it enhances student engagement and motivation, tends to sustain hard work, and should cultivate high order thinking and problem solving. 

As part of the Harvard research, Stone Wiske¹²¹ worked alongside teachers to develop and evaluate a range of pedagogic approaches to Teaching For Understanding in the classroom.

She articulates some of the dilemmas involved in developing any such curriculum framework. The need for clear learning goals, for example, became apparent when teachers attempted to assess students’ performances but it was not always easy to extrapolate these.

For Wiske and her colleagues the key question for teachers in the programme is what do you want your students to understand by the end of the term or year in your class? 

The Assessment for Learning research project in the UK¹²⁷ has also been concerned with learning mechanisms that encourage student understanding within a supportive, affirmative climate. It has focused particularly on micro strategies that teachers can develop in relation to three specific areas of activity: questioning in the classroom, feedback through marking and peer and self-assessment. This research shows first that where teachers allow a longer ‘wait time’ during whole-class discussions, students soon realise their learning depends less on their capacity to spot the ‘right’ answers and more on their readiness to express and discuss their own understandings.

A second focus of this research is the role of quality feedback on students’ oral and written work, as distinct from the awarding of grades. The research indicates that when teachers abandon marks, students begin to engage more productively in improving their work in response to detailed, focused, comments.

Transformation

While social theories of learning will provide rich insights for pedagogy, in common with cognitive theories these fail to adequately account for developments of the new, the radical, or indeed for the kind of creativity that inspires new movements across the arts, sciences and humanities. Over the last decade, Yves Engestrom¹²⁹ has reinterpreted a theory of learning that combines cognitive and social views of learning¹³⁰ to develop his theory of ‘learning by expanding’. This work is important, because unlike other learning theorists Engestrom is chiefly preoccupied with ways in which completely new forms of learning, change and innovation occur, especially in the workplace.

In the kinds of learning identified by the constructivists, learners need to be faced with a problem and then to try to solve that problem. 

Engestrom stresses that where people learn to do things they have not done before, Vygotsky’s zones of proximal development are more properly interpreted as a collective rather than individual phenomena. The new is a collective invention in the face of felt dilemmas and contradictions that impede ongoing activity and impel movement and change.¹³⁴ An essential feature of this view of learning is the notion that developmental processes do not coincide with learning processes. Rather, the developmental process lags behind the learning, as was Vygotsky’s thesis. This view of learning has also much in common with Freire’s view of conscientisation, in which ‘problem posing’ rather than problem solving education demands that the dialogue and the relationship between educator and learner become a critical co-investigation into real-world dilemmas.

Chapter 5: Knowledge

Knowledge profoundly influences pedagogy. And pedagogy can transform knowledge in myriad ways. This symbiotic relationship is central to any understanding of pedagogic processes and ambitions. Knowledge is intrinsically linked to the way our minds make sense of the world. 

Knowledge can too easily become a commodity, almost literally information for delivery to the empty head. A wider and more generous interpretation of knowledge allows a special relationship between the education of children, or others, and the growth of knowledge. To know more and better does not seem to be one among several kinds of mental activity. It has a privileged place.

 Paul Hurst, for example, has argued that all knowledge is of the ‘knowing that’ variety and that the distinction cannot be made. ‘Knowing how’ knowledge, he argued, is essentially ‘knowing that’⁴ plus experience. 

 In the CSILE project in Ontario, the ideas of Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia have been influential and central to thinking about the forms of pedagogic settings.⁶ They suggest a five-fold distinction:

• formal knowledge;
• procedural knowledge;
• informal knowledge;
• impressionistic knowledge;
• self-regulatory knowledge.

The first two categories repeat the ‘knowing that’/‘knowing how’ distinction. Informal knowledge is somewhere between the two. It represents knowledge we use in problem solving but somehow cannot formulate in words. Others have referred to this as tacit knowledge. 

The Women’s Ways of Knowing Project focused specifically on the ways women think. Culminating in a book entitled Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind, Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jill Mattuck Tarule analysed and coded 135 in-depth interviews that asked women about their gender, their relationships, their ways of knowing and their moral dilemmas.

From their research, they formulated a theory consisting of fives types of knowing by which women perceive themselves and approach the world. They saw that the ways that women think about education and learning also affect their self-perception.

The first of these ways of knowing is silence, that by blindly following authority and sticking with stereotypes provides a very hard time in defining oneself.

Next is received knowledge, where one listens to the voices of others, followed by subjective knowledge, where one listens to oneself and severs the sense of obligation to follow other views.

The next category is procedural knowledge, consisting of connected knowing and separate knowing. Connected knowers believe that truth is personal, particular, and grounded in firsthand experience. They attempt to find truth through listening, empathising, and taking impersonal stances to information, whereas separate knowers completely exclude their feelings from making meaning rely and strictly on reason.

The last way of knowing that Belenky et al. define is constructed knowledge, where one integrates one’s own opinions and sense of self with reason and the outside world.

Twelve Principles of Knowledge Building

• 1Real ideas and authentic problems In the classroom as a knowledge building community, learners are concerned with understanding based on their real problems in real world.
• 2Improvable ideas Students’ ideas are regarded as improvable objects.
• 3Idea diversity In the classroom, the diversity of ideas raised by students is necessary.
• 4Rise above Through a sustained improvement of ideas and understanding, students create higher level concepts.
• 5Epistemic agency Students themselves find their way in order to advance.
• 6Community knowledge, collective responsibility Students’ contribution to improving their collective knowledge in the classroom is the primary purpose of the knowledge building classroom.
• 7Democratising knowledge Every individual is invited to contribute to knowledge advancement in the classroom.
• 8Symmetric knowledge advancement. A goal for knowledge building communities is to have individuals and organisations actively working to provide a reciprocal advance of their knowledge.
• 9Pervasive knowledge building Students contribute to collective knowledge building.
• 10Constructive uses of authoritative sources All members, including the teacher, sustain inquiry as a natural approach to sustaining their understanding.
• 11Knowledge building discourse Students are engaged in discourse to share with one another, and to improve knowledge advancement in the classroom.
• 12Concurrent, embedded and transformative assessment Students take a global view of their understanding and then decide how to approach their assessments. They create and engage in assessments in a variety of ways.⁸

Pedagogy, as Brian Simon has strongly articulated,²¹ begins with a formulation of what has to be known, namely the process of defining the objectives of teaching, and from this pedagogical means can be defined and established. This approach, as we have indicated, is the opposite of basing the educational process solely on learners, and their immediate interests and spontaneous activity, with the futile search for a total differentiation of the learning process on an individual basis.

Pedagogy is a social, collective process. It requires an engagement with groups as well as individuals, and learning expectations that go beyond the personal. 

 In particular, overzealous and mechanical interpretations of Piaget’s developmental psychology had a distorting influence on the pedagogic models and the ideas of many teachers, particularly in the early primary years. One of the strongest critics of this organic view of development, Lev Vygotsky, argued that the approach led to a pedagogical pessimism.²² InVygotsky’s view, if a child showed an incapacity to deal with or insufficient understanding of a certain field, one should concentrate every effort on this deficiency and compensate for it through pedagogic means.

It was this idea that so influenced Jerome Bruner. His seminal text published in 1960, entitled The Process of Education, argued that schools waste a great deal of people’s time by postponing the teaching of important areas because they are deemed ‘too difficult’. Bruner began with the hypothesis:

that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

And from this Bruner derived two important ideas. The first was the importance of making structures in learning central to the pedagogic process:

the learning and teaching of structure, rather than simply the mastering of facts and techniques, is at the centre of the classic problem of transfer … If earlier learning is to render later learning explicit, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible. (page 12)

The second was the concept of the ‘spiral curriculum’, whereby a curriculum as it develops should repeatedly revisit the basic ideas that make up the general picture, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them. It was this approach that led to the controversial MACOS project…

… in creating a curriculum we have to be aware of the way the relations of power influence our designs.

… strident debates about the organisation of the science curriculum [in secondary schools]. Should the curriculum be organised around topics like global warming or environmental problems rather than physics, chemistry or biology or earth sciences? And if it were the latter, what curriculum weight should be given to each?

In other words you do not acquire ‘the knowledge’. Rather knowledge building is a social process which may precede the appropriation³⁰ of certain skills and understandings into a personal repertoire.

Chapter 6: Toolkits

concept of a ‘toolkit’: the multifaceted, shared, repertoire of values, concepts and dispositions, stories of practice, rituals and protocols, together with physical tools and artefacts, from which individuals and groups make differing selections in order to construct lines of activity and forms of life.⁴ 

…the importance within pedagogy of symbolic tools of the mind,⁵ particularly language and the notion of learning mechanisms such as heuristics and other conceptual tools

Learning to be an historian, scientist or storyteller is not the same as learning science/history/drama: instead, it is learning a culture with all the attendant non-rational activity and meaning making that is facilitated by imaginative toolkits of practice. 

…tools characteristically play a double role: as means to act upon the world and as cognitive scaffolds that facilitate such action.¹⁸

Vygotsky used the term ‘higher functioning’ when referring to thought processes that are supported by material and symbolic tools in combination. While pole-vaulter and pole together enable individual athletes to achieve great physical leaps, shared languages and numerical signs – the tools of thinking – enable whole communities to hypothesise, conjecture, theorise, and guess.²³ Researchers across a range of disciplines can take unique and creative cognitive leaps when using statistical tools in combination with a socially-shared symbol system. In mathematical practices, for example, history shows that increasingly sophisticated activity has been afforded by the gradual adoption of new instruments – from mental arithmetic, to paper and writing implements, abacus, slide rule, mechanical calculator, electronic calculator, computer software. 

None of the mathematical instruments mentioned above, for instance, exists independently of the culture and context in which it was created. A mathematical tool such as an abacus or calculator only becomes a useful instrument when someone appropriates it for herself and integrates and directs it towards some relevant purpose. Such appropriation is never simply an individual process. In the maths classroom, for instance, calculators only take on a social meaning when both the teacher’s and the students’ responsibilities are engaged.

Research shows that students who read texts with a computer ‘Reading Partner’ often became better readers of novel, print-based texts and also better essay writers, apparently as a result of having learned to be more self-regulating by following the tool’s original model. 

This distinction between with and of the tool in some senses parallels the contrasting cognitive/acquisition-oriented and social/participatory views of learning. 

For example, weekly faculty meetings (or staff meetings in primary schools) are traditionally used to inform, to consolidate roles and relationships, and to confirm shared routines, processes and the allocation of resources. So often these become inflexible rituals in the teacher’s toolkit of daily practice. Brighouse suggests teams abandon traditional agendas and venues for a period of time and physically relocate meetings to teachers’ classrooms, rotating to a different classroom each week. Take time to critique the physical setting itself. Is the space conducive to learning? Is it a stimulating, resource-rich environment? Make the main point of focus of each meeting the progress of three or four students selected by the host teacher. Analyse these students’ work and evaluate the feedback they are being given on their learning. Discuss points of failure and their achievements. In this way new approaches and insights will emerge that will extend existing repertoires. These can include the introduction of innovative teaching strategies, a selection of new tools to support specific learners, the use of a new technology or the introduction of a new class reader or more appropriate resource.⁴⁸

Over time, as part of our research, we have identified six ways⁶³ by which we can consider the differing roles that new technological tools play within the toolkits of practice and pedagogy. These are:

• Informational tools supporting the process of knowledge building within student and teacher communities.
• Communicative tools creating and sustaining the kind of coherence and ongoing collaboration that support a community of practice. For teaching communities these can be particularly important in overcoming professional isolation and challenging ossified practices.
• Tools of the discipline enabling teachers of whatever subject or age group to develop more effective teaching of core disciplinary concepts, extending the range of tools available within the subject and offering a wide range of new opportunities and contexts for learning that is grounded in authentic practices outside the school environment.
• Productivity tools allowing students and teacher professionals to carry out everyday tasks more effectively. Many generic software tools (word processors, desk top publishing, presentation software, spreadsheets, and so on) can be used to develop and store the kind of artefacts essential to teachers’ practice, such as lesson plan templates, presentations for governors, and parents’ newsletters.
• Pedagogic tools focusing explicitly on supporting, developing or changing a student’s or teacher’s understanding of a concept, aiding collaboration and situating a student’s or teacher’s own practice in a specific context.
• Research tools providing teachers and students with access to authentic electronic data as well as to systematic research evidence. These allow hitherto separately bounded research- and school-based communities to connect. Teachers experienced in the key concerns of schools and classrooms can work alongside colleagues experienced in the processes, tools and discourse of research practices.

Chapter 7: Identities

…essential attributes of identity that we see as key to the building of such esteem.

The first of these attributes of identity we call voice: this concerns the process by which we take control of our lives, our activities and who we want to be. The second is relationships, a key element of identity but so often underestimated in the development of self-image and esteem. The third is community, introduced as a theoretical concept in Chapter 4. That subtle combination of people, place and joint enterprise that enables us to define, construct and affirm (or not, as the case may be) who we are. The fourth attribute, also discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to learning, is language, the most intimate, personal manifestation of our selves, our communities and our ways of meaning making. The fifth is imagination, which allows us to envision what we – and our communities – might in the future become, enabling the gradual modification of mindsets, shared beliefs and activities that can lead to wholly new identities and ways of being. 

First, voice. Developing the human potential to be proactive, problem orientated, attentionally focused, constructional, and directed to ends⁵ would seem to be a key focus of pedagogy.

Teacher research continues to be underrepresented in professional publications, which is understandable given the hectic nature of professional lives that requires such full-time energy. 

The second attribute of identity that we want to point to flows naturally from the first, that is relationships.

Teachers who are approachable, who create these little moments of time to listen, are also likely to gain our trust. 

How are relationships created and sustained in institutions like schools, colleges or teaching hospitals? Leadership plays a role, but often at the outset when establishing personal commitment as well as supportive protocols and procedures. Thereafter, within a shared and open framework, trust can be built. It’s a good feeling. There is nothing accidental, however, about its origins and in formal institutions developing quality relationships a sense of trust has to be worked at. Providing a ‘voice’ for learners, as discussed in the previous section, is important. It implies empathy and understanding and a recognition of the affective and emotional dimensions of human learning and development.²¹

Reggio Emilia’s pedagogy sets great store by this, seeing the interrelat-edness of the affective and cognitive processes as being key to young children’s development.

Paulo Freire also appealed in his pedagogic writings for humility on the part of all educators in light of a huge need for mutual respect between teacher and learner. He believed there were six essentials for successful educational dialogue: love, humility, faith, mutual trust, hope, and critical thinking. His notion of a pedagogy of love demanded that the teacher must always begin with a deep respect for all students, and for what they could bring to dialogue that would make it richer for everyone. Such love cannot exist in a relation of domination, he argues, it is an act of courage not of fear, a commitment to others. By talking simultaneously about reason and knowledge, and about love and hope, Freire brought together the interrelatedness of cognitive understanding and sensitivity

There is a profound connection between identity, self-esteem and our third attribute, community. We often think of identity as being about developing a sense of self. But identity is essentially also a social process, for who we are, as we have seen throughout this book, lies in the way we live day to day and the people we care about, interact with (or don’t), and the projects’ we share. This experience of identity within a community is a way of being in the world and for any given individual there will be a plurality of overlapping identities – a plurality that can frequently be a source of stress and a contradiction in both our self-representation and social action. 

Interns’ evaluations of their year of study show their growing awareness of their own and their students’ identities in broad terms of ‘growth’ and esteem rather than in conventional, one-off, summative academic outcomes:

I can’t judge the success of my teaching. I know I am definitely doing a lot of good things, but I think the success will come when I see my kids off to college. I want them to be competitive in the world outside of school.

I don’t know how I’m going to judge my successes. It’s not going to be what the teachers next year say about me or my students. It’s not from tests or quizzes. It may come from the students choosing a piece of writing that they did during the year that they feel really proud of.

A fourth attribute of identity is language. If there is anything so automatic in our lives that it is difficult to achieve real consciousness about, then it is the inseparability of language and identity. We live in language and, like fish who (according to the proverb) will be the last to discover water, have difficulty grasping what it is like to ‘swim’ in language.

Whatever our home language, it is a symbolic tool: a system of sounds, meaning and structures with which we make sense of the world. It also functions, as we have seen in previous chapters, as a tool of thought, as a means of social organisation, as the repository and means of transmitting knowledge, and as the raw material of literature. It is the creator, sustainer, and destroyer of human relationships. And so because language is a fundamental feature of any community, it is a central aspect of a person’s sense of social identity.³⁵

Imagination is our fifth attribute of identity, of our understanding of the world and our place in it. It can not only make a big difference to our experience of identity, but also in how we view our own and others’ potential for learning and development.

Imagination enables us to expand ourselves out of the limits of time and space so we can create new images of the world and our place in it.

 Wenger has suggested nine processes that support the work of imagination, many of which are illustrated by this and other case studies in this book:

• recognising our experiences in others, and standing in someone else’s shoes;
• defining a trajectory that connects what we are doing to an extended identity, thus seeing ourselves in new ways;
• locating our engagement in broader systems of time and space;
• sharing stories, explanations, descriptions;
• opening access to distant practices through excursions, visiting, talking, observing;
• assuming the meaning of foreign artefacts and actions;
• creating models and representational artefacts;
• documenting historical development, events and transitions, and reinterpreting histories in new terms;
• generating scenarios, and exploring other possible worlds and identities.

But it was to be the work of Jean Lave that was to really capture our imagination in the mid-1990s and influence our emerging model of teacher development. We began to recognise that any conceptualisation of professional knowledge needed to be rooted in a social theory of learning. Lave’s research underlined the way in which cognitive change was an attribute of situated pedagogical relationships in particular settings and contexts.⁴⁸