I find that I ramble all too easily so I’m going to try my best to keep this brief to spare Scott and my group mates.
Brown
Brown says, “It is clearly romantic to suggest, as do J. S. Brown et al., that students in public schools be enculturated into the cultures of mathematicians, historians, and literary critics. For a start, practitioners of these callings do not as a rule populate schools; teachers of these subjects may be consumers of the outputs of these disciplines, but they are rarely practitioners. History teachers are seldom historians. Practicing mathematicians infrequently teach high school, let alone grade school. (p. 189)”
This was something I brought up earlier in the semester. A problem I had was that some of my teachers didn’t even know the material they were teaching. Granted, Brown takes it a bit further than I was willing to take it, because I’m not sure exactly what sets apart a historian from a history teacher apart from the field research they conduct. But again, that same argument could probably be made about any teacher in any subject. I’m not necessarily claiming that instructors should be practicing experts, but I do believe that in my experiences my teachers could have been far more knowledgeable on their subjects.
It’s really tough for me to even make it past the first few pages because there are so many quotes that I’m really enthusiastic about. I’ll pick one more and move on to the next author.
“If it is not to apprentice children to the traditional academic disciplines, what is the purpose of schooling? (p. 189)”
Again, I don’t know if I’m 100% on board with this, but it’s really got me thinking. For some reason I feel some sort of connection to this theory of apprenticeship, but I still feel like it’s too uninformed a decision. But I’ve felt this way about so many of the different learning theories we’ve gone over. This does contradict Lave and Wenger, because they would argue that the purpose of school is for students to view their educational society around them, and witness how the other students learn. Or perhaps L&W would argue that students should simply be out in the field, learning first-hand. Maybe they would recommend a combination of the two? It’s all so enticing!
Driver
“There is an important point at issue here…presenting is in conflict with learners’ prior knowledge schemes.(p. 7)”
This is a long paragraph and would take a while to type it all out. But basically, what I’m getting from this paragraph is that learning is, indeed, a social mechanism, and the role of the teacher is to act as an intervener, offering guidance along the way. I think so far, this may be my favorite “explanation” of the process. After reading all of the articles so far, I’m sold on the thought that learning is a societal mechanism. Learning can not be done solely on an individual basis. But I think this is so far my favorite distinction of the teachers’ roles. I’m very nervous that I will end up taking my role as teacher too far, and become more of a babysitter than a form of guidance.
Pea
With Pea, I get what he’s trying to say. I just don’t think I agree with how he says it. Yes, I do think intelligence can be acquired. But I’m not sure one can necessarily quantify it, which is one reason why I have a problem with standardized exams. I understand that intelligence can be “distributed” in the sense that many people can share the same intelligence, or knowledge, or whatever. Again, I get what Pea is doing, just not sure if this is the way I would go about explaining the learning process.
I guess that was brief?
Tags: thegroup
I’m on board with Brown et al when they say that it’s impractical to think that students should be apprentices of all subject areas taught in school. I still don’t see how they thought it was feasible.
I also liked Driver et al’s article. It helped me to see that the way in which you phrase a question can have a big impact on student’s learning.
It was really refreshing to me to see a role for teachers in these readings after looking at situated cognition (particularly), where I felt like the whole idea of teaching as a profession was a joke. Seeing you mention this helps me figure out some of my discomfort with the earlier theory.