I was excited for this reading because it finally sounded useful! When I think of a handbook, I think of an operation manual or a compilation of information and facts on a certain topic. Handbooks are practical and useful to navigate life (e.g. my cryptic crossword handbook helps me decipher clues!) so if Fischer et al. are going to write a handbook on the learning sciences then count me in. While I’m mostly joking about my expectations of this week’s reading, I do think the title of this text is significant and something to remember as we dive deeper into the learning theories herein at play. Also, when I said useful in my opening sentence, the implicit assumption I made is that only texts with information directly relating to my life is worthwhile to read. I did this again, mostly joking, but I am becoming aware of how even my sense of humor might be grounded in situativity?
Chapter 1 was mostly a review, but there was one quote that stood out to me. Hoadley notes that “from an epistemological perspective, Dewey saw ‘an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education’ (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 20), and advocated for a holistic, pragmatic approach to the science of learning, while behaviorists like Tolman and Skinner saw human experiences as epiphenomenal and an invitation to pseudo-science.” (pg. 12) I hadn’t thought about the relationship between pseudo-science and socio-cultural learning, but I can kind of see what Hoadley, and effectively Tolman and Skinner mean. Learning is messy so measuring it, specifically quantitative, is challenging. There is an underlying assumption built in to Skinner’s thoughts that qualitative science is “pseuedo-science”, which I’m not sure about and makes me feel that kind of white supremacy ickiness but I digress. I wonder if there are specific challenges to applying (and advocating for) constructivism learning theory to the science classroom, because of how both science and Western education are routed in a respect for only quantitative data?
In Chapter 4, I really appreciated how the authors laid out knowing, transfer, and motivation for cognitive and socio-cultural theories. I specifically found the part about transfer interesting, since we talked a lot in class about this. Danish and Gresalfi point out that any socioculturalist would argue that “we routinely move from situation to situation with little effort or challenge. Thus, the question becomes one of accounting for this cross-situational fluidity.” (pg. 36) So basically obviously once you master tying your shoes, you can tie them anywhere. But it gets more complicated when you start to thing about contextualized learning. So for example, the author went on to talk about how you can account for this discrepancy by focusing “beyond the individual to include the contexts in which information is engaged.” (pg. 37) I guess I’m kind of confused why sociocultural perspectives are criticized for the loss of individuality due to the focus on the collective context, because I thought sociocultural perspective brought to the table that everyone’s learning is contextualized and everyone has prior experiences and everyone is different? I know I’m missing something here…
Lastly, I was intrigued to read about designing from both cognitive and sociocultural perspectives (the how-to part of the handbook…??). After reading that Cognitivists values, I recognized so many of my teaching moves from TAing and tutoring. I would design tricky problems to elucidate specific common misconceptions in a hope to make the topic more engaging. I would have loved “Big Data” to have some algorithm to specify what my students were missing commonly throughout all the problems, so I could generalize that knowledge, return it to them, and have them reapply it until they succeed. One thing I’m currently thinking about, but not enough to expand upon here, is if there is indeed a “right” theory, a best way to structure education let’s say, how might each camp of theorists prove theirs is correct to the other camp? Because I keep thinking ugh if only I could see into the brain to I could quantify EVERYTHING, but scientists always think that, it’s never true, and that would only really be a cognitive assessment. Would the assessments be so fundamentally different that you couldn’t convince the other camp that you’re correct? As I type this out I’m guessing this is what is currently happening…
Even after reading about Lee’s 1995 work on using signifying to teach literary interpretation, I might say this isn’t an authentic practice since it was still taught in the same teacher-students power dynamic method. Instead, the students always had this knowledge; they just didn’t use it because they didn’t know how to. So the solution is better teaching, specifically using real world examples like signifying. When we were talking in class, the part that kind of made sense was the order in which things would be taught in a class. So the “authentic” way is have them explore signifying as a phenomenon and form literacy skills from there, while the cognitive way would be to teach them a list of 10 top literacy skills and have them identify/synthesize/play with them in real African American spoken word texts. But both ways of teaching the lesson are more interesting to kids (I think?) than just reading the list and memorizing/writing random sentences to demonstrate mastery. The legitimate practice is also notable different than “fun sauce” sprinkled on top of a lesson where they write a rap about what they learned. I don’t know what my real point here is, except to deconstruct lesson styles based on theories, maybe.