N I T E RI OR
MA TE RI
AL BrainBody
Development mind emotions morals
Stimulus response
Figure 7.5 The collective domain can be divided into interior and material domains Of late, with the massive rise to popularity of post-modernism there has been a strong focus on symbolic meaning, often at the cost of material inequalities and realities. What you have to watch out for are radical positions that explain everything in education through a single domain. This is surprisingly common, with some arguing that our learning is basically explained by how the brain works. Others argue that education only makes sense when put in the context of class struggle, or that it is the mind of an individual learner that constructs all of reality; while some point to social interaction as providing the secret key to understanding education.
We can visually catch these dreams of omnipotence in figures 7.6 to 7.9.
It’s one thing to make your area of specialisation the most important aspect of your professional life; another to project it as the answer to all of education’s problems.
Just as bad are trite forms of integral holism where everything counts and you can get away with an ‘it’s complex’ line, where as many factors as possible are thrown together into a mushy, sloppy soup. There is real hard work in deducing how the brain and mind interact, social and psychological factors inter-relate, and social structure and social meaning interdepend; how the outside becomes the inside, and the inside the outside. These are some of the hardest questions that currently face us. Piaget was one of the most gifted polymaths of the twentieth century who spent decades attempting to master the human and natural sciences to understand how we learn, working between individual and collective forms of learning knowledge,
INDIVIDUAL
and between our physical and interior adaptation mechanisms. All of it was a mystery to him and certainly a simple four quadrants with a climbing mechanism inside each would not have solved any of his problems.
Figure 7.6 Social structural explanation dominates
Figure 7.7 Social interaction explanation dominates
But we all have to start somewhere, so I have written this book as a start-up. There is merit in trying to make a starting point as simple as possible while still getting at the essential structure and that is what I tried to do by making two elementary distinctions and then travelling around in the spaces they produced. I did not interrogate the nature of the distinctions, the difficulties of boundary crossings, or the way the spaces are intimately tied up with each other. I don’t want to leave
Physical body/brain Individual mind
Social interaction Social structure more important than
Physical body/brain Individual mind
Social interaction Social structure more important than
you with an oversimplified comment that all the quadrants work together in a complex way, or that they give you everything you need to imagine the varieties of educational experience. This book is a primer. It prepares the surface for the study of education and puts in place a small amount of dynamite so that the main explosive event can happen. It is a first book of elementary distinctions that enables the educational imagination to begin its travels. It is written for someone interested in the way the study of education works. It provides two simple distinctions between individual/collective and material/interior to make sense of it all; and a basic rule that helps an education student to climb through its basic levels and not get lost by travelling too far into the worlds of psychology, sociology, philosophy, economics, linguistics, geography, politics and other human sciences.
Figure 7.8 Physical body/brain explanation dominates
Figure 7.9 Individual mind explanation dominates Physical body/brain Individual mind
Social interaction Social structure more important than
Physical body/brain Individual mind
Social interaction Social structure more important than
This forces a half apology from me. Although Boundaries of the Educational Imagination stands in its own right as an introductory primer to the educational imagination, it is best used with Cracking the Code and Conceptual Integration.
Here comes the other half of the apology. In no way do these three texts and the practices contained in them provide the educational imagination with everything it needs to function. A playing of educational scales, a combinatorial matrix of education variables and the metaphoric combination of different inputs do amazing things for the development of an educational imagination, but none provide an ethical heartland that gives the grounding principles behind why we educate and are so passionate about it. A full educational imagination is able to do more than recognise different possible variations of educational experience, walk through its assorted levels and conceptually blend different inputs. It is able to negotiate the ethical principles that sit behind matrices and levels and light them up from a deep backdrop. More than this, it should be able to imagine how different ethical principles operate in different ways and politically negotiate a path through them depending on the situation at hand. But that is to anticipate The Good Fight, to which I now turn.
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Endnotes
1 There are complications and caveats to this simple picture. Many countries in the South are on a strong upward developmental path, like the BRICS countries; while some countries in the North are on a strong downward path, like Greece and possibly Italy and Spain. Others have become failed states or descended into war. Take a look at the table below. It is based on a fascinating attempt by the United Nations to rank all the countries of the world on a human development index (HDI). At http://hdr.undp.org/en/
statistics/ you will find an excellent website that uses three basic dimensions (health, education and income) to rank countries from best to worst on a HDI. I selected seven countries, the five BRICS and the highest and lowest country. The bold figures are final scores based on a combination of key indicators in each component (for education it consists of indicators like public expenditure, expected years of schooling of children, adult literacy rate and mean years of schooling of adults). The bottom figure in brackets provides one key indicator inside each component.
Rank Country Health
Rank Country Health
Each country has a different education story to tell and we shall explore a country level focus later on in this chapter, but the key point is that there are other organising logics that run in complex parallels with education.
2 http://www.sacmeq.org/visualization-research.htm.
3 The Southern and Eastern Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) has conducted three projects across the region in the last few decades. The first (SACMEQ 1) ran from 1995 to 1998, the second from 1998 to 2004 and the third from 2005 to 2010, with the numbers of students, teachers and schools increasing each time. SACMEQ I involved seven countries, 20 000 learners and 1 000 primary schools; SACMEQ II had 40 000 learners, 5 300 teachers and 2 000 primary schools; and SACMEQ III studied 15 countries with 61 000 learners, 8 000 teachers and around 2 700 schools (Spaull, 2011, p. 40). There are problems with the validity of the tests as the South African versions were available only in English and Afrikaans, thus putting most students at a disadvantage to other countries testing in home languages.
4 http://www.sacmeq.org/visualization-research.htm.
5 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/about-us/how-we-work/
mission/.
6 http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012_07_01_archive.html.
7 This open-access work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 2.0 Germany, which permits use, reproduction and distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. See http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/.
8 This does not mean that mass education only began in the nineteenth century, but Tau would not have been able to see it clearly from above. After the Reformation there was a concerted attempt in Scandinavian countries to ensure literacy for Christian purposes, but this was done inside homes with tests in the parish (Miller, 2006, p. 131).
9 Feminisation of teaching varied by country (Miller, 2004). In Denmark and Germany, for example, it has been far slower than other European countries.
10 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international- agenda/gender-and-education/resources/the-world-atlas-of-gender-equality-in-education/.
11 The idea of a one-room schoolhouse has not disappeared, especially from the mind-sets of progressive educators who are attracted to the idea of everyone living together as one big happy family. The Discovery Charter School in Newark, New Jersey, has attempted just such a model. Here is a description by De Gregori:
Walking past the attended entrance room, the visitor is immediately introduced to a vast scenario. Here, students from different grades sit at small, individual, easily movable tables, forming groups around their teachers. Student tables and other elements are painted in various bright colours, and they become purposeful, cost-effective components of the larger classroom space, contributing to its vitality. A variety of plants are also installed in the room, providing a link between the man-made and natural environments. The room, occasionally divided with a few transferable low partitions, is full of activity. There are students sitting, reading and writing at workstations along the walls. Laptops are noticeable, but not as much as voices. Questions and answers fly across the room. It could be described as a choral humming interspersed with solos. However, the noise and movement of people appear not to distract from the various learning activities (De Gregori, 2011, p. 9).
12 It still took the Germans another 120 years to get to the point where over three quarters of their children were in school. Developing countries in Africa have been given far less time to attempt the same feat and without the benefits of colonial plunder to help them.
13 Robson was being a little unfair. There were specific technical and architectural discussions about the optimum size and shape of schoolrooms in England (see British and Foreign School Society, 1816, pp. 3−5).
14 http://www.virtualclassrooms.info/machinima.htm.
15 http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet28/gregory1.jpg.
16 http://www.simschool.org/about.
17 https://moodle.org/stats/.
18 See www.functionalfate.org for a dedicated website.
19 Semantic knowledge is further divided into declarative and procedural knowledge: the difference being the ability to say what you know and do what you know. It’s a foundational distinction, especially in education, but at one level too fine for a book as introductory as this one. It has been hard for me as a writer to make decisions about where to cut off the level of focus.
This is not due to engaging in fields that lose their educational purchase, but because the level is too fine for a primer. The choice not to go into more detail about how cognitive science classifies knowledge is particularly tough as the full set of distinctions provides a powerful map of how we work with knowledge in education. But it’s simply too hard to carry both intricate detail and an introduction to the broad terrain at the same time. For example, here is a more complex figure of working memory:
Followed by a fuller set of distinctions than the ones I work with in this chapter.
20 Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
21 He had a terrible relationship with his mother and blamed it partly on her lack of purchase on reality. As he noted, ‘I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health’.
22 http://camsacar.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/zeno_paradox.gif.
23 This account is based on the research of Perry, who conducted in-depth interviews with undergraduate students at Harvard during the 1960s. Neither Harvard nor the 1960s are representative of what is happening to students across the world, nor does development stop with undergraduates: what of postgraduates and the much needed critique of relativism?
24 Biologists used the way we learn as an analogy for how we work at a
Working memory
Central Executive Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) and other cortical and sub-cortical
structures Intentionality
• Attention, Selection, Inhibition
Episodic Buffer (PFC)
• Integration and temporary storage of phonological store and visuospatial sketchpad Phonological Store
(Left PFC, anterior temporal frontal areas &
parietal cortex)
• Vocal and subvocal articulatory rehearsal of verbal and accoustic stimuli for temporary storage allowing for long-term store Declarative long-term memory (Stored in cortex by hippocampus in humans)
• Memory for facts and verbal material, episodic memory and semantic memory storage of visual and spatial
• Memory for facts and verbal material, episodic memory and semantic memory storage of visual and spatial