Why this blog?

"... Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Letters to a Young Artist, R. M. Rilke

Rooted in the promise and challenge of growth ...

these are letters from a young teacher.

Monday, June 28, 2010

IERG Summer Training: Day One, Part One


Imaginative Education Summer Training
Vancouver, British Columbia

DAY ONE

After the keynote talk last night, now we are into full-day course work. I've realized that I'm a bit of an odd man out, though certainly not the only one. I do not belong to the two dominant groups of educators from schools that are actively working to implement Imaginative Education in their schools. One cohort has a year already behind them, so they make up most of Level 2, while the other is just starting, like myself, so we are considered Level 1.

So, for us in Level 1, today was all about introductions, information, and intention. What is the point of Imaginative Education? What does it consist of? What are the fundamental theories? Well, I'll do my best to tell you, so far as I understand it ...

First of all, the underlying theory of Imaginative Education is best read in Kieran Egan's The Educated Mind. Looking back on his earlier work, I can see how it has built up to a book like this. It's quite comprehensive, something to sink your teeth into, but not so complicated and involved that you're going to lose your teeth entirely over it.

The introductory chapter, "Three Old Ideas and a New One", provides the premise: Three dominant paradigms of educational thought are sort of duking it out in the current education system, making only for conflicted and confused educators, unsure what the real purpose of education is. These three ideas include the two purposes I mentioned in my post yesterday - socialization and academics - plus the more newly developed purpose of education to stimulate children's development. As I re-read this introductory chapter last night, I realized that these ideas represent the three waves of educational paradigm shifting in Western human history.

Before Western and Eastern worlds, there was just one human world, and in this world, education served one purpose alone: socialization, and, we might add, survival. Oral cultures used both apprenticeship models of teaching and stories to acculturate their youth into the customs, values, and beliefs of their cultural community, as well as their individual roles in it. We see this purpose today in moves toward democratic education, as well as in the "basics" of reading and mathematics deemed crucial to functioning as an adult in our society.

Fast forward to Plato. Now, Plato is not the first philosopher of Greek society (Socrates being his most significant predecessor), but I'm going to dare to say that he was the first philosopher responsible for a conception that would become Western society (the Enlightenment being its birthing, perhaps). His work, The Republic revolutionized education by suggesting that education was meant not as a service to society, but to the advancement of the individual mind. From Plato we have the Academy, and from the Academy, of course, academics: the "core curriculum", as it is called, of areas of study deemed necessary to study in the course of one's life. (Seeing as his heroic, exemplary "philosopher-kings" would have to undergo up to 50 years of education, it was a societal role reserved for the elite, capable few. Today, this is called tracking. Thank you, Plato. Really.)

Fast forward again to the 19th century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his masterpiece Émile with the observation that we "are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man." Boom! If Plato is responsible for the conception of the Western world, then Rousseau's mental DNA contributed greatly to the birth of child development. With 20th century scholars Jean Piaget and John Dewey added into the mix, we have, in today's world, the developmental purpose of education: to stimulate children's psychological development in the grasping of advanced mental concepts, ideas, and theories of mind. We cannot expect children to add and subtract numbers, they say, before we allow them to experience the concept of number to begin with. Piaget, especially, is well-known for his series of "tasks" that children of a certain age cannot complete, due to their developmental stage. Besides the fact that this serves to utterly humiliate the actual capabilities of children, it helps us understand that children's ideas and knowledge of the world develops as they grow, much the way human ideas have developed throughout history.

Ok. Now what? A new theory? A new idea? No and yes. Or yes and no. I'm not sure what Egan is suggesting is so much a "new" theory as a new idea regarding the relation these three theories have to each other in the educational world. Which you might, of course, call a theory.

His premise: these three theories are inherently incompatible with each other; not that they are inherently incorrect, but that they cannot be compromised when pooled together conceptually. One always prevails above the others, and each has served as the dominant educational paradigm of the recent past of educational thought. In other words, if these theories make up the points of a triangle, they pull and pull on their respective ends, trying to make their point the top of an isosceles formation, rather than reach towards each other in equilateral formation.

If we want to re-conceive education as fulfilling all three purposes simultaneously, while keeping it free of conflicting paradigms for instruction, then we must re-conceive our notion of these purposes. Socialization reaches beyond the society; Academics reach beyond knowledge; and psychological development reaches beyond the brain. When each of these ideas reaches beyond their perceived boundaries, they do, indeed, connect with each other. Where? Egan calls them "kinds of understanding".

He begins with Russian educational psychologist and thinker Vygotsky, "He argued that we make sense of the world by use of mediating intellectual tools that in turn profoundly influence the kind of sense we make." (Egan, p. 29) In other words, as the child interacts with its environment, s/he picks up on the ways the world is represented, observed, and made sense of by others, and eventually comes to adapt these tools already in use. "So the mind is not an isolable thing like the brain inside its skull; it extends into and is constituted of its socio-cultural surroundings, and its kinds of understanding are products of the intellectual tools forged and used in those surroundings." (p. 30)

Surroundings ... children learn to socialize themselves by grasping onto these cognitive tools, as they observe and interact with them in their surroundings. Kinds of understanding ... require different kinds of knowledge, but this knowledge is not the determinant factor of one's understanding of the world. Intellectual tools ... children move through stages of life, in which they more readily grasp certain tools before others, the journey of which is, by itself, a process of development. None of the original ideas is refuted in Egan's new idea, but they are observed through a different lens that seems to allow them to cooperate better with each other.


And this is all just back story! I haven't even gotten to the juice! I'll keep you on edge, just a bit, while I compose the next post.

No comments: