Chinese Pedagogic Discourse – Professor Wu, Zhejaing University

In a eurocentric field of education discourse (and all its baggage), Popkewitz’s introduction included this qoute from his work: “Disturb the common sense of western and chinese thought … to resist the demands of discourse that exist in public domains.”

Can we talk about Confucian heritage in terms of memorization? literary interpretation? teachers as the authority? students as the dependent? These are the words of education.

Key questions:

• What pedagogical vision is unveiled in Chinese dialog?
• What counts as knowledge and learning?
• Where does the meaning-making process occur?

Let’s look at Confusius talking to his student, Tsze-kung. Analects 1:15

When should the teacher speak?

“I never enlighten anyone who has not been driven into being ‘fen’ and never express to anyone who has not got into being ‘fei’”

The purpose of the teacher is to help the student express somethiing in language that they already have inside.

What should be talked about? What is offered by the teacher?

“To learn is to know the way of growing. By growing it means polishing, carving, transforming and vbecoming” No need to grow to fast.

He responds by using a cultual poem.

“Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is” (Heidegger)

“If you do not learn poetry, you will not know how to speak” (Analects 16:13)

So what is the contemporary Poetry?

Confucius refuses to talk about his poetry until the student who is ready. “Only the students who already understands can listen” (Heidegger)

If you go today to China, the classroom will look much different than what Confusious talked about. Subject has become object. They use “grids of specification,” like Foucault talks about.

A couple things about the modern thinking:

• Only the things that fit together in a system are worth knowing.
• Attributes such as author, phlosphor, teacher are new constructions.
• Qualification is the most important thing

History

What is History in this ancient view?  History is an active thing, happening right now. The historian is a neutral documenter, recoding what is done and what is dais, side-by-side.

We have to think about this because history is a very important source of meaning.

How can we evade value judgement?

These days, democracy is considered the image of peace. But you could ask, what is the source of meanings beyond human-made value?

Ritual Hermeneutics Vs. Reason

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity

The term langiage-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or form of life

Question: Does Confucius’ view of education work in the k-12 environment?

The division of knowledge into subjects and grades is a human construction and the cause of many problems.

Question: 1. Given the importance of confusious in Chine, how did wrote memorization become so important? 2. Has the dialog become a ritual itself?

Ritual is not something superficial, it is the action of meaning. If you visit a village today, the design of the houses and community follows the ritual. I memorize in order to store so they become lenses to my life.

“Family, raising children, is more important that governing nations”

Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) Discussion: Led by Kevin Harris

Flow is a timeless state of consciousness where the skill of the participant is perfectly matched to the challenge at hand.

1. A challenging activity requiring skills: The challenge must match the capabilities of the person. Competition might generate this state, but if the goal simply becomes to beat the other player, flow might not be achieved.
2. The merging of action and awareness: People in flow report merging with the activity they are doing.
3. Clear Goals and Feedback: Trivial goals don’t matter, sitting on your couch and surviving is not interesting enough. In general, immediate feedback is best. What’s interesting is that people report going into a state of flow by doing creative acts or shopping. What is required is personalyl set goals and achiving them.
4. Concentrating on the task at hand: Memory of past events fades away, ability to plan is inhibited. Self <-> Attention <-> Enviroment. It is coming from an information processing view, describing where the brain is putting it’s attention.
5. Paradox of Control: It’s about exercising control in a difficult situation, demonstrating that you are in control. This means the activity has a doubtful outcome. It also requires the ability to change that outcome. There are also two kinds of danger: objective and subjective. Objective dangers are more random, Subjective dangers relate more to the participant. Gambling is an example of the paradox of control. They think they are in control, but actually are simply addicted.
6. The loss of self-consciousness: Not loosing yourself, but loosing perception of yourself.
7. The transformation of Time: Time elongates and stretches. Interviews with dancers show that a 1/4 second spin may feel like 30 seconds.
8. The Autotelic Experience: Anything can bring you to a state of flow as long as the choice to participate is voluntary.

Subjects turned Objects: Statistics as a vehicle for social constructions to become forces within educational design. A personal reaction to readings from AERA, Baker, Desrosieres and Popkewitz

I entered into the field of education at a particular time in it’s history. Institutions have been long established that package learning into title, diploma, and degree programs. These institutions are governed, implicitly and explicitly, by dozens of other institutions such as grant providers, civil governments and accreditation boards, each with their own agendas. Everyone is accountable to one or more parties in this system. I am accountable to a design budget.

My dilemma is really the same as the others’ in this system: What can I do with the resources I have to produce the best educational outcome? But what exactly is the “best outcome?” I’ve used many versions of “best” in the past. I want the “deepest understanding” or the “richest learning experience.” How about some “good grades” or “higher performance than other instructional methods?” One colleague of mine said it simply, “It is all about efficiency.” We want the largest return for our investment based on how we define return.

So let’s define our return in terms of the kind of student we want to produce. If we can define the outcome then we can design the treatment, right? If I’m not mistaken, this is the moment when numbers will begin to poke their little heads up. At first, we are able to use qualitative statement to describe this student. Here are a few:

“The student will be able to look at a list of metals and make an informed guess at which will best suit a particular engineering design challenge”

“The student will be able to navigate in a french speaking environment”

“The student will have a positive experience with the course material”

What happens next is that we start grouping and counting. How often did the student choose the right material? What kind of french environments? What percentage of students had how good of an experience? Two things just happened here according to Desrosieres and Popkewitz. First, we just created systems of equalities that allowed us to group individual things into categories. Second, we began to record abstractions of those categories by translating them into numbers, which have no meaning in of themselves.

If we are going to group things together, one way is to define the attributes of a group member and look for similarities that exist in in the individual cases. If enough attributes are present to a high enough degree, that particular item is considered part of the category. Thank you Descartes for giving us the tools of deconstruction.

This process has the side effect of creating an equality between members of the group. The fact that they have been combined makes them the same. By following this pattern, the wonders of sociology were created (Desrosieres 1994). We can measure things like poverty, unemployment, working class people, good teachers, bad students, etc.  Along the way we have actually fabricated types of people (Popkewitz 2009). We have constructed a notion of a thing that does not exist, an abstract definition of a combination of attributes to stand in for a human being.

Is there anything wrong with this? Morally, I’m not sure. However, it sure is helpful. Galton’s wood board with a falling steel ball converts a random series of coin flips into the famous normal curve abstraction. This abstraction then allows us to see things in a new way and find patterns were we didn’t see them before. Abstraction is the basis of logic. It is the tool in which we can make meaning out of new experiences, record music with marks on paper, create computers, make strategies on how to get out of a fight with you wife and many other wonderful things. Once we have something as complex as a student converted into something as simple as a catagory, we can count, average, find means and calculate predictions. Like the normal curve, these tools give us a new grids of intelligibility (Popkewitz 2009). On the other hand, abstractions are not mearly the subjects of our reason. Once they have been given a name they become objects themselves and push back on us.

For example, when governments write number based rules to establish wealth and taxes, these categories may actually change the way citizens make decisions and do things. I saw a clear example of this when wealthy houses in Nicaragua and India would leave a few bricks out of their building so the house would not be “complete” and therefore exempt from tax. Numbers and categories are also pushing back when students enroll in a particular university based on it’s rankings or a student is not allowed to graduate based on a standardized test score. The stories are countless and the space of many contested critical analysis. According to Heran in L’assi se statistique de la sociologie, as abstractions are linked to hard social facts such as institutions, laws and customs, they take on a substantial existence of their own.

So to come full circle, I believe that statistics become the vehicle for defining the best educational outcome due to the system of accountability and expectations of efficiency that surround the designer. In instructional design we often start by creating an abstract description of a desired outcome. We then design a treatment and asses whether it met the outcome, iterating along the way. The danger in this outcomes based approach is that it will always tend toward a success description in terms that can be numerically or categorically measured. The critical designer must now determine what assumptions are used to create the required categorical equalities. They must also determine how the definition of the outcomes may become actors themselves, changing the system by their very existence.

This last point is quite revenant to my current design investigations. Students will always be tempted to game the system, like the homeowners in Nicaragua, to use the systems of assessment to their own advantage. It may be that if we continue to represent their learning progress only in terms of categorical, statistical abstractions, the actual outcomes may be very different that those predicted, or even within the vision of our mathematics. Could it be that if educational designers are aware of this fact, they could create a design where “playing the game” will actually embody the desired learning experience? Either way, for better or worse, education research has placed much of its faith in numerical studies for its objective research. If such an educational design does ever exist, it had better prove its value numerically.

References

AERA. Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research in AERA Publications.  (2006) pp. 1-15

Baker. Risk, Insurance and the Social Construction of Responsibility. Embracing Risk: The changing culture of insurance and responsibility (2002) pp. 33-51

Desrosieres. (1994): How to Make Things Which Hold Together: Social Science, Statistics and the State. pp. 15

Popkewitz. (2009): Numbers in Grids of Intelligibility: Making Sense of How Educational Truth is Told. pp. 1-24

Heran, F. (1984): ‘ L’ assi se statistique de la sociologie’ in Economie e t Statistique, 168 (juillet-aout), 23-26