Welcome to...

Tech-infused social studies methods

2007-08-09T12:20:00.000-04:00

I'm getting a little traction on what I think a "next step" is for tech integration in social studies methods.

First, here's my perception of the current state-of-the-field: ACCESS. Social studies teacher-educators, and social studies teachers, are using tech in instruction/instructional prep to access info: looking for it, gathering it, marking resources on the web that can be re-purposed and used in instruction, etc. It's basically the web as library or repository of learning aids.

So what's next? I'm still murky, but here are my threads.

The role of tech had better not be to add value to the distributor (e.g., a lesson plan on the web vs. on paper--much better for the person wishing to share it, but for the end user it's all the same or slightly worse than having it on paper). Instead, the role of the tech should be to add value to the end-user BEYOND being able to access it--it adds flexibility (re-mixable) or it links out to other useful resources (organization?). For example, I'm thinking of Wise Pockets--tech is just a delivery mechanism for the info. In contrast, the math applets on teacherlink let the teacher do something that couldn't be done otherwise--these manipulatives can't exist on paper.
If students are using tech, it's not parallel play but collaborative. If the students' use of tech is to individually access info or do a manipulative, it reinforces the at-your-desk paradigm of education, reduces the discussion and social learning that can make for powerful teaching. So if you're considering a parallel play thing, do it either as a whole class or structure it as groupwork, or push it off into homework (but provide scaffolding to make sure students are attending to the key parts). Example of parallel play: Students individually watch a video clip, then discuss. Example of collaborative play: Students blog about the video clip or work together to mark up or re-edit the clip.
Students' using tech is almost always preferable over teachers' use of tech--unless it's a parallel play thing or the tool is so complex that it bogs the students down (i.e., insight from Randy Bell's astronomy work).
Students using tech to organize or create is almost always better than students using tech only to access info.

Again, I don't have a clear vision of the next step. But I think my instinct is that it will require teachers and teacher-educators to be into a creating/organizing mode on the web...and that requires websites or wikis or blogs or something along those lines.

More thinking about "powerful social studies"

2007-07-18T11:27:00.000-04:00

I don't think this is unique to social studies, but it occurred to me this morning that good teaching...

Produces the following in the students

Learning, specifically

Knowledge (key facts for the concept/content area)
Understandings (broader frameworks/heuristics which contain the facts)
Skills (duh)
...and the ability to transfer this knowledge, these understandings, and these skills to new encounters with the topic/task, whether directly or indirectly

Enjoyment! It wasn't a turn-off; students will be willing to do more learning
Interest--students are motivated to do some future learning on their own on at least some level

Produces all of the above in the teacher as well

What makes this "powerful teaching"? Well, it's entirely possible to teach in such a way that students learn but are turned off (e.g., drill). I guess what I'm thinking of here is that the power comes from what happens after the learning is over--the learning wasn't just a mental exercise, but a little more transformational

And, of course, I think technology can go a long way towards

supporting the learning, espec the learning for transfer
making enjoyment and interest more probable
providing tools/competencies for continuing to explore, assuming that a student is interested
keeping the teacher-as-learner mode alive throughout a career

Of course, to do any of this, technology needs to be used skillfully (aligned to purposes of instruction, adding value to content/productivity/student action) and not randomly (using it because it's there, or just using what's familiar rather than what's appropriate).

But this still doesn't get into what's uniquely social-studies-related about "powerful social studies."

Unethical but interesting teaching strategy for a high school history class

2007-06-07T22:49:00.001-04:00

Just finished reading Marcus, Paxton, & Meyerson (2006). Given students' tendency to "historical fundamentalism" (viewing what the textbook, teacher, and assigned readings say as revealed truth), what if the teacher adopted a "two truths and a lie" style of teaching?

"As I teach, I will occasionally misrepresent or lie. Most of what I say will be true, but I will, every day, say something wrong or unsubstantiated: the First Amendment prohibits public displays of religion, for example, or that at the time of Columbus' landing, the population of North America was greater than that of Europe. Check what I say--look in the textbook, examine other sources. Don't take down my statements as gospel, because they're not. When things don't seem to line up, bring it up. At the end of the (lesson/week/unit), we'll review and I'll show you conflicting evidence."

I imagine that this approach would

Go a long way toward diminishing (but not eliminating) historical fundamentalism
Be interesting/engaging for students, even for those who aren't busy considering all the angles and checking references.

On the other hand,

I foresee some students getting confused -- they'll remember the lie (what they heard first), not the truth (what they heard later).
I imagine that this would be very, very difficult to keep up on the teacher's part--mentally, even emotionally exhausting.

Powerful social studies

2007-06-07T22:27:00.000-04:00

Trying to operationalize a buzz word: "powerful social studies." I need this to make sense for me and for my students.

Data points:

Parker
Brophy & Alleman (2006) have a pretty good definition of "powerful ideas" -- fundamental to discipline, not a broad topic (transportation) and not just a factoid ("the fuel used in airplanes is not the same as the fuel used in cars") but in the midrange (categories of transportation, historical progression, relative merits of what's being transported, infrastructure). This points me at ideas that are important and useful.

Thinking about this for myself, I see a core of knowledge, preferably the kind of knowledge that associates with the powerful ideas suggested by Brophy and Alleman. Along with this knowledge comes certain attitudes and abilities that also must be in place for (IMHO) "powerful social studies" to take place. Here's a cheesy little sketch of it:

So: Sure, students need to know something about history, govt/civics, econ, geography, etc. But I also want them to be

Curious in the face of new (hist, geo, econ, govt/civ) information (attitude)
Concerned when they perceive problem (injustice, inaccuracy, looming environmental collapse) (attitude)
Critical of new information -- not accepting it at face value but always seeking to triangulate (attitude/ability -- this is a skill b/c you have to be able to operate on the information while at the same time leaving the door open to altering or reversing the info)
Competent at taking action to resolve problems of information, injustice, looming environmental collapse): looking up new info, expressing oneself, etc. (ability)

And of course you address these all simultaneously -- you can't first teach the "base of knowledge" and THEN do the interesting things (curious, concerned, critical, competent) with this knowledge. Both are developed hand-in-hand.

Generativity in teachers

2007-06-02T13:37:00.001-04:00

Quick thought about what separates some of the best teachers (and professors) from the rest, particularly when it comes to using technology: generativity. I've now seen it in enough teachers (ex: MR@BMS) and pre-service teachers (KL@UVA) and professors (JP@NCSU) to recognize it.

Sure, a good teacher is a risk-taker, knows his or her content area, students, curriculum, is clear and fair in interactions with students, etc. But if, on top of that, the teacher is motivated to create learning materials and situations, then the amazing things happen.

Examples:

Creating peg-board and tags to teach geographic regions
Creating virtual theater for explaining the staging of Pygmalion
Creating custom videos and dynamic graphs to explain air pressure and temperature

True, off-the-shelf materials can be used. But when a teacher takes the time to customize or custom-create materials, they generally become more powerful--at least for this teacher and these students.

Plus: A generative teacher is probably going to engage students in more active, student-centered, generative activities.

On the other side: A non-generative teacher is probably more inclined to be transmission-oriented, which lends itself to students tuning out, egocentric fallacy, all kinds of other not-so-optimal dynamics.

So: Watch for this.

Notes on Whose History? (Symcox)

2007-02-03T17:42:00.000-05:00

p. 11
"knowledge is a valued commodity, defined by those with power and dispensed to those without. However, from time to time the curriculum itself becomes a vehicle to challenge those power relationships and to transform society."

Notes on Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

2006-09-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

p. 3
Opening anecdote about Gerstner's first day at IBM: hit the 'off' button; "Let's just talk about your business."

p. 4
"Yet PowerPoint is entirely presenter-oriented, and not content-oriented, not audience-oriented. The claims of PP marketing are addressed to speaker...."

"PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP prsentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spactial resoilution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous docration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."

"Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when the relevant information is shown adjacent in space within our eyespan."

p. 5
Compares "data graphics based on PP templates" to Pravda graphics.

"But in the reality of day-to-day pracitce, the PP cognitive style is faux-analytical." Compares intricate bulleted lists to computer code. Basically seems to be pushing a more honest, less lazy approach: design the slide yourself (using textboxes and/or graphics) to lay out the interrelation between ideas -- don't just list stuff.

pp. 8-9
Amazing dissection of Boeing slide about Columbia shuttle disaster, showing how the slide soft-peddles the (terrifying) data and implications.

p. 10
Props to Feynman for writing "about much of basic physics -- mechanic, optics, thermodynamics, quantum behavior -- in a 600-page book with only 2 levels: chapters and headings within chapters." Talking about Feynman Lectures on Physics.

p. 11
Feynman also hated bullets.... Ha! "Indeed, for those who have rad Feynman's books, a good way to try to think clearly about evidence and explanation is to ask, 'What would Feynman do?'" Anyone wanna make WWFD bracelets?

p. 12
Gripe: "the PP design style" uses "only about 30-40% of the space available on a slide to show unique content, with all remaining space devoted to Phluff, bullets, frames, and branding."

Singles out EDUCAITONAL ADMINISTRATORS as having especially little to say -- "the really lightweight slides" among the 2,140 examined.

Nothing to say, so add Phluff, which reduces the content further. Instead: use handouts

p. 13
History of PPT: MS bought "Presenter" from the developer ("a software house"). T's point = ppt aesthetic and world is the corporate software world: programming ("deeply heirarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time") meets marketing ("fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics"). Wow. When you put it that way...it's like the worst of both worlds!!

Compares ppt social style ("The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers") to classic "hegemonic systems" such as Roman state system.

"A better metaphor for presentation is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility...." Further explanation by T: Teachers explain, reason, find things out, question, identify and organize content, review evidence, highlight credible authority and not patronizing authoritarianism.

"Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mericals, which is better than encouraging children to smoke."

"Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something."

pp. 14-15
Norvig's Gettysburg address ppt.

pp. 16-18
PPT and statistical evidence. T favors tables rather than cluttered or misleading graphical displays. Ideal: table-graphic. I'm not totally sold. Or I like the idea, but need a stronger example from T.

pp. 19-20
Mocking Harvard School of Public Health's Instructional Computing Facility's sample slides and adminitions ("a witless PP pitch on how to make a witless PP pitch" -- that's kind of beautiful, no?). "The templates dom, however, emulate the format of reading primers for 6 year-olds." (reproduces Dick and Jane page in sidebar.) Hey, those are my IT bretheren!

p. 23
"The Dreaded Build Sequence" = "line-by-line slow reveal"

"But formats, sequencing, and cognitive approach should be decided by the character of the content and what is to be explained, not by the limitations of the presentation."

p. 24
"Presentations largely stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. The way to make big improvements in a presentation is to get better content. Designer formats will not salvage weak content."

"At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm to content."

"PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector for low-resolution materials. And that's about it."

More to-dos and not-to-dos. Advice = use paper handouts for high-res. Hunh: specifically an 11x17 folded to make 4 pp. "Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audeince that you are serious and precise; that you seek to leave traces and have consequences. And that you respect your audience."

p. 25
"In day-to-day practice, PowerPoint templates may improve 10% or 20% of all presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers, at a cost of detectable intellectual damage to 80%. For statistical data, the damage levels approach demetia."

"PowerPOint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real talk, and audiences to pretend that they are listening."

Stalin-cult propaganda photo spoof. Caption: "Military parade, Stalin Square, Budapest, April 4, 1956. Photograph by AP/Wide World Photos." Yow. Now that I know the date, it's even more poignant.

pp. 26-27
Research basis: Study of "several thousand slides, 5 case studies, and extensive quantitative comparisons between PowerPoint and other methods of communicating information."

Cites others' excoriation of ppt (i.e. Columbia Accident Investigation Board -- Columbia killed by ppt?)

Working out new modes of communication+ work

2006-04-24T18:14:00.000-04:00

Had an interesting experience today using Skype. Had a conference call with six other people. Two were on text-only; two had audio in but not audio back out (no mic); two others were at a shared in/out (one machine handling whole connection). It was a weird situation. Basically, 1-2 people could TALK back to me...the rest could talk back via text. How to keep the communication flowing? I ended up narrating a lot, filling in holes, creating structure.... All very strange.

It made me think of the peripatetic school, teaching while wandering. They worked out that the wandering supported their philosophizing. (Or maybe Aristotle just liked to walk...) We are coming at it the other way: we're given the tool (mixed-mode text and voice chat) and we have to work out how it supports our process. It's not intuitive, but you don't get anywhere unless you start moving....

I also thought back to experiences where an instructor had us enter a chat room...too many voices, too little structure. We were given the tool but had no idea how to use it.

The whole SITEmentor experience is about finding out how to communicate and work through these tools. I'm glad to be working it out on a smaller scale. I am thinking the social connections made in the smaller group will help bring out more authentic interaction in the larger groupings.

Fear and knowing, teaching, and technology

2006-03-05T22:04:00.000-05:00

Reading Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach. I unfortunately returned this book before capturing the thought, but I guess I could get into this with Bob Covert. Here's the thing: Palmer has this thing about fear: teachers are afraid, students are afraid; objectivist ways of knowing are motivated by or shot through with fear or at least the need to control.

I don't know if I buy the whole thing, but there's something in there.

First, I definitely agree that teaching involves a certain amount of terror (of exposure, of losing control, of being mocked).

Second, certain approaches to learning involve terror, whether socially (fear of embarrassment in front of one's peers) or even in more abstracted way -- fear of not knowing the important bits or making a rookie mistake, confusing signal for noise the way an expert never would. And these two wires can link up as well: I want to be well-read and worldly, and yet I can't immediately pick up on the Aldrich Ames name-check at a dinner party. Whoops. In a history class, I just learned about secret Nazi-Soviet military cooperation PRIOR to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; when at a friend's house for dinner, I was terrified as I discussed this and had to fly in the face of his dad's decades of casual reading about the topic. Even now, before I could write about it, I had to look it up and confirm that I wasn't crazy, that I hadn't misunderstood the whole thing. (For future reference: see Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-Soviet Relations, 1922-1941, by Aleksandr M. Nekrich, edited and translated by Gregory L. Freeze. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997. See also review in 1998 Canadian Journal of History, gently re-directing Nekrich's interpretation of the data.)

Third, a learner who learned in fear becomes a teacher who teaches in fear and uses techniques that quite possibly also inflict fear upon his/her learners.

Also, I think there's a further step to take: something along the lines of "technology and fear" -- I think fear plays a large role in the way people feel about technology and what they choose to do (or not do) with technology. True, I try to stick technology into everything, but so it goes. Besides: content knowledge + pedagogical knowledge = pedagogical content knowledge, right? And then we jam technology into that, too -- technological pedagogical content knoweldge! So I am in good company here.

So: anything useful to be done with this idea of technology and fear? If nothing else, just as I get terrified that my knowledge will fail me, I also get terrified that my technology will fail me (hard drive crash, motherboard meltdown, links go dead at a critical moment).

Studying history = conversation

2006-01-26T09:50:00.000-05:00

I was at a parent meeting last night, discussing PrimaryAccess, and one parent raised a concern that by the kids being limited to only certain images, teachers would be able to present one-sided or otherwise too-limited takes on history.

Thoughts:

First, PrimaryAccess is not in the business of preventing teachers from doing that. The teacher is working from the curriculum, and if the parent has a problem with the curriculum or the teacher's treatment of a subject, that's for the parent, teacher, and administration to talk about.
That being said, I can think of two ways in which PrimaryAccess does help alleviate a situation like that:

Teaching with images is far less predictable than teaching from a text. Students can take an image in a whole different direction than what a teacher intended. Therefore, a teacher might offer a one-sided set of images and teach toward a specific interpretation, but I think there's a pretty good chance that the students, or some students, will take that visual evidence and use it to support a different interpretation. So I think it's harder for a teacher to constrain students' thinking when working from visuals. Of course, I could be wrong about this (e.g., every propaganda campaign ever relies upon powerful visuals), but my antennae are out for data. Note: I think video might have the OPPOSITE effect -- I think video is far more powerful than images and has a huge referential illusion effect, just like textbooks.
Since PrimaryAccess can play back over the web, the audience for students' work is far broader than usual -- parents (and grandparents and cousins and whoever else you want to send this to) can watch and respond and enter the conversation.

And this is where I end up: ideally, history is a conversation between teacher and students, between past and present. PrimaryAccess broadens that conversation (potentially bringing in family/community via web playback) and deepens it (getting people right into powerful primary sources).

Social component to online work

2006-01-20T12:34:00.000-05:00

This point takes three steps.

1. When people look at you, they immediately start making assumptions, filling in the backstory. For example, I've had students tell me that, upon first glance, they think I'm a Young Republican. Once they get to know me, this perception changes. These snap judgments say more about the judger than the judged (e.g., if I notice someone with a French accent and think 'Oh, he must hate America', I've just said a lot about me but nothing of consequence about Francophones), but they're are natural, inevitable, and important.

2. I think we make these assumptions/judgments because of our story-making nature. We live in a story, we talk in stories; our brain can't just tag a new individual with a variable ('I'll call this person x') and leave it at that until more data comes in. No: we have to rush in and fill the vaccuum with enough data to move along to the next action.

3. Why online community bogs down: WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH DATA ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE TO MAKE THESE SNAP JUDGMENTS. Someone is just 'ThomasCH' or a tiny icon -- we can't relate to it, assign labels to it, weave it into the narrative. So we slough it off, unless something extraordinary happens.

So: If you want get an online community up and keep it running, it needs to provide lots of data about people. New members need to be able to quickly sketch in a mental impression of the folks they encounter, and current members need to be able to quickly grab data on new people as well.

Missing voice from teacher prep

2005-11-17T20:32:00.000-05:00

PARENTS. I am curious to know what parents are thinking about tech -- what would they want to see? Not want to see? What motivations would be driving their inclinations -- tech as job-preparation, tech as prep-for-college? Tech is irrelevant to ed? Tech is poisonous to people?

I think there would be a huge variation, and I would love to see the spread in opinions. I think they would provide powerful grist for PSTs discussions. And this is something that undergrads (and probably all non-parents) are probably NOT very aware of, even less than their awareness of, say, school administration.

Teachers' enthusiasm for/openness to tech...

2005-11-17T20:28:00.000-05:00

...all depends on their comfort level with taking risks.

And not all younger teachers are inherently more into using tech. In fact, they may be even more risk-averse and therefore not interested in integrating tech into instruction.

Something to watch for: second-career teachers. I think they might provide a pool of older teachers who are more willing to try tech. I have a few examples in mind but want to observe more.

Reading How Students Learn

2005-09-18T17:53:00.000-04:00

Ch. 2

Comment about students' application of everyday principles to history: truth of "what happened". When constructing an understanding of history, this is what we're trying to do. Small children often experience this issue in the context of "telling the truth" ("What did you do??") vs. "telling a lie" ("I didn't do anything! It fell on its own.") But this isn't what we do in history -- sources aren't either "telling the truth" or "telling a lie"; also, there are layers to truth or accuracy. Also, sources can tell us things that they don't directly address. (For example, a painting might not be accurate and useful in describing the event, but it does tell us a lot about the artist and the time period or political/artistic influences under which it was created.)

More difficulties with everyday concepts: causation, or agency. Focus on individuals and single events. Loses ability to explain things that are gradual, structural change (e.g., urbanization) or motivated by abstract principles (e.g., Elizabeth I's reluctance to execute Mary Stewart coming from abhorrence at the idea of executing a monarch).

Taxonomy of info (for social studies or everything? Everything, I guess)

tools (time, change, empathy, cause, evidence, accounts)
substantive content

concepts (e.g., "president")
particulars (George Washington)

Ch. 3

Three main ideas of HPL:

Be constructivist - take into account prior conceptions, information
Learners work best with tools, tools need to be suited to discipline's needs
Learners need to be metacognitive

Discussion of "seven-year gap": some 8-year-olds demonstrate a better grasp of historical thinking than most 15-year-olds. So: it depends on how they're taught, no?

Applying these ideas: two examples

Pilgrims' landing: common task in many curricula. Focuses on 12-15-year-olds in an activity built around tertiary (textbook) accounts, primary accounts (from the period), secondary accounts, maps, pictures created afterwards. Students are given prompts, asked to address "how do they know?" For example, how did artists know what to put in the pictures? Also, what to do when the pictures don't match the first-hand accounts' descriptions? Requires students to apply empathy (e.g., "providence") and to work with evidence (e.g., Bradford's diary, accuracy of paintings).
St. Brendan: useful b/c it's relatively unfamiliar, and it is self-contained. Pilgrims, for example, connect forwards and backwards (religious persecution, migration, etc.). St. Brendan doesn't. So: the lesson isn't about learning new content, it's about learning to work with evidence. Also: substantive misconceptions (size of icebergs, location of Faeroe Islands) don't get in the way. Five stages "common student assumptions about how we know of the past":

It's an information problem (so look up the info)
It's a problem about access to the past (we weren't there, so we don't know)
It's a problem about finding true reports (get someone who was there to tell us)
It's a problem about trusting true reports (people lie in their reports....)
It's a problem about working things out using evidence

Great stuff about what the evidence (Severin's voyage) does and doesn't support (that Brendan could have made it, not that he DID make it), supported with a visual (donkey) and a parallel (students' exercise books) -- good way to make the ideas accessible and discussable. Provess breaks out very nicely (introducing new evidence), especially as it uses evidence that isn't "about" Brendan (Vikings' accounts, map of winds, etc.).

Sample Grades 4-7 curriculum to allow for both content knowledge (concepts and particulars) AND "second-order concepts" (historical thinking skills), followed by a "Model for Progression in Ideas About Evidence". Tricky. The sequence of topics isn't necessary the best one to follow; the progression of ideas isn't certain (can skip levels, or stick on levels) and students will progress unevenly. So: a new process: Units organized by "target generalizations about the past" and "target ideas about change / empathetic exaplanation / evidence / causal explanation". Nifty chart integrating content knowledge, stages of thinking about evidence, metacognitive stops, etc.

Reading Grant

2005-09-01T21:19:00.000-04:00

So Blair (lecture) students see history as static, unrelated to them, and don't see their classroom instruction as being instrumental to their knowledge of history. They have a simplistic view of history (flat). Strait (interactive, multi-modal) students are the opposite. And yet this isn't causation? So somehow Strait only got students who already viewed history as complex? Who already drew connections between past and present, between their lives and historical events?

Something to shore up PrimaryAccess proposal:

p. 105
"Comparing students' reponses to the questionnaire with their performance on the exam, Smith and Niemi conclude that although several factors correlate with higher test scores, the strongest relate to the nature of classroom instruction. In particular, higher test scores correlate with student reports of instruction that includes complex writing tasks, in-depth reading (meaning from sources outside the textbook), extensive student discussion, and learning tools such as outside speakers, film, and computers."

[The exam in question is the 1994 NAEP history; the questionnaire was (I believe) a simultaneous survey to ask the students about the classroom instruction they were receiving.]

Reading Baron "Bossed..."

2005-09-01T21:00:00.000-04:00

My big learning here: Students' (or at least 4th/5th graders') complete lack of understanding of abstractions: economy, political parties, government, institutions. Instead, they personalize (reduce to a set of motivations that map onto interpersonal relations) everything as a way of making sense of it. For me, this connects up with a sentence from my Intro to Qual reading: "People develop theories (theories-in-use or tacit theories) about events as a way of reducing ambiguity and explaining paradox" (Marshall & Rossman, 19). So kids' actions make sense. (BTW, I wonder how many adults would similarly personalize everything -- the folks who crop up on "Jaywalking" don't inspire confidence....) The sentence following this one might be applicable to historical thinking: "When they [researchers] decide to conduct inquiry, however, they should be guided by more systematic considerations...." This is an important part of historical thinking -- that critical thinking stance that processes information systematically, doesn't rush to conclusions, or does so with one eye out for reason to reverse course.

I was also very interested by the students' reported synthesis of their reasons for revolt (tax collectors' "suprised" colonists; if they had had time to prepare or had received warning, things might have been different). Where did this come from? Barton reports students being shown a cartoon of a woman beating a tax collector with a broom. I'm pretty sure this resonates with students and is evocative of something else they've seen (a cartoon?) -- women = at home, reinforced by broom (domestic tool, something used at home); broom also = at work, in the middle of something, not prepped and ready for tax collection but for domestic chores. So we have the elements of HOME and BUSY DOING SOMETHING ELSE. Tax collector is therefore intruding on the home, interrupting something. Where does the "surprise" come in? Woman hitting tax collector with broom -- this is something that might happen in response to a mischeivous child or pet who startled the women, stole a pie, tracked dirt into the house, whatever. So: given a different visual, would the students have keyed in on the same constructed meaning? I don't think so. On the other hand, what would be a more appropriate image? Won't all images cue similar misconstructions?

The Al Campanis problem

2005-09-01T19:33:00.000-04:00

Something jarred loose by reading Jack Shafer on the news coverage of the Katrina after-events ("Lost in the Flood" 31 Aug 2005 at http://slate.msn.com/id/2124688/):

Al Campanis is known for being the guy who, like Trent Lott and lotts of other people, sunk his career by displaying his racist thinking in front of an audience. From Shafer: 'Campanis, you may recall, was the Los Angeles Dodgers vice president who brought his career to an end when he appeared on Nightline in 1987 and explained to Ted Koppel that blacks might not have "some of the necessities" it takes to manage a major league team or run it as a general manager for the same reason black people aren't "good swimmers." They lack "buoyancy," he said.'

However, this slice of behavior doesn't speak for the whole of Campanis: 'Not to excuse Campanis, but as racists go he was an underachiever. While playing in the minor leagues, he threw down his mitt and challenged another player who was bullying Jackie Robinson. As Dodger GM, he aggressively signed black and Latino players, treated them well, and earned their admiration. Although his Nightline statement was transparently racist, in the furor that followed, nobody could cite another racist remark he had ever made. His racism, which surely blocked blacks from potential front-office Dodger careers, was the racism of overwhelming ignorance—a trait he shared (shares?) with many other baseball executives.'

So here's the danger: served an indiciative slice of data, we paint a big picture. But that big picture might be wildly off the mark from the truth, or at least leave out important elements.

And if you're into the Campanis thing: I guess you could really measure the man's soul by what he did afterwards. Did he apologize? Make amends? Have a dialog? Shafer: "Note to Al Campanis' departed soul: Al, if you had endowed a foundation to build a 50-meter pool in an urban neighborhood and hired some good coaches, I bet that pool would have spawned Olympic-caliber swimmers." So he didn't do this. What did he do?

Research is... Qualitative research is...

2005-08-25T21:06:00.000-04:00

Research is...

something that gets you tenure
difficult to do, or at least difficult to do well: hard to conceptualize, hard to do, hard to write up, hard to explain; hard to fund, often, or at least hard to consent. Lots of conceptual pitfalls (e.g., overlooked latent variables or interaction effects or maturation...), and really hard to control.
about establishing relationships between things (can I be more specific?), finding interactions between things (lame).
all about description. I started to write 'measurement', but then stopped -- to quantitative, right? But I figure 'description' is good -- measurement IS description, just a lower-bandwidth form of it.

Qualitative research is...

also hard to do. It's easier to start, though: you just have to decide that you're interested enough in something to do it, to do a whoooooole lot of it.
one way to guarantee that you'll end up with SOMETHING, if you just keep going. Quant ed research seems to usually end up in a RND or else it has a demonstrated result but a serious flaw (e.g., NAEP's lack of attention to motivation).
appropriate when you're looking into complex situations with uncontrollable variables (e.g., most ed research) -- when you're interested in capturing cognitive processes or mental models. I think quant is appropriate for a lot of 'what' or 'when' or 'who' or 'where' questions, but qual is perhaps more appropriate as you get into the more interesting 'why' or 'how' questions.

Reading Wineburg

2005-08-25T09:01:00.000-04:00

Lots of good points. Without looking at the book, just off the top of my head....

First chapter: Kids don't know history. Has been true since 1917, probably has been true since Socrates....
Comment on what-to-study-as-an-ed-researcher: we know that traditional or typical methods are wildly unsuccessful. So, instead, let's focus on the extraordinary, the successful -- find out what the good and effective teachers are doing and then think about how to replicate it. Me: True, but...doesn't this potentially mean that we'll be advocating strategies that only the top 2% can pull off? "C'mon, everyone, have an encyclopedic knowledge of your subject! Have a flair for drama! Run the risk of getting fired for saying something inflammatory in class while trying to create a teachable moment!"
Last chapter: GREAT section on finding out what's in kids' heads, how it got there, and how much of an impact schools/teachers/textbooks have. Answers: not much, movies, and none. 1967 Pentagon protest (flowers in rifle barrels) = big "Dunno"; guesses = eulogy, American prisoner of NVA. Pro-war demonstration at Manhattan City Hall = "against the war" protest! OK, so what the kids DO know (or think they know), where does it come from? Example of "baby killers": (a) not historically accurate (or part of what Wineburg calls the 'historical memory'), and (b) it's eventually traced back to Forrest Gump. Similar lineage to idea of 'War is good for the economy' (Schindler's List). Lines up with VanSledright on possible role of Pocahantas in shaping students' perception of Governor Percy during starving time (fat). Students in Wineburg's study all from Seattle area and from three different schools: public, private elite, and private religious. Kids had been exposed to different teachers, textbooks, emphases, etc. But all shared the same pattern of non-informed/mis-information. So, again lining up with VanSledright (sticking to colonists' side no matter what; then again, those were fifth-graders, right?), collective memory or popular perception is far more powerful (dominates students' thinking) than the teacher/textbook/pedagogy.
Nice bit about the significance of video-on-demand (e.g., Forrest Gump): the always-available-past. Creates understanding of, view of 'reality' or 'historical fact.'
So: let's think about textbooks. I'm starting to think that they're not worth fighting about, or at least that the best way to use a textbook is to teach AGAINST it where appropriate. The best textbook in the world (whatever that is, in someone's opinion) won't necessarily have an effect, won't overcome students' 'preconceived misconceptions.' So just roll with it and get into something interesting/juicy by teaching against it and bringing in more accurate sources when appropriate (e.g., midwife, slave ship).
More on textbooks: I'm starting to think that they're a bad idea for the humanities, or at best a necessary evil. The humanities are all living, breathing things, but by issuing students a textbook, you're also sending them a message: "Here's your dose of history / language arts / foreign language; don't mark in it and turn it back in at the end of the course. Take dosage as instructed until course of treatment is done." So the humanities are something done to the student rather than something done by the student. Ironic, eh? Instead, I'd rather students learn from collections of sources or even write their own textbooks. (In fact, Wineburg says something in line with this last point.) Textbooks are just a crutch for the teacher and/or the school. They're probably necessary, but let's not kid ourselves about them being a good thing (a la Mr. Barnes, in the chapter on the Stanford TAP -- but even he acknowledged that kids don't and will never read textbooks). Note: I don't feel the same way about, say, economics textbooks or stats textbooks, or (kinda) programming textbooks. We all KNOW that these are living, breathing disciplines, and the 'textbook effect' doesn't (for me) kick in as much.
Lots of great, qualitative work is summarized in this book. I have a lot of respect for Wineburg and his partners. I especially like the picture work (identify/explain what's going on in these iconic photos; "draw a hippie," "draw hippies at a protest").

Reading Berners-Lee

2005-07-25T09:59:00.001-04:00

Wonky, but interesting to a wonk. Requires the reader to be able to imagine some of the logistical and institutional barriers, to get excited by the discussion of coding feats or establishing standards.

Insightful, obviously.

Nice things to remember:

Recursion: "It isn't the letters, it's the way they're strung together into words. It isn't the words, it's the way they're strung together into phrases. It isn't the phrases, it's the way they're strung together in a document." (p. 13) Every piece has meaning on an atomic level, but the more important meaning is always one level, then another level up, etc....
Meeting the users where they are: 'I had seen numerous developers arrive at CERN to tout systems that "helped" people organize information. They'd say, 'To use this system all you have to do is divide all your documents into four categories' or 'You just have to save all your data as a WordWonderful document' or whatever. I saw one protagonist after the next shot down in flames by indignant researchers because the developers were forcing them to reorganize their work to fit the system. I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as close as possible to no rules at all." (p. 15)
More meeting the users where they are, this time in their I'm-thinking-about-working and not I'm-thinking-about-a-computer: "The job of computers and networks is to get out of the way, to not be seen." (p. 159) Comes across more clearly on the page: right now, when you log in, you see the computer (desktop, applications, folders) -- why not see your work? Just load the browser and go -- all apps, all data run through there. Location independent (all data should be externally stored -- it's just a URL), with universal, permanent access to computers and the net. "[B]efore long, I should be able to walk up to a screen, see it quickly glow with my home page on it, and follow a link immediately. This simple difference in timing will dramatically cahnge the way we use computers, making the experience more like getting out a pen rather than getting out a lawnmower. Computers will be there when we suddenly have an idea, allowing us to cpature it and preventing the world from losing it." (p. 159)
Information, polishing v. loss: "Information is often lost within an organization when a 'final document' of some kind is created at the end of an endeavor. Often, everything from the minutes of meetings to background research vanishes, and the reasoning that brought the group to its endpoint is lost. It might actually still exist on some disk somewhere, but it is effectively useless because the finished document doesn't link to it." (p. 163) Great point. Knowledge Management is all about responding to this fact that info is LOST when the final doc comes out. What got made explicit is just the tip of the iceberg, and the rest slips back into being tacit knowledge.
Making the web a full part of the human experience: "We ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily. We should be able not only to follow loinks, but to create them--between all sorts of media. We should be able to not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people. Intercreativity is the process of making things or solving problems together. If interactivity is not just sitting there passivley in front of a display screen [Big Brother model], then intercreativity is not just sitting there in front of something 'interactive.'" (p. 169)
Raising the pie higher: "I long for a move from argument by repetition of sound bites to a hypertext exposition that can be justified and challenged--one that will allow us to look up and compare, side by side, what politicians, or defendants and accusers, actually say, regardless of what is claimed in television commercials and nightly news interviews." (pp. 173-4) Preach on, because I feel the spirit!

Reading Berners-Lee

2005-07-25T09:59:00.000-04:00

Recursion: "It isn't the letters, it's the way they're strung together into words. It isn't the words, it's the way they're strung together into phrases. It isn't the phrases, it's the way they're strung together in a document." (p. 13) Every piece has meaning on an atomic level, but the more important meaning is always one level, then another level up, etc....
Meeting the users where they are: 'I had seen numerous developers arrive at CERN to tout systems that "helped" people organize information. They'd say, 'To use this system all you have to do is divide all your documents into four categories' or 'You just have to save all your data as a WordWonderful document' or whatever. I saw one protagonist after the next shot down in flames by indignant researchers because the developers were forcing them to reorganize their work to fit the system. I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as close as possible to no rules at all." (p. 15)
More meeting the users where they are, this time in their I'm-thinking-about-working and not I'm-thinking-about-a-computer: "The job of computers and networks is to get out of the way, to not be seen." (p. 159) Comes across more clearly on the page: right now, when you log in, you see the computer (desktop, applications, folders) -- why not see your work? Just load the browser and go -- all apps, all data run through there. Location independent (all data should be externally stored -- it's just a URL), with universal, permanent access to computers and the net. "[B]efore long, I should be able to walk up to a screen, see it quickly glow with my home page on it, and follow a link immediately. This simple difference in timing will dramatically cahnge the way we use computers, making the experience more like getting out a pen rather than getting out a lawnmower. Computers will be there when we suddenly have an idea, allowing us to cpature it and preventing the world from losing it." (p. 159)
Information, polishing v. loss: "Information is often lost within an organization when a 'final document' of some kind is created at the end of an endeavor. Often, everything from the minutes of meetings to background research vanishes, and the reasoning that brought the group to its endpoint is lost. It might actually still exist on some disk somewhere, but it is effectively useless because the finished document doesn't link to it." (p. 163) Great point. Knowledge Management is all about responding to this fact that info is LOST when the final doc comes out. What got made explicit is just the tip of the iceberg, and the rest slips back into being tacit knowledge.
Making the web a full part of the human experience: "We ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily. We should be able not only to follow loinks, but to create them--between all sorts of media. We should be able to not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people. Intercreativity is the process of making things or solving problems together. If interactivity is not just sitting there passivley in front of a display screen [Big Brother model], then intercreativity is not just sitting there in front of something 'interactive.'" (p. 169)
Raising the pie higher: "I long for a move from argument by repetition of sound bites to a hypertext exposition that can be justified and challenged--one that will allow us to look up and compare, side by side, what politicians, or defendants and accusers, actually say, regardless of what is claimed in television commercials and nightly news interviews." (pp. 173-4) Preach on, because I feel the spirit!

Reading Wineburg

2005-07-24T16:14:00.000-04:00

Intro

Since 1917, we know that "kids don't know history"; tests are only great at establishing that kids don't know what's on the test.

Ask not what kids don't know (i.e., facts, grand narrative); ask what they do know about history.

Grist of public debate on history is "lurid headlines and hand-wringing" (p. ix)

Popular view, straight from horse's mouth: Rush Limbaugh: "History is real simple. You know what history is? It's what happened." This is a master-text, both because it sums up the popular view AND employs great, bullying-yet-populist rhetoric at the same time. (p. ix) But to de-construct: it's all content, there's no mode-of-thought required other than that of amassing factual info.

Research question: "What is it, exactly, that historians do when they "read historically"? what concrete acts of cognition lead to sophistocated historical interpretations?" (p. xii)

Debate is over which history to teach, skipping over point of why teach history. (p. xii)

The whole intro gives, as it turns out, a great set-up on the rest of the chapters

Ch. 1: Historical thinking and other unnatural acts

"George Washington or Bart Simpson" -Senator Slade Gorton, 1995 debates on natl hist standards.

Text of debate: tit-fot-tat, I'm-right-you're-wrong.
Subtext of debate: standards writers are "worse than external enemies" (traitors); standards opponents are :driven by patent fears over a diverse America in which the 'new faces [that] crowded onto the stage of history ruin the symmetry and security of older versions of the past'" (racists) (p. 4). Traitors vs. racists...ahhh...debate in America.... Q: did anyone compare anyone else to Hitler or Chamberlain? Because that's how you KNOW you're no longer debating (Godwin's law).

Wineburg on "Why study history?": "history holds the potential, only partly realized, or humanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in the school curriculum. I make not claim or irginiality in arguing this point of view. But each generation must ask itself anew why studying the past is important, and remind itself why history can bring us together rather than--as we have seen most recently--tear us apart." (p. 5) -same or similar to Barton and Levtik's "readiness for participatory democracy" argument?

Wineburg on "How to study history?": another balancing act, this time between "familiar" (feelings of proximity) and "strange" (feelings of distance)

Bradley Commission: students should enter into a world of drama (p. 8)

Take this, Limbaugh-view: "Trying to shed what we know in order to glimpse the 'real'past is like trying to examine microbes with the naked eye. The instruments we abandon [modes of thought] are the ones that enable us to see." (p. 10)

Example of complexity vs. simplification: Locke on govt (familiar in the sense of feeling-of-proximity; familiar because it's well known, well-publicized) vs. Locke on religion (strange because of feeling-of-distance, this-guy-is-different-than-I; unfamiliar because it's not the sound bite about Locke that folks tend to know) (p. 11)

Textbooks: use Barthes' '"referential illusion," the notion that the way things are told is simply the way things were. To achieve this illusion, textbooks exploit various linguistic conventions.' (p. 12)

elimination of metadiscourse (where author expresses positionality)
elimination or scant acknowledgement of document record (so audience can see how account was constructed)
POV = 3rd person omniscient

Students and teachers reading history: Derek the gifted high school student (projects himself backward; "they wouldn't do it that way because it doesn't make sense") and Colleen the principal (rejects textbooky approach, but unable to write about history in a non-textbooky style: eliminated metadiscourse, 3rd person omniscient). So: the enemy is us? We are cuahgt in our own worldview? Unable to break free of distortion-inducing modes of thinking or modes of expressing?

Presentism ("the act of viewing the past through the lens of the present") "is not some bad habit we've fallen into. It is, instead, our psychological condition at rest, a way of thinking that requires little effort and comes quite naturally." (p. 19)

GREAT closing with Primo Levi story about speaking to 5th graders ("If it should happen to you again, do as I told you. You'll see that you'll be able to do it."), Marco Polo's rhinocerous. "Our encounter with history presents us with a choice: to learn about rhinoceroses or to learn about unicorns."

Reading Bransford

2005-07-12T10:04:00.000-04:00

1: Learning: From speculation to science

In the early part of the twentieth century, educaiton focused on the acquisition of literacy skills: simple reading, writing, and calculating. It was not the general rule for educatonal systems to train people to think and read critically, to express themselves clearly and persuasively, to solve complex problems in science and mathematics. Now, at the end of the century, these aspects of high literacy are required of almost everyone...." (p 4)

[ Note "express themselves clearly and persuasively" -- that's pretty subjective and has as much to do with the audience as the speaker. Consider Blink and the role of sub-concious cues. ]

As Nobel laureate Herbert Simon wisely stated, the meaning of "knowing" has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it. (p. 5)

"formal educational environments have been better at selecting talent than developing it" (p 5)

"the contemporary view of learning is that people construct new knowledge and understanding based on what they already know and believe." (p 10) -- connects nicely to wikis, no? People see, build upon.

p. 10 example of teaching children that world is round. Step 1: Evidence of eyes teach them that world is flat. Step 2: teacher says world is round. Kids picture a pancake. When told that it's a sphere, they picture a pancake on top of or inside a sphere. [Me: Step 3: Full understanding, integrating understanding of scale. ]

Parallel example: Fish is Fish.

Bransford uses these as examples of how people construct meaning on top of what's already in their heads. I also see these as cues for the importance of visualization, which is where technology can come in. Especially when addressing complex ideas -- not just "what does it look like?" but, for instance, the role of scale in understanding that the world looks flat but is spherical.

p. 11: "A common misconception regarding constructivist theories of knowing (that existing knowledge is used to build new knowledge) is that teachers should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This perspective confuses a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivists assume that all knowlege is constructed from previous knowledge, irrespective of how one is taught...." (Example of listening to a lecture: listener is integrating new info with old.)

So constructivist theory-of-knowing is about what's going on in the learner's head. Constructivist theory-of-teaching is about teacher behaviors.

p. 13: Modern learning calls not just for understanding (and understanding of increasingly complex situations) but successful TRANSFER to new situations.

p. 14-18: Key findings

Students come to the classroom with preconceptions.... (these initial understandings must be engaged or there will be no learning or no transfer beyond test) (Does this connect with VanSledright's observation about students' relapse to previous, unsupported viewpoints on history?)
To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application. (This is what separates experts and novices -- grasp of micro within macro context. Allows transfer, allows non-memorization but an understanding (buttressed by key memorized details) that maps to new contexts.)
A "metacognitive" approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring progress in achieving them.

pp. 19-21: Implications for teaching

Teachers must draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them. (Example: my opening assign in European Hist of asking students to write "The History of the World")
Teachers must teach some subject matter in depth, providing many examples in which the same concept is at work and providing a firm foundation of factual knowledge.
The teaching of metacognitive skills should be integrated into the curriculum in a variety of ways.

Kick-butt diagram on p. 22 of "knowledge of how people learn" -- photocopy and post!

pp. 23-26: designing classroom environments.

Be learner-centered - focus on student's heads, not teacher's ego. Give them "just manageable difficulties" (zone of proximity?)
Be knowledge-centered - look beyond engagement or just factual recall. Measure understanding, ability to transfer
Lots of formative evals
Encouragement of learning in context/extending learning into community environment and not just in the classroom. After all, kids spend 14% of their time at school, 33% sleeping, and 53% in home/community. Make sure the learning takes place outside the 14% slice!

Applying the design framework to adults: most prof devel for teachers is NOT learner-centered, is NOT knowledge-centered include insufficient formative assessment and are not community-centered.

2: How Experts Differ from Novices

Experts notice different things, they know not just facts but facts organized into schema (knowledge), know facts in the context of their application, can retrieve knowledge without significant attentional effort, can't always teach (!), have varying levels of flexibility.

big thing: connection between knowledge and contexts of its application
chessboard experiment: masters can recall real positions, but not meaningless (random) positions

3: Learning and Transfer

p. 51: Early assumption of "formal discipline": learning Latin helps you learn anything, because you learned how to learn and pay attention. (I guess this goes back to the selecting for talent rather than developing it thing.)

Big thing: no general "mental muscle".
Example of college student building ability to memorize number strings (chunked by numbers significant in track records) -- didn't transfer to letter strings.

p. 53: Key characteristics of learning and transfer for classroom/trad education contexts:

Initial learning is necessary for transfer, and a considerable amount is known about the kinds of learning experiences that support transfer
Knowledge that is overly contextualized can reduce tranfer; abstrat representations of knolwedge can help transfer
Transfer is best viewed as an active, dynamic process rather than a passive end-product of a particular set of learning experiences
All new learning involves transfer based on previous learning, and this fact has important implications for the design of instruction that helps students learn.

pp. 53 & 55: Refs LOGO experiments noting non-transfer to other "thinking & problem-solving" activities. But didn't assess how well students learned LOGO (the initial learning) -- the non-transfer was because they didn't know LOGO well enough in the first place to transfer any of the skills involved. Not enough skill to transfer.

pp. 54-55: More fun: such a thing as negative transfer exists. Can condition people to NOT do well on a related task -- just get them in the habit of doing something the same way every time.... (Liquid problem, using direct or Einstellung solution)

p. 59: preparation for learning matters. Students given advance organizer then lecture, students allowed to wrestle with data then lecture, students with just data. Students with data (constructivist?) and then lecture kicked butt.

p. 64: Cool box on flexible transfer problem (general sending troops on multiple roads to converge on target; doctor using rays from multiple angles to converge (and concentrate) on tumor)

pp. 71-73: Interesting stuff on cultural impacts: pumpkin pie example throws Af-Am student (who is familiar with sweet potato pie, but without that reference he's stuck on "What's pumpkin pie like?"); patterns of language/interaction/attentional focus between blacks and whites ("Look at that red fire truck!" vs. "Isn't that a pretty toy? Doesn't it make you feel happy?") - white parents far more into naming/counting/describing, black parents more into affective focus.

pp. 73-77: transfer between school and community: community tasks use tools far more often than in school. School version wants student to do more "mental work", therefore lack of transfer (two different contexts: tool-rich vs. tool-poor). Example: How can you get 3/4 of 2/3 cup of cottage cheese? School = fractions, real world = measuring, dumping, forming circle, cutting into quarters, taking 3 quarters.

4: How Children Learn

Surprising commonalities with adults. Study of very young yield major insights into how brain works.

History

tabula rasa / blooming, buzzing confusion / no attentional capability
Piaget: stages of development
perceptual learning theory

Bottom line: children are learners, they are intentional.

Box on p. 81: Vygotsky, zone of proximal development: ZoPD = "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined by problem silving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers." In other words, distance between "what I can do by myself" and "what I can do with assistance/coaching"

pp. 81-82 Trends in infants: predisposed to learn certain things, the privileged domains (biological concepts, causality, language, number concepts, etc.), use of strategies and metacognition, their own theories of mind, and connections with the community (as they provide support in the zone of proximal development).

pp. 82- cool methodogical advances (use of sucking, detection of gaze). Show compentency, intentionality, habituation, etc.

p. 89: Interest fact in number concepts. Children get the idea of bigger number = bigger quantities. But fractions are a stumbling block, because they don't fit that pattern. (Wonder what might be a parallel in developing one's understanding of tech?)

p. 94: importance of context clues in learning language: eat the apple vs. throw the apple. (Any potential connections to use of technology?)

pp. 98-99: Strategies in doing simple math problems. Children use different strategies depending on the numbers they're given. (Rings true plus makes me wonder about people's strategies when it comes to learning/using tech. Always have multiple ways to do any one thing -- how do they decide to do it one way one time and another way another time? Or perhaps that's a sign of maturity: once people start developing multiple ways of doing things, and use the different ways depending on the situation rather than always doing it the same way.)

p. 102: Theories of intelligence is interesting: entity theories (it's a fixed quantity) or incremental theories (it's built up over time). The theory one subscribes to will drive one's behavior (entity = look good, avoid looking bad; incremental = build up oneself via challenges, persistence is key)

p. 102: people are problem-solvers and problem-creators. They like a challenge. Jigsaw puzzle, crossword puzzle, nesting cups.

pp. 102- Role of parents: they help manage zone of proximal development, provide scaffolding. Great definition of scaffolding on p. 104:

interesting the child in the task;
reducing the number of steps required to solve a problem by simplifying the task, so that a child can manage components of the process and recognize when a fit with task rewquirements is achieved;
maintaining the pursuit of the goal, through motivation of the child and direction of the activity;
marking critical features of discrepancies between what a child has produced and the ideal solution;
controlling frustration and risk in problem solving; and
demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed

Wide variations possible in children's development, depending upon parent/community encouragement to tell stories, label things, speak to adults, ask questions, or play question game (known-answer situations) -- patterns vary by SES, and in classroom this can hurt working-class students. Solution: "The answer is not to concentrate exclusively on changing children or changing schools, but to encourage adaptive flexibility in both directions." (p. 111)

5: Mind and Brain

[This isn't my field, so I skimmed. But the highlighted concepts are...]

Learning changes the physical structure of the brain
These structural changes alter the functional organization of the brain; in other words, learning organizes and reorganizes the brain
Different parts of the brain may be ready to learn at different time

Observes that people love to make mountains out of molehills with this topic (left-brain/right-brain; we only use 20% of our brains; neural branching).

Key technology = PET, FMRI snapshots of brain

6: The Design of Learning Environments

Great section on "mission creep" in education. It's not so muc that schools are getting worse as expectations are getting higher. Examples writing instruction moved from taking dictation to expressing oneself; reading competency measured not just by rectitation literacy but extraction literacy. Consider that today all students (all young people!) are expected to read (and not just recite) Shakespeare and to write about (not copy) what they read and connect it with the rest of the world. (p. 133) Break it down by subject areas: complex literacy mentioned in lang arts, plus critical reading and evaluation of hist docs in social studies, testing theories in science, experimenting and observing....

Set up four lenses for looking at environments for learning:

learner-centered environment, aka culturally responsive or culturally appropriate, etc.: takes time to understand learners and engage their patterns of speech, thinking, constructing meaning. Example of talk-story in Hawaii as a starting point.
knowledge-centered environment: learners need to head somewhere, can't just study themselves, so...need a well-organized body of knowledge, building responsively and critically off learners' initial assumptions. Some great criticism of curricula: math curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep and includes "not so much a form of thinking as a substitute for thinking"; Amer Hist texts that omit info critical for understanding; science curricula emphasize facts over doing science. Interesting alternatives: consider Mathematics in Context -- "students use their own words, pictures, or diagrams to describe mathematical situations"...builds toward using formal symbols and equations. Fun fact: :to the Romans, a curriculum was a rutted course that guided the path of two-wheeled chariots" -- kids get stuck, can't really roam the landscape because knowledge isn't taught properly to achieve transfer, students can't make connections between points A and C (much less point X') in the scope-and-sequence chart. Note: you do need some reps/rote excercises, because a certain level of automaticity is desired for certain skills (reading, writing, calculating -- without these, progress in any field is difficult).
Assessment-centered environments: assessment = "opportunity for feedback and revision"; trad classroom contain too little feedback, too few (or no) opportunities for revision. Use assessment heavily for summative, not for formative. Also those assessments that are used are fact- and recall-heavily. Effective assessment will probably require re-shaping what parents and students (and teachers) think of as learning. Note role of new technologies to provide more frequent, more useful feedback. Note: good assessment, by eliminating teachers' assumptions about students and their knowledge and ability to do, can end up radically changing one's teaching style or even the curriculum. Thinking outside the box on assessment: present problems but don't ask for solutions; ask students to compare/contrast problems, explain processes involved. Portfolios: neat idea, great potential; usually implemented poorly. Again: insufficient feedback/revision. Classification tool for assessments: process constrained (step-by-step or process is explained) vs. process open (minimal explicit cues on how to reach solution), content knowledge rich (draw heavily on prior knowledge) vs. content knowledge lean (require no previous knowledge or all necessary info is given).
Community-centered environments: Community can = classroom, school, or wider community. Again, issues of clash of the cultures (ex. of [silent] Inuit students and [talkative] non-Inuit students being viewed differently by lower-48 speech pathologist vs. Inuit teacher; Japanese classroom practices [learning from listening to whole-class discussion of errors] vs. American classroom practices [minimal listening to each other, mostly competing to say the right answer first/fastest/best]). Dewey: great waste of school is lack of transfer from school to world and from world to school. Separate spheres. Learning from TV: benefit (vocab, school-readiness), espec in early childhood, of watching educ programs, even if it's a minority of the total viewing time. Also huge impact on attitudes (learning stereotypes or learning tolerance).

All four areas should be "aligned": knowledge with learners, assessments with knowledge, all three integrated into community.

Reading Barton and Levstik

2005-06-20T06:21:00.000-04:00

The main idea: History in the schools needs a purpose -- we cannot expect students to study history "for it's own sake." (Do they also make the more general argument that, "it's good for you!" a la chess or music or computer programming?) History-for-it's-own-sake (intermixed with indoctrination and identification) is the typical pattern in American classrooms -- absorb a laundry list of uninteresting facts, regurgitate them on the evaluation, repeat -- and results in the abysmal results that we can observe [NAEP, Jay Walking -- do B&L cite any stats or anecdotes?]. The purpose that they take is that history, if done properly, prepares students for participation in a democratic society.

Bonus feature: what makes their analysis especially interesting and even convincing is comparison to other countries. They draw upon the work of Peter Lee (and others) in Britain, pointing out the differences in teaching and the curricular expectations of students as well as the differences this creates in students' responses to history and to evaluations of their historical thinking. Barton and Levstik have also conducted research in Northern Ireland, where the political and cultural climate shapes the curriculum and the students in unique ways, constraining certain activities and arousing certain interests in the students. Several references are also made to work in Ghana, but it is not fully represented.

They then conduct an analysis of all the possible "stances" (student behaviors in reacting to history in the classroom) and "tools" for studying history (each of which is analyzed for its "affordances" and "constraints"). They then conclude with a chapter discussing the research on teacher education, and the implications for their view on history-for-participatory-democracy approach. The overview:

Stances

Identification -- (Ch. 3) students study the past to "associate themselves, either as individuals or as members of larger social groups, with specific people, events, or insitutions in history." (p. 45) A "leap of faith" [involves excluding certain facts or assuming the best about the people, events, or institutions ]. Shibboleth: "History tells us who we are." Most common activity, but also most reviled [except by Lynne Cheney.] "threatens the discipline's posture as an objective and scholarly enterprise, separate from and above earthly political or social concerns." (p. 53) B&L point out that identification, by binding one to one community, cuts off ties to another. Interesting: can identify with personal history, family history (both important to adults, but not for young people), national history; can identify the present with the past. More interesting: in Britain, kids (following their teachers) will write, '"Britain entered in 1940."' In the US, kids will write, "We entered in 1941." (p. 51) It's a give-away that an American is writing on an IB exam. "Students in the United States, like their teachers, associate themselves with the people and events of the national past even when they do not approve of them." (p. 51) Bottom line: "It seems evident to us that participation in a pluralist, participatory democracy requires a fundamental attachement to one's country." (p. 58) "The legitimacy of a state's demands and benefits--at least in a democratic nation--rests on a shared sense of identity among its citizens." (p. 59) Sure, identification can be used as a club to uphold status quo, but also note that identity doesn't have to be about the past, can be about "the here and now" and not a grand history. "[T]hemes of pluralism and participation should form the basis for hte history curriculum from an early age. Stories of Columbus and Thanksgiving, George Washington and Betsy Ross, meanwhile, should take a back seat or be discarded altogether. Americans will never fully share a national identity so long as their earliest history lessons extol European conquest and praise slaveowners." (p. 61) "By and large, diversity exists in the school curriculum only when it doesn't really matter." (p. 62)
Analytic -- (Ch. 4) "analysis involves breaking material down into its constituent parts, detecing the connections and interactions of those parts, and identifying the arragement or organizational structure that holds them together." - following Bloom (p. 69) "Analysis is also prominent when working with evidence to construct historical explanations or accounts." In other words, analysis is history's bread and butter. Students learn to separate authority (true because everyone says so) from evidence (true because it's supported by evidence). "Analysis is the activity most often promoted, defended, and justified by historians and other educators." (p. 70) Analysis is "use" of history, identification is often "abuse". The History of the Present: "For Turner, studying the past without connecting it to the present was antiquarianism, not history: 'The goals of the antiquarian is the dead past; the goal of the historian is the living present.'" (p. 71) Carl Becker says history's purpose is to "illuminate the present". Examples are Novick The Holocaust in American Life, Blight Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Beliefs about the past shape the present; analysis lays bare the connections or corrects misconceptions about the past. Example: Woodward The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Can also hope to use analysis to "learn lessons" from the past. Hotly debated. Zinn is into "the use of the past to shed light on contemporary politics", emphasizes that history can teach use lessons, but these observations are limited. (p. 77) Lee agrees. Even if these insights emerge from historical research, this isn't scientific research, uncovering immutable laws of physics. Just because US involvement in Iraq shares many similarities with its involvement in Vietnam, that doesn't mean it will continue to correlate. B&L don't completely agree: analysis can yield generalizations, ex. Billings and Blee The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. Move beyond getting the story right and instead aim to "contribue to policy discussions of the alleviation os chronic rural poverty by identifying lessons (their word) in the historical experiences of the communities they studied." (p. 78) More ammo: Schelsinger notes that "all public policy decisions are to some extent historical, because they are made with an eye toward the consequences of past decisions." (p. 81) T. Jefferson also on this side, talks of study of past providing "a repertoire of vicarious experience that can widen our understanding of the causes and consequences of human actions." (p. 81) [ Yup. Think unanticipated consequences of innovations in Rogers. ] "Any public action will inevitably be justified on some historical grounds, and as citizens in a participatory democracy, we must be able to evaluate those justifications--to determine if the particular generalizations or analogies in use are the most appropriate ones." (p. 82) And now for a little history on history in the US: New Social Studies movement of 60s-70s popularized idea that history education is not about memorizing or internalizing past accounts but learning how these accounts are created. In Great Britain, the movement succeeded (via Schools Council History 13-16 project) in revamping curriculum. Sample products: What Happened on Lexington Green? An Inquiry into the Nature and Methods of History (Amherst Project), What is History unit (Schools Council) (p. 82) Kownslar argues that "when students learned that written history was an interpretation based on primary sources, they became better able to develop and defend their generalizations as well as 'less likely to be fooled or misled by vague statements, myths, or stereotypes in textbooks, or those advanced by some politicians, journalists, salesmen, teachers ,neighbors, or friends, and, equally important, by the students themselves.'" (p. 84) Lines up with Wineburg and VanSledright. Note: American students don't intuitively get this. They see history's purpose as to learn content, to learn how present emerged from past, and to learn lessons from past; don't see it as learning craft of history. But in Northern Ireland, secondary students see history class as teaching them to "make up their own minds" because they recognize that official history and street history are both socially constructed. (p. 85)
Moral Response -- (Ch. 5) students study history "to celebrate the good things in history and condemn the bad" (p. 91). Possible goals = remembrance, condemnation, admiration; "all revolve around notions of right and wrong, of what should and should not happen. Such questions are a central part of participatory democracy." (p. 91) Remembrance and forgetting: very big in Northern Ireland. Must remember "death and hardship". One girl: "they shouldn't be forgotten". (p. 93) In the US, teachers tend to shy away from controversy, and thus sweep items under the rug: example of study of Vietnam era. Students want to know more about war, protests; teachers want to avoid topic. Vietnam was not 'part of "who we are" as a nation, and they worried about including it as one of the most important events because "it was a negative thing" In general, these teachers rejected any incident that illustrated a lack of unity and consensus in US history' (developmentally inappropriate for young children or represent abberations in national past, or would undermine sense of national identity. (p. 95) Teachers "were terrified of what they might unleash by speaking about them [past injustices] in the present, and in response, they chose silence." (p. 95) Result: domination of "story of unity and consensus" Fairness and justice: ... blah blah ... some interesting stuff on New Zealand (white) students debating Maori rights, returning land. Heroes and Heroism: White and O'Brien asked 600 students K-12 who their heroes were. Parents, family, cartoon characters; no hero; sports or entertainment figures; "Fewer than 1% of the children chose historical figures." (p. 104) Most folks view this with horror; B&L say "the problem is deeper than that and stems from the very idea of hilding up famous people as character models for students." (p. 104) Idolization = danger of having idols crushed once their flaws are realized. Tactics for "dealing with the blemishes of historical individuals": flaws were part of culture at the time, or else incorporate study of flaws into study of the heroes. But B&L suggest focusing on heroic acts, not heroes. Ex: Johnson's Civil Rights Act, Shindler's protection of Jews. These guys aren't heroes, but they did heroic things.
Exhibition -- (Ch. 6) Great opening vignette about freshman college experience of being caught in a class with two bores fighting over details. People love to exhibit historical knowledge (re-enactments, trivia, showing off memorabilia, reading books, watching documentaries). Exhibition has been used as the main peg for accountability (definitions, vocab words, answering questions). B&L comment that exhibition has pretty much no purpose in a participatory democracy. More interesting: state-mandated tests once offered hope that they would assess not just exhibition of facts but skills and thus help re-work the teaching of history; but that didn't happen. Many states dropped science and social studies from the tests; those states that did do social studies focus on exhibition of facts but not skills. "We had no problem teaching to the tests as long as the tests were worth teaching to." (p. 115) Still more interesting: sometimes tests did include items that required analysis/judgement; schools/teachers, however, failed to prepare students for these items and continued to stress exhibition of facts and coverage of content. (p. 117) "Both research evidence and our own experience in schools, then, suggest that the drawbacks of requiring students to display historical information to hold schools accountable are likely to outweigh the potential advantages." (p. 117) Exhibition as a service to others: think museums, historical sites (ex of Scottish "folk museum" -- redundant, unlabeled), older people passing on knowledge to younger people. B&L see value, but question usefulness; preference: "Exhibitions also would be more useful if they allowed audiences to relate the displated information to their own ideas, perspectives, and questions." (p. 123)

Tools

Narrative structure -- (Ch. 7) Narrative = wildly over-loaded term. Huge, sweeping definitions and expectations (foundation of all human understanding, blah blah). Need to define it, see it in different settings. Usual consulting of dictionary, examination of others' use of the term, etc. Fun hole-poking: if you go with "it has a beginning, a middle, and an end", then when exactly does, say, women's sufferage begin? They like Burke's pentad of actor, action, scene, instrument, and intention. Adapt it into: "constructed sequences of events that are both causally related and chronological; these sequences typically include a setting, actor, agent, goal, and instrument." (p. 132) Feel that this spans both fiction and history. Students and historical narratives: interesting stuff about how students remember better when all elements are present, invent missing pieces (e.g., intentions of actor) when they're absent. Result is combination of facts and inventions or "fanciful elaborations". Pattern holds up in research by VanSledright, Brophy, McKeown and Beck, plus B&L themselves. GREAT examples of student thinking on p. 134. Students view historical narratives like dramatic narratives (known outcome unfolding); "expect history to be composed of causal links ... quick, clean, and obvious -- not long-term, complicated, or ambiguous." (p. 135) Affordances and constraints: narrative is a great example of "pattern-making" by human brain. Both students and professionals do this. So: it's familiar and it's intuitive. But audience (students) of narrative tend to forget that they're constructed and that they're tools that mediate access to history, not history itself. But the narratives are so "powerful" that the students just accept them. Also, narratives necessarily involve simplification. [ Surely this isn't a killer but just something to keep in mind?? ] But simplification is necessary to provide coherence. Narrative structure as a cultural tool: Note that history doesn't have to be narrative. Ex: Bynum Unruly Women: The Politics of Sexual Control in the Old South, Genovese Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Non-narrative history is common. But is it harder for children to understand? Pappas' study of reading narrative and non-narrative to kindergarteners found preference for non-narrative. "Pappas concludes that narrative may be less 'primary' than many educators believe and that an emphasis on stories in the first years of schooling may hinder children's mastery of a wider range of texts." (p. 141) Other researchers concur. So: US is apparently narrative-heavy (inside school = emphasis on stories, even in social studies; outside school = TV dominated by comedies and dramas with a narrative arc), but Northern Ireland isn't (inside school = presentation of both sides, outside school = TV shows include lots of documentaries that are closer to Genovese than narrative history). Study of asking students to arrange pictures chronologically: US students explained choices by constructing simplistic narrative (immigration before presidents, because first people had to come); Northern Ireland students more accurate, explained choices with more complex understanding of multiple conditions existing simultaneously. (p. 144)
Narratives of individual achievement and motivation -- (Ch. 8) Think historical fiction, biographies, or response activities (?). Important for sake of participatory democracy: students must see that history is about and made by people, not molecules or pawns or other ciphers. "History can help them see how individuals influence the course of events [emphasis added]." (p. 151) Downside: can lose sight of "larger structural conditions" (after all, Marx quote sets up chapter). So: "To prepare students for democracy, history education must not only acquaint them with human agency but help them better understand the context within which such agency operates." (p. 151) Interesting: another "balance" idea, similar to Wineburg's comment about balancing between familiarity and strangeness. Ex: of far extreme of nonindividual history: Annales school of historians (long-term focus, look at big sweeps such as "changes in social structure, agricultural systems, demographic patterns, and collective mentality"). Textbooks seem to follow this approach, especially in their unit titles ("The Nation Expands"), but is this boring/uninteresting to students? So: mix in individual narratives, but whose? The powerful (Geo. Washington)? The famous (Columbus?)? The representative (midwife)? The interesting (slave narrative)? The uplifting (Harriet Tubman)? Real (Anne Frank) or fictional (My Brother Sam is Dead, Across Five Aprils)? Affordances and constraints: it's a familiar format (narrative is a building-block, and individual narratives receive attention from pre-literacy onward), involves children emotionally ("I would have..."), exposes them to illuminating details of life of others in the past. About one student who read historical fiction:Her textbook was a national narrative, but she wanted an individual narrative -- "What she wanted were readings that focused on emotion, morality, and individual judgment." (p. 155) . But B&L feel this is "overemphasizing individual choices, responses, and actions in the first place." (p. 155) Children intensively exposed to history through individuals (e.g., acting out witch trials): "they explained all historical events as though they were about individuals; they almost completely ignored the impact of collective action, as well as the role of societal institutions...." (pp. 155-6) Slavery comes from individuals' "prejudice" or because Whites were "lazy"; sexism is because men are "bossy"; even national conflicts stem from personal motives (the British fought the French because "they didn't like each other that much"; colonists rebelled because they were "bossed around by the Queen"); explorers are "individual hobbyists or entrepreneurs rather than commissioned agents of government"; change comes from "Great [Individuals]" -- Lincoln set the slaves free, Martin Luther King "said a speech" and ended segregation. What's left out: political factions, the economic underpinnings of groups, the amount of structure and media-savvy that went into the Civil Rights movement. Doesn't leave students equipped to think about and act in participatory democracy, doesn't allow them to see enduring connections that span generations and not just lifetimes (slavery/Jim Crow -> economic status, social disruption of black population -> modern issues such as Rodney King riots; students tend to blame present individuals [espec. blacks, for not taking advantage of post-Civil Rights opportunities] and don't see past's role in the present). This bias towards individualist lense is persistent, continues even after instruction. [It certainly fits well with presentism -- students live in the present, and they are individuals...it's part and parcel of projecting yourself backward or historical events forward.] Individual narratives as a cultural tool: stepping back, this is how children try to make sense of the world. They're stitching together what they know into a cohesive whole, and the framework they're best at or most comfortable with is the individual narrative. So they'll drop out things that don't hang on this frame, focus on those pieces that fit, re-cast things as needed to make them fit better. "Margaret Donaldson and her colleagues have shown that young children attempt to make 'human sense' of the world around them by putting novel situations into the context with which they are most familiar--the world of human motivations and intentions." (p. 160) And here comes our handy contrast: Northern Ireland! Less narrative-focused, less individual-focused. Politics make it dangerous to single out individuals for attention (i.e., they'd be making a hero/villain out of someone else's villain/hero) Students did a better job of explaining differences in clothing, corporal punishment at school, etc. Can see societal factors (changing standards) and not just individual factors (personal tastes or brutality). US vs. UK public (and private?) discourse supports the difference: US blames' individuals for societal problems (poor are poor because they're lazy or insufficiently entrepreneurial), UK is more willing to point at differential advantages/disadvantages of social classes. But the US isn't monolithic: we can probably expect different patterns in different racial or SES groups (i.e., what narratives get emphasized within black families, Nat Amer families?).
Master narrative (national story) of freedom and progress -- (Ch. 9) GREAT intro. Quote from Ian McEwan Amsterdam about a character remembering, but in his remembering giving himself all the best lines. American practice (or public use) of history is like this: we remember our history, and we give ourselves the best possible light by focusing on an "onward and upward" master narrative of freedom and progress. Loewen: "textbook authors present our nation as getting ever better in all areas, from race relations to transportation." (p. 167) Same goes for museums, public historic sites. Students seem to have internalized this: Wertsch on O'Connor study of 24 college students, out of whom 23 wrote "quest-for-freedom" narratives when asked to explain origins of country. B&L found same thing in research on middle-schoolers, who ID'd important of people and docs by associating them with freedom and progress. [But doesn't this again hook into presentism because growth and development, espec in US society, is about increasing freedom (autonomy) and progress (educational and economic attainment)? Freedom and progress jibe with the kids on an individual level, not just a national level.] Interesting: because we have freedom, other countries don't. Student in study by Searle-White: "Unlike other countries, we have freedom of speech, and other countries didn't have that kind of right." (p. 168) Progress: comparing present to past, the present isn't just different, it's BETTER, whether something objective (typing v. word-processing, candles v. light bulbs) or subjectives (names! "You don't want a really beautiful girl, and her name is Flossie, or a really cute boy, and his name is Oliver") (p. 170) Perceptions of progress also drive understanding of chronology (arranging of pictures - all wilderness/settlement/rural scenes come before all urban scenes; crooked streets = old while straight streets = modern) And now for our inter-cultural perspective: freedom and progress are clearly not the touchstones of, say, Israeli or Palestinian national narratives. Northern Ireland students in chronological photo-arranging exercise displayed far more nuanced understanding (not all primitive conditions have to predate all modern conditions -- differentials exist at the same time in different places; one child asked if he could NOT lay out in a linear format but instead overlap pictures). In dialogues about historically sig events, US students chose technological advancements (light bulb -- Irish kids laughed at the idea!), Irish kids pointed out things like the Multi-Party talks, but recognized that history is set to repeat, assuming the two communities (yet again) lapse into violence. So, to reducto ad absurdum: US = linear, Northern Ireland = cyclical view. Back to the fact that US is not a monolith: Epstein on students' ideas about history. Interviewed white and black students (with white and black interviewers, respectively): racial splits on choosing of "three most important people in US history", "three most important events in US history". Seemed to reflect different assumptions about the US and its history: freedom and progress (with slavery = aberration) vs. one long exercise in hypocrisy (fancy words about rights and equality on paper, but brutality and oppression in real life, or even just a straight-up attempt at genocide, for some Nat Amer groups). Affordances and constraints: uhhh...it's not true? Particularly easy to see if you consider foreign policy. At best, it's not all true all the time. Here the necessary simplifications (due to need to leave things out as you form the narrative) can become hugely distorting. Also, just as personal narratives removes the ability to see impact of historical factors/influences across generations, narrative of freedom and progress dims the view of consequences of actions (because all actions are good, right? Interesting connect to Dan Kearns' argument about a downside to social equality and the social safety net) and triggers a dismissal of alternative perspectives (how could anyone view this any other way? How could our motives be interpreted as NOT being about freedom and progress? Freedom is on the march, I tell you!). Also may be a crappy lens for history: "By suggesting that the desire for freedom is the enduring motivation that drives both individual experience and public policy, it misrepresents the cause of many historical events and renders students incapable of making reasonable and informed judgments." (p. 179) Affordance: "It is a hell of a story!" (p. 179) The American Dream is a powerful idea, recognized and felt the world over. Also: "The concept of freedom has been so powerful because, as Foner notes, it 'exposes the condtradictions between what America claims to be and what it actually is.'" (p. 179) Also, historically, we haven't just TALKED about extending freedom and progress, we've actually done it: material progress, extension of social and political freedoms. Plus: "David Blight, for example, argues that by the early 20th century, despite the persistence of lynching, poverty, and segregation, African Americans coul dnot 'afford the despair born of short-term defeats' and instead embraced 'a faith that at least since 1863 time, God, and the weight of history might be on their side.'" (p. 180) Also, take Northern Ireland's intractable struggles: does this stem from, among other things, a lack of hope? That's Thomas Friedman-ish -- that hope is a great part of the US character and might be a necessary ingredient for others.... So: two edges to this sword (national narrative of freedom and progress), and both are razor-sharp. Can mitigate the constraints by getting students to 1.) realize that the narrative is a narrative, a painted portrait and not a mirror; 2.) constantly consider "the advantages and disadvantages of historical changes and events" (p. 181) -- who benefitted? who suffered? Get into how, why, where, who...and what happened as a result. Every action has diverse impacts; try to see what WEB DuBois spoke of in "the full range of suffering and the persistence of possibility in American history" (p. 181) "Anyone who believes the narrative of freedom and progress will disappear from US history in the near future is seriously deluded." (p. 182)
Inquiry -- (Ch. 10) Greek root of historein = "to inquire". We use the word for the outcome, not the action. That's why when we mean inquiry in history, we have to say "historical inquiry." For the Greeks that would have been redundant. Whee. "Inquiry is a basic part of what history is about in our society" (p. 185): collecting geneological info or antiques or making films...all rely upon inquiry. But it's not common in schools' social studies classrooms (but it is at least present in other classrooms, no? Ex: Science, English?) Teachers and students really struggle with it. VanSledright is a great example: students cut corners (Milson: "path of least resistance") by getting factual info from web or textbook or other students and then interpret docs to support those accounts. Also, inquiry is hard/frustrating; students (and teachers) want to give up. "Perspective" and "reliability" are abstract concepts, hard to judge, and it's easy to sink into the murk of "they're all liars". Takes time to develop any critical facility with these concepts.Great Britain and "Project Chata" research on children's understanding of historical concepts (Lee, Ashby, Dickinson). Found that kids see that "Everything is up for grabs, because there is no way of deciding between competing opinions" (p. 196) Most crushing finding by VanS: "Who fired the first shot?", even after three days of study, got opinions that were NOT based in the evidence but what students thought "must" have happened. So the kids got the lesson about bias and reliability, and thereby felt free to discount any/all evidence as needed to proceed with their own [often dramatic or even cinematic] theory. Often, these theories were shaped by personal prejudices / allegiances (the colonists MUST be right! They wouldn't do something unprovoked!). Other researchers have noted the same problem: Dehea Smith saw third graders pitch evidence (gathered by the students themselves! framed around questions they had posed!) go "out the window" and as their historical accounts became "wholesale fiction"! (pp. 191-196) B&L: problem isn't that teachers and students can't do it, the problem is balancing all the "subtools" of inquiry. I can't seem to shake loose a tidy list of these sub-tools, but I think they involve search and reflection (Dewey). In fact, I'm tempted to call it "experience-reflection-action" after the Jesuits. Whatever inquiry is, it's going to involve heavy metacognition on search strategies, the results of searches, the artifacts' claims, and how these claims influence the previous assumptions. Oh, wait, here it is: following Dewey's definition of reflective thought ("conscious inquiry into the nature, conditions, and bearing of the belief.... Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends." -p. 187): felt difficulty ("some perplexity, confusion, or doubt" -- you've gotta be interested in the inquiry topic or else it's just like solving alegbra equations...except slower and more painful....) -- so inquiry should arise from students' own concerns [but what to do if they don't have any or claim not to have any??] And after that felt difficulty?? B&L don't break it down further. Do indicate that inquiry != only looking at primary sources. Feel that primary sources have become fetishized, or at least are sometimes used to veil underlying strategies. Example of "History comes alive when students analyze primary source documents!" approach -- teachers (or historians) responsible for the searching/judging; students are only responsible for cranking out their little products (analyses). "Many such exercises fail to engage students even in the most minimal evaluation of the usefulness of sources they are examining, for their purpose is not to develop any kind of reasoned judgment, but to help students explain how given primary sources illustrate facts and concepts they have learned elsewhere." (p. 199) Seixas: this is substituting "provisional, dynamic, and ongoing conversation to a static set of verities." (p. 200) or (Stanley and Whitson) "technical formalism in which students apply skills to pseudoproblems" (p. 201) ...Seixas then suggests "conceptualizing history 'around students' questioning of their own culture and experince, an investigation of the past that questions its traces and theorizes its legacy and import for the present.'" (p. 200) OK...that's radically different AND even harder to do.... But I can agree with B&L on this: "The critical task for the teacher is to help students develop questions that lead them toward inquiries that are meaningful and significant." (p. 200) So if inquiry is so hard to do, why bother? It's meaningful, it's natural, it's a good (and necessary) thing for participatory democracy, and it "makes the process of knoweldge construction more transparent" (p. 191). Plus, it's possible, right? Can't B&L always pull the Northern Ireland / British curriculum rabbit out of the hat and say that it's a matter of paradigm? American kids are trained on an individualist, narrative paradigm, but over there they're trained on a social class, inquiry (or at least non-narrative) paradigm? Fun fact: B&L are NOT down with the New Social Studies' agenda of turning students into mini-historians. Participatory democrats need to be able to do inquiry, but they don't need to be able to write monographs. Mini-historian approach is too limiting for the "deep and sensitive" reasoning they're after. (p. 187) I guess the next chapters really drive that home.
Historical empathy, version 1: perspective recognition -- (Ch. 11) Terminology problem of empathy, sympathy -- has spawned attempts to pin down meaning via perspective-taking, rational understanding, understanding people in the past, perspective recognition, historical empathy. How is a girl to choose? B&L feel that some emotional component is necessary -- this isn't just analysis. Participatory democracy stems from feelings as well as ideas. But you can't be expected to sympathize or identify with Hitler, so.... B&L will split the idea into two pieces: caring with and about people in the past (Ch. 12; more emotional) and recognizing their perspectives (Ch. 11; more analytical). So: let understand the actions of people in the past by using their perspective -- how did they see it? Understand Hitler's outlook but not accept it as your own (Foster). Note that this perspective recognition is tricky: fragmentary nature of evidence, shifts in language (e.g., slang), presentism. Scale for differentiating levels of perspective recognition, B&L like (again) the idea of subtools for achieving it: sense of 'otherness,' shared 'normalcy,' historical contextualization, differentiation of perspectives, and contextualization of the present (pp. 209-210). Nice sections illustrating each. I like the one about kids reacting to photo of girl in a tenement, discussion of why should would bathe in a sink (no washing machines, so that was how they washed their clothes), another of kids discussing Colonial food (they didn't have burritos because they weren't smart enough to make them), or consider washing: kids see wash boards as "because they didn't have washing machines" or "because they weren't smart enough to have washing machines," not "because that was a lot easier than the previous method of crouching by a stream and pounding with rocks!" (p. 213) Other topics that elicit interesting demonstrations of historical empathy / perspective recognition: discussion of women's roles in society and Salem witch trials. The latter forced students to "not look for evidence that they themselves considered convincing but [identify] those items that would have been convincing to people at the time." (p. 215) Next up: recognize that a diversity of views (perspectives) exist at any one time. Ex: opponents to American involvement in WWI and WWII. [ Me: Northern and Southern slavery-as-institution-mandated-by-God or institution-mandated-by-science (or capitalism), Southern slave sympathizers, Northern racists, Northern abolitionists (e.g., ship 'em back or maybe 'I just don't like slavery because it drives down my wages'), Northern radicals (equality), British perspective....] Women's rights movement: not all women within the movement wanted the same things. Last step (contextualization of present) is trickiest: seeing one's own attitudes and behaviors and assumptions as not just the 'normal' ones or 'right' ones or 'best' ones or 'smartest' ones but as something that emerges from the influence of social, economic, political, religious, familial, and personal factors. Affordances and constraints: by understanding others' perspectives (reasons why), we focus on the cause and miss the effect (the consequences of the actions taken). Also creates "biases that detract from our ability to deliberate over issues of the common good." (p. 222) Ex: dropping the atomic bomb.
Historical empathy, version 2: caring -- (Ch. 12) So when we feel indignity over slavery or the Trail of Tears, aren't we just guilty of presentism? "If this kind of presentism is immature, then we don't want to grow up." (p. 229) Students care, and history without caring about the people in the past is soulless, un-motivating. More sub-tooling: we care about the people and events, we care that particular events took place, we care for people when we respond to suffering, and we can care to change out beliefs and behaviors based on what we learned. (p. 229) The last is the big linch-pin to participatory democracy. "The ultimate purpose of history education, in our view, is to enable students to take action in the present, and if they are going to take action, they must care to do so" (p. 237) Affordances and constraints: "caring" about history is treated as disreputable -- but this is because it's considered in isolation: B&L aren't saying it's the ONLY goal or tool that should be used. "Trying to develop care withouth these other tools [narrative, inquiry, perspective recognition] would be folly, and we have rarely encountered teachers who tried to do so. The greater danger--and the more common one--is that the other tools will be used without care: Students will be asked to learn stories they don't care about, to inquire into events without caring that they occurred, to examine the perspectives of people without caring for them--and to study history without caring to use it in the present. In fact, this is a concise description of most history education in the United States--study without care." (p. 241) It's safe for the teacher, but a failure as a learning experience.

Implications for teacher-prep (ch. 13)

Traditional debate over how to prepare history teachers for the classroom centered around content knowledge (knowing your history; Shulman) vs. methods (how to teach history).

However, even teachers with training in using inquiry, etc., tend to end up teaching in the same manner as those using more traditional forms (lecture, textbook) -- they just talk about it differently. Different talk, same walk.

Reality is that the top two priorities for teachers are COVERAGE of the curriculum and CONTROL over the classroom. Teachers want to fit in, want to be accepted by their peers and the community as competant professionals. They are judged by their students' "getting through the material" and by keeping order in the classroom, therefore these become their primary goals.

Problem: both goals tend to clash with use of inquiry, empathy, etc.

Observation: key to changing teacher behavior in the classroom is changing the teacher's goal. If coverage and control are the goals, things will pretty much always be as they are, with or without more knowledge of history or more training in teaching methods.

Modest proposal: priority in preparing history teachers for the classroom should be getting them to set for themselves the goal of preparing students for participatory democracy. Then and only then will the tools described earlier be used with proper recognition of their affordances and constraints.

My thought: doesn't this require them (the PSTs) to buy into a pretty specific political view (i.e., pluralism)? Sure, I like it too and can see the connection to good history classrooms, but I recognize that lots of others folks are NOT into the pluralist model and are in fact in opposition to it, seeing it as "exactly what's wrong with America." They're in certain private schools, they're in home schools, they're on Fox News, and they're in Congress and they're in your neighborhood. Pretty much the only argument they'll listen to is student outcomes, particularly as measured by content knowledge.

Reading VanSledright

2005-06-08T07:03:00.000-04:00

Problems with K12 students "doing history" (not that adults are immune to this either):

Popularity contest -- students' arguments don't just rest upon the use of the documents, marshalling of facts, etc. It's also rhetorical style and student's social capital. Example: "Percy the liar" thesis in VanSledright's Starving Time exercise (Ch. 3)
"They're all liars" default -- "In a conversation I once had with Peter Lee, the British history education researcher who has done extensive work with children at a variety of ages, he remarked that he had talked with a number of students who, on being confronted with conflicting evidence and the potential for inconclusive interpretive moves, indicated, well, perhaps people had just made things up and/or were simply lying. This jump from initial trust in the general veractiy of accounts to concluding that people are prevaricating in one form or anotehr raises again the question of what young children learn when you expose the referential illusion and reveal the inner interpretive machinery of doing history." (Ch. 3, p. 50)
"Disney effect"(Afflerbach & VanSledright, 2001) -- students seem to be influenced by what they recall (or think they recall) from films. Ex of Pocohantas, in which the governor is fat, deceptive, and has a dog named Percy. The characteristics of fat and lying got associated by the students with Capt Percy (gov during starving time) despite not appearing in the primary sources (but could be intuited, perhaps?) -- seems that there's some leakage from the movie into students' impression of history/people in history. I'd be interested in seeing more examples of this, not that we need to see too many examples to prove the point (e.g., Gone With the Wind, Westerns).

Not that this discounts VanSledright's approach (and it's not like the history-as-grocery-list or one-damn-thing-after-another is a sparkling paradigm either), but it needs to be addressed.

Getting up to speed on name-drops, quotes

Joan Wallach Scott: reality and interpretation are inextricably linked. Related idea: students (and most folks) see truth as objective. We might not know it, but, as the X-Files says, it's out there. If only we had the right sources, or if only the sources we had didn't dissemble so much, then we'd know it. However, a mature historical thinker recognizes that Truth is a slippery fish, that all claims of it are merely interpretations whose foundations are weak or strong depending on their use of the available sources.
Lowenthal: History is a foreign country. The ancients are alien to us. (Contrast with Tacitus: nothing human is alien to me.) So here's a finer-grained presentation of the idea:

ancient vs. modern split. Trick is not to just understand the ancients but to see things as they would have seen them, to have the same reference points, blinders,
paucity of evidence, wide range of possible interpretations
depending on the subject, you're working with both primary and secondary sources. Therefore, you have not just the "reality" of the primary sources but also the interpretations built into the secondary sources.

Voltaire & Neitzche: "history is like a package of tricks the living play on the dead." (Ch. 2, p. 27)

Tech initiatives and the tidal wave

2004-11-15T17:54:00.000-05:00

Think about a teacher over the course of his/her career. They'll have seen a whole bunch of fads and policy initiatives come and go, and they might think that they can also just "outlast" computers. But it's different. Technology is a tidal wave -- it's coming and it's unstoppable. What else is a tidal wave? Demographics...increasing transience...legal worries.... Anyway, the point is, how can we get teachers to pay attention the these unavoidable changes and address them head-on, have to most productive possible response to them? People don't like to change (hence the outlast strategy); how can we get them to recognize the situations that call for change and then to follow through? For some reason I don't think the "public policy initiative" is the way to go.

Games

2004-10-20T13:10:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth and Nancy reporting back from "Serious Games" conf in DC early Oct 2004:
Application: Games can be used for training, skill-building, changing attitudes, even psychological processing (soldiers returning from combat?). My (un-asked) question: did you see a lot of content-learning games? I imagine they would be harder than skill-focused, or at least harder to do in an interesting way.
People: Nancy heard some guy, Kimble?, who had a very ID-driven way of approaching game design: do a needs assessment, etc. My un-asked question: any Prensky representation?

Wacky Social Studies idea

2004-10-13T13:59:00.000-04:00

Inspired by "My Life, Your Life" (mentioned in Kinzie 13 Oct 2004): class into two groups. One group studies plantations: roles, examples, objects. Other half of the class studies utopian communities: roles, examples, objects. Prepare presentation; each half present to the other. Basically, two different models for organizing society on display, one based on consensus (?) and one based on command.

Retention and transfer

2004-10-13T13:53:00.000-04:00

Quick thought: drug rehab practitioners really know the importance of retention and transfer. What have they learned? Are their findings applicable to other forms of training?

Provocative sentence...reflect

2004-09-20T15:12:00.000-04:00

Non-educators often make the mistake of equating access to information with access to learning. In reality, these are two separate goals. In fact, increasing access to information can actually undermine learning, because it sometimes requires reducing or eliminating the challenge or resistance that is essential to learning.

- From CAST Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age, Ch. 4

Read me!

2004-09-17T13:24:00.000-04:00

Pflaum, William. The Technology Fix. (2004) - published by ASCD. 80+% of computers off or unused; those that are being used are being used poorly (PowerPointlessness). Read about it on fno.org. Read me!

Potential study topic

2004-09-16T16:47:00.000-04:00

Teachers are conservative and control-oriented. Do not adapt well to new technologies. Why? Well, technologies decrease control (might not work, make teacher look foolish in front of students; worst-case scenario is that technologies will empower students to ignore/show up/defy teacher). So why so control-oriented? Partially because effective teaching (not to mention socialization) does require at least some element of control, but I think there's something even more powerful than professional interest at stake. Perhaps teachers seek to re-create parent-child (all-powerful, all-knowing role vs. dependent, mother-may-I role) dynamic. [ So perhaps one interesting study on teachers might link parenting style experienced during childhood to classroom management style and to adoption of technology. Worth considering? ]

Thoughts from 701...

2004-09-13T16:25:00.000-04:00

Two models for instruction: transfer (learners are vessels waiting to be filled -- CAI aims for this); inspiration (learners are tinder waiting for a spark)

Role of ETC -- responsible for creating useful applications of technology? I say no -- teachers have to create it. ETC just assists in their thinking/discovery/skills acquisition. If the teachers aren't doing it, it's "not invented here" and they hate it/resent it/sabotage it.

Adopting vs. adapting -- we've adopted new technologies (piecemeal), but haven't adapted the curriculum to best utilize these new technologies.

But would this be appropriate? These tools are still immature. The technologies are still evolving. You don't want to build the curriculum around Flash. Even building the curriculum around something as big as the Internet is extremely dubious -- there's not yet enough "there", there. But I guess it also depends on how much you value the current curriculum. As others pointed out, the current curriculum doesn't exactly serve kids' needs either.

What I want and what might be a stepping stone

2004-09-13T10:39:00.000-04:00

What I want: cheap, durable, easy (intuitive) to use, flexible tools to teach with. I'm not so interested in specialty websites, content-area software, etc. Instead, I want something as ubiquitous as a pencil or a chalkboard. Anytime you need operations on data, you reach for...

Examples:
1. teaching: graphing calculators -- powerful tool all the way through math from algebra onwards. Little bit of a learning curve.
2. administration: internal mail servers -- not hard to learn (but most people only use at a more basic level than intended), effectively sends text
3. administration: internal web servers are close to being a reality. Would nicely augment/replace printing, given broad enough hardware base. Need to become simpler to operate/manage.

What I want:
1. database tool -- can slurp any combo of data (ASCII or binary), can search, organize, etc.
2. graphical tool -- can construct graphical models of ideas, include links to or imports from database

What to look at:
1. Project Inkwell is pushing for a universal educational platform. Sounds fishy on one level (proprietary? open source? -plus the website is members-only...) but could be the real deal.
2. hiddenagenda.com -- challenges college kids to create educational games for middle-schoolers. But why can't we see the games they've created?

Improving teaching

2004-09-02T11:59:00.000-04:00

Too much information thrown at teachers, all of it flagged as top priority. So they filter out as much as possible and focus only on what they have to. So while classrooms have become wired and computers and peripherals have been plopped on campuses, few teachers have bothered (or been able to find the time) to really start to figure out how to teach with (or through) these new resources. And even when a teacher does try something new, the road is littered with obstacles -- hardware crashes, bad software, limited access to hardware and software, skill gaps among students (and on the part of the teacher!) and so on.

So how to break through the filter and trigger teachers' experimentation? Application? Innovation? -Or, dare we hope, sharing?

I'd say start small, and keep it flexible. Link it to a prof devel plan -- require one documented new teaching technique every year, and one documented follow-up on a previous teaching technique. Focus on the classroom application and the rest (e.g., administrative competency) will follow. Or so I hope.

First posting

2004-09-01T01:29:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my little corner of the world. School starts tomorrow and I'm not ready. Then again, no one's about to beat me up about that, so I guess it's OK.