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Pedagogy | Pedagogy, most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Pedagogy is often described as the act of teaching. The pedagogy adopted by teachers shapes their actions, judgments, and teaching strategies by taking into consideration theories of learning, understandings of students and their needs, and the backgrounds and interests of individual students. Its aims may range from furthering liberal education (the general development of human potential) to the narrower specifics of vocational education (the imparting and acquisition of specific skills).
Instructive strategies are governed by the pupil's background knowledge and experience, situation and environment, as well as learning goals set by the student and teacher. One example would be the Socratic method.
Definition
The meaning of the term "pedagogy" is often contested and a great variety of definitions has been suggested. The most common approach is to define it as the study or science of teaching methods. In this sense, it is the methodology of education. As a methodology, it investigates the ways and practices that can be used to realize the aims of education. The main aim is often identified with the transmission of knowledge. Other aims include fostering skills and character traits. They include helping the student develop their intellectual and social abilities as well as psychomotor and affective learning, which are about developing practical skills and adequate emotional dispositions, respectively.
However, not everyone agrees with this characterization of pedagogy and some see it less as a science and more as an art or a craft. This characterization puts more emphasis on the practical aspect of pedagogy, which may involve various forms of "tacit knowledge that is hard to put into words". This approach is often based on the idea that the most central aspects of teaching are only acquired by practice and cannot be easily codified through scientific inquiry. In this regard, pedagogy is concerned with "observing and refining one's skill as a teacher". A more inclusive definition combines these two characterizations and sees pedagogy both as the practice of teaching and the discourse and study of teaching methods. Some theorists give an even wider definition by including considerations such as "the development of health and bodily fitness, social and moral welfare, ethics and aesthetics". Due to this variety of meanings, it is sometimes suggested that pedagogy is a "catch-all term" associated with various issues of teaching and learning. In this sense, it lacks a precise definition.
According to Patricia Murphy, a detailed reflection on the meaning of the term "pedagogy" is important nonetheless since different theorists often use it in very different ways. In some cases, non-trivial assumptions about the nature of learning are even included in its definition. Pedagogy is often specifically understood in relation to school education. But in a wider sense, it includes all forms of education, both inside and outside schools. In this wide sense, it is concerned with the process of teaching taking place between two parties: teachers and learners. The teacher's goal is to bring about certain experiences in the learner to foster their understanding of the subject matter to be taught. Pedagogy is interested in the forms and methods used to convey this understanding.
Pedagogy is closely related to didactics but there are some differences. Usually, didactics is seen as the more limited term that refers mainly to the teacher's role and activities, i.e how their behavior is most beneficial to the process of education. This is one central aspect of pedagogy besides other aspects that consider the learner's perspective as well. In this wider sense, pedagogy focuses on "any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance learning in another".
The word pedagogy is a derivative of the Greek (paidagōgia), from (paidagōgos), itself a synthesis of (ágō), "I lead", and (, genitive , ) "boy, child": hence, "attendance on boys, to lead a child". It is pronounced variously, as , , or . The related word pedagogue has had a negative connotation of pedantry, dating from at least the 1650s; a related expression is educational theorist. The term "pedagogy" is also found in the English discourse, but it is more broadly discussed in other European languages, such as French and German.
History
Western
In the Western world, pedagogy is associated with the Greek tradition of philosophical dialogue, particularly the Socratic method of inquiry. A more general account of its development holds that it emerged from the active concept of humanity as distinct from a fatalistic one and that history and human destiny are results of human actions. This idea germinated in ancient Greece and was further developed during the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment.
Socrates
Socrates (470 – 399 BCE) employed the Socratic method while engaging with a student or peer. This style does not impart knowledge, but rather tries to strengthen the logic of the student by revealing the conclusions of the statement of the student as erroneous or supported. The instructor in this learning environment recognizes the learners' need to think for themselves to facilitate their ability to think about problems and issues. It was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues.
Plato
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BCE) describes a system of education in The Republic (375 BCE) in which individual and family rights are sacrificed to the State. He describes three castes: one to learn a trade; one to learn literary and aesthetic ideas; and one to be trained in literary, aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical ideas. Plato saw education as a fulfillment of the soul, and by fulfilling the soul the body subsequently benefited. Plato viewed physical education for all as a necessity to a stable society.
Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) composed a treatise, On Education, which was subsequently lost. However, he renounced Plato's view in subsequent works, advocating for a common education mandated to all citizens by the State. A small minority of people residing within Greek city-states at this time were considered citizens, and thus Aristotle still limited education to a minority within Greece. Aristotle advocates physical education should precede intellectual studies.
Quintilian
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35 – 100 CE) published his pedagogy in Institutio Oratoria (95 CE). He describes education as a gradual affair, and places certain responsibilities on the teacher. He advocates for rhetorical, grammatical, scientific, and philosophical education.
Tertullian
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (155 – 240 CE) was a Christian scholar who rejected all pagan education, insisting this was "a road to the false and arrogant wisdom of ancient philosophers".
Jerome
Saint Jerome (347 – 30 September 420 CE), or Saint Hieronymus, was a Christian scholar who detailed his pedagogy of girls in numerous letters throughout his life. He did not believe the body in need of training, and thus advocated for fasting and mortification to subdue the body. He only recommends the Bible as reading material, with limited exposure, and cautions against musical instruments. He advocates against letting girls interact with society, and of having "affections for one of her companions than for others." He does recommend teaching the alphabet by ivory blocks instead of memorization so "She will thus learn by playing." He is an advocate of positive reinforcement, stating "Do not chide her for the difficulty she may have in learning. On the contrary, encourage her by commendation..."
Jean Gerson
Jean Charlier de Gerson (13 December 1363 – 12 July 1429), the Chancellor of the University of Paris, wrote in De parvulis ad Christum trahendis "Little children are more easily managed by caresses than fear," supporting a more gentle approach than his Christian predecessors. He also states "Above all else, let the teacher make an effort to be a father to his pupils." He is considered a precursor of Fenelon.
John Amos Comenius
John Amos Comenius (28 March 1592 – 15 November 1670) is considered the father of modern education.
Johann Pestalozzi
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (January 12, 1746 – February 17, 1827), founder of several educational institutions both in German- and French-speaking regions of Switzerland and wrote many works explaining his revolutionary modern principles of education. His motto was "Learning by head, hand and heart".
Johann Herbart
The educational philosophy and pedagogy of Johann Friedrich Herbart (4 May 1776 – 14 August 1841) highlighted the correlation between personal development and the resulting benefits to society. In other words, Herbart proposed that humans become fulfilled once they establish themselves as productive citizens. Herbartianism refers to the movement underpinned by Herbart's theoretical perspectives. Referring to the teaching process, Herbart suggested five steps as crucial components. Specifically, these five steps include: preparation, presentation, association, generalization, and application. Herbart suggests that pedagogy relates to having assumptions as an educator and a specific set of abilities with a deliberate end goal in mind.
John Dewey
The pedagogy of John Dewey (20 October 1859 – 1 June 1952) is presented in several works, including My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916), Schools of To-morrow (1915) with Evelyn Dewey, and Experience and Education (1938). In his eyes, the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good (My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey, 1897). Dewey advocated for an educational structure that strikes a balance between delivering knowledge while also taking into account the interests and experiences of the student (The Child and the Curriculum, Dewey, 1902). Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. He envisioned a divergence from the mastery of a pre-selected set of skills to the cultivation of autonomy and critical-thinking within the teacher and student alike.
Eastern
Confucius
Confucius (551–479 BCE) stated that authority has the responsibility to provide oral and written instruction to the people under the rule, and "should do them good in every possible way." One of the deepest teachings of Confucius may have been the superiority of personal exemplification over explicit rules of behavior. His moral teachings emphasized self-cultivation, emulation of moral exemplars, and the attainment of skilled judgement rather than knowledge of rules. Other relevant practices in the Confucian teaching tradition include the Rite and its notion of body-knowledge as well as Confucian understanding of the self, one that has a broader conceptualization than the Western individual self.
Pedagogical considerations
Teaching method
Hidden curriculum
A hidden curriculum refers to extra educational activities or side effect of an education, "[lessons] which are learned but not openly intended" such as the transmission of norms, values, and beliefs conveyed in the classroom and the social environment.
Learning space
Learning space or learning setting refers to a physical setting for a learning environment, a place in which teaching and learning occur. The term is commonly used as a more definitive alternative to "classroom", but it may also refer to an indoor or outdoor location, either actual or virtual. Learning spaces are highly diverse in use, learning styles, configuration, location, and educational institution. They support a variety of pedagogies, including quiet study, passive or active learning, kinesthetic or physical learning, vocational learning, experiential learning, and others.
Learning theories
Learning theories are conceptual frameworks describing how knowledge is absorbed, processed, and retained during learning. Cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences, as well as prior experience, all play a part in how understanding, or a world view, is acquired or changed and knowledge and skills retained.
Distance learning
Distance education or long-distance learning is the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school. Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via post. Today it involves online education. Courses that are conducted (51 percent or more) are either hybrid, blended or 100% distance learning. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering large-scale interactive participation and open access through the World Wide Web or other network technologies, are recent developments in distance education. A number of other terms (distributed learning, e-learning, online learning, etc.) are used roughly synonymously with distance education.
Teaching resource adaptation
Adapting the teaching resource should suit appropriate teaching and learning environments, national and local cultural norms, and make it accessible to different types of learners. Key adaptations in teaching resource include:
Classroom constraints
Large class size – consider smaller groups or have discussions in pairs;
Time available – shorten or lengthen the duration of activities;
Modifying materials needed – find, make or substitute required materials;
Space requirements – reorganize classroom, use a larger space, move indoors or outdoors.
Cultural familiarity
Change references to names, food and items to make them more familiar;
Substitute local texts or art (folklore, stories, songs, games, artwork and proverbs).
Local relevance
Use the names and processes for local institutions such as courts;
Be sensitive of local behavior norms (e.g. for genders and ages);
Ensure content is sensitive to the degree of rule of law in society (trust in authorities and institutions).
Inclusivity for diverse students
Appropriate reading level(s) of texts for student use;
Activities for different learning styles;
Accommodation for students with special educational needs;
Sensitivity to cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity;
Sensitivity to students' socioeconomic status.
Pedagogical approaches
Evidence-based
Dialogic learning
Dialogic learning is learning that takes place through dialogue. It is typically the result of egalitarian dialogue; in other words, the consequence of a dialogue in which different people provide arguments based on validity claims and not on power claims.
Student-centered learning
Student-centered learning, also known as learner-centered education, broadly encompasses methods of teaching that shift the focus of instruction from the teacher to the student. In original usage, student-centered learning aims to develop learner autonomy and independence by putting responsibility for the learning path in the hands of students. Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving.
Critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy applies critical theory to pedagogy and asserts that educational practices are contested and shaped by history, that schools are not politically neutral spaces, and that teaching is political. Decisions regarding the curriculum, disciplinary practices, student testing, textbook selection, the language used by the teacher, and more can empower or disempower students. It asserts that educational practices favor some students over others and some practices harm all students. It also asserts that educational practices often favor some voices and perspectives while marginalizing or ignoring others.
Academic degrees
The academic degree Ped. D., Doctor of Pedagogy, is awarded honorarily by some US universities to distinguished teachers (in the US and UK, earned degrees within the instructive field are classified as an Ed.D., Doctor of Education, or a Ph.D., Doctor of Philosophy). The term is also used to denote an emphasis in education as a specialty in a field (for instance, a Doctor of Music degree in piano pedagogy).
Pedagogues around the world
The education of pedagogues, and their role in society, varies greatly from culture to culture.
Belgium
Important pedagogues in Belgium are Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (Catholic University of Leuven). According to these scholars, schools nowadays are often dismissed as outdated or ineffective. Deschoolers even argue that schools rest on the false premise that schools are necessary for learning but that people learn faster or better outside the classroom. Others critique the fact that some teachers stand before a classroom with only six weeks of teacher education. Against this background, Masschelein and Simons propose to look at school from a different point of view. Their educational morphology approaches the school as a particular scholastic 'form of gathering'. What the authors mean with that, is the following: school is a particular time-space-matter arrangement. This thus includes concretes architectures, technologies, practices and figures. This arrangement "deals in a specific way with the new generation, allows for a particular relation to the world, and for a particular experience of potentiality and of commonality (of making things public)".
Masschelein and Simons' most famous work is the book "Looking after school: a critical analysis of personalisation in Education". It takes a critical look at the main discourse of today's education. Education is seen through a socio-economic lens: education is aimed at mobilising talents and competencies (p23). This is seen in multiple texts from governing bodies, in Belgium and Europe. One of the most significant examples is quoted on page 23: "Education and training can only contribute to growth and job-creation if learning is focused on the knowledge, skills and competences to be acquired by students (learning outcomes) through the learning process, rather than on completing a specific stage or on time spent in school." (European Commission, 2012, p.7) This is, according to Masschelein and Simons a plea for learning outcomes and demonstrates a vision of education in which the institution is no longer the point of departure. The main ambition in this discourse of education is the efficient and effective realisation of learning outcomes for all. Things like the place and time of learning, didactic and pedagogic support are means to an end: the acquisition of preplanned learning outcomes. And these outcomes are a direct input for the knowledge economy. Masschelein and Simons' main critique here is that the main concern is not the educational institution (anymore). Rather, the focus lies on the learning processes and mainly on the learning outcomes of the individual learner.
Brazil
In Brazil, a pedagogue is a multidisciplinary educator. Undergraduate education in Pedagogy qualifies students to become school administrators or coordinators at all educational levels, and also to become multidisciplinary teachers, such as pre-school, elementary and special teachers.
Denmark
In Scandinavia, a pedagogue (pædagog) is broadly speaking a practitioner of pedagogy, but the term is primarily reserved for individuals who occupy jobs in pre-school education (such as kindergartens and nurseries). A pedagogue can occupy various kinds of jobs, within this restrictive definition, e.g. in retirement homes, prisons, orphanages, and human resource management. When working with at-risk families or youths they are referred to as social pedagogues (socialpædagog).
The pedagogue's job is usually distinguished from a teacher's by primarily focusing on teaching children life-preparing knowledge such as social or non-curriculum skills, and cultural norms. There is also a very big focus on the care and well-being of the child. Many pedagogical institutions also practice social inclusion. The pedagogue's work also consists of supporting the child in their mental and social development.
In Denmark all pedagogues are educated at a series of national institutes for social educators located in all major cities. The education is a 3.5-year academic course, giving the student the title of a Bachelor in Social Education (Danish: Professionsbachelor som pædagog).
It is also possible to earn a master's degree in pedagogy/educational science from the University of Copenhagen. This BA and MA program has a more theoretical focus compared to the more vocational Bachelor in Social Education.
Hungary
In Hungary, the word pedagogue (pedagógus) is synonymous with the teacher (tanár); therefore, teachers of both primary and secondary schools may be referred to as pedagogues, a word that appears also in the name of their lobbyist organizations and labor unions (e.g. Labor Union of Pedagogues, Democratic Labor Union of Pedagogues). However, undergraduate education in Pedagogy does not qualify students to become teachers in primary or secondary schools but makes them able to apply to be educational assistants. As of 2013, the six-year training period was re-installed in place of the undergraduate and postgraduate division which characterized the previous practice.
Modern pedagogy
An article from Kathmandu Post published on 3 June 2018 described the usual first day of school in an academic calendar. Teachers meet their students with distinct traits. The diversity of attributions among children or teens exceeds similarities. Educators have to teach students with different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds. This situation entails a differentiated strategy in pedagogy and not the traditional approach for teachers to accomplish goals efficiently.
American author and educator Carol Ann Tomlinson defined Differentiated Instruction as "teachers' efforts in responding to inconsistencies among students in the classroom." Differentiation refers to methods of teaching. She explained that Differentiated Instruction gives learners a variety of alternatives for acquiring information. Primary principles comprising the structure of Differentiated Instruction include formative and ongoing assessment, group collaboration, recognition of students' diverse levels of knowledge, problem-solving, and choice in reading and writing experiences.
Howard Gardner gained prominence in the education sector for his Multiple Intelligences Theory. He named seven of these intelligences in 1983: Linguistic, Logical and Mathematical, Visual and Spatial, Body and Kinesthetic, Musical and Rhythmic, Intrapersonal, and Interpersonal. Critics say the theory is based only on Gardner's intuition instead of empirical data. Another criticism is that the intelligence is too identical for types of personalities. The theory of Howard Gardner came from cognitive research and states these intelligences help people to "know the world, understand themselves, and other people." Said differences dispute an educational system that presumes students can "understand the same materials in the same manner and that a standardized, collective measure is very much impartial towards linguistic approaches in instruction and assessment as well as to some extent logical and quantitative styles."
Educational research
See also
Outline of education
References
Sources
See also
List of important publications in philosophy
List of important publications in anthropology
List of important publications in economics
Further reading
Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1971). The Relevance of Education. New York, NY: Norton
Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belkapp Press.
John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968 (English translation: 1970)
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971
David L. Kirp, The Sandbox Investment, 2007
Montessori, M. (1910). Antropologia Pedagogica.
Montessori, M. (1921). Manuale di Pedagogia Scientifica.
Montessori, M. (1934). Psico Aritmética.
Montessori, M. (1934). Psico Geométria.
Piaget, J. (1926). The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan.
Karl Rosenkranz (1848). Pedagogics as a System. Translated 1872 by Anna C. Brackett, R.P. Studley Company
Karl Rosenkranz (1899). The philosophy of education. D. Appleton and Co.
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794
Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Didactics
Educational psychology
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Social pedagogy | Social pedagogy describes a holistic and relationship-centred way of working in care and educational settings with people across the course of their lives. In many countries across Europe (and increasingly beyond), it has a long-standing tradition as a field of practice and academic discipline concerned with addressing social inequality and facilitating social change by nurturing learning, well-being and connection both at an individual and community level. The term 'pedagogy' originates from the Greek pais (child) and agein (to bring up, or lead), with the prefix 'social' emphasising that upbringing is not only the responsibility of parents but a shared responsibility of society. Social pedagogy has therefore evolved in somewhat different ways in different countries and reflects cultural and societal norms, attitudes and notions of education and upbringing, of the relationship between the individual and society, and of social welfare provision for its marginalised members. Social pedagogues (professionals who have completed a qualification in social pedagogy) work within a range of different settings, from early years through adulthood to working with disadvantaged adult groups as well as older people. To achieve a holistic perspective within each of these settings, social pedagogy draws together theories and concepts from related disciplines such as sociology, psychology, education, philosophy, medical sciences, and social work.
Methods
Hämäläinen points out that social pedagogy is not a method or a set of methods, but that any method is chosen based on social pedagogical considerations. In the past 3 main methods were defined:
Individual case work – with the aim to improve/develop individual life circumstances,
Social group work – with the aim of developing social competences,
Community intervention work – with the aim to develop social demographic structures.
After 1970 a lot of different methods derived from those three. In practice a mono-methodical approach can be barely found; approaches/ concepts of action predominate which include more than the three classic methods.
Principles
Social pedagogy is based on humanistic values stressing human dignity, mutual respect, trust, unconditional appreciation, and equality, to mention but a few. It is underpinned by a fundamental concept of children, young people and adults as equal human beings with rich and extraordinary potential and considers them competent, resourceful and active agents.
In their earlier work on social pedagogy, Petrie et al. identify 9 principles underpinning social pedagogy:
"A focus on the child as a whole person, and support for the child’s overall development;
The practitioner seeing herself/himself as a person, in relationship with the child or young person;
Children and staff are seen as inhabiting the same life space, not as existing in separate hierarchical domains;
As professionals, pedagogues are encouraged constantly to reflect on their practice and to apply both theoretical understandings and self-knowledge to the sometimes challenging demands with which they are confronted;
Pedagogues are also practical, so their training prepares them to share in many aspects of children’s daily lives and activities;
Children’s associative life is seen as an important resource: workers should foster and make use of the group;
Pedagogy builds on an understanding of children’s rights that is not limited to procedural matters or legislated requirements;
There is an emphasis on team work and on valuing the contribution of others in 'bringing up' children: other professionals, members of the local community and, especially, parents.
The centrality of relationship and, allied to this, the importance of listening and communicating."
Eichsteller & Holthoff suggest that social pedagogy aims to achieve:
Holistic education – education of head (cognitive knowledge), heart (emotional and spiritual learning), and hands (practical and physical skills);
Holistic well-being – strengthening health-sustaining factors and providing support for people to enjoy a long-lasting feeling of happiness;
To enable children, young people as well as adults to empower themselves and be self-responsible persons who take responsibility for their society;
To promote human welfare and prevent or ease social problems.
They go on to describe social pedagogical practice as a holistic process creating a balance between:
the professional: (theory and concepts, reflective practitioner – the ‘head’)
the personal: (using one's personality, positive attitude, building personal relationships, but keeping the ‘private’ out – the ‘heart’)
the practical: (using certain methods and creative activities – the ‘hands’)
All three elements are equal and complement each other, thus generating synergy.
Historic development
Although pedagogy varies across European countries, there are similar roots that have developed into differing strands of contemporary thinking in pedagogy. Hämäläinen explains that “historically, social pedagogy is based on the belief that you can decisively influence social circumstances through education” – and importantly, education is seen as a lifelong learning process that does not only refer to children but includes educating adults, for instance in order to change their idea of children.
While philosophers of Classical antiquity like Plato and Aristotle discussed how education could contribute to social development, social pedagogy in theory and practice only emerged through the influence of modern thinking in the Renaissance, the Reformation and later during the Enlightenment, when children started to come into the picture of social philosophy.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A major impetus for the current understanding of pedagogy was the educational philosophy of the Swiss social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Concerned with the decay of society, he developed his theories based on his belief that human beings were inherently good as they were closest to nature when born, but society and its institutions corrupted them and denaturalized them. Consequently, bringing up children in harmony with nature and its laws so as to preserve the good was central for Rousseau's pedagogic theory. Rousseau innovatively “argued that the momentum for learning was provided by the growth of the person (nature) – and that what the educator needed to do was to facilitate opportunities for learning,” as Doyle and Smith note.
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
Rousseau's educational philosophy inspired ensuing pedagogues, notably Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), who refined Rousseau's thoughts by developing a method of holistic education, which addressed head, heart, and hands. These three elements are inseparable from each other in Pestalozzi's method and need to be kept in harmony. "Nature forms the child as an indivisible whole, as a vital organic unity with many sided moral, mental, and physical capacities. Each of these capacities is developed through and by means of the others," Pestalozzi stated.
New Education Movement
Pestalozzi's ideas sparked interest across continental Europe, and particularly the New Education Movement transferred his pedagogic concept into various settings, such as kindergarten (Fröbel), school (Montessori, Steiner, Hahn), residential care (Korczak), and informal work with children and young people (Montessori). Thus the New Education Movement contributed to a continental pedagogic discourse, which saw children being conceptualised as equal human beings ("Children do not become humans, they already are", Korczak), and as competent, active agents ("A child has a hundred languages", Malaguzzi). Furthermore, there was increasing recognition for child participation and children's rights, for instance in the pedagogic concepts of Montessori and Korczak.
The New Education Movement led to a spread of pedagogic concepts and ideas across many European countries and made two fundamental points which demonstrate its ambition to use pedagogy for social change: “First, in all education the personality of the child is an essential concern; second, education must make for human betterment, that is for a New Era”.
Alleviating poverty
Based on the educational ideas of Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Fröbel, the German headteacher Friedrich Diesterweg (1790—1866) emphasised the social relevance of pedagogy in fighting social inequalities. For him social pedagogy was "educational action by which one aims to help the poor in society". Through the contribution of Diesterweg and other thinkers, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, pedagogy took on a more social role, one of community education that also occurs in later writers like Paulo Freire and John Dewey.
Although pedagogy was early on concerned with changing social conditions through education – Rousseau is most famous for his Social Contract (1762) – its primary focus had been on the individual and his or her upbringing, which Rousseau had aimed to protect from the negative influences of society. Pedagogic thinkers like Pestalozzi and later on Montessori followed in his tradition of developing a child-centred pedagogy, which was increasingly criticised by an emerging school of thought that promoted a pedagogy focused on the collective, on the community and how to use pedagogic ideas for social betterment – or a social pedagogy, as the German educationalist Karl Mager had written in 1844 for the first time.
Social pedagogy
One of the first key thinkers, Paul Natorp, “claimed that all pedagogy should be social, that is, that in the philosophy of education the interaction of educational processes and society must be taken into consideration”. His social pedagogic theories were influenced by Plato’s doctrine of ideas, together with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative of treating people as subjects in their own rights instead of treating them as means to an end, and Pestalozzi’s method.
In the 1920s, with influential educationalists such as Herman Nohl, German social pedagogy was interpreted from a hermeneutical perspective, which acknowledged that an individual’s life and their problems can only be understood through their eyes and in their social context, by understanding how the individual interacts with their social environment.
Following World War II and the experiences within National Socialism that exposed the dangers of collective education in the hands of a totalitarian state, social pedagogy “became more critical, revealing a critical attitude towards society and taking the structural factors of society that produce social suffering into consideration”. Consequently, contemporary social pedagogy in Germany is as a discipline linked more closely to social work and sociology than to psychology.
Due to different historical developments and cultural notions, social pedagogy has very different traditions in other countries, although these are connected through the overarching core principles of social pedagogy. And even within one country, there is not the pedagogic approach – within the general discipline pedagogy we can distinguish various approaches. Some of these are named after key thinkers like Fröbel or Montessori who have created a very specific pedagogic concept for the context of their work, while others are termed according to the medium they are utilising, such as adventure, play, circus, music, or theatre pedagogy.
Qualifying as a social pedagogue
Similar to other academic disciplines, social pedagogy is a degree-level qualification (higher education) of usually 3.5 years. There are different education routes to qualify as a social pedagogue, which vary from country to country:
Germany
In Germany social pedagogy and social work have merged into one course – ‘Soziale Arbeit’- since 2007 graduates holding after successful study a double degree: Social Worker and Social Pedagogy.
Social Pedagogy can be studied at Fachhochschule (Universities of applied Sciences) and universities, social pedagogy is offered as Bachelor of Arts (3.5 years) with 1 semester of practical placement as part of the curriculum- Graduates will have the ability to place their professional activity in legal and socio-political perspective and analyse it. The interplay of work experience in their placement and theoretical work in the university prepares the graduates to work with clients, in the field of administration and management of social organisations. For a deeper more research based study Social Pedagogy can be studied after the Bachelor as Master of Arts (2 years).
Social Pedagogy is multidisciplinary – the study includes:
Psychology
Sociology
Pedagogy / Education Theory
Social Work
Social Management
Law and Politics
Professional Concepts such as Mediation, Therapy, Supervision, communication concepts.
Media
Economy
Social Justice
Health
Theatre pedagogy
Denmark
Danish social pedagogues usually qualify at Seminariets (seminariums), which offer 3.5 year courses that include 3 placements in different pedagogic settings throughout the period of studies. Some seminariums also offer short courses on social pedagogy in English. Further studies at MA level often combine social pedagogy with interlinked disciplines, such as social work, sociology or psychology, and can be pursued at several universities.
Czech Republic and Slovakia
Czech and also Slovak social pedagogues usually study at the university level (there is also possibility to study at the college where they will get a DiS. degree). Social Pedagogy is offered as a Bachelor study programme. For research based studies, Social Pedagogy can be studied as Master programme after finishing the bachelor's degree. The academics separate Social Pedagogy from the social work and they look at them as at two separate disciplines.
In Slovakia is Social pedagogy a part of professional network in Educational and psychological centres (as part of school facilities) and also in schools.
North America
In the United States, Arizona State University's School of Social Transformation offers a master of arts degree in social and cultural pedagogy. The 30-unit program requires 10 three-credit courses. The core courses (9 credits) include Foundations of Social Transformation, Research Methods, and Social and Cultural Pedagogy: Theoretical and Practical Issues. Students complete five elective courses (15 credits) and then either a thesis or a capstone project (6 credits). The program develops students' capacity to analyze non-formal education policies and practices and examine the educational impact of a range of institutions, organizations and associational spaces. It provides training and skills for work in settings such as: adult education, community organizing, literacy programs, museum education, dis/ability programs, youth and sports programs, peace education, environmental education, religious organizations, health education, civic education, Indigenous and tribal communities, for-the-job and on-the-job training. There is also a professional organization, the Social Pedagogy Association (SPA), which was established as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2016 by graduates of the social and cultural pedagogy masters program at ASU. The goal of SPA is to encourage and track the growth of social pedagogy in the United States.
United Kingdom
A variety of qualifications are now available in the UK, ranging from a Level 3 qualification to BA programmes to a master's degree. Since February 2017 the Social Pedagogy Professional Association has acted as a professional home for social pedagogy in the UK. As a membership organisation it has developed social pedagogy standards of proficiency and standards for education and training.
Slovenia
In Slovenia social pedagogues usually study at the university level. Social Pedagogy is offered as a Bachelor study programme and as Master programme after finishing the bachelor's degree. The academics separate Social Pedagogy from the social work and they look at them as at two separate disciplines.
See also
Theatre pedagogy
Free school movement
References
Further reading
Cameron, C. & Moss, P. (2011). Social Pedagogy and Working with Children. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Charfe, L. & Gardner, A. (2019). Social Pedagogy and Social Work. London: Sage
Hatton, K. (2013). Social Pedagogy in the UK: Theory and Practice. Lyme Regis: Russell House.
Kornbeck, J. & Rosendal Jensen, N. (2009). The Diversity of Social Pedagogy in Europe. Bremen: Europäischer Hochschulverlag.
Kornbeck, J. & Rosendal Jensen, N. (2011). Social Pedagogy for the Entire Lifespan: Volume I. Bremen: Europäischer Hochschulverlag.
Kornbeck, J. & Rosendal Jensen, N. (2012). Social Pedagogy for the Entire Lifespan: Volume II. Bremen: Europäischer Hochschulverlag.
Petrie, P. & Moss, P. (2002). From Children's Services to Children's Spaces. London: Routledge.
Petrie, P. (2011). Communication Skills for Working with Children and Young People: Introducing Social Pedagogy. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Stephens, P. (2013). Social Pedagogy: Heart and Head. Bremen: Europäischer Hochschulverlag.
Storø, J. (2013). Practical Social Pedagogy: Theories, Values and Tools for Working with Children and Young People. Bristol: Policy Press.
Further information
http://www.internationaljournalofsocialpedagogy.com – the articles in the International Journal of Social Pedagogy reflect the cross-cultural perspectives of a wide range of social pedagogical traditions and provide a greater understanding of social pedagogy in ways that are both relevant at a practice level and contribute to the body of theory and research
http://www.sppa-uk.org - The Social Pedagogy Professional Association is the professional home for social pedagogy in the UK
http://www.social-pedagogy.org.uk/spdn/ - The Social Pedagogy Development Network offers a free forum for anyone interested in social pedagogy
http://www.socialpedagogyuk.com – The official website for social pedagogy in the UK, run by TCRU, NCERCC, Jacaranda Recruitment and ThemPra Social Pedagogy
http://www.thempra.org.uk – ThemPra Social Pedagogy website for further information on social pedagogy and ThemPra's courses, qualifications and systemic change strategies
http://www.jacaranda-development.co.uk – Jacaranda Development website for further information on social pedagogy and Jacaranda's training courses, field trips and consultancy
http://www.infed.org – The Online Encyclopaedia for Informal Education has various articles on social pedagogy, related themes and key thinkers
http://www.communitycare.co.uk – Community Care have published both news articles and research reports on social pedagogy over the last few years
http://www.cypnow.com – Children and Young People Now report regularly on news and developments regarding social pedagogy
http://www.socmag.net – The International Social Work and Society News Magazine brings together news from practice in the social sector across the globe, with the 7th edition including an article on the developments around social pedagogy in the UK
http://www.socialpedagogy.org - The Social Pedagogy Association of the United States, dedicated to the growth and development of social pedagogy in the United States
Alternative education
Pedagogical disciplines | 0.823299 | 0.976683 | 0.804102 |
Constructivism (philosophy of education) | Constructivism in education is a theory that suggests that learners do not passively acquire knowledge through direct instruction. Instead, they construct their understanding through experiences and social interaction, integrating new information with their existing knowledge. This theory originates from Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
Background
Constructivism in education is rooted in epistemology, a theory of knowledge concerned with the logical categories of knowledge and its justification. It acknowledges that learners bring prior knowledge and experiences shaped by their social and cultural environment and that learning is a process of students "constructing" knowledge based on their experiences. While Behaviorism focuses on understanding what students are doing, constructivism emphasizes the importance of understanding what students are thinking and how to enrich their thinking.
Constructivism in educational psychology can be attributed to the work of Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and his theory of cognitive development. Piaget's focus was on how humans make meaning by integrating experiences with ideas, emphasizing human development as distinct from external influences Another influential figure, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), emphasized the importance of sociocultural learning in his theory of social constructivism, highlighting how interactions with adults, peers, and cognitive tools contribute to the formation of mental constructs.
Building upon Vygotsky's work, Jerome Bruner and other educational psychologists introduced the concept of instructional scaffolding, where the learning environment provides support that is gradually removed as learners internalize the knowledge.
Views more focused on human development within the social sphere include the sociocultural or socio-historical perspective of Lev Vygotsky and the situated cognition perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Lave, and Etienne Wenger. Additionally, the works of Brown, Collins, and Duguid, as well as Newman, Griffin, Cole, and Barbara Rogoff.
The concept of constructivism has impacted a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, education, and the history of science. In its early stages, constructivism focused on the relationship between human experiences and their reflexes or behavior patterns. Piaget referred to these systems of knowledge "schemes."
Piaget's theory of constructivist learning has significantly influenced learning theories and teaching methods in education. It serves as a foundational concept in education reform movements within cognitive science and neuroscience.
Overview
The formalization of constructivism from a within-the-human perspective is commonly credited to Jean Piaget. Piaget described the mechanisms by which information from the environment and ideas from the individual interact to form internalized structures developed by learners. He identified processes of assimilation and accommodation as crucial in this interaction, as individuals construct new knowledge from their experiences.
When individuals assimilate new information, they integrate it into their existing framework without altering that framework. This can happen when their experiences align with their internal view of the world, but it can also occur if they fail to update a flawed understanding. Accommodation is the process of adjusting one's mental representation of the external world to fit new experiences. It can be understood as the mechanism by which failure leads to learning.
It is important to note that constructivism is not a specific pedagogy, but rather a theory explaining how learning occurs, regardless of the learning environment. However, constructivism is often associated with pedagogic approaches that promote active learning, or learning by doing. While there is much enthusiasm for constructivism as a design strategy, some experts believe that it is more of a philosophical framework than a theory that can precisely describe instruction or prescribe design strategies.
Constructivist pedagogy
The nature of the learner
Social constructivism recognizes and embraces the individuality and complexity of each learner, actively encouraging and rewarding it as a vital component of the learning process.
The importance of the background and culture of the learner
Social constructivism, also known as socioculturalism, emphasizes the role of an individual's background, culture, and worldview in shaping their understanding of truth. According to this theory, learners inherit historical developments and symbol systems from their culture and continue to learn and develop these throughout their lives. This approach highlights the significance of a learner's social interactions with knowledgeable members of society. It suggests that without such interactions, it is challenging to grasp the social meaning of important symbol systems and learn how to effectively use them. Social constructivism also points out that young children develop their thinking abilities through interactions with peers, adults, and the physical world. Therefore, it is essential to consider the learner's background and culture throughout the learning process, as these factors help shape the knowledge and truth that the learner acquires.
Responsibility for learning
Social constructivism emphasizes the importance of the student being actively involved in the learning process, unlike previous educational viewpoints where the responsibility rested with the instructor to teach and where the learner played a passive, receptive role. Von Glasersfeld (1989) emphasized that learners construct their own understanding and that they do not simply mirror and reflect what they read. Learners look for meaning and will try to find regularity and order in the events of the world even in the absence of full or complete information.
The motivation for learning
When considering students' learning, it is essential to take into account their motivation and confidence. According to Von Glasersfeld, a student's motivation to learn is strongly influenced by their belief in their potential for learning This belief is shaped by their past experiences of successfully mastering problems, which is more influential than external acknowledgment and motivation. This idea aligns with Vygotsky's concept of the "zone of proximal development," where students are challenged at a level slightly above their current development. By successfully completing challenging tasks, students build confidence and motivation to take on even more complex challenges.
According to a study on the impact that COVID-19 had on the learning process in Australian University students, a student's motivation and confidence depends on self-determination theory. This theory requires support from the educational environment to fulfill three basic needs to achieve growth, including autonomy, relatedness, and competency. During the historical event of COVID-19, the basic needs were hindered in some way, along with environments that were meant to foster education and growth, which was hindered through the change from traditional in-person classes to online classes that left students with significantly less opportunities for social interactive and active learning opportunities.
The role of the instructor
Instructors as facilitators
According to the social constructivist approach, instructors are expected to adapt to the role of facilitators rather than traditional teachers. While a teacher teacher gives a didactic lecture that covers the subject matter, a facilitator assists the student in developing their own understanding of the content. This shift in roles places the focus on the student's active involvement in the learning process, as opposed to the instructor and the content itself.
As a result, a facilitator requires a different set of skills compared to a teacher. For instance, a teacher imparts information, whereas a facilitator encourages questions; a teacher leads from the front, while a facilitator provides support from the background; and a teacher delivers answers based on a set curriculum, whereas a facilitator offers guidance and creates an environment for the learner to form their own conclusions. Furthermore, a teacher typically engages in a monologue, whereas a facilitator maintains an ongoing dialogue with the learners.
Additionally, a facilitator should be able to dynamically adapt the learning experience by taking the lead in guiding the experience to align with the learners' interests and needs in order to create value.
The learning environment should be created in a way that both supports and challenges the student's thinking While it is advocated to give the student ownership of the problem and solution process, it is not the case that any and all activities or solutions are adequate. The critical goal is to support the student in developing effective thinking skills.
Relationship between instructor and students
In the social constructivist viewpoint, the role of the facilitator involves both the instructor and the students being actively engaged in learning from each other. This dynamic interaction requires that the instructor's culture, values, and background play a significant part in shaping the learning experience. Students compare their own thoughts with those of the instructor and their peers, leading to the development of a new, socially validated understanding of the subject matter. The task or problem serves as the interface between the instructor and the student, creating a dynamic interaction. As a result, both students and instructors need to develop an awareness of each other's viewpoints and consider their own beliefs, standards, and values, making the learning experience both subjective and objective at the same time.
Several studies highlight the significance of mentoring in the learning process. The social constructivist model underscores the importance of the relationship between the student and the instructor in facilitating learning.
Interactive learning can be facilitated through various approaches such as reciprocal teaching, peer collaboration, cognitive apprenticeship, problem-based instruction, Anchored Instruction, and other methods that involve collaborative learning.
Learning is an active process
Social constructivism, which is strongly influenced by Vygotsky's work, proposes that knowledge is initially built within a social setting and is then taken in by individuals. According to social constructivists, the act of sharing individual viewpoints, known as collaborative elaboration, leads to learners jointly constructing understanding that would not be achievable on their own.
Social constructivist scholars view learning as an active process in which students are encouraged to discover principles, concepts, and facts independently. Therefore, it is crucial to promote speculation and intuitive thinking in students.
According to other constructivist scholars, individuals create meanings through their interactions with each other and the environment they inhabit. Knowledge is created by people and is shaped by social and cultural influences. McMahon (1997) also emphasizes the social nature of learning, stating that it is not solely a mental process or a result of external factors shaping behavior. Instead, meaningful learning occurs when individuals participate in social activities.
According to Vygotsky (1978), an important aspect of intellectual development is the convergence of speech and practical activity. He emphasized that as children engage in practical activities, they construct meaning on an individual level, and through speech, they connect this meaning to their culture and the interpersonal world they share with others.
Collaboration among learners
Another tenet of social constructivism is that collaboration among individuals with diverse skills and backgrounds is essential for developing a comprehensive understanding of a particular subject or field.
In some social constructivist models, there is an emphasis on the importance of collaboration among learners, which contrasts with traditional competitive approaches. One concept from Vygotsky that is particularly relevant to peer collaboration is the zone of proximal development. This is defined as the gap between a learner's actual developmental level, determined by independent problem-solving, and the level of potential development, determined through problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. It differs from Piaget's fixed biological stages of development. Through a process called "scaffolding," a learner can be extended beyond the limitations of physical maturation, allowing the development process to catch up to the learning process.
When students present and teach new material to their peers, it fosters a non-linear process of collective knowledge construction.
The importance of context
The social constructivist paradigm emphasizes that the environment in which learning takes place plays a crucial role in the learning process.
The concept of the learner as an active processor is based on the idea that there are no universal learning laws that apply to all domains. When individuals possess decontextualized knowledge, they may struggle to apply their understanding to real-world tasks. This is due to the lack of engagement with the concept in its complex, real-world environment, as well as the absence of experience with the intricate interrelationships that influence the application of the concept.
One concept within social constructivism is authentic or situated learning, which involves students participating in activities directly related to the practical application of their learning within a culture similar to the real-world setting. Cognitive apprenticeship is a suggested effective model of constructivist learning that aims to immerse students in authentic practices through activity and social interaction, similar to the successful methods used in craft apprenticeship.[
Holt and Willard-Holt (2000) highlight the concept of dynamic assessment, which offers a distinct approach to evaluating learners compared to traditional tests. Dynamic assessment extends the interactive nature of learning to the assessment process, emphasizing interaction between the assessor and the learner. It involves a dialogue between the assessor and the learner to understand the current performance level on a task and explore ways to improve future performance. This approach views assessment and learning as interconnected processes, rather than separate entities.
According to this viewpoint, instructors should approach assessment as an ongoing and interactive process that evaluates the learner's achievements, the quality of the learning experience, and course materials. The feedback generated by the assessment process is crucial for driving further development.
The selection, scope, and sequencing of the subject matter
Knowledge should be discovered as an integrated whole
The organization of knowledge should prioritize integration over division into separate subjects or compartments.
This again emphasizes the significance of presenting learning within a specific context. The world in which learners operate is not divided into separate subjects but rather comprises a complex array of facts, problems, dimensions, and perceptions.
Engaging and challenging the student
Students benefit from being challenged with tasks that require them to apply skills and knowledge slightly beyond their current level of mastery. This approach can help to maintain their motivation and build on past achievements to boost their confidence. This is in line with Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which refers to the gap between a person's current level of ability and their potential level of development under the guidance of adults or more capable peers.
Vygotsky (1978) argued that effective instruction should be slightly ahead of a learner's current developmental stage. By doing so, instruction can stimulate the development of a range of functions that are in the learner's zone of proximal development. This highlights the crucial role of instruction in fostering development.
In order to effectively engage and challenge students, it is important that the tasks and learning environment mirror the complexity of the real-world environment in which the students are expected to operate upon completing their education. Students should not only take ownership of the learning and problem-solving process but also take ownership of the problems themselves.
When it comes to organizing subject matter, the constructivist perspective suggests that the fundamental principles of any subject can be taught to anyone at any point, in some capacity. This approach entails introducing the foundational concepts that makeup topics or subject areas initially and then consistently revisiting and expanding on these ideas.
Instructors should recognize that while they are given a set curriculum to follow, they inevitably personalize it to reflect their own beliefs, thoughts, and emotions about the subject matter and their students. As a result, the learning experience becomes a collaborative effort, influenced by the emotions and life experiences of all involved. It's important to consider the student's motivation as central to the learning process.
The structuredness of the learning process
Incorporating an appropriate balance between structure and flexibility into the learning process is essential. According to Savery (1994), a highly structured learning environment may pose challenges for learners in constructing meaning based on their existing conceptual understandings. A facilitator should strive to provide adequate structure to offer clear guidance and parameters for achieving learning objectives, while also allowing for an open and flexible learning experience that enables learners to discover, interact, and arrive at their own understanding of truth.
Teaching Techniques
A few strategies for cooperative learning include:
Reciprocal Questioning: students work together to ask and answer questions
Jigsaw Classroom: students become "experts" on one part of a group project and teach it to the others in their group
Structured Controversies: Students work together to research a particular controversy
The Harkness discussion method
The "Harkness" discussion method is named after Edward Harkness, who funded its development at Phillips Exeter Academy in the 1930s. This method involves students sitting in a circle, guiding their own discussion. The teacher's role is minimized, with the students initiating, directing, and focusing the discussion. They work together as a team, sharing responsibility and goals. The ultimate aim is to illuminate the subject, interpret different viewpoints, and piece together a comprehensive understanding. Discussion skills are crucial, and every participant is expected to contribute to keeping the discussion engaging and productive.
Criticism
Many cognitive psychologists and educators have raised concerns about the core principles of constructivism, arguing that these theories may be misleading or inconsistent with well-established findings.
In neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development, it is proposed that learning is influenced by the processing and representational resources available at a particular age. This implies that if the demands of a concept to be learned exceed the available processing efficiency and working memory resources, then the concept is considered unlearnable. This approach to learning can impact the understanding of essential theoretical concepts and reasoning. Therefore, for effective learning to occur, a child must operate in an environment that aligns with their developmental and individual learning constraints, taking into account any deviations from the norm for their age. If this condition is not met, the learning process may not progress as intended.
Many educators have raised concerns about the effectiveness of this approach to instructional design, particularly when it comes to creating instruction for beginners. While some proponents of constructivism claim that "learning by doing" improves learning, critics argue that there is insufficient empirical evidence to support this assertion, especially for novice learners. Sweller and his colleagues argue that novices do not possess the underlying mental models, or "schemas" necessary for "learning by doing". Additionally, Mayer (2004) conducted a review of the literature and concluded that fifty years of empirical data do not support the use of pure discovery as a constructivist teaching technique. In situations requiring discovery, he recommends the use of guided discovery instead.
Some researchers, such as Kirschner et al. (2006), have characterized the constructivist teaching methods as "unguided methods of instruction" and have suggested more structured learning activities for learners with little to no prior knowledge. Slezak has expressed skepticism about constructivism, describing it as "fashionable but thoroughly problematic doctrines that can have little benefit for practical pedagogy or teacher education." Similar views have been stated by Meyer, Boden, Quale and others.
Kirschner et al. grouped several learning theories together, including Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based learning, and suggested that highly scaffolded constructivist methods such as problem-based learning and inquiry learning may be ineffective. They described several research studies that were favorable to problem-based learning given learners were provided some level of guidance and support.
Confusion between constructivist and maturationist views
Many people confuse constructivist with maturationist views. The constructivist (or cognitive-developmental) stream "is based on the idea that the dialectic or interactionist process of development and learning through the student's active construction should be facilitated and promoted by adults". The romantic maturationist stream emphasizes the natural development of students without adult interventions in a permissive environment. In contrast, constructivism involves adults actively guiding learning while allowing children to take charge of their own learning process.
Subtypes
Contextual constructivism
According to William Cobern (1991) Contextual constructivism is "about understanding the fundamental, culturally based beliefs that both students and teachers bring to class, and how these beliefs are supported by culture. Contextual constructivists not only raise new research questions, they also call for a new research paradigm. The focus on contextualization means that qualitative, especially ethnographic, techniques are to be preferred" (p. 3).
Radical constructivism
Ernst von Glasersfeld developed radical constructivism by coupling Piaget's theory of learning and philosophical viewpoint about the nature of knowledge with Kant's rejection of an objective reality independent of human perception or reason. Radical constructivism does not view knowledge as an attempt to generate ideas that match an independent, objective reality. Instead, theories and knowledge about the world, as generated by our senses and reason, either fit within the constraints of whatever reality may exist and, thus, are viable or do not and are not viable. As a theory of education, radical constructivism emphasizes the experiences of the learner, differences between learners and the importance of uncertainty.
Relational constructivism
Björn Kraus' relational constructivism can be perceived as a relational consequence of radical constructivism. In contrast to social constructivism, it picks up the epistemological threads and maintains the radical constructivist idea that humans cannot overcome their limited conditions of reception. Despite the subjectivity of human constructions of reality, relational constructivism focuses on the relational conditions that apply to human perceptional processes.
Social constructivism
In recent decades, constructivist theorists have extended the traditional focus on individual learning to address collaborative and social dimensions of learning. It is possible to see social constructivism as a bringing together of aspects of the work of Piaget with that of Bruner and Vygotsky.
Communal constructivism
The concept Communal constructivism was developed by Leask and Younie, in 1995, through their research on the European SchoolNet, which demonstrated the value of experts collaborating to push the boundaries of knowledge, including communal construction of new knowledge between experts, rather than the social construction of knowledge, as described by Vygotsky, where there is a learner to teacher scaffolding relationship. "Communal constructivism,” as a concept, applies to those situations in which there is currently no expert knowledge or research to underpin knowledge in an area. "Communal constructivism" refers, specifically, to the process of experts working together to create, record, and publish new knowledge in emerging areas. In the seminal European SchoolNet research where, for the first time, academics were testing out how the internet could support classroom practice and pedagogy, experts from a number of countries set up test situations to generate and understand new possibilities for educational practice.
Bryan Holmes, in 2001, applied this to student learning, as described in an early paper, "in this model, students will not simply pass through a course like water through a sieve but instead leave their own imprint in the learning process."
Influence on computer science and robotics
Constructivism has influenced the course of programming and computer science. Some famous programming languages have been created, either wholly or in part, for educational use, to support the constructionist theory of Seymour Papert. These languages have been dynamically typed and reflective. Logo and its successor, Scratch, are the best known of them. Constructivism has also informed the design of interactive machine learning systems, whereas Radical Constructivism has been explored as a paradigm to design experiments in rehabilitation robotics and more precisely in prosthetics.
List of notable constructivists
Writers who influenced constructivism include:
John Dewey (1859–1952)
Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952)
Jean Piaget (1896–1980)
Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934)
Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002)
George Kelly (1905–1967)
Jerome Bruner (1915–2016)
Herbert Simon (1916–2001)
Paul Watzlawick (1921–2007)
Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010)
Edgar Morin (born 1921)
Humberto Maturana (1928–2021)
Paulo Freire (1921–1997)
See also
Autodidactism
Connectivism
Constructivist epistemology
Constructivist teaching methods
Critical pedagogy
Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)
Educational psychology
Learning styles
Philosophy of education
Reform mathematics
Situated cognition
Socratic method
Teaching for social justice
Vocational education
APOS Theory
References
Further reading
Dalgarno, B. (1996) Constructivist computer assisted learning: theory and technique, ASCILITE Conference, 2–4 December 1996, retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20140902003411/http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/adelaide96/papers/21.html
Hilbert, T. S., & Renkl, A. (2007). Learning how to Learn by Concept Mapping: A Worked-Example Effect. Oral presentation at the 12th Biennial Conference EARLI 2007 in Budapest, Hungary
Jeffery, G. (ed) (2005) The creative college: building a successful learning culture in the arts, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.
Jonassen, D., Mayes, T., & McAleese, R. (1993). A manifesto for a constructivist approach to uses of technology in higher education. In T.M. Duffy, J. Lowyck, & D.H. Jonassen (Eds.), Designing environments for constructive learning (pp. 231–247). Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
Piaget, Jean. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence. New York: Routledge.
Jean Piaget (1967). Logique et Connaissance scientifique, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade.
External links
A journey into Constructivism by Martin Dougiamas, 1998–11.
Cognitively Guided Instruction reviewed on the Promising Practices Network
Sample Online Activity Objects Designed with Constructivist Approach (2007)
Liberal Exchange learning resources offering a constructivist approach to learning English as a second/foreign language (2009)
Lutz, S., & Huitt, W. (2018). "Connecting cognitive development and constructivism." In W. Huitt (Ed.), Becoming a Brilliant Star: Twelve core ideas supporting holistic education (pp. 45–63). IngramSpark.
Definition of Constructivism by Martin Ryder (a footnote to the book chapter The Cyborg and the Noble Savage where Ryder discusses One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop from a constructivist educator's point of view)
Education reform
Alternative education
Educational psychology
Constructivism (psychological school) | 0.802684 | 0.997562 | 0.800727 |
Critical pedagogy | Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
It insists that issues of social justice and democracy are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning. The goal of critical pedagogy is emancipation from oppression through an awakening of the critical consciousness, based on the Portuguese term conscientização. When achieved, critical consciousness encourages individuals to effect change in their world through social critique and political action in order to self-actualize.
Critical pedagogy was founded by the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who promoted it through his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It subsequently spread internationally, developing a particularly strong base in the United States, where proponents sought to develop means of using teaching to combat racism, sexism, and oppression. As it grew, it incorporated elements from fields like the Human rights movement, Civil rights movement, Disability rights movement, Indigenous rights movement, postmodern theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory.
Background
Critical Pedagogy is believed to have its roots in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which was established in 1923. As an outgrowth of critical theory, critical pedagogy is intended to educate and work towards a realization of the emancipatory goals of critical pedagogy. The theory is influenced by Karl Marx who believed that inequality is a result of socioeconomic differences and that all people need to work toward a socialized economy. More recently, critical pedagogy can also be traced back to Paulo Freire's best-known 1968 work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire, a professor of history and the philosophy of education at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, sought in this and other works to develop a philosophy of adult education that demonstrated a solidarity with the poor in their common struggle to survive by engaging them in a dialog of greater awareness and analysis. Although his family had suffered loss and hunger during the Great Depression, the poor viewed him and his formerly middle-class family "as people from another world who happened to fall accidentally into their world". His intimate discovery of class and their borders "led, invariably, to Freire's radical rejection of a class-based society".
While prominent figures within Critical Pedagogy include Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, bell hooks, and others, it is important to note that their work on critical pedagogy varies in focus. For example, some approach critical pedagogy from a Marxist perspective with a focus on socioeconomic class. Paulo Freire, on the other hand, writes about how critical pedagogy can lead to liberty and freedom of the oppressed and marginalized. Bell Hooks applies a feminist perspective to critical pedagogy and Ira Shor, for example, advocates for the need of moving the theoretical framework of critical pedagogy to a more practical one.
The influential works of Freire made him arguably the most celebrated critical educator. He seldom used the term "critical pedagogy" himself when describing this philosophy. His initial focus targeted adult literacy projects in Brazil and later was adapted to deal with a wide range of social and educational issues. Freire's pedagogy revolved around an anti-authoritarian and interactive approach aimed to examine issues of relational power for students and workers. The center of the curriculum used the fundamental goal based on social and political critiques of everyday life. Freire's praxis required implementation of a range of educational practices and processes with the goal of creating not only a better learning environment but also a better world. Freire himself maintained that this was not merely an educational technique but a way of living in our educative practice.
Freire endorses students' ability to think critically about their education situation; this method of thinking is thought by practitioners of critical pedagogy to allow them to "recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded". Realizing one's consciousness ("conscientization", "conscientização") is then a needed first step of "praxis", which is defined as the power and know-how to take action against oppression while stressing the importance of liberating education. "Praxis involves engaging in a cycle of theory, application, evaluation, reflection, and then back to theory. Social transformation is the product of praxis at the collective level."
Critical pedagogue Ira Shor, who was mentored by and worked closely with Freire from 1980 until Freire's death in 1997, defines critical pedagogy as:
Critical pedagogy explores the dialogic relationships between teaching and learning. Its proponents claim that it is a continuous process of what they call "unlearning", "learning", and "relearning", "reflection", "evaluation", and the effect that these actions have on the students, in particular students whom they believe have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by what they call "traditional schooling".
The educational philosophy has since been developed by Henry Giroux and others since the 1980s as a praxis-oriented "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action". Freire wrote the introduction to his 1988 work, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. Another leading critical pedagogy theorist who Freire called his "intellectual cousin", Peter McLaren, wrote the foreword. McLaren and Giroux co-edited one book on critical pedagogy and co-authored another in the 1990s. Among its other leading figures in no particular order are bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), Joe L. Kincheloe, Patti Lather, Myles Horton, Antonia Darder, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Peter McLaren, Khen Lampert, Howard Zinn, Donaldo Macedo, Dermeval Saviani, Sandy Grande, Michael Apple, and Stephanie Ledesma. Educationalists including Jonathan Kozol and Parker Palmer are sometimes included in this category. Other critical pedagogues known more for their Anti-schooling, unschooling, or deschooling perspectives include Ivan Illich, John Holt, Ira Shor, John Taylor Gatto, and Matt Hern.
Critical pedagogy has several other strands and foundations. Postmodern, anti-racist, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and environmental theories all play a role in further expanding and enriching Freire's original ideas about a critical pedagogy, shifting its main focus on social class to include issues pertaining to religion, military identification, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and age. Much of the work also draws on anarchism, György Lukács, Wilhelm Reich, postcolonialism, and the discourse theories of Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Gilles Deleuze (rhizomatic learning) and Michel Foucault. Radical Teacher is a magazine dedicated to critical pedagogy and issues of interest to critical educators. Many contemporary critical pedagogues have embraced Postmodern, anti-essentialist perspectives of the individual, of language, and of power, "while at the same time retaining the Freirean emphasis on critique, disrupting oppressive regimes of power/knowledge, and social change".
Developments and critiques
Like critical theory itself, the field of critical pedagogy continues to evolve. Contemporary critical educators, such as bell hooks and Peter McLaren, discuss in their criticisms the influences of many varied concerns, institutions, and social structures, "including globalization, the mass media, and race/spiritual relations", while citing reasons for resisting the possibilities to change. McLaren has developed a social movement based version of critical pedagogy that he calls revolutionary critical pedagogy, emphasizing critical pedagogy as a social movement for the creation of a democratic socialist alternative to capitalism.
Curry Malott and Derek R. Ford's first collaborative book, Marx, Capital, and Education built on McLaren's revolutionary pedagogy by connecting it to the global class struggle and the history of the actually-existing workers' movements. As Curry Malott noted, "Critical pedagogy was created as a break from the Marxism of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Bowles and Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America. Even though it is true that critical pedagogy has become increasingly domesticated and watered down, it's birth was an act of counterrevolution itself." In particular, they argued for a critical pedagogy that simultaneously pursued communism and national liberation. Malott and Ford were the first authors to bring Harry Haywood's work into critical pedagogy. They believed that critical pedagogy had been divorced from its radical roots. Yet when Malott went to re-investigate those roots, he decided that they were not revolutionary at all. In fact, he argued that they were permeated by anti-communism and hostility to any actually-existing struggles of oppressed peoples. As a result, both Malott and Ford moved away from critical pedagogy. Ford developed a political pedagogy that built on McLaren's revolutionary critical pedagogy but took "a distanced and expository position" to link the project more explicitly to communism. Yet he later abandoned that as a starting point and instead turned his attention to educational forms.
Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have created the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy at McGill University. In line with Kincheloe and Steinberg's contributions to critical pedagogy, the project attempts to move the field to the next phase of its evolution. In this second phase, critical pedagogy seeks to become a worldwide, decolonizing movement dedicated to listening to and learning from diverse discourses of people from around the planet. Kincheloe and Steinberg also embrace Indigenous knowledges in education as a way to expand critical pedagogy and to question educational hegemony. Joe L. Kincheloe, in expanding on the Freire's notion that a pursuit of social change alone could promote anti-intellectualism, promotes a more balanced approach to education than postmodernists.
One of the major texts taking on the intersection between critical pedagogy and Indigenous knowledge(s) is Sandy Grande's, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). In agreement with this perspective, Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs, challenges the anthropocentrism of critical pedagogy and writes that to achieve its transformative goals there are other differences between Western and Indigenous worldview that must be considered. Approaching the intersection of Indigenous perspectives and pedagogy from another perspective, critical pedagogy of place examines the impacts of place.
In the classroom
Ira Shor, a professor at the City University of New York, provides for an example of how critical pedagogy is used in the classroom. He develops these themes in looking at the use of Freirean teaching methods in the context of the everyday life of classrooms, in particular, institutional settings. He suggests that the whole curriculum of the classroom must be re-examined and reconstructed. He favors a change of role of the student from object to active, critical subject. In doing so, he suggests that students undergo a struggle for ownership of themselves. He states that students have previously been lulled into a sense of complacency by the circumstances of everyday life and that through the processes of the classroom, they can begin to envision and strive for something different for themselves.
Of course, achieving such a goal is not automatic nor easy, as he suggests that the role of the teacher is critical to this process. Students need to be helped by teachers to separate themselves from unconditional acceptance of the conditions of their own existence. Once this separation is achieved, then students may be prepared for critical re-entry into an examination of everyday life. In a classroom environment that achieves such liberating intent, one of the potential outcomes is that the students themselves assume more responsibility for the class. Power is thus distributed amongst the group and the role of the teacher becomes much more mobile, not to mention more challenging. This encourages the growth of each student's intellectual character rather than a mere "mimicry of the professorial style."
Teachers, however, do not simply abdicate their authority in a student-centered classroom. In the later years of his life, Freire grew increasingly concerned with what he felt was a major misinterpretation of his work and insisted that teachers cannot deny their position of authority.
And due to the student-centeredness that critical pedagogy insists upon, there are inherent conflicts associated with the "large collections of top-down content standards in their disciplines". Critical pedagogy advocates insist that teachers themselves are vital to the discussion about Standards-based education reform in the United States because a pedagogy that requires a student to learn or a teacher to teach externally imposed information exemplifies the banking model of education outlined by Freire where the structures of knowledge are left unexamined. To the critical pedagogue, the teaching act must incorporate social critique alongside the cultivation of intellect.
Joe L. Kincheloe argues that this is in direct opposition to the epistemological concept of positivism, where "social actions should proceed with law-like predictability". In this philosophy, a teacher and their students would be served by Standards-based education where there is "only be one correct way to teach" as "[e]veryone is assumed to be the same regardless of race, class, or gender". Donald Schön's concept of "indeterminate zones of practice" illustrates how any practice, especially ones with human subjects at their center, are infinitely complex and highly contested, which amplify the critical pedagogue's unwillingness to apply universal practices.
Furthermore, bell hooks, who is greatly influenced by Freire, points out the importance of engaged pedagogy and the responsibility that teachers, as well as students, must have in the classroom:
Resistance from students
Students sometimes resist critical pedagogy. Student resistance to critical pedagogy can be attributed to a variety of reasons. Student objections may be due to ideological reasons, religious or moral convictions, fear of criticism, or discomfort with controversial issues. Kristen Seas argues: "Resistance in this context thus occurs when students are asked to shift not only their perspectives, but also their subjectivities as they accept or reject assumptions that contribute to the pedagogical arguments being constructed." Karen Kopelson asserts that resistance to new information or ideologies, introduced in the classroom, is a natural response to persuasive messages that are unfamiliar.
Kristen Seas further explains: "Students [often] reject the teacher's message because they see it as coercive, they do not agree with it, or they feel excluded by it." Karen Kopelson concludes "that many if not most students come to the university in order to gain access to and eventual enfranchisement in 'the establishment,' not to critique and reject its privileges."
Critical pedagogy of teaching
The rapidly changing demographics of the classroom in the United States has resulted in an unprecedented amount of linguistic and cultural diversity. In order to respond to these changes, advocates of critical pedagogy call into question the focus on practical skills of teacher credential programs. "[T]his practical focus far too often occurs without examining teachers' own assumptions, values, and beliefs and how this ideological posture informs, often unconsciously, their perceptions and actions when working with linguistic-minority and other politically, socially, and economically subordinated students." As teaching is considered an inherently political act to the critical pedagogue, a more critical element of teacher education becomes addressing implicit biases (also known as implicit cognition or implicit stereotypes) that can subconsciously affect a teacher's perception of a student's ability to learn.
Advocates of critical pedagogy insist that teachers, then, must become learners alongside their students, as well as students of their students. They must become experts beyond their field of knowledge, and immerse themselves in the culture, customs, and lived experiences of the students they aim to teach.
Criticism
Critical pedagogy has been the subject of varied debates inside and outside the field of education. Philosopher John Searle characterized the goal of Giroux's form of critical pedagogy "to create political radicals", thus highlighting the antagonistic moral and political grounds of the ideals of citizenship and "public wisdom." These varying moral perspectives of what is right are to be found in what John Dewey has referred to as the tensions between traditional and progressive education. Searle argued that critical pedagogy's objections to the Western canon are misplaced and/or disingenuous:
In 1992, Maxine Hairston took a hard line against critical pedagogy in the first year college composition classroom and argued, "everywhere I turn I find composition faculty, both leaders in the profession and new voices, asserting that they have not only the right, but the duty, to put ideology and radical politics at the center of their teaching." Hairston further confers,
Sharon O'Dair (2003) said that compositionists "focus [...] almost exclusively on ideological matters", and further argues that this focus is at the expense of proficiency of student writing skills in the composition classroom. To this end, O'Dair explained that "recently advocated working-class pedagogies privilege activism over "language instruction." Jeff Smith argued that students want to gain, rather than to critique, positions of privilege, as encouraged by critical pedagogues.
Scholars who have worked in the field of critical pedagogy have also critiqued the movement from various angles. In 2016, Curry Stephenson Malott, who had written several books about critical pedagogy and identified as a critical pedagogue, renounced and critiqued his previous work. In History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War, he writes about his "long journey of self-reflection and de-indoctrination" that culminated in the break. Malott writes that "the term critical pedagogy was created by Henry Giroux (1981) as an attempt to dismiss socialism and the legacy of Karl Marx." During the same period, Derek R. Ford also broke with critical pedagogy, claiming that it was "at a dead end." While Ford is not concerned with "proficiency" like O'Dair, he agrees that the focus on critique at the expense of imagination and actual political engagement serves to produce the critical pedagogue as "the enlightened and isolated researcher that reveals the truth behind the curtain." Both Malott and Ford, however, note exceptions to their critiques within the field, such as the work of Peter McLaren.
See also
Adult education
Critical psychology
Inclusive school
John Asimakopoulos
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Praxis intervention
Praxis School
Rouge Forum
Social criticism
Student voice
Further reading
Gottesman, Isaac (2016), The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race (New York: Routledge)
Salmani Nodoushan, M. A., & Pashapour, A. (2016). Critical pedagogy, rituals of distinction, and true professionalism. Journal of Educational Technology, 13(1), 29–43.
References
Philosophy of education
Pedagogical movements and theories
Critical theory
Popular education | 0.805133 | 0.994359 | 0.800592 |
Andragogy | Andragogy refers to methods and principles used in adult education. The word comes from the Greek ἀνδρ- (andr-), meaning "adult male", and ἀγωγός (agogos), meaning "leader of". Therefore, andragogy literally means "leading men (adult males)", whereas "pedagogy" literally means "leading children".
Definitions
There are many different theories in the areas of learning, teaching and training. Andragogy commonly is defined as the art or science of teaching adults or helping adults learn. In contrast to pedagogy, or the teaching of children, andragogy is based on a humanistic conception of self-directed and autonomous learners where teachers are defined as facilitators of learning.
Although Malcolm Knowles proposed andragogy as a theory, others posit that there is no single theory of adult learning or andragogy. In the literature where adult learning theory is often identified as a principle or an assumption, there are a variety of different approaches and theories that are also evolving in view of evolving higher education instruction, workplace training, new technology and online learning (Omoregie, 2021).
Malcolm Knowles identified these adult learner characteristics related to the motivation of adult learning.
Need to know: Adults need to know the reason for learning something.
Foundation: Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities.
Self-concept: Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
Readiness: Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives.
Orientation: Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented.
Motivation: Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators.
Blaschke (2012) described Malcolm Knowles' 1973 theory as "self-directed" learning. The goals include helping learners develop the capacity for self-direction, supporting transformational learning and promoting "emancipatory learning and social action" (Blaschke, 2019, p. 76).
Although Knowles' andragogy is a well-known theory in the English-speaking world, his theory has an ancillary role internationally. This is especially true in European countries where andragogy is a term used to refer to a field of systematic reflection. The acceptance of andragogy in European countries, according to St. Clair and Käpplinger (2021) is to accept andragogy as the "scientific study of learning in adults and the concomitant teaching approaches" (p. 485). Further, the definition of andragogy and its application to adult learning is more variable currently due to both the impact of globalization and the rapid expansion of adult online learning.
History
The term was originally coined by German educator Alexander Kapp in 1833. Andragogy was developed into a theory of adult education by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. It later became very popular in the US by the American educator Malcolm Knowles. Knowles asserted that andragogy (Greek: "man-leading") should be distinguished from the more commonly used term pedagogy (Greek: "child-leading").
Knowles collected ideas about a theory of adult education from the end of World War II until he was introduced to the term "androgogy". In 1966, Knowles met Dušan Savićević in Boston. Savićević was the one who shared the term andragogy with Knowles and explained how it was used in the European context. In 1967, Knowles made use of the term "andragogy" to explain his theory of adult education. Then after consulting with Merriam-Webster, he corrected the spelling of the term to "andragogy" and continued to make use of the term to explain his multiple ideas about adult learning.
Knowles' theory can be stated with six assumptions related to the motivation of adult learning:
Need to know: Adults need to know the reason for learning something.
Foundation: Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities.
Self-concept: Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
Readiness: Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives.
Orientation: Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented.
Motivation: Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators.
In most European countries, the Knowles discussion played at best, a marginal role. "Andragogy" was, from 1970 on, connected with emerging academic and professional institutions, publications, or programs, triggered by a similar growth of adult education in practice and theory as in the United States. "Andragogy" functioned here as a header for (places of) systematic reflections, parallel to other academic headers like "biology", "medicine", and "physics".
Early examples of this use of andragogy are the Yugoslavian (scholarly) journal for adult education, named Andragogija in 1969, and the Yugoslavian Society for Andragogy; at Palacky University in Olomouc (Czech Republic) the Katedra sociologie a andragogiky (Sociology and Andragogy Department) was established in 1990. Also, Prague University has a Katedra Andragogiky (Andragogical Department); in 1993, Slovenia's Andragoski Center Republike Slovenije (Slovenian Republic Andragogy Center) was founded with the journal Andragoska Spoznanja; in 1995, Bamberg University (Germany) named a Lehrstuhl Andragogik (Androgogy Chair).
On this formal level "above practice" and specific approaches, the term "andragogy" could be used relating to all types of theories, for reflection, analysis, training, in person-oriented programs, or human resource development.
Principles
Adult learning is based upon comprehension, organization and synthesis of knowledge rather than rote memory. Some scholars have proposed seven principles of adult learning:
Adults must want to learn: They learn effectively only when they are free to direct their own learning and have a strong inner motivation to develop a new skill or acquire a particular type of knowledge, this sustains learning.
Adults will learn only what they feel they need to learn – Adults are practical in their approach to learning; they want to know, "How is this going to help me right now? Is it relevant (content, connection, and application) and does it meet my targeted goals?"
Adults learn by doing: Adolescents learn by doing, but adults learn through active practice and participation. This helps in integrating component skills into a coherent whole.
Adult learning focuses on problem solving: Adolescents tend to learn skills sequentially. Adults tend to start with a problem and then work to find a solution. A meaningful engagement, such as posing and answering realistic questions and problems is necessary for deeper learning. This leads to more elaborate, longer lasting, and stronger representations of the knowledge (Craik & Lockhart, 1972).
Experience affects adult learning: Adults have more experience than adolescents. This can be an asset and a liability, if prior knowledge is inaccurate, incomplete, or immature, it can interfere with or distort the integration of incoming information (Clement, 1982; National Research Council, 2000).
Adults learn best in an informal situation: Adolescents have to follow a curriculum. Often, adults learn by taking responsibility for the value and need of content they have to understand and the particular goals it will achieve. Being in an inviting, collaborative and networking environment as an active participant in the learning process makes it efficient.
Adults want guidance and consideration as equal partners in the process: Adults want information that will help them improve their situation. They do not want to be told what to do and they evaluate what helps and what doesn't. They want to choose options based on their individual needs and the meaningful impact a learning engagement could provide. Socialization is more important among adults.
Academic discipline
In the field of adult education during recent decades, a process of growth and differentiation emerged as a scholarly and scientific approach, andragogy. It refers to the academic discipline(s) within university programs that focus on the education of adults; andragogy exists today worldwide. The term refers to a new type of education which was not qualified by missions and visions, but by academic learning including: reflection, critique, and historical analyses.
Dušan Savićević, who provided Knowles with the term andragogy, explicitly claims andragogy as a discipline, the subject of which is the study of education and learning of adults in all its forms of expression' (Savicevic, 1999, p. 97, similarly Henschke, 2003,), Reischmann, 2003.
Recent research and the COVID 19 pandemic have expanded andragogy into the online world internationally, as evidenced by country and international organizations that foster the development of adult learning, research and collaboration in educating adults. New and expanding online instruction is fostered by national organizations, literacy organizations, academic journals and higher education institutions that are helping adults to achieve learning and skills that will contribute to individual economic improvement.
New learning resources and approaches are identified, such as finding that using collaborative tools like a wiki can encourage learners to become more self-directed, thereby enriching the classroom environment. Andragogy gives scope to self-directed learners and helps in designing and delivering the focused instructions. The methods used by andragogy can be used in different educational environments (e.g. adolescent education).
Internationally there are many academic journals, adult education organizations (including government agencies) and centers for adult learning housed in a plethora of international colleges and universities that are working to promote the field of adult learning, as well as adult learning opportunities in training, traditional classes and in online learning.
In academic fields, andrologists are those who practice and specialize in the field of andragogy. Andragologists have received a doctoral degree from an accredited university in Education (EdD) or a Philosophy (PhD) and focused their dissertation utilizing andragogy as a main component of their theoretical framework.
Differences in learning: The Pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy continuum
In the 20th century, adult educators began to challenge the application of pedagogical theory and teacher-centered approaches to the teaching of adults. Unlike children, adult learners are not transmitted knowledge. Rather, the adult learner is an active participant in their learning. Adult students also are asked to actively plan their learning process to include identifying learning objectives and how they will be achieved. Knowles (1980) summarized the key characteristics of andragogy in this model: 1) independency or self-directedness 2) using past experiences to construct learning, 3) association with readiness to learn, and 4) changing education perspectives from subject-centered one to performance centered perspectives.
A new educational strategy has evolved in response to globalization that identifies learners as self-determined, especially in higher education and work-place settings: heutagogy, a process where students learn on their own with some guidance from the teacher. The motivation to learn comes from the students' interest in not only performing, but being recognized for their accomplishment (Akiyildiz, 2019). In addition, in heutagogy, learning is learner-centric - where the decisions relating to the learning process are managed by the student. Further, the student determines whether or not the learning objectives are met.
Differences between pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy include:
Critique
There is no consensus internationally on whether andragogy is a learning theory or a set of principles, characteristics or assumptions of adult learning. Knowles himself changed his position on whether andragogy applied only to adults and came to believe that "pedagogy-andragogy represents a continuum ranging from teacher-directed to student-directed learning and that both approaches are appropriate with children and adults, depending on the situation." Hanson (1996) argues that the difference in learning is not related to the age and stage of one's life, but instead related to individual characteristics and the differences in "context, culture and power" within different educational settings.
In another critique of Knowles' work, Knowles was not able to use one of his principles (Self-concept) with adult learners to the extent that he describes in his practices. In one course, Knowles appears to allow "near total freedom in learner determination of objectives" but still "intended" the students to choose from a list of 18 objectives on the syllabus. Self-concept can be critiqued not just from the instructor's point of view, but also from the student's point of view. Not all adult learners will know exactly what they want to learn in a course and may seek a more structured outline from an instructor. An instructor cannot assume that an adult will desire self-directed learning in every situation.
Kidd (1978) goes further by claiming that principles of learning have to be applied to lifelong development. He suggested that building a theory on adult learning would be meaningless, as there is no real basis for it. Jarvis even implies that andragogy would be more the result of an ideology than a scientific contribution to the comprehension of the learning processes. Knowles himself mentions that andragogy is a "model of assumptions about learning or a conceptual framework that serves as a basis for an emergent theory." There appears to be a lack of research on whether this framework of teaching and learning principles is more relevant to adult learners or if it is just a set of good practices that could be used for both children and adult learners.
The way adults learn is different from the pedagogical approach used to foster learning in K-12 settings. These learning differences are key and can be used to show that the six characteristics/principles of andragogy remain applicable when designing teaching and learning materials, in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), for example.
See also
References
Further reading
Loeng, S. (2012). Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy – an andragogical pioneer. Studies in Continuing Education,
Reischmann, Jost (2005): Andragogy. In: English, Leona (ed): International Encyclopedia of Adult Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. S. 58–63. (.pdf-download)
Smith, M. K. (1996; 1999) 'Andragogy', in the Encyclopedia of Informal Education.
Andragogy and other Learning Theories
Philosophy of education | 0.805499 | 0.993581 | 0.800329 |
Didactic method | A didactic method ( didáskein, "to teach") is a teaching method that follows a consistent scientific approach or educational style to present information to students. The didactic method of instruction is often contrasted with dialectics and the Socratic method; the term can also be used to refer to a specific didactic method, as for instance constructivist didactics.
Overview
Didactics is a theory of teaching, and in a wider sense, a theory and practical application of teaching and learning. In demarcation from "mathetics" (the science of learning), didactics refers only to the science of teaching.
This theory might be contrasted with open learning, also known as experiential learning, in which people can learn by themselves, in an unstructured manner (or in an unusually structured manner) as in experiential education, on topics of interest. It can also be contrasted with autodidactic learning, in which one instructs oneself, often from existing books or curricula.
The theory of didactic learning methods focuses on the baseline knowledge students possess and seeks to improve upon and convey this information. It also refers to the foundation or starting point in a lesson plan, where the overall goal is knowledge. A teacher or educator functions in this role as an authoritative figure, but also as both a guide and a resource for students.
Didactics or the didactic method have different connotations in continental Europe and English-speaking countries. Didacticism was indeed the cultural origin of the didactic method but refers within its narrow context usually pejoratively to the use of language to a doctrinal end. The interpretation of these opposing views are theorised to be the result of a differential cultural development in the 19th century when Great Britain and its former colonies went through a renewal and increased cultural distancing from continental Europe. It was particularly the later appearance of Romanticism and Aestheticism in the Anglo-Saxon world which offered these negative and limiting views of the didactic method. On the other hand, in continental Europe those moralising aspects of didactics were removed earlier by cultural representatives of the Age of Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and later specifically related to teaching by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.
The consequences of these cultural differences then created two main didactic traditions: The Anglo-Saxon tradition of curriculum studies on one side and the Continental and North European tradition of didactics on the other. Still today, the science of didactics carries much less weight in much of the English-speaking world..
With the advent of globalisation at the beginning of the 20th century, however, the arguments for such relative philosophical aspects in the methods of teaching started to diminish somewhat. It is therefore possible to categorise didactics and pedagogy as a general analytic theory on three levels:
a theoretical or research level (denoting a field of study)
a practical level (summaries of curricular activities)
a discursive level (implying a frame of reference for professional dialogs)
Nature of didactics and difference with pedagogy
The discipline of didactics is interested in both theoretical knowledge and practical activities related to teaching, learning and their conditions. It is concerned with the content of teaching (the "what"), the method of teaching (the "how") and the historical, cultural and social justifications of curricular choices (the "why"). It focuses on the individual learner, their cognitive characteristics and functioning when they learn a given content and become a knowing subject. The perspective of educational reality in didactics is drawn extensively from cognitive psychology and the theory of teaching, and sometimes from social psychology. Didactics is descriptive and diachronic ("what is" and "what was"), as opposed to pedagogy, the other discipline related to educational theorizing, which is normative or prescriptive and synchronic ("what should or ought to be") in nature. Didactics can be said to provide the descriptive foundation for pedagogy, which is more concerned with educational goal-setting and with the learner's becoming a social subject and their future role in society.
In continental Europe, as opposed to English-speaking research cultures, pedagogy and didactics are distinct areas of study. Didactics is a knowledge-based discipline concerned with the descriptive and rational study of all teaching-related activities before, during and after the teaching of content in the classroom, which includes the "planning, control and regulation of the teaching context" and its objective is to analyze how teaching leads to learning. On the other hand, pedagogy is a practice-oriented discipline concerned with the normative study of the applied aspects of teaching in real teaching contexts, i.e., inside the classroom. Pedagogy draws from didactic research and can be seen as an applied component of didactics.
Didactic transposition
In France, didactics refers to the science that takes the teaching of disciplined knowledge as its object of study. In other words, didactics is concerned with the teaching of specific disciplines to students. One of the central concepts studied in didactics of a specific discipline in France is the concept of "didactic transposition" (La transposition didactique in French). French philosopher and sociologist Michel Verret introduced this concept in 1975, which was borrowed and elaborated further in the 1980s by the French didactician of Mathematics Yves Chevallard. Although Chevallard initially presented this concept regarding the didactics of mathematics, it has since been generalized for other disciplines as well.
Didactic transposition is composed of multiple steps. The first step, called the "external transposition" (transposition externe), is about how the "scholarly knowledge" (savoir savant) produced by the scholars, scientists or specialists of a certain discipline in a research context, i.e., at universities and other academic institutions is transformed into "knowledge to teach" (savoir à enseigner) by precisely selecting, rearranging and defining the knowledge which will be taught (the official curriculum for each discipline) and how it will be taught, so that it becomes an object of learning accessible to the learner. This external didactic transposition is a socio-political construction made possible by different actors working within various educational institutions: education specialists, political authorities, teachers and their associations define the issues of teaching and choose what should be taught under which form. Chevallard called this socio-political context of institutional organization the “noosphere”, which defines the limits, redefines and reorganizes the knowledge in socially, historically or culturally determined contexts.
The second step, called the "internal transposition" (transposition interne) is about how the knowledge to teach is transformed into "taught knowledge" (savoir enseigné), which is the knowledge actually taught through the day-to-day concrete practices of a teacher in a teaching context, e.g. in a classroom, and which depends on their students and the constraints imposed on them (time, exams, conformity to prevailing school rules, etc.).
In the third and final step, the taught knowledge is transformed into "acquired knowledge" (savoir acquis), which is the knowledge as it is actually acquired by students in a learning context. The acquired knowledge can be used as a feedback to the didactic system. Didactic research has to account for all the aforementioned steps of didactic transposition.
Didactic triangle
The teacher is given the knowledge or content to be taught to students in what is called a teaching situation. The teaching or didactic situation is represented by a triangle with three vertices: the knowledge or content to be taught, the teacher, and the student. This is called the "didactic triangle". In this triangle, the teacher-content side is concerned with didactic elaboration, the student-content side is about didactic appropriation, and the teacher-student side is about didactic interaction.
Didactic teaching
Didactic method provides students with the required theoretical knowledge. It is an effective method used to teach students who are unable to organize their work and depend on the teachers for instructions. It is also used to teach basic skills of reading and writing. The teacher or the literate is the source of knowledge and the knowledge is transmitted to the students through didactic method.
Didactic Teaching materials:
The Montessori school had preplanned teaching (Didactic) materials designed, to develop practical, sensory, and formal skills. Lacing and buttoning frames, weights, and packet to be identified by their sound or smell. Because they direct learning in the prepared environment, Montessori educators are called directress rather than teachers.
In Brazil, there has been for more than 80 years the government program called PNLD (National Program of Didactic Book). This program seeks to provide basic education schools with didactic and pedagogical records, expanding access to the book and democratizing access to sources of information and culture. Textbooks, in many cases, are the only sources of information that poor children and young people have access to in a poor country like Brazil. These books are also valuable support to teachers, offering modern learning methodologies and updated concepts and content in the most diverse disciplines
Functions of didactic method
cognitive function: to understand and learn basic concepts
formative-educative function: to develop skills, behavior, abilities, etc.
instrumental function : to achieve educational objectives
normative function : helps to achieve productive learning, attain required results, etc.
Method of teaching
In didactic method of teaching, the teacher gives instructions to the students and the students are mostly passive listeners . It is a teacher-centered method of teaching and is content-oriented. Neither the content nor the knowledge of the teacher are questioned.
The process of teaching involves the teacher who gives instructions, commands, delivers content, and provides necessary information. The pupil activity involves listening and memorization of the content. In the modern education system, lecture method which is one of the most commonly used methods is a form of didactic teaching.
Limitations
Though the didactic method has been given importance in several schools, it does not satisfy the needs and interests of all students. It can be tedious for students to listen to the possible lectures. There is minimum interaction between the students and the teachers. Learning which also involves motivating the students to develop an interest towards the subject may not be satisfied through this teaching method.
It may be a monologue process and experience of the students may not have a significant role in learning.
See also
Guy Brousseau
References
External links
Didactics
Pedagogy | 0.805871 | 0.991336 | 0.798889 |
Enculturation | Enculturation is the process by which people learn the dynamics of their surrounding culture and acquire values and norms appropriate or necessary to that culture and its worldviews.
Definition and history of research
The term enculturation was used first by sociologist of science Harry Collins to describe one of the models whereby scientific knowledge is communicated among scientists, and is contrasted with the 'algorithmic' mode of communication.
The ingredients discussed by Collins for enculturation are
Learning by Immersion: whereby aspiring scientists learn by engaging in the daily activities of the laboratory, interacting with other scientists, and participating in experiments and discussions.
Tacit Knowledge: highlighting the importance of tacit knowledge—knowledge that is not easily codified or written down but is acquired through experience and practice.
Socialization: where individuals learn the social norms, values, and behaviours expected within the scientific community.
Language and Discourse: Scientists must become fluent in the terminology, theoretical frameworks, and modes of argumentation specific to their discipline.
Community Membership: recognition of the individual as a legitimate member of the scientific community.
The problem tackled in the article of Harry Collins was the early experiments for the detection of gravitational waves.
Enculturation is mostly studied in sociology and anthropology. The influences that limit, direct, or shape the individual (whether deliberately or not) include parents, other adults, and peers. If successful, enculturation results in competence in the language, values, and rituals of the culture. Growing up, everyone goes through their own version of enculturation. Enculturation helps form an individual into an acceptable citizen. Culture impacts everything that an individual does, regardless of whether they know about it. Enculturation is a deep-rooted process that binds together individuals. Even as a culture undergoes changes, elements such as central convictions, values, perspectives, and young raising practices remain similar. Enculturation paves way for tolerance which is highly needed for peaceful co-habitance.
The process of enculturation, most commonly discussed in the field of anthropology, is closely related to socialization, a concept central to the field of sociology. Both roughly describe the adaptation of an individual into social groups by absorbing the ideas, beliefs and practices surrounding them. In some disciplines, socialization refers to the deliberate shaping of the individual. As such, the term may cover both deliberate and informal enculturation.
The process of learning and absorbing culture need not be social, direct or conscious. Cultural transmission can occur in various forms, though the most common social methods include observing other individuals, being taught or being instructed. Less obvious mechanisms include learning one's culture from the media, the information environment and various social technologies, which can lead to cultural transmission and adaptation across societies. A good example of this is the diffusion of hip-hop culture into states and communities beyond its American origins.
Enculturation has often been studied in the context of non-immigrant African Americans.
Conrad Phillip Kottak (in Window on Humanity) writes:
Enculturation is referred to as acculturation in some academic literature. However, more recent literature has signalled a difference in meaning between the two. Whereas enculturation describes the process of learning one's own culture, acculturation denotes learning a different culture, for example, that of a host. The latter can be linked to ideas of a culture shock, which describes an emotionally-jarring disconnect between one's old and new culture cues.
Famously, the sociologist Talcott Parsons once described children as "barbarians" of a sort, since they are fundamentally uncultured.
How enculturation occurs
When minorities come into the U.S., these people might fully associate with their racial legacy prior to taking part in processing enculturation. Enculturation can happen in several ways. Direct education implies that your family, instructors, or different individuals from the general public unequivocally show you certain convictions, esteems, or anticipated standards of conduct. Parents may play a vital role in teaching their children standard behavior for their culture, including table manners and some aspects of polite social interactions. Strict familial and societal teaching, which often uses different forms of positive and negative reinforcement to shape behavior, can lead a person to adhere closely to their religious convictions and customs. Schools also provide a formal setting to learn national values, such as honoring a country's flag, national anthem, and other significant patriotic symbols.
Participatory learning occurs as individuals take an active role of interacting with their environment and culture. Through their own engagement in meaningful activities, they learn socio-cultural norms for their area and may adopt related qualities and values. For example, if your school organizes an outing to gather trash at a public park, this action assists with ingraining the upsides of regard for nature and ecological protection. Strict customs frequently stress participatory learning - for example, kids who take part in the singing of psalms during Christmas will assimilate the qualities and practices of the occasion.
Observational learning is when knowledge is gained essentially by noticing and emulating others. As much as an individual related to a model accepts that emulating the model will prompt good results and feels that one is fit for mimicking the way of behaving, learning can happen with no unequivocal instruction. For example, a youngster who is sufficiently fortunate to be brought into the world by guardians in a caring relationship will figure out how to be tender and mindful in their future connections.
See also
Civil society
Dual inheritance theory
Education
Educational anthropology
Ethnocentrism
Indoctrination
Intercultural competence
Mores
Norm (philosophy)
Norm (sociology)
Peer pressure
Transculturation
References
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Enculturation and Acculturation
Community empowerment
Concepts of moral character, historical and contemporary (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Cultural concepts
Cultural studies
Interculturalism | 0.804035 | 0.990046 | 0.796032 |
Qualitative research | Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or field observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Background
Qualitative research has been informed by several strands of philosophical thought and examines aspects of human life, including culture, expression, beliefs, morality, life stress, and imagination. Contemporary qualitative research has been influenced by a number of branches of philosophy, for example, positivism, postpositivism, critical theory, and constructivism.
The historical transitions or 'moments' in qualitative research, together with the notion of 'paradigms' (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005), have received widespread popularity over the past decades. However, some scholars have argued that the adoptions of paradigms may be counterproductive and lead to less philosophically engaged communities.
Approaches to inquiry
The use of nonquantitative material as empirical data has been growing in many areas of the social sciences, including learning sciences, development psychology and cultural psychology. Several philosophical and psychological traditions have influenced investigators' approaches to qualitative research, including phenomenology, social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, and positivism.
Philosophical traditions
Phenomenology refers to the philosophical study of the structure of an individual's consciousness and general subjective experience. Approaches to qualitative research based on constructionism, such as grounded theory, pay attention to how the subjectivity of both the researcher and the study participants can affect the theory that develops out of the research. The symbolic interactionist approach to qualitative research examines how individuals and groups develop an understanding of the world. Traditional positivist approaches to qualitative research seek a more objective understanding of the social world. Qualitative researchers have also been influenced by the sociology of knowledge and the work of Alfred Schütz, Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Harold Garfinkel.
Sources of data
Qualitative researchers use different sources of data to understand the topic they are studying. These data sources include interview transcripts, videos of social interactions, notes, verbal reports and artifacts such as books or works of art. The case study method exemplifies qualitative researchers' preference for depth, detail, and context. Data triangulation is also a strategy used in qualitative research. Autoethnography, the study of self, is a qualitative research method in which the researcher uses his or her personal experience to understand an issue.
Grounded theory is an inductive type of research, based on ("grounded" in) a very close look at the empirical observations a study yields. Thematic analysis involves analyzing patterns of meaning. Conversation analysis is primarily used to analyze spoken conversations. Biographical research is concerned with the reconstruction of life histories, based on biographical narratives and documents. Narrative inquiry studies the narratives that people use to describe their experience.
Data collection
Qualitative researchers may gather information through observations, note-taking, interviews, focus groups (group interviews), documents, images and artifacts.
Interviews
Research interviews are an important method of data collection in qualitative research. An interviewer is usually a professional or paid researcher, sometimes trained, who poses questions to the interviewee, in an alternating series of usually brief questions and answers, to elicit information. Compared to something like a written survey, qualitative interviews allow for a significantly higher degree of intimacy, with participants often revealing personal information to their interviewers in a real-time, face-to-face setting. As such, this technique can evoke an array of significant feelings and experiences within those being interviewed. Sociologists Bredal, Stefansen and Bjørnholt identified three "participant orientations", that they described as "telling for oneself", "telling for others" and "telling for the researcher". They also proposed that these orientations implied "different ethical contracts between the participant and researcher".
Participant observation
In participant observation ethnographers get to understand a culture by directly participating in the activities of the culture they study. Participant observation extends further than ethnography and into other fields, including psychology. For example, by training to be an EMT and becoming a participant observer in the lives of EMTs, Palmer studied how EMTs cope with the stress associated with some of the gruesome emergencies they deal with.
Recursivity
In qualitative research, the idea of recursivity refers to the emergent nature of research design. In contrast to standardized research methods, recursivity embodies the idea that the qualitative researcher can change a study's design during the data collection phase.
Recursivity in qualitative research procedures contrasts to the methods used by scientists who conduct experiments. From the perspective of the scientist, data collection, data analysis, discussion of the data in the context of the research literature, and drawing conclusions should be each undertaken once (or at most a small number of times). In qualitative research however, data are collected repeatedly until one or more specific stopping conditions are met, reflecting a nonstatic attitude to the planning and design of research activities. An example of this dynamism might be when the qualitative researcher unexpectedly changes their research focus or design midway through a study, based on their first interim data analysis. The researcher can even make further unplanned changes based on another interim data analysis. Such an approach would not be permitted in an experiment. Qualitative researchers would argue that recursivity in developing the relevant evidence enables the researcher to be more open to unexpected results and emerging new constructs.
Data analysis
Qualitative researchers have a number of analytic strategies available to them.
Coding
In general, coding refers to the act of associating meaningful ideas with the data of interest. In the context of qualitative research, interpretative aspects of the coding process are often explicitly recognized and articulated; coding helps to produce specific words or short phrases believed to be useful abstractions from the data.
Pattern thematic analysis
Data may be sorted into patterns for thematic analyses as the primary basis for organizing and reporting the study findings.
Content analysis
According to Krippendorf, "Content analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inference from data to their context" (p. 21). It is applied to documents and written and oral communication. Content analysis is an important building block in the conceptual analysis of qualitative data. It is frequently used in sociology. For example, content analysis has been applied to research on such diverse aspects of human life as changes in perceptions of race over time, the lifestyles of contractors, and even reviews of automobiles.
Issues
Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS)
Contemporary qualitative data analyses can be supported by computer programs (termed computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software). These programs have been employed with or without detailed hand coding or labeling. Such programs do not supplant the interpretive nature of coding. The programs are aimed at enhancing analysts' efficiency at applying, retrieving, and storing the codes generated from reading the data. Many programs enhance efficiency in editing and revising codes, which allow for more effective work sharing, peer review, data examination, and analysis of large datasets.
Common qualitative data analysis software includes:
ATLAS.ti
Dedoose (mixed methods)
MAXQDA (mixed methods)
NVivo
QDA MINER
A criticism of quantitative coding approaches is that such coding sorts qualitative data into predefined (nomothetic) categories that are reflective of the categories found in objective science. The variety, richness, and individual characteristics of the qualitative data are reduced or, even, lost.
To defend against the criticism that qualitative approaches to data are too subjective, qualitative researchers assert that by clearly articulating their definitions of the codes they use and linking those codes to the underlying data, they preserve some of the richness that might be lost if the results of their research boiled down to a list of predefined categories. Qualitative researchers also assert that their procedures are repeatable, which is an idea that is valued by quantitatively oriented researchers.
Sometimes researchers rely on computers and their software to scan and reduce large amounts of qualitative data. At their most basic level, numerical coding schemes rely on counting words and phrases within a dataset; other techniques involve the analysis of phrases and exchanges in analyses of conversations. A computerized approach to data analysis can be used to aid content analysis, especially when there is a large corpus to unpack.
Trustworthiness
A central issue in qualitative research is trustworthiness (also known as credibility or, in quantitative studies, validity). There are many ways of establishing trustworthiness, including member check, interviewer corroboration, peer debriefing, prolonged engagement, negative case analysis, auditability, confirmability, bracketing, and balance. Data triangulation and eliciting examples of interviewee accounts are two of the most commonly used methods of establishing the trustworthiness of qualitative studies.
Transferability of results has also been considered as an indicator of validity.
Limitations of qualitative research
Qualitative research is not without limitations. These limitations include participant reactivity, the potential for a qualitative investigator to over-identify with one or more study participants, "the impracticality of the Glaser-Strauss idea that hypotheses arise from data unsullied by prior expectations," the inadequacy of qualitative research for testing cause-effect hypotheses, and the Baconian character of qualitative research. Participant reactivity refers to the fact that people often behave differently when they know they are being observed. Over-identifying with participants refers to a sympathetic investigator studying a group of people and ascribing, more than is warranted, a virtue or some other characteristic to one or more participants. Compared to qualitative research, experimental research and certain types of nonexperimental research (e.g., prospective studies), although not perfect, are better means for drawing cause-effect conclusions.
Glaser and Strauss, influential members of the qualitative research community, pioneered the idea that theoretically important categories and hypotheses can emerge "naturally" from the observations a qualitative researcher collects, provided that the researcher is not guided by preconceptions. The ethologist David Katz wrote "a hungry animal divides the environment into edible and inedible things....Generally speaking, objects change...according to the needs of the animal." Karl Popper carrying forward Katz's point wrote that "objects can be classified and can become similar or dissimilar, only in this way--by being related to needs and interests. This rule applied not only to animals but also to scientists." Popper made clear that observation is always selective, based on past research and the investigators' goals and motives and that preconceptionless research is impossible.
The Baconian character of qualitative research refers to the idea that a qualitative researcher can collect enough observations such that categories and hypotheses will emerge from the data. Glaser and Strauss developed the idea of theoretical sampling by way of collecting observations until theoretical saturation is obtained and no additional observations are required to understand the character of the individuals under study. Bertrand Russell suggested that there can be no orderly arrangement of observations such that a hypothesis will jump out of those ordered observations; some provisional hypothesis usually guides the collection of observations.
In psychology
Community psychology
Autobiographical narrative research has been conducted in the field of community psychology. A selection of autobiographical narratives of community psychologists can be found in the book Six Community Psychologists Tell Their Stories: History, Contexts, and Narrative.
Educational psychology
Edwin Farrell used qualitative methods to understand the social reality of at-risk high school students. Later he used similar methods to understand the reality of successful high school students who came from the same neighborhoods as the at-risk students he wrote about in his previously mentioned book.
Health psychology
In the field of health psychology, qualitative methods have become increasingly employed in research on understanding health and illness and how health and illness are socially constructed in everyday life. Since then, a broad range of qualitative methods have been adopted by health psychologists, including discourse analysis, thematic analysis, narrative analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. In 2015, the journal Health Psychology published a special issue on qualitative research.<ref>Gough, B., & Deatrick, J.A. (eds.)(2015). Qualitative research in health psychology [special issue]. Health Psychology, 34 (4).</ref>
Industrial and organizational psychology
According to Doldor and colleagues organizational psychologists extensively use qualitative research "during the design and implementation of activities like organizational change, training needs analyses, strategic reviews, and employee development plans."
Occupational health psychology
Although research in the field of occupational health psychology (OHP) has predominantly been quantitatively oriented, some OHP researchers have employed qualitative methods. Qualitative research efforts, if directed properly, can provide advantages for quantitatively oriented OHP researchers. These advantages include help with (1) theory and hypothesis development, (2) item creation for surveys and interviews, (3) the discovery of stressors and coping strategies not previously identified, (4) interpreting difficult-to-interpret quantitative findings, (5) understanding why some stress-reduction interventions fail and others succeed, and (6) providing rich descriptions of the lived lives of people at work.Schonfeld, I. S., & Farrell, E. (2010). Qualitative methods can enrich quantitative research on occupational stress: An example from one occupational group. In D. C. Ganster & P. L. Perrewé (Eds.), Research in occupational stress and wellbeing series. Vol. 8. New developments in theoretical and conceptual approaches to job stress (pp. 137-197). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Some OHP investigators have united qualitative and quantitative methods within a single study (e.g., Elfering et al., [2005]); these investigators have used qualitative methods to assess job stressors that are difficult to ascertain using standard measures and well validated standardized instruments to assess coping behaviors and dependent variables such as mood.
Social media psychology
Since the advent of social media in the early 2000s, formerly private accounts of personal experiences have become widely shared with the public by millions of people around the world. Disclosures are often made openly, which has contributed to social media's key role in movements like the #metoo movement.
The abundance of self-disclosure on social media has presented an unprecedented opportunity for qualitative and mixed methods researchers; mental health problems can now be investigated qualitatively more widely, at a lower cost, and with no intervention by the researchers. To take advantage of these data, researchers need to have mastered the tools for conducting qualitative research.
Academic journals
Consumption Markets & Culture
Journal of Consumer Research
Qualitative Inquiry Qualitative Market Research Qualitative Research The Qualitative ReportSee also
Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS)
References
Further reading
Adler, P. A. & Adler, P. (1987). : context and meaning in social inquiry / edited by Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder
Baškarada, S. (2014) "Qualitative Case Study Guidelines", in The Qualitative Report, 19(40): 1-25. Available from
Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research ( 2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2011). The SAGE Handbook of qualitative research ( 4th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
DeWalt, K. M. & DeWalt, B. R. (2002). Participant observation. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Fischer, C.T. (Ed.) (2005). Qualitative research methods for psychologists: Introduction through empirical studies. Academic Press. .
Franklin, M. I. (2012), "Understanding Research: Coping with the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide". London/New York. Routledge
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gubrium, J. F. and J. A. Holstein. (2000). "The New Language of Qualitative Method." New York: Oxford University Press.
Gubrium, J. F. and J. A. Holstein (2009). "Analyzing Narrative Reality." Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gubrium, J. F. and J. A. Holstein, eds. (2000). "Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World." New York: Oxford University Press.
Hammersley, M. (2008) Questioning Qualitative Inquiry, London, Sage.
Hammersley, M. (2013) What is qualitative research?, London, Bloomsbury.
Holliday, A. R. (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research, 2nd Edition. London: Sage Publications
Holstein, J. A. and J. F. Gubrium, eds. (2012). "Varieties of Narrative Analysis." Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kaminski, Marek M. (2004). Games Prisoners Play. Princeton University Press. .
Malinowski, B. (1922/1961). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Miles, M. B. & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Pamela Maykut, Richard Morehouse. 1994 Beginning Qualitative Research. Falmer Press.
Pernecky, T. (2016). Epistemology and Metaphysics for Qualitative Research. London, UK: Sage Publications.
Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research & evaluation methods ( 3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Pawluch D. & Shaffir W. & Miall C. (2005). Doing Ethnography: Studying Everyday Life. Toronto, ON Canada: Canadian Scholars' Press.
Racino, J. (1999). Policy, Program Evaluation and Research in Disability: Community Support for All." New York, NY: Haworth Press (now Routledge imprint, Francis and Taylor, 2015).
Ragin, C. C. (1994). Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method, Pine Forge Press,
Riessman, Catherine K. (1993). "Narrative Analysis." Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rosenthal, Gabriele (2018). Interpretive Social Research. An Introduction. Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
Savin-Baden, M. and Major, C. (2013). "Qualitative research: The essential guide to theory and practice." London, Rutledge.
Silverman, David, (ed), (2011), "Qualitative Research: Issues of Theory, Method and Practice". Third Edition. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Sage Publications
Stebbins, Robert A. (2001) Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Taylor, Steven J., Bogdan, Robert, Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods, Wiley, 1998,
Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the field: on writing ethnography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wolcott, H. F. (1995). The art of fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Wolcott, H. F. (1999). Ethnography: A way of seeing. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Ziman, John (2000). Real Science: what it is, and what it means''. Cambridge, Uk: Cambridge University Press.
External links
Qualitative Philosophy
C.Wright Mills, On intellectual Craftsmanship, The Sociological Imagination,1959
Participant Observation, Qualitative research methods: a Data collector's field guide
Analyzing and Reporting Qualitative Market Research
Overview of available QDA Software
Videos
Research methods
Psychological methodology | 0.796718 | 0.997602 | 0.794807 |
Autodidacticism | Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning, self-study and self-teaching) is the practice of education without the guidance of schoolmasters (i.e., teachers, professors, institutions).
Overview
Autodidacts are self-taught humans who learn a subject-of-study's aboutness through self-study. This educative praxis (process) may involve or complement formal education. Formal education itself may have a hidden curriculum that requires self-study for the uninitiated.
Generally, autodidacts are individuals who choose the subject they will study, their studying material, and the studying rhythm and time. Autodidacts may or may not have formal education, and their study may be either a complement or an alternative to formal education. Many notable contributions have been made by autodidacts.
The self-learning curriculum is infinite. One may seek out alternative pathways in education and use these to gain competency; self-study may meet some prerequisite-curricula criteria for experiential education or apprenticeship.
Self-education techniques used in self-study can include reading educational textbooks, watching educational videos and listening to educational audio recordings, or by visiting infoshops. One uses some space as a learning space, where one uses critical thinking to develop study skills within the broader learning environment until they've reached an academic comfort zone.
Etymology
The term has its roots in the Ancient Greek words (, ) and (, ). The related term didacticism defines an artistic philosophy of education.
Terminology
Various terms are used to describe self-education. One such is heutagogy, coined in 2000 by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon of Southern Cross University in Australia; others are self-directed learning and self-determined learning. In the heutagogy paradigm, a learner should be at the centre of their own learning. A truly self-determined learning approach also sees the heutagogic learner exploring different approaches to knowledge in order to learn; there is an element of experimentation underpinned by a personal curiosity.
Andragogy "strive[s] for autonomy and self-direction in learning", while Heutagogy "identif[ies] the potential to learn from novel experiences as a matter of course [...] manage their own learning". Ubuntugogy is a type of cosmopolitanism that has a collectivist ethics of awareness concerning the African diaspora.
Modern era
Autodidacticism is sometimes a complement of modern formal education. As a complement to formal education, students would be encouraged to do more independent work. The Industrial Revolution created a new situation for self-directed learners.
Before the twentieth century, only a small minority of people received an advanced academic education. As stated by Joseph Whitworth in his influential report on industry dated from 1853, literacy rates were higher in the United States. However, even in the U.S., most children were not completing high school. High school education was necessary to become a teacher. In modern times, a larger percentage of those completing high school also attended college, usually to pursue a professional degree, such as law or medicine, or a divinity degree.
Collegiate teaching was based on the classics (Latin, philosophy, ancient history, theology) until the early nineteenth century. There were few if any institutions of higher learning offering studies in engineering or science before 1800. Institutions such as the Royal Society did much to promote scientific learning, including public lectures. In England, there were also itinerant lecturers offering their service, typically for a fee.
Prior to the nineteenth century, there were many important inventors working as millwrights or mechanics who, typically, had received an elementary education and served an apprenticeship. Mechanics, instrument makers and surveyors had various mathematics training. James Watt was a surveyor and instrument maker and is described as being "largely self-educated". Watt, like some other autodidacts of the time, became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Lunar Society. In the eighteenth century these societies often gave public lectures and were instrumental in teaching chemistry and other sciences with industrial applications which were neglected by traditional universities. Academies also arose to provide scientific and technical training.
Years of schooling in the United States began to increase sharply in the early twentieth century. This phenomenon was seemingly related to increasing mechanization displacing child labor. The automated glass bottle-making machine is said to have done more for education than child labor laws because boys were no longer needed to assist. However, the number of boys employed in this particular industry was not that large; it was mechanization in several sectors of industry that displaced child labor toward education. For males in the U.S. born 1886–90, years of school averaged 7.86, while for those born in 1926–30, years of school averaged 11.46.
One of the most recent trends in education is that the classroom environment should cater towards students' individual needs, goals, and interests. This model adopts the idea of inquiry-based learning where students are presented with scenarios to identify their own research, questions and knowledge regarding the area. As a form of discovery learning, students in today's classrooms are being provided with more opportunity to "experience and interact" with knowledge, which has its roots in autodidacticism.
Successful self-teaching can require self-discipline and reflective capability. Some research suggests that the ability to regulate one's own learning may need to be modeled to some students so that they become active learners, while others learn dynamically via a process outside conscious control. To interact with the environment, a framework has been identified to determine the components of any learning system: a reward function, incremental action value functions and action selection methods. Rewards work best in motivating learning when they are specifically chosen on an individual student basis. New knowledge must be incorporated into previously existing information as its value is to be assessed. Ultimately, these scaffolding techniques, as described by Vygotsky (1978) and problem solving methods are a result of dynamic decision making.
In his book Deschooling Society, philosopher Ivan Illich strongly criticized 20th-century educational culture and the institutionalization of knowledge and learning - arguing that institutional schooling as such is an irretrievably flawed model of education - advocating instead ad-hoc co-operative networks through which autodidacts could find others interested in teaching themselves a given skill or about a given topic, supporting one another by pooling resources, materials, and knowledge.
Secular and modern societies have given foundations for new systems of education and new kinds of autodidacts. As Internet access has become more widespread the World Wide Web (explored using search engines such as Google) in general, and websites such as Wikipedia (including parts of it that were included in a book or referenced in a reading list), YouTube, Udemy, Udacity and Khan Academy in particular, have developed as learning centers for many people to actively and freely learn together. Organizations like The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) have been formed to publicize and provide guidance for self-directed education. Entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates are considered influential self-teachers.
History
The first philosophical claim supporting an autodidactic program to the study of nature and God was in the philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Alive son of the Vigilant), whose titular hero is considered the archetypal autodidact. The story is a medieval autodidactic utopia, a philosophical treatise in a literary form, which was written by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Tufail in the 1160s in Marrakesh. It is a story about a feral boy, an autodidact prodigy who masters nature through instruments and reason, discovers laws of nature by practical exploration and experiments, and gains summum bonum through a mystical mediation and communion with God. The hero rises from his initial state of tabula rasa to a mystical or direct experience of God after passing through the necessary natural experiences. The focal point of the story is that human reason, unaided by society and its conventions or by religion, can achieve scientific knowledge, preparing the way to the mystical or highest form of human knowledge.
Commonly translated as "The Self-Taught Philosopher" or "The Improvement of Human Reason", Ibn-Tufayl's story Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan inspired debates about autodidacticism in a range of historical fields from classical Islamic philosophy through Renaissance humanism and the European Enlightenment. In his book Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: a Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism, Avner Ben-Zaken showed how the text traveled from late medieval Andalusia to early modern Europe and demonstrated the intricate ways in which autodidacticism was contested in and adapted to diverse cultural settings.
Autodidacticism apparently intertwined with struggles over Sufism in twelfth-century Marrakesh; controversies about the role of philosophy in pedagogy in fourteenth-century Barcelona; quarrels concerning astrology in Renaissance Florence in which Pico della Mirandola pleads for autodidacticism against the strong authority of intellectual establishment notions of predestination; and debates pertaining to experimentalism in seventeenth-century Oxford. Pleas for autodidacticism echoed not only within close philosophical discussions; they surfaced in struggles for control between individuals and establishments.
In the story of Black American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams presents a historical account to examine Black American's relationship to literacy during slavery, the Civil War and the first decades of freedom. Many of the personal accounts tell of individuals who have had to teach themselves due to racial discrimination in education.
In architecture
Many successful and influential architects, such as Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Violet-Le-Duc, Tadao Ando were self-taught.
There are very few countries allowing autodidacticism in architecture today. The practice of architecture or the use of the title "architect", are now protected in most countries.
Self-taught architects have generally studied and qualified in other fields such as engineering or arts and crafts. Jean Prouvé was first a structural engineer. Le Corbusier had an academic qualification in decorative arts. Tadao Ando started his career as a draftsman, and Eileen Gray studied fine arts.
When a political state starts to implement restrictions on the profession, there are issues related to the rights of established self-taught architects. In most countries the legislation includes a grandfather clause, authorising established self-taught architects to continue practicing. In the UK, the legislation allowed self-trained architects with two years of experience to register. In France, it allowed self-trained architects with five years of experience to register. In Belgium, the law allowed experienced self-trained architects in practice to register. In Italy, it allowed self-trained architects with 10 years of experience to register. In The Netherlands, the "" along with additional procedures, allowed architects with 10 years of experience and architects aged 40 years old or over, with 5 years of experience, to access the register.
However, other sovereign states chose to omit such a clause, and many established and competent practitioners were stripped of their professional rights. In the Republic of Ireland, a group named "Architects' Alliance of Ireland" is defending the interests of long-established self-trained architects who were deprived of their rights to practice as per Part 3 of the Irish Building Control Act 2007.
Theoretical research such as Architecture of Change, Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment or older studies such as Vers une Architecture from Le Corbusier describe the practice of architecture as an environment changing with new technologies, sciences, and legislation. All architects must be autodidacts to keep up to date with new standards, regulations, or methods.
Self-taught architects such as Eileen Gray, Luis Barragán, and many others, created a system where working is also learning, where self-education is associated with creativity and productivity within a working environment.
While he was primarily interested in naval architecture, William Francis Gibbs learned his profession through his own study of battleships and ocean liners. Through his life he could be seen examining and changing the designs of ships that were already built, that is, until he started his firm Gibbs and Cox.
Predictors
Openness is the largest predictor of self-directed learning out of the Big Five personality traits, though, in a study, personality only explained 10% of the variance in self-directed learning.
Future role
The role of self-directed learning continues to be investigated in learning approaches, along with other important goals of education, such as content knowledge, epistemic practices and collaboration. As colleges and universities offer distance learning degree programs and secondary schools provide cyber school options for K–12 students, technology provides numerous resources that enable individuals to have a self-directed learning experience. Several studies show these programs function most effectively when the "teacher" or facilitator is a full owner of virtual space to encourage a broad range of experiences to come together in an online format. This allows self-directed learning to encompass both a chosen path of information inquiry, self-regulation methods and reflective discussion among experts as well as novices in a given area. Furthermore, massive open online courses (MOOCs) make autodidacticism easier and thus more common.
A 2016 Stack Overflow poll reported that due to the rise of autodidacticism, 69.1% of software developers appear to be self-taught.
Notable individuals
Some notable autodidacts can be broadly grouped in the following interdisciplinary areas:
Artists and authors
Actors, musicians, and other artists
Architects
Engineers and inventors
Scientists, historians, and educators
Educational materials availability
Most governments have compulsory education that may deny the right to education on the basis of discrimination; state school teachers may unwittingly indoctrinate students into the ideology of the oppressive community and government via a hidden curriculum.
See also
References
Further reading
External links
African-American society
African Americans and education
Alternative education
Applied learning
Area studies
Black studies
Cybernetics
Education activism
Education theory
Education in Poland during World War II
Education museums in the United States
Espionage
History of education in the United States
Information sensitivity
Learning
Learning methods
Learning to read
Lyceum movement
Methodology
Open content
Pedagogical movements and theories
Philosophical methodology
Philosophy of education
Play (activity)
Pre-emancipation African-American history
Problem solving methods
Research methods
Sampling (statistics)
School desegregation pioneers
Science experiments
Self-care
Teaching
Underground education
United States education law
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Education sciences | Education sciences, also known as education studies, education theory, and traditionally called pedagogy, seek to describe, understand, and prescribe education including education policy. Subfields include comparative education, educational research, instructional theory, curriculum theory and psychology, philosophy, sociology, economics, and history of education. Related are learning theory or cognitive science.
History
The earliest known attempts to understand education in Europe were by classical Greek philosophers and sophists, but there is also evidence of contemporary (or even preceding) discussions among Arabic, Indian, and Chinese scholars.
Philosophy of education
Educational thought is not necessarily concerned with the construction of theories as much as the "reflective examination of educational issues and problems from the perspective of diverse disciplines."
For example, a cultural theory of education considers how education occurs through the totality of culture, including prisons, households, and religious institutions as well as schools. Other examples are the behaviorist theory of education that comes from educational psychology and the functionalist theory of education that comes from sociology of education.
Normative theories of education
Normative theories of education provide the norms, goals, and standards of education. In contrast, descriptive theories of education provide descriptions, explanations or predictions of the processes of education.
"Normative philosophies or theories of education may make use of the results of [philosophical thought] and of factual inquiries about human beings and the psychology of learning, but in any case they propound views about what education should be, what dispositions it should cultivate, why it ought to cultivate them, how and in whom it should do so, and what forms it should take. In a full-fledged philosophical normative theory of education, besides analysis of the sorts described, there will normally be propositions of the following kinds:
1. Basic normative premises about what is good or right;
2. Basic factual premises about humanity and the world;
3. Conclusions, based on these two kinds of premises, about the dispositions education should foster;
4. Further factual premises about such things as the psychology of learning and methods of teaching; and
5. Further conclusions about such things as the methods that education should use."
Examples of the purpose of schools include: to develop reasoning about perennial questions, to master the methods of scientific inquiry, to cultivate the intellect, to create change agents, to develop spirituality, and to model a democratic society.
Common educational philosophies include: educational perennialism, educational progressivism, educational essentialism, critical pedagogy, Montessori education, Waldorf education, and democratic education.
Normative Curriculum theory
Normative theories of curriculum aim to "describe, or set norms, for conditions surrounding many of the concepts and constructs" that define curriculum. These normative propositions differ from those above in that normative curriculum theory is not necessarily untestable. A central question asked by normative curriculum theory is: given a particular educational philosophy, what is worth knowing and why? Some examples are: a deep understanding of the Great Books, direct experiences driven by student interest, a superficial understanding of a wide range knowledge (e.g. Core knowledge), social and community problems and issues, knowledge and understanding specific to cultures and their achievements (e.g. African-Centered Education).
Normative Feminist educational theory
Scholars such as Robyn Wiegman argue that, "academic feminism is perhaps the most successful institutionalizing project of its generation, with more full-time faculty positions and new doctoral degree programs emerging each year in the field it inaugurated, Women's Studies". Feminist educational theory stems from four key tenets, supported by empirical data based on surveys of feminist educators. The first tenet of feminist educational theory is, "Creation of participatory classroom communities". Participatory classroom communities often are smaller classes built around discussion and student involvement. The second tenet is, "Validation of personal experience". Classrooms in which validation of personal experience occur often are focused around students providing their own insights and experiences in group discussion, rather than relying exclusively on the insight of the educator. The third tenet is, "Encouragement of social understanding and activism". This tenet is generally actualized by classrooms discussing and reading about social and societal aspects that students may not be aware of, along with breeding student self-efficacy. The fourth and final tenet of feminist education is, "Development of critical thinking skills/open-mindedness". Classrooms actively engaging in this tenet encourage students to think for themselves and prompt them to move beyond their comfort zones, working outside the bounds of the traditional lecture-based classroom. Though these tenets at times overlap, they combine to provide the basis for modern feminist educational theory, and are supported by a majority of feminist educators.
Feminist educational theory derives from the feminist movement, particularly that of the early 1970s, which prominent feminist bell hooks describes as, "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression". Academic feminist Robyn Weigman recalls that, "In the early seventies, feminism in the U.S. academy was less an organized entity than a set of practices: an ensemble of courses listed on bulletin boards often taught for free by faculty and community leaders". While feminism traditionally existed outside of the institutionalization of schools (particularly universities), feminist education has gradually taken hold in the last few decades and has gained a foothold in institutionalized educational bodies. "Once fledgling programs have become departments, and faculty have been hired and tenured with full-time commitments".
There are supporters of feminist education as well, many of whom are educators or students. Professor Becky Ropers-Huilman recounts one of her positive experiences with feminist education from the student perspective, explaining that she "...felt very 'in charge' of [her] own learning experiences," and "...was not being graded–or degraded... [while completing] the majority of the assigned work for the class (and additional work that [she] thought would add to class discussion)," all while "...[regarding] the teacher's feedback on [her] participation as one perspective, rather than the perspective". Ropers-Huilman experienced a working feminist classroom that successfully motivated students to go above and beyond, succeeding in generating self-efficacy and caring in the classroom. When Ropers-Huilman became a teacher herself, she embraced feminist educational theory, noting that, "[Teachers] have an obligation as the ones who are vested with an assumed power, even if that power is easily and regularly disrupted, to assess and address the effects that it is having in our classrooms". Ropers-Huilman firmly believes that educators have a duty to address feminist concepts such as the use and flow of power within the classroom, and strongly believes in the potential of feminist educational theory to create positive learning experiences for students and teachers as she has personally experienced.
Ropers-Huilman also celebrates the feminist classroom's inclusivity, noting that in a feminist classroom, "in which power is used to care about, for, and with others… educational participants can shape practices aimed at creating an inclusive society that discovers and utilizes the potential of its actors". Ropers-Huilman believes that a feminist classroom carries the ability to greatly influence the society as a whole, promoting understanding, caring, and inclusivity. Ropers-Huilman actively engages in feminist education in her classes, focusing on concepts such as active learning and critical thinking while attempting to demonstrate and engage in caring behavior and atypical classroom settings, similar to many other feminist educators.
Leading feminist scholar bell hooks argues for the incorporation of feminism into all aspects of society, including education, in her book Feminism is for Everybody. hooks notes that, "Everything [people] know about feminism has come into their lives thirdhand". hooks believes that education offers a counter to the, "...wrongminded notion of feminist movement which implied it was anti-male". hooks cites feminism's negative connotations as major inhibitors to the spread and adoption of feminist ideologies. However, feminist education has seen tremendous growth in adoption in the past few decades, despite the negative connotations of its parent movement.
Criticism of Feminist educational theory
Opposition to feminist educational theory comes from both those who oppose feminism in general and feminists who oppose feminist educational theory in particular. Critics of feminist educational theory argue against the four basic tenets of the theory, "...[contesting] both their legitimacy and their implementation". Lewis Lehrman particularly describes feminist educational ideology as, "...'therapeutic pedagogy' that substitutes an 'overriding' (and detrimental) value on participatory interaction for the expertise of the faculty" (Hoffman). Lehrman argues that the feminist educational tenets of participatory experience and validation of person experience hinder education by limiting and inhibiting the educator's ability to share his or her knowledge, learned through years of education and experience.
Others challenge the legitimacy of feminist educational theory, arguing that it is not unique and is instead a sect of liberatory education. Even feminist educational scholars such as Frances Hoffmann and Jayne Stake are forced to concede that, "feminist pedagogy shared intellectual and political roots with the movements comprising the liberatory education agenda of the past 30 years". These liberatory attempts at the democratization of classrooms demonstrate a growth in liberatory education philosophy that some argue feminist educational theory simply piggybacks off of.
The harshest critiques of feminist educational theory often come from feminists themselves. Feminist scholar Robyn Wiegman argues against feminist education in her article "Academic Feminism against Itself", arguing that feminist educational ideology has abandoned the intersectionality of feminism in many cases, and has also focused exclusively on present content with a singular perspective. Wiegman refers to feminist scholar James Newman's arguments, centered around the idea that, "When we fail... to challenge both students and ourselves to theorize alterity as an issue of change over time as well as of geographic distance, ethnic difference, and sexual choice, we repress... not only the 'thickness' of historical difference itself, but also... our (self) implication in a narrative of progress whose hero(in)es inhabit only the present". Newman (and Wiegman) believe that this presentist ideology imbued within modern academic feminism creates an environment breeding antifeminist ideologies, most importantly an abandonment of the study of difference, integral to feminist ideology. Wiegman believes that feminist educational theory does a great disservice to the feminist movement, while failing to instill the critical thinking and social awareness that feminist educational theory is intended to.
Educational anthropology
Philosophical anthropology is the philosophical study of human nature. In terms of learning, examples of descriptive theories of the learner are: a mind, soul, and spirit capable of emulating the Absolute Mind (Idealism); an orderly, sensing, and rational being capable of understanding the world of things (Realism), a rational being with a soul modeled after God and who comes to know God through reason and revelation (Neo-Thomism), an evolving and active being capable of interacting with the environment (Pragmatism), a fundamentally free and individual being who is capable of being authentic through the making of and taking responsibility for choices (Existentialism). Philosophical concepts for the process of education include Bildung and paideia. Educational anthropology is a sub-field of anthropology and is widely associated with the pioneering work of George Spindler. As the name would suggest, the focus of educational anthropology is obviously on education, although an anthropological approach to education tends to focus on the cultural aspects of education, including informal as well as formal education. As education involves understandings of who we are, it is not surprising that the single most recognized dictum of educational anthropology is that the field is centrally concerned with cultural transmission. Cultural transmission involves the transfer of a sense of identity between generations, sometimes known as enculturation and also transfer of identity between cultures, sometimes known as acculturation. Accordingly, thus it is also not surprising that educational anthropology has become increasingly focused on ethnic identity and ethnic change.
Descriptive Curriculum theory
Descriptive theories of curriculum explain how curricula "benefit or harm all publics it touches".
The term hidden curriculum describes that which is learned simply by being in a learning environment. For example, a student in a teacher-led classroom is learning submission. The hidden curriculum is not necessarily intentional.
Instructional theory
Instructional theories focus on the methods of instruction for teaching curricula. Theories include the methods of: autonomous learning, coyote teaching, inquiry-based instruction, lecture, maturationism, socratic method, outcome-based education, taking children seriously, transformative learning
Educational psychology
Educational psychology is an empirical science that provides descriptive theories of how people learn. Examples of theories of education in psychology are: constructivism, behaviorism, cognitivism, and motivational theory
Cognitive science
Educational neuroscience
Educational neuroscience is an emerging field that brings together researchers in diverse disciplines to explore the interactions between biological processes and education.
Sociology of education
The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is most concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education. Examples of theories of education from sociology include: functionalism, conflict theory, social efficiency, and social mobility.
Teaching method
Learning theories
Educational research
Educational assessment
Educational evaluation
Educational aims and objectives
Politics in education
Education economics
Comparative education
Educational theorists
List of educational psychologists
See also
Anti-schooling activism
Classical education movement
Cognitivism (learning theory)
Andragogy
Geragogy
Humanistic education
International education
Peace education
Movement in learning
Co-construction, collaborative learning
Scholarship of teaching and learning
Notes
References
Thomas, G. (2007) Education and Theory: Strangers in Paradigms. Open University Press
External links
Educational Theory (journal) | 0.803965 | 0.986535 | 0.793139 |
Sociocultural perspective | The sociocultural perspective is a theory used in fields such as psychology and education and is used to describe awareness of circumstances surrounding individuals and how their behaviors are affected specifically by their surrounding, social and cultural factors. According to Catherine A. Sanderson (2010) “Sociocultural perspective: A perspective describing people’s behavior and mental processes as shaped in part by their social and/or cultural contact, including race, gender, and nationality.” Sociocultural perspective theory is a broad yet significant aspect in our being. It applies to every sector of our daily lives. How we communicate, understand, relate and cope with one another is partially based on this theory. Our spiritual, mental, physical, emotional, physiological being are all influenced by factors studied by sociocultural perspective theory.
Ideology
Various studies examine topics using the sociocultural perspective in order to account for variability from person to person and acknowledge that social and cultural differences affect these individuals. One example comes from the journal European Psychologist: Investigating Motivation in Context: Developing Sociocultural Perspectives by Richard A. Walker, Kimberley Pressick-kilborn, Bert M. Lancaster, and Erica J. Sainsbury (2004). Recently, however, a renewed interest in the contextual nature of motivation has come about for several reasons. First, the relatively recent influence of the ideas of Vygotsky and his followers (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996; Greeno & The Middle School Through Applications Project, 1998) in educational psychology has led writers in the field (Goodenow, 1992; Pintrich, 1994; Anderman & Anderman, 2000) to acknowledge the importance of context and to call for its greater recognition in educational psychology, and more particularly in motivational research. As both Goodenow (1992) and Hickey (1997) note, in sociocultural theories deriving from Vygotsky, human activities, events, and actions cannot be separated from the context in which they occur so that context becomes an important issue in sociocultural research. Second, researchers concerned with learning and cognition (e.g., Greeno et al., 1998) have come to see these processes also as being situated in particular contexts. While this view, with its emphasis on the distributed nature of learning and cognition, has origins in sociocultural theories".
This theory or perspective is examined in The Modern Language Journal “A Sociocultural Perspective on Language Learning Strategies: The Role of Mediation” by Richard Donato and Dawn McCormick. According to Donato and McCormick (1994) “Sociocultural theory maintains that social interaction and cultural institutions, such as schools, classrooms, etc., have important roles to play in an individual’s cognitive growth and development.” “We believe that this perspective goes beyond current cognitive and social psychological conceptions of strategic language learning, both of which assume that language tasks and contexts are generalizable. The sociocultural perspective, on the other hand, views language learning tasks and contexts as situated activities that are continually under development (22) and that are influential upon individuals’ strategic orientations to classroom learning.”
Health factors
The sociocultural perspective is also used here in order to assess use of mental health services for immigrants: “From a sociocultural perspective, this article reviews causes of mental health service under use among Chinese immigrants and discusses practice implications. Factors explaining service under use among Chinese immigrants are multifaceted, extending across individual, family, cultural and system domains. The first of these is cultural explanation of mental illness. Cultural beliefs, regarding the cause of mental disorders greatly affect service use. The perceived causes of mental illness include moral, religious, or cosmological, physiological, psychological, social and genetic factors”. From Canadian Social Work, “A Sociocultural Perspective of Mental Health Services Use by Chinese Immigrants” by Lin Fang, (2010).
Coping
According to Asian American Journal of Psychology, "Coping with perceived racial and gender discrimination experiences among 11 Asian/Asian American female faculty at various Christian universities" have been examined in this theory. After the study was conducted the results revealed that "ten of the 11 women described experiences where they perceived being treated differently due to race and/or gender. Qualitative analyses of interview data revealed four themes related to coping: Proactive Coping, External Support, Personal Resources, and Spiritual Coping. The resulting themes are discussed in light of existing research, with an emphasis on the importance of understanding cultural and religious values to the study of coping".
Language
Another instance of the sociocultural perspective can be found in language learning literature: “By adopting a sociocultural perspective that highlights the critical role of the social context in cognitive and social development (Vygotsky, 1978), we propose that learners’ actions to facilitate or sometimes constrain their language learning cannot be fully understood without considering the situated contexts in which strategies emerge and develop, as well as the kinds of hierarchies within which studies from diverse backgrounds find themselves in U.S. classrooms (Bourdieu, 1991). From Theory Into Practice, “A Sociocultural Perspective on Second Language Learner Strategies: Focus on the Impact of Social Context.” by Eun-Young Jang and Robert T. Jimenez, 2011.
References
-Kim, C. L., Hall, M., Anderson, T. L., & Willingham, M. M. (2011). Coping with discrimination in academia: Asian-American and Christian perspectives. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 2(4), 291-305.
-Jarrett, C. (2008). Foundations of sand?. The Psychologist, 21(9), 756-759.
-European Psychologist, Vol 9(4), Dec, 2004. Special Section: Motivation in Real-Life, Dynamic, and Interactive Learning Environments. pp. 245–256
-Modern Language Journal, Vol 78(4), Win, 1994. Special issue: Sociocultural theory and second language learning. pp. 453–464.
-Canadian Social Work: “A Sociocultural Perspective of Mental Health Services Use by Chinese Immigrants” by Lin Fang, Autumn 2010, Vol. 12 Issue 1, p152-160, 9p
-Theory Into Practice. A Sociocultural Perspective on Second Language Learner Strategies: Focus on the Impact of Social Context. Eun-Young Jang and Robert T. Jimenez 2011, Vol. 50 Issue 2, p141-148. 8p.
Footnotes
General references
Kim, C. L., Hall, M., Anderson, T. L., & Willingham, M. M. (2011). Coping with discrimination in academia: Asian-American and Christian perspectives. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 2(4), 291-305.
Jarrett, C. (2008). Foundations of sand?. The Psychologist, 21(9), 756-759.
European Psychologist, Vol 9(4), Dec, 2004. Special Section: Motivation in Real-Life, Dynamic, and Interactive Learning Environments. pp. 245–256
Modern Language Journal, Vol 78(4), Win, 1994. Special issue: Sociocultural theory and second language learning. pp. 453–464.
Canadian Social Work: “A Sociocultural Perspective of Mental Health Services Use by Chinese Immigrants” by Lin Fang, Autumn 2010, Vol. 12 Issue 1, p152-160, 9p
Theory Into Practice. A Sociocultural Perspective on Second Language Learner Strategies: Focus on the Impact of Social Context. Eun-Young Jang and Robert T. Jimenez 2011, Vol. 50 Issue 2, p141-148. 8p.
Psychological theories | 0.804496 | 0.985019 | 0.792444 |
Dialogic learning | Dialogic learning is learning that takes place through dialogue. It is typically the result of egalitarian dialogue; in other words, the consequence of a dialogue in which different people provide arguments based on validity claims and not on power claims.
The concept of dialogic learning is not a new one. Within the Western tradition, it is frequently linked to the Socratic dialogues. It is also found in many other traditions; for example, the book The Argumentative Indian, written by Nobel Prize of Economics winner Amartya Sen, situates dialogic learning within the Indian tradition and observes that an emphasis on discussion and dialogue spread across Asia with the rise of Buddhism.
In recent times, the concept of dialogic learning has been linked to contributions from various perspectives and disciplines, such as the theory of dialogic action, the dialogic inquiry approach, the theory of communicative action, the notion of dialogic imagination and the dialogical self. In addition, the work of an important range of contemporary authors is based on dialogic conceptions. Among those, it is worth mentioning transformative learning theory; Michael Fielding, who sees students as radical agents of change; Timothy Koschmann, who highlights the potential advantages of adopting dialogicality as the basis of education; and Anne Hargrave, who demonstrates that children in dialogic-learning conditions make significantly larger gains in vocabulary, than do children in a less dialogic reading environment.
Specifically, the concept of dialogic learning (Flecha) evolved from the investigation and observation of how people learn both outside and inside of schools, when acting and learning freely is allowed. At this point, it is important to mention the "Learning Communities", an educational project which seeks social and cultural transformation of educational centers and their surroundings through dialogic learning, emphasizing egalitarian dialogue among all community members, including teaching staff, students, families, entities, and volunteers. In the learning communities, it is fundamental the involvement of all members of the community because, as research shows, learning processes, regardless of the learners' ages, and including the teaching staff, depend more on the coordination among all the interactions and activities that take place in different spaces of the learners' lives, like school, home, and workplace, than only on interactions and activities developed in spaces of formal learning, such as classrooms. Along these lines, the "Learning Communities" project aims at multiplying learning contexts and interactions with the objective of all students reaching higher levels of development.
Classroom education
Dialogic education is an educational philosophy and pedagogical approach that draws on many authors and traditions and applies dialogic learning. In effect, dialogic education takes place through dialogue by opening up dialogic spaces for the co-construction of new meaning to take place within a gap of differing perspectives. In a dialogic classroom, students are encouraged to build on their own and others’ ideas, resulting not only in education through dialogue but also in education for dialogue. Teachers and students are in an equitable relationship and listen to multiple points of view. The pedagogy aims on arriving at the goal: the students’ knowing for and through themselves and therefore “casting the teacher as a guide rather than a director”.
Dialogic approaches to education typically involve dialogue in the form of face-to-face talk including questioning and exploring ideas within a ‘dialogic space’ but can also encompass other instances where 'signs' are exchanged between people, for instance via computer-mediated communication. In this way, dialogic approaches need not be limited only to classroom-based talk or "external talk".
In teaching through the opening of a shared dialogic space, dialogic education draws students into the co-construction of shared knowledge by questioning and building on dialogue rather than simply learning a set of facts. As argued by Mikhail Bakhtin, children learn through persuasive dialogue rather than an authoritative transmission of facts, which enables them to understand by seeing from different points of view. Merleau-Ponty writes that when dialogue works it should no longer be possible to determine who is thinking because learners will find themselves thinking together. It has been suggested by Robin Alexander that in dialogic education, teachers should frame questions carefully in order to encourage reflection and take different students' contributions and present them as a whole. In addition, answers should be considered as leading to further questions in dialogue rather than an end goal.
Definitions of dialogic
There is a lack of clarity around what is meant by the term ‘dialogic’ when used to refer to educational approaches. The term ‘dialogue’ itself is derived from two words in classical Greek, ‘dia’ meaning ‘through’ and ‘logos’ meaning ‘word’ or 'discourse'. Dialogic is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective applied to describe anything ‘relating to or in the form of dialogue’. Dialogic can also be used in contrast to ‘monologic’, which is the idea that there is only one true perspective and so that everything has one final correct meaning or truth. Dialogic, however, contends that there is always more than one voice in play behind any kind of explicit claim to knowledge. If knowledge is a product of dialogue it follows that knowledge is never final since the questions we ask and so the answers that we receive, will continue to change.
Dialogic education has been defined as engaging students in an ongoing process of shared inquiry taking the form of a dialogue and as Robin Alexander outlines in his work on dialogic teaching, it involves drawing students into a process of co-constructing knowledge. Rupert Wegerif sums this up by claiming that 'Dialogic Education is education for dialogue as well as education through dialogue'.
Formats
There are a number of formats of instruction, that have been recognized as "dialogic" (as opposed to "monologic").
Interactional: Dialogue involves a high student-teacher talk ratio, short utterances/turns, and interactive exchanges.
Question-answer: Dialogue involves either a teacher asking students questions and eliciting answers from the students or students asking questions and eliciting answers from the teacher and/or one another.
Conversational: Instructional dialogue is modeled after natural mundane everyday conversations.
Without authority: Dialogic guidance occurs among equal peers as authority distorts dialogic processes. Jean Piaget was the first scholar who articulated this position.
Types
There are a number of types of dialogic pedagogy, that is, where the form and the content is recognized as "dialogic".
Paideia: Learning through asking thought-provoking questions, challenging assumptions, beliefs, and ideas, that involve argumentation and disagreements. This notion comes from Socratic dialogues described and developed by Plato.
Exploratory talk for learning: Collective mindstorming and probing ideas, enabling "the speaker to try out ideas, to hear how they sound, to see what others make of them, to arrange information and ideas into different patterns" (p. 4).
Internally persuasive discourse: Bakhtin's notion of "internally persuasive discourse" (IPD) has become influential in helping conceptualize learning. There are at least three approaches to how this notion is currently used in the literature on education:
IPD is understood as appropriation when somebody else's words, ideas, approaches, knowledge, feelings, become one's own. In this approach, "internal" in IPD is understood as an individual's psychological and personal deep conviction.
IPD understood as a student's authorship recognized and accepted by a community of practice, in which the student generates self-assignments and long-term projects within the practice.
IPD is understood as a dialogic regime of the participants' testing ideas and searching for the boundaries of personally-vested truths. In this approach, "internal" is interpreted as internal to the dialogue itself in which everything is "dialogically tested and forever testable" (p. 319).
Instrumental
Instrumental dialogic pedagogy uses dialogue for achieving non-dialogic purposes, usually making students arrive at certain preset learning outcomes. For example, Nicolas Burbules defines dialogue in teaching instrumentally as facilitating new understanding, "Dialogue is an activity directed toward discovery and new understanding, which stands to improve the knowledge, insight, or sensitivity of its participants".
The teacher presents the endpoint of the lesson, for example, "At the end of the lesson, the students will be able to understand/master the following knowledge and skills." However, the teacher's method of leading students to the endpoint can be individualized both in instruction techniques and in time taken. Different students are "closer" or further" from the endpoint and require different strategies to get them there. Thus, for Socrates to manipulate Meno to the preset endpoint – what is virtue is not known and problematic – is not the same as manipulating Anytus to the same endpoint. It takes different and individualized instructional strategies.
Socrates, Paulo Freire and Vivian Paley all strongly critique the idea of preset endpoints however in practice they often set endpoints.
Instrumental dialogic pedagogy remains influential and important for scholars and practitioners of dialogic pedagogy field. Some appreciate its focus on asking good questions, attendance to subjectivity, use of provocations and contradictions, and the way it disrupts familiar and unreflected relations. However, others are concerned about the teacher's manipulation of the student's consciousness and its intellectualism.
Non-instrumental
In contrast to instrumental approaches to dialogic pedagogy, non-instrumental approaches to dialogic pedagogy view dialogue not as a pathway or strategy for achieving meaning or knowledge but as the medium in which they live. Following Bakhtin, meaning is understood as living in the relationship between a genuine question seeking for information and a sincere answer aiming at addressing this question. Non-instrumental dialogic pedagogy focuses on "eternal damn final questions". It is interested in the mundane only because it can give it the material and opportunity to move to the sublime. This is seen, for example, in the work of Christopher Phillips.
The non-instrumental "epistemological dialogue", a term introduced by Alexander Sidorkin, is a purified dialogue to abstract a single main theme, a development of a main concept, and unfold the logic. According to Sidorkin, ontological dialogic pedagogy priorities human ontology in pedagogical dialogue:
Sociolinguist Per Linell and educational philosopher Alexander Sidorkin evidence a non-instrumental ecological approach to dialogic pedagogy that focuses on the dialogicity of the mundane everyday social interaction, its non-constrained nature, in which participants can have freedom to move in and out of the interaction, and the absence or minimum of pedagogical violence. Using the metaphor of "free-range kids", Lenore Skenazy defines the participants in this ecological dialogue as free-range dialogic participants.
Theories
Wells: dialogic inquiry
Gordon Wells (1999) defines "inquiry" not as a method but as a predisposition for questioning, trying to understand situations collaborating with others with the objective of finding answers. "Dialogic inquiry" is an educational approach that acknowledges the dialectic relationship between the individual and the society, and an attitude for acquiring knowledge through communicative interactions. Wells points out that the predisposition for dialogic inquiry depends on the characteristics of the learning environments, and that is why it is important to reorganize them into contexts for collaborative action and interaction. According to Wells, dialogic inquiry not only enriches individuals' knowledge but also transforms it, ensuring the survival of different cultures and their capacity to transform themselves according to the requirements of every social moment.
Freire: the theory of dialogic action
Paulo Freire (1970) states that human nature is dialogic, and believes that communication has a leading role in our life. We are continuously in dialogue with others, and it is in that process that we create and recreate ourselves. According to Freire, dialogue is a claim in favor of the democratic choice of educators. Educators, in order to promote free and critical learning should create the conditions for dialogue that encourages the epistemological curiosity of the learner. The goal of the dialogic action is always to reveal the truth by interacting with others and the world. In his dialogic action theory, Freire distinguishes between dialogical actions, the ones that promote understanding, cultural creation, and liberation; and non-dialogic actions, which deny dialogue, distort communication, and reproduce power.
Habermas: the theory of communicative action
Rationality, for Jürgen Habermas (1984), has less to do with knowledge and its acquisition than with the use of knowledge that individuals who are capable of speech and action make. In instrumental rationality, social agents make an instrumental use of knowledge: they propose certain goals and aim to achieve them in an objective world. On the contrary, in communicative rationality, knowledge is the understanding provided by the objective world as well as by the intersubjectivity of the context where action develops. If communicative rationality means understanding, then the conditions that make reaching consensus possible have to be studied. This need brings us to the concepts of arguments and argumentation. While arguments are conclusions that consist of validity claims as well as the reasons by which they can be questioned, argumentation is the kind of speech in which participants give arguments to develop or turn down the validity claims that have become questionable. At this point, Habermas' differentiation between validity claims and power claims is important. We may attempt to have something we say to be considered good or valid by imposing it by means of force, or by being ready to enter a dialogue in which other people's arguments may lead us to rectify our initial stances. In the first case, the interactant holds power claims, while in the second case, validity claims are held. While in power claims, the argument of force is applied; in validity claims, the force of an argument prevails. Validity claims are the basis of dialogic learning.
Bakhtin: dialogic imagination
Mikhail Bakhtin established (1981) that there is a need of creating meanings in a dialogic way with other people. His concept of dialogism states a relation among language, interaction, and social transformation. Bakhtin believes that the individual does not exist outside of dialogue. The concept of dialogue, itself, establishes the existence of the "other" person. In fact, it is through dialogue that the "other" cannot be silenced or excluded. Bakhtin states that meanings are created in processes of reflection between people. And these are the same meanings that we use in later conversations with others, where those meanings get amplified and even change as we acquire new meanings. In this sense, Bakhtin states that every time that we talk about something that we have read about, seen, or felt; we are actually reflecting the dialogues we have had with others, showing the meanings that we have created in previous dialogues. This is, what is said cannot be separated from the perspectives of others: the individual speech and the collective one are deeply related. It is in this sense that Bakhtin talks about a chain of dialogues, to point out that every dialogue results from a previous one and, at the same time, every new dialogue is going to be present in future ones.
CREA: dialogic interactions and interactions of power
In their debate with John Searle (Searle & Soler 2004) the Centre of Research in Theories and Practices that Overcome Inequalities (CREA, from now on) made two critiques to Habermas. CREA's work on communicative acts points out, on the one hand, that the key concept is interaction and not claim; and, on the other hand, that in relationships can be identified power interactions and dialogic interactions. Although a manager can hold validity claims when inviting his employee to have a coffee with him, the employee can be moved to accept because of the power claim that arises from the unequal structure of the company and of the society, which places her in a subordinate position to the employer. CREA defines power relations as those in which the power interactions involved predominate over the dialogic interactions, and dialogic relations as those in which dialogic interactions are prevalent over power interactions. Dialogic interactions are based on equality and seek understanding through speakers appreciating the provided arguments to the dialogue regardless of the position of power of the speaker. In the educational institutions of democracies, we can find more dialogic interactions than in the educational centers of dictatorships. Nonetheless, even in the educational centers of democracies, when discussing curricular issues, the voice of the teaching staff prevails over the voice of the families, which is almost absent. The educational projects that have contributed to transforming some power interactions into dialogic interactions show that one learns much more through dialogic interactions than through power ones.
History
Dialogic education is argued to have historical roots in ancient oral educational traditions. The chavrusa rabbinic approach, for example, involved pairs of learners analyzing, discussing, and debating shared texts during the era of the Tannaim (approximately 10-220 CE).
Dialogue was also a defining feature of early-Indian texts, rituals, and practices that spread across Asia with the rise of Buddhism. Indeed, one of the earliest references to an idea of dialogue is in the Rigveda (c. 1700-1100 BC), where the poet asks the deities Mitra and Varuna to defend him from the one “who has no pleasure in questioning, or in repeated calling, or in dialogue”. Later, Buddhist educators such as Nichiren (1222-1282) would themselves present work in a dialogic form. It has also been linked to traditional Islamic education with Halaqat al-’Ilm, or Halaqa for short, in mosque-based education whereby small groups participate in discussion and questioning in 'circles of knowledge'. A dialogic element has similarly been found in Confucian education.
Links are often also made with the Socratic method, established by Socrates (470-399 BC), which is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presumptions. Dialogic practices and dialogic pedagogy existed in Ancient Greece, before, during, and after Socrates' time, possibly in other forms than those depicted by Plato. There is some debate over whether the Socratic method should be understood as dialectic rather than as dialogic. However it is interpreted, Socrates approach as described by Plato has been influential in informing modern-day conceptions of dialogue, particularly in Western culture. This is notwithstanding the fact that dialogic educational practices may have existed in Ancient Greece prior to the life of Socrates.
Although modern interest in dialogic pedagogy seems to have emerged only in the 1960s, it was a very old and probably widespread educational practice. In more recent times, Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the idea of dialogism, as opposed to "monologism", to literature. Paulo Freire's work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed introduced these ideas to educational theory. Over the last five decades, robust research evidence has mounted on the impact of dialogic education. A growing body of research indicates that dialogic methods lead to improved performance in students’ content knowledge, text comprehension, and reasoning capabilities. The field has not, however, been without controversy. Indeed, dialogic strategies may be challenging to realize in educational practice given limited time and other pressures. It has also been acknowledged that forms of cultural imperialism may be encouraged through the implementation of a dialogic approach.
Notable authors
Robin Alexander
Mikhail Bakhtin
Karen Barad
Jerome Bruner
Martin Buber
Jacques Derrida
John Dewey
Paulo Freire
Antonio Gramsci
Jürgen Habermas
William James
Julia Kristeva
Matthew Lipman
George Herbert Mead
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Neil Mercer
Michael Oakeshott
Jean Piaget
Charles Sanders Peirce
Plato
Lev Vygotsky
Rupert Wegerif
See also
Dialogic
Dialectic process vs. dialogic process
Dialogical analysis
Dialogical self
Heteroglossia
Intertextuality
Learning theory (education)
Pedagogy
Relational dialectics
References
Bibliography
Aubert, A., Flecha, A., García, C., Flecha, R., y Racionero, S. (2008). Aprendizaje dialógico en la sociedad de la información. Barcelona: Hipatia Editorial.
Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the Heart. New York: Continuum (O.V. 1995).
Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, self & society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Searle J., & Soler M. (2004). Lenguaje y Ciencias Sociales. Diálogo entre John Searle y CREA. Barcelona: El Roure Ciencia.
Sen, A. (2005) The argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian history, culture and identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
External links
Journals
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal
International Journal for Dialogic Science
Research groups
Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group (CEDiR) operates out of the University of Cambridge and contributes to this field. As taken from their website, CEDiR's aim is to consolidate and extend research on dialogic education, reaching across disciplines and contexts to influence theory, policy and practice.
The Center for Research on Dialogic Instruction and the In-Class Analysis of Classroom Discourse is a joint effort housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Learning
Philosophy of psychology
Psychological theories
Theory of mind | 0.813549 | 0.973255 | 0.79179 |
Social constructivism | Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge according to which human development is socially situated, and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others. Like social constructionism, social constructivism states that people work together to actively construct artifacts. But while social constructivism focuses on cognition, social constructionism focuses on the making of social reality.
A very simple example is an object like a cup. The object can be used for many things, but its shape does suggest some 'knowledge' about carrying liquids (see also Affordance). A more complex example is an online course—not only do the 'shapes' of the software tools indicate certain things about the way online courses should work, but the activities and texts produced within the group as a whole will help shape how each person behaves within that group. A person's cognitive development will also be influenced by the culture that they are involved in, such as the language, history, and social context. For a philosophical account of one possible social-constructionist ontology, see the 'Criticism' section of Representative realism.
Philosophy
Strong social constructivism as a philosophical approach tends to suggest that "the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge". According to Maarten Boudry and Filip Buekens, Freudian psychoanalysis is a good example of this approach in action. However, Boudry and Buekens do not claim that 'bona fide' science is completely immune from all socialisation and paradigm shifts, merely that the strong social constructivist claim that all scientific knowledge is constructed ignores the reality of scientific success.
One characteristic of social constructivism is that it rejects the role of superhuman necessity in either the invention/discovery of knowledge or its justification. In the field of invention it looks to contingency as playing an important part in the origin of knowledge, with historical interests and resourcing swaying the direction of mathematical and scientific knowledge growth. In the area of justification while acknowledging the role of logic and reason in testing, it also accepts that the criteria for acceptance vary and change over time. Thus mathematical proofs follow different standards in the present and throughout different periods in the past, as Paul Ernest argues.
Education
Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. Social constructivism extends constructivism by incorporating the role of other actors and culture in development. In this sense it can also be contrasted with social learning theory by stressing interaction over observation. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of A. Sullivan Palincsar. Psychological tools are one of the key concepts in Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective.
Studies on increasing the use of student discussion in the classroom both support and are grounded in theories of social constructivism. There is a full range of advantages that results from the implementation of discussion in the classroom. Participating in group discussion allows students to generalize and transfer their knowledge of classroom learning and builds a strong foundation for communicating ideas orally. Many studies argue that discussion plays a vital role in increasing student ability to test their ideas, synthesize the ideas of others, and build deeper understanding of what they are learning. Large and small group discussion also affords students opportunities to exercise self-regulation, self-determination, and a desire to persevere with tasks. Additionally, discussion increases student motivation, collaborative skills, and the ability to problem solve. Increasing students’ opportunity to talk with one another and discuss their ideas increases their ability to support their thinking, develop reasoning skills, and to argue their opinions persuasively and respectfully. Furthermore, the feeling of community and collaboration in classrooms increases through offering more chances for students to talk together.
Studies have found that students are not regularly accustomed to participating in academic discourse. Martin Nystrand argues that teachers rarely choose classroom discussion as an instructional format. The results of Nystrand’s (1996) three-year study focusing on 2400 students in 60 different classrooms indicate that the typical classroom teacher spends under three minutes an hour allowing students to talk about ideas with one another and the teacher. Even within those three minutes of discussion, most talk is not true discussion because it depends upon teacher-directed questions with predetermined answers. Multiple observations indicate that students in low socioeconomic schools and lower track classrooms are allowed even fewer opportunities for discussion. Discussion and interactive discourse promote learning because they afford students the opportunity to use language as a demonstration of their independent thoughts. Discussion elicits sustained responses from students that encourage meaning-making through negotiating with the ideas of others. This type of learning “promotes retention and in-depth processing associated with the cognitive manipulation of information”.
One recent branch of work exploring social constructivist perspectives on learning focuses on the role of social technologies and social media in facilitating the generation of socially constructed knowledge and understanding in online environments.
Academic writing
In a constructivist approach, the focus is on the sociocultural conventions of academic discourse such as citing evidence, hedging and boosting claims, interpreting the literature to back one's own claims, and addressing counter claims. These conventions are inherent to a constructivist approach as they place value on the communicative, interpersonal nature of academic writing with a strong focus on how the reader receives the message. The act of citing others’ work is more than accurate attribution; it is an important exercise in critical thinking in the construction of an authorial self.
See also
Constructivist epistemology
Educational psychology
Experiential learning
Learning theory
Virtual community
References
Further reading
Books
Dyson, A. H. (2004). Writing and the sea of voices: Oral language in, around, and about writing. In R.B. Ruddell, & N.J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (pp. 146–162). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Paul Ernest (1998), Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics, Albany NY: SUNY Press
Fry, H & Kettering, S & Marshall, S (Eds.) (2008). A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Routledge
Glasersfeld, Ernst von (1995). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Grant, Colin B. (2000). Functions and Fictions of Communication. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang.
Grant, Colin B. (2007). Uncertainty and Communication: New Theoretical Investigations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hale, M.S. & City, E.A. (2002). “But how do you do that?”: Decision making for the seminar facilitator. In J. Holden & J.S. Schmit. Inquiry and the literary text: Constructing discussions in the English classroom / Classroom practices in teaching English, volume 32. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
André Kukla (2000), Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science, London: Routledge
Nystrand, M. (1996). Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Poerksen, Bernhard (2004), The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic.
Schmidt, Siegfried J. (2007). Histories & Discourses: Rewriting Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society. London: Harvard University Press.
Chapter 6, Social Constructivism in Introduction to International Relations: Theories and Approaches, Robert Jackson and Georg Sørensen, Third Edition, OUP 2006
Papers
Barab, S., Dodge, T. Thomas, M.K., Jackson, C. & Tuzun, H. (2007). Our designs and the social agendas they carry. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 16(2), 263-305.
Boudry, M & Buekens, F (2011) The Epistemic Predicament of a Pseudoscience: Social Constructivism Confronts Freudian Psychoanalysis. Theoria, 77, 159–179
Collins, H. M. (1981) Stages in the Empirical Program of Relativism - Introduction. Social Studies of Science. 11(1) 3-10
Corden, R.E. (2001). Group discussion and the importance of a shared perspective: Learning from collaborative research. Qualitative Research, 1(3), 347-367.
Paul Ernest, Social constructivism as a philosophy of mathematics: Radical constructivism rehabilitated? 1990
Mark McMahon, Social Constructivism and the World Wide Web - A Paradigm for Learning, ASCILITE 1997
Carlson, J. D., Social Constructivism, Moral Reasoning and the Liberal Peace: From Kant to Kohlberg, Paper presented at the annual meeting of The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois 2005
Glasersfeld, Ernst von, 1981. ‘An attentional model for the conceptual construction of units and number’, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 12:2, 83-94.
Glasersfeld, Ernst von, 1989. Cognition, construction of knowledge, and teaching, Synthese, 80, 121-40.
Matsumura, L.C., Slater, S.C., & Crosson, A. (2008). Classroom climate, rigorous instruction and curriculum, and students’ interactions in urban middle schools. The Elementary School Journal, 108(4), 294-312.
McKinley, J. (2015). Critical argument and writer identity: social constructivism as a theoretical framework for EFL academic writing. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 12(3), 184-207.
Reznitskaya, A., Anderson, R.C., & Kuo, L. (2007). Teaching and learning argumentation, The Elementary School Journal, 107(5), 449-472.
Ronald Elly Wanda. "The Contributions of Social Constructivism in Political Studies".
Weber, K., Maher, C., Powell, A., & Lee, H.S. (2008). Learning opportunities from group discussions: Warrants become the objects of debate. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 68 (3), 247-261.
Constructivism
Enactive cognition
Social epistemology
Epistemology of science | 0.795251 | 0.994121 | 0.790576 |
21st century skills | 21st century skills comprise skills, abilities, and learning dispositions identified as requirements for success in 21st century society and workplaces by educators, business leaders, academics, and governmental agencies. This is part of an international movement focusing on the skills required for students to prepare for workplace success in a rapidly changing, digital society. Many of these skills are associated with deeper learning, which is based on mastering skills such as analytic reasoning, complex problem solving, and teamwork, which differ from traditional academic skills as these are not content knowledge-based.
During the latter decades of the 20th century and into the 21st century, society evolved through technology advancements at an accelerated pace, impacting economy and the workplace, which impacted the educational system preparing students for the workforce. Beginning in the 1980s, government, educators, and major employers issued a series of reports identifying key skills and implementation strategies to steer students and workers towards meeting these changing societal and workplace demands.
Western economies transformed from industrial-based to service-based, with trades and vocations having smaller roles. However, specific hard skills and mastery of particular skill sets, with a focus on digital literacy, are in increasingly high demand. People skills that involve interaction, collaboration, and managing others are increasingly important. Skills that enable flexibility and adaptability in different roles and fields, those that involve processing information and managing people more than manipulating equipment—in an office or a factory—are in greater demand. These are also referred to as "applied skills" or "soft skills", including personal, interpersonal, or learning-based skills, such as life skills (problem-solving behaviors), people skills, and social skills. The skills have been grouped into three main areas:
Learning and innovation skills: critical thinking and problem solving, communications and collaboration, creativity and innovation
Digital literacy skills: information literacy, media literacy, Information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy
Career and life skills: flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural interaction, productivity and accountability
Many of these skills are also identified as key qualities of progressive education, a pedagogical movement that began in the late nineteenth century and continues in various forms to the present.
Background
Since the early 1980s, a variety of governmental, academic, non-profit, and corporate entities have conducted considerable research to identify key personal and academic skills and competencies needed for the current and next generation. Though identification and implementation of 21st century skills into education and workplaces began in the United States, it has spread to Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and through national and international organizations such as APEC and the OECD.
In 1981, the US Secretary of Education created the National Commission on Excellence in Education to examine the quality of education in the United States." The commission issued its report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform in 1983. A key finding was that "educational reform should focus on the goal of creating a Learning Society." The report's recommendations included instructional content and skills:
Five New Basics: English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Computer Science
Other Curriculum Matters: Develop proficiency, rigor, and skills in Foreign Languages, Performing Arts, Fine Arts, Vocational Studies, and the pursuit of higher-level education.
Skills and abilities (consolidated):
enthusiasm for learning
deep understanding
application of learning
examination, inquiry, critical thinking and reasoning
communication – write well, listen effectively, discuss intelligently, be proficient in a foreign language,
cultural, social, and environmental – understanding and implications
technology – understand the computer as an information, computation, and communication device, and the world of computers, electronics, and related technologies.
diverse learning across a broad range – fine arts, performing arts, and vocational
Until the dawn of the 21st century, education systems across the world focused on preparing students to accumulate content and knowledge. As a result, schools focused on providing literacy and numeracy skills students, as these were perceived as necessary. However, developments in technology and telecommunication have made information and knowledge easily accessible. Therefore, while skills such as literacy and numeracy remain relevant and necessary, they no longer sufficiently prepare students for 21st century workplace success. In response to technological, demographic and socio-economic changes, education systems began shifting toward curricula and instruction that integrated a range of skills involving, not only on cognition, but interdependencies of cognitive, social, and emotional characteristics.
Notable efforts were conducted by the US Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), a national coalition called the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the American Association of college and Universities, researchers at MIT and other institutions of higher learning, and private organizations.
Additional research has found that the top skills demanded by U.S. Fortune 500 companies by the year 2000 had shifted from traditional reading, writing and arithmetic to teamwork, problem solving, and interpersonal skills. A 2006 Conference Board survey of some 400 employers revealed that the most important skills for new workforce entrants included oral and written communications and critical thinking/problem solving, ahead of basic knowledge and skills, such as the reading comprehension and mathematics. While the 'three Rs' were still considered foundational to new workforce entrants' abilities, employers emphasized that applied skills like collaboration/teamwork and critical thinking were 'very important' to success at work."
A 2006 report from MIT researchers countered the suggestion that students acquire critical skills and competencies independently by interacting with popular culture, noting three continuing trends that "suggest the need for policy and pedagogical interventions:"
The Participation Gap – the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.
The Transparency Problem – The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.
The Ethics Challenge – The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants."
According to labor economists at MIT and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, the economic changes brought about over the past four decades by emerging technology and globalization, employers' demands for people with competencies like complex thinking and communications skills has increased greatly. They argue that the success of the U.S. economy will rely on the nation's ability to give students the "foundational skills in problem-solving and communications that computers don't have."
In 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an effort sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), issued the Common Core Standards, calling for the integration of 21st century skills into K-12 curricula across the United States. Teachers and general citizens also played a critical role in its development along with the NGA and CCSSO by commenting during two public forums which helped shape the curriculum and standards. States also convened teams of teachers to assist and provide feedback looking towards the National Education Association (NEA) and many other education organizations to provide constructive feedback. As of December 2018, 45 states have entirely adopted the common core standards, one state has adopted half by only adopting the literacy section (Minnesota), and only four states remain who have not adopted into the common core standards of education (Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia).
Skills
The skills and competencies considered "21st century skills" share common themes, based on the premise that effective learning, or deeper learning, requires a set of student educational outcomes that include acquisition of robust core academic content, higher-order thinking skills, and learning dispositions. This pedagogy involves creating, working with others, analyzing, and presenting and sharing both the learning experience and the learned knowledge or wisdom with peers, mentors, and teachers. Additionally, these skills foster engagement; seeking, forging, and facilitating connections to knowledge, ideas, peers, instructors, and wider audiences; creating/producing; and presenting/publishing. The classification or grouping has been undertaken to encourage and promote pedagogies that facilitate deeper learning through both traditional instruction as well as active learning, project-based learning, problem based learning, and others. A 2012 survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) identified three top skills necessary for their employees: critical thinking, communication and collaboration. Below are some of the more readily identifiable lists of 21st century skills.
Common Core
The Common Core Standards issued in 2010 intended to support the "application of knowledge through higher-order thinking skills." The initiative's stated goals promote the skills and concepts required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines and life in the global economy. Skills identified for success in the areas of literacy and mathematics:
cogent reasoning
evidence collection
critical-thinking, problem-solving, analytical thinking
communication
SCANS
Following the release of A Nation at Risk, the U.S. Secretary of Labor appointed the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) to determine the skills needed for young people to succeed in the workplace fostering a high-performance economy. SCANS focused on a
"learning a living" system. In 1991, an initial report was issued titled, What Work Requires of Schools. The report concluded that a high-performance workplace requires workers who have key fundamental skills: basic skills and knowledge, thinking skills to apply that knowledge, personal skills to manage and perform; and five key workplace competencies.
Fundamental skills:
Basic skills: reads, writes, performs arithmetic and mathematical operations, listens and speaks.
Thinking skills: thinks creatively, makes decisions, solves problems, visualizes, knows how to learn, and reasons
Personal qualities: displays responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity and honesty
Workplace competencies:
Resources: identifies, organizes, plans, and allocates resources
Interpersonal: works with others (participates as member of a team, teaches others new skills, serves clients/customers, exercises leadership, negotiates, works with diversity)
Information: acquires and uses information (acquires and evaluates, organizes and maintains, and interprets and communicates information; uses computers to process information)
Systems: understands complex inter-relationships (understands systems, monitors and corrects performance, improves or designs systems)
Technology: works with a variety of technologies (selects technology, applies technology to task, maintains and troubleshoots equipment)
Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21)
In 2002, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (then Partnership for 21st Century Learning, or P21.org, now disbanded) was founded as a non-profit organization by a coalition that included members of the national business community, education leaders, and policymakers: the National Education Association (NEA), United States Department of Education, AOL Time Warner Foundation, Apple Computer, Inc., Cable in the Classroom, Cisco Systems, Inc., Dell Computer Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, SAP, Ken Kay (President and co-founder), and Diny Golder-Dardis. To foster a national conversation on "the importance of 21st century skills for all students" and "position 21st century readiness at the center of US K-12 education", P21 identified six key areas:
Core subjects
21st century content
Learning and thinking skills
Information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy
Life skills
21st century assessments
7C Skills were identified by P21 senior fellows, Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel:
Critical thinking and problem solving
Creativity and innovation
Cross-cultural understanding
Communications, information, and media literacy
Computing and ICT literacy
Career and life-skills
4 Cs
Prompted by many school districts and states requesting a more manageable set of skills as a starting point, P21 conducted research that identified a commonly accepted subset they called the Four Cs of 21st century learning:
Collaboration
Communication
Critical thinking
Creativity
The University of Southern California's Project New Literacies website list four different "C" skills:
Create
Circulate
Connect
Collaborate
Participatory culture and new media literacies
Researchers at MIT, led by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program, in 2006 issued a white paper ("Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century"), that examined digital media and learning. To address this Digital Divide, they recommended an effort be made to develop the cultural competencies and social skills required to participate fully in modern society instead of merely advocating for installing computers in each classroom. What they term participatory culture shifts this literacy from the individual level to a broader connection and involvement, with the premise that networking and collaboration develop social skills that are vital to new literacies. These in turn build on traditional foundation skills and knowledge taught in school: traditional literacy, research, technical, and critical analysis skills.
Participatory culture is defined by this study as having: low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, informal mentorship, belief that members' own contributions matter, and social connection (caring what other people think about their creations).
Forms of participatory culture include:
Affiliations – memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as message boards, metagaming, game clans, and other social media).
Expressions – producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups.
Collaborative Problem-solving – working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
Circulations – shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)
The skills identified were:
Play
Simulation
Appropriation
Multitasking
Distributed Cognition
Collective Intelligence
Judgment
Transmedia Navigation
Networking
Negotiation
A 2005 study (Lenhardt & Madden) found that more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one third of teens who use the Internet shared content they produced, indicating a high degree of involvement in participatory cultures. Such digital literacies emphasize the intellectual activities of a person working with sophisticated information communications technology, not on proficiency with the tool.
EnGauge 21st century skills
In 2003 the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory and the Metiri Group issued a report entitled "enGauge 21st Century Skills: Literacy in the Digital Age" based on two years of research. The report called for policymakers and educators to define 21st century skills, highlight the relationship of those skills to conventional academic standards, and recognize the need for multiple assessments to measure and evaluate these skills within the context of academic standards and the current technological and global society. To provide a common understanding of, and language for discussing, the needs of students, citizens, and workers in a modern digital society, the report identified four "skill clusters":
Digital-Age
Inventive Thinking
Effective Communication
High Productivity
OECD competencies
In 1997, member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development launched the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to monitor "the extent to which students near the end of compulsory schooling have acquired the knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society". In 2005 they identified three "Competency Categories to highlight delivery related, interpersonal, and strategic competencies:"
Using Tools Interactively
Interacting in Heterogeneous Groups
Acting Autonomously
American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
The AAC&U conducted several studies and surveys of their members. In 2007 they recommended that graduates of higher education attain four skills—The Essential Learning Outcomes:
Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World
Intellectual and Practical Skills
Personal and Social Responsibility
Integrative Learning
They found that skills most widely addressed in college and university goals are:
writing
critical thinking
quantitative reasoning
oral communication
intercultural skills
information literacy
ethical reasoning
A 2015 survey of AAC&U member institutions added the following goals:
analytic reasoning
research skills and projects
integration of learning across disciplines
application of learning beyond the classroom
civic engagement and competence
ISTE / NETS performance standards
The ISTE Educational Technology Standards (formerly National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)) are a set of standards published by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) to leverage the use of technology in K-12 education. These are sometimes intermixed with information and communication technologies (ICT) skills. In 2007 NETS issued a series of six performance indicators (only the first four are on their website as of 2016):
Creativity and Innovation
Communication and Collaboration
Research and Information Fluency
Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
Digital Citizenship
Technology Operations and Concepts
ICT Literacy Panel digital literacy standards (2007)
In 2007 the Educational Testing Service (ETS) ICT Literacy Panel released its digital literacy standards:
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) proficiencies:
Cognitive proficiency
Technical proficiency
ICT proficiency
A person possessing these skills would be expected to perform these tasks for a particular set of information: access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create/publish/present. The emphasis is on proficiency with digital tools.
Dede learning styles and categories
In 2005, Chris Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education developed a framework based on new digital literacies entitled Neomillennial Learning Styles:
Fluency in multiple media
Active learning based on collectively seeking, sieving, and synthesizing experiences.
Expression through non-linear, associational webs of representations.
Co-design by teachers and students of personalized learning experiences.
Dede category system
With the exponential expansion of personal access to Internet resources, including social media, information and content on the Internet has evolved from being created by website providers to communities of contributors and individuals. The 21st century Internet centered on material created by a small number of people, Web 2.0 tools (e.g. Wikipedia) foster online communication, collaboration, and creation of content by large numbers of people (individually or in groups) in online communities.
In 2009, Dede created a category system for Web 2.0 tools:
Sharing (communal bookmarking, photo/video sharing, social networking, writers' workshops/fanfiction)
Thinking (blogs, podcasts, online discussion fora)
Co-Creating (wikis/collaborative file creation, mashups/collective media creation, collaborative social change communities)
World Economic Forum
In 2015, after consultations with Charles Fadel (of P21 and the Center for Curriculum Redesign), the World Economic Forum published a report titled "New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology" that focused on the pressing issue of the 21st-century skills gap and ways to address it through technology. In the report, they defined a set of 16 crucial proficiencies for education in the 21st century. Those skills include six "foundational literacies", four "competencies" and six "character qualities" listed below.
Foundation literacies:
Literacy and numeracy
Scientific literacy
ICT literacy
Financial literacy
Cultural literacy
Civic literacy
Competencies:
Critical thinking/problem solving
Communication
Collaboration
Creativity
Character qualities:
Initiative
Persistence/grit
Adaptability
Curiosity
Leadership
Social and cultural awareness
National Research Council
In a paper titled "Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century" produced by the National Research Council of National Academies, the National Research defines 21st century skills, describes how the skills relate to each other and summaries the evidence regarding these skills.
As a first step toward describing "21st century skills", the National Research Council identified three domains of competence: cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal while recognizing that these domains intertwine in human development and learning. More specifically, these three domains represent distinct facets of human thinking, building on previous efforts to identify and organize dimensions of human behavior. The committee produced the following cluster of 21st century skills in the above-mentioned three domains.
Cognitive competencies:
Cognitive processes and strategies: Critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, reasoning and argumentation, interpretation, decision-making, adaptive learning
Knowledge: Information literacy, ICT literacy, oral and written communication, and active listening
Creativity: Creativity and innovation
Intrapersonal competencies:
Intellectual openness: Flexibility, adaptability, artistic and cultural appreciation, personal and social responsibility, appreciation for diversity, adaptability, continuous learning, intellectual interest and curiosity
Work ethic/conscientiousness: Initiative, self-direction, responsibility, perseverance, grit, career orientation, ethics, integrity, citizenship
Positive core self-evaluation: Self monitoring, self evaluation, self reinforcement, physical and psychological health
Interpersonal competencies:
Teamwork and collaboration: Communication, collaboration, cooperation, teamwork, coordination, interpersonal skills
Leadership: Responsibility, assertive communication, self presentation, social influence with others
Center for Curriculum Redesign (“CCR”)
After an extensive, 3-year review and synthesis of 111 global frameworks and 861 research papers, and using natural language processing and orthogonality analysis, CCR published in 2019 and updated in 2024 a list of ten competenciesthat concatenate the 250+ different terms used worldwide into:
Skills: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration.
Character: Curiosity, Courage, Resilience, Ethics.
Meta-Learning: Metacognition & Metaemotion
Additionally, CCR mapped the various competencies to the academic disciplines most conducive to their development.
During its comprehensive research on AI’s present and future capabilities in education, CCR added an analysis of the more critical competencies in the age of AI, adding an “Emphasis” designation on specific facets of these competencies. For instance, since incremental creativity is reachable by AI, the human emphasis should be on imagination.
Lastly, CCR introduced the motivational drivers of personalized learning in an age of AI: Identity (& Belonging), Agency (& Growth mindset), and Purpose (& Passion).
Implementation
Multiple agencies and organizations issued guides and recommendation for implementation of 21st century skills supporting and encouraging change in learning environments and learning spaces. Five separate educational areas impacted include standards, assessment, professional development, curriculum & instruction, and learning environments.
The efforts to implement 21st century skills into learning environments and curricula supports the evolution of education systems from traditional practices or factory model school model into a variety of different organizational models. Examples of hands-on learning and project-based learning are observable in programs and spaces such as STEM and makerspaces. Collaborative learning environments fostered flexibility in furniture and classroom layout as well as differentiated spaces, such as small seminar rooms near classrooms. Literacy with, and access to, digital technology also impacted the design of furniture and fixed components as students and teachers use tablets, interactive whiteboards and interactive projectors. Classroom sizes changed to accommodate a variety of furniture arrangements and groupings, as opposed to traditional configurations of desks in rows.
In 2016, the Brookings Institution found that more than 100 countries embraced the concept of “21st century skills” in one terminology or another. However, further research by Brookings and CCR in 2018 showed that none of the major jurisdictions provided professional development to teachers, nor assessments of these competencies.
See also
Applied academics
Design-based learning
Information literacies
Learning environment
Learning space
Phenomenon-based learning
STEM fields
References
External links
Seven Survival Skills
Chris Dede, Comparing Frameworks for "21st Century Skills", Harvard Graduate School, July 2009.
How Do You Define 21st-Century Learning?
Making 21st Century Schools – Creating Learner-Centered Schoolplaces/Workplaces for a New Culture of Students at Work, Bob Pearlman
About eSTEM
Collaboration
Curricula
Learning
Learning methods
Learning programs
Pedagogy
Skills
United States educational programs | 0.793603 | 0.995593 | 0.790105 |
Education | Education is the transmission of knowledge, skills, and character traits and manifests in various forms. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education also follows a structured approach but occurs outside the formal schooling system, while informal education entails unstructured learning through daily experiences. Formal and non-formal education are categorized into levels, including early childhood education, primary education, secondary education, and tertiary education. Other classifications focus on teaching methods, such as teacher-centered and student-centered education, and on subjects, such as science education, language education, and physical education. Additionally, the term "education" can denote the mental states and qualities of educated individuals and the academic field studying educational phenomena.
The precise definition of education is disputed, and there are disagreements about the aims of education and the extent to which education differs from indoctrination by fostering critical thinking. These disagreements impact how to identify, measure, and enhance various forms of education. Essentially, education socializes children into society by instilling cultural values and norms, equipping them with the skills necessary to become productive members of society. In doing so, it stimulates economic growth and raises awareness of local and global problems. Organized institutions play a significant role in education. For instance, governments establish education policies to determine the timing of school classes, the curriculum, and attendance requirements. International organizations, such as UNESCO, have been influential in promoting primary education for all children.
Many factors influence the success of education. Psychological factors include motivation, intelligence, and personality. Social factors, such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender, are often associated with discrimination. Other factors encompass access to educational technology, teacher quality, and parental involvement.
The primary academic field examining education is known as education studies. It delves into the nature of education, its objectives, impacts, and methods for enhancement. Education studies encompasses various subfields, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, and economics of education. Additionally, it explores topics such as comparative education, pedagogy, and the history of education.
In prehistory, education primarily occurred informally through oral communication and imitation. With the emergence of ancient civilizations, the invention of writing led to an expansion of knowledge, prompting a transition from informal to formal education. Initially, formal education was largely accessible to elites and religious groups. The advent of the printing press in the 15th century facilitated widespread access to books, thus increasing general literacy. In the 18th and 19th centuries, public education gained significance, paving the way for the global movement to provide primary education to all, free of charge, and compulsory up to a certain age. Presently, over 90% of primary-school-age children worldwide attend primary school.
Definitions
The term "education" originates from the Latin words , meaning "to bring up," and , meaning "to bring forth." The definition of education has been explored by theorists from various fields. Many agree that education is a purposeful activity aimed at achieving goals like the transmission of knowledge, skills, and character traits. However, extensive debate surrounds its precise nature beyond these general features. One approach views education as a process occurring during events such as schooling, teaching, and learning. Another perspective perceives education not as a process but as the mental states and dispositions of educated individuals resulting from this process. Furthermore, the term may also refer to the academic field that studies the methods, processes, and social institutions involved in teaching and learning. Having a clear understanding of the term is crucial when attempting to identify educational phenomena, measure educational success, and improve educational practices.
Some theorists provide precise definitions by identifying specific features exclusive to all forms of education. Education theorist R. S. Peters, for instance, outlines three essential features of education, including imparting knowledge and understanding to the student, ensuring the process is beneficial, and conducting it in a morally appropriate manner. While such precise definitions often characterize the most typical forms of education effectively, they face criticism because less common types of education may occasionally fall outside their parameters. Dealing with counterexamples not covered by precise definitions can be challenging, which is why some theorists prefer offering less exact definitions based on family resemblance instead. This approach suggests that all forms of education are similar to each other but need not share a set of essential features common to all. Some education theorists, such as Keira Sewell and Stephen Newman, argue that the term "education" is context-dependent.
Evaluative or thick conceptions of education assert that it is inherent in the nature of education to lead to some form of improvement. They contrast with thin conceptions, which offer a value-neutral explanation. Some theorists provide a descriptive conception of education by observing how the term is commonly used in ordinary language. Prescriptive conceptions, on the other hand, define what constitutes good education or how education should be practiced. Many thick and prescriptive conceptions view education as an endeavor that strives to achieve specific objectives, which may encompass acquiring knowledge, learning to think rationally, and cultivating character traits such as kindness and honesty.
Various scholars emphasize the importance of critical thinking in distinguishing education from indoctrination. They argue that indoctrination focuses solely on instilling beliefs in students, regardless of their rationality; whereas education also encourages the rational ability to critically examine and question those beliefs. However, it is not universally accepted that these two phenomena can be clearly distinguished, as some forms of indoctrination may be necessary in the early stages of education when the child's mind is not yet fully developed. This is particularly relevant in cases where young children must learn certain things without comprehending the underlying reasons, such as specific safety rules and hygiene practices.
Education can be characterized from both the teacher's and the student's perspectives. Teacher-centered definitions emphasize the perspective and role of the teacher in transmitting knowledge and skills in a morally appropriate manner. On the other hand, student-centered definitions analyze education based on the student's involvement in the learning process, suggesting that this process transforms and enriches their subsequent experiences. It's also possible to consider definitions that incorporate both perspectives. In this approach, education is seen as a process of shared experience, involving the discovery of a common world and the collaborative solving of problems.
Types
There are several classifications of education. One classification depends on the institutional framework, distinguishing between formal, non-formal, and informal education. Another classification involves different levels of education based on factors such as the student's age and the complexity of the content. Further categories focus on the topic, teaching method, medium used, and funding.
Formal, non-formal, and informal
The most common division is between formal, non-formal, and informal education. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, typically with a chronological and hierarchical order. The modern schooling system organizes classes based on the student's age and progress, ranging from primary school to university. Formal education is usually overseen and regulated by the government and often mandated up to a certain age.
Non-formal and informal education occur outside the formal schooling system, with non-formal education serving as a middle ground. Like formal education, non-formal education is organized, systematic, and pursued with a clear purpose, as seen in activities such as tutoring, fitness classes, and participation in the scouting movement. Informal education, on the other hand, occurs in an unsystematic manner through daily experiences and exposure to the environment. Unlike formal and non-formal education, there is typically no designated authority figure responsible for teaching. Informal education unfolds in various settings and situations throughout one's life, often spontaneously, such as children learning their first language from their parents or individuals mastering cooking skills by preparing a dish together.
Some theorists differentiate between the three types based on the learning environment: formal education occurs within schools, non-formal education takes place in settings not regularly frequented, such as museums, and informal education unfolds in the context of everyday routines. Additionally, there are disparities in the source of motivation. Formal education tends to be propelled by extrinsic motivation, driven by external rewards. Conversely, in non-formal and informal education, intrinsic motivation, stemming from the enjoyment of the learning process, typically prevails. While the differentiation among the three types is generally clear, certain forms of education may not neatly fit into a single category.
In primitive cultures, education predominantly occurred informally, with little distinction between educational activities and other daily endeavors. Instead, the entire environment served as a classroom, and adults commonly assumed the role of educators. However, informal education often proves insufficient for imparting large quantities of knowledge. To address this limitation, formal educational settings and trained instructors are typically necessary. This necessity contributed to the increasing significance of formal education throughout history. Over time, formal education led to a shift towards more abstract learning experiences and topics, distancing itself from daily life. There was a greater emphasis on understanding general principles and concepts rather than simply observing and imitating specific behaviors.
Levels
Types of education are often categorized into different levels or stages. One influential framework is the International Standard Classification of Education, maintained by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This classification encompasses both formal and non-formal education and distinguishes levels based on factors such as the student's age, the duration of learning, and the complexity of the content covered. Additional criteria include entry requirements, teacher qualifications, and the intended outcome of successful completion. The levels are grouped into early childhood education (level 0), primary education (level 1), secondary education (levels 2–3), post-secondary non-tertiary education (level 4), and tertiary education (levels 5–8).
Early childhood education, also referred to as preschool education or nursery education, encompasses the period from birth until the commencement of primary school. It is designed to facilitate holistic child development, addressing physical, mental, and social aspects. Early childhood education is pivotal in fostering socialization and personality development, while also imparting fundamental skills in communication, learning, and problem-solving. Its overarching goal is to prepare children for the transition to primary education. While preschool education is typically optional, in certain countries such as Brazil, it is mandatory starting from the age of four.
Primary (or elementary) education usually begins between the ages of five and seven and spans four to seven years. It has no additional entry requirements and aims to impart fundamental skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. Additionally, it provides essential knowledge in subjects such as history, geography, the sciences, music, and art. Another objective is to facilitate personal development. Presently, primary education is compulsory in nearly all nations, with over 90% of primary-school-age children worldwide attending such schools.
Secondary education succeeds primary education and typically spans the ages of 12 to 18 years. It is normally divided into lower secondary education (such as middle school or junior high school) and upper secondary education (like high school, senior high school, or college, depending on the country). Lower secondary education usually requires the completion of primary school as its entry prerequisite. It aims to expand and deepen learning outcomes, with a greater focus on subject-specific curricula, and teachers often specialize in one or a few specific subjects. One of its goals is to acquaint students with fundamental theoretical concepts across various subjects, laying a strong foundation for lifelong learning. In certain instances, it may also incorporate rudimentary forms of vocational training. Lower secondary education is compulsory in numerous countries across Central and East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In some nations, it represents the final phase of compulsory education. However, mandatory lower secondary education is less common in Arab states, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and West Asia.
Upper secondary education typically commences around the age of 15, aiming to equip students with the necessary skills and knowledge for employment or tertiary education. Completion of lower secondary education is normally a prerequisite. The curriculum encompasses a broader range of subjects, often affording students the opportunity to select from various options. Attainment of a formal qualification, such as a high school diploma, is frequently linked to successful completion of upper secondary education. Education beyond the secondary level may fall under the category of post-secondary non-tertiary education, which is akin to secondary education in complexity but places greater emphasis on vocational training to ready students for the workforce.
In some countries, tertiary education is synonymous with higher education, while in others, tertiary education encompasses a broader spectrum. Tertiary education builds upon the foundation laid in secondary education but delves deeper into specific fields or subjects. Its culmination results in an academic degree. Tertiary education comprises four levels: short-cycle tertiary, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral education. These levels often form a hierarchical structure, with the attainment of earlier levels serving as a prerequisite for higher ones. Short-cycle tertiary education concentrates on practical aspects, providing advanced vocational and professional training tailored to specialized professions. Bachelor's level education, also known as undergraduate education, is typically longer than short-cycle tertiary education. It is commonly offered by universities and culminates in an intermediary academic credential known as a bachelor's degree. Master's level education is more specialized than undergraduate education and often involves independent research, normally in the form of a master's thesis. Doctoral level education leads to an advanced research qualification, usually a doctor's degree, such as a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). It usually involves the submission of a substantial academic work, such as a dissertation. More advanced levels include post-doctoral studies and habilitation.
Successful completion of formal education typically leads to certification, a prerequisite for advancing to higher levels of education and entering certain professions. Undetected cheating during exams, such as utilizing a cheat sheet, poses a threat to this system by potentially certifying unqualified students.
In most countries, primary and secondary education is provided free of charge. However, there are significant global disparities in the cost of tertiary education. Some countries, such as Sweden, Finland, Poland, and Mexico, offer tertiary education for free or at a low cost. Conversely, in nations like the United States and Singapore, tertiary education often comes with high tuition fees, leading students to rely on substantial loans to finance their studies. High education costs can pose a significant barrier for students in developing countries, as their families may struggle to cover school fees, purchase uniforms, and buy textbooks.
Others
The academic literature explores various types of education, including traditional and alternative approaches. Traditional education encompasses long-standing and conventional schooling methods, characterized by teacher-centered instruction within a structured school environment. Regulations govern various aspects, such as the curriculum and class schedules.
Alternative education serves as an umbrella term for schooling methods that diverge from the conventional traditional approach. These variances might encompass differences in the learning environment, curriculum content, or the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship. Characteristics of alternative schooling include voluntary enrollment, relatively modest class and school sizes, and customized instruction, fostering a more inclusive and emotionally supportive environment. This category encompasses various forms, such as charter schools and specialized programs catering to challenging or exceptionally talented students, alongside homeschooling and unschooling. Alternative education incorporates diverse educational philosophies, including Montessori schools, Waldorf education, Round Square schools, Escuela Nueva schools, free schools, and democratic schools. Alternative education encompasses indigenous education, which emphasizes the preservation and transmission of knowledge and skills rooted in indigenous heritage. This approach often employs traditional methods such as oral narration and storytelling. Other forms of alternative schooling include gurukul schools in India, madrasa schools in the Middle East, and yeshivas in Jewish tradition.
Some distinctions revolve around the recipients of education. Categories based on the age of the learner are childhood education, adolescent education, adult education, and elderly education. Categories based on the biological sex of students include single-sex education and mixed-sex education. Special education is tailored to meet the unique needs of students with disabilities, addressing various impairments on intellectual, social, communicative, and physical levels. Its goal is to overcome the challenges posed by these impairments, providing affected students with access to an appropriate educational structure. In the broadest sense, special education also encompasses education for intellectually gifted children, who require adjusted curricula to reach their fullest potential.
Classifications based on the teaching method include teacher-centered education, where the teacher plays a central role in imparting information to students, and student-centered education, where students take on a more active and responsible role in shaping classroom activities. In conscious education, learning and teaching occur with a clear purpose in mind. Unconscious education unfolds spontaneously without conscious planning or guidance. This may occur, in part, through the influence of teachers' and adults' personalities, which can indirectly impact the development of students' personalities. Evidence-based education employs scientific studies to determine the most effective educational methods. Its aim is to optimize the effectiveness of educational practices and policies by ensuring they are grounded in the best available empirical evidence. This encompasses evidence-based teaching, evidence-based learning, and school effectiveness research.
Autodidacticism, or self-education, occurs independently of teachers and institutions. Primarily observed in adult education, it offers the freedom to choose what and when to study, making it a potentially more fulfilling learning experience. However, the lack of structure and guidance may lead to aimless learning, while the absence of external feedback could result in autodidacts developing misconceptions and inaccurately assessing their learning progress. Autodidacticism is closely associated with lifelong education, which entails continuous learning throughout one's life.
Categories of education based on the subject encompass science education, language education, art education, religious education, physical education, and sex education. Special mediums such as radio or websites are utilized in distance education, including e-learning (use of computers), m-learning (use of mobile devices), and online education. Often, these take the form of open education, wherein courses and materials are accessible with minimal barriers, contrasting with traditional classroom or onsite education. However, not all forms of online education are open; for instance, some universities offer full online degree programs that are not part of open education initiatives.
State education, also known as public education, is funded and controlled by the government and available to the general public. It typically does not require tuition fees and is therefore a form of free education. In contrast, private education is funded and managed by private institutions. Private schools often have a more selective admission process and offer paid education by charging tuition fees. A more detailed classification focuses on the social institutions responsible for education, such as family, school, civil society, state, and church.
Compulsory education refers to education that individuals are legally mandated to receive, primarily affecting children who must attend school up to a certain age. This stands in contrast to voluntary education, which individuals pursue based on personal choice rather than legal obligation.
Role in society
Education serves various roles in society, spanning social, economic, and personal domains. Socially, education establishes and maintains a stable society by imparting fundamental skills necessary for interacting with the environment and fulfilling individual needs and aspirations. In contemporary society, these skills encompass speaking, reading, writing, arithmetic, and proficiency in information and communications technology. Additionally, education facilitates socialization by instilling awareness of dominant social and cultural norms, shaping appropriate behavior across diverse contexts. It fosters social cohesion, stability, and peace, fostering productive engagement in daily activities. While socialization occurs throughout life, early childhood education holds particular significance. Moreover, education plays a pivotal role in democracies by enhancing civic participation through voting and organizing, while also promoting equal opportunities for all.
On an economic level, individuals become productive members of society through education, acquiring the technical and analytical skills necessary for their professions, as well as for producing goods and providing services to others. In early societies, there was minimal specialization, with children typically learning a broad range of skills essential for community functioning. However, modern societies are increasingly complex, with many professions requiring specialized training alongside general education. Consequently, only a relatively small number of individuals master certain professions. Additionally, skills and tendencies acquired for societal functioning may sometimes conflict, with their value dependent on context. For instance, fostering curiosity and questioning established teachings promotes critical thinking and innovation, while at times, obedience to authority is necessary to maintain social stability.
By facilitating individuals' integration into society, education fosters economic growth and diminishes poverty. It enables workers to enhance their skills, thereby improving the quality of goods and services produced, which ultimately fosters prosperity and enhances competitiveness. Public education is widely regarded as a long-term investment that benefits society as a whole, with primary education showing particularly high rates of return. Additionally, besides bolstering economic prosperity, education contributes to technological and scientific advancements, reduces unemployment, and promotes social equity. Moreover, increased education is associated with lower birth rates, partly due to heightened awareness of family planning, expanded opportunities for women, and delayed marriage.
Education plays a pivotal role in equipping a country to adapt to changes and effectively confront new challenges. It raises awareness and contributes to addressing contemporary global issues, including climate change, sustainability, and the widening disparities between the rich and the poor. By instilling in students an understanding of how their lives and actions impact others, education can inspire individuals to strive towards realizing a more sustainable and equitable world. Thus, education not only serves to maintain societal norms but also acts as a catalyst for social development. This extends to evolving economic circumstances, where technological advancements, notably increased automation, impose new demands on the workforce that education can help meet. As circumstances evolve, skills and knowledge taught may become outdated, necessitating curriculum adjustments to include subjects like digital literacy, and promote proficiency in handling new technologies. Moreover, education can embrace innovative forms such as massive open online courses to prepare individuals for emerging challenges and opportunities.
On a more individual level, education fosters personal development, encompassing learning new skills, honing talents, nurturing creativity, enhancing self-knowledge, and refining problem-solving and decision-making abilities. Moreover, education contributes positively to health and well-being. Educated individuals are often better informed about health issues and adjust their behavior accordingly, benefit from stronger social support networks and coping strategies, and enjoy higher incomes, granting them access to superior healthcare services. The social significance of education is underscored by the annual International Day of Education on January 24, established by the United Nations, which designated 1970 as the International Education Year.
Role of institutions
Organized institutions play a pivotal role in multiple facets of education. Entities such as schools, universities, teacher training institutions, and ministries of education comprise the education sector. They interact not only with one another but also with various stakeholders, including parents, local communities, religious groups, non-governmental organizations, healthcare professionals, law enforcement agencies, media platforms, and political leaders. Numerous individuals are directly engaged in the education sector, such as students, teachers, school principals, as well as school nurses and curriculum developers.
Various aspects of formal education are regulated by the policies of governmental institutions. These policies determine at what age children need to attend school and at what times classes are held, as well as issues pertaining to the school environment, such as infrastructure. Regulations also cover the exact qualifications and requirements that teachers need to fulfill. An important aspect of education policy concerns the curriculum used for teaching at schools, colleges, and universities. A curriculum is a plan of instruction or a program of learning that guides students to achieve their educational goals. The topics are usually selected based on their importance and depend on the type of school. The goals of public school curricula are usually to offer a comprehensive and well-rounded education, while vocational training focuses more on specific practical skills within a field. The curricula also cover various aspects besides the topic to be discussed, such as the teaching method, the objectives to be reached, and the standards for assessing progress. By determining the curricula, governmental institutions have a strong impact on what knowledge and skills are transmitted to the students. Examples of governmental institutions include the Ministry of Education in India, the Department of Basic Education in South Africa, and the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico.
International organizations also play a pivotal role in education. For example, UNESCO is an intergovernmental organization that promotes education through various means. One of its activities is advocating for education policies, such as the treaty Convention on the Rights of the Child, which declares education as a fundamental human right for all children and young people. The Education for All initiative aimed to provide basic education to all children, adolescents, and adults by 2015, later succeeded by the Sustainable Development Goals initiative, particularly goal 4. Related policies include the Convention against Discrimination in Education and the Futures of Education initiative.
Some influential organizations are non-governmental rather than intergovernmental. For instance, the International Association of Universities promotes collaboration and knowledge exchange among colleges and universities worldwide, while the International Baccalaureate offers international diploma programs. Institutions like the Erasmus Programme facilitate student exchanges between countries, while initiatives such as the Fulbright Program provide similar services for teachers.
Factors of educational success
Educational success, also referred to as student and academic achievement, pertains to the extent to which educational objectives are met, such as the acquisition of knowledge and skills by students. For practical purposes, it is often primarily measured in terms of official exam scores, but numerous additional indicators exist, including attendance rates, graduation rates, dropout rates, student attitudes, and post-school indicators such as later income and incarceration rates. Several factors influence educational achievement, such as psychological factors related to the individual student, and sociological factors associated with the student's social environment. Additional factors encompass access to educational technology, teacher quality, and parental involvement. Many of these factors overlap and mutually influence each other.
Psychological
On a psychological level, relevant factors include motivation, intelligence, and personality. Motivation is the internal force propelling people to engage in learning. Motivated students are more likely to interact with the content to be learned by participating in classroom activities like discussions, resulting in a deeper understanding of the subject. Motivation can also help students overcome difficulties and setbacks. An important distinction lies between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsically motivated students are driven by an interest in the subject and the learning experience itself. Extrinsically motivated students seek external rewards such as good grades and recognition from peers. Intrinsic motivation tends to be more beneficial, leading to increased creativity, engagement, and long-term commitment. Educational psychologists aim to discover methods to increase motivation, such as encouraging healthy competition among students while maintaining a balance of positive and negative feedback through praise and constructive criticism.
Intelligence significantly influences individuals' responses to education. It is a cognitive trait associated with the capacity to learn from experience, comprehend, and apply knowledge and skills to solve problems. Individuals with higher scores in intelligence metrics typically perform better academically and pursue higher levels of education. Intelligence is often closely associated with the concept of IQ, a standardized numerical measure assessing intelligence based on mathematical-logical and verbal abilities. However, it has been argued that intelligence encompasses various types beyond IQ. Psychologist Howard Gardner posited distinct forms of intelligence in domains such as mathematics, logic, spatial cognition, language, and music. Additional types of intelligence influence interpersonal and intrapersonal interactions. These intelligences are largely autonomous, meaning that an individual may excel in one type while performing less well in another.
The learner's personality may also influence educational achievement. For instance, characteristics such as conscientiousness and openness to experience, identified in the Big Five personality traits, are associated with academic success. Other mental factors include self-efficacy, self-esteem, and metacognitive abilities.
Sociological
Sociological factors center not on the psychological attributes of learners but on their environment and societal position. These factors encompass socioeconomic status, ethnicity, cultural background, and gender, drawing significant interest from researchers due to their association with inequality and discrimination. Consequently, they play a pivotal role in policy-making endeavors aimed at mitigating their impact.
Socioeconomic status is influenced by factors beyond just income, including financial security, social status, social class, and various attributes related to quality of life. Low socioeconomic status impacts educational success in several ways. It correlates with slower cognitive development in language and memory, as well as higher dropout rates. Families with limited financial means may struggle to meet their children's basic nutritional needs, hindering their development. Additionally, they may lack resources to invest in educational materials such as stimulating toys, books, and computers. Financial constraints may also prevent attendance at prestigious schools, leading to enrollment in institutions located in economically disadvantaged areas. Such schools often face challenges such as teacher shortages and inadequate educational materials and facilities like libraries, resulting in lower teaching standards. Moreover, parents may be unable to afford private lessons for children falling behind academically. In some cases, students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are compelled to drop out of school to contribute to family income. Limited access to information about higher education and challenges in securing and repaying student loans further exacerbate the situation. Low socioeconomic status is also associated with poorer physical and mental health, contributing to a cycle of social inequality that persists across generations.
Ethnic background correlates with cultural distinctions and language barriers, which can pose challenges for students in adapting to the school environment and comprehending classes. Moreover, explicit and implicit biases and discrimination against ethnic minorities further compound these difficulties. Such biases can impact students' self-esteem, motivation, and access to educational opportunities. For instance, teachers may harbor stereotypical perceptions, albeit not overtly racist, leading to differential grading of comparable performances based on a child's ethnicity.
Historically, gender has played a pivotal role in education as societal norms dictated distinct roles for men and women. Education traditionally favored men, who were tasked with providing for the family, while women were expected to manage households and care for children, often limiting their access to education. Although these disparities have improved in many modern societies, gender differences persist in education. This includes biases and stereotypes related to gender roles in various academic domains, notably in fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), which are often portrayed as male-dominated. Such perceptions can deter female students from pursuing these subjects. In various instances, discrimination based on gender and social factors occurs openly as part of official educational policies, such as the severe restrictions imposed on female education by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the school segregation of migrants and locals in urban China under the hukou system.
One facet of several social factors is characterized by the expectations linked to stereotypes. These expectations operate externally, influenced by how others respond to individuals belonging to specific groups, and internally, shaped by how individuals internalize and conform to them. In this regard, these expectations can manifest as self-fulfilling prophecies by affecting the educational outcomes they predict. Such outcomes may be influenced by both positive and negative stereotypes.
Technology and others
Technology plays a crucial role in educational success. While educational technology is often linked with modern digital devices such as computers, its scope extends far beyond that. It encompasses a diverse array of resources and tools for learning, including traditional aids like books and worksheets, in addition to digital devices.
Educational technology can enhance learning in various ways. In the form of media, it often serves as the primary source of information in the classroom, allowing teachers to allocate their time and energy to other tasks such as lesson planning, student guidance, and performance assessment. By presenting information using graphics, audio, and video instead of mere text, educational technology can also enhance comprehension. Interactive elements, such as educational games, further engage learners in the learning process. Moreover, technology facilitates the accessibility of educational materials to a wide audience, particularly through online resources, while also promoting collaboration among students and communication with teachers. The integration of artificial intelligence in education holds promise for providing new learning experiences to students and supporting teachers in their work. However, it also introduces new risks related to data privacy, misinformation, and manipulation. Various organizations advocate for student access to educational technologies, including initiatives such as the One Laptop per Child initiative, the African Library Project, and Pratham.
School infrastructure also plays a crucial role in educational success. It encompasses physical aspects such as the school's location, size, and available facilities and equipment. A healthy and safe environment, well-maintained classrooms, appropriate classroom furniture, as well as access to a library and a canteen, all contribute to fostering educational success. Additionally, the quality of teachers significantly impacts student achievement. Skilled teachers possess the ability to motivate and inspire students, and tailor instructions to individual abilities and needs. Their skills depend on their own education, training, and teaching experience. A meta-analysis by Engin Karadağ et al. concludes that, compared to other influences, factors related to the school and the teacher have the greatest impact on educational success.
Parent involvement also enhances achievement and can increase children's motivation and commitment when they know their parents are invested in their educational endeavors. This often results in heightened self-esteem, improved attendance rates, and more positive behavior at school. Parent involvement covers communication with teachers and other school staff to raise awareness of current issues and explore potential resolutions. Other relevant factors, occasionally addressed in academic literature, encompass historical, political, demographic, religious, and legal aspects.
Education studies
The primary field exploring education is known as education studies, also termed education sciences. It seeks to understand how knowledge is transmitted and acquired by examining various methods and forms of education. This discipline delves into the goals, impacts, and significance of education, along with the cultural, societal, governmental, and historical contexts that influence it. Education theorists draw insights from various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, history, politics, and international relations. Consequently, some argue that education studies lacks the clear methodological and subject delineations found in disciplines like physics or history. Education studies focuses on academic analysis and critical reflection and differs in this respect from teacher training programs, which show participants how to become effective teachers. Furthermore, it encompasses not only formal education but also explores all forms and facets of educational processes.
Various research methods are utilized to investigate educational phenomena, broadly categorized into quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches. Quantitative research mirrors the methodologies of the natural sciences, employing precise numerical measurements to collect data from numerous observations and utilizing statistical tools for analysis. Its goal is to attain an objective and impartial understanding. Conversely, qualitative research typically involves a smaller sample size and seeks to gain a nuanced insight into subjective and personal factors, such as individuals' experiences within the educational process. Mixed-methods research aims to integrate data gathered from both approaches to achieve a balanced and comprehensive understanding. Data collection methods vary and may include direct observation, test scores, interviews, and questionnaires. Research projects may investigate fundamental factors influencing all forms of education or focus on specific applications, seek solutions to particular problems, or evaluate the effectiveness of educational initiatives and policies.
Subfields
Education studies encompasses various subfields such as pedagogy, educational research, comparative education, and the philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, and history of education. The philosophy of education is the branch of applied philosophy that examines many of the fundamental assumptions underlying the theory and practice of education. It explores education both as a process and a discipline while seeking to provide precise definitions of its nature and distinctions from other phenomena. Additionally, it delves into the purpose of education, its various types, and the conceptualization of teachers, students, and their relationship. Furthermore, it encompasses educational ethics, which examines the moral implications of education, such as the ethical principles guiding it and how teachers should apply them to specific situations. The philosophy of education boasts a long history and was a subject of discourse in ancient Greek philosophy.
The term "pedagogy" is sometimes used interchangeably with education studies, but in a more specific sense, it refers to the subfield focused on teaching methods. It investigates how educational objectives, such as knowledge transmission or the development of skills and character traits, can be achieved. Pedagogy is concerned with the methods and techniques employed in teaching within conventional educational settings. While some definitions confine it to this context, in a broader sense, it encompasses all forms of education, including teaching methods beyond traditional school environments. In this broader context, it explores how teachers can facilitate learning experiences for students to enhance their understanding of the subject matter and how learning itself occurs.
The psychology of education delves into the mental processes underlying learning, focusing on how individuals acquire new knowledge and skills and experience personal development. It investigates the various factors influencing educational outcomes, how these factors vary among individuals, and the extent to which nature or nurture contribute to these outcomes. Key psychological theories shaping education encompass behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Related disciplines include educational neuroscience and the neurology of education, which explore the neuropsychological processes and changes associated with learning.
The field of sociology of education delves into how education shapes socialization, examining how social factors and ideologies influence access to education and individual success within it. It explores the impact of education on different societal groups and its role in shaping personal identity. Specifically, the sociology of education focuses on understanding the root causes of inequalities, offering insights relevant to education policy aimed at identifying and addressing factors contributing to inequality. Two prominent perspectives within this field are consensus theory and conflict theory. Consensus theorists posit that education benefits society by preparing individuals for their societal roles, while conflict theorists view education as a tool employed by the ruling class to perpetuate inequalities.
The field of economics of education investigates the production, distribution, and consumption of education. It seeks to optimize resource allocation to enhance education, such as assessing the impact of increased teacher salaries on teacher quality. Additionally, it explores the effects of smaller class sizes and investments in new educational technologies. By providing insights into resource allocation, the economics of education aids policymakers in making decisions that maximize societal benefits. Furthermore, it examines the long-term economic implications of education, including its role in fostering a highly skilled workforce and enhancing national competitiveness. A related area of interest involves analyzing the economic advantages and disadvantages of different educational systems.
Comparative education is the discipline that examines and contrasts education systems. Comparisons can occur from a general perspective or focus on specific factors like social, political, or economic aspects. Often applied to different countries, comparative education assesses the similarities and differences of their educational institutions and practices, evaluating the consequences of distinct approaches. It can be used to glean insights from other countries on effective education policies and how one's own system may be improved. This practice, known as policy borrowing, presents challenges as policy success can hinge on the social and cultural context of students and teachers. A related and contentious topic concerns whether the educational systems of developed countries are superior and should be exported to less developed ones. Other key topics include the internationalization of education and the role of education in transitioning from authoritarian regimes to democracies.
The history of education delves into the evolution of educational practices, systems, and institutions. It explores various key processes, their potential causes and effects, and their interrelations.
Aims and ideologies
A central topic in education studies revolves around how people should be educated and what goals should guide this process. Various aims have been proposed, including the acquisition of knowledge and skills, personal development, and the cultivation of character traits. Commonly suggested attributes encompass qualities like curiosity, creativity, rationality, and critical thinking, along with tendencies to think, feel, and act morally. Scholars diverge on whether to prioritize liberal values such as freedom, autonomy, and open-mindedness, or qualities like obedience to authority, ideological purity, piety, and religious faith.
Some education theorists concentrate on a single overarching purpose of education, viewing more specific aims as means to this end. At a personal level, this purpose is often equated with assisting the student in leading a good life. Societally, education aims to cultivate individuals into productive members of society. There is debate regarding whether the primary aim of education is to benefit the educated individual or society as a whole.
Educational ideologies encompass systems of fundamental philosophical assumptions and principles utilized to interpret, understand, and assess existing educational practices and policies. They address various aspects beyond the aims of education, including the subjects taught, the structure of learning activities, the role of teachers, methods for assessing educational progress, and the design of institutional frameworks and policies. These ideologies are diverse and often interrelated. Teacher-centered ideologies prioritize the role of teachers in imparting knowledge to students, while student-centered ideologies afford students a more active role in the learning process. Process-based ideologies focus on the methods of teaching and learning, contrasting with product-based ideologies, which consider education in terms of the desired outcomes. Conservative ideologies uphold traditional practices, whereas Progressive ideologies advocate for innovation and creativity. Additional categories are humanism, romanticism, essentialism, encyclopaedism, pragmatism, as well as authoritarian and democratic ideologies.
Learning theories
Learning theories attempt to elucidate the mechanisms underlying learning. Influential theories include behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Behaviorism posits that learning entails a modification in behavior in response to environmental stimuli. This occurs through the presentation of a stimulus, the association of this stimulus with the desired response, and the reinforcement of this stimulus-response connection. Cognitivism views learning as a transformation in cognitive structures and emphasizes the mental processes involved in encoding, retrieving, and processing information. Constructivism asserts that learning is grounded in the individual's personal experiences and places greater emphasis on social interactions and their interpretation by the learner. These theories carry significant implications for instructional practices. For instance, behaviorists often emphasize repetitive drills, cognitivists may advocate for mnemonic techniques, and constructivists typically employ collaborative learning strategies.
Various theories suggest that learning is more effective when it is based on personal experience. Additionally, aiming for a deeper understanding by connecting new information to pre-existing knowledge is considered more beneficial than simply memorizing a list of unrelated facts. An influential developmental theory of learning is proposed by psychologist Jean Piaget, who outlines four stages of learning through which children progress on their way to adulthood: the sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages. These stages correspond to different levels of abstraction, with early stages focusing more on simple sensory and motor activities, while later stages involve more complex internal representations and information processing, such as logical reasoning.
Teaching methods
The teaching method pertains to how the content is delivered by the teacher, such as whether group work is employed rather than focusing on individual learning. There is a wide array of teaching methods available, and the most effective one in a given scenario depends on factors like the subject matter and the learner's age and level of competence. This is reflected in modern school systems, which organize students into different classes based on age, competence, specialization, and native language to ensure an effective learning process. Different subjects often employ distinct approaches; for example, language education frequently emphasizes verbal learning, while mathematical education focuses on abstract and symbolic thinking alongside deductive reasoning. One crucial aspect of teaching methodologies is ensuring that learners remain motivated, either through intrinsic factors like interest and curiosity or through external rewards.
The teaching method also includes the utilization of instructional media, such as books, worksheets, and audio-visual recordings, as well as implementing some form of test or evaluation to gauge learning progress. Educational assessment is the process of documenting the student's knowledge and skills, which can happen formally or informally and may take place before, during, or after the learning activity. Another significant pedagogical element in many modern educational approaches is that each lesson is part of a broader educational framework governed by a syllabus, which often spans several months or years. According to Herbartianism, teaching is broken down into phases. The initial phase involves preparing the student's mind for new information. Subsequently, new ideas are introduced to the learner and then linked to concepts already familiar to them. In later phases, understanding transitions to a more general level beyond specific instances, and the ideas are then applied in practical contexts.
History
The history of education delves into the processes, methods, and institutions entwined with teaching and learning, aiming to elucidate their interplay and influence on educational practices over time.
Prehistory
Education during prehistory primarily facilitated enculturation, emphasizing practical knowledge and skills essential for daily life, such as food production, clothing, shelter, and safety. Formal schools and specialized instructors were absent, with adults in the community assuming teaching roles, and learning transpiring informally through daily activities, including observation and imitation of elders. In oral societies, storytelling served as a pivotal means of transmitting cultural and religious beliefs across generations. With the advent of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution around 9000 BCE, a gradual educational shift toward specialization ensued, driven by the formation of larger communities and the demand for increasingly intricate artisanal and technical skills.
Ancient era
Commencing in the 4th millennium BCE and spanning subsequent eras, a pivotal transformation in educational methodologies unfolded with the advent of writing in regions such as Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, and ancient China. This breakthrough profoundly influenced the trajectory of education. Writing facilitated the storage, preservation, and dissemination of information, ushering in subsequent advancements such as the creation of educational aids like textbooks and the establishment of institutions such as schools.
Another significant aspect of ancient education was the establishment of formal education. This became necessary as civilizations evolved and the volume of knowledge expanded, surpassing what informal education could effectively transmit across generations. Teachers assumed specialized roles to impart knowledge, leading to a more abstract educational approach less tied to daily life. Formal education remained relatively rare in ancient societies, primarily accessible to the intellectual elite. It covered fields like reading and writing, record keeping, leadership, civic and political life, religion, and technical skills associated with specific professions. Formal education introduced a new teaching paradigm that emphasized discipline and drills over the informal methods prevalent earlier. Two notable achievements of ancient education include the founding of Plato's Academy in Ancient Greece, often regarded as the earliest institution of higher learning, and the establishment of the Great Library of Alexandria in Ancient Egypt, renowned as one of the ancient world's premier libraries.
Medieval era
Many facets of education during the medieval period were profoundly influenced by religious traditions. In Europe, the Catholic Church wielded considerable authority over formal education. In the Arab world, the rapid spread of Islam led to various educational advancements during the Islamic Golden Age, integrating classical and religious knowledge and establishing madrasa schools. In Jewish communities, yeshivas emerged as institutions dedicated to the study of religious texts and Jewish law. In China, an expansive state educational and examination system, shaped by Confucian teachings, was instituted. As new complex societies emerged in regions like Africa, the Americas, Northern Europe, and Japan, some adopted existing educational practices, while others developed new traditions.
Additionally, this era witnessed the establishment of various institutes of higher education and research. Prominent among these were the University of Bologna (the world's oldest university in continuous operation), the University of Paris, and Oxford University in Europe. Other influential centers included the Al-Qarawiyyin University in Morocco, Al-Azhar University in Egypt, and the House of Wisdom in Iraq. Another significant development was the formation of guilds, associations of skilled craftsmen and merchants who regulated their trades and provided vocational education. Prospective members underwent various stages of training on their journey to mastery.
Modern era
Starting in the early modern period, education in Europe during the Renaissance slowly began to shift from a religious approach towards one that was more secular. This development was tied to an increased appreciation of the importance of education and a broadened range of topics, including a revived interest in ancient literary texts and educational programs. The turn toward secularization was accelerated during the Age of Enlightenment starting in the 17th century, which emphasized the role of reason and the empirical sciences. European colonization affected education in the Americas through Christian missionary initiatives. In China, the state educational system was further expanded and focused more on the teachings of neo-Confucianism. In the Islamic world, the outreach of formal education increased and remained under the influence of religion. A key development in the early modern period was the invention and popularization of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century, which had a profound impact on general education. It significantly reduced the cost of producing books, which were hand-written before, and thereby augmented the dissemination of written documents, including new forms like newspapers and pamphlets. The increased availability of written media had a major influence on the general literacy of the population.
These alterations paved the way for the advancement of public education during the 18th and 19th centuries. This era witnessed the establishment of publicly funded schools with the goal of providing education for all, in contrast to previous periods when formal education was primarily delivered by private schools, religious institutions, and individual tutors. An exception to this trend was the Aztec civilization, where formal education was compulsory for youth across social classes as early as the 14th century. Closely related changes were to make education compulsory and free of charge for all children up to a certain age.
Contemporary era
The promotion of public education and universal access to education gained momentum in the 20th and 21st centuries, endorsed by intergovernmental organizations such as the UN. Key initiatives included the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Education for All initiative, the Millennium Development Goals, and the Sustainable Development Goals. These endeavors led to a consistent increase in all forms of education, particularly impacting primary education. In 1970, 28% of all primary-school-age children worldwide were not enrolled in school; by 2015, this figure had decreased to 9%.
The establishment of public education was accompanied by the introduction of standardized curricula for public schools as well as standardized tests to assess the progress of students. Contemporary examples are the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which is a globally used test to assess language proficiency in non-native English speakers, and the Programme for International Student Assessment, which evaluates education systems across the world based on the performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science. Similar shifts impacted teachers, with the establishment of institutions and norms to regulate and oversee teacher training, including certification mandates for teaching in public schools.
Emerging educational technologies have significantly influenced modern education. The widespread availability of computers and the internet has notably expanded access to educational resources and facilitated new forms of learning, such as online education. This became particularly pertinent during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools worldwide closed for prolonged periods, prompting many to adopt remote learning methods through video conferencing or pre-recorded video lessons to sustain instruction. Additionally, contemporary education is impacted by the increasing globalization and internationalization of educational practices.
See also
References
Notes
Citations
Sources
External links
Education – OECD
Education – UNESCO
Education – World Bank
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Learning theory (education) | Learning theory describes how students receive, process, and retain knowledge during learning. Cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences, as well as prior experience, all play a part in how understanding, or a worldview, is acquired or changed and knowledge and skills retained.
Behaviorists look at learning as an aspect of conditioning and advocating a system of rewards and targets in education. Educators who embrace cognitive theory believe that the definition of learning as a change in behaviour is too narrow, and study the learner rather than their environment—and in particular the complexities of human memory. Those who advocate constructivism believe that a learner's ability to learn relies largely on what they already know and understand, and the acquisition of knowledge should be an individually tailored process of construction. Transformative learning theory focuses on the often-necessary change required in a learner's preconceptions and worldview. Geographical learning theory focuses on the ways that contexts and environments shape the learning process.
Outside the realm of educational psychology, techniques to directly observe the functioning of the brain during the learning process, such as event-related potential and functional magnetic resonance imaging, are used in educational neuroscience. The theory of multiple intelligences, where learning is seen as the interaction between dozens of different functional areas in the brain each with their own individual strengths and weaknesses in any particular human learner, has also been proposed, but empirical research has found the theory to be unsupported by evidence.
Educational philosophy
Classical theorists
Plato
Plato (428 BC–347 BC) proposed the question: "How does an individual learn something new when the topic is brand new to that person?", This question may seem trivial; however, think of a human-like a computer. The question would then become: How does a computer take in any factual information without previous programming? Plato answered his own question by stating that knowledge is present at birth and all information learned by a person is merely a recollection of something the soul has already learned previously, which is called the Theory of Recollection or Platonic epistemology. This answer could be further justified by a paradox: If a person knows something, they don't need to question it, and if a person does not know something, they don't know to question it. Plato says that if one did not previously know something, then they cannot learn it. He describes learning as a passive process, where information and knowledge are ironed into the soul over time. However, Plato's theory elicits even more questions about knowledge: If we can only learn something when we already had the knowledge impressed onto our souls, then how did our souls gain that knowledge in the first place? Plato's theory can seem convoluted; however, his classical theory can still help us understand knowledge today.
Locke
John Locke (1632–1704) offered an answer to Plato's question as well. Locke offered the "blank slate" theory where humans are born into the world with no innate knowledge and are ready to be written on and influenced by the environment. The thinker maintained that knowledge and ideas originate from two sources, which are sensation and reflection. The former provides insights regarding external objects (including their properties) while the latter provides the ideas about one's mental faculties (volition and understanding). In the theory of empiricism, these sources are direct experience and observation. Locke, like David Hume, is considered an empiricist because he locates the source of human knowledge in the empirical world.
Locke recognized that something had to be present, however. This something, to Locke, seemed to be "mental powers". Locke viewed these powers as a biological ability the baby is born with, similar to how a baby knows how to biologically function when born. So as soon as the baby enters the world, it immediately has experiences with its surroundings and all of those experiences are being transcribed to the baby's "slate". All of the experiences then eventually culminate into complex and abstract ideas. This theory can still help teachers understand their students' learning today.
Educational psychology
Behavior analysis
The term "behaviorism" was coined by American psychologist John Watson (1878–1959). Watson believed the behaviorist view is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science with a goal to predict and control behavior. In an article in the Psychological Review, he stated that, "Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness."
Methodological behaviorism is based on the theory of only explaining public events, or observable behavior. B.F. Skinner introduced another type of behaviorism called radical behaviorism, or the conceptual analysis of behavior, which is based on the theory of also explaining private events; particularly, thinking and feelings. Radical behaviorism forms the conceptual piece of behavior analysis.
In behavior analysis, learning is the acquisition of a new behavior through conditioning and social learning.
Learning and conditioning
The three main types of conditioning and learning:
Classical conditioning, where the behavior becomes a reflex response to an antecedent stimulus.
Operant conditioning, where antecedent stimuli results from the consequences that follow the behavior through a reward (reinforcement) or a punishment.
Social learning theory, where an observation of behavior is followed by modeling.
Ivan Pavlov discovered classical conditioning. He observed that if dogs come to associate the delivery of food with a white lab coat or the ringing of a bell, they produce saliva, even when there is no sight or smell of food. Classical conditioning considers this form of learning the same, whether in dogs or in humans. Operant conditioning reinforces this behavior with a reward or a punishment. A reward increases the likelihood of the behavior recurring, a punishment decreases its likelihood. Social learning theory observes behavior and is followed with modeling.
These three learning theories form the basis of applied behavior analysis, the application of behavior analysis, which uses analyzed antecedents, functional analysis, replacement behavior strategies, and often data collection and reinforcement to change behavior. The old practice was called behavior modification, which only used assumed antecedents and consequences to change behavior without acknowledging the conceptual analysis; analyzing the function of behavior and teaching of new behaviors that would serve the same function was never relevant in behavior modification.
Behaviorists view the learning process as a change in behavior, and arrange the environment to elicit desired responses through such devices as behavioral objectives, Competency-based learning, and skill development and training. Educational approaches such as Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention, curriculum-based measurement, and direct instruction have emerged from this model.
Transfer of learning
Transfer of learning is the idea that what one learns in school somehow carries over to situations different from that particular time and that particular setting. Transfer was amongst the first phenomena tested in educational psychology. Edward Lee Thorndike was a pioneer in transfer research. He found that though transfer is extremely important for learning, it is a rarely occurring phenomenon. In fact, he held an experiment where he had the subjects estimate the size of a specific shape and then he would switch the shape. He found that the prior information did not help the subjects; instead it impeded their learning.
One explanation of why transfer does not occur often involves surface structure and deep structure. The surface structure is the way a problem is framed. The deep structure is the steps for the solution. For example, when a math story problem changes contexts from asking how much it costs to reseed a lawn to how much it costs to varnish a table, they have different surface structures, but the steps for getting the answers are the same. However, many people are more influenced by the surface structure. In reality, the surface structure is unimportant. Nonetheless, people are concerned with it because they believe that it provides background knowledge on how to do the problem. Consequently, this interferes with their understanding of the deep structure of the problem. Even if somebody tries to concentrate on the deep structure, transfer still may be unsuccessful because the deep structure is not usually obvious. Therefore, surface structure gets in the way of people's ability to see the deep structure of the problem and transfer the knowledge they have learned to come up with a solution to a new problem.
Current learning pedagogies focus on conveying rote knowledge, independent of the context that gives it meaning. Because of this, students often struggle to transfer this stand-alone information into other aspects of their education. Students need much more than abstract concepts and self-contained knowledge; they need to be exposed to learning that is practiced in the context of authentic activity and culture. Critics of situated cognition, however, would argue that by discrediting stand-alone information, the transfer of knowledge across contextual boundaries becomes impossible. There must be a balance between situating knowledge while also grasping the deep structure of material, or the understanding of how one arrives to know such information.
Some theorists argue that transfer does not even occur at all. They believe that students transform what they have learned into the new context. They say that transfer is too much of a passive notion. They believe students, instead, transform their knowledge in an active way. Students don't simply carry over knowledge from the classroom, but they construct the knowledge in a way that they can understand it themselves. The learner changes the information they have learned to make it best adapt to the changing contexts that they use the knowledge in. This transformation process can occur when a learner feels motivated to use the knowledge—however, if the student does not find the transformation necessary, it is less likely that the knowledge will ever transform.
Techniques and benefits of transfer of learning
There are many different conditions that influence transfer of learning in the classroom. These conditions include features of the task, features of the learner, features of the organization and social context of the activity. The features of the task include practicing through simulations, problem-based learning, and knowledge and skills for implementing new plans. The features of learners include their ability to reflect on past experiences, their ability to participate in group discussions, practice skills, and participate in written discussions. All the unique features contribute to a student's ability to use transfer of learning. There are structural techniques that can aid learning transfer in the classroom. These structural strategies include hugging and bridging.
Hugging uses the technique of simulating an activity to encourage reflexive learning. An example of the hugging strategy is when a student practices teaching a lesson or when a student role plays with another student. These examples encourage critical thinking that engages the student and helps them understand what they are learning—one of the goals of transfer of learning and desirable difficulties.
Bridging is when instruction encourages thinking abstractly by helping to identify connections between ideas and to analyze those connections. An example is when a teacher lets the student analyze their past test results and the way they got those results. This includes amount of study time and study strategies. Looking at their past study strategies can help them come up with strategies to improve performance. These are some of the ideas important to successful to hugging and bridging practices.
There are many benefits of transfer of learning in the classroom. One of the main benefits is the ability to quickly learn a new task. This has many real-life applications such as language and speech processing. Transfer of learning is also very useful in teaching students to use higher cognitive thinking by applying their background knowledge to new situations.
Cognitivism
Gestalt theory
Cognitive theories grew out of Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology was developed in Germany in the early 1900s by Wolfgang Kohler and was brought to America in the 1920s. The German word Gestalt is roughly equivalent to the English "emergence (of a form-as in the game pictionary, when all of a sudden one recognises what the person is trying to convey - the form and meaning "emerge")", configuration or organization and emphasizes the whole of human experience. Over the years, the Gestalt psychologists provided demonstrations and described principles to explain the way we organize our sensations into perceptions. Max Wertheimer, one of the founding fathers of Gestalt Theory, observed that sometimes we interpret motion when there is no motion at all. For example: a powered sign used at a convenience store to indicate that the store is open or closed might be seen as a sign with "constant light". However, the lights are actually flashing. Each light has been programmed to blink rapidly at their own individual pace. Perceived as a whole however, the sign appears fully lit without flashes. If perceived individually, the lights turn off and on at designated times. Another example of this would be a brick house: As a whole, it is viewed as a standing structure. However, it is actually composed of many smaller parts, which are individual bricks. People tend to see things from a holistic point of view rather than breaking it down into sub units.
In Gestalt theory, psychologists say that instead of obtaining knowledge from what's in front of us, we often learn by making sense of the relationship between what's new and old. Because we have a unique perspective of the world, humans have the ability to generate their own learning experiences and interpret information that may or may not be the same for someone else.
Gestalt psychologists criticize behaviorists for being too dependent on overt behavior to explain learning. They propose looking at the patterns rather than isolated events. Gestalt views of learning have been incorporated into what have come to be labeled cognitive theories. Two key assumptions underlie this cognitive approach: that the memory system is an active organized processor of information and that prior knowledge plays an important role in learning. Gestalt theorists believe that for learning to occur, prior knowledge must exist on the topic. When the learner applies their prior knowledge to the advanced topic, the learner can understand the meaning in the advanced topic, and learning can occur. Cognitive theories look beyond behavior to consider how human memory works to promote learning, and an understanding of short-term memory and long-term memory is important to educators influenced by cognitive theory. They view learning as an internal mental process (including insight, information processing, memory and perception) where the educator focuses on building intelligence and cognitive development. The individual learner is more important than the environment.
Other cognitive theories
Once memory theories like the Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model and Baddeley's working memory model were established as a theoretical framework in cognitive psychology, new cognitive frameworks of learning began to emerge during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Today, researchers are concentrating on topics like cognitive load and information processing theory. These theories of learning play a role in influencing instructional design. Cognitive theory is used to explain such topics as social role acquisition, intelligence and memory as related to age.
In the late twentieth century, situated cognition emerged as a theory that recognized current learning as primarily the transfer of decontextualized and formal knowledge. Bredo (1994) depicts situated cognition as "shifting the focus from individual in environment to individual and environment". In other words, individual cognition should be considered as intimately related with the context of social interactions and culturally constructed meaning. Learning through this perspective, in which knowing and doing become inseparable, becomes both applicable and whole.
Much of the education students receive is limited to the culture of schools, without consideration for authentic cultures outside of education. Curricula framed by situated cognition can bring knowledge to life by embedding the learned material within the culture students are familiar with. For example, formal and abstract syntax of math problems can be transformed by placing a traditional math problem within a practical story problem. This presents an opportunity to meet that appropriate balance between situated and transferable knowledge. Lampert (1987) successfully did this by having students explore mathematical concepts that are continuous with their background knowledge. She does so by using money, which all students are familiar with, and then develops the lesson to include more complex stories that allow for students to see various solutions as well as create their own. In this way, knowledge becomes active, evolving as students participate and negotiate their way through new situations.
Constructivism
Founded by Jean Piaget, constructivism emphasizes the importance of the active involvement of learners in constructing knowledge for themselves. Students are thought to use background knowledge and concepts to assist them in their acquisition of novel information. On approaching such new information, the learner faces a loss of equilibrium with their previous understanding, and this demands a change in cognitive structure. This change effectively combines previous and novel information to form an improved cognitive schema. Constructivism can be both subjectively and contextually based. Under the theory of radical constructivism, coined by Ernst von Glasersfeld, understanding relies on one's subjective interpretation of experience as opposed to objective "reality". Similarly, William Cobern's idea of contextual constructivism encompasses the effects of culture and society on experience.
Constructivism asks why students do not learn deeply by listening to a teacher, or reading from a textbook. To design effective teaching environments, it believes one needs a good understanding of what children already know when they come into the classroom. The curriculum should be designed in a way that builds on the pupil's background knowledge and is allowed to develop with them. Begin with complex problems and teach basic skills while solving these problems. The learning theories of John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and David A. Kolb serve as the foundation of the application of constructivist learning theory in the classroom. Constructivism has many varieties such as active learning, discovery learning, and knowledge building, but all versions promote a student's free exploration within a given framework or structure. The teacher acts as a facilitator who encourages students to discover principles for themselves and to construct knowledge by working answering open-ended questions and solving real-world problems. To do this, a teacher should encourage curiosity and discussion among his/her students as well as promoting their autonomy. In scientific areas in the classroom, constructivist teachers provide raw data and physical materials for the students to work with and analyze.
Transformative learning theory
Transformative learning theory seeks to explain how humans revise and reinterpret meaning. Transformative learning is the cognitive process of effecting change in a frame of reference. A frame of reference defines our view of the world. The emotions are often involved. Adults have a tendency to reject any ideas that do not correspond to their particular values, associations and concepts.
Our frames of reference are composed of two dimensions: habits of mind and points of view. Habits of mind, such as ethnocentrism, are harder to change than points of view. Habits of mind influence our point of view and the resulting thoughts or feelings associated with them, but points of view may change over time as a result of influences such as reflection, appropriation and feedback. Transformative learning takes place by discussing with others the "reasons presented in support of competing interpretations, by critically examining evidence, arguments, and alternative points of view". When circumstances permit, transformative learners move toward a frame of reference that is more inclusive, discriminating, self-reflective, and integrative of experience.
Educational neuroscience
American Universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and University of Southern California began offering majors and degrees dedicated to educational neuroscience or neuroeducation in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Such studies seek to link an understanding of brain processes with classroom instruction and experiences. Neuroeducation analyzes biological changes in the brain from processing new information. It looks at what environmental, emotional, and social situations best help the brain store and retain new information via the linking of neurons—and best keep the dendrites from being reabsorbed, losing the information. The 1990s were designated "The Decade of the Brain", and advances took place in neuroscience at an especially rapid pace. The three dominant methods for measuring brain activities are event-related potential, functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography (MEG).
The integration and application to education of what we know about the brain was strengthened in 2000 when the American Federation of Teachers stated: "It is vital that we identify what science tells us about how people learn in order to improve the education curriculum." What is exciting about this new field in education is that modern brain imaging techniques now make it possible, in some sense, to watch the brain as it learns, and the question then arises: can the results of neuro-scientific studies of brains as they are learning usefully inform practice in this area? The neuroscience field is young. Researchers expected that new technologies and ways of observing will produce new scientific evidence that helps refine the paradigms of what students need and how they learn best. In particular, it may bring more informed strategies for teaching students with learning disabilities.
Formal and mental discipline
All individuals have the ability to develop mental discipline and the skill of mindfulness, the two go hand in hand. Mental discipline is huge in shaping what people do, say, think and feel. It's critical in terms of the processing of information and involves the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to new things and information people come across, or have recently been taught. Mindfulness is important to the process of learning in many aspects. Being mindful means to be present with and engaged in whatever you are doing at a specific moment in time. Being mindful can aid in helping us to more critically think, feel and understand the new information we are in the process of absorbing.
The formal discipline approach seeks to develop causation between the advancement of the mind by exercising it through exposure to abstract school subjects such as science, language and mathematics. With student's repetitive exposure to these particular subjects, some scholars feel that the acquisition of knowledge pertaining to science, language and math is of "secondary importance", and believe that the strengthening and further development of the mind that this curriculum provides holds far greater significance to the progressing learner in the long haul. D.C. Phillips and Jonas F. Soltis provide some skepticism to this notion. Their skepticism stems largely in part from feeling that the relationship between formal discipline and the overall advancement of the mind is not as strong as some would say. They illustrate their skepticism by opining that it is foolish to blindly assume that people are better off in life, or at performing certain tasks, because of taking particular, yet unrelated courses.
Multiple intelligences
The existence of multiple intelligences is proposed by psychologist Howard Gardner, who suggests that different kinds of intelligence exists in human beings. It is a theory that has been fashionable in continuous professional development (CPD) training courses for teachers. However, the theory of multiple intelligences is often cited as an example of pseudoscience because it lacks empirical evidence or falsifiability.
Multimedia learning
Multimedia learning refers to the use of visual and auditory teaching materials that may include video, computer and other information technology. Multimedia learning theory focuses on the principles that determine the effective use of multimedia in learning, with emphasis on using both the visual and auditory channels for information processing.
The auditory channel deals with information that is heard, and the visual channel processes information that is seen. The visual channel holds less information than the auditory channel. If both the visual and auditory channels are presented with information, more knowledge is retained. However, if too much information is delivered it is inadequately processed, and long-term memory is not acquired. Multimedia learning seeks to give instructors the ability to stimulate both the visual and auditory channels of the learner, resulting in better progress.
Using online games for learning
Many educators and researchers believe that information technology could bring innovation on traditional educational instructions. Teachers and technologists are searching for new and innovative ways to design learner-centered learning environments effectively, trying to engage learners more in the learning process. Claims have been made that online games have the potential to teach, train and educate and they are effective means for learning skills and attitudes that are not so easy to learn by rote memorization.
There has been a lot of research done in identifying the learning effectiveness in game based learning. Learner characteristics and cognitive learning outcomes have been identified as the key factors in research on the implementation of games in educational settings. In the process of learning a language through an online game, there is a strong relationship between the learner's prior knowledge of that language and their cognitive learning outcomes. For the people with prior knowledge of the language, the learning effectiveness of the games is much more than those with none or less knowledge of the language.
Other learning theories
Other learning theories have also been developed for more specific purposes. For example, andragogy is the art and science to help adults learn. Connectivism is a recent theory of networked learning, which focuses on learning as making connections. The Learning as a Network (LaaN) theory builds upon connectivism, complexity theory, and double-loop learning. It starts from the learner and views learning as the continuous creation of a personal knowledge network (PKN).
Learning style theories
Learning style theories propose that individuals learn in different ways, that there are distinct learning styles and that knowledge of a learner's preferred learning style leads to faster and more satisfactory improvement. However, the current research has not been able to find solid scientific evidence to support the main premises of learning styles theory.
Affective Context Model
People remember how things made them feel, and use those emotional imprints to create memories on demand.
Informal and post-modern theories
In theories that make use of cognitive restructuring, an informal curriculum promotes the use of prior knowledge to help students gain a broad understanding of concepts. New knowledge cannot be told to students, it believes, but rather the students' current knowledge must be challenged. In this way, students adjust their ideas to more closely resemble actual theories or concepts. By using this method students gain the broad understanding they're taught and later are more willing to learn and keep the specifics of the concept or theory. This theory further aligns with the idea that teaching the concepts and the language of a subject should be split into multiple steps.
Other informal learning theories look at the sources of motivation for learning. Intrinsic motivation may create a more self-regulated learner, yet schools undermine intrinsic motivation. Critics argue that the average student learning in isolation performs significantly less well than those learning with collaboration and mediation. Students learn through talk, discussion, and argumentation.
Educational anthropology
Philosophical anthropology
According to Theodora Polito, "every well-constructed theory of education [has] at [its] center a philosophical anthropology," which is "a philosophical reflection on some basic problems of mankind." Philosophical anthropology is an exploration of human nature and humanity. Aristotle, an early influence on the field, deemed human nature to be "rational animality," wherein humans are closely related to other animals but still set apart by their ability to form rational thought. Philosophical anthropology expanded upon these ideas by clarifying that rationality is, "determined by the biological and social conditions in which the lives of human beings are embedded." Fully developed learning theories address some of the "basic problems of mankind" by examining these biological and social conditions to understand and manipulate the rationality of humanity in the context of learning.
Philosophical anthropology is evident in behaviorism, which requires an understanding of humanity and human nature in order to assert that the similarities between humans and other animals are critical and influential to the process of learning. Situated cognition focuses on how humans interact with each other and their environments, which would be considered the "social conditions" explored within the field of philosophical anthropology. Transformative learning theories operate with the assumption that humans are rational creatures capable of examining and redefining perspectives, something that is heavily considered within philosophical anthropology.
An awareness and understanding of philosophical anthropology contributes to a greater comprehension and practice of any learning theory. In some cases, philosophy can be used to further explore and define uncertain terms within the field of education. Philosophy can also be a vehicle to explore the purpose of education, which can greatly influence an educational theory.
Criticism
Critics of learning theories that seek to displace traditional educational practices claim that there is no need for such theories; that the attempt to comprehend the process of learning through the construction of theories creates problems and inhibits personal freedom.
See also
Andragogical learning theory
Cognitivism (learning theory)
Connectivism (learning theory)
Constructivism (learning theory)
Cultural-historical psychology
Evidence-based education
Instructional theory
Instructional design
Kinesthetic learning
Learning by teaching
Learning environment
Learning space
Psychology of learning
Science, technology, society and environment education
About accelerating the learning process
Cognitive acceleration
Spaced repetition
Incremental reading
Forward testing effect
About the mechanisms of memory and learning
Neural networks in the brain
Sleep and learning
Latent learning
Memory consolidation
Short-term memory versus working memory
Long-term memory
Desirable difficulties
Declarative memory versus procedural memory
The cerebellum and motor learning
About learning theories related to classroom learning
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 2: The Learning Process
References
76. Teaching for Transfer of Learning. Thomas, Ruth; National Center for Research in Vocational Education, Berkeley, CA.. 93 NCRVE, December 1992.
77. Perkins, D. (1992). Transfer of Learning. International Encyclopedia of Education, 2. Retrieved March 23, 2015.
Further reading
External links
Social Science Research Network. How to Become an Expert Law Teacher by Understanding the Neurobiology of Learning
ERIC Digest. How People Learn (and What Technology Might Have To Do with It)
Instructional Design Learning theories
Learning theories Wiki Learning theories
Psychological theories
Education theory | 0.793779 | 0.994869 | 0.789706 |
Contextual learning | Contextual learning is based on a constructivist theory of teaching and learning. Learning takes place when teachers are able to present information in such a way that students are able to construct meaning based on their own experiences. Contextual learning experiences include internships, service learning and study abroad programs.
Contextual learning has the following characteristics:
emphasizing problem solving
recognizing that teaching and learning need to occur in multiple contexts
assisting students in learning how to monitor their learning and thereby become self-regulated learners
anchoring teaching in the diverse life context of students
encouraging students to learn from each other
employing authentic assessment
Key elements
Current perspectives on what it means for learning to be contextualized include
situated cognition – all learning is applied knowledge
social cognition – intrapersonal constructs
distributed cognition – constructs that are continually shaped by other people and things outside the individual
Constructivist learning theory maintains that learning is a process of constructing meaning from experience
Benefits
Both direct instruction and constructivist activities can be compatible and effective in the achievement of learning goals.
Increasing one’s efforts results in more ability. This theory opposes the notion that one’s aptitude is unchangeable. Striving for learning goals motivates an individual to be engaged in activities with a commitment to learning.
Children learn the standards values, and knowledge of society by raising questions and accepting challenges to find solutions that are not immediately apparent. Other learning processes are explaining concepts, justifying their reasoning and seeking information. Therefore, learning is a social process which requires social and cultural factors to be considered during instructional planning. This social nature of learning also drives the determination of the learning goals.
Knowledge and learning are situated in particular physical and social context. A range of settings may be used such as the home, the community, and the workplace, depending on the purpose of instruction and the intended learning goals.
Knowledge may be viewed as distributed or stretched over the individual, other persons, and various artifacts such as physical and symbolic tools and not solely as a property of individuals. Thus, people, as an integral part of the learning process, must share knowledge and tasks.
Assessment
One of the main goals of contextual learning is to develop an authentic task to assess performance. Creating an assessment in a context can help to guide the teacher to replicate real world experiences and make necessary inclusive design decisions. Contextual learning can be used as a form of formative assessment and can help give educators a stronger profile on how the intended learning goals, standards and benchmarks fit the curriculum. It is essential to establish and align the intended learning goals of the contextual task at the beginning to create a shared understanding of what success looks like. Self-directed theory states that humans by nature seek purpose and the desire to make a contribution and to be part of a cause greater and more enduring then oneself. Contextual learning can help bring relevance and meaning to the learning, helping students relate to the world they live in.
Questions to address when defining and developing a contextual task
Does the task fulfill the intended learning goals?
Does the task involve problems that require the students to use their knowledge creatively to find a solution?
Is the task an engaging learning experience?
Is the audience as authentic as possible?
Does the task require students to use processes, products and procedures that simulate those used by people working in a similar field?
Is the task inclusive?
Are there clear criteria for students on how the product, performance or service will be evaluated?
Are there models of excellence which demonstrate standards?
Are the students involved in the assessment process?
Is there a provision made for continuous formative feedback, from oneself, from teachers and peers to help the students improve?
Is there an opportunity for student choice and ownership to the extent that would be.
GRASPS Concept Wheel
See also
Context-based learning
Experiential learning
References
Alternative education | 0.812602 | 0.970948 | 0.788994 |
Social learning (social pedagogy) | Social learning (social pedagogy) is learning that takes place at a wider scale than individual or group learning, up to a societal scale, through social interaction between peers.
Definition
Social learning is defined as learning through the observation of other people's behaviors. It is a process of social change in which people learn from each other in ways that can benefit wider social-ecological systems. Different social contexts allow individuals to pick up new behaviors by observing what people are doing within that environment. Social learning and social pedagogy emphasize the dynamic interaction between people and the environment in the construction of meaning and identity.
The process of learning a new behaviour starts by observing a behaviour, taking the information in and finally adopting that behaviour. Examples of environmental contexts that promote social learning are schools, media, family members and friends.
If learning is to be considered as social, then it must:
demonstrate that a change in understanding has taken place in the individuals involved;
demonstrate that this change goes beyond the individual and becomes situated within wider social units or communities of practice;
occur through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network.
It is a theoretical system that focuses on the development of the child and how practice and training affect their life skills. This idea is centered around the notion that children are active and competent.
History
18th century
Jean-Jacques Rousseau brings forth the idea that all humans are born good but are ultimately corrupted by society, implying a form of social learning.
19th century
The literature on the topic of social pedagogy tends to identify German educator Karl Mager (1810-1858) as the person who coined the term ‘social pedagogy’ in 1844. Mager and Friedrich Adolph Diesterweg shared the belief that education should go beyond the individual's acquisition of knowledge and focus on the acquisition of culture by society. Ultimately, it should benefit the community itself.
1900s - 1950s
Developmental psychology focused on the theories of behaviorism from B.F. Skinner and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to explain how humans learn new behaviours.
The founding father of social pedagogy, German philosopher and educator Paul Natorp (1854-1924) published the book Sozialpädagogik: Theorie der Willensbildung auf der Grundlage der Gemeinschaft (Social Pedagogy: The theory of educating the human will into a community asset) in 1899. Natorp argued that in all instances, pedagogy should be social. Teachers should consider the interaction between educational and societal processes.
1950s - 1990s
The field of developmental psychology underwent significant changes during these decades as social learning theories started to gain traction through the research and experiments of Psychologists such as Julian Rotter, Albert Bandura and Robert Sears. In 1954, Julian Rotter developed his social learning theory which linked human behavior changes with environmental interactions. Predictable variables were behavior potential, expectancy, reinforcement value and psychological situation. Bandura conducted his bobo doll experiment in 1961 and developed his social learning theory in 1977. These contributions to the field of developmental psychology cemented a strong knowledge foundation and allowed researchers to build on and expand our understanding of human behavior.
Theories
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Natural Man
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), with his book Emile, or On Education, introduced his pedagogic theory where the child should be brought up in harmony with nature. The child should be introduced to society only during the fourth stage of development, the age of moral self-worth (15 to 18 years of age). That way, the child enters society in an informed and self-reliable manner, with one's own judgment. Rousseau's conceptualization of childhood and adolescence is based on his theory that human beings are inherently good but corrupted a society that denaturalize them. Rousseau is the precursor of the child-centered approach in education.
Karl Mager - Social Pedagogy
Karl Mager (1810 - 1858) is often identified as the one who coined the term social pedagogy. He held the belief that education should focus on the acquisition of knowledge but also of culture through society and should orient its activities to benefit the community. It also implies that knowledge should not solely come from individuals but also from the larger concept of society.
Paul Natorp - Social Pedagogy
Paul Natorp (1854 - 1924) was a German philosopher and educator. In 1899, he published Sozialpädagogik: Theorie der Willensbildung auf der Grundlage der Gemeinschaft (Social Pedagogy: The theory of educating the human will into a community asset). According to him, education should be social, thus an interaction between educational and social processes. Natorp believed in the model of Gemeinschaft (small community) in order to build universal happiness and achieve true humanity. At the time, philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Immanuel Kant were preoccupied by the structure of society and how it may influence human interrelations. Philosophers were not solely thinking of the child as an individual but rather at what he/she can bring to creating human togetherness and societal order.
Natorp's perspective was influenced by Plato's ideas about the relation between the individual and the city-state (polis). The polis is a social and political structure of society that, according to Plato, allows individuals to maximize their potential. It is strictly structured with classes serving others and philosopher kings setting universal laws and truths for all. Furthermore, Plato argued for the need to pursue intellectual virtues rather than personal advancements such as wealth and reputation. Natorp's interpretation of the concept of the polis is that an individual will want to serve his/her community and state after having been educated, as long as the education is social (Sozialpädagogik).
Natorp focused on education for the working class as well as social reform. His view of social pedagogy outlined that education is a social process and social life is an educational process. Social pedagogic practices are a deliberative and rational form of socialization. Individuals become social human beings by being socialized into society. Social pedagogy involves teachers and children sharing the same social spaces.
Herman Nohl - Hermeneutic Perspective
Herman Nohl (1879 - 1960) was a German pedagogue of the first half of the twentieth century. He interpreted reality from a hermeneutical perspective (methodological principles of interpretation) and tried to expose the causes of social inequalities. According to Nohl, social pedagogy's aim is to foster the wellbeing of student by integrating into society youth initiatives, programs and efforts. Teachers should be advocates for the welfare of their students and contribute to the social transformations it entails. Nohl conceptualized a holistic educative process that takes into account the historical, cultural, personal and social contexts of any given situation.
Robert Sears - Social Learning
Robert Richardson Sears (1908 - 1989) focused his research mostly on the stimulus-response theory. Much of his theoretical effort was expended on understanding the way children come to internalize the values, attitudes, and behaviours of the culture in which they are raised. Just like Albert Bandura, he focused most of his research on aggression, but also on the growth of resistance to temptation and guilt, and the acquisition of culturally-approved sex-role behaviors. Sears wanted to prove the importance of the place of parents in the child's education, concentrating on features of parental behaviour that either facilitated or hampered the process. Such features include both general relationship variables such as parental warmth and permissiveness and specific behaviours such as punishment in the form of love withdrawal and power assertion.
Albert Bandura - Social Learning
Albert Bandura advanced the social learning theory by including the individual and the environment in the process of learning and imitating behaviour. In other words, children and adults learn or change behaviours by imitating behaviours observed in others. Albert Bandura mentions that the environment plays an important role as it is the stimuli that triggers the learning process. For example, according to Bandura (1978), people learn aggressive behaviour through 3 sources: Family members, community and mass media. Research shows that parent who prefer aggressive solution to solve their problems tend to have children who use aggressive tactics to deal with other people. Research also found that communities in which fighting prowess are valued have a higher rate of aggressive behaviour. Also, findings show that watching televisions can have at least 4 different effect on people: 1) it teaches aggressive style of conduct, 2) it alters restraints over aggressive behavior,3) it desensitizes and habituate people to violence and 4) it shapes people's image of reality. The environment also allows people to learn through another person's experience. For example, students don't cheat on exams (at least no openly) because they know the consequences of it, even if they never experienced the consequences themselves
However, still according to Banduras, the learning process does not stop at the influence of the family, community and media, the internal process (individual thoughts, values, etc.) will determine at which frequency and which intensity an individual will imitate and adopt a certain behaviour. Indeed, parents plays an important role in a child's education for two reasons: Firstly, because of the frequency and intensity of the interactions and secondly because the children often admire their parent and often take them as role models. Therefore, even if the stimuli is the parents' interactions with their children, if their child did not admire them, their children would not reproduce their behaviour as often. That is the main difference between early social learning theory and Bandura's point of view. This principle is called reciprocal determinism, which means that the developmental process is bidirectional, and that the individual has to value his environment in order to learn for it. Bandura also states that this process starts at births; indeed, research shows that infants are more receptive to certain experiences and less to others. Albert Bandura also says that most human behaviours are driven by goals and that we regulate our behaviour through weighing the benefits and the troubles that we can get into because of a particular behaviour.
Application in education and pedagogy
Social learning and social pedagogy has proven its efficiency with the application in practical professions, like nursing, where the student can observe a trained professional in a professional/work settings, and they can learn about nursing throughout all its aspects: interactions, attitudes, co-working skills and the nursing job itself. Students who have taken part in social learning state that they increased their nursing skills, and that it could only be possible with a good learning environment, a good mentor, and a student who is assertive enough. It means that social learning can be achieved with a good mentor, but one needs to be a good listener too. This mentoring experience creates what Albert Bandura called observational learning, when students observe a well-trained model/teacher and the students's knowledge and understanding increase.
Experiences in the field for student teachers are a good way to show how social pedagogy and social learning contribute to one's education. Indeed, field experiences are part of a student's life in their route to their teaching degree. Field experiences are based on the social learning theory; a student follows a teacher for some time, at first observing the cooperating teacher and taking notes about the teaching act. The second part of the field experience is actual teaching, and receiving feedback from the role model and the students. The student teachers try as much as they can to imitate what they have learned by observing their cooperating teacher.
Cyberbullying being an issue in schools, social pedagogy can be a solution to decrease this trend. Indeed, the bullied pupil can build a relationship with a particular mentor or role model, which in return can empower the student to deal with issues such as cyberbullying. This can work both on the victim and the bully, since both may lack confidence and affection. Using social pedagogy instead of punishments and reactive actions is also a way to derive from the traditional model of raising children, and teaching, which relies on punishments and rewards.
Parent education is also based on social learning. From birth, children look at their parents and try to model what they do, how they talk, and what they think. Of course, a child's environment is much larger than only their familiar environment, but it is an influential part. A study by Dubanoski and Tanabe, was made on parenting and social learning, where parents had to attend classes that would teach them social learning principles to improve their children's behaviour. The classes taught the parents how to record objectively their children's behaviour, and to deal with them by teaching the correct behaviour, not by punishing the wrong one. A significant number of parents improve their children behaviour by the end of the study.
The issue of how long social learning takes is important for the design of learning initiatives, teaching experiences and policy interventions. The process of going beyond individual learning to a broader understanding situated in a community of practice can take some time to develop. A longitudinal case study in Australia looked at an environmental group concerned about land degradation. The whole project was led by a local committee, Wallatin Wildlife and Landcare. They wanted to "encourage social learning among landholders through field visits, focus groups, and deliberative processes to balance innovative 'thinking outside the box' with judicious use of public funds". They found that social learning was documented after approximately fifteen months, but was initially restricted to an increased understanding of the problem without improved knowledge to address it. Further knowledge necessary to address the problem in focus emerged during the third year of the program. This suggests that learning initiatives could take around three years to develop sufficient new knowledge embedded in a community of practice in order to address complex problems.
Social media and technology
Benefits
Social pedagogy is in fact the interaction between society and the individual, which create a learning experience. Therefore, if talking about the current development of social pedagogy and social learning, the recent trend in term of learning in our society, is the use of social media and other forms of technology. On one side, if well designed within an educational framework, social media can surely help with the development of certain essential skills:
Digital literacy
Independence and self-learning
Networking
Knowledge management
Decision-making
Collaboration/teamwork
Therefore, it can be seen that social media can be extremely useful for developing some of the key skills needed in this digital age. For instance, “the main feature of social media is that they empower the end user to access, create, disseminate and share information easily in a user-friendly, open environment". By using social media, the learning experience becomes easier and more accessible to all. By allowing social media in the pedagogical program of our young students, it could help them to grow and fully participate in our digital society.
With the growing use of technology and different social platform in many aspects of our life, we can use social media at work and at home as well as in schools. It can be seen that social media now enables teachers to set online group work, based on cases or projects, and students can collect data in the field, without any need for direct face-to-face contact with either the teacher or other students.
Disadvantages
The benefits of social media in education stipulate how easier the communication between individuals becomes. However, others will argue that it excludes the vital tacit knowledge that direct, face-to-face interpersonal contact enables, and that social learning is bound up with physical and spatial learning. Social learning includes sharing experiences and working with others. Social media facilitates those experiences but make it less effective by eliminating the physical interaction between individuals. The more time students spend on social sites, the less time they spend socializing in person. Because of the lack of nonverbal cues, like tone and inflection, the use of social media is not an adequate replacement for face-to-face communication. Students who spend a great amount of time on social networking sites are less effective at communicating in person.
With the omnipresence of technology in our life and the easy access to unlimited source of information, the difference between using technology as a tool and not as an end in itself needs to be understood.
See also
Pedagogy
Andragogy
Poliglota – start-up of language learning based on social groups in public places
Chamilo – an open-source learning management system incorporating a social learning features set
Docsity – a social learning network for international students and professionals
Social learning tools
Social skills
Social pedagogy
References
Further reading
The following are links that will help researchers locate additional information about editing social pedagogy.
Bass, R. (2014). "Social Pedagogies in ePortfolio Practices: Principles for Design and Impact." Retrieved Jan. 22, 2015.
Bass, R., & Elmendorf, H. (n.d.). "Designing for difficulty: Social pedagogies as a framework for course design." Retrieved Jan. 7, 2015.
del Moral, M. E., Cernea, A., & Villalustre, L. (2013). "Connectivist learning objects and learning styles." Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects, 9, 105+.
Juwah, C.. (Ed.) (2006) Interactions in Online Education: Implications for Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.
Khan, B. H. (Ed.) (2007) Flexible Learning in an Information Society. Hershey, PA: Idea Group.
External links
Reed, M. S., A. C. Evely, G. Cundill, I. Fazey, J. Glass, A. Laing, J. Newig, B. Parrish, C. Prell, C. Raymond and L. C. Stringer. 2010. What is Social Learning?. Ecology and Society 15 (4): r1. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/resp1/
Social Learning Platform which act as a bridge between knowledge providers and seekers. [online] URL: http://www.coursee.co
Pontefract, Dan. February 2012: Social Media is not Social Learning. (Retrieved 18/12/2012)
Hart, Jane. 2012. List, voted by learning practionioners: Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012(Retrieved 18/12/2012)
Pedagogy
Peer learning | 0.811684 | 0.971426 | 0.788491 |
Collaborative learning | Collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. Unlike individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another's resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another's ideas, monitoring one another's work, etc.). More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetric roles. Put differently, collaborative learning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task where each individual depends on and is accountable to each other. These include both face-to-face conversations and computer discussions (online forums, chat rooms, etc.). Methods for examining collaborative learning processes include conversation analysis and statistical discourse analysis.
Thus, collaborative learning is commonly illustrated when groups of students work together to search for understanding, meaning, or solutions or to create an artifact or product of their learning. Furthermore, collaborative learning redefines the traditional student-teacher relationship in the classroom which results in controversy over whether this paradigm is more beneficial than harmful. Collaborative learning activities can include collaborative writing, group projects, joint problem solving, debates, study teams, and other activities. The approach is closely related to cooperative learning.
Theoretical background
Collaborative learning is rooted in Lev Vygotsky's concept of learning called zone of proximal development. Typically there are tasks that learners can and cannot accomplish. Between these two areas is the zone of proximal development, which is a category of things that a learner can learn but with the help of guidance. The zone of proximal development gives guidance as to what set of skills a learner has that are in the process of maturation. In Vygotsky's definition of zone of proximal development, he highlighted the importance of learning through communication and interactions with others rather than just through independent work. This has made way for the ideas of group learning, one of which being collaborative learning.
Collaborative learning is very important in achieving critical thinking. According to Gokhale (1995), individuals are able to achieve higher levels of learning and retain more information when they work in a group rather than individually, this applies to both the facilitators of knowledge, the instructors, and the receivers of knowledge, the students. For example, Indigenous communities of the Americas illustrate that collaborative learning occurs because individual participation in learning occurs on a horizontal plane where children and adults are equal.
Differences from cooperative learning
There has been a split regarding the differences between collaborative and cooperative learning. Some believe that collaborative learning is similar to, yet distinct from, cooperative learning. While both models use a division of labor, collaborative learning requires the mutual engagement of all participants and a coordinated effort to solve the problem whereas cooperative learning requires individuals to take responsibility for a specific section and then coordinate their respective parts together. Another proposed differentiation is that cooperative learning is typically used for children because it is used to understand the foundations of knowledge while collaborative learning applies to college and university students because it is used to teach non-foundations of learning. Another believed difference is that collaborative learning is a philosophy of interaction whereas cooperative learning is a structure of interaction.
However, many psychologists have defined cooperative learning and collaborative learning similarly. Both are group learning mechanisms for learners to obtain a set of skills or knowledge. Some notable psychologists that use this definition for both collaborative and cooperative learning are Johnson & Johnson, Slavin, Cooper and more.
Classroom
Often, collaborative learning is used as an umbrella term for a variety of approaches in education that involve joint intellectual effort by students or students and teachers by engaging individuals in interdependent learning activities. Many have found this to be beneficial in helping students learn effectively and efficiently than if the students were to learn independently. Some positive results from collaborative learning activities are students are able to learn more material by engaging with one another and making sure everyone understands, students retain more information from thoughtful discussion, and students have a more positive attitude about learning and each other by working together.
Encouraging collaborative learning may also help improve the learning environment in higher education. Kenneth Bruffee performed a theoretical analysis on the state of higher education in America. Bruffee aimed to redefine collaborative learning in academia. Simply including more interdependent activities will help the students become more engaged and thoughtful learners, but teaching them that obtaining knowledge is a communal activity itself.
When compared to more traditional methods where students non-interactively receive information from a teacher, cooperative, problem-based learning demonstrated improvement of student engagement and retention of classroom material. Additionally, academic achievement and student retention within classrooms are increased. A meta-analysis comparing small-group work to individual work in K-12 and college classrooms also found that students working in small groups achieved significantly more than students working individually, and optimal groups for learning tended to be three- to four-member teams with lower-ability students working best in mixed groups and medium-ability students doing best in homogeneous groups. For higher-ability students, group ability levels made no difference.
In more than 40 studies of elementary, middle, and high school English classrooms, discussion-based practices improved comprehension of the text and critical-thinking skills for students across ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Even discussions lasting as briefly as ten minutes with three participants improved perceived understanding of key story events and characters. Improvement in students' understanding of course content has also been observed at universities.
Workplace
The popularity of collaborative learning in the workplace has increased over the last decade. With the emergence of many new collaborative tools, as well as the cost benefit of being able to reinforce learning in workers and in trainees during collaborative training, many work environments are now looking toward methods that involve collaborating with older employees and giving trainees more of a hands-on approach. Most companies are transitioning from traditional training programs that include instructor-led training sessions or online guided tutorials. Collaborative learning is extremely helpful because it uses past experiences from prior employees to help new trainees get over different challenges.
There are many facets to collaboration in the workplace. It is critical to helping worker's share information with each other and creating strategic planning documents that require multiple inputs. It also allows for forms of vertical integration to find effective ways to synchronize business operations with vendors without being forced to acquire additional businesses.
Many businesses still work on the traditional instructor and trainee model and as they transition from one model to another there are many issues that still need to be debugged in the conversation process:
Need to understand actual interests and concerns regarding collaborating processes, activities and tools
Reigning leaders and managers must better understand the collaborative tools and processes that can boost productivity
Become better equipped to design, implement and evaluate collaborative learning environment
Web technologies have been accelerating learner-centered personalized learning environments. This helps knowledge be constructed and shared, instead of just passed down by authorities and passively consumed or ignored. Technologies such as discussion threads, email or electronic bulletin boards by sharing personal knowledge and ideas do not let others refine individual ideas so we need more collaborative tools. Now these tools on Web 2.0 have been able to enhance collaborative learning like no other because it allows individuals to work together to generate, discuss and evaluate evolving ideas. These tools allow for them to find people that are like minded and collaborate with them effortlessly.
According to a collaborative learning study conducted by Lee & Bonk (2014), there are still many issues that are still being resolved when dealing with collaborative learning in a workplace. The goal was to examine corporate personnel, including learning managers and instructors, plus the tools that they use for collaboration. The researchers conducted an online survey to see what aspects of collaborative learning should be investigated, followed by an open discussion forum with 30 corporate personnel. The results showed that collaboration is becoming very necessary in workplaces and tools such as wikis are very commonly used. There is implication for a lot of future work, in order to have collaborative learning be highly effective in the workplace. Some of the unsolved problems they identified:
Cultural diversity, and accordingly a lack of awareness of cultural norms
Geographical distance and time zone differences
Member isolation in virtual teams
Generation gaps and age differences in the acceptance of collaboration tools
Lack of technology support for learners
Lack of learners' awareness about effective collaboration processes and strategies
Lack of learners' technological skills and knowledge about collaboration tools
It is crucial to consider the interactive processes among people, but the most critical point is the construction of new knowledge brought about through joint work.
Technology
Technology has become an important factor in collaborative learning. Over the past ten years, the Internet has allowed for a shared space for groups to communicate. Virtual environments have been critical to allowing people to communicate long-distances but still feel like they are part of the group. Research has been conducted on how technology has helped increase the potential of collaborative learning.One study in particular conducted by Elizabeth Stacey looked at how technology affected the communication of postgraduate students studying a Master of Business Administration (MBA) using computer-mediated communication (CMC). Many of these students were able to still remotely learn even when they were not present on their university campus. The results of the study helped build an online learning environment model but since this research was conducted the Internet has grown extensively and thus new software is changing these means of communication.
There has been a development of new technology that support collaborative learning in higher education and the workplace. These tools allow for a strong more power and engaging learning environment. Chickering identified seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education developed by Chickering. Two of these principles are especially important in developing technology for collaboration.
"Good practice develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,"
Good practice uses active learning techniques.
Some examples of how technology is being increasingly integrated with technology are as follows:
Collaborative networked learning: according to Findley (1987) "Collaborative Networked Learning (CNL) is that learning which occurs via electronic dialogue between self-directed co-learners and learners and experts. Learners share a common purpose, depend upon each other and are accountable to each other for their success. CNL occurs in interactive groups in which participants actively communicate and negotiate learning with one another within a contextual framework which may be facilitated by an online coach, mentor or group leader.
Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is a relatively new educational paradigm within collaborative learning which uses technology in a learning environment to help mediate and support group interactions in a collaborative learning context. CSCL systems use technology to control and monitor interactions, to regulate tasks, rules, and roles, and to mediate the acquisition of new knowledge.
Collaborative learning using Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an example of how collaborative learning tools have been extremely beneficial in both the classroom and workplace setting. They are able to change based on how groups think and are able to form into a coherent idea based on the needs of the Wikipedia user.
Collaborative learning in virtual worlds by their nature provide an excellent opportunity for collaborative learning. At first learning in virtual worlds was restricted to classroom meetings and lectures, similar to their counterparts in real life. Now collaborative learning is evolving as companies starting to take advantage of unique features offered by virtual world spaces - such as ability to record and map the flow of ideas, use 3D models, and virtual worlds mind mapping tools.
Cultural variations
There also exists cultural variations in ways of collaborative learning. Research in this area has mainly focused on children in indigenous Mayan communities of the Americas or in San Pedro, Guatemala and European American middle-class communities.
Generally, researchers have found that children in indigenous Mayan communities such as San Pedro typically learn through keenly observing and actively contributing to the mature activities of their community. This type of learning is characterized by the learner's collaborative participation through multi-modal communication verbal and non-verbal and observations. They are highly engaged within their community through focused observation. Mayan parents believe that children learn best by observing and so an attentive child is seen as one who is trying to learn. It has also been found that these children are extremely competent and independent in self-maintenance at an early age and tend to receive little pressure from their parents.
Research has found that even when Indigenous Mayan children are in a classroom setting, the cultural orientation of indigenous learners shows that observation is a preferred strategy of learning. Thus children and adults in a classroom setting adopt cultural practice and organize learning collaboratively. This is in contrast to the European-American classroom model, which allocates control to teachers/adults allowing them to control classroom activities.
Within the European American middle-class communities, children typically do not learn through collaborative learning methods. In the classroom, these children generally learn by engaging in initiation-reply-evaluation sequences. This sequence starts with the teacher initiating an exchange, usually by asking a question. The student then replies, with the teacher evaluating the student's answer. This way of learning fits with European-American middle-class cultural goals of autonomy and independence that are dominant in parenting styles within European-American middle-class culture.
Examples from Indigenous communities in the Americas
Although learning happens in a variety of ways in indigenous communities, collaborative learning is one of the main methods used in indigenous learning styles instead of using European-American approaches to learning. These methods include learning in a horizontal plane where children and adults equally contribute to ideas and activities.
For example, Mayan people of San Pedro use collaboration in order to build upon one another's ideas and activities. Specifically, many learning practices focus on "role-switching." When learning a new task, people alternate between helpful observer and active participant. Mayan mothers do not act as teachers when completing a task with their children, but instead collaborate with children through play and other activities. People of this Mayan community use the shared endeavors method more than European-Americans who tend to use the transmit-and-test model more often. The shared endeavors model is when people go off of others ideas and learn from them, while the transmit-and-test model is what is used in most American schools when a teacher gives students information and then tests the students on the information. The shared endeavors model is a form of collaborative learning because everyone learns from one another and are able to hear and share others' ideas.
In Nocutzepo, Mexico, indigenous heritage families form collective units where it is generally agreed that children and youth engage in adult cooperative household or community economic practices such as food preparation, child care, participating in markets, agriculture, animal herding, and construction to name a few. During planting and harvesting season, entire families are out in the fields together where children usually pitch into the activity with smaller tasks alongside adults; however, are always observant when it comes to activities done by adults, such as driving a tractor or handling an axe. These children learn through imitation, observation, listening, pitching in, and doing activities in a social and cultural context. When children begin to participate in the daily family/community activities, they form a sense of belonging, especially when they collaborate with adults establishing a more mature integration with their family and community.
Indigenous people of the Americas utilize collaborative learning through their emphasis on role sharing and responsibility sharing within their communities. The Mayan community of San Pedro, Guatemala utilizes flexible leadership that allows children to have an active role in their learning. Children and adults work as cohesive groups when tackling new projects. Collaborative learning is prevalent in Indigenous communities due to the integration of children in the daily lives of the adults. Age is not a determining factor in whether or not individuals are incorporated into collaborative efforts and learning that occurs in indigenous communities.
Participation of learner is a key component to collaborative learning as it functions as the method by which the learning process occurs. Thus collaborative learning occurs when children and adults in communities switch between "knowledge performers" and "observing helpers". For example, when parents in an indigenous Mazahua community where assigned the task of organizing children to build a roof over a market stand in such a way that they would learn to do it themselves, parents and children both collaborated on a horizontal structure. Switching between knowledge performer and observing helper, adults and children completed the task peacefully, without assigned roles of educator/student and illustrated that children still took initiative even when adults were still performing.
Adults and children in indigenous communities of the Americas participate in a horizontal organizational structure; therefore when they work together with one another they are reciprocals of each other. This horizontal structure allows for flexible leadership, which is one of the key aspects of collaborative learning. The indigenous communities of the Americas are unique in their collaborative learning because they do not discriminate upon age, instead Indigenous communities of the Americas encourage active participation and flexible leadership roles, regardless of age. Children and adults regularly interchange their roles within their community, which contributes to the fluidity of the learning process. In addition, Indigenous communities consider observation to be a part of the collaborative learning process.
Collaborative learning can also be incorporated into university settings. For example, the Intercultural Maya University of Quintana Roo, Mexico, has a system that incorporates elders, such as grandparents to act as tutors and as a resource for students to discuss information and knowledge regarding their own language and culture. The elders give their recommendation at the end of a semester in the decision of passing or failing a student, based on his/her behavior in the community and how well he/she is learning Maya. The system is called IKNAL, a mayan word that implies companionship in the learning and doing process that involves several members of the community.
Examples from around the world
Collaborative learning varies across the world. The traditional model for learning is instructor based but that model is quickly changing on a global standpoint as countries fight to be at the top of the economy. A country's history, culture, religious beliefs and politics are all aspects of their national identity and these characteristics influence on citizen's view of collaboration in both a classroom and workplace setting.
Japan
While the empirical research in Japan is still relatively sparse, many language educators have taken advantage of Japan's natural collectivism and experimented with collaborative learning programs More recently, technological advancements and their high adoption rate among students in Japan have made computer supported collaborative learning accessible. Japanese student's value for friendship and their natural inclination towards reciprocity seems to support collaborative learning in Japan.
Examples
Collaborative learning development enables developers of learning systems to work as a network. Specifically relevant to e-learning where developers can share and build knowledge into courses in a collaborative environment at a quick pace and typically lower cost. Knowledge of a single subject can be pulled together from remote locations using software systems.
Collaborative learning in thesis circles in higher education is another example of people learning together. In a thesis circle, a number of students work together with at least one professor or lecturer, to collaboratively coach and supervise individual work on final (e.g. undergraduate or MSc) projects. Students switch frequently between their role as co-supervisor of other students and their own thesis work (incl. receiving feedback from other students).
Collaborative learning in a composition classroom can unite students when assigned open-tasks. Kenneth Bruffee introduced the learning method, Classroom Consensus Group, in which the instructor allocates groups of three to five (three being ideal) students and assigns a problem to be solved or question to be answered. There are two directions the nonfoundational task can be presented: as an indistinct, no right answer that generates discussion or propose an answer and request questions and a process of how the answer came to be. Once the task is assigned, the instructor backs off in order to resist the urge to intervene in students' conversation. The goal is to remove focus of the instructor's authority. The instructor must keep time to ensure the students are centered on analogizing, generalizing, and bridging their comprehension with others. Following group discussion, the instructor is to evaluate, not judge, the students' work. Ideas should be presented to the entire class thus allowing the small groups to come together as a whole. It is then that the answers can be compared, gaps can be filled, and authority is not on one individual.
Collaborative scripts structure collaborative learning by creating roles and mediating interactions while allowing for flexibility in dialogue and activities. Collaborative scripts are used in nearly all cases of collaborative learning some of which are more suited for face-to-face collaborative learning—usually, more flexible—and others for computer-supported collaborative learning—typically, more constraining. Additionally, there are two broad types of scripts: macro-scripts and micro-scripts. Macro-scripts aim at creating situations within which desired interactions will occur. Micro-scripts emphasize activities of individual learners.
Collaborative learning is also employed in the business and government sectors. For example, within the federal government of the United States, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is employing a collaborative project management approach that focuses on collaborating, learning and adapting (CLA). CLA involves three concepts:
Adapting strategically based on applied learning.
Collaborating intentionally with stakeholders to share knowledge and reduce duplication of effort,
Learning systematically by drawing on evidence from a variety of sources and taking time to reflect on implementation.
See also
Collaborative information seeking
Educational psychology
Intergenerational equity
Learning agenda
Learning by teaching (LdL)
Learning circle
Learning community
Numbers heads together
Organizational learning
Teaching for social justice
Youth/adult partnerships
References
Collaboration
Learning methods | 0.797758 | 0.988037 | 0.788215 |
Conceptual framework | A conceptual framework is an analytical tool with several variations and contexts. It can be applied in different categories of work where an overall picture is needed. It is used to make conceptual distinctions and organize ideas. Strong conceptual frameworks capture something real and do this in a way that is easy to remember and apply.
Examples
Isaiah Berlin used the metaphor of a "fox" and a "hedgehog" to make conceptual distinctions in how important philosophers and authors view the world. Berlin describes hedgehogs as those who use a single idea or organizing principle to view the world (such as Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Plato, Henrik Ibsen and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). Foxes, on the other hand, incorporate a type of pluralism and view the world through multiple, sometimes conflicting, lenses (examples include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, Aristotle, Herodotus, Molière, and Honoré de Balzac).
Economists use the conceptual framework of supply and demand to distinguish between the behavior and incentive systems of firms and consumers. Like many other conceptual frameworks, supply and demand can be presented through visual or graphical representations (see demand curve). Both political science and economics use principal agent theory as a conceptual framework. The politics-administration dichotomy is a long-standing conceptual framework used in public administration.
All three of these cases are examples of a macro level conceptual framework.
Overview
The use of the term conceptual framework crosses both scale (large and small theories) and contexts (social science, marketing, applied science, art etc.). The explicit definition of what a conceptual framework is and its application can therefore vary.
Conceptual frameworks are beneficial as organizing devices in empirical research. One set of scholars has applied the notion of a conceptual framework to deductive, empirical research at the micro- or individual study level. They employ American football plays as a useful metaphor to clarify the meaning of conceptual framework (used in the context of a deductive empirical study).
Likewise, conceptual frameworks are abstract representations, connected to the research project's goal that direct the collection and analysis of data (on the plane of observation – the ground). Critically, a football play is a "plan of action" tied to a particular, timely, purpose, usually summarized as long or short yardage. Shields and Rangarajan (2013) argue that it is this tie to "purpose" that makes American football plays such a good metaphor. They define a conceptual framework as "the way ideas are organized to achieve a research project's purpose". Like football plays, conceptual frameworks are connected to a research purpose or aim. Explanation is the most common type of research purpose employed in empirical research. The formal hypothesis of a scientific investigation is the framework associated with explanation.
Explanatory research usually focuses on "why" or "what caused" a phenomenon. Formal hypotheses posit possible explanations (answers to the why question) that are tested by collecting data and assessing the evidence (usually quantitative using statistical tests). For example, Kai Huang wanted to determine what factors contributed to residential fires in U.S. cities. Three factors were posited to influence residential fires. These factors (environment, population, and building characteristics) became the hypotheses or conceptual framework he used to achieve his purpose – explain factors that influenced home fires in U.S. cities.
Types
Several types of conceptual frameworks have been identified, and line up with a research purpose in the following ways:
Working hypothesis – exploration or exploratory research
Pillar questions – exploration or exploratory research
Descriptive categories – description or descriptive research
Practical ideal type – analysis (gauging)
Models of operations research – decision making
Formal hypothesis – explanation and prediction
Note that Shields and Rangarajan (2013) do not claim that the above are the only framework-purpose pairing. Nor do they claim the system is applicable to inductive forms of empirical research. Rather, the conceptual framework-research purpose pairings they propose are useful and provide new scholars a point of departure to develop their own research design.
Frameworks have also been used to explain conflict theory and the balance necessary to reach what amounts to resolution. Within these conflict frameworks, visible and invisible variables function under concepts of relevance. Boundaries form and within these boundaries, tensions regarding laws and chaos (or freedom) are mitigated. These frameworks often function like cells, with sub-frameworks, stasis, evolution and revolution. Anomalies may exist without adequate "lenses" or "filters" to see them and may become visible only when the tools exist to define them.
See also
Analogy
Inquiry
Conceptual model
Theory
References
Further reading
Shields, Patricia and Rangarajan, Nandhini. (2013). A Playbook for Research Methods: Integrating Conceptual Frameworks and Project Management. Stillwater, OK; New Forums Press
Research
Conceptual modelling | 0.790891 | 0.996126 | 0.787827 |
Praxis (process) | Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas. This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulo Freire, Murray Rothbard, and many others. It has meaning in the political, educational, spiritual and medical realms.
Origins
The word praxis is from . In Ancient Greek the word praxis (πρᾶξις) referred to activity engaged in by free people. The philosopher Aristotle held that there were three basic activities of humans: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing). Corresponding to these activities were three types of knowledge: theoretical, the end goal being truth; poietical, the end goal being production; and practical, the end goal being action. Aristotle further divided the knowledge derived from praxis into ethics, economics, and politics. He also distinguished between eupraxia (εὐπραξία, "good praxis") and dyspraxia (δυσπραξία, "bad praxis, misfortune").
Marxism
Young Hegelian August Cieszkowski was one of the earliest philosophers to use the term praxis to mean "action oriented towards changing society" in his 1838 work Prolegomena zur Historiosophie (Prolegomena to a Historiosophy). Cieszkowski argued that while absolute truth had been achieved in the speculative philosophy of Hegel, the deep divisions and contradictions in man's consciousness could only be resolved through concrete practical activity that directly influences social life. Although there is no evidence that Karl Marx himself read this book, it may have had an indirect influence on his thought through the writings of his friend Moses Hess.
Marx uses the term "praxis" to refer to the free, universal, creative and self-creative activity through which man creates and changes his historical world and himself. Praxis is an activity unique to man, which distinguishes him from all other beings. The concept appears in two of Marx's early works: the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the Theses on Feuerbach (1845). In the former work, Marx contrasts the free, conscious productive activity of human beings with the unconscious, compulsive production of animals. He also affirms the primacy of praxis over theory, claiming that theoretical contradictions can only be resolved through practical activity. In the latter work, revolutionary practice is a central theme:
Marx here criticizes the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach for envisaging objects in a contemplative way. Marx argues that perception is itself a component of man's practical relationship to the world. To understand the world does not mean considering it from the outside, judging it morally or explaining it scientifically. Society cannot be changed by reformers who understand its needs, only by the revolutionary praxis of the mass whose interest coincides with that of society as a whole—the proletariat. This will be an act of society understanding itself, in which the subject changes the object by the very fact of understanding it.
Seemingly inspired by the Theses, the nineteenth century socialist Antonio Labriola called Marxism the "philosophy of praxis". This description of Marxism would appear again in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and the writings of the members of the Frankfurt School. Praxis is also an important theme for Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, Karel Kosik and Henri Lefebvre, and was seen as the central concept of Marx's thought by Yugoslavia's Praxis School, which established a journal of that name in 1964.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre posits a view of individual praxis as the basis of human history. In his view, praxis is an attempt to negate human need. In a revision of Marxism and his earlier existentialism, Sartre argues that the fundamental relation of human history is scarcity. Conditions of scarcity generate competition for resources, exploitation of one over another and division of labor, which in its turn creates struggle between classes. Each individual experiences the other as a threat to his or her own survival and praxis; it is always a possibility that one's individual freedom limits another's. Sartre recognizes both natural and man-made constraints on freedom: he calls the non-unified practical activity of humans the "practico-inert". Sartre opposes to individual praxis a "group praxis" that fuses each individual to be accountable to each other in a common purpose. Sartre sees a mass movement in a successful revolution as the best exemplar of such a fused group.
Hannah Arendt
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that Western philosophy too often has focused on the contemplative life (vita contemplativa) and has neglected the active life (vita activa). This has led humanity to frequently miss much of the everyday relevance of philosophical ideas to real life. For Arendt, praxis is the highest and most important level of the active life. Thus, she argues that more philosophers need to engage in everyday political action or praxis, which she sees as the true realization of human freedom. According to Arendt, our capacity to analyze ideas, wrestle with them, and engage in active praxis is what makes us uniquely human.
In Maurizio Passerin d'Etreves's estimation, "Arendt's theory of action and her revival of the ancient notion of praxis represent one of the most original contributions to twentieth century political thought. ... Moreover, by viewing action as a mode of human togetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory democracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch."
Education
Praxis is used by educators to describe a recurring passage through a cyclical process of experiential learning, such as the cycle described and popularised by David A. Kolb.
Paulo Freire defines praxis in Pedagogy of the Oppressed as "reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed." Through praxis, oppressed people can acquire a critical awareness of their own condition, and, with teacher-students and students-teachers, struggle for liberation.
In the British Channel 4 television documentary New Order: Play at Home, Factory Records owner Tony Wilson describes praxis as "doing something, and then only afterwards, finding out why you did it".
Praxis may be described as a form of critical thinking and comprises the combination of reflection and action. Praxis can be viewed as a progression of cognitive and physical actions:
Taking the action
Considering the impacts of the action
Analysing the results of the action by reflecting upon it
Altering and revising conceptions and planning following reflection
Implementing these plans in further actions
This creates a cycle which can be viewed in terms of educational settings, learners and educational facilitators.
Scott and Marshall (2009) refer to praxis as "a philosophical term referring to human action on the natural and social world". Furthermore, Gramsci (1999) emphasises the power of praxis in Selections from the Prison Notebooks by stating that "The philosophy of praxis does not tend to leave the simple in their primitive philosophy of common sense but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life".
To reveal the inadequacies of religion, folklore, intellectualism and other such 'one-sided' forms of reasoning, Gramsci appeals directly in his later work to Marx's 'philosophy of praxis', describing it as a 'concrete' mode of reasoning. This principally involves the juxtaposition of a dialectical and scientific audit of reality; against all existing normative, ideological, and therefore counterfeit accounts. Essentially a 'philosophy' based on 'a practice', Marx's philosophy, is described correspondingly in this manner, as the only 'philosophy' that is at the same time a 'history in action' or a 'life' itself (Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1972, p. 332).
Spirituality
Praxis is also key in meditation and spirituality, where emphasis is placed on gaining first-hand experience of concepts and certain areas, such as union with the Divine, which can only be explored through praxis due to the inability of the finite mind (and its tool, language) to comprehend or express the infinite. In an interview for YES! Magazine, Matthew Fox explained it this way:
According to Strong's Concordance, the Hebrew word ta‛am is, properly, a taste. This is, figuratively, perception and, by implication, intelligence; transitively, a mandate: advice, behaviour, decree, discretion, judgment, reason, taste, understanding.
Medicine
Praxis is the ability to perform voluntary skilled movements. The partial or complete inability to do so in the absence of primary sensory or motor impairments is known as apraxia.
See also
Apraxia
Christian theological praxis
Hexis
Lex artis
Orthopraxy
Praxeology
Praxis Discussion Series
Praxis (disambiguation)
Praxis intervention
Praxis school
Practice (social theory)
Theses on Feuerbach
References
Further reading
Paulo Freire (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum International Publishing Group.
External links
Entry for "praxis" at the Encyclopaedia of Informal Education
Der Begriff Praxis
Concepts in the philosophy of mind
Marxism | 0.789564 | 0.997456 | 0.787556 |
Culture | Culture is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitude, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.
Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.
A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group.
Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change.
Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.
Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.
Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.
Description
Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.
When used as a count noun, a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. "bro culture"), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.
Etymology
The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi", using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, "refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human."
In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, "The very word culture meant 'place tilled' in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' and cultus, 'A cult, especially a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly."
Culture described by Richard Velkley: ... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of "modern liberalism and Enlightenment." Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.
In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.
The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time." Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as "person[s] of worth within the world of meaning"—raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.
The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans. However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.
Change
Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.
Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.
Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.
Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.
Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct borrowing", on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.
Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.
Early modern discourses
German Romanticism
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to the concept of : "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: "" ("Dare to be wise!"). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of : "For Herder, was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people."
In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion of culture as "worldview". According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures.
In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind." He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas"; different cultures, or different "folk ideas", are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.
English Romanticism
In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of : "...culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."
In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine. As these forms were associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from ). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.
Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.
Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by "the folk," i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as "noble savages" living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.
In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of religion.
Anthropology
Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in the United States and Canada, archaeology. The term , or "culture glasses," coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the "lenses" through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that , which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, "can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately."
Sociology
The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society. For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture. Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present.
Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918–1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term ('cultural sociology'). Cultural sociology was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.
Early researchers and development of cultural sociology
The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.
Cultural studies
In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and Raymond Williams (1921–1988) developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.
In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism.
From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender.
Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to "fit in" certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one's participation in this practice.
In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion, or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as "capitalist" mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.
In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, "cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition." The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.
The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded. Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts.
In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product.
This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.
Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups:
The first group covers the variables that represent the "efficiency orientation" of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.
The second covers the variables that represent the "social orientation" of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.
In 2016, a new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud, who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with the tradition of textual theory.
Psychology
Starting in the 1990s, psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology. Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts. Culture may affect the way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people's personalities across cultures. As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. LGBT culture is displayed with significantly different levels of tolerance within different cultures and nations. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture. For example, people who are raised in a culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style. Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure. Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation. The notion of the anxious, unstable, and rebellious adolescent has been criticized by experts, such as Robert Epstein, who state that an undeveloped brain is not the main cause of teenagers' turmoils. Some have criticized this understanding of adolescence, classifying it as a relatively recent phenomenon in human history created by modern society, and have been highly critical of what they view as the infantilization of young adults in American society. According to Robert Epstein and Jennifer, "American-style teen turmoil is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, suggesting that such mayhem is not biologically inevitable. Second, the brain itself changes in response to experiences, raising the question of whether adolescent brain characteristics are the cause of teen tumult or rather the result of lifestyle and experiences." David Moshman has also stated in regards to adolescence that brain research "is crucial for a full picture, but it does not provide an ultimate explanation."
Protection of culture
There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of cultural heritage and cultural diversity. UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.
In the 21st century, the protection of culture has been the focus of increasing activity by national and international organizations. The UN and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally-binding conventions or treaties. The aim is not to protect a person's property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.
Tourism is having an increasing impact on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society.
See also
Animal culture
Anthropology
Cultural area
Cultural studies
Cultural identity
Cultural tourism
Culture 21 – United Nations plan of action
Outline of culture
Recombinant culture
Semiotics of culture
References
Sources
Further reading
Books
Bastian, Adolf (2009), Encyclopædia Britannica Online
Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Macmillan. Third edition, 1882, available online. Retrieved: 2006-06-28.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Press. .
Barzilai, Gad (2003). Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities University of Michigan Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.
Carhart. Michael C. (2007). The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, Cambridge, Harvard University press.
Cohen, Anthony P. (1985). The Symbolic Construction of Community. New York: Routledge
Dawkins, R. (1999) [1982]. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford Paperbacks.
Findley & Rothney (1986). Twentieth-Century World, Houghton Mifflin
Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York. .
Goodall, J. (1986). The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hoult, T.F., ed. (1969). Dictionary of Modern Sociology. Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
Jary, D. and J. Jary (1991). The HarperCollins Dictionary of Sociology. New York: HarperCollins.
Keiser, R. Lincoln (1969). The Vice Lords: Warriors of the Streets. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. .
Kroeber, A.L. and C. Kluckhohn (1952). Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum
Kim, Uichol (2001). "Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: An integrated analysis." In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
McClenon, James. Tylor, Edward B(urnett) (1998) Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Ed. William Swatos and Peter Kivisto. Walnut Creek: AltaMira, pp. 528–529.
Middleton, R. (1990). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. .
O'Neil, D. (2006). Cultural Anthropology Tutorials , Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California. Retrieved: 2006-07-10.
Reagan, Ronald. "Final Radio Address to the Nation" , January 14, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2006.
Reese, W.L. (1980). Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought. New Jersey US; Sussex, UK: Humanities Press.
UNESCO (2002). Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, issued on International Mother Language Day,
White, L. (1949). The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. .
Articles
The Meaning of "Culture" (2014-12-27), Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
External links
Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology
What is Culture?
Social concepts
Social constructionism
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Personal development | Personal development or self-improvement consists of activities that develop a person's capabilities and potential, enhance quality of life, and facilitate the realization of dreams and aspirations. Personal development may take place over the course of an individual's entire lifespan and is not limited to one stage of a person's life. It can include official and informal actions for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counselor, manager, coach, or mentor, and it is not restricted to self-help. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems offered to support positive adult development at the individual level in organizations.
Overview
Among other things, personal development may include the following activities:
Social entrepreneurship or civic engagement
Participating in festivals, conferences, or conventions
Improving self-awareness
Improving self-knowledge
Improving skills and/or learning new ones
Building or renewing identity/self-esteem
Developing strengths or talents
Improving a career
Identifying or improving potential
Building employability or (alternatively) human capital
Enhancing lifestyle and/or the quality of life and time management calculating the return on time invested.
Improving health
Improving wealth or social status
Fulfilling aspirations
Initiating a life enterprise
Defining and executing personal development plans (PDPs)
Improving social relations or emotional intelligence
Spiritual identity development and recognition
A distinction can be made between personal development and personal growth. Although similar, both concepts portray different ideas. Personal development specifies the focus of the "what" that is evolving, while personal growth entails a much more holistic view of broader concepts including morals and values being developed.
Personal development can also include developing other people's skills and personalities.This can happen through roles such as those of a teacher or mentor, either through a personal competency (such as the alleged skill of certain managers in developing the potential of employees) or through a professional service (such as providing training, assessment, or coaching).
Beyond improving oneself and developing others, "personal development" labels a field of practice and research:
As a field of practice, personal development includes personal-development methods, learning programs, assessment systems, tools, and techniques.
As a field of research, personal-development topics appear in psychology journals, education research, management journals and books, and human-development economics.
Any sort of development—whether economic, political, biological, organizational or personal—requires a framework if one wishes to know whether a change has actually occurred. In the case of personal development, an individual often functions as the primary judge of improvement or of regression, but the validation of objective improvement requires assessment using standard criteria.
Personal-development frameworks may include:
Goals or benchmarks that define the end-points
Strategies or plans for reaching goals
Measurement and assessment of progress, levels or stages that define milestones along a development path
A feedback system to provide information on changes
As an industry
Personal development as an industry has several business-relationship formats of operating. The main ways are business-to-consumer and business-to-business. However, there have been two new ways emerge: consumer-to-business and consumer-to-consumer. The personal development market had a global market size of 38.28 billion dollars in 2019.
Business-to-consumer market
A wide array of personal development products are available to individuals. Examples include self-help books; education technology, neuroenhancement, and experiential learning (instructor-led training, motivational speeches, seminars, social or spiritual retreats).
Domains
Higher education, cognitive training
Personal finance
Weight loss, physical fitness, nutrition, and beauty enhancement
Large-group awareness training
Sensory deprivation
Time-management
Yoga
Martial arts
Initiation ceremonies
Meditation
Asceticism
General methods of personal development also include:
Life coaching or counseling
Recommendation systems
Nootropics, such as caffeinated drinks
Brain computer interface
Virtual assistant
Business-to-business market
Some consulting firms such as DDI and FranklinCovey specialize in personal development, but generalist firms operating in the fields of human resources, recruitment and organizational strategy—such as Hewitt, Watson Wyatt Worldwide, Hay Group, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Korn/Ferry—have entered what they perceive as a growing market, not to mention smaller firms and self-employed professionals who provide consulting, training and coaching.
Origins
Major religions—such as the age-old Abrahamic and Indian religions—as well as 20th-century New Age philosophies have variously used practices such as prayer, music, dance, singing, chanting, poetry, writing, sports and martial arts.
Michel Foucault describes in Care of the Self the techniques of epimelia used in ancient Greece and Rome, which included dieting, exercise, sexual abstinence, contemplation, prayer, and confession—some of which also became practices within different branches of Christianity.
Wushu and tai chi utilize traditional Chinese techniques, including breathing and qi exercises, meditation, martial arts, as well as practices linked to traditional Chinese medicine, such as dieting, massage, and acupuncture.
Two individual ancient philosophical traditions: those of Aristotle (Western tradition) and Confucius (Eastern tradition) stand out and contribute to the worldwide view of "personal development" in the 21st century. Elsewhere anonymous or named founders of schools of self-development appear endemic—note the traditions of the Indian sub-continent in this regard.
South Asian traditions
Some ancient Indians aspired to "beingness, wisdom and happiness".
Paul Oliver suggests that the popularity of Indian traditions for a personal developer may lie in their relative lack of prescriptive doctrine.
Islamic personal development
Khurram Murad describes that personal development in Islam is to work towards eternal life in Jannuh. There are many avenues in the journey to paradise, such as devoted practicing of the laws of the Quran and Sunnah, such as optimized service towards the self and others. Sincere worship of Allah is the foundation for self-discovery and self-development. Allah has provided ways to help those striving towards eternal life, including staying away from things of the world. These worldly things can distract those away from the path to paradise. It does not mean worldly success is inherently disruptive but can become so when spiritual beliefs do not align with the Sunnah. In the end, paradise will bring satisfaction to those working on their personal development because of the pleasure that comes from Allah.
Aristotle and the Western tradition
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BCE322 BCE) wrote Nicomachean Ethics, in which he defined personal development as a category of phronesis or practical wisdom, where the practice of virtues (arête) leads to eudaimonia, commonly translated as "happiness" but more accurately understood as "human flourishing" or "living well". Aristotle continues to influence the Western concept of personal development , particularly in the economics of human development and in positive psychology.
Confucius and the East Asian tradition
In Chinese tradition, Confucius (around 551 BCE479 BCE) founded an ongoing philosophy. His ideas continue to influence family values, education and personnel management in China and East Asia. In his Great Learning Confucius wrote:
Contexts
Psychology
Psychology became linked to personal development in the early 20th century starting with the research efforts of Alfred Adler (1870–1937) and Carl Jung (1875–1961).
Adler refused to limit psychology to analysis alone. He made the important point that aspirations focus on looking forward and do not limit themselves to unconscious drives or to childhood experiences. He also originated the concepts of lifestyle (1929—he defined "lifestyle" as an individual's characteristic approach to life, in facing problems) and of self-image, as a concept that influenced management under the heading of work-life balance, also known as the equilibrium between a person's career and personal life.
Carl Gustav Jung made contributions to personal development with his concept of individuation, which he saw as the drive of the individual to achieve the wholeness and balance of the Self.
Daniel Levinson (1920–1994) developed Jung's early concept of "life stages" and included a sociological perspective. Levinson proposed that personal development comes under the influence—throughout life—of aspirations, which he called "the Dream":
Research on success in reaching goals, as undertaken by Albert Bandura (1925–2021), suggested that self-efficacy best explains why people with the same level of knowledge and skills get very different results. Having self-efficacy leads to an increased likelihood of success. According to Bandura self-confidence functions as a powerful predictor of success because:
It causes you to expect to succeed
It allows you take risks and set challenging goals
It helps you keep trying if at first you do not succeed
It helps you control emotions and fears when life may throw more difficult things your way
In 1998 Martin Seligman won election to a one-year term as President of the American Psychological Association and proposed a new focus: on healthy individuals rather than on pathology (he created the "positive psychology" current)
Carl Rogers proposed a theory about humanistic psychology called Self Concept. This concept consisted of two ideas of the self. The first idea is the ideal self which describes the person we want to be. The second one is the real self which is the objective view of one self and who we really are. Rogers emphasized that healthy development is when the real self and the ideal self are accurate. Incongruence is what Rogers described to be when the real self and the ideal self are not accurate in their viewings. The ideal self is not lowered in order to compensate for the real self, but the real self is lifted by the ideal self in order to achieve healthy development.
It is important to note that real lasting personal development is only achieved through meaningful and lasting accomplishments. Viktor Frankl emphasized this by stating "Genuine and lasting well-being is the result of a “life well-lived”. In an article written by Ugur, H., Constantinescu, P.M., & Stevens, M.J. (2015) they described that society has taught us to create positive illusions that give the appearance of positive development but are only effective in the short term. Additionally, they give two examples of personal development. The first is hedonic well-being which is the pursuit of pleasurable experiences that lead to increased personal happiness. The second is eudaimonic well-being which is living life by making choices that are congruent with authentic being.
Social psychology
Social psychology heavily emphasizes and focuses on human behavior and how individuals interact with others in society. Infants develop socially by creating trusting and dependent relationships with others—namely parental figures. They learn how to act and treat other people based on the example of parental figures and other adults they interact with often. Toddlers further develop social skills. Additionally, they begin to gain a desire for autonomy and grow more and more independent as they grow older. The balance of social involvement and autonomy varies per person, but normally autonomous behavior increases with age. Some studies suggest that selfishness begins to diminish, and prosocial behaviors increase, between the ages of six years old to twelve years old. Additionally, the years of adulthood are times of development—self-actualization, relational and occupational development, loss, and coping skills development, etc.—affected by those around us: parents, co-workers, romantic partners, and children. Social psychology draws from many other psychological theories and principles yet views them through a lens of social interaction.
Psychodynamic psychology
The psychodynamic view of personal development varies from other perspectives. Namely, that the development of our traits, personalities, and thinking patterns are predominantly subconscious. Psychodynamic theory suggests these subconscious changes—which emerge as external actions—are formed from suppressed sexual and aggressive urges and other internalized conflicts. Sigmund Freud and other notable psychodynamic theorists postulate that these repressed cognitions form during childhood and adolescence. Conscious development would then be "digging up" these repressed memories and feelings. Once repressed memories and emotions are discovered, an individual can sift through them and receive healthy closure. Much, if not all, of conscious development occurs with the aid of a trained psychodynamic therapist.
Cognitive-behavioral psychology
Cognitive-behavioral views on personal development follow traditional patterns of personal development: behavior modification, cognitive reframing, and successive approximation being some of the more notable techniques. An individual is seen as in control of their actions and their thoughts, though self-mastery is required. With behavior modification, individuals will develop personal skills and traits by altering their behavior independent of their emotions. For example, a person may feel intense anger but would still behave in a positive manner. They are able to suppress their emotions and act in a more socially acceptable way. The accumulation of these efforts would change the person into a more patient individual. Cognitive reframing plays an instrumental role in personal development. Cognitive-behavioral psychologists believe that how we view events is more important than the event itself. Thus, if one can view negative events in beneficial ways, they can progress and develop with fewer setbacks. Successive approximation—or shaping—most closely aligns with personal development. Successive approximation is when one desires a final result but takes incremental steps to achieve the result. Normally, each successful step towards the final goal is rewarded until the goal is achieved. Personal development, if it is to be long-lasting, is achieved incrementally.
Educational psychology
Educational psychology focuses on the human learning experience: learning and teaching methods, aptitude testing, and so on. Educational psychology seeks to further personal development by increasing one's ability to learn, retain information, and apply knowledge to real-world experiences. If one is able to increase efficacious learning, they are better equipped for personal development.
Early education
Education offers children the opportunity to begin personal development at a young age. The curriculum taught at school must be carefully planned and managed in order to successfully promote personal development. Providing an environment for children that allows for quality social relationships to be made and clearly communicated objectives and aims is key to their development. If early education fails to meet these qualifications, it can greatly stunt development in children, hindering their success in education as well as society. They can fall behind in development compared to peers of the same age group.
Higher education
During the 1960s a large increase in the number of students on American campuses led to research on the personal development needs of undergraduate students. Arthur Chickering defined seven vectors of personal development for young adults during their undergraduate years:
Developing competence
Managing emotions
Achieving autonomy and interdependence
Developing mature interpersonal relationships
Establishing personal identity
Developing purpose
Developing integrity
In the UK, personal development took a central place in university policy in 1997 when the Dearing Report declared that universities should go beyond academic teaching to provide students with personal development. In 2001 a Quality Assessment Agency for UK universities produced guidelines for universities to enhance personal development as:
a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development;
objectives related explicitly to student development; to improve the capacity of students to understand what and how they are learning, and to review, plan and take responsibility for their own learning
In the 1990s, business schools began to set up specific personal-development programs for leadership and career orientation and in 1998 the European Foundation for Management Development set up the EQUIS accreditation system which specified that personal development must form part of the learning process through internships, working on team projects and going abroad for work or exchange programs.
The first personal development certification required for business school graduation originated in 2002 as a partnership between Metizo, a personal-development consulting firm, and the Euromed Management School in Marseilles: students must not only complete assignments but also demonstrate self-awareness and achievement of personal-development competencies.
As an academic department, personal development as a specific discipline is often associated with business schools. As an area of research, personal development draws on links to other academic disciplines:
Education for questions of learning and assessment
Psychology for motivation and personality
Sociology for identity and social networks
Economics for human capital and economic value
Philosophy for ethics and self-reflection
Developmental activities
Personal Development can include gaining self-awareness of the course of one's lifespan. It includes multiple definitions but is different from self knowledge. Self-awareness is more in depth and explores the conscious and unconscious aspects of ourselves. We are able to gain self-awareness through socializing and communicating according to the social behaviorism view. Self-awareness can also be a positive intrapersonal experience where one is able to reflect during a moment of action or past actions. Becoming more self aware can help us to increase our emotional intelligence, leadership skills, and performance.
The workplace
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), proposed a hierarchy of needs with self actualization at the top, defined as "the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming". In other words, self actualization is the ambition to become a better version of oneself, to become everything one is capable of being.
Since Maslow himself believed that only a small minority of people self-actualize—he estimated one percent—his hierarchy of needs had the consequence that organizations came to regard self-actualization or personal development as occurring at the top of the organizational pyramid, while openness and job security in the workplace would fulfill the needs of the mass of employees.
As organizations and labor markets became more global, responsibility for development shifted from the company to the individual. In 1999 management thinker Peter Drucker wrote in the Harvard Business Review:
Management professors Sumantra Ghoshal of the London Business School and Christopher Bartlett of the Harvard Business School wrote in 1997 that companies must manage people individually and establish a new work contract. On the one hand, the company must allegedly recognize that personal development creates economic value: "market performance flows not from the omnipotent wisdom of top managers but from the initiative, creativity and skills of all employees". On the other hand, employees should recognize that their work includes personal development and "embrace the invigorating force of continuous learning and personal development".
The 1997 publication of Ghoshal's and Bartlett's Individualized Corporation corresponded to a change in career development from a system of predefined paths defined by companies, to a strategy defined by the individual and matched to the needs of organizations in an open landscape of possibilities. Another contribution to the study of career development came with the recognition that women's careers show specific personal needs and different development paths from men. The 2007 study of women's careers by Sylvia Ann Hewlett Off-Ramps and On-Ramps had a major impact on the way companies view careers. Further work on the career as a personal development process came from study by Herminia Ibarra in her Working Identity on the relationship with career change and identity change, indicating that priorities of work and lifestyle continually develop through life.
Personal development programs in companies fall into two categories: the provision of employee benefits and the fostering of development strategies.
Employee surveys may help organizations find out personal-development needs, preferences and problems, and they use the results to design benefits programs. Typical programs in this category include:
Work-life balance
Time management
Stress management
Health programs
Counseling
As an investment, personal development programs have the goal of increasing human capital or improving productivity, innovation or quality. Proponents actually see such programs not as a cost but as an investment with results linked to an organization's strategic development goals. Employees gain access to these investment-oriented programs by selection according to the value and future potential of the employee, usually defined in a talent management architecture including populations such as new hires, perceived high-potential employees, perceived key employees, sales staff, research staff and perceived future leaders. Organizations may also offer other (non-investment-oriented) programs to many or even all employees. Personal development also forms an element in management tools such as personal development planning, assessing one's level of ability using a competency grid, or getting feedback from a 360 questionnaire filled in by colleagues at different levels in the organization.
A common criticism surrounding personal development programs is that they are often treated as an arbitrary performance management tool to pay lip service to, but ultimately ignored. As such, many companies have decided to replace personal development programs with SMART Personal Development Objectives, which are regularly reviewed and updated. Personal Development Objectives help employees achieve career goals and improve overall performance.
Criticism
Scholars have targeted self-help claims as misleading and incorrect. In 2005, Steve Salerno portrayed the American self-help movement—he uses the acronym "SHAM": the "Self-Help and Actualization Movement"—not only as ineffective in achieving its goals but also as socially harmful, and that self-help customers keep investing more money in these services regardless of their effectiveness. Others similarly point out that with self-help books "supply increases the demand ... The more people read them, the more they think they need them ... more like an addiction than an alliance".
Self-help writers have been described as working "in the area of the ideological, the imagined, the narrativized. ... although a veneer of scientism permeates the[ir] work, there is also an underlying armature of moralizing".
See also
Coaching
End-of-history illusion
Holland Codes
Human Potential Movement
Know thyself
Life planning
Life skills
Micropsychoanalysis
Self-discovery
Training and development
True Will
References | 0.788779 | 0.997302 | 0.786651 |
Interdisciplinarity | Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, etc. It is related to an interdiscipline or an interdisciplinary field, which is an organizational unit that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions emerge. Large engineering teams are usually interdisciplinary, as a power station or mobile phone or other project requires the melding of several specialties. However, the term "interdisciplinary" is sometimes confined to academic settings.
The term interdisciplinary is applied within education and training pedagogies to describe studies that use methods and insights of several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. Interdisciplinarity involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies—along with their specific perspectives—in the pursuit of a common task. The epidemiology of HIV/AIDS or global warming requires understanding of diverse disciplines to solve complex problems. Interdisciplinary may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women's studies or ethnic area studies. Interdisciplinarity can likewise be applied to complex subjects that can only be understood by combining the perspectives of two or more fields.
The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand a given subject in terms of multiple traditional disciplines. Interdisciplinary education fosters cognitive flexibility and prepares students to tackle complex, real-world problems by integrating knowledge from multiple fields. This approach emphasizes active learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, equipping students with the adaptability needed in an increasingly interconnected world. For example, the subject of land use may appear differently when examined by different disciplines, for instance, biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics.
Development
Although "interdisciplinary" and "interdisciplinarity" are frequently viewed as twentieth century terms, the concept has historical antecedents, most notably Greek philosophy. Julie Thompson Klein attests that "the roots of the concepts lie in a number of ideas that resonate through modern discourse—the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis and the integration of knowledge", while Giles Gunn says that Greek historians and dramatists took elements from other realms of knowledge (such as medicine or philosophy) to further understand their own material. The building of Roman roads required men who understood surveying, material science, logistics and several other disciplines. Any broadminded humanist project involves interdisciplinarity, and history shows a crowd of cases, as seventeenth-century Leibniz's task to create a system of universal justice, which required linguistics, economics, management, ethics, law philosophy, politics, and even sinology.
Interdisciplinary programs sometimes arise from a shared conviction that the traditional disciplines are unable or unwilling to address an important problem. For example, social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology paid little attention to the social analysis of technology throughout most of the twentieth century. As a result, many social scientists with interests in technology have joined science, technology and society programs, which are typically staffed by scholars drawn from numerous disciplines. They may also arise from new research developments, such as nanotechnology, which cannot be addressed without combining the approaches of two or more disciplines. Examples include quantum information processing, an amalgamation of quantum physics and computer science, and bioinformatics, combining molecular biology with computer science. Sustainable development as a research area deals with problems requiring analysis and synthesis across economic, social and environmental spheres; often an integration of multiple social and natural science disciplines. Interdisciplinary research is also key to the study of health sciences, for example in studying optimal solutions to diseases. Some institutions of higher education offer accredited degree programs in Interdisciplinary Studies.
At another level, interdisciplinarity is seen as a remedy to the harmful effects of excessive specialization and isolation in information silos. On some views, however, interdisciplinarity is entirely indebted to those who specialize in one field of study—that is, without specialists, interdisciplinarians would have no information and no leading experts to consult. Others place the focus of interdisciplinarity on the need to transcend disciplines, viewing excessive specialization as problematic both epistemologically and politically. When interdisciplinary collaboration or research results in new solutions to problems, much information is given back to the various disciplines involved. Therefore, both disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians may be seen in complementary relation to one another.
Barriers
Because most participants in interdisciplinary ventures were trained in traditional disciplines, they must learn to appreciate differences of perspectives and methods. For example, a discipline that places more emphasis on quantitative rigor may produce practitioners who are more scientific in their training than others; in turn, colleagues in "softer" disciplines who may associate quantitative approaches with difficulty grasp the broader dimensions of a problem and lower rigor in theoretical and qualitative argumentation. An interdisciplinary program may not succeed if its members remain stuck in their disciplines (and in disciplinary attitudes). Those who lack experience in interdisciplinary collaborations may also not fully appreciate the intellectual contribution of colleagues from those disciplines. From the disciplinary perspective, however, much interdisciplinary work may be seen as "soft", lacking in rigor, or ideologically motivated; these beliefs place barriers in the career paths of those who choose interdisciplinary work. For example, interdisciplinary grant applications are often refereed by peer reviewers drawn from established disciplines; interdisciplinary researchers may experience difficulty getting funding for their research. In addition, untenured researchers know that, when they seek promotion and tenure, it is likely that some of the evaluators will lack commitment to interdisciplinarity. They may fear that making a commitment to interdisciplinary research will increase the risk of being denied tenure.
Interdisciplinary programs may also fail if they are not given sufficient autonomy. For example, interdisciplinary faculty are usually recruited to a joint appointment, with responsibilities in both an interdisciplinary program (such as women's studies) and a traditional discipline (such as history). If the traditional discipline makes the tenure decisions, new interdisciplinary faculty will be hesitant to commit themselves fully to interdisciplinary work. Other barriers include the generally disciplinary orientation of most scholarly journals, leading to the perception, if not the fact, that interdisciplinary research is hard to publish. In addition, since traditional budgetary practices at most universities channel resources through the disciplines, it becomes difficult to account for a given scholar or teacher's salary and time. During periods of budgetary contraction, the natural tendency to serve the primary constituency (i.e., students majoring in the traditional discipline) makes resources scarce for teaching and research comparatively far from the center of the discipline as traditionally understood. For these same reasons, the introduction of new interdisciplinary programs is often resisted because it is perceived as a competition for diminishing funds.
Due to these and other barriers, interdisciplinary research areas are strongly motivated to become disciplines themselves. If they succeed, they can establish their own research funding programs and make their own tenure and promotion decisions. In so doing, they lower the risk of entry. Examples of former interdisciplinary research areas that have become disciplines, many of them named for their parent disciplines, include neuroscience, cybernetics, biochemistry and biomedical engineering. These new fields are occasionally referred to as "interdisciplines". On the other hand, even though interdisciplinary activities are now a focus of attention for institutions promoting learning and teaching, as well as organizational and social entities concerned with education, they are practically facing complex barriers, serious challenges and criticism. The most important obstacles and challenges faced by interdisciplinary activities in the past two decades can be divided into "professional", "organizational", and "cultural" obstacles.
Interdisciplinary studies and studies of interdisciplinarity
An initial distinction should be made between interdisciplinary studies, which can be found spread across the academy today, and the study of interdisciplinarity, which involves a much smaller group of researchers. The former is instantiated in thousands of research centers across the US and the world. The latter has one US organization, the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (founded in 1979), two international organizations, the International Network of Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (founded in 2010) and the Philosophy of/as Interdisciplinarity Network (founded in 2009). The US's research institute devoted to the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity, the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas, was founded in 2008 but is closed as of 1 September 2014, the result of administrative decisions at the University of North Texas.
An interdisciplinary study is an academic program or process seeking to synthesize broad perspectives, knowledge, skills, interconnections, and epistemology in an educational setting. Interdisciplinary programs may be founded in order to facilitate the study of subjects which have some coherence, but which cannot be adequately understood from a single disciplinary perspective (for example, women's studies or medieval studies). More rarely, and at a more advanced level, interdisciplinarity may itself become the focus of study, in a critique of institutionalized disciplines' ways of segmenting knowledge.
In contrast, studies of interdisciplinarity raise to self-consciousness questions about how interdisciplinarity works, the nature and history of disciplinarity, and the future of knowledge in post-industrial society. Researchers at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity have made the distinction between philosophy 'of' and 'as' interdisciplinarity, the former identifying a new, discrete area within philosophy that raises epistemological and metaphysical questions about the status of interdisciplinary thinking, with the latter pointing toward a philosophical practice that is sometimes called 'field philosophy'.
Perhaps the most common complaint regarding interdisciplinary programs, by supporters and detractors alike, is the lack of synthesis—that is, students are provided with multiple disciplinary perspectives but are not given effective guidance in resolving the conflicts and achieving a coherent view of the subject. Others have argued that the very idea of synthesis or integration of disciplines presupposes questionable politico-epistemic commitments. Critics of interdisciplinary programs feel that the ambition is simply unrealistic, given the knowledge and intellectual maturity of all but the exceptional undergraduate; some defenders concede the difficulty, but insist that cultivating interdisciplinarity as a habit of mind, even at that level, is both possible and essential to the education of informed and engaged citizens and leaders capable of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources in order to render reasoned decisions.
While much has been written on the philosophy and promise of interdisciplinarity in academic programs and professional practice, social scientists are increasingly interrogating academic discourses on interdisciplinarity, as well as how interdisciplinarity actually works—and does not—in practice. Some have shown, for example, that some interdisciplinary enterprises that aim to serve society can produce deleterious outcomes for which no one can be held to account.
Politics of interdisciplinary studies
Since 1998, there has been an ascendancy in the value of interdisciplinary research and teaching and a growth in the number of bachelor's degrees awarded at U.S. universities classified as multi- or interdisciplinary studies. The number of interdisciplinary bachelor's degrees awarded annually rose from 7,000 in 1973 to 30,000 a year by 2005 according to data from the National Center of Educational Statistics (NECS). In addition, educational leaders from the Boyer Commission to Carnegie's President Vartan Gregorian to Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science have advocated for interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary approaches to problem-solving in the 21st century. This has been echoed by federal funding agencies, particularly the National Institutes of Health under the direction of Elias Zerhouni, who has advocated that grant proposals be framed more as interdisciplinary collaborative projects than single-researcher, single-discipline ones.
At the same time, many thriving longstanding bachelor's in interdisciplinary studies programs in existence for 30 or more years, have been closed down, in spite of healthy enrollment. Examples include Arizona International (formerly part of the University of Arizona), the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University, and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University; others such as the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University, and George Mason University's New Century College, have been cut back. Stuart Henry has seen this trend as part of the hegemony of the disciplines in their attempt to recolonize the experimental knowledge production of otherwise marginalized fields of inquiry. This is due to threat perceptions seemingly based on the ascendancy of interdisciplinary studies against traditional academia.
Examples
Communication science: Communication studies takes up theories, models, concepts, etc. of other, independent disciplines such as sociology, political science and economics and thus decisively develops them.
Environmental science: Environmental science is an interdisciplinary earth science aimed at addressing environmental issues such as global warming and pollution, and involves the use of a wide range of scientific disciplines including geology, chemistry, physics, ecology, and oceanography. Faculty members of environmental programs often collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to solve complex global environmental problems. Those who study areas of environmental policy such as environmental law, sustainability, and environmental justice, may also seek knowledge in the environmental sciences to better develop their expertise and understanding in their fields.
Knowledge management: Knowledge management discipline exists as a cluster of divergent schools of thought under an overarching knowledge management umbrella by building on works in computer science, economics, human resource management, information systems, organizational behavior, philosophy, psychology, and strategic management.
Liberal arts education: A select realm of disciplines that cut across the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences, initially intended to provide a well-rounded education. Several graduate programs exist in some form of Master of Arts in Liberal Studies to continue to offer this interdisciplinary course of study.
Materials science: Field that combines the scientific and engineering aspects of materials, particularly solids. It covers the design, discovery and application of new materials by incorporating elements of physics, chemistry, and engineering.
Permaculture: A holistic design science that provides a framework for making design decisions in any sphere of human endeavor, but especially in land use and resource security.
Provenance research: Interdisciplinary research comes into play when clarifying the path of artworks into public and private art collections and also in relation to human remains in natural history collections.
Sports science: Sport science is an interdisciplinary science that researches the problems and manifestations in the field of sport and movement in cooperation with a number of other sciences, such as sociology, ethics, biology, medicine, biomechanics or pedagogy.
Transport sciences: Transport sciences are a field of science that deals with the relevant problems and events of the world of transport and cooperates with the specialised legal, ecological, technical, psychological or pedagogical disciplines in working out the changes of place of people, goods, messages that characterise them.<ref>Hendrik Ammoser, Mirko Hoppe: Glossary of Transport and Transport Sciences (PDF; 1,3 MB), published in the series Discussion Papers from the Institute of Economics and Transport, Technische Universität Dresden. Dresden 2006. </ref>
Venture research: Venture research is an interdisciplinary research area located in the human sciences that deals with the conscious entering into and experiencing of borderline situations. For this purpose, the findings of evolutionary theory, cultural anthropology, social sciences, behavioral research, differential psychology, ethics or pedagogy are cooperatively processed and evaluated.Siegbert A. Warwitz: Vom Sinn des Wagens. Why people take on dangerous challenges. In: German Alpine Association (ed.): Berg 2006. Tyrolia Publishing House. Munich-Innsbruck-Bolzano. P. 96-111.
Historical examples
There are many examples of when a particular idea, almost in the same period, arises in different disciplines. One case is the shift from the approach of focusing on "specialized segments of attention" (adopting one particular perspective), to the idea of "instant sensory awareness of the whole", an attention to the "total field", a "sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity", an "integral idea of structure and configuration". This has happened in painting (with cubism), physics, poetry, communication and educational theory. According to Marshall McLuhan, this paradigm shift was due to the passage from an era shaped by mechanization, which brought sequentiality, to the era shaped by the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity.
Efforts to simplify and defend the concept
An article in the Social Science Journal attempts to provide a simple, common-sense, definition of interdisciplinarity, bypassing the difficulties of defining that concept and obviating the need for such related concepts as transdisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, and multidisciplinary:
In turn, interdisciplinary richness of any two instances of knowledge, research, or education can be ranked by weighing four variables: number of disciplines involved, the "distance" between them, the novelty of any particular combination, and their extent of integration.
Interdisciplinary knowledge and research are important because:
"Creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge.
Immigrants often make important contributions to their new field.
Disciplinarians often commit errors which can be best detected by people familiar with two or more disciplines.
Some worthwhile topics of research fall in the interstices among the traditional disciplines.
Many intellectual, social, and practical problems require interdisciplinary approaches.
Interdisciplinary knowledge and research serve to remind us of the unity-of-knowledge ideal.
Interdisciplinarians enjoy greater flexibility in their research.
More so than narrow disciplinarians, interdisciplinarians often treat themselves to the intellectual equivalent of traveling in new lands.
Interdisciplinarians may help breach communication gaps in the modern academy, thereby helping to mobilize its enormous intellectual resources in the cause of greater social rationality and justice.
By bridging fragmented disciplines, interdisciplinarians might play a role in the defense of academic freedom."
Quotations
See also
Commensurability (philosophy of science)
Double degree
Encyclopedism
Holism
Holism in science
Integrative learning
Interdiscipline
Interdisciplinary arts
Interdisciplinary teaching
Interprofessional education
Meta-functional expertise
Methodology
Polymath
Science of team science
Social ecological model
Science and technology studies (STS)
Synoptic philosophy
Systems theory
Thematic learning
Periodic table of human sciences in Tinbergen's four questions
Transdisciplinarity
References
Further reading
Association for Interdisciplinary Studies
Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (University of Manchester)
College for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Frank, Roberta: Interdisciplitarity': The First Half Century", Issues in Integrative Studies 6 (1988): 139-151.
Frodeman, R., Klein, J.T., and Mitcham, C. Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press, 2010.
The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington
Gram Vikas (2007) Annual Report, p. 19.
Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies
Indiresan, P.V. (1990) Managing Development: Decentralisation, Geographical Socialism And Urban Replication. India: Sage
Interdisciplinary Arts Department, Columbia College Chicago
Interdisciplinarity and tenure/
Interdisciplinary Studies Project, Harvard University School of Education, Project Zero
Klein, Julie Thompson (1996) Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (University Press of Virginia)
Klein, Julie Thompson (2006) "Resources for interdisciplinary studies." Change, (Mark/April). 52–58
Klein, Julie Thompson and Thorsten Philipp (2023), "Interdisciplinarity" in Handbook Transdisciplinary Learning. Eds. Thorsten Philipp und Tobias Schmohl, 195-204. Bielefeld: transcript. doi: 10.14361/9783839463475-021.
Kockelmans, Joseph J. editor (1979) Interdisciplinarity and Higher Education, The Pennsylvania State University Press .
Yifang Ma, Roberta Sinatra, Michael Szell, Interdisciplinarity: A Nobel Opportunity, November 2018
Gerhard Medicus Gerhard Medicus: Being Human – Bridging the Gap between the Sciences of Body and Mind, Berlin 2017 VWB]
Moran, Joe. (2002). Interdisciplinarity.
Morson, Gary Saul and Morton O. Schapiro (2017). Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities. (Princeton University Press)
NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York, NY
Poverty Action Lab
Rhoten, D. (2003). A multi-method analysis of the social and technical conditions for interdisciplinary collaboration.
School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine
Siskin, L.S. & Little, J.W. (1995). The Subjects in Question. Teachers College Press. about the departmental organization of high schools and efforts to change that.
Stiglitz, Joseph (2002) Globalisation and its Discontents, United States of America, W.W. Norton and Company
Sumner, A and M. Tribe (2008) International Development Studies: Theories and Methods in Research and Practice, London: Sage
Thorbecke, Eric. (2006) "The Evolution of the Development Doctrine, 1950–2005". UNU-WIDER Research Paper No. 2006/155. United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research
Trans- & inter-disciplinary science approaches- A guide to on-line resources on integration and trans- and inter-disciplinary approaches.
Truman State University's Interdisciplinary Studies Program
Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr, eds. 2000. Practicing Interdisciplinarity (University of Toronto Press)
External links
Association for Interdisciplinary Studies
National Science Foundation Workshop Report: Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Innovative Science and Engineering Fields''
Rethinking Interdisciplinarity online conference, organized by the Institut Nicod, CNRS, Paris [broken]
Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas
Labyrinthe. Atelier interdisciplinaire, a journal (in French), with a special issue on La Fin des Disciplines?
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities: An Online Open Access E-Journal, publishing articles on a number of areas
Article about interdisciplinary modeling (in French with an English abstract)
Wolf, Dieter. Unity of Knowledge, an interdisciplinary project
Soka University of America has no disciplinary departments and emphasizes interdisciplinary concentrations in the Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences, International Studies, and Environmental Studies.
SystemsX.ch – The Swiss Initiative in Systems Biology
Tackling Your Inner 5-Year-Old: Saving the world requires an interdisciplinary perspective
Academia
Academic discipline interactions
Knowledge
Occupations
Pedagogy
Philosophy of education | 0.789029 | 0.996882 | 0.786568 |
Problem-posing education | Problem-posing education, coined by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is a method of teaching that emphasizes critical thinking for the purpose of liberation. Freire used problem posing as an alternative to the banking model of education.
Origins
Freire's pedagogy emerged from his observations and experiences working as an instructor in literacy programs with peasant laborers in Brazil. During this work, Freire became aware of the economic, political, and social domination resulting from paternalism. Paternalism leads to a culture of silence, which keeps people from confronting their oppression. He turned this philosophy to pedagogy because "the whole education system was one of the major instruments for the maintenance of this culture of silence".
Freire's philosophy of education centers on critical consciousness, whereby the oppressed recognize the causes of their oppression "so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of fuller humanity". Problem-posing education is the path to critical consciousness.
Freire's work has its roots in the constructivist theory of learning, and specifically the work of Jean Piaget and John Dewey. The constructivist theory holds that knowledge is constructed by individuals by using their experiences, which is what Freire drew upon in developing his pedagogy. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire wrote:
Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world.
Philosophy
The philosophy of problem-posing education is the foundation of modern critical pedagogy. Problem-posing education solves the student–teacher contradiction by recognizing that knowledge is not deposited from one (the teacher) to another (the student) but is instead formulated through dialogue between the two. Freire's argument concludes that "authentic education is not carried on by "A" for "B" or by "A" about "B", but rather by "A" with "B". The representation of knowledge rather than the imposition of it leads to liberation.
Method
As a method of teaching, problem-posing involves "listening ..., dialogue ..., and action". Many models for applying problem-posing in the classroom have been formulated since Freire first coined the term.
One of the most influential models is the book Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching, edited by Ira Shor. When teachers implement problem-posing education in the classroom, they approach students as fellow learners and partners in dialogue (or dialoguers), which creates an atmosphere of hope, love, humility, and trust. This is done through six points of reference:
Learners (students/teachers in dialogue) approach their acts of knowing as grounded in individual experience and circumstance.
Learners approach the historical and cultural world as a transformable reality shaped by human ideological representations of reality.
Learners make connections between their own conditions and the conditions produced through the making of reality.
Learners consider the ways that they can shape this reality through their methods of knowing. This new reality is collective, shared, and shifting.
Learners develop literacy skills that put their ideas into print, thus giving potency to the act of knowing.
Learners identify the myths in the dominant discourse and work to destabilize these myths, ending the cycle of oppression.
Examples
The Montessori method, developed by Maria Montessori, is an example of problem-posing education in an early childhood model.
Ira Shor, a professor of Composition and Rhetoric at CUNY, who has worked closely with Freire, also advocates a problem posing model in his use of critical pedagogy. He has published on the use of contract grading, the physical set-up of the classroom, and the political aspects of student and teacher roles.
James D. Kirylo, in his book, Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, reiterated Freire's thought, and stated that a problem-posing education is one where human beings are viewed as conscious beings who are unfinished, yet in process of becoming.
Other advocates of problem-posing critical pedagogy include Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and bell hooks.
See also
Inquiry-based learning
Problem-based learning
Problem solving
Unschooling
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
Pedagogy | 0.792521 | 0.992 | 0.786181 |
Interactionism | In micro-sociology, interactionism is a theoretical perspective that sees social behavior as an interactive product of the individual and the situation. In other words, it derives social processes (such as conflict, cooperation, identity formation) from social interaction, whereby subjectively held meanings are integral to explaining or understanding social behavior.
This perspective studies the ways in which individuals shape, and are shaped by, society through their interactions. Interactionism thus argues that the individual is an active and conscious piece of the social-context system, rather than merely a passive object in their environment. It believes interactions to be guided by meanings that are attached to the self, to others with whom each individual interacts, and to situations of interaction; all of which are altered in interaction themselves. In this sense, interactionism may stand in contrast to studies of socialization, insofar as interactionism conceives individuals to influence groups at least as much as groups influence individuals.
George Herbert Mead, as an advocate of pragmatism and the subjectivity of social reality, is considered a leader in the development of interactionism. Herbert Blumer expanded on Mead's work and coined the term symbolic interactionism.
Through this perspective (under modern techniques), one may observe human behavior by three parts: trait, situation, and interaction (between trait and situation). 'Trait' refers to the extent to which personality directly affects behaviour, independent of the situation (and therefore consistently across different situations); 'situation' takes into account the extent to which all different people will provide basically the same response to a given situation; and 'interaction' involves the ways in which the same situation affects individual people differently.
Subcategories and scholars
Interactionism has several subcategories:
Classical interactionism
Ethnomethodology
Holistic interactionism
Phenomenology
Social action
Social constructionism
Symbolic interactionism (Blumerian interactionism)
Verstehen
Influential scholars
George Herbert Mead
Charles Cooley
W. I. Thomas
Herbert Blumer
Everett Hughes
Erving Goffman
Anselm Strauss
Ralph Turner
Interactions
Interactionism is micro-sociological perspective that argues meaning to be produced through the interactions of individuals.
The social interaction is a face-to-face process consisting of actions, reactions, and mutual adaptation between two or more individuals, with the goal of communicating with others. (It also includes animal interaction such as mating.) The interaction includes all language (including body language) and mannerisms. If the interaction is in danger of ending before one intends it to, it can be conserved by conforming to the others' expectations, by ignoring certain incidents or by solving apparent problems.
Erving Goffman underlined the importance of control in the interaction: one must attempt to control the others' behaviour during the interaction, in order to attain the information one is seeking and to control the perception of one's own image. Important concepts in the field of interactionism include the "social role" and Goffman's "presentation of self."
Methodology
Interactionists are interested in how people see themselves in the broader social context and how they act within society.
In extreme cases, interactionists would deny social class to be an issue, arguing that people from one class cannot be generalized to all think in one way. Instead, these interactionists believe everyone has different attitudes, values, culture, and beliefs. Therefore, it is the duty of the sociologist to carry out the study within society; they set out to gather qualitative data.
Rejection of positivist methods
Interactionists reject statistical (quantitative) data, a method preferred by post-positivists. These methods include: experiments, structured interviews, questionnaires, non-participant observation, and secondary sources. This rejection is based in a few basic criticisms, namely:
Statistical data is not "valid;" in other words, these methods do not provide people with a true picture of society on the topic being researched.
Quantitative research is biased and therefore not objective. Whilst the sociologist would be distant, it is argued that the existence of a hypothesis implies that the research is biased towards a pre-set conclusion (e.g., Rosenhan experiment in 1973). Therefore, such research is rejected by interactionists, who claim that it is artificial and also raises ethical issues to experiment on people.
Preferred interactionist methods
Interactionists prefer several methods to contrast those of structuralism, particularly: unstructured interviews, covert participant observation, overt participant observation, and content analysis via analysing historical, public, and personal documents.
Interactionist methods generally reject the absolute need to provide statistics. Statistics allows cause-and-effect to be shown, as well as isolating variables so that relationships and trends can be distinguished over time. Instead, interactionists want to "go deep" to explain society, however this draws criticisms, including:
Information and sociological research cannot be compared or contrasted, hence one can never truly understand how society changes.
Data is not reliable.
Gathered information is interpreted (hence the name "Interpretivist") by a sociologist, therefore it is not objective.
Despite these criticisms, interactionist methods do allow flexibility. The fact that there is no hypothesis means that the sociologist is not rooted in an attempt to prove dogma or theory. Instead, researchers react to what they discover, not assuming anything about society. (This is not entirely true: there can be hypotheses for many studies using interactionist methods. The researcher may then be inclined to observe certain events happening while ignoring the bigger picture. This will still bias the results, if such studies are not well conducted. This is arguably why some theorists have turned to this method. It also shows how human behaviour is affected and altered through interactions i.e. socialization.)
Case studies
Field experiments:
In the Rosenhan experiment, David Rosenhan (1973) found 8 normal researchers to carry out a study, at 12 hospitals, of the treatment of mental health in California. Critics argue that the method was unethical, and the vast majority of interactionists concur.
Unstructured interviews:
Aaron Cicourel and John Kitsuse (1963) conducted an ethnomethodology study in American schools.
Howard Becker (1971)
William Labov (1973) conducted a study of sociolinguistics.
Joan Smith (1998)
Participant observation:
John Howard Griffin
Michael Haralambos.
Links to other theories
Interactionism, or the idea that individuals have more awareness, skill and power to change their own situation, links to several other theories.
Neo-Marxism is a loose term for various 20th-century approaches that amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, usually by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions, such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism.
Pluralism is the idea that the "public gets what the public wants." It is the notion that our lives offer choice like a representative democracy. This idea of consumer choice means that each individual has power as a consumer to change any aspect of life if he/she wishes to do so. The situation that exists is, according to the theory, a reflection of the norms, values and beliefs of the majority of people. It fits with the idea of individual power, although interactionist sociologists may not accept the idea that we are all labeled as "consumers".
See also
Interpersonal relationship
Niklas Luhmann
Situational ethics
Social interactionist theory
References
Sociological theories | 0.798337 | 0.98361 | 0.785253 |
Nomothetic and idiographic | Nomothetic and idiographic are terms used by Neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband to describe two distinct approaches to knowledge, each one corresponding to a different intellectual tendency, and each one corresponding to a different branch of academia. To say that Windelband supported that last dichotomy is a consequent misunderstanding of his own thought. For him, any branch of science and any discipline can be handled by both methods as they offer two integrating points of view.
Nomothetic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to generalize, and is typical for the natural sciences. It describes the effort to derive laws that explain types or categories of objective phenomena, in general.
Idiographic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to specify, and is typical for the humanities. It describes the effort to understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often cultural or subjective phenomena.
Use in the social sciences
The problem of whether to use nomothetic or idiographic approaches is most sharply felt in the social sciences, whose subject are unique individuals (idiographic perspective), but who have certain general properties or behave according to general rules (nomothetic perspective).
Often, nomothetic approaches are quantitative, and idiographic approaches are qualitative, although the "Personal Questionnaire" developed by Monte B. Shapiro and its further developments (e.g. Discan scale and PSYCHLOPS) are both quantitative and idiographic. Another very influential quantitative but idiographic tool is the Repertory grid when used with elicited constructs and perhaps elicited elements. Personal cognition (D.A. Booth) is idiographic, qualitative and quantitative, using the individual's own narrative of action within situation to scale the ongoing biosocial cognitive processes in units of discrimination from norm (with M.T. Conner 1986, R.P.J. Freeman 1993 and O. Sharpe 2005). Methods of "rigorous idiography" allow probabilistic evaluation of information transfer even with fully idiographic data.
In psychology, idiographic describes the study of the individual, who is seen as a unique agent with a unique life history, with properties setting them apart from other individuals (see idiographic image). A common method to study these unique characteristics is an (auto)biography, i.e. a narrative that recounts the unique sequence of events that made the person who they are. Nomothetic describes the study of classes or cohorts of individuals. Here the subject is seen as an exemplar of a population and their corresponding personality traits and behaviours. It is widely held that the terms idiographic and nomothetic were introduced to American psychology by Gordon Allport in 1937, but Hugo Münsterberg used them in his 1898 presidential address at the American Psychological Association meeting. This address was published in Psychological Review in 1899.
Theodore Millon stated that when spotting and diagnosing personality disorders, first clinicians start with the nomothetic perspective and look for various general scientific laws; then when they believe they have identified a disorder, they switch their view to the idiographic perspective to focus on the specific individual and his or her unique traits.
In sociology, the nomothetic model tries to find independent variables that account for the variations in a given phenomenon (e.g. What is the relationship between timing/frequency of childbirth and education?). Nomothetic explanations are probabilistic and usually incomplete. The idiographic model focuses on a complete, in-depth understanding of a single case (e.g. Why do I not have any pets?).
In anthropology, idiographic describes the study of a group, seen as an entity, with specific properties that set it apart from other groups. Nomothetic refers to the use of generalization rather than specific properties in the same context.
See also
Nomological
References
Further reading
Cone, J. D. (1986). "Idiographic, nomothetic, and related perspectives in behavioral assessment." In: R. O. Nelson & S. C. Hayes (eds.): Conceptual foundations of behavioral assessment (pp. 111–128). New York: Guilford.
Thomae, H. (1999). "The nomothetic-idiographic issue: Some roots and recent trends." International Journal of Group Tensions, 28(1), 187–215.
Concepts in epistemology | 0.794873 | 0.987158 | 0.784666 |
Situated learning | Situated learning is a theory that explains an individual's acquisition of professional skills and includes research on apprenticeship into how legitimate peripheral participation leads to membership in a community of practice. Situated learning "takes as its focus the relationship between learning and the social situation in which it occurs".
The theory is distinguished from alternative views of learning which define learning as the acquisition of propositional knowledge. Lave and Wenger situated learning in certain forms of social co-participation and instead of asking what kinds of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are involved, they focused on the kinds of social engagements that provide the proper context and facilitate learning.
Overview
Situated learning was first proposed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger as a model of learning in a community of practice. At its simplest, situated learning is learning that takes place in the same context in which it is applied. For example, the workplace is considered as a discernible community of practice operating as a context wherein newcomers assimilate norms, behavior, values, relationships, and beliefs.
Lave and Wenger (1991) argues that learning is a social process whereby knowledge is co-constructed; they suggest that such learning is situated in a specific context and embedded within a particular social and physical environment.
Against the prevalent view of learning that involves the cognitive process in which individuals are respectively engaged in as learners, Lave and Wenger viewed learning as participation in the social world, suggesting learning as an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice. In their view, learning is the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice and move toward full participation in it. Learners' participation in the community of practice always entails situated negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world. They understand and experience the world through the constant interactions by which they reconstruct their identity (i.e., becoming a different person) and evolve the form of their membership in the community as the relations between newcomers and old-timers who share the social practice change. In their view, motivation is situated because learners are naturally motivated by their growing value of participation and their desires to become full practitioners.
Lave and Wenger assert that situated learning "is not an educational form, much less a pedagogical strategy". However, since their writing, others have advocated different pedagogies that include experiential and situated activity:
Workshops, kitchens, greenhouses and gardens used as classrooms
Stand-up role playing in the real-world setting, including most military training (much of which, though, takes a behaviorist approach)
Field trips including archaeological digs and participant-observer studies in an alien culture
On the job training including apprenticeship and cooperative education
Sports practice, music practice, and art are situated learning by definition, as the exact actions in the real setting are those of practice – with the same equipment or instruments
Many of the original examples from Lave and Wenger concerned adult learners, and situated learning still has a particular resonance for adult education. For example, Hansman shows how adult learners discover, shape, and make explicit their own knowledge through situated learning within a community of practice.
History
In the 2003 article "The Nature of Situated Learning", Paula Vincini argued that "the theory behind situated learning or situated cognition arises from the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and cognitive science." She summarized:
In 1996 John R. Anderson et al. had traced back the origin of the concept to the "cognitive revolution" in the 1960s, They argued:
Vincini (2003) continued to explain, that "the social interaction that occurs in communities of practice between experts and novices is crucial to the theory of situated cognition or learning. In Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave and Wenger emphasize that novices begin learning by observing members of the community and then slowly move from the periphery of the community to fully participating members."
Elements
Put in terms developed by William Rankin, the major elements in situated learning are content (facts and processes of a task), context (situations, values, environmental cues), and community (the group where the learner will create and negotiate). Situated learning also involves participation (where a learner works together with others in order to solve a problem).
Situated learning deals with how one's knowledge develops over the course of an activity and how they create and interpret.
Content:
In situated learning, no importance is given to the retention of the content. Rather, situated learning stresses reflective and higher-order thinking where the results are used in solving problems faced in daily life. Situated learning is thus more application-based.
Context:
Context provides a framework for the usage of the product or the result at the right time, place, and situation in the social, psychological and material environment. Context creates a platform to examine the learning experiences.
Community:
Community helps the learner to create, interpret, reflect and form meanings. It provides opportunities to share experiences among learners and also to interact.
Participation:
It is where the interchange of ideas, problem-solving and engagement of the learners take place. This takes place in a social setting which includes reflecting, interpreting, and negotiating among the participants of the community.
Claims
Situated learning means to have a thought and action which is used at the right time and place. In this approach, the content is learned through doing activities. It is dilemma-driven, it challenges the intellectual and psychomotor skills of a learner. Situated learning contributes to bringing about the relationship between classroom situations and real-life situations outside the classroom.
In adult classroom, the conditions are so created that it is complex and unclear, from which they gain experiences and they learn.
There are four claims by Brown, Collins, and Dugid:
Action is grounded in the concrete situations in which it occurs.
Knowledge does not transfer between tasks.
Training by abstraction is of little use.
Learning is a social phenomenon.
Implications of these claims for instruction
To provide authenticated tasks in the learning environment: It is said that authenticated task involves two stages that are an objective and data in the setting also to the level of which students are performing the tasks which are authenticated.
Simulated apprenticeship: Students can become apprentices in a given discipline by gaining knowledge and skills.
Anchored instructions: It emphasizes the conditions laid by situated learning. It gives a situated context to solve the problem.
Learning communities: Change of the classroom culture from more of knowledge supplying to a learning community where students focus on knowledge building and solve problems that they are interested in.
Assessment in appropriate place: It shows an individual's performance in different situations and also focuses on the process and product.
Topics
Situated learning was first projected by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger as a model of learning in a community of practice. This type of learning allows an individual (students/learner) to learn by socialization, visualization, and imitation.
Situated cognition and problem-based learning
Learning begins with people trying to solve problems. When learning is problem-based, people explore real-life situations to find answers, or to solve the problems. Hung's study focuses on how important being social is to learning.
In believing that learning is social, Hung adds that learners who gravitate to communities with shared interests tend to benefit from the knowledge of those who are more knowledgeable than they are. He also says that these social experiences provide people with authentic experiences. When students are in these real-life situations they are compelled to learn. Hung concludes that taking a problem-based learning approach to designing a curriculum carries students to a higher level of thinking.
Rethinking education in the age of technology
In the 2009 article "Rethinking education in the age of technology", Collins & Halverson argued:
Situated learning is becoming more involved with technology in ways to help individuals learn information differently than they have in the past. The model of learning a skill through technology mimics how individuals learned in the past from a professional in that skill. In the past when individuals learned about a particular topic it was done in person, in a hands-on environment. Technology makes it possible to do these same things using a computer or any other similar device. Interaction through the computer between individuals is one more way to make situated learning more successful as well as give students an opportunity to have another venue through which to learn. In fact,
Training teachers to integrate technology into the classroom curriculum
Allowing students to have the opportunity to participate, interact and inject their own ideas is a way to obviously grow and make informed decisions. Gee has proven this with the use of video games. It enables the learner to build their social and communication skills as well as develop their cognition abilities. Computer-based learning software such as SimCity has permitted users to utilize situated learning by allowing them to run their own city and become dictators whereby they have to make informed decisions that will either deteriorate their people or help them thrive. As stated, more effective learning environments are built this way.
Students process information by visualizing, hearing, reasoning and reflecting so they tend to learn more easily by having models to go by or imitate. In some study cases, teachers have gone as far as to make the classroom environment as homey as possible, whether it is a computerized setup or a physical setup. It gives the students the look and feel of being at home in a comfortable setting which allows them to feel and learn freely. It has been proven to have a great impact on the students learning abilities. This is another innovative way of utilizing situated learning.
When students complete their education, they will be expected to use the skills they have learned throughout their educational career in their professional career. It is imperative that they are able to sufficiently utilize these skills to complete work goals. Through situated learning, students will be able to learn the skills and also be able to accurately use the skills they have learned. Situated learning allows students to gain experience through doing in some way and from this experience they are able to be productive in their lives after they have graduated.
After graduation
Situated learning continues after graduation. According to Halverson (2009):
In situations where situated learning is not possible, simulations can offer an alternative way to provide employees with an authentic learning experience. Situated learning allows employees to immediately apply what they've learned in the context of performing job-related tasks. Learning occurs among peers who perform the same function. Problem-solving and the generation of new ideas can be better supported in a social learning environment where all of the stakeholders experience the positive effects of ongoing learning. Often, the benefits of situated learning extend well beyond the immediate group of practitioners throughout the organization and the broader community. Richardson notes that, in an educational setting, teachers can use collaborative technologies in their own practice in order to gain a better understanding of how to integrate these technologies in the classroom.
New tradition of online instruction
Many online learning courses still use the traditional teacher-directed, textbook-oriented curriculum that is compartmentalized by discipline. Many universities have begun to recognize that authentic situation learning must occur in online courses. A key aspect is to recognize that the unit itself must be an authentic activity and not just made up of disjointed activities.
Utley presents Hung's argument that:
While it may be possible for adult learners to gain knowledge and apply theories presented in other learning environments to what they experience in a real-world setting, situated learning offers an opportunity to work with others in considering how to best apply new concepts related to the specific context of their practice. While theoretical knowledge provides a foundation, the insights and skills developed through authentic practice can lead to more meaningful learning.
The increase in learning centers across the country is evidence of how the U.S., and the world really, has morphed into a society of continuing learners. Much of this learning is happening in centers described by Halverson and Collins. Examples of these learning centers, which are perfect examples of situated learning, include local libraries and job training centers. These learning centers are providing adults in particular with the kind of social interaction they need to extend their learning. This supports Hung's findings that people learn by simply being in certain situations with others.
As organizations re-evaluate how they accomplish necessary workplace training with limited funds, they depend on informal learning that occurs within specific areas of practice to ensure that employees develop the skills they need to be effective.
The new world of work
Reliance on structured, theoretical training programs, especially offered by third-party providers, is decreasing, and companies are finding ways to facilitate authentic learning opportunities within their communities of practice. Wagner notes that financial considerations have led to fewer managers, so organizations are looking to those who actually do the work for ideas about improving their products and services.
When determining whether abstract or specific instruction is going to be more productive it is important to look at which method will be most useful to the individuals that are learning the skill. If students receive specific instruction they are going to be capable of performing those set tasks only. When students are taught abstract instruction they are exposed to more skills that will be useful in helping them obtain a variety of jobs but at the same time, they may have training that is not necessarily needed. When money is "wasted" by educating individuals on things that are not needed for their future it is possible to look at the situation and realize that the monies could have been of more use in giving another individual more specific instruction.
Our students are coming out of school unprepared and it seems that if they were in an educational setting where situated learning was implemented as much as possible, they would be better prepared for their futures. Based on Wagner's research we are less prepared than other countries as far as education goes, which is not necessarily something new, but it is definitely something that seems too far from changing. When our students are put into situations where they learn by doing they most likely will be more successful than if they were just told how something needed to be done.
Web tools for classrooms
In the 2010 article "Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms", W. Richardson stipulated:
Teachers/instructors have come to realize just how important it is to utilize the web as a teaching tool for the new generation of students (digital natives). One digital tool that can be used is a weblog. It gives the students an opportunity to think, research, and realize that they can write and have a voice that can be viewed and read by many who may or may not share the same idea. When students blog, they are creating journals/text entries which are considered to be English (writing) and reading; they also have the opportunity to utilize other learning tools such as videos, photos, and other digital media.
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Ning allow learners, once they move beyond the personal connections, to embrace a community where they can learn from each other. Social interaction is an important part of the learning process. As technology has grown and become an integral part of the lives of children, teens, and young adults, older adults have been forced to adapt. For example, as more adults have been forced to move through the job market recently, they've turned to technology to develop new skills and to find work. Even fast-food restaurants require job seekers to complete employment applications online.
Students learn in different manners and visualization or situated learning seems to be the most used of all learning styles. Students are able to mimic what they see and hear which enables them to retain information for the long term. Through visualizations of different types of computer applications; the student's knowledge is defined by the social process of interacting and doing. It allows the students to learn naturally as a result of social behavior. The computer application acts as a guide while the students learn naturally from their own experience. As always, situated learning accelerates a student's learning process and ability.
Web-based learning tools provide integrated environments of various technologies to support diverse educators' and learners' needs via the internet. The goals of these tools are to enhance face-to-face instruction and make distance learning are courses available. Each of these tools offers similar components, such as course note-posting, assignments submission, quizzes, and communication features. The primary motivation for developing these tools is to make it easier for instructors who have very little knowledge of HTML and web navigation to put course materials on the web. There are significant drawbacks as well of using these tools. For example, these systems course instructors and course administrators to use predetermined navigation models and course formats. These constraints may have a negative impact on their flexibility and usability for administrators, teachers, and students. A tool should be as such suitable for diverse courses campus-wide. Accordingly, a web-based learning tool should be able to provide facilities for courses, news, and announcements, and area to store course notes and related information synchronous and asynchronous tools such as e-mail, bulletin board, and chat facilities as well as features for creating and administering online quizzes and online submissions. Web tools also support inquiry-based learning suitable for teachers and students both involving the essence of inquiry-based learning.
Inquiry-based learning describes approaches to learning that are based on the investigation of questions, scenarios, or problems-often assisted by a facilitator. Inquiries will understand and study issues and questions to improve their knowledge or solutions. It includes problem-based learning and is used in small-scale investigation and projects as well as research. It will be much more beneficial for students because involvement in learning results in the improvement of possessing skills and attitudes that permit you to seek solutions and issues while you build your new knowledge. There are numerous web tools that support inquiry-based learning which teachers can use effectively to make all students interact in the class.
Web-based learning tools are also referred to as learning objects, interactive web-based tools that support learning by enhancing, amplifying, and guiding the cognitive processes of learners. It offers two noteworthy features that can reduce the impact of potential obstacles teachers face when using technology. Firstly it is designed to focus on specific concepts, making them easy to learn and use and more attractive to busy educators who have little time to learn more complex, advanced software packages. Ease of use also makes it more palatable to teachers who are apprehensive about using technology. Secondly, a wide range of web-based learning tools exists including drill and practice assessment tools or tutorials, video case studies or supports, general web-based multimedia resources, and self-contained interactive tools in a specific content area. In contrast with other learning technologies burdened with implementation challenges and costs, web-based learning tools are readily accessible over the net and teachers need not worry about extra cost or not having the latest version. It is speculated that the broad selection of readily accessible web-based learning tools will make it easier for teachers to integrate WBLT's into a classroom environment. Some of the best interactive web tools for educators.
Project-based learning
Project-based learning simulates the experiences that learners would have while performing the functions required in a job, which allows the opportunity to immediately apply what they've learned and benefit from an organization's existing knowledge base. With recent advances in technology, it is possible to facilitate the social aspects of learning by virtually connecting individuals within a distributed community of practice in the online environment.
While these are skills that teachers are trying to develop in young learners, adults have already developed and used these skills. They have sharpened these skills through work, higher education, raising children or through marriage. As lifelong learners dealing with real-life problems, a project-based approach is what develops when they come together with other adults at brick-and-mortar learning centers or in social networking communities on the web.
Evaluation
Situated learning activities are collaborative and complex therefore traditional methods of assessment are not sufficient. A few of the trends followed in evaluating the situated learning could be:
Focus on the process rather than the products:
The process includes the content so this can be assessed by a few methods such as concept map and videotape coding.
Non linear measures:
It means that the answers by the learner should be able to accept and defend multiple perspectives. They should measure the attitude, efficacy, perceptual skills and higher-order thinking.
Using technology:
Collaboration with technology will allow to track the students activities like time spent on planning, collecting information with respect to solve a problem etc.
See also
Cognitive apprenticeship
Constructivism (philosophy of education)
Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)
Educational technology
Experiential learning
Instructional design
Situated cognition
Transformative learning
References
External links
Foulger, T.S. (2005). Innovating Professional Development Standards: A Shift to Utilize Communities of Practice. Essays in Education, 14. Retrieved Nov 11, 2007, from https://web.archive.org/web/20081120034733/http://www.usca.edu/essays/vol14summer2005.html
Situated Learning in Adult Education. ERIC Digest.
New Ways of Learning in the Workplace. ERIC Digest.
Educational technology
Learning | 0.800415 | 0.980209 | 0.784574 |
Social constructionism | Social constructionism is a term used in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory. The term can serve somewhat different functions in each field; however, the foundation of this theoretical framework suggests various facets of social reality—such as concepts, beliefs, norms, and values—are formed through continuous interactions and negotiations among society's members, rather than empirical observation of physical reality. The theory of social constructionism posits that much of what individuals perceive as 'reality' is actually the outcome of a dynamic process of construction influenced by social conventions and structures.
Unlike phenomena that are innately determined or biologically predetermined, these social constructs are collectively formulated, sustained, and shaped by the social contexts in which they exist. These constructs significantly impact both the behavior and perceptions of individuals, often being internalized based on cultural narratives, whether or not these are empirically verifiable. In this two-way process of reality construction, individuals not only interpret and assimilate information through their social relations but also contribute to shaping existing societal narratives.
Examples of social constructs range widely, encompassing the assigned value of money, conceptions of concept of self/self-identity, beauty standards, gender, language, race, ethnicity, social class, social hierarchy, nationality, religion, social norms, the modern calendar and other units of time, marriage, education, citizenship, stereotypes, femininity and masculinity, social institutions, and even the idea of 'social construct' itself. These constructs are not universal truths but are flexible entities that can vary dramatically across different cultures and societies. They arise from collaborative consensus and are shaped and maintained through collective human interactions, cultural practices, and shared beliefs. This articulates the view that people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to validate those concepts, meaning without a society these constructs would cease to exist.
Overview
A social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.
The social construction of target populations refers to the cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy.
Social constructionism posits that the meanings of phenomena do not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic representation that people develop about them throughout their history, and which becomes their shared reality. From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions to other definitions) rather than to an external reality.
Origins
In the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne wrote that, "We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things." In 1886 or 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche put it similarly: "Facts do not exist, only interpretations." In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann said, "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment. Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones." Lippman's "environment" might be called "reality", and his "pseudo-environment" seems equivalent to what today is called "constructed reality".
Social constructionism has more recently been rooted in "symbolic interactionism" and "phenomenology". With Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality published in 1966, this concept found its hold. More than four decades later, much theory and research pledged itself to the basic tenet that people "make their social and cultural worlds at the same time these worlds make them." It is a viewpoint that uproots social processes "simultaneously playful and serious, by which reality is both revealed and concealed, created and destroyed by our activities." It provides a substitute to the "Western intellectual tradition" where the researcher "earnestly seeks certainty in a representation of reality by means of propositions."
In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents"; furthermore, reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry." Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy." Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the linguistic turn" and more recently the "turn to discourse theory". The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it."
A broad definition of social constructionism has its supporters and critics in the organizational sciences. A constructionist approach to various organizational and managerial phenomena appear to be more commonplace and on the rise.
Andy Lock and Tom Strong trace some of the fundamental tenets of social constructionism back to the work of the 18th-century Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist Giambattista Vico.
Berger and Luckmann give credit to Max Scheler as a large influence as he created the idea of sociology of knowledge which influenced social construction theory.
According to Lock and Strong, other influential thinkers whose work has affected the development of social constructionism are: Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin Volosinov, Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Ken Gergen, Mary Gergen, Rom Harre, and John Shotter.
Applications
Personal construct psychology
Since its appearance in the 1950s, personal construct psychology (PCP) has mainly developed as a constructivist theory of personality and a system of transforming individual meaning-making processes, largely in therapeutic contexts. It was based around the notion of persons as scientists who form and test theories about their worlds. Therefore, it represented one of the first attempts to appreciate the constructive nature of experience and the meaning persons give to their experience. Social constructionism (SC), on the other hand, mainly developed as a form of a critique, aimed to transform the oppressing effects of the social meaning-making processes. Over the years, it has grown into a cluster of different approaches, with no single SC position. However, different approaches under the generic term of SC are loosely linked by some shared assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality.
A usual way of thinking about the relationship between PCP and SC is treating them as two separate entities that are similar in some aspects, but also very different in others. This way of conceptualizing this relationship is a logical result of the circumstantial differences of their emergence. In subsequent analyses these differences between PCP and SC were framed around several points of tension, formulated as binary oppositions: personal/social; individualist/relational; agency/structure; constructivist/constructionist. Although some of the most important issues in contemporary psychology are elaborated in these contributions, the polarized positioning also sustained the idea of a separation between PCP and SC, paving the way for only limited opportunities for dialogue between them.
Reframing the relationship between PCP and SC may be of use in both the PCP and the SC communities. On one hand, it extends and enriches SC theory and points to benefits of applying the PCP "toolkit" in constructionist therapy and research. On the other hand, the reframing contributes to PCP theory and points to new ways of addressing social construction in therapeutic conversations.
Educational psychology
Like social constructionism, social constructivism states that people work together to construct artifacts. While social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created through the social interactions of a group, social constructivism focuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of his or her interactions in a group.
Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of Lev Vygotsky, Ernst von Glasersfeld and A. Sullivan Palincsar.
Systemic therapy
Some of the systemic models that use social constructionism include narrative therapy and solution-focused therapy.
Poverty
Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner (2013), in Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960-2008, examine how media has framed the poor in the U.S. and how negative framing has caused a shift in government spending. Since 1960, the government has decreasingly spent money on social services such as welfare. Evidence shows the media framing the poor more negatively since 1960, with more usage of words such as lazy and fraud.
Crime
Potter and Kappeler (1996), in their introduction to Constructing Crime: Perspective on Making News And Social Problems wrote, "Public opinion and crime facts demonstrate no congruence. The reality of crime in the United States has been subverted to a constructed reality as ephemeral as swamp gas."
Criminology has long focussed on why and how society defines criminal behavior and crime in general. While looking at crime through a social constructionism lens, there is evidence to support that criminal acts are a social construct where abnormal or deviant acts become a crime based on the views of society. Another explanation of crime as it relates to social constructionism are individual identity constructs that result in deviant behavior. If someone has constructed the identity of a "madman" or "criminal" for themselves based on a society's definition, it may force them to follow that label, resulting in criminal behavior.
History and development
Berger and Luckmann
Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common-sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. In their model, people interact on the understanding that their perceptions of everyday life are shared with others, and this common knowledge of reality is in turn reinforced by these interactions. Since this common-sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality, particularly for future generations who were not involved in the original process of negotiation. For example, as parents negotiate rules for their children to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced "givens" that they cannot change. Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism has its roots in phenomenology. It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching of Alfred Schutz, who was also Berger's PhD adviser.
Narrative turn
During the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of Michel Foucault and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice. This particularly affected the emergent sociology of science and the growing field of science and technology studies. In particular, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar, and others used social constructionism to relate what science has typically characterized as objective facts to the processes of social construction. Their goal was to show that human subjectivity imposes itself on the facts taken as objective, not solely the other way around. A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. At the same time, social constructionism shaped studies of technologythe Sofield, especially on the social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel, etc. Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructionist accounts. Sociologists such as Sal Restivo and Randall Collins, mathematicians including Reuben Hersh and Philip J. Davis, and philosophers including Paul Ernest have published social constructionist treatments of mathematics.
Postmodernism
Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the ongoing mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at a time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity. These worldviews are gradually crystallized by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions; given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy; maintained by therapies and socialization; and subjectively internalized by upbringing and education. Together, these become part of the identity of social citizens.
In the book The Reality of Social Construction, the British sociologist Dave Elder-Vass places the development of social constructionism as one outcome of the legacy of postmodernism. He writes "Perhaps the most widespread and influential product of this process [coming to terms with the legacy of postmodernism] is social constructionism, which has been booming [within the domain of social theory] since the 1980s."
Criticisms
Critics argue that social constructionism rejects the influences of biology on behaviour and culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behaviour. Scientific estimates of nature versus nurture and gene–environment interactions have shown almost always substantial influences of both genetics and social, often in an inseparable manner. Claims that genetics does not affect humans are seen as outdated by most contemporary scholars of human development.
Social constructionism has also been criticized for having an overly narrow focus on society and culture as a causal factor in human behavior, excluding the influence of innate biological tendencies. This criticism has been explored by psychologists such as Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate as well as by Asian studies scholar Edward Slingerland in What Science Offers the Humanities. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides used the term standard social science model to refer to social theories that they believe fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain.
In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal Social Text deliberately written to be incomprehensible but including phrases and jargon typical of the articles published by the journal. The submission, which was published, was an experiment to see if the journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." In 1999, Sokal, with coauthor Jean Bricmont published the book Fashionable Nonsense, which criticized postmodernism and social constructionism.
Philosopher Paul Boghossian has also written against social constructionism. He follows Ian Hacking's argument that many adopt social constructionism because of its potentially liberating stance: if things are the way that they are only because of human social conventions, as opposed to being so naturally, then it should be possible to change them into how people would rather have them be. He then states that social constructionists argue that people should refrain from making absolute judgements about what is true and instead state that something is true in the light of this or that theory. Countering this, he states:
Woolgar and Pawluch argue that constructionists tend to "ontologically gerrymander" social conditions in and out of their analysis.
Alan Sokal also criticize social constructionism for contradicting itself on the knowability of the existence of societies. The argument is that if there was no knowable objective reality, there would be no way of knowing whether or not societies exist and if so, what their rules and other characteristics are. One example of the contradiction is that the claim that "phenomena must be measured by what is considered average in their respective cultures, not by an objective standard." Since there are languages that have no word for average and therefore the whole application of the concept of "average" to such cultures contradict social constructionism's own claim that cultures can only be measured by their own standards. Social constructionism is a diverse field with varying stances on these matters. Some social constructionists do acknowledge the existence of an objective reality but argue that human understanding and interpretation of that reality are socially constructed. Others might contend that while the term average may not exist in all languages, equivalent or analogous concepts might still be applied within those cultures, thereby not completely invalidating the principle of cultural relativity in measuring phenomena.
See also
References
Further reading
Books
Boghossian, P. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford University Press, 2006. Online review: Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor, 1967; ).
Best, J. Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, New York: Gruyter, 1989
Burr, V. Social Constructionism, 2nd ed. Routledge 2003.
Ellul, J. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965. New York: Random House/ Vintage 1973
Ernst, P., (1998), Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics; Albany, New York: State University of New York Press
Gergen, K., An Invitation to Social Construction. Los Angeles: Sage, 2015 (3d edition, first 1999).
Glasersfeld, E. von, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 1995.
Hacking, I., The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999;
Hibberd, F. J., Unfolding Social Constructionism. New York: Springer, 2005.
Kukla, A., Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science, London: Routledge, 2000.
Lawrence, T. B. and Phillips, N. Constructing Organizational Life: How Social-Symbolic Work Shapes Selves, Organizations, and Institutions. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lowenthal, P., & Muth, R. Constructivism. In E. F. Provenzo, Jr. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the social and cultural foundations of education (pp. 177–179). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008.
McNamee, S. and Gergen, K. (Eds.). Therapy as Social Construction. London: Sage, 1992 .
McNamee, S. and Gergen, K. Relational Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2005. .
Penman, R. Reconstructing communicating. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.
Poerksen, B. The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic, 2004.
Restivo, S. and Croissant, J., "Social Constructionism in Science and Technology Studies" (Handbook of Constructionist Research, ed. J.A. Holstein & J.F. Gubrium) Guilford, NY 2008, 213–229;
Schmidt, S. J., Histories and Discourses: Rewriting Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic, 2007.
Searle, J., The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995; .
Shotter, J. Conversational realities: Constructing life through language. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993.
Stewart, J., Zediker, K. E., & Witteborn, S. Together: Communicating interpersonally – A social construction approach (6th ed). Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury, 2005.
Weinberg, D. Contemporary Social Constructionism: Key Themes. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014.
Willard, C. A., Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; .
Wilson, D. S. (2005), "Evolutionary Social Constructivism". In J. Gottshcall and D. S. Wilson, (Eds.), The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press; . Full text
Articles
Drost, Alexander. "Borders. A Narrative Turn – Reflections on Concepts, Practices and their Communication", in: Olivier Mentz and Tracey McKay (eds.), Unity in Diversity. European Perspectives on Borders and Memories, Berlin 2017, pp. 14–33.
Mallon, R, "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
Shotter, J., & Gergen, K. J., Social construction: Knowledge, self, others, and continuing the conversation. In S. A. Deetz (Ed.), Communication Yearbook, 17 (pp. 3–33). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.
External links
Communication theory
Consensus reality
Human behavior
Human communication
Social concepts
Social epistemology
Sociology of knowledge
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Social environment | The social environment, social context, sociocultural context or milieu refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact. The interaction may be in person or through communication media, even anonymous or one-way, and may not imply equality of social status. The social environment is a broader concept than that of social class or social circle.
The physical and social environment is a determining factor in active and healthy aging in place, being a central factor in the study of environmental gerontology.
Moreover, the social environment is the setting where people live and interact. It includes the buildings and roads around them, the jobs available, and how money flows; relationships between people, like who has power and how different groups get along; and culture, like art, religion, and traditions. It includes the physical world and the way people relate to each other and their communities.
Components
The physical environment is the ever-changing natural world, including weather, land, and natural resources. Floods or earthquakes can alter the landscape, affecting how plants and animals live. Human interaction with nature can also have an impact. For example, logging can change the weather in that area, pollution can make water dirty, and habitat fragmentation caused by human activity makes it so animals cannot move around as easily, which can cause problems for their families.
Social relations are how people interact with each other. Sociologist Emile Durkheim thought that if these interactions were disrupted, it could affect how we feel. Social relations can offer social support, which means the different ways people help each other out. This could be emotional support, like comforting someone when they are sad, or practical support, like helping with chores. Being part of groups, like families or clubs, can also make people feel good about ourselves; conversely, not having good relationships or having too many problems with others can make them feel bad. So, having good connections with people can make us happier and healthier.
"Sociocultural" basically means the mix of society and culture that affects how people think, feel, and act, which can also affect our health. It includes things like how wealth, education, career, cultural background, race, ethnicity, language, and beliefs shape people's identity and health.
Interpersonal relationships are how people connect with others emotionally and socially. When someone has a mental disorder, it often affects how they get along with people. Sometimes, the disorder itself can cause conflicts with others. These conflicts can appear in different areas of our relationships.
Family relationships are important because having a supportive family makes life easier. They're there for you no matter what, whether things are going great or not so great. When life gets tough, hearing comforting words from your mom, spouse, or siblings can help you feel better and give you the courage to face challenges. In this post, we're going to talk about why family is important, what makes a good family, and how to make your relationships with family members stronger.
Social relationships are the connections between people like family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. When scientists study how relationships affect human health and behavior, they usually focus on these close connections, not just formal ones like with doctors or lawyers. They are interested in how people interact with their social circle and how it impacts them overall.
Work relationship: Work friendships are special connections between people at work. They are important because they affect the people involved and the company they work for. Friendships at work play a big role in how well someone does their job and how motivated they are. These relationships can be complicated, happening both at work and outside of it, and they can be good or bad. Not having any work friends can make someone feel really lonely and left out.
Religious relationship: Religion can have a significant impact on relationships. Couples who share the same religious beliefs can find comfort and support in their faith. For example, they might pray together when they are arguing, which can help them deal with their feelings. Studies have shown that couples who pray together tend to focus more on what they have in common rather than their own individual worries. Having a strong religious foundation can also help couples get through difficult situations, like cheating. They might feel like their relationship is special because they believe it is part of God's plan for them. Overall, when couples share the same religious beliefs, it can make it easier for them to talk about their faith and support each other in their relationship.
A sexual relationship, also called an intimate relationship, is when two people have a close bond either physically or emotionally. Intimacy usually means being close in a special way, and while it often involves sex, it can also happen in relationships without any sexual attraction, like between friends or family members.
Importance of positive social environments and relationships for parents
Where a child grows up and goes to school has a big impact on who they become friends with and how good those friendships are. Most of the time, kids make friends with people in their family or neighborhood. So, where parents choose to live, work, and send their kids to school can affect how healthy and happy their children are.
Solidarity
People with the same social environment often develop a sense of social solidarity; people often tend to trust and help one another, and to congregate in social groups. They will often think in similar styles and patterns, even though the conclusions which they reach may differ.
Natural/artificial environment
In order to enrich their lives, people have used natural resources, and in the process have brought about many changes in the natural environment. Human settlements, roads, farmlands, dams, and many other elements have all developed through the process. All these man-made components are included in human cultural environment, Erving Goffman in particular emphasising the deeply social nature of the individual environment. There are still many people living in villages and this is their social environment. A village is a township with production, living, ecology and culture. The state is trying to solve the problem of integrated rural development, which includes construction, expansion, and road building.
Milieu/social structure
C. Wright Mills contrasted the immediate milieu of jobs/family/neighborhood with the wider formations of the social structure, highlighting in particular a distinction between "the personal troubles of milieu" and the "public crises of social structure".
Emile Durkheim took a wider view of the social environment (milieu social), arguing that it contained internalized expectations and representations of social forces/social facts: "Our whole social environment seems to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds" – collective representations.
Phenomenology
Phenomenologists contrast two alternative visions of society, as a deterministic constraint (milieu) and as a nurturing shell (ambiance).
Max Scheler distinguishes between milieu as an experienced value-world, and the objective social environment on which we draw to create the former, noting that the social environment can either foster or restrain our creation of a personal milieu.
Social surgery
Pierre Janet saw neurosis in part as the product of the identified patient's social environment – family, social network, work etc. – and considered that in some instances what he termed "social surgery" to create a healthier environment could be a beneficial measure.
Similar ideas have since been taken up in community psychiatry and family therapy.
See also
Alfred Schütz – The four divisions of the lifeworld
Communitarianism
Community of practice
Family nexus
Framing (social sciences)
Generalized other
Habitus (sociology)
Microculture
Milieu control
Milieu therapy
Pillarisation
References
Further reading
Leo Spitzer, "Milieu and Ambience: An Essay in Historical Semantics", in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research III (1942-3)
James Morrow, Where the Everyday Begins. A Study of Environment and Everyday Life. transcript, Bielefeld 2017, .
Alfred Russel Wallace (1913), Social Environment and Moral Progress
Sociological terminology
Personal life | 0.787271 | 0.995926 | 0.784064 |
Theory U | Theory U is a change management method and the title of a book by Otto Scharmer. Scharmer with colleagues at MIT conducted 150 interviews with entrepreneurs and innovators in science, business, and society and then extended the basic principles into a theory of learning and management, which he calls Theory U. The principles of Theory U are suggested to help political leaders, civil servants, and managers break through past unproductive patterns of behavior that prevent them from empathizing with their clients' perspectives and often lock them into ineffective patterns of decision-making.
Some notes about theory U
Fields of attention
Thinking (individual)
Conversing (group)
Structuring (institutions)
Ecosystem coordination (global systems)
Presencing
The author of the theory U concept expresses it as a process or journey, which is also described as Presencing, as indicated in the diagram (for which there are numerous variants).
At the core of the "U" theory is presencing: sensing + presence. According to The Learning Exchange, Presencing is a journey with five movements:
On that journey, at the bottom of the U, lies an inner gate that requires us to drop everything that isn't essential. This process of letting-go (of our old ego and self) and letting-come (our highest future possibility: our Self) establishes a subtle connection to a deeper source of knowing. The essence of presencing is that these two selves – our current self and our best future self – meet at the bottom of the U and begin to listen and resonate with each other. Once a group crosses this threshold, nothing remains the same. Individual members and the group as a whole begin to operate with a heightened level of energy and sense of future possibility. Often they then begin to function as an intentional vehicle for an emerging future.
The core elements are shown below.
"Moving down the left side of the U is about opening up and dealing with the resistance of thought, emotion, and will; moving up the right side is about intentionally reintegrating the intelligence of the head, the heart, and the hand in the context of practical applications".
Leadership capacities
According to Scharmer, a value created by journeying through the "U" is to develop seven essential leadership capacities:
Holding the space: listen to what life calls you to do (listen to oneself, to others and make sure that there is space where people can talk)
Observing: Attend with your mind wide open (observe without your voice of judgment, effectively suspending past cognitive schema)
Sensing: Connect with your heart and facilitate the opening process (i.e. see things as interconnected wholes)
Presencing: Connect to the deepest source of your self and will and act from the emerging whole
Crystallizing: Access the power of intention (ensure a small group of key people commits itself to the purpose and outcomes of the project)
Prototyping: Integrating head, heart, and hand (one should act and learn by doing, avoiding the paralysis of inaction, reactive action, over-analysis, etc.)
Performing: Playing the "macro violin" (i.e. find the right leaders, find appropriate social technology to get a multi-stakeholder project going).
The sources of Theory U include interviews with 150 innovators and thought leaders on management and change. Particularly the work of Brian Arthur, Francisco Varela, Peter Senge, Ed Schein, Joseph Jaworski, Arawana Hayashi, Eleanor Rosch, Friedrich Glasl, Martin Buber, Rudolf Steiner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe have been critical. Artists are represented in the project from 2001 -2010 by Andrew Campbell, whose work was given a separate index page linked to the original project site. https://web.archive.org/web/20050404033150/http://www.dialogonleadership.org/indexPaintings.html
Today, Theory U constitutes a body of leadership and management praxis drawing from a variety of sources and more than 20 years of elaboration by Scharmer and colleagues. Theory U is translated into 20 languages and is used in change processes worldwide.
Meditation teacher Arawana Hayashi has explained how she considers Theory U relevant to "the feminine principle".
Earlier work: U-procedure
The earlier work by Glasl involved a sociotechnical, Goethean and anthroposophical process involving a few or many co-workers, managers and/or policymakers. It proceeded from phenomenological diagnosis of the present state of the organisation to plans for the future. They described a process in a U formation consisting of three levels (technical and instrumental subsystem, social subsystem and cultural subsystem) and seven stages beginning with the observation of organisational phenomena, workflows, resources etc., and concluding with specific decisions about desired future processes and phenomena. The method draws on the Goethean techniques described by Rudolf Steiner, transforming observations into intuitions and judgements about the present state of the organisation and decisions about the future. The three stages represent explicitly recursive reappraisals at progressively advanced levels of reflective, creative and intuitive insight and (epistemologies), thereby enabling more radically systemic intervention and redesign. The stages are: phenomena – picture (a qualitative metaphoric visual representation) – idea (the organising idea or formative principle) – and judgement (does this fit?). The first three then are reflexively replaced by better alternatives (new idea --> new image --> new phenomena) to form the design design. Glasl published the method in Dutch (1975), German (1975, 1994) and English (1997).
The seven stages are shown below.
In contrast to that earlier work on the U procedure, which assumes a set of three subsystems in the organization that need to be analyzed in a specific sequence, Theory U starts from a different epistemological view that is grounded in Varela's approach to neurophenomenology. It focuses on the process of becoming aware and applies to all levels of systems change. Theory U contributed to advancing organizational learning and systems thinking tools towards an awareness-based view of systems change that blends systems thinking with systems sensing. On the left-hand side of the U the process is going through the three main "gestures" of becoming aware that Francisco Varela spelled out in his work (suspension, redirection, letting-go). On the right-hand side of the U this process extends towards actualizing the future that is wanting to emerge (letting come, enacting, embodying).
Criticism
Sociologist Stefan Kühl criticizes Theory U as a management fashion on three main points: First of all, while Theory U posits to create change on all levels, including the level of the individual "self" and the institutional level, case studies mainly focus on clarifying the positions of individuals in groups or teams. Except of the idea of participating in online courses on Theory U, the theory remains silent on how broad organisational or societal changes may take place. Secondly, Theory U, like many management fashions, neglects structural conflicts of interest, for instance between groups, organisations and class. While it makes sense for top management to emphasize common values, visions and the community of all staff externally, Kühl believes this to be problematic if organisations internally believe too strongly in this community, as this may prevent the articulation of conflicting interests and therefore organisational learning processes. Finally, the 5 phase model of Theory U, like other cyclical (but less esoteric) management models, such as PDCA, are a gross simplification of decision-making processes in organisation that are often wilder, less structured and more complex. Kühl argues that Theory U may be useful as it allows management to make decisions despite unsure knowledge and encourages change, but expects that Theory U will lose its glamour.
See also
Appreciative inquiry
Art of Hosting
Decision cycle
Learning cycle
OODA loop
V-Model
References
External links
C. Otto Scharmer Home Page
Presencing Home Page
The U-Process for Discovery
Change management | 0.793976 | 0.987202 | 0.783815 |
Foucauldian discourse analysis | Foucauldian discourse analysis is a form of discourse analysis, focusing on power relationships in society as expressed through language and practices, and based on the theories of Michel Foucault.
Overview
Subject of analysis
Besides focusing on the meaning of a given discourse, the distinguishing characteristic of this approach is its stress on power relationships. These are expressed through language and behaviour, and the relationship between language and power. This form of analysis developed out of Foucault's genealogical work, where power was linked to the formation of discourse within specific historical periods. Some versions of this method stress the genealogical application of discourse analysis to illustrate how discourse is produced to govern social groups. The method analyses how the social world, expressed through language, is affected by various sources of power. As such, this approach is close to social constructivism, as the researcher tries to understand how our society is being shaped (or constructed) by language, which in turn reflects existing power relationships. The analysis attempts to understand how individuals view the world, and studies categorizations, personal and institutional relationships, ideology, and politics.
The approach was inspired by the work of both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and by critical theory.
Foucauldian discourse analysis, like much of critical theory, is often used in politically oriented studies. It is preferred by scholars who criticize more traditional forms of discourse analysis as failing to account for the political implications of discourse. Political power is gained by those in power being more knowledgeable and therefore more legitimate in exercising their control over others in both blatant and invisible ways.
Process
Kendall and Wickham outline five steps in using "Foucauldian discourse analysis". The first step is a simple recognition that discourse is a body of statements that are organized in a regular and systematic way. The subsequent four steps are based on the identification of rules on:
how those statements are created;
what can be said (written) and what cannot;
how spaces in which new statements can be made are created;
making practices material and discursive at the same time.
Areas of study
Studies employing the Foucauldian discourse analysis might look at how figures in authority use language to express their dominance, and request obedience and respect from those subordinate to them. The disciplinary interaction between authority and their followers emphasize the power dynamic found within the relationships. In a specific example, a study may look at the language used by teachers towards students, or military officers towards conscripts. This approach could also be used to study how language is used as a form of resistance to those in power. Foucauldian discourse analysis has also been deployed to illustrate how scholars and activists at times unwittingly reproduce the very discourses that they aim to challenge and overcome.
L'Ordre du discours
L'Ordre du discours (The Order of Discourse) is Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, delivered on December 2, 1970. Foucault presents the hypothesis that in any society the production of discourse is controlled, in order to eliminate powers and dangers and contain random events in this production.
Speech control and exclusion procedures
Foucault presents the hypothesis that, in every society, the production of discourses is controlled with the aim of: 1. exorcising its powers and dangers; 2. reducing the force of uncontrollable events; 3. hide the real forces that materialize the social constitution. To this end, he theorizes that external or internal procedures are used.
External procedures
These procedures are exercised from the outside and function as systems of exclusion, insofar as they concern the part of the discourse that puts power and desire into play. The three great systems of this type are: the prohibited word, the division of madness and the will to truth.
Prohibition: definition of what can be said in each circumstance. It is divided into three: taboo of the object, ritual of the circumstance and privileged or exclusive right of the speaker.
Division of madness: the madman's speech, according to Foucault, "cannot be transmitted like that of others": either he is considered null, or he is endowed with special powers, such as predicting the future.
Will to truth: the will to truth and the institutions that surround it exert pressure on discursive production. He cites as an example the subordination of Western literature to the credible and natural imposed by science.
Internal procedures
These procedures start from the speech itself with the function of classifying, ordering and dictating its distribution; the discourses themselves exercise their own control and are characterized by serving as principles of classification, ordering and distribution to dominate the dimension of discourse related to what happens and to chance. This title includes the commentary, the author and the organization into disciplines.
Commentary: there is a gap between the recurring discourses ("speak themselves"), constantly revisited, and the commonplace ones ("are spoken"). Those that resort to larger ones are called commentaries. Through this gap there is the possibility of creating different discourses, where comments, regardless of their apparent novelty, will always be a repetition of the first text.
Author: it should not be understood as the individual who produces the speech, but rather as a "discourse grouping principle", a section of that individual. It is through the role of the author that the individual will distinguish what to write or not, what will go into his work within everything he says every day.
Disciplines: principle that results from the delimitation of a "field of truth" where the discourse must be inserted. This field concerns the rules imposed for the construction of a discourse in a given field of knowledge (such as botany or medicine, which relate to its construction) as well as "a domain of objects, a set of methods, a body of propositions considered true, a set of rules and definitions, techniques and instruments" necessary for their acceptance within the "true" of a given discipline.
See also
References
Further reading
Johannes Angermuller. Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis. Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Basingstoke, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Johannes Angermuller. Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France. The Making of An Intellectual Generation. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Lucy Niall. A Dictionary of Postmodernism. Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
Sara Mills. Discourse: The New Critical Idiom. Series Editor: John Drakakis, Routledge, 1997.
Discourse analysis
Michel Foucault | 0.791043 | 0.990769 | 0.783741 |
Usability | Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.
The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, vehicle, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job function by designers, technical writers, marketing personnel, and others. It is widely used in consumer electronics, communication, and knowledge transfer objects (such as a cookbook, a document or online help) and mechanical objects such as a door handle or a hammer.
Usability includes methods of measuring usability, such as needs analysis and the study of the principles behind an object's perceived efficiency or elegance. In human-computer interaction and computer science, usability studies the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with a computer program or a web site (web usability) is designed. Usability considers user satisfaction and utility as quality components, and aims to improve user experience through iterative design.
Introduction
The primary notion of usability is that an object designed with a generalized users' psychology and physiology in mind is, for example:
More efficient to use—takes less time to accomplish a particular task
Easier to learn—operation can be learned by observing the object
More satisfying to use
Complex computer systems find their way into everyday life, and at the same time the market is saturated with competing brands. This has made usability more popular and widely recognized in recent years, as companies see the benefits of researching and developing their products with user-oriented methods instead of technology-oriented methods. By understanding and researching the interaction between product and user, the usability expert can also provide insight that is unattainable by traditional company-oriented market research. For example, after observing and interviewing users, the usability expert may identify needed functionality or design flaws that were not anticipated. A method called contextual inquiry does this in the naturally occurring context of the users own environment. In the user-centered design paradigm, the product is designed with its intended users in mind at all times. In the user-driven or participatory design paradigm, some of the users become actual or de facto members of the design team.
The term user friendly is often used as a synonym for usable, though it may also refer to accessibility. Usability describes the quality of user experience across websites, software, products, and environments. There is no consensus about the relation of the terms ergonomics (or human factors) and usability. Some think of usability as the software specialization of the larger topic of ergonomics. Others view these topics as tangential, with ergonomics focusing on physiological matters (e.g., turning a door handle) and usability focusing on psychological matters (e.g., recognizing that a door can be opened by turning its handle). Usability is also important in website development (web usability). According to Jakob Nielsen, "Studies of user behavior on the Web find a low tolerance for difficult designs or slow sites. People don't want to wait. And they don't want to learn how to use a home page. There's no such thing as a training class or a manual for a Web site. People have to be able to grasp the functioning of the site immediately after scanning the home page—for a few seconds at most." Otherwise, most casual users simply leave the site and browse or shop elsewhere.
Usability can also include the concept of prototypicality, which is how much a particular thing conforms to the expected shared norm, for instance, in website design, users prefer sites that conform to recognised design norms.
Definition
ISO defines usability as "The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use." The word "usability" also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen and computer science professor Ben Shneiderman have written (separately) about a framework of system acceptability, where usability is a part of "usefulness" and is composed of:
Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they re-establish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
Usability is often associated with the functionalities of the product (cf. ISO definition, below), in addition to being solely a characteristic of the user interface (cf. framework of system acceptability, also below, which separates usefulness into usability and utility). For example, in the context of mainstream consumer products, an automobile lacking a reverse gear could be considered unusable according to the former view, and lacking in utility according to the latter view. When evaluating user interfaces for usability, the definition can be as simple as "the perception of a target user of the effectiveness (fit for purpose) and efficiency (work or time required to use) of the Interface". Each component may be measured subjectively against criteria, e.g., Principles of User Interface Design, to provide a metric, often expressed as a percentage. It is important to distinguish between usability testing and usability engineering. Usability testing is the measurement of ease of use of a product or piece of software. In contrast, usability engineering (UE) is the research and design process that ensures a product with good usability. Usability is a non-functional requirement. As with other non-functional requirements, usability cannot be directly measured but must be quantified by means of indirect measures or attributes such as, for example, the number of reported problems with ease-of-use of a system.
Intuitive interaction or intuitive use
The term intuitive is often listed as a desirable trait in usable interfaces, sometimes used as a synonym for learnable. In the past, Jef Raskin discouraged using this term in user interface design, claiming that easy to use interfaces are often easy because of the user's exposure to previous similar systems, thus the term 'familiar' should be preferred. As an example: Two vertical lines "||" on media player buttons do not intuitively mean "pause"—they do so by convention. This association between intuitive use and familiarity has since been empirically demonstrated in multiple studies by a range of researchers across the world, and intuitive interaction is accepted in the research community as being use of an interface based on past experience with similar interfaces or something else, often not fully conscious, and sometimes involving a feeling of "magic" since the course of the knowledge itself may not be consciously available to the user . Researchers have also investigated intuitive interaction for older people, people living with dementia, and children.
Some have argued that aiming for "intuitive" interfaces (based on reusing existing skills with interaction systems) could lead designers to discard a better design solution only because it would require a novel approach and to stick with boring designs. However, applying familiar features into a new interface has been shown not to result in boring design if designers use creative approaches rather than simple copying. The throwaway remark that "the only intuitive interface is the nipple; everything else is learned." is still occasionally mentioned. Any breastfeeding mother or lactation consultant will tell you this is inaccurate and the nipple does in fact require learning on both sides. In 1992, Bruce Tognazzini even denied the existence of "intuitive" interfaces, since such interfaces must be able to intuit, i.e., "perceive the patterns of the user's behavior and draw inferences." Instead, he advocated the term "intuitable," i.e., "that users could intuit the workings of an application by seeing it and using it". However, the term intuitive interaction has become well accepted in the research community over the past 20 or so years and, although not perfect, it should probably be accepted and used.
ISO standards
ISO/TR 16982:2002 standard
ISO/TR 16982:2002 ("Ergonomics of human-system interaction—Usability methods supporting human-centered design") is an International Standards Organization (ISO) standard that provides information on human-centered usability methods that can be used for design and evaluation. It details the advantages, disadvantages, and other factors relevant to using each usability method. It explains the implications of the stage of the life cycle and the individual project characteristics for the selection of usability methods and provides examples of usability methods in context. The main users of ISO/TR 16982:2002 are project managers. It therefore addresses technical human factors and ergonomics issues only to the extent necessary to allow managers to understand their relevance and importance in the design process as a whole. The guidance in ISO/TR 16982:2002 can be tailored for specific design situations by using the lists of issues characterizing the context of use of the product to be delivered. Selection of appropriate usability methods should also take account of the relevant life-cycle process. ISO/TR 16982:2002 is restricted to methods that are widely used by usability specialists and project managers. It does not specify the details of how to implement or carry out the usability methods described.
ISO 9241 standard
ISO 9241 is a multi-part standard that covers a number of aspects of people working with computers. Although originally titled Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs), it has been retitled to the more generic Ergonomics of Human System Interaction. As part of this change, ISO is renumbering some parts of the standard so that it can cover more topics, e.g. tactile and haptic interaction. The first part to be renumbered was part 10 in 2006, now part 110.
IEC 62366
IEC 62366-1:2015 + COR1:2016 & IEC/TR 62366-2 provide guidance on usability engineering specific to a medical device.
Designing for usability
Any system or device designed for use by people should be easy to use, easy to learn, easy to remember (the instructions), and helpful to users. John Gould and Clayton Lewis recommend that designers striving for usability follow these three design principles
Early focus on end users and the tasks they need the system/device to do
Empirical measurement using quantitative or qualitative measures
Iterative design, in which the designers work in a series of stages, improving the design each time
Early focus on users and tasks
The design team should be user-driven and it should be in direct contact with potential users. Several evaluation methods, including personas, cognitive modeling, inspection, inquiry, prototyping, and testing methods may contribute to understanding potential users and their perceptions of how well the product or process works. Usability considerations, such as who the users are and their experience with similar systems must be examined. As part of understanding users, this knowledge must "...be played against the tasks that the users will be expected to perform." This includes the analysis of what tasks the users will perform, which are most important, and what decisions the users will make while using your system. Designers must understand how cognitive and emotional characteristics of users will relate to a proposed system. One way to stress the importance of these issues in the designers' minds is to use personas, which are made-up representative users. See below for further discussion of personas. Another more expensive but more insightful method is to have a panel of potential users work closely with the design team from the early stages.
Empirical measurement
Test the system early on, and test the system on real users using behavioral measurements. This includes testing the system for both learnability and usability. (See Evaluation Methods). It is important in this stage to use quantitative usability specifications such as time and errors to complete tasks and number of users to test, as well as examine performance and attitudes of the users testing the system. Finally, "reviewing or demonstrating" a system before the user tests it can result in misleading results. The emphasis of empirical measurement is on measurement, both informal and formal, which can be carried out through a variety of evaluation methods.
Iterative design
Iterative design is a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process. Based on the results of testing the most recent iteration of a design, changes and refinements are made. This process is intended to ultimately improve the quality and functionality of a design. In iterative design, interaction with the designed system is used as a form of research for informing and evolving a project, as successive versions, or iterations of a design are implemented. The key requirements for Iterative Design are: identification of required changes, an ability to make changes, and a willingness to make changes. When a problem is encountered, there is no set method to determine the correct solution. Rather, there are empirical methods that can be used during system development or after the system is delivered, usually a more inopportune time. Ultimately, iterative design works towards meeting goals such as making the system user friendly, easy to use, easy to operate, simple, etc.
Evaluation methods
There are a variety of usability evaluation methods. Certain methods use data from users, while others rely on usability experts. There are usability evaluation methods for all stages of design and development, from product definition to final design modifications. When choosing a method, consider cost, time constraints, and appropriateness. For a brief overview of methods, see Comparison of usability evaluation methods or continue reading below. Usability methods can be further classified into the subcategories below.
Cognitive modeling methods
Cognitive modeling involves creating a computational model to estimate how long it takes people to perform a given task. Models are based on psychological principles and experimental studies to determine times for cognitive processing and motor movements. Cognitive models can be used to improve user interfaces or predict problem errors and pitfalls during the design process. A few examples of cognitive models include:
Parallel design
With parallel design, several people create an initial design from the same set of requirements. Each person works independently, and when finished, shares concepts with the group. The design team considers each solution, and each designer uses the best ideas to further improve their own solution. This process helps generate many different, diverse ideas, and ensures that the best ideas from each design are integrated into the final concept. This process can be repeated several times until the team is satisfied with the final concept.
GOMS
GOMS stands for goals, operators, methods, and selection rules. It is a family of techniques that analyzes the user complexity of interactive systems. Goals are what the user must accomplish. An operator is an action performed in pursuit of a goal. A method is a sequence of operators that accomplish a goal. Selection rules specify which method satisfies a given goal, based on context.
Human processor model
Sometimes it is useful to break a task down and analyze each individual aspect separately. This helps the tester locate specific areas for improvement. To do this, it is necessary to understand how the human brain processes information. A model of the human processor is shown below.
Many studies have been done to estimate the cycle times, decay times, and capacities of each of these processors. Variables that affect these can include subject age, aptitudes, ability, and the surrounding environment. For a younger adult, reasonable estimates are:
Long-term memory is believed to have an infinite capacity and decay time.
Keystroke level modeling
Keystroke level modeling is essentially a less comprehensive version of GOMS that makes simplifying assumptions in order to reduce calculation time and complexity.
Inspection methods
These usability evaluation methods involve observation of users by an experimenter, or the testing and evaluation of a program by an expert reviewer. They provide more quantitative data as tasks can be timed and recorded.
Card sorts
Card sorting is a way to involve users in grouping information for a website's usability review. Participants in a card sorting session are asked to organize the content from a Web site in a way that makes sense to them. Participants review items from a Web site and then group these items into categories. Card sorting helps to learn how users think about the content and how they would organize the information on the Web site. Card sorting helps to build the structure for a Web site, decide what to put on the home page, and label the home page categories. It also helps to ensure that information is organized on the site in a way that is logical to users.
Tree tests
Tree testing is a way to evaluate the effectiveness of a website's top-down organization. Participants are given "find it" tasks, then asked to drill down through successive text lists of topics and subtopics to find a suitable answer. Tree testing evaluates the findability and labeling of topics in a site, separate from its navigation controls or visual design.
Ethnography
Ethnographic analysis is derived from anthropology. Field observations are taken at a site of a possible user, which track the artifacts of work such as Post-It notes, items on desktop, shortcuts, and items in trash bins. These observations also gather the sequence of work and interruptions that determine the user's typical day.
Heuristic evaluation
Heuristic evaluation is a usability engineering method for finding and assessing usability problems in a user interface design as part of an iterative design process. It involves having a small set of evaluators examining the interface and using recognized usability principles (the "heuristics"). It is the most popular of the usability inspection methods, as it is quick, cheap, and easy. Heuristic evaluation was developed to aid in the design of computer user-interface design. It relies on expert reviewers to discover usability problems and then categorize and rate them by a set of principles (heuristics.) It is widely used based on its speed and cost-effectiveness. Jakob Nielsen's list of ten heuristics is the most commonly used in industry. These are ten general principles for user interface design. They are called "heuristics" because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines.
Visibility of system status: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
Match between system and the real world: The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
User control and freedom: Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
Error prevention: Even better than good error messages is a careful design that prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators—unseen by the novice user—may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Help and documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
Thus, by determining which guidelines are violated, the usability of a device can be determined.
Usability inspection
Usability inspection is a review of a system based on a set of guidelines. The review is conducted by a group of experts who are deeply familiar with the concepts of usability in design. The experts focus on a list of areas in design that have been shown to be troublesome for users.
Pluralistic inspection
Pluralistic Inspections are meetings where users, developers, and human factors people meet together to discuss and evaluate step by step of a task scenario. As more people inspect the scenario for problems, the higher the probability to find problems. In addition, the more interaction in the team, the faster the usability issues are resolved.
Consistency inspection
In consistency inspection, expert designers review products or projects to ensure consistency across multiple products to look if it does things in the same way as their own designs.
Activity Analysis
Activity analysis is a usability method used in preliminary stages of development to get a sense of situation. It involves an investigator observing users as they work in the field. Also referred to as user observation, it is useful for specifying user requirements and studying currently used tasks and subtasks. The data collected are qualitative and useful for defining the problem. It should be used when you wish to frame what is needed, or "What do we want to know?"
Inquiry methods
The following usability evaluation methods involve collecting qualitative data from users. Although the data collected is subjective, it provides valuable information on what the user wants.
Task analysis
Task analysis means learning about users' goals and users' ways of working. Task analysis can also mean figuring out what more specific tasks users must do to meet those goals and what steps they must take to accomplish those tasks. Along with user and task analysis, a third analysis is often used: understanding users' environments (physical, social, cultural, and technological environments).
Focus groups
A focus group is a focused discussion where a moderator leads a group of participants through a set of questions on a particular topic. Although typically used as a marketing tool, focus groups are sometimes used to evaluate usability. Used in the product definition stage, a group of 6 to 10 users are gathered to discuss what they desire in a product. An experienced focus group facilitator is hired to guide the discussion to areas of interest for the developers. Focus groups are typically videotaped to help get verbatim quotes, and clips are often used to summarize opinions. The data gathered is not usually quantitative, but can help get an idea of a target group's opinion.
Questionnaires/surveys
Surveys have the advantages of being inexpensive, require no testing equipment, and results reflect the users' opinions. When written carefully and given to actual users who have experience with the product and knowledge of design, surveys provide useful feedback on the strong and weak areas of the usability of a design. This is a very common method and often does not appear to be a survey, but just a warranty card.
Prototyping methods
It is often very difficult for designers to conduct usability tests with the exact system being designed. Cost constraints, size, and design constraints usually lead the designer to creating a prototype of the system. Instead of creating the complete final system, the designer may test different sections of the system, thus making several small models of each component of the system. Prototyping is an attitude and an output, as it is a process for generating and reflecting on tangible ideas by allowing failure to occur early. prototyping helps people to see what could be of communicating a shared vision, and of giving shape to the future. The types of usability prototypes may vary from using paper models, index cards, hand drawn models, or storyboards. Prototypes are able to be modified quickly, often are faster and easier to create with less time invested by designers and are more apt to change design; although sometimes are not an adequate representation of the whole system, are often not durable and testing results may not be parallel to those of the actual system.
The Tool Kit Approach
This tool kit is a wide library of methods that used the traditional programming language and it is primarily developed for computer programmers. The code created for testing in the tool kit approach can be used in the final product. However, to get the highest benefit from the tool, the user must be an expert programmer.
The Parts Kit Approach
The two elements of this approach include a parts library and a method used for identifying the connection between the parts. This approach can be used by almost anyone and it is a great asset for designers with repetitive tasks.
Animation Language Metaphor
This approach is a combination of the tool kit approach and the part kit approach. Both the dialogue designers and the programmers are able to interact with this prototyping tool.
Rapid prototyping
Rapid prototyping is a method used in early stages of development to validate and refine the usability of a system. It can be used to quickly and cheaply evaluate user-interface designs without the need for an expensive working model. This can help remove hesitation to change the design, since it is implemented before any real programming begins. One such method of rapid prototyping is paper prototyping.
Testing methods
These usability evaluation methods involve testing of subjects for the most quantitative data. Usually recorded on video, they provide task completion time and allow for observation of attitude. Regardless to how carefully a system is designed, all theories must be tested using usability tests. Usability tests involve typical users using the system (or product) in a realistic environment [see simulation]. Observation of the user's behavior, emotions, and difficulties while performing different tasks, often identify areas of improvement for the system.
Metrics
While conducting usability tests, designers must use usability metrics to identify what it is they are going to measure, or the usability metrics. These metrics are often variable, and change in conjunction with the scope and goals of the project. The number of subjects being tested can also affect usability metrics, as it is often easier to focus on specific demographics. Qualitative design phases, such as general usability (can the task be accomplished?), and user satisfaction are also typically done with smaller groups of subjects. Using inexpensive prototypes on small user groups provides more detailed information, because of the more interactive atmosphere, and the designer's ability to focus more on the individual user.
As the designs become more complex, the testing must become more formalized. Testing equipment will become more sophisticated and testing metrics become more quantitative. With a more refined prototype, designers often test effectiveness, efficiency, and subjective satisfaction, by asking the user to complete various tasks. These categories are measured by the percent that complete the task, how long it takes to complete the tasks, ratios of success to failure to complete the task, time spent on errors, the number of errors, rating scale of satisfactions, number of times user seems frustrated, etc. Additional observations of the users give designers insight on navigation difficulties, controls, conceptual models, etc. The ultimate goal of analyzing these metrics is to find/create a prototype design that users like and use to successfully perform given tasks. After conducting usability tests, it is important for a designer to record what was observed, in addition to why such behavior occurred and modify the model according to the results. Often it is quite difficult to distinguish the source of the design errors, and what the user did wrong. However, effective usability tests will not generate a solution to the problems, but provide modified design guidelines for continued testing.
Remote usability testing
Remote usability testing (also known as unmoderated or asynchronous usability testing) involves the use of a specially modified online survey, allowing the quantification of user testing studies by providing the ability to generate large sample sizes, or a deep qualitative analysis without the need for dedicated facilities. Additionally, this style of user testing also provides an opportunity to segment feedback by demographic, attitudinal and behavioral type. The tests are carried out in the user's own environment (rather than labs) helping further simulate real-life scenario testing. This approach also provides a vehicle to easily solicit feedback from users in remote areas. There are two types, quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative use large sample sized and task based surveys. These types of studies are useful for validating suspected usability issues. Qualitative studies are best used as exploratory research, in small sample sizes but frequent, even daily iterations. Qualitative usually allows for observing respondent's screens and verbal think aloud commentary (Screen Recording Video, SRV), and for a richer level of insight also include the webcam view of the respondent (Video-in-Video, ViV, sometimes referred to as Picture-in-Picture, PiP)
Remote usability testing for mobile devices
The growth in mobile and associated platforms and services (e.g.: Mobile gaming has experienced 20x growth in 2010–2012) has generated a need for unmoderated remote usability testing on mobile devices, both for websites but especially for app interactions. One methodology consists of shipping cameras and special camera holding fixtures to dedicated testers, and having them record the screens of the mobile smart-phone or tablet device, usually using an HD camera. A drawback of this approach is that the finger movements of the respondent can obscure the view of the screen, in addition to the bias and logistical issues inherent in shipping special hardware to selected respondents. A newer approach uses a wireless projection of the mobile device screen onto the computer desktop screen of the respondent, who can then be recorded through their webcam, and thus a combined Video-in-Video view of the participant and the screen interactions viewed simultaneously while incorporating the verbal think aloud commentary of the respondents.
Thinking aloud
The Think aloud protocol is a method of gathering data that is used in both usability and psychology studies. It involves getting a user to verbalize their thought processes (i.e. expressing their opinions, thoughts, anticipations, and actions) as they perform a task or set of tasks. As a widespread method of usability testing, think aloud provides the researchers with the ability to discover what user really think during task performance and completion.
Often an instructor is present to prompt the user into being more vocal as they work. Similar to the Subjects-in-Tandem method, it is useful in pinpointing problems and is relatively simple to set up. Additionally, it can provide insight into the user's attitude, which can not usually be discerned from a survey or questionnaire.
RITE method
Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) is an iterative usability method similar to traditional "discount" usability testing. The tester and team must define a target population for testing, schedule participants to come into the lab, decide on how the users behaviors will be measured, construct a test script and have participants engage in a verbal protocol (e.g., think aloud). However it differs from these methods in that it advocates that changes to the user interface are made as soon as a problem is identified and a solution is clear. Sometimes this can occur after observing as few as 1 participant. Once the data for a participant has been collected the usability engineer and team decide if they will be making any changes to the prototype prior to the next participant. The changed interface is then tested with the remaining users.
Subjects-in-tandem or co-discovery
Subjects-in-tandem (also called co-discovery) is the pairing of subjects in a usability test to gather important information on the ease of use of a product. Subjects tend to discuss the tasks they have to accomplish out loud and through these discussions observers learn where the problem areas of a design are. To encourage co-operative problem-solving between the two subjects, and the attendant discussions leading to it, the tests can be designed to make the subjects dependent on each other by assigning them complementary areas of responsibility (e.g. for testing of software, one subject may be put in charge of the mouse and the other of the keyboard.)
Component-based usability testing
Component-based usability testing is an approach which aims to test the usability of elementary units of an interaction system, referred to as interaction components. The approach includes component-specific quantitative measures based on user interaction recorded in log files, and component-based usability questionnaires.
Other methods
Cognitive walkthrough
Cognitive walkthrough is a method of evaluating the user interaction of a working prototype or final product. It is used to evaluate the system's ease of learning. Cognitive walkthrough is useful to understand the user's thought processes and decision making when interacting with a system, specially for first-time or infrequent users.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking creates standardized test materials for a specific type of design. Four key characteristics are considered when establishing a benchmark: time to do the core task, time to fix errors, time to learn applications, and the functionality of the system. Once there is a benchmark, other designs can be compared to it to determine the usability of the system. Many of the common objectives of usability studies, such as trying to understand user behavior or exploring alternative designs, must be put aside. Unlike many other usability methods or types of labs studies, benchmark studies more closely resemble true experimental psychology lab studies, with greater attention to detail on methodology, study protocol and data analysis.
Meta-analysis
Meta-analysis is a statistical procedure to combine results across studies to integrate the findings. This phrase was coined in 1976 as a quantitative literature review. This type of evaluation is very powerful for determining the usability of a device because it combines multiple studies to provide very accurate quantitative support.
Persona
Personas are fictitious characters created to represent a site or product's different user types and their associated demographics and technographics. Alan Cooper introduced the concept of using personas as a part of interactive design in 1998 in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, but had used this concept since as early as 1975. Personas are a usability evaluation method that can be used at various design stages. The most typical time to create personas is at the beginning of designing so that designers have a tangible idea of who the users of their product will be. Personas are the archetypes that represent actual groups of users and their needs, which can be a general description of person, context, or usage scenario. This technique turns marketing data on target user population into a few physical concepts of users to create empathy among the design team, with the final aim of tailoring a product more closely to how the personas will use it. To gather the marketing data that personas require, several tools can be used, including online surveys, web analytics, customer feedback forms, and usability tests, and interviews with customer-service representatives.
Benefits
The key benefits of usability are:
Higher revenues through increased sales
Increased user efficiency and user satisfaction
Reduced development costs
Reduced support costs
Corporate integration
An increase in usability generally positively affects several facets of a company's output quality. In particular, the benefits fall into several common areas:
Increased productivity
Decreased training and support costs
Increased sales and revenues
Reduced development time and costs
Reduced maintenance costs
Increased customer satisfaction
Increased usability in the workplace fosters several responses from employees: "Workers who enjoy their work do it better, stay longer in the face of temptation, and contribute ideas and enthusiasm to the evolution of enhanced productivity." To create standards, companies often implement experimental design techniques that create baseline levels. Areas of concern in an office environment include (though are not necessarily limited to):
Working posture
Design of workstation furniture
Screen displays
Input devices
Organization issues
Office environment
Software interface
By working to improve said factors, corporations can achieve their goals of increased output at lower costs, while potentially creating optimal levels of customer satisfaction. There are numerous reasons why each of these factors correlates to overall improvement. For example, making software user interfaces easier to understand reduces the need for extensive training. The improved interface tends to lower the time needed to perform tasks, and so would both raise the productivity levels for employees and reduce development time (and thus costs). Each of the aforementioned factors are not mutually exclusive; rather they should be understood to work in conjunction to form the overall workplace environment. In the 2010s, usability is recognized as an important software quality attribute, earning its place among more traditional attributes such as performance, robustness and aesthetic appearance. Various academic programs focus on usability. Several usability consultancy companies have emerged, and traditional consultancy and design firms offer similar services.
There is some resistance to integrating usability work in organisations. Usability is seen as a vague concept, it is difficult to measure and other areas are prioritised when IT projects run out of time or money.
Professional development
Usability practitioners are sometimes trained as industrial engineers, psychologists, kinesiologists, systems design engineers, or with a degree in information architecture, information or library science, or Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). More often though they are people who are trained in specific applied fields who have taken on a usability focus within their organization. Anyone who aims to make tools easier to use and more effective for their desired function within the context of work or everyday living can benefit from studying usability principles and guidelines. For those seeking to extend their training, the User Experience Professionals' Association offers online resources, reference lists, courses, conferences, and local chapter meetings. The UXPA also sponsors World Usability Day each November. Related professional organizations include the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) and the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups in Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), Design of Communication (SIGDOC) and Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH). The Society for Technical Communication also has a special interest group on Usability and User Experience (UUX). They publish a quarterly newsletter called Usability Interface.
See also
Accessibility
Chief experience officer (CXO)
Design for All (inclusion)
Experience design
Fitts's law
Form follows function
Gemba or customer visit
GOMS
Gotcha (programming)
GUI
Human factors
Information architecture
Interaction design
Interactive systems engineering
Internationalization
Learnability
List of human-computer interaction topics
List of system quality attributes
Machine-Readable Documents
Natural mapping (interface design)
Non-functional requirement
RITE method
System Usability Scale
Universal usability
Usability goals
Usability testing
Usability engineering
User experience
User experience design
Web usability
World Usability Day
References
Further reading
R. G. Bias and D. J. Mayhew (eds) (2005), Cost-Justifying Usability: An Update for the Internet Age, Morgan Kaufmann
Donald A. Norman (2013), The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books,
Donald A. Norman (2004), Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things, Basic Books,
Jakob Nielsen (1994), Usability Engineering, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers,
Jakob Nielsen (1994), Usability Inspection Methods, John Wiley & Sons,
Ben Shneiderman, Software Psychology, 1980,
External links
Usability.gov
Human–computer interaction
Technical communication
Information architecture
Software quality | 0.79019 | 0.991262 | 0.783286 |
Life skills | Life skills are abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable humans to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of life. This concept is also termed as psychosocial competency. The subject varies greatly depending on social norms and community expectations but skills that function for well-being and aid individuals to develop into active and productive members of their communities are considered as life skills.
Enumeration and categorization
The UNICEF Evaluation Office suggests that "there is no definitive list" of psychosocial skills;
nevertheless UNICEF enumerates psychosocial and interpersonal skills that are generally well-being oriented, and essential alongside literacy and numeracy skills. Since it changes its meaning from culture to culture and life positions, it is considered a concept that is elastic in nature. But UNICEF acknowledges social and emotional life skills identified by Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Life skills are a product of synthesis: many skills are developed simultaneously through practice, like humor, which allows a person to feel in control of a situation and make it more manageable in perspective. It allows the person to release fears, anger, and stress & achieve a qualitative life.
For example, decision-making often involves critical thinking ("what are my options?") and values clarification ("what is important to me?"), ("How do I feel about this?"). Ultimately, the interplay between the skills is what produces powerful behavioral outcomes, especially where this approach is supported by other strategies.
Life skills can vary from financial literacy, through substance-abuse prevention, to therapeutic techniques to deal with disabilities such as autism.
Core skills
The World Health Organization in 1999 identified the following core cross-cultural areas of life skills:
decision-making and problem-solving;
creative thinking (see also: lateral thinking) and critical thinking;
communication and interpersonal skills;
self-awareness and empathy;
assertiveness and equanimity; and
resilience and coping with emotions and coping with stress.
UNICEF listed similar skills and related categories in its 2012 report.
Life skills curricular designed for K-12 often emphasize communications and practical skills needed for successful independent living as well as for developmental-disabilities/special-education students with an Individualized Education Program (IEP).
There are various courses being run based on WHO's list supported by UNFPA. In Madhya Pradesh, India, the programme is being run with Government to teach these through Government Schools.
Skills for work and life
Skills for work and life, known as technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is comprising education, training and skills development relating to a wide range of occupational fields, production, services and livelihoods. TVET, as part of lifelong learning, can take place at secondary, post-secondary and tertiary levels, and includes work-based learning and continuing training and professional development which may lead to qualifications. TVET also includes a wide range of skills development opportunities attuned to national and local contexts. Learning to learn and the development of literacy and numeracy skills, transversal skills and citizenship skills are integral components of TVET.
Parenting: a venue of life skills nourishment
Life skills are often taught in the domain of parenting, either indirectly through the observation and experience of the child, or directly with the purpose of teaching a specific skill. Parenting itself can be considered as a set of life skills which can be taught or comes natural to a person. Educating a person in skills for dealing with pregnancy and parenting can also coincide with additional life skills development for the child and enable the parents to guide their children in adulthood.
Many life skills programs are offered when traditional family structures and healthy relationships have broken down, whether due to parental lapses, divorce, psychological disorders or due to issues with the children (such as substance abuse or other risky behavior). For example, the International Labour Organization is teaching life skills to ex-child laborers and at-risk children in Indonesia to help them avoid and to recover from worst forms of child abuse.
Models: behavior prevention vs. positive development
While certain life skills programs focus on teaching the prevention of certain behaviors, they can be relatively ineffective. Based upon their research, the Family and Youth Services Bureau, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advocates the theory of positive youth development (PYD) as a replacement for the less effective prevention programs. PYD focuses on the strengths of an individual as opposed to the older decrepit models which tend to focus on the "potential" weaknesses that have yet to be shown. "..life skills education, have found to be an effective psychosocial intervention strategy for promoting positive social, and mental health of adolescents which plays an important role in all aspects such as strengthening coping strategies and developing self-confidence and emotional intelligence..."
See also
Sources
Further reading
People Skills & Self-Management (free online guide), Alliances for Psychosocial Advancements in Living: Communication Connections (APAL-CC)
Reaching Your Potential: Personal and Professional Development, 4th Edition
Life Skills: A Course in Applied Problem Solving., Saskatchewan NewStart Inc., First Ave and River Street East, Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada.
References | 0.788093 | 0.993628 | 0.783071 |
Relativism | Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism (also factual relativism) is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (cultural relativism). Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the word truthfulness of views within a given framework.
Forms of relativism
Anthropological versus philosophical relativism
Anthropological relativism refers to a methodological stance, in which the researcher suspends (or brackets) their own cultural prejudice while trying to understand beliefs or behaviors in their contexts. This has become known as methodological relativism, and concerns itself specifically with avoiding ethnocentrism or the application of one's own cultural standards to the assessment of other cultures. This is also the basis of the so-called "emic" and "etic" distinction, in which:
An emic or insider account of behavior is a description of a society in terms that are meaningful to the participant or actor's own culture; an emic account is therefore culture-specific, and typically refers to what is considered "common sense" within the culture under observation.
An etic or outsider account is a description of a society by an observer, in terms that can be applied to other cultures; that is, an etic account is culturally neutral, and typically refers to the conceptual framework of the social scientist. (This is complicated when it is scientific research itself that is under study, or when there is theoretical or terminological disagreement within the social sciences.)
Philosophical relativism, in contrast, asserts that the truth of a proposition depends on the metaphysical, or theoretical frame, or the instrumental method, or the context in which the proposition is expressed, or on the person, groups, or culture who interpret the proposition.
Methodological relativism and philosophical relativism can exist independently from one another, but most anthropologists base their methodological relativism on that of the philosophical variety.
Descriptive versus normative relativism
The concept of relativism also has importance both for philosophers and for anthropologists in another way. In general, anthropologists engage in descriptive relativism ("how things are" or "how things seem"), whereas philosophers engage in normative relativism ("how things ought to be"), although there is some overlap (for example, descriptive relativism can pertain to concepts, normative relativism to truth).
Descriptive relativism assumes that certain cultural groups have different modes of thought, standards of reasoning, and so forth, and it is the anthropologist's task to describe, but not to evaluate the validity of these principles and practices of a cultural group. It is possible for an anthropologist in his or her fieldwork to be a descriptive relativist about some things that typically concern the philosopher (e.g., ethical principles) but not about others (e.g., logical principles). However, the descriptive relativist's empirical claims about epistemic principles, moral ideals and the like are often countered by anthropological arguments that such things are universal, and much of the recent literature on these matters is explicitly concerned with the extent of, and evidence for, cultural or moral or linguistic or human universals.
The fact that the various species of descriptive relativism are empirical claims may tempt the philosopher to conclude that they are of little philosophical interest, but there are several reasons why this is not so. First, some philosophers, notably Kant, argue that certain sorts of cognitive differences between human beings (or even all rational beings) are impossible, so such differences could never be found to obtain in fact, an argument that places a priori limits on what empirical inquiry could discover and on what versions of descriptive relativism could be true. Second, claims about actual differences between groups play a central role in some arguments for normative relativism (for example, arguments for normative ethical relativism often begin with claims that different groups in fact have different moral codes or ideals). Finally, the anthropologist's descriptive account of relativism helps to separate the fixed aspects of human nature from those that can vary, and so a descriptive claim that some important aspect of experience or thought does (or does not) vary across groups of human beings tells us something important about human nature and the human condition.
Normative relativism concerns normative or evaluative claims that modes of thought, standards of reasoning, or the like are only right or wrong relative to a framework. 'Normative' is meant in a general sense, applying to a wide range of views; in the case of beliefs, for example, normative correctness equals truth. This does not mean, of course, that framework-relative correctness or truth is always clear, the first challenge being to explain what it amounts to in any given case (e.g., with respect to concepts, truth, epistemic norms). Normative relativism (say, in regard to normative ethical relativism) therefore implies that things (say, ethical claims) are not simply true in themselves, but only have truth values relative to broader frameworks (say, moral codes). (Many normative ethical relativist arguments run from premises about ethics to conclusions that assert the relativity of truth values, bypassing general claims about the nature of truth, but it is often more illuminating to consider the type of relativism under question directly.)
Legal relativism
In English common law, two (perhaps three) separate standards of proof are recognized:
proof based on the balance of probabilities is the lesser standard used in civil litigation, which cases mostly concern money or some other penalty, that, if further and better evidence should emerge, is reasonably reversible.
proof beyond reasonable doubt is used in criminal law cases where an accused's right to personal freedom or survival is in question, because such punishment is not reasonably reversible.
Absolute truth is so complex as to be only capable of being fully understood by the omniscient established during the Tudor period as the one true God
Related and contrasting positions
Relationism is the theory that there are only relations between individual entities, and no intrinsic
properties. Despite the similarity in name, it is held by some to be a position distinct from relativism—for instance, because "statements about relational properties [...] assert an absolute truth about things in the world".
On the other hand, others wish to equate relativism, relationism and even relativity, which is a precise theory of relationships between physical objects: Nevertheless, "This confluence of relativity theory with relativism became a strong contributing factor in the increasing prominence of relativism".
Whereas previous investigations of science only sought sociological or psychological explanations of failed scientific theories or pathological science, the 'strong programme' is more relativistic, assessing scientific truth and falsehood equally in a historic and cultural context.
Criticisms
A common argument against relativism suggests that it inherently refutes itself: the statement "all is relative" classes either as a relative statement or as an absolute one. If it is relative, then this statement does not rule out absolutes. If the statement is absolute, on the other hand, then it provides an example of an absolute statement, proving that not all truths are relative. However, this argument against relativism only applies to relativism that positions truth as relative–i.e. epistemological/truth-value relativism. More specifically, it is only extreme forms of epistemological relativism that can come in for this criticism as there are many epistemological relativists who posit that some aspects of what is regarded as factually "true" are not universal, yet still accept that other universal truths exist (e.g. gas laws or moral laws).
Another argument against relativism posits a Natural Law. Simply put, the physical universe works under basic principles: the "Laws of Nature". Some contend that a natural Moral Law may also exist, for example as argued by, Immanuel Kant in Critique of Practical Reason, Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) and addressed by C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1952). Dawkins said "I think we face an equal but much more sinister challenge from the left, in the shape of cultural relativism - the view that scientific truth is only one kind of truth and it is not to be especially privileged".
Philosopher Hilary Putnam, among others, states that some forms of relativism make it impossible to believe one is in error. If there is no truth beyond an individual's belief that something is true, then an individual cannot hold their own beliefs to be false or mistaken. A related criticism is that relativizing truth to individuals destroys the distinction between truth and belief.
Views
Philosophical
Ancient
Sophism
Sophists are considered the founding fathers of relativism in Western philosophy. Elements of relativism emerged among the Sophists in the 5th century BC. Notably, it was Protagoras who coined the phrase, "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." The thinking of the Sophists is mainly known through their opponent, Plato. In a paraphrase from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, Protagoras said: "What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me."
Modern
Bernard Crick
Bernard Crick, a British political scientist and advocate of relativism, suggested in In Defence of Politics (1962) that moral conflict between people is inevitable. He thought that only ethics can resolve such conflict, and when that occurs in public it results in politics. Accordingly, Crick saw the process of dispute resolution, harms reduction, mediation or peacemaking as central to all of moral philosophy. He became an important influence on feminists and later on the Greens.
Paul Feyerabend
Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend is often considered to be a relativist, although he denied being one.
Feyerabend argued that modern science suffers from being methodologically monistic (the belief that only a single methodology can produce scientific progress). Feyerabend summarises his case in Against Method with the phrase "anything goes".
In an aphorism [Feyerabend] often repeated, "potentially every culture is all cultures". This is intended to convey that world views are not hermetically closed, since their leading concepts have an "ambiguity" - better, an open-endedness - which enables people from other cultures to engage with them. [...] It follows that relativism, understood as the doctrine that truth is relative to closed systems, can get no purchase. [...] For Feyerabend, both hermetic relativism and its absolutist rival [realism] serve, in their different ways, to "devalue human existence". The former encourages that unsavoury brand of political correctness which takes the refusal to criticise "other cultures" to the extreme of condoning murderous dictatorship and barbaric practices. The latter, especially in its favoured contemporary form of "scientific realism", with the excessive prestige it affords to the abstractions of "the monster 'science'", is in bed with a politics which likewise disdains variety, richness and everyday individuality - a politics which likewise "hides" its norms behind allegedly neutral facts, "blunts choices and imposes laws".
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science, as expressed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is often interpreted as relativistic. He claimed that, as well as progressing steadily and incrementally ("normal science"), science undergoes periodic revolutions or "paradigm shifts", leaving scientists working in different paradigms with difficulty in even communicating. Thus the truth of a claim, or the existence of a posited entity, is relative to the paradigm employed. However, it is not necessary for him to embrace relativism because every paradigm presupposes the prior, building upon itself through history and so on. This leads to there being a fundamental, incremental, and referential structure of development which is not relative but again, fundamental.
From these remarks, one thing is however certain: Kuhn is not saying that incommensurable theories cannot be compared - what they can't be is compared in terms of a system of common measure. He very plainly says that they can be compared, and he reiterates this repeatedly in later work, in a (mostly in vain) effort to avert the crude and sometimes catastrophic misinterpretations he suffered from mainstream philosophers and post-modern relativists alike.
But Kuhn rejected the accusation of being a relativist later in his postscript:
scientific development is ... a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles ... That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.
Some have argued that one can also read Kuhn's work as essentially positivist in its ontology: the revolutions he posits are epistemological, lurching toward a presumably 'better' understanding of an objective reality through the lens presented by the new paradigm. However, a number of passages in Structure do indeed appear to be distinctly relativist, and to directly challenge the notion of an objective reality and the ability of science to progress towards an ever-greater grasp of it, particularly through the process of paradigm change.
In the sciences there need not be progress of another sort. We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.
We are all deeply accustomed to seeing science as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be any such goal? Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define relativism in Metaphors We Live By as the rejection of both subjectivism and metaphysical objectivism in order to focus on the relationship between them, i.e. the metaphor by which we relate our current experience to our previous experience. In particular, Lakoff and Johnson characterize "objectivism" as a "straw man", and, to a lesser degree, criticize the views of Karl Popper, Kant and Aristotle.
Robert Nozick
In his book Invariances, Robert Nozick expresses a complex set of theories about the absolute and the relative. He thinks the absolute/relative distinction should be recast in terms of an invariant/variant distinction, where there are many things a proposition can be invariant with regard to or vary with. He thinks it is coherent for truth to be relative, and speculates that it might vary with time. He thinks necessity is an unobtainable notion, but can be approximated by robust invariance across a variety of conditions—although we can never identify a proposition that is invariant with regard to everything. Finally, he is not particularly warm to one of the most famous forms of relativism, moral relativism, preferring an evolutionary account.
Joseph Margolis
Joseph Margolis advocates a view he calls "robust relativism" and defends it in his books Historied Thought, Constructed World, Chapter 4 (California, 1995) and The Truth about Relativism (Blackwell, 1991). He opens his account by stating that our logics should depend on what we take to be the nature of the sphere to which we wish to apply our logics. Holding that there can be no distinctions which are not "privileged" between the alethic, the ontic, and the epistemic, he maintains that a many-valued logic just might be the most apt for aesthetics or history since, because in these practices, we are loath to hold to simple binary logic; and he also holds that many-valued logic is relativistic. (This is perhaps an unusual definition of "relativistic". Compare with his comments on "relationism".) To say that "True" and "False" are mutually exclusive and exhaustive judgements on Hamlet, for instance, really does seem absurd. A many-valued logicwith its values "apt", "reasonable", "likely", and so onseems intuitively more applicable to interpreting Hamlet. Where apparent contradictions arise between such interpretations, we might call the interpretations "incongruent", rather than dubbing either of them "false", because using many-valued logic implies that a measured value is a mixture of two extreme possibilities. Using the subset of many-valued logic, fuzzy logic, it can be said that various interpretations can be represented by membership in more than one possible truth set simultaneously. Fuzzy logic is therefore probably the best mathematical structure for understanding "robust relativism" and has been interpreted by Bart Kosko as philosophically being related to Zen Buddhism.
It was Aristotle who held that relativism implies that we should, sticking with appearances only, end up contradicting ourselves somewhere if we could apply all attributes to all ousiai (beings). Aristotle, however, made non-contradiction dependent upon his essentialism. If his essentialism is false, then so too is his ground for disallowing relativism. (Subsequent philosophers have found other reasons for supporting the principle of non-contradiction.)
Beginning with Protagoras and invoking Charles Sanders Peirce, Margolis shows that the historic struggle to discredit relativism is an attempt to impose an unexamined belief in the world's essentially rigid rule-like nature. Plato and Aristotle merely attacked "relationalism"the doctrine of true for l or true for k, and the like, where l and k are different speakers or different worldsor something similar (most philosophers would call this position "relativism"). For Margolis, "true" means true; that is, the alethic use of "true" remains untouched. However, in real world contexts, and context is ubiquitous in the real world, we must apply truth values. Here, in epistemic terms, we might tout court retire "true" as an evaluation and keep "false". The rest of our value-judgements could be graded from "extremely plausible" down to "false". Judgements which on a bivalent logic would be incompatible or contradictory are further seen as "incongruent", although one may well have more weight than the other. In short, relativistic logic is not, or need not be, the bugbear it is often presented to be. It may simply be the best type of logic to apply to certain very uncertain spheres of real experiences in the world (although some sort of logic needs to be applied in order to make that judgement). Those who swear by bivalent logic might simply be the ultimate keepers of the great fear of the flux.
Richard Rorty
Philosopher Richard Rorty has a somewhat paradoxical role in the debate over relativism: he is criticized for his relativistic views by many commentators, but has always denied that relativism applies to much anybody, being nothing more than a Platonic scarecrow. Rorty claims, rather, that he is a pragmatist, and that to construe pragmatism as relativism is to beg the question.
'"Relativism" is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists'
'"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called 'relativists' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.'
'In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.'
Rorty takes a deflationary attitude to truth, believing there is nothing of interest to be said about truth in general, including the contention that it is generally subjective. He also argues that the notion of warrant or justification can do most of the work traditionally assigned to the concept of truth, and that justification is relative; justification is justification to an audience, for Rorty.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he argues that the debate between so-called relativists and so-called objectivists is beside the point because they do not have enough premises in common for either side to prove anything to the other.
Nalin de Silva
In his book Mage Lokaya (My World), 1986, Nalin de Silva criticized the basis of the established western system of knowledge, and its propagation, which he refers as "domination throughout the world".He explained in this book that mind independent reality is impossible and knowledge is not found but constructed. Further he has introduced and developed the concept of "Constructive Relativism" as the basis on which knowledge is constructed relative to the sense organs, culture and the mind completely based on Avidya.
Colin Murray Turbayne
In his final book Metaphors for the Mind: The Creative Mind and Its Origins (1991), Colin Murray Turbayne joins the debate about relativism and realism by providing an analysis of the manner in which Platonic metaphors which were first presented in the procreation model of the Timaeus dialogue have evolved over time to influence the philosophical works of both George Berkeley and Emmanuel Kant. In addition, he illustrates the manner in which these ancient Greek metaphors have subsequently evolved to impact the development of the theories of "substance" and "attribute", which in turn have dominated the development of human thought and language in the 20th century.
In his The Myth of Metaphor (1962) Turbayne argues that it is perfectly possible to transcend the limitations which are inherent in such metaphors, including those incorporated within the framework of classical "objective" mechanistic Newtonian cosmology and scientific materialism in general. In Turbayne's view, one can strive to embrace a more satisfactory epistemology by first acknowledging the limitations imposed by such metaphorical systems. This can readily be accomplished by restoring Plato's metaphorical model to its original state in which both "male" and "female" aspects of the mind work in concert within the context of a harmonious balance during the process of creation.
Postmodernism
The term "relativism" often comes up in debates over postmodernism, poststructuralism and phenomenology. Critics of these perspectives often identify advocates with the label "relativism". For example, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is often considered a relativist view because it posits that linguistic categories and structures shape the way people view the world. Stanley Fish has defended postmodernism and relativism.
These perspectives do not strictly count as relativist in the philosophical sense, because they express agnosticism on the nature of reality and make epistemological rather than ontological claims. Nevertheless, the term is useful to differentiate them from realists who believe that the purpose of philosophy, science, or literary critique is to locate externally true meanings. Important philosophers and theorists such as Michel Foucault, Max Stirner, political movements such as post-anarchism or post-Marxism can also be considered as relativist in this sense - though a better term might be social constructivist.
The spread and popularity of this kind of "soft" relativism varies between academic disciplines. It has wide support in anthropology and has a majority following in cultural studies. It also has advocates in political theory and political science, sociology, and continental philosophy (as distinct from Anglo-American analytical philosophy). It has inspired empirical studies of the social construction of meaning such as those associated with labelling theory, which defenders can point to as evidence of the validity of their theories (albeit risking accusations of performative contradiction in the process). Advocates of this kind of relativism often also claim that recent developments in the natural sciences, such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity theory show that science is now becoming relativistic. However, many scientists who use these methods continue to identify as realist or post-positivist, and some sharply criticize the association.
Religious
Buddhism
Madhyamaka Buddhism, which forms the basis for many Mahayana Buddhist schools and which was founded by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna taught the idea of relativity. In the Ratnāvalī, he gives the example that shortness exists only in relation to the idea of length. The determination of a thing or object is only possible in relation to other things or objects, especially by way of contrast. He held that the relationship between the ideas of "short" and "long" is not due to intrinsic nature (svabhāva). This idea is also found in the Pali Nikāyas and Chinese Āgamas, in which the idea of relativity is expressed similarly: "That which is the element of light ... is seen to exist on account of [in relation to] darkness; that which is the element of good is seen to exist on account of bad; that which is the element of space is seen to exist on account of form."
Madhyamaka Buddhism discerns two levels of truth: relative and ultimate. The two truths doctrine states that there are Relative or conventional, common-sense truth, which describes our daily experience of a concrete world, and Ultimate truth, which describes the ultimate reality as sunyata, empty of concrete and inherent characteristics. Conventional truth may be understood, in contrast, as "obscurative truth" or "that which obscures the true nature". It is constituted by the appearances of mistaken awareness. Conventional truth would be the appearance that includes a duality of apprehender and apprehended, and objects perceived within that. Ultimate truth is the phenomenal world free from the duality of apprehender and apprehended.
Catholicism
The Catholic Church, especially under John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, has identified relativism as one of the most significant problems for faith and morals today.
According to the Church and to some theologians, relativism, as a denial of absolute truth, leads to moral license and a denial of the possibility of sin and of God. Whether moral or epistemological, relativism constitutes a denial of the capacity of the human mind and reason to arrive at truth. Truth, according to Catholic theologians and philosophers (following Aristotle) consists of adequatio rei et intellectus, the correspondence of the mind and reality. Another way of putting it states that the mind has the same form as reality. This means when the form of the computer in front of someone (the type, color, shape, capacity, etc.) is also the form that is in their mind, then what they know is true because their mind corresponds to objective reality.
The denial of an absolute reference, of an axis mundi, denies God, who equates to Absolute Truth, according to these Christian theologians. They link relativism to secularism, an obstruction of religion in human life.
Leo XIII
Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) was the first known Pope to use the word "relativism", in his encyclical Humanum genus (1884). Leo condemned Freemasonry and claimed that its philosophical and political system was largely based on relativism.
John Paul II
John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor
As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.
In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), he says:
Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.
Benedict XVI
In April 2005, in his homily during Mass prior to the conclave which would elect him as Pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger talked about the world "moving towards a dictatorship of relativism":
How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Ephesians 4, 14). Having a clear Faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching", looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an "Adult" means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth.
On June 6, 2005, Pope Benedict XVI told educators:
Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own 'ego'.
Then during the World Youth Day in August 2005, he also traced to relativism the problems produced by the communist and sexual revolutions, and provided a counter-counter argument.
In the last century we experienced revolutions with a common programme–expecting nothing more from God, they assumed total responsibility for the cause of the world in order to change it. And this, as we saw, meant that a human and partial point of view was always taken as an absolute guiding principle. Absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism. It does not liberate man, but takes away his dignity and enslaves him. It is not ideologies that save the world, but only a return to the living God, our Creator, the Guarantor of our freedom, the Guarantor of what is really good and true.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis refers in Evangelii gaudium to two forms of relativism, "doctrinal relativism" and a "practical relativism" typical of "our age". The latter is allied to "widespread indifference" to systems of belief.
Jainism
Mahavira (599-527 BC), the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, developed a philosophy known as Anekantavada. John Koller describes anekāntavāda as "epistemological respect for view of others" about the nature of existence, whether it is "inherently enduring or constantly changing", but "not relativism; it does not mean conceding that all arguments and all views are equal".
Sikhism
In Sikhism the Gurus (spiritual teachers) have propagated the message of "many paths" leading to the one God and ultimate salvation for all souls who tread on the path of righteousness. They have supported the view that proponents of all faiths can, by doing good and virtuous deeds and by remembering the Lord, certainly achieve salvation. The students of the Sikh faith are told to accept all leading faiths as possible vehicles for attaining spiritual enlightenment provided the faithful study, ponder and practice the teachings of their prophets and leaders. The holy book of the Sikhs called the Sri Guru Granth Sahib says: "Do not say that the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran are false. Those who do not contemplate them are false." Guru Granth Sahib page 1350; later stating: "The seconds, minutes, and hours, days, weeks and months, and the various seasons originate from the one Sun; O nanak, in just the same way, the many forms originate from the Creator." Guru Granth Sahib page 12,13.
See also
References
Bibliography
Maria Baghramian, Relativism, London: Routledge, 2004,
Gad Barzilai, Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003,
Andrew Lionel Blais, On the Plurality of Actual Worlds, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997,
Benjamin Brown, Thoughts and Ways of Thinking: Source Theory and Its Applications. London: Ubiquity Press, 2017. .
Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985,
Rom Harré and Michael Krausz, Varieties of Relativism, Oxford, UK; New York, NY: Blackwell, 1996,
Knight, Robert H. The Age of Consent: the Rise of Relativism and the Corruption of Popular Culture. Dallas, Tex.: Spence Publishing Co., 1998. xxiv, 253, [1] p.
Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010,
Martin Hollis, Steven Lukes, Rationality and Relativism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982,
Joseph Margolis, Michael Krausz, R. M. Burian, Eds., Rationality, Relativism, and the Human Sciences, Dordrecht: Boston, M. Nijhoff, 1986,
Jack W. Meiland, Michael Krausz, Eds. Relativism, Cognitive and Moral, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982,
Markus Seidel, Epistemic Relativism: A Constructive Critique, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014,
External links
Westacott, E. Relativism, 2005, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Westacott, E. Cognitive Relativism, 2006, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Professor Ronald Jones on relativism
What 'Being Relative' Means, a passage from Pierre Lecomte du Nouy's "Human Destiny" (1947)
BBC Radio 4 series "In Our Time", on Relativism - the battle against transcendent knowledge, 19 January 2006
Against Relativism, by Christopher Noriss
The Catholic Encyclopedia
Harvey Siegel reviews Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge
Epistemological schools and traditions | 0.785616 | 0.995858 | 0.782362 |
Philosophy of education | The philosophy of education is the branch of applied philosophy that investigates the nature of education as well as its aims and problems. It also examines the concepts and presuppositions of education theories. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws inspiration from various disciplines both within and outside philosophy, like ethics, political philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Many of its theories focus specifically on education in schools but it also encompasses other forms of education. Its theories are often divided into descriptive theories, which provide a value-neutral description of what education is, and normative theories, which investigate how education should be practiced.
A great variety of topics is discussed in the philosophy of education. Some studies provide a conceptual analysis of the fundamental concepts of education. Others center around the aims or purpose of education, like passing on knowledge and the development of the abilities of good reasoning, judging, and acting. An influential discussion concerning the epistemic aims of education is whether education should focus mainly on the transmission of true beliefs or rather on the abilities to reason and arrive at new knowledge. In this context, many theorists emphasize the importance of critical thinking in contrast to indoctrination. Another debate about the aims of education is whether the primary beneficiary is the student or the society to which the student belongs.
Many of the more specific discussions in the philosophy of education concern the contents of the curriculum. This involves the questions of whether, when, and in what detail a certain topic, like sex education or religion, should be taught. Other debates focus on the specific contents and methods used in moral, art, and science education. Some philosophers investigate the relation between education and power, often specifically regarding the power used by modern states to compel children to attend school. A different issue is the problem of the equality of education and factors threatening it, like discrimination and unequal distribution of wealth. Some philosophers of education promote a quantitative approach to educational research, which follows the example of the natural sciences by using wide experimental studies. Others prefer a qualitative approach, which is closer to the methodology of the social sciences and tends to give more prominence to individual case studies.
Various schools of philosophy have developed their own perspective on the main issues of education. Existentialists emphasize the role of authenticity while pragmatists give particular prominence to active learning and discovery. Feminists and postmodernists often try to uncover and challenge biases and forms of discrimination present in current educational practices. Other philosophical movements include perennialism, classical education, essentialism, critical pedagogy, and progressivism. The history of the philosophy of education started in ancient philosophy but only emerged as a systematic branch of philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century.
Definition
The philosophy of education is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, aims, and problems of education. As the philosophical study of education, it investigates its topic similar to how other discipline-specific branches of philosophy, like the philosophy of science or the philosophy of law, study their topics. A central task for the philosophy of education is to make explicit the various fundamental assumptions and disagreements at work in its field and to evaluate the arguments raised for and against the different positions. The issue of education has a great many manifestations in various fields. Because of this, both the breadth and the influence of the philosophy of education are significant and wide-ranging, touching many other branches of philosophy, such as ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Its theories are often formulated from the perspective of these other philosophical disciplines. But due to its interdisciplinary nature, it also attracts contributions from scholars belonging to fields outside the domain of philosophy.
While there is wide agreement on the general topics discussed in the philosophy of education, it has proven difficult to give a precise definition of it. The philosophy of education belongs mainly to applied philosophy. According to some definitions, it can be characterized as an offshoot of ethics. But not everyone agrees with this characterization since the philosophy of education has a more theoretical side as well, which includes the examination of the fundamental concepts and theories of education as well as their philosophical implications. These two sides are sometimes referred to as the outward and the inward looking nature of the philosophy of education. Its topics can range from very general questions, like the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, to more specific issues, like how to teach art or whether public schools should implement standardized curricula and testing.
The problem of education was already an important topic in ancient philosophy and has remained so to the present day. But it only emerged as a distinct branch of philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century, when it became the subject of a systematic study and analysis. The term "education" can refer either to the process of educating or to the field of study investigating education as this process. This ambiguity is also reflected on the level of the philosophy of education, which encompasses the study of the philosophical presuppositions and issues both of education as a process and as a discipline. Many works in the philosophy of education focus explicitly or implicitly on the education happening in schools. But in its widest sense, education takes place in various other fields as well, such as at home, in libraries, in museums, or in the public media. Different types of education can be distinguished, such as formal and informal education or private and public education.
Subdivisions
Different subdivisions of the philosophy of education have been suggested. One categorization distinguishes between descriptive and normative issues. Descriptive theories aim to describe what education is and how to understand its related concepts. This includes also epistemological questions, which ask not whether a theory about education is true or false, but how one can arrive at the knowledge to answer such questions. Normative theories, on the other hand, try to give an account of how education should be practiced or what is the right form of education. Some normative theories are built on a wider ethical framework of what is right or good and then arrive at their educational normative theories by applying this framework to the practice of education. But the descriptive and the normative approaches are intertwined and cannot always be clearly separated since descriptive findings often directly imply various normative attitudes.
Another categorization divides topics in the philosophy of education into the nature and aims of education on the one hand, and the methods and circumstances of education on the other hand. The latter section may again be divided into concrete normative theories and the study of the conceptual and methodological presuppositions of these theories. Other classifications additionally include areas for topics such as the role of reasoning and morality as well as issues pertaining to social and political topics and the curriculum.
The theories within the philosophy of education can also be subdivided based on the school of philosophy they belong to. Various schools of philosophy, such as existentialism, pragmatism, Marxism, postmodernism, and feminism, have developed their own perspective on the main issues of education. They often include normative theories about how education should or should not be practiced and are in most cases controversial.
Another approach is to simply list all topics discussed in the philosophy of education. Among them are the issues and presuppositions concerning sex education, science education, aesthetic education, religious education, moral education, multicultural education, professional education, theories of teaching and learning, the measurement of learning, knowledge and its value, cultivating reason, epistemic and moral aims of education, authority, fallibilism, and fallibility.
Finally, yet another way that philosophy of education is often tacitly divided is in terms of western versus non-western and “global south” perspectives. For many generations, philosophy of education has maintained a relatively ethnocentric orientation, with little attention paid to ideas from outside Europe and North America, but this is starting to change in the 21st century due to decolonization and related movements.
Main topics
Fundamental concepts of education
The starting point of many philosophical inquiries into a field is the examination and clarification of the fundamental concepts used in this field, often in the form of conceptual analysis. This approach is particularly prominent in the analytic tradition. It aims to make ambiguities explicit and to uncover various implicit and potentially false assumptions associated with these terms.
Theorists in this field often emphasize the importance of this form of investigation since all subsequent work on more specific issues already has to assume at least implicitly what their central terms mean to demarcate their field. For example, in order to study what constitutes good education, one has to have a notion of what the term "education" means and how to achieve, measure, and evaluate it. Definitions of education can be divided into thin and thick definitions. Thin definitions are neutral and descriptive. They usually emphasize the role of the transmission of knowledge and understanding in education. Thick definitions include additional normative components, for example, by stating that the process in question has to have certain positive results to be called education. According to one thick definition, education means that the person educated has acquired knowledge and intellectual skills, values these factors, and has thus changed for the better. These characteristics can then be used to distinguish education from other closely related terms, such as "indoctrination". Other fundamental notions in the philosophy of education include the concepts of teaching, learning, student, schooling, and rearing.
Aims of education
A central question in the philosophy of education concerns the aims of education, i.e. the question of why people should be educated and what goals should be pursued in the process of education. This issue is highly relevant for evaluating educational practices and products by assessing how well they manage to realize these goals. There is a lot of disagreement and various theories have been proposed concerning the aims of education. Prominent suggestions include that education should foster knowledge, curiosity, creativity, rationality, and critical thinking while also promoting the tendency to think, feel, and act morally. The individual should thereby develop as a person, and achieve self-actualization by realizing their potential. Some theorists emphasize the cultivation of liberal ideals, such as freedom, autonomy, and open-mindedness, while others stress the importance of docility, obedience to authority, and ideological purity, sometimes also with a focus on piety and religious faith. Many suggestions concern the social domain, such as fostering a sense of community and solidarity and thus turning the individual into a productive member of society while protecting them from the potentially negative influences of society. The discussion of these positions and the arguments cited for and against them often include references to various disciplines in their justifications, such as ethics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
There is wide consensus concerning certain general aims of education, like that it should foster all students, help them in the development of their ability to reason, and guide them in how to judge and act. But these general characteristics are usually too vague to be of much help and there are many disagreements about the more specific suggestions of what education should aim for. Some attempts have been made to provide an overarching framework of these different aims. According to one approach, education should at its core help the individual lead a good life. All the different more specific goals are aims of education to the extent that they serve this ultimate purpose. On this view, it may be argued that fostering rationality and autonomy in the students are aims of education to the extent that increased rationality and autonomy will result in the student leading a better life.
The different theories of the aims of education are sometimes divided into goods-based, skills-based, and character-based accounts. Goods-based accounts hold that the ultimate aim of education is to produce some form of epistemic good, such as truth, knowledge, and understanding. Skills-based accounts, on the other hand, see the development of certain skills, like rationality as well as critical and independent thinking as the goal of education. For character-based accounts, the character traits or virtues of the learner play the central role, often with an emphasis on moral and civic traits like kindness, justice, and honesty.
Epistemic
Many theories emphasize the epistemic aims of education. According to the epistemic approach, the central aim of education has to do with knowledge, for example, to pass on knowledge accumulated in the societal effort from one generation to the next. This process may be seen both as the development of the student's mind as well as the transmission of a valuable heritage. Such an approach is sometimes rejected by pragmatists, who emphasize experimentation and critical thinking over the transmission of knowledge. Others have argued that this constitutes a false dichotomy: that the transmission of knowledge and the development of a rational and critical mind are intertwined aims of education that depend on and support each other. In this sense, education aims also at fostering the ability to acquire new knowledge. This includes both instilling true beliefs in the students as well as teaching the methods and forms of evidence responsible for verifying existing beliefs and arriving at new knowledge. It promotes the epistemic autonomy of students and may help them challenge unwarranted claims by epistemic authorities. In its widest sense, the epistemic approach includes various related goals, such as imparting true beliefs or knowledge to the students as well as teaching dispositions and abilities, such as rationality, critical thinking, understanding, and other intellectual virtues.
Critical thinking and indoctrination
Critical thinking is often cited as one of the central aims of education. There is no generally accepted definition of critical thinking. But there is wide agreement that it is reasonable, reflective, careful, and focused on determining what to believe or how to act. It has clarity and rationality as its standards and includes a metacognitive component monitoring not just the solution of the problem at hand but also ensuring that it complies with its own standards in the process. In this sense, education is not just about conveying many true beliefs to the students. Instead, the students' ability to arrive at conclusions by themselves and the disposition to question pre-existing beliefs should also be fostered, often with the goal of benefitting not just the student but society at large. But not everyone agrees with the positive role ascribed to critical thinking in education. Objections are often based on disagreements about what it means to reason well. Some critics argue that there is no universally correct form of reasoning. According to them, education should focus more on teaching subject-specific skills and less on imparting a universal method of thinking. Other objections focus on the allegation that critical thinking is not as neutral, universal, and presuppositionless as some of its proponents claim. On this view, it involves various implicit biases, like egocentrism or distanced objectivity, and culture-specific values arising from its roots in the philosophical movement of the European Enlightenment.
The problem of critical thinking is closely connected to that of indoctrination. Many theorists hold that indoctrination is in important ways different from education and should be avoided in education. But others contend that indoctrination should be part of education or even that there is no difference between the two. These different positions depend a lot on how "indoctrination" is to be defined. Most definitions of indoctrination agree that its goal is to get the student to accept and embrace certain beliefs. It has this in common with most forms of education but differs from it in other ways. According to one definition, the belief acquisition in indoctrination happens without regard for the evidential support of these beliefs, i.e. without presenting proper arguments and reasons for adopting them. According to another, the beliefs are instilled in such a way as to discourage the student to question or assess for themselves the believed contents. In this sense, the goals of indoctrination are exactly opposite to other aims of education, such as rationality and critical thinking. In this sense, education tries to impart not just beliefs but also make the students more open-minded and conscious of human fallibility. An intimately related issue is whether the aim of education is to mold the mind of the pupil or to liberate it by strengthening its capacity for critical and independent inquiry.
An important consequence of this debate concerns the problem of testimony, i.e to what extent students should trust the claims of teachers and books. It has been argued that this issue depends a lot on the age and the intellectual development of the student. In the earlier stages of education, a high level of trust on the side of the students may be necessary. But the more their intellectual capacities develop, the more they should use them when trying to assess the plausibility of claims and the reasons for and against them. In this regard, it has been argued that, especially for young children, weaker forms of indoctrination may be necessary while they still lack the intellectual capacities to evaluate the reasons for and against certain claims and thus to critically assess them. In this sense, one can distinguish unavoidable or acceptable forms of indoctrination from their avoidable or unacceptable counterparts. But this distinction is not always affirmed and some theorists contend that all forms of indoctrination are bad or unacceptable.
Individual and society
A recurrent source of disagreement about the aims of education concerns the question of who is the primary beneficiary of education: the individual educated or the society having this individual as its member. In many cases, the interests of both are aligned. On the one hand, many new opportunities in life open to the individual through education, especially concerning their career. On the other hand, education makes it more likely that the person becomes a good, law-abiding, and productive member of society. But this issue becomes more problematic in cases where the interests of the individual and society conflict with each other. This poses the question of whether individual autonomy should take precedence over communal welfare. According to comprehensive liberals, for example, education should emphasize the self-directedness of the students. On this view, it is up to the student to choose their own path in life. The role of education is to provide them with the necessary resources but it does not direct the student with respect to what constitutes an ethically good path in life. This position is usually rejected by communitarians, who stress the importance of social cohesion by being part of the community and sharing a common good.
Curriculum
An important and controversial issue in the philosophy of education concerns the contents of the curriculum, i.e. the question of what should be taught to students. This includes both the selection of subjects to be taught and the consideration of arguments for and against the inclusion of a particular topic. This issue is intimately tied to the aims of education: one may argue that a certain subject should be included in the curriculum because it serves one of the aims of education.
While many positions about what subjects to include in the curriculum are controversial, some particular issues stand out where these controversies go beyond the academic discourse to a wide public discourse, like questions about sexual and religious education. Controversies in sex education involve both biological aspects, such as the functioning of sex organs, and social aspects, such as sexual practices and gender identities. Disagreements in this area concern which aspects are taught and in which detail as well as to which age groups these teachings should be directed. Debates on religious education include questions like whether religion should be taught as a distinct subject and, if so, whether it should be compulsory. Other questions include which religion or religions should be taught and to what degree religious views should influence other topics, such as ethics or sex education.
Another prominent topic in this field concerns the subject of moral education. This field is sometimes referred to as "educational ethics". Disagreements in this field concern which moral beliefs and values should be taught to the students. This way, many of the disagreements in moral philosophy are reflected in the field of moral education. Some theorists in the Kantian tradition emphasize the importance of moral reasoning and enabling children to become morally autonomous agents who can tell right from wrong. Theorists in the Aristotelian tradition, on the other hand, focus more on moral habituation through the development of virtues that concern both perception, affect, and judgment in regard to moral situations. A related issue, heavily discussed in ancient philosophy, is the extent to which morality can be taught at all instead of just being an inborn disposition.
Various discussions also concern the role of art and aesthetics in public education. It has been argued that the creativity learned in these areas can be applied to various other fields and may thereby benefit the student in various ways. It has been argued that aesthetic education also has indirect effects on various other issues, such as shaping the student's sensibilities in the fields of morality and politics as well as heightening their awareness of self and others.
Some researchers reject the possibility of objectivity in general. They use this claim to argue against universal forms of education, which they see as hiding particular worldviews, beliefs, and interests under a false cover. This is sometimes utilized to advance an approach focused on more diversity, for example, by giving more prominence in education to the great variety of cultures, customs, languages, and lifestyles without giving preference to any of them.
Different approaches to solving these disputes are employed. In some cases, psychology in the field of child development, learning, and motivation can provide important general insights. More specific questions about the curriculum of a particular subject, such as mathematics, are often strongly influenced by the philosophy of this specific discipline, such as the philosophy of mathematics.
Power
The problem of power is another issue in the philosophy of education. Of specific interest on this topic is that the modern states compel children to attend school, so-called compulsory education. The children and their parents usually have few to no ways of opting out or changing the established curriculum. An important question in this respect is why or whether modern states are justified to use this form of power. For example, various liberationist movements belonging to the fields of deschooling and unschooling reject this power and argue that the children's welfare is best served in the absence of compulsory schooling in general. This is sometimes based on the idea that the best form of learning does not happen while studying but instead occurs as a side-effect while doing something else. This position is often rejected by pointing out that it is based on overly optimistic presuppositions about the children's natural and unguided development of rationality. While some objections focus on compulsory education in general, a less radical and more common criticism concerns specific compulsory topics in the curriculum, for example, in relation to sexuality or religion. Another contemporary debate in the United States concerns the practice of standardized testing: it has been argued that this discriminates against certain racial, cultural, or religious minorities since the standardized test may implicitly assume various presuppositions not shared by these minorities. Other issues in relation to power concern the authority and responsibility teachers have towards their students.
Postmodern theorists often see established educational practices as instruments of power used by elites in society to further their own interests. Important aspects in this regard are the unequal power relation between the state and its institutions in contrast to the individual as well as the control that can thus be employed due to the close connection between power and knowledge, specifically the knowledge passed on through education.
Equality
A recurrent demand on public education is that all students should be treated equally and in a fair manner. One reason for this demand is that education plays a central role for the child's path and prospects in life, which should not be limited by unfair or arbitrary external circumstances. But there are various disagreements about how this demand is best understood and whether it is applicable in all cases. An initial problem concerns what is meant by "equality". In the field of education, it is often understood as equality of opportunity. In this sense, the demand for equality implies that education should open the same opportunities to everyone. This means, among other things, that students from higher social classes should not enjoy a competitive advantage over others. One difficulty with this demand, when understood in a wide sense, is that there are many sources of educational inequality and it is not always in the best interest to eliminate all of them. For example, parents who are concerned with their young children's education may read them bedtime stories early on and thereby provide them with a certain advantage over other children who do not enjoy this privilege. But disallowing such practices to level the field would have serious negative side-effects. A weaker position on this issue does not demand full equality but holds instead that educational policies should ensure that certain factors, like race, native language, and disabilities, do not pose obstacles to the equality of opportunity.
A closely related topic is whether all students, both high and low performers, should be treated equally. According to some, more resources should be dedicated to low performers, to help them get to an average level, while others recommend a preferential treatment for high performers in order to help them fully develop their exceptional abilities and thereby benefit society at large. A similar problem is the issue of specialization. It concerns the question of whether all students should follow the same curriculum or to what extent they should specialize early on in specific fields according to their interests and skills.
Marxist critiques of the school systems in capitalist societies often focus on the inequality they cause by sorting students for different economic positions. While overtly this process happens based on individual effort and desert, they argue that this just masks and reinforces the underlying influence of the preexisting social class structure. This is sometimes integrated into a wider Marxist perspective on society which holds that education in capitalist societies plays the role of upholding this inequality and thereby reproduces the capitalist relations of production.
Other criticisms of the dominant paradigms in education are often voiced by feminist and postmodern theorists. They usually point to alleged biases and forms of discrimination present in current practices that should be eliminated. Feminists often hold that traditional education is overly man-oriented and thereby oppresses women in some form. This bias was present to severe degrees in earlier forms of education and a lot of progress has been made towards more gender-equal forms of education. Nonetheless, feminists often contend that certain problems still persist in contemporary education. Some argue, for example, that this manifests itself in the prominence given to cognitive development in education, which is said to be associated primarily with masculinity in contrast to a more feminine approach based on emotion and intuition. A related criticism holds that there is an overemphasis on abilities belonging to the public sphere, like reason and objectivity, in contrast to equally important characteristics belonging to the private sphere, like compassion and empathy.
Epistemology
The philosophy of education is also interested in the epistemology of education. This term is often used to talk about the epistemic aims of education, i.e. questions like whether educators should aim at transmitting justified true beliefs rather than merely true beliefs or should additionally foster other epistemic virtues like critical thinking. In a different sense, the epistemology of education concerns the issue of how we arrive at knowledge on educational matters. This is especially relevant in the field of educational research, which is an active field of investigation with many studies being published on a regular basis. It is also quite influential in regard to educational policy and practice. Epistemological questions in this field concern the objectivity of its insights.
An important methodological divide in this area, often referred to as the "paradigm wars", is between the quantitative or statistical approach in contrast to the qualitative or ethnographical approach. The quantitative approach usually focuses on wide experimental studies and employs statistical methods to uncover the general causal factors responsible for educational phenomena. It has been criticized based on the claim that its method, which is inspired by the natural sciences, is inappropriate for understanding the complex cultural and motivational patterns investigated by the social sciences. The qualitative approach, on the other hand, gives more weight to particular case studies for reaching its conclusions. Its opponents hold that this approach lacks the methodological rigor to arrive at well-warranted knowledge. The mixed-method research is a recent contemporary approach in which the methods of both camps are combined. The question of the most promising approach is relevant to how funding budgets are spent on research, which in its turn has important implications for policymaking.
Others
One question concerns how the learners are to be conceptualized. John Locke sees the mind as a blank slate or a tabula rasa that passively absorbs information and is filled with contents through experience. This view contrasts with a more pragmatist perspective, which in its emphasis on practice sees students not as passive absorbers but as active learners that should be encouraged to discover and learn things by themselves.
Another disputed topic is the role of testing in public education. Some theorists have argued that it is counterproductive since it puts undue pressure on the students. But testing also plays various critical roles, such as providing feedback on the learning progress both to the student, their parents, and their teachers. Concrete discussions on the role of testing often focus less on whether it should be done at all and more on how much importance should be ascribed to the test results. This also includes questions about the form of testing, for example, whether it should be standardized. Standardized tests present the same questions and scoring system to all students taking the test and are often motivated by a desire for objective and fair evaluations both of students and schools. Opponents have argued that this approach tends to favor certain social groups over others and severely limits the creativity and effectiveness of teachers.
Philosophical movements
Existentialist
The existentialist sees the world as one's personal subjectivity, where goodness, truth, and reality are individually defined. Reality is a world of existing, truth subjectively chosen, and goodness a matter of freedom. The subject matter of existentialist classrooms should be a matter of personal choice. Teachers view the individual as an entity within a social context in which the learner must confront others' views to clarify his or her own. Character development emphasizes individual responsibility for decisions. Real answers come from within the individual, not from outside authority. Examining life through authentic thinking involves students in genuine learning experiences. Existentialists are opposed to thinking about students as objects to be measured, tracked, or standardized. Such educators want the educational experience to focus on creating opportunities for self-direction and self-actualization. They start with the student, rather than on curriculum content.
Perennialism
Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a person. Since details of fact change constantly, these cannot be the most important. Therefore, one should teach principles, not facts. Since people are human, one should teach first about humans, not machines or techniques. Since people are people first, and workers second if at all, one should teach liberal topics first, not vocational topics. The focus is primarily on teaching reasoning and wisdom rather than facts, the liberal arts rather than vocational training.
Classical education
The Classical education movement advocates a form of education based in the traditions of Western culture, with a particular focus on education as understood and taught in the Middle Ages. The term "classical education" has been used in English for several centuries, with each era modifying the definition and adding its own selection of topics. By the end of the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages, the definition of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art, and languages. In the 20th and 21st centuries it is used to refer to a broad-based study of the liberal arts and sciences, as opposed to a practical or pre-professional program. Classical Education can be described as rigorous and systematic, separating children and their learning into three rigid categories, Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric.
Essentialism
According to educational essentialism, there are certain essential facts about the world that every student needs to learn and master. It is a form of traditional education that relies on long-standing and established subjects and teaching methods. Essentialists usually focus on subjects like reading, writing, mathematics, and science, usually starting with very basic skills while progressively increasing complexity. They prefer a teacher-centered approach, meaning that the teacher acts as the authority figure guiding the learning activity while students are expected to follow their lead.
Social reconstructionism and critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action." Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements for social justice.
Democratic education
Democratic education is a theory of learning and school governance in which students and staff participate freely and equally in a school democracy. In a democratic school, there is typically shared decision-making among students and staff on matters concerning living, working, and learning together.
Progressivism
Educational progressivism is the belief that education must be based on the principle that humans are social animals who learn best in real-life activities with other people. Progressivists, like proponents of most educational theories, claim to rely on the best available scientific theories of learning. Most progressive educators believe that children learn as if they were scientists, following a process similar to John Dewey's model of learning known as "the pattern of inquiry": 1) Become aware of the problem. 2) Define the problem. 3) Propose hypotheses to solve it. 4) Evaluate the consequences of the hypotheses from one's past experience. 5) Test the likeliest solution.
Unschooling
Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
Contemplative education
Contemplative education focuses on bringing introspective practices such as mindfulness and yoga into curricular and pedagogical processes for diverse aims grounded in secular, spiritual, religious and post-secular perspectives. Contemplative approaches may be used in the classroom, especially in tertiary or (often in modified form) in secondary education. Parker Palmer is a recent pioneer in contemplative methods. The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society founded a branch focusing on education, The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.
Contemplative methods may also be used by teachers in their preparation; Waldorf education was one of the pioneers of the latter approach. In this case, inspiration for enriching the content, format, or teaching methods may be sought through various practices, such as consciously reviewing the previous day's activities; actively holding the students in consciousness; and contemplating inspiring pedagogical texts. Zigler suggested that only through focusing on their own spiritual development could teachers positively impact the spiritual development of students.
History
Ancient
Plato
Plato's educational philosophy was grounded in a vision of an ideal Republic wherein the individual was best served by being subordinated to a just society due to a shift in emphasis that departed from his predecessors. The mind and body were to be considered separate entities. In the dialogues of Phaedo, written in his "middle period" (360 BCE), Plato expressed his distinctive views about the nature of knowledge, reality, and the soul:When the soul and body are united, then nature orders the soul to rule and govern, and the body to obey and serve. Now which of these two functions is akin to the divine? and which to the mortal? Does not the divine appear ... to be that which naturally orders and rules, and the mortal to be that which is subject and servant?On this premise, Plato advocated removing children from their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the state, with great care being taken to differentiate children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. Education would be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, and music and art, which he considered the highest form of endeavor.
Plato believed that talent was distributed non-genetically and thus must be found in children born in any social class. He built on this by insisting that those suitably gifted were to be trained by the state so that they might be qualified to assume the role of a ruling class. What this established was essentially a system of selective public education premised on the assumption that an educated minority of the population were, by virtue of their education (and inborn educability), sufficient for healthy governance.
Plato's writings contain some of the following ideas:
Elementary education would be confined to the guardian class till the age of 18, followed by two years of compulsory military training and then by higher education for those who qualified. While elementary education made the soul responsive to the environment, higher education helped the soul to search for truth which illuminated it. Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to train and blend gentle and fierce qualities in the individual and create a harmonious person.
At the age of 20, a selection was made. The best students would take an advanced course in mathematics, geometry, astronomy and harmonics. The first course in the scheme of higher education would last for ten years. It would be for those who had a flair for science. At the age of 30 there would be another selection; those who qualified would study dialectics and metaphysics, logic and philosophy for the next five years. After accepting junior positions in the army for 15 years, a man would have completed his theoretical and practical education by the age of 50.
Aristotle
Only fragments of Aristotle's treatise On Education are still in existence. We thus know of his philosophy of education primarily through brief passages in other works. Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education. Thus, for example, he considered repetition to be a key tool to develop good habits. The teacher was to lead the student systematically; this differs, for example, from Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas (though the comparison is perhaps incongruous since Socrates was dealing with adults).
Aristotle placed great emphasis on balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught. Subjects he explicitly mentions as being important included reading, writing and mathematics; music; physical education; literature and history; and a wide range of sciences. He also mentioned the importance of play.
One of education's primary missions for Aristotle, perhaps its most important, was to produce good and virtuous citizens for the polis. All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
Medieval
Ibn Sina
In the medieval Islamic world, an elementary school was known as a maktab, which dates back to at least the 10th century. Like madrasahs (which referred to higher education), a maktab was often attached to a mosque. In the 11th century, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the West), wrote a chapter dealing with the maktab entitled "The Role of the Teacher in the Training and Upbringing of Children", as a guide to teachers working at maktab schools. He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the value of competition and emulation among pupils as well as the usefulness of group discussions and debates. Ibn Sina described the curriculum of a maktab school in some detail, describing the curricula for two stages of education in a maktab school.
Ibn Sina wrote that children should be sent to a maktab school from the age of 6 and be taught primary education until they reach the age of 14. During which time, he wrote that they should be taught the Qur'an, Islamic metaphysics, language, literature, Islamic ethics, and manual skills (which could refer to a variety of practical skills).
Ibn Sina refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as the period of specialization, when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the age of 14 should be given a choice to choose and specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching, medicine, geometry, trade and commerce, craftsmanship, or any other subject or profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote that this was a transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility regarding the age in which pupils graduate, as the student's emotional development and chosen subjects need to be taken into account.
The empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa' was also developed by Ibn Sina. He argued that the "human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know" and that knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" which is developed through a "syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." He further argued that the intellect itself "possesses levels of development from the material intellect (al-‘aql al-hayulani), that potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-‘aql al-fa‘il), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge."
Ibn Tufail
In the 12th century, the Andalusian-Arabian philosopher and novelist Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) demonstrated the empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa' as a thought experiment through his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone. Some scholars have argued that the Latin translation of his philosophical novel, Philosophus Autodidactus, published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".
Modern
Michel de Montaigne
Child education was among the psychological topics that Michel de Montaigne wrote about. His essays On the Education of Children, On Pedantry, and On Experience explain the views he had on child education. Some of his views on child education are still relevant today.
Montaigne's views on the education of children were opposed to the common educational practices of his day. He found fault both with what was taught and how it was taught. Much of the education during Montaigne's time was focused on the reading of the classics and learning through books.Montaigne disagreed with learning strictly through books. He believed it was necessary to educate children in a variety of ways. He also disagreed with the way information was being presented to students. It was being presented in a way that encouraged students to take the information that was taught to them as absolute truth. Students were denied the chance to question the information. Therefore, students could not truly learn. Montaigne believed that, to learn truly, a student had to take the information and make it their own.
At the foundation Montaigne believed that the selection of a good tutor was important for the student to become well educated. Education by a tutor was to be conducted at the pace of the student.He believed that a tutor should be in dialogue with the student, letting the student speak first. The tutor also should allow for discussions and debates to be had. Such a dialogue was intended to create an environment in which students would teach themselves. They would be able to realize their mistakes and make corrections to them as necessary.
Individualized learning was integral to his theory of child education. He argued that the student combines information already known with what is learned and forms a unique perspective on the newly learned information. Montaigne also thought that tutors should encourage the natural curiosity of students and allow them to question things.He postulated that successful students were those who were encouraged to question new information and study it for themselves, rather than simply accepting what they had heard from the authorities on any given topic. Montaigne believed that a child's curiosity could serve as an important teaching tool when the child is allowed to explore the things that the child is curious about.
Experience also was a key element to learning for Montaigne. Tutors needed to teach students through experience rather than through the mere memorization of information often practised in book learning.He argued that students would become passive adults, blindly obeying and lacking the ability to think on their own. Nothing of importance would be retained and no abilities would be learned. He believed that learning through experience was superior to learning through the use of books. For this reason he encouraged tutors to educate their students through practice, travel, and human interaction. In doing so, he argued that students would become active learners, who could claim knowledge for themselves.
Montaigne's views on child education continue to have an influence in the present. Variations of Montaigne's ideas on education are incorporated into modern learning in some ways. He argued against the popular way of teaching in his day, encouraging individualized learning. He believed in the importance of experience, over book learning and memorization. Ultimately, Montaigne postulated that the point of education was to teach a student how to have a successful life by practicing an active and socially interactive lifestyle.
John Locke
In Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding John Locke composed an outline on how to educate this mind in order to increase its powers and activity:
"The business of education is not, as I think, to make them perfect in any one of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it."
"If men are for a long time accustomed only to one sort or method of thoughts, their minds grow stiff in it, and do not readily turn to another. It is therefore to give them this freedom, that I think they should be made to look into all sorts of knowledge, and exercise their understandings in so wide a variety and stock of knowledge. But I do not propose it as a variety and stock of knowledge, but a variety and freedom of thinking, as an increase of the powers and activity of the mind, not as an enlargement of its possessions."
Locke expressed the belief that education maketh the man, or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an "empty cabinet", with the statement, "I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education."
Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences." He argued that the "associations of ideas" that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self: they are, put differently, what first mark the tabula rasa. In his Essay, in which is introduced both of these concepts, Locke warns against, for example, letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the night for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other."
"Associationism", as this theory would come to be called, exerted a powerful influence over eighteenth-century thought, particularly educational theory, as nearly every educational writer warned parents not to allow their children to develop negative associations. It also led to the development of psychology and other new disciplines with David Hartley's attempt to discover a biological mechanism for associationism in his Observations on Man (1749).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though he paid his respects to Plato's philosophy, rejected it as impractical due to the decayed state of society. Rousseau also had a different theory of human development; where Plato held that people are born with skills appropriate to different castes (though he did not regard these skills as being inherited), Rousseau held that there was one developmental process common to all humans. This was an intrinsic, natural process, of which the primary behavioral manifestation was curiosity. This differed from Locke's 'tabula rasa' in that it was an active process deriving from the child's nature, which drove the child to learn and adapt to its surroundings.
Rousseau wrote in his book Emile that all children are perfectly designed organisms, ready to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults, but due to the malign influence of corrupt society, they often fail to do so. Rousseau advocated an educational method which consisted of removing the child from society—for example, to a country home—and alternately conditioning him through changes to his environment and setting traps and puzzles for him to solve or overcome.
Rousseau was unusual in that he recognized and addressed the potential of a problem of legitimation for teaching. He advocated that adults always be truthful with children, and in particular that they never hide the fact that the basis for their authority in teaching was purely one of physical coercion: "I'm bigger than you." Once children reached the age of reason, at about 12, they would be engaged as free individuals in the ongoing process of their own.
He once said that a child should grow up without adult interference and that the child must be guided to suffer from the experience of the natural consequences of his own acts or behaviour. When he experiences the consequences of his own acts, he advises himself.
"Rousseau divides development into five stages (a book is devoted to each). Education in the first two stages seeks to the senses: only when Émile is about 12 does the tutor begin to work to develop his mind. Later, in Book 5, Rousseau examines the education of Sophie (whom Émile is to marry). Here he sets out what he sees as the essential differences that flow from sex. 'The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive' (Everyman edn: 322). From this difference comes a contrasting education. They are not to be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework: Nature means them to think, to will, to love to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of men. They should learn many things, but only such things as suitable' (Everyman edn.: 327)."
Émile
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant believed that education differs from training in that the former involves thinking whereas the latter does not. In addition to educating reason, of central importance to him was the development of character and teaching of moral maxims. Kant was a proponent of public education and of learning by doing.
Charlotte Mason
Charlotte Mason was a British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of children's education. Her ideas led to a method used by some homeschoolers. Mason's philosophy of education is probably best summarized by the principles given at the beginning of each of her books. Two key mottos taken from those principles are "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life" and "Education is the science of relations." She believed that children were born persons and should be respected as such; they should also be taught the Way of the Will and the Way of Reason. Her motto for students was "I am, I can, I ought, I will." Charlotte Mason believed that children should be introduced to subjects through living books, not through the use of "compendiums, abstracts, or selections." She used abridged books only when the content was deemed inappropriate for children. She preferred that parents or teachers read aloud those texts (such as Plutarch and the Old Testament), making omissions only where necessary.
20th and 21st century
Rudolf Steiner (Waldorf education)
Waldorf education (also known as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education) is a humanistic approach to pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Now known as Waldorf or Steiner education, his pedagogy emphasizes a balanced development of cognitive, affective/artistic, and practical skills (head, heart, and hands). Schools are normally self-administered by faculty; emphasis is placed upon giving individual teachers the freedom to develop creative methods.
Steiner's theory of child development divides education into three discrete developmental stages predating but with close similarities to the stages of development described by Piaget. Early childhood education occurs through imitation; teachers provide practical activities and a healthy environment. Steiner believed that young children should meet only goodness. Elementary education is strongly arts-based, centered on the teacher's creative authority; the elementary school-age child should meet beauty. Secondary education seeks to develop the judgment, intellect, and practical idealism; the adolescent should meet truth.
Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The approach emphasizes the role of the imagination in learning, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. The educational philosophy's overarching goals are to provide young people the basis on which to develop into free, morally responsible and integrated individuals, and to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.
John Dewey
In Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, John Dewey stated that education, in its broadest sense, is the means of the "social continuity of life" given the "primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group". Education is therefore a necessity, for "the life of the group goes on." Dewey was a proponent of Educational Progressivism and was a relentless campaigner for reform of education, pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' actual experiences.
In 1896, Dewey opened the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in an institutional effort to pursue together rather than apart "utility and culture, absorption and expression, theory and practice, [which] are [indispensable] elements in any educational scheme. As the unified head of the departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy, John Dewey articulated a desire to organize an educational experience where children could be more creative than the best of progressive models of his day. Transactionalism as a pragmatic philosophy grew out of the work he did in the Laboratory School. The two most influential works that stemmed from his research and study were The Child and the Curriculum (1902) and Democracy and Education (1916). Dewey wrote of the dualisms that plagued educational philosophy in the latter book: "Instead of seeing the educative process steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture." Dewey found that the preoccupation with facts as knowledge in the educative process led students to memorize "ill-understood rules and principles" and while second-hand knowledge learned in mere words is a beginning in study, mere words can never replace the ability to organize knowledge into both useful and valuable experience.
Maria Montessori
The Montessori method arose from Dr. Maria Montessori's discovery of what she referred to as "the child's true normal nature" in 1907, which happened in the process of her experimental observation of young children given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity. The method itself aims to duplicate this experimental observation of children to bring about, sustain and support their true natural way of being.
William Heard Kilpatrick
William Heard Kilpatrick was a US American philosopher of education and a colleague and a successor of John Dewey. He was a major figure in the progressive education movement of the early 20th century. Kilpatrick developed the Project Method for early childhood education, which was a form of Progressive Education organized curriculum and classroom activities around a subject's central theme. He believed that the role of a teacher should be that of a "guide" as opposed to an authoritarian figure. Kilpatrick believed that children should direct their own learning according to their interests and should be allowed to explore their environment, experiencing their learning through the natural senses. Proponents of Progressive Education and the Project Method reject traditional schooling that focuses on memorization, rote learning, strictly organized classrooms (desks in rows; students always seated), and typical forms of assessment.
William Chandler Bagley
William Chandler Bagley taught in elementary schools before becoming a professor of education at the University of Illinois, where he served as the Director of the School of Education from 1908 until 1917. He was a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia, from 1917 to 1940. An opponent of pragmatism and progressive education, Bagley insisted on the value of knowledge for its own sake, not merely as an instrument, and he criticized his colleagues for their failure to emphasize systematic study of academic subjects. Bagley was a proponent of educational essentialism.
A. S. Neill
A. S. Neill founded Summerhill School, the oldest existing democratic school in Suffolk, England, in 1921. He wrote a number of books that now define much of contemporary democratic education philosophy. Neill believed that the happiness of the child should be the paramount consideration in decisions about the child's upbringing, and that this happiness grew from a sense of personal freedom. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child, was responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood.
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger's philosophizing about education was primarily related to higher education. He believed that teaching and research in the university should be unified and that students should be taught "to focus on and explicitly investigate the ontological presuppositions which implicitly guide research in each domain of knowledge,” an approach he believed would "encourage revolutionary transformation in the sciences and humanities."
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology". Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual." Piaget created the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."
Jean Piaget described himself as an epistemologist, interested in the process of the qualitative development of knowledge. As he says in the introduction of his book Genetic Epistemology: "What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."
Mortimer Jerome Adler
Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research. Adler was married twice and had four children. Adler was a proponent of educational perennialism.
Harry S. Broudy
Harry S. Broudy's philosophical views were based on the tradition of classical realism, dealing with truth, goodness, and beauty. However he was also influenced by the modern philosophy existentialism and instrumentalism. In his textbook Building a Philosophy of Education he has two major ideas that are the main points to his philosophical outlook: The first is truth and the second is universal structures to be found in humanity's struggle for education and the good life. Broudy also studied issues on society's demands on school. He thought education would be a link to unify the diverse society and urged the society to put more trust and a commitment to the schools and a good education.
Jerome Bruner
Another important contributor to the inquiry method in education is Jerome Bruner. His books The Process of Education and Toward a Theory of Instruction are landmarks in conceptualizing learning and curriculum development. He argued that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. This notion was an underpinning for his concept of the "spiral" (helical) curriculum which posited the idea that a curriculum should revisit basic ideas, building on them until the student had grasped the full formal concept. He emphasized intuition as a neglected but essential feature of productive thinking. He felt that interest in the material being learned was the best stimulus for learning rather than external motivation such as grades. Bruner developed the concept of discovery learning which promoted learning as a process of constructing new ideas based on current or past knowledge. Students are encouraged to discover facts and relationships and continually build on what they already know.
Paulo Freire
A Brazilian philosopher and educator committed to the cause of educating the impoverished peasants of his nation and collaborating with them in the pursuit of their liberation from what he regarded as "oppression", Paulo Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking concept of education", in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Freire also suggests that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student; he comes close to suggesting that the teacher-student dichotomy be completely abolished, instead promoting the roles of the participants in the classroom as the teacher-student (a teacher who learns) and the student-teacher (a learner who teaches). In its early, strong form this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.
Aspects of the Freirian philosophy have been highly influential in academic debates over "participatory development" and development more generally. Freire's emphasis on what he describes as "emancipation" through interactive participation has been used as a rationale for the participatory focus of development, as it is held that 'participation' in any form can lead to empowerment of poor or marginalised groups. Freire was a proponent of critical pedagogy.
"He participated in the import of European doctrines and ideas into Brazil,
assimilated them to the needs of a specific socio-economic situation, and thus expanded and refocused them in a thought-provoking way"
John Holt
In 1964 John Holt published his first book, How Children Fail, asserting that the academic failure of schoolchildren was not despite the efforts of the schools, but actually because of the schools. How Children Fail ignited a firestorm of controversy. Holt was catapulted into the American national consciousness to the extent that he made appearances on major TV talk shows, wrote book reviews for Life magazine, and was a guest on the To Tell The Truth TV game show. In his follow-up work, How Children Learn, published in 1967, Holt tried to elucidate the learning process of children and why he believed school short circuits that process.
Nel Noddings
Nel Noddings' first sole-authored book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) followed close on the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan's ground-breaking work in the ethics of care In a Different Voice. While her work on ethics continued, with the publication of Women and Evil (1989) and later works on moral education, most of her later publications have been on the philosophy of education and educational theory. Her most significant works in these areas have been Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (1993) and Philosophy of Education (1995).
Noddings' contribution to education philosophy centers around the ethic of care. Her belief was that a caring teacher-student relationship will result in the teacher designing a differentiated curriculum for each student, and that this curriculum would be based around the students' particular interests and needs. The teacher's claim to care must not be based on a one time virtuous decision but an ongoing interest in the students' welfare.
Professional organizations and associations
See also
Education sciences
Methodology
Learning theory (education)
Outline of educational aims
Pedagogy
Philosophy education
References
Further reading
Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education, by Steven M. Cahn, 1997, .
A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy), ed. by Randall Curren, Paperback edition, 2006, .
The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, ed. by Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish, Paperback edition, 2003, .
Philosophy of Education (Westview Press, Dimension of Philosophy Series), by Nel Noddings, Paperback edition, 1995, .
Andre Kraak, Michael Young Education in Retrospect: Policy And Implementation Since 1990
Daan Thoomes, The necessity of education. In: The History of education and childhood. Radboud University, Nijmegen, 2000
External links
"Philosophy of Education". In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education
Thinkers of Education. UNESCO-International Bureau of Education website
Education studies | 0.784354 | 0.996986 | 0.781989 |
Socratic method | The Socratic method (also known as method of Elenchus or Socratic debate) is a form of argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions.
In Plato's dialogue "Theaetetus", Socrates describes his method as a form of "midwifery" because it is employed to help his interlocutors develop their understanding in a way analogous to a child developing in the womb. The Socratic method begins with commonly held beliefs and scrutinizes them by way of questioning to determine their internal consistency and their coherence with other beliefs and so to bring everyone closer to the truth.
In modified forms, it is employed today in a variety of pedagogical contexts.
Development
In the second half of the 5th century BC, sophists were teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric to entertain, impress, or persuade an audience to accept the speaker's point of view. Socrates promoted an alternative method of teaching, which came to be called the Socratic method.
Socrates began to engage in such discussions with his fellow Athenians after his friend from youth, Chaerephon, visited the Oracle of Delphi, which asserted that no man in Greece was wiser than Socrates. Socrates saw this as a paradox, and began using the Socratic method to answer his conundrum. Diogenes Laërtius, however, wrote that Protagoras invented the "Socratic" method.
Plato famously formalized the Socratic elenctic style in prose—presenting Socrates as the curious questioner of some prominent Athenian interlocutor—in some of his early dialogues, such as Euthyphro and Ion, and the method is most commonly found within the so-called "Socratic dialogues", which generally portray Socrates engaging in the method and questioning his fellow citizens about moral and epistemological issues. But in his later dialogues, such as Theaetetus or Sophist, Plato had a different method to philosophical discussions, namely dialectic.
Method
Elenchus is the central technique of the Socratic method. The Latin form (plural ) is used in English as the technical philosophical term. The most common adjectival form in English is ; and are also current. This was also very important in Plato's early dialogues.
Socrates (as depicted by Plato) generally applied his method of examination to concepts such as the virtues of piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Such an examination challenged the implicit moral beliefs of the interlocutors, bringing out inadequacies and inconsistencies in their beliefs, and usually resulting in aporia. In view of such inadequacies, Socrates himself professed ignorance. Socrates said that his awareness of his ignorance made him wiser than those who, though ignorant, still claimed knowledge. This claim was based on a reported Delphic oracular pronouncement that no man was wiser than Socrates. While this belief seems paradoxical at first glance, in fact it allowed Socrates to discover his own errors.
Socrates used this claim of wisdom as the basis of moral exhortation. He claimed that the chief goodness consists in the caring of the soul concerned with moral truth and moral understanding, that "wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state", and that "life without examination [dialogue] is not worth living".
Socrates rarely used the method to actually develop consistent theories, and he even made frequent use of creative myths and allegories. The Parmenides dialogue shows Parmenides using the Socratic method to point out the flaws in the Platonic theory of forms, as presented by Socrates; it is not the only dialogue in which theories normally expounded by Plato's Socrates are broken down through dialectic. Instead of arriving at answers, the method breaks down the theories we hold, to go "beyond" the axioms and postulates we take for granted. Therefore, myth and the Socratic method are not meant by Plato to be incompatible; they have different purposes, and are often described as the "left hand" and "right hand" paths to good and wisdom.
Scholarly debate
In Plato's early dialogues, the elenchus is the technique Socrates uses to investigate, for example, the nature or definition of ethical concepts such as justice or virtue. According to Gregory Vlastos, it has the following steps:
Socrates' interlocutor asserts a thesis, for example "Courage is endurance of the soul".
Socrates decides whether the thesis is false and targets for refutation.
Socrates secures his interlocutor's agreement to further premises, for example "Courage is a fine thing" and "Ignorant endurance is not a fine thing".
Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor agrees, these further premises imply the contrary of the original thesis; in this case, it leads to: "courage is not endurance of the soul".
Socrates then claims he has shown his interlocutor's thesis is false and its negation is true.
One elenctic examination can lead to a new, more refined, examination of the concept being considered, in this case it invites an examination of the claim: "Courage is endurance of the soul". Most Socratic inquiries consist of a series of and typically end in puzzlement known as .
Michael Frede points out Vlastos' conclusion in step No. 5 above makes nonsense of the aporetic nature of the early dialogues. Having shown a proposed thesis is false is insufficient to conclude some other competing thesis must be true. Rather, the interlocutors have reached aporia, an improved state of still not knowing what to say about the subject under discussion.
The exact nature of the elenchus is subject to a great deal of debate, in particular concerning whether it is a positive method, leading to knowledge, or a negative method used solely to refute false claims to knowledge. Some qualitative research shows that the use of the Socratic method within a traditional Yeshiva education setting helps students succeed in law school, although it remains an open question as to whether that relationship is causal or merely correlative.
Yet, W. K. C. Guthrie in The Greek Philosophers sees it as an error to regard the Socratic method as a means by which one seeks the answer to a problem, or knowledge. Guthrie claims that the Socratic method actually aims to demonstrate one's ignorance. Socrates, unlike the Sophists, did believe that knowledge was possible, but believed that the first step to knowledge was recognition of one's ignorance. Guthrie writes, "[Socrates] was accustomed to say that he did not himself know anything, and that the only way in which he was wiser than other men was that he was conscious of his own ignorance, while they were not. The essence of the Socratic method is to convince the interlocutor that whereas he thought he knew something, in fact he does not."
Modern applications
Socratic seminar
A Socratic seminar (also known as a Socratic circle) is a pedagogical approach based on the Socratic method and uses a dialogic approach to understand information in a text. Its systematic procedure is used to examine a text through questions and answers founded on the beliefs that all new knowledge is connected to prior knowledge, that all thinking comes from asking questions, and that asking one question should lead to asking further questions. A Socratic seminar is not a debate. The goal of this activity is to have participants work together to construct meaning and arrive at an answer, not for one student or one group to "win the argument".
This approach is based on the belief that participants seek and gain deeper understanding of concepts in the text through thoughtful dialogue rather than memorizing information that has been provided for them. While Socratic seminars can differ in structure, and even in name, they typically involve a passage of text that students must read beforehand and facilitate dialogue. Sometimes, a facilitator will structure two concentric circles of students: an outer circle and an inner circle. The inner circle focuses on exploring and analysing the text through the act of questioning and answering. During this phase, the outer circle remains silent. Students in the outer circle are much like scientific observers watching and listening to the conversation of the inner circle. When the text has been fully discussed and the inner circle is finished talking, the outer circle provides feedback on the dialogue that took place. This process alternates with the inner circle students going to the outer circle for the next meeting and vice versa. The length of this process varies depending on the text used for the discussion. The teacher may decide to alternate groups within one meeting, or they may alternate at each separate meeting.
The most significant difference between this activity and most typical classroom activities involves the role of the teacher. In Socratic seminar, the students lead the discussion and questioning. The teacher's role is to ensure the discussion advances regardless of the particular direction the discussion takes.
Various approaches to Socratic seminar
Teachers use Socratic seminar in different ways. The structure it takes may look different in each classroom. While this is not an exhaustive list, teachers may use one of the following structures to administer Socratic seminar:
Inner/outer circle or fishbowl: Students need to be arranged in inner and outer circles. The inner circle engages in discussion about the text. The outer circle observes the inner circle, while taking notes. The outer circle shares their observations and questions the inner circle with guidance from the teacher/facilitator. Students use constructive criticism as opposed to making judgements. The students on the outside keep track of topics they would like to discuss as part of the debrief. Participants in the outer circle can use an observation checklist or notes form to monitor the participants in the inner circle. These tools will provide structure for listening and give the outside members specific details to discuss later in the seminar. The teacher may also sit in the circle but at the same height as the students.
Triad: Students are arranged so that each participant (called a "pilot") in the inner circle has two "co-pilots" sitting behind them on either side. Pilots are the speakers because they are in the inner circle; co-pilots are in the outer circle and only speak during consultation. The seminar proceeds as any other seminar. At a point in the seminar, the facilitator pauses the discussion and instructs the triad to talk to each other. Conversation will be about topics that need more in-depth discussion or a question posed by the leader. Sometimes triads will be asked by the facilitator to come up with a new question. Any time during a triad conversation, group members can switch seats and one of the co-pilots can sit in the pilot's seat. Only during that time is the switching of seats allowed. This structure allows for students to speak, who may not yet have the confidence to speak in the large group. This type of seminar involves all students instead of just the students in the inner and outer circles.
Simultaneous seminars: Students are arranged in multiple small groups and placed as far as possible from each other. Following the guidelines of the Socratic seminar, students engage in small group discussions. Simultaneous seminars are typically done with experienced students who need little guidance and can engage in a discussion without assistance from a teacher/facilitator. According to the literature, this type of seminar is beneficial for teachers who want students to explore a variety of texts around a main issue or topic. Each small group may have a different text to read/view and discuss. A larger Socratic seminar can then occur as a discussion about how each text corresponds with one another. Simultaneous Seminars can also be used for a particularly difficult text. Students can work through different issues and key passages from the text.
No matter what structure the teacher employs, the basic premise of the seminar/circles is to turn partial control and direction of the classroom over to the students. The seminars encourage students to work together, creating meaning from the text and to stay away from trying to find a correct interpretation. The emphasis is on critical and creative thinking.
Text selection
Socratic seminar texts
A Socratic seminar text is a tangible document that creates a thought-provoking discussion.
The text ought to be appropriate for the participants' current level of intellectual and social development. It provides the anchor for dialogue whereby the facilitator can bring the participants back to the text if they begin to digress. Furthermore, the seminar text enables the participants to create a level playing field – ensuring that the dialogical tone within the classroom remains consistent and pure to the subject or topic at hand. Some practitioners argue that "texts" do not have to be confined to printed texts, but can include artifacts such as objects, physical spaces, and the like.
Pertinent elements of an effective Socratic text
Socratic seminar texts are able to challenge participants' thinking skills by having these characteristics:
Ideas and values: The text must introduce ideas and values that are complex and difficult to summarize. Powerful discussions arise from personal connections to abstract ideas and from implications to personal values.
Complexity and challenge: The text must be rich in ideas and complexity and open to interpretation. Ideally it should require multiple readings, but should be neither far above the participants' intellectual level nor very long.
Relevance to participants' curriculum: An effective text has identifiable themes that are recognizable and pertinent to the lives of the participants. Themes in the text should relate to the curriculum.
Ambiguity: The text must be approachable from a variety of different perspectives, including perspectives that seem mutually exclusive, thus provoking critical thinking and raising important questions. The absence of right and wrong answers promotes a variety of discussion and encourages individual contributions.
Two different ways to select a text
Socratic texts can be divided into two main categories:
Print texts (e.g., short stories, poems, and essays) and non-print texts (e.g. photographs, sculptures, and maps); and
Subject area, which can draw from print or non-print artifacts. As examples, language arts can be approached through poems, history through written or oral historical speeches, science through policies on environmental issues, math through mathematical proofs, health through nutrition labels, and physical education through fitness guidelines.
Questioning methods
Socratic seminars are based upon the interaction of peers. The focus is to explore multiple perspectives on a given issue or topic. Socratic questioning is used to help students apply the activity to their learning. The pedagogy of Socratic questions is open-ended, focusing on broad, general ideas rather than specific, factual information. The questioning technique emphasizes a level of questioning and thinking where there is no single right answer.
Socratic seminars generally start with an open-ended question proposed either by the leader or by another participant. There is no designated first speaker; as individuals participate in Socratic dialogue, they gain experience that enables them to be effective in this role of initial questioner.
The leader keeps the topic focused by asking a variety of questions about the text itself, as well as questions to help clarify positions when arguments become confused. The leader also seeks to coax reluctant participants into the discussion, and to limit contributions from those who tend to dominate. She or he prompts participants to elaborate on their responses and to build on what others have said. The leader guides participants to deepen, clarify, and paraphrase, and to synthesize a variety of different views.
The participants share the responsibility with the leader to maintain the quality of the Socratic circle. They listen actively to respond effectively to what others have contributed. This teaches the participants to think and speak persuasively using the discussion to support their position. Participants must demonstrate respect for different ideas, thoughts and values, and must not interrupt each other.
Questions can be created individually or in small groups. All participants are given the opportunity to take part in the discussion. Socratic circles specify three types of questions to prepare:
Opening questions generate discussion at the beginning of the seminar in order to elicit dominant themes.
Guiding questions help deepen and elaborate the discussion, keeping contributions on topic and encouraging a positive atmosphere and consideration for others.
Closing questions lead participants to summarize their thoughts and learning and personalize what they've discussed.
Challenges and disadvantages
Scholars such as Peter Boghossian suggest that although the method improves creative and critical thinking, there is a flip side to the method. He states that the teachers who use this method wait for the students to make mistakes, thus creating negative feelings in the class, exposing the student to possible ridicule and humiliation.
Some have countered this thought by stating that the humiliation and ridicule is not caused by the method, rather it is due to the lack of knowledge of the student. Boghossian mentions that even though the questions may be perplexing, they are not originally meant for it, in fact such questions provoke the students and can be countered by employing counterexamples.
Psychotherapy
The Socratic method, in the form of Socratic questioning, has been adapted for psychotherapy, most prominently in classical Adlerian psychotherapy, logotherapy, rational emotive behavior therapy, cognitive therapy and reality therapy. It can be used to clarify meaning, feeling, and consequences, as well as to gradually unfold insight, or explore alternative actions.
The Socratic method has also recently inspired a new form of applied philosophy: Socratic dialogue, also called philosophical counseling. In Europe Gerd B. Achenbach is probably the best known practitioner, and Michel Weber has also proposed another variant of the practice.
See also
Devil's advocate
Harkness tablea teaching method based on the Socratic method
Marva Collins
Pedagogy
The Paper Chase1973 film based on a 1971 novel of the same name, dramatizing the use of the Socratic method in law school classes
Socrates Cafe
Socratic questioning
Socratic irony
References
External links
Robinson, Richard, Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd edition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1953).
Ch. 2: Elenchus;
Ch. 3: Elenchus: Direct and Indirect
Philosopher.org – 'Tips on Starting your own Socrates Cafe', Christopher Phillips, Cecilia Phillips
Socraticmethod.net Socratic Method Research Portal
How to Use the Socratic Method
UChicago.edu – 'The Socratic Method' by Elizabeth Garrett (1998)
Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling, an example from Rick Garlikov
Project Gutenberg: Works by Plato
Project Gutenberg: Works by Xenophon (includes some Socratic works)
Project Gutenberg: Works by Cicero (includes some works in the "Socratic dialogue" format)
The Socratic Club
Socratic and Scientific Method
Method
Debate types
Education in ancient Greece
Educational psychology
History of education
Dialectic
Inquiry
Philosophical methodology
Group problem solving methods
Rhetoric | 0.782408 | 0.999048 | 0.781663 |
Constructivist teaching methods | Constructivist teaching is based on constructivism (philosophy of education). Constructivist teaching is based on the belief that learning occurs as learners are actively involved in a process of meaning and knowledge construction as opposed to passively receiving information.
History
Constructivist approach teaching methods are based on Constructivist learning theory. Scholars such as Ernst von Glasersfeld trace the origin of this approach to the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, George Berkeley, and Jean Piaget. There are those who also cite the contribution of John Dewey such as his works on action research, which allows the construction of complex understanding of teaching and learning.
Dewey and Piaget researched childhood development and education; both were very influential in the development of informal education. Dewey's idea of influential education suggests that education must engage with and enlarge exploration of thinking and reflection associated with the role of educators. Contrary to this, Piaget argued that we learn by expanding our knowledge by experiences which are generated through play from infancy to adulthood which are necessary for learning. Both theories are now encompassed by the broader movement of progressive education. Constructivist learning theory states that all knowledge is constructed from a base of prior knowledge. As such, children are not to be treated as a blank slate, and make sense of classroom material in the context of his or her current knowledge.
The development of constructivist models of teaching are specifically attributed to the works of Maria Montessori, which were further developed by more recent by theorists such as David A. Kolb, and Ronald Fry, among others. These theorists have proposed sensory and activity-based learning methods. It was Kolb and Fry who were able to develop a methodology for experiential learning that involves concrete experience, observation and reflection, forming abstract concepts, and testing in new situations.
Activities
The constructivist method is composed of at least five stages: inviting ideas, exploration, proposition, explanation and solution, and taking action. The constructivist classroom also focuses on daily activities when it comes to student work. Teaching methods also emphasize communication and social skills, as well as intellectual collaboration. This is different from a traditional classroom where students primarily work alone, learning through repetition and lecture. Activities encouraged in constructivist classrooms include:
Experimentation: Students individually perform an experiment and then come together as a class to discuss the results.
Research projects: Students research a topic and can present their findings to the class.
Field trips: This allows students to put the concepts and ideas discussed in class in a real-world context. Field trips would often be followed by class discussions.
Films: These provide visual context and thus bring another sense into the learning experience.
Class discussions: This technique is used in all of the methods described above. It is one of the most important distinctions of constructivist teaching methods.
Campus wikis: These provide learners with a platform for curating helpful learning resources.
Constructivist approaches can also be used in online learning. Tools such as discussion forums, wikis and blogs can enable learners to actively construct knowledge. Because existing knowledge schemata are explicitly acknowledged as a starting point for new learning, constructivist approaches tend to validate individual and cultural differences and diversity.
Assessment
Traditional testing is only one facet of constructivist assessment of student success. Assessment also consists of personal, thorough interpretation of students' performance in the context of what their out-of-school life.
Non-traditional constructivist assessment strategies include:
Oral discussions: The teacher presents students with a "focus" question and allows an open discussion on the topic.
KWL(H) Chart (What we know, What we want to know, What we have learned, How we know it). This technique can be used throughout the course of study for a particular topic, but is also a good assessment technique as it shows the teacher the progress of the student throughout the course of study.
Mind Mapping: In this activity, students list and categorize the concepts and ideas relating to a topic.
Hands-on activities: These encourage students to manipulate their environments or a particular learning tool. Teachers can use a checklist and observation to assess student success with the particular material.
Pre-testing: This allows a teacher to determine what knowledge students bring to a new topic and thus will be helpful in directing the course of study.
Arguments against constructivist teaching techniques
Critics have voiced the following arguments against constructivist based teaching instruction:
A group of cognitive scientists has also questioned the central claims of constructivism, saying that they are either misleading or contradict known findings.
One possible deterrent for this teaching method is that, due to the emphasis on group work, the ideas of the more active students may dominate the group's conclusions.
While proponents of constructivism argue that constructivist students perform better than their peers when tested on higher-order reasoning, the critics of constructivism argue that this teaching technique forces students to "reinvent the wheel". Supporters counter that "Students do not reinvent the wheel but, rather, attempt to understand how it turns, how it functions." Proponents argue that students — especially elementary school-aged children — are naturally curious about the world, and giving them the tools to explore it in a guided manner will serve to give them a stronger understanding of it.
Mayer (2004) developed a literature review spanning fifty years and concluded "The research in this brief review shows that the formula constructivism = hands-on activity is a formula for educational disaster." His argument is that active learning is often suggested by those subscribing to this philosophy. In developing this instruction these educators produce materials that require learning to be behaviorally active and not be "cognitively active". That is, although they are engaged in activity, they may not be learning (Sweller, 1988). Mayer recommends using guided discovery, a mix of direct instruction and hands-on activity, rather than pure discovery: "In many ways, guided discovery appears to offer the best method for promoting constructivist learning."
Kirchner et al. (2006) agree with the basic premise of constructivism, that learners construct knowledge, but are concerned with the instructional design recommendations of this theoretical framework. "The constructivist description of learning is accurate, but the instructional consequences suggested by constructivists do not necessarily follow." (Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark, 2006, p. 78). Specifically, they say instructors often design unguided instruction that relies on the learner to "discover or construct essential information for themselves" (Kirchner et al., 2006, p75).
For this reason they state that it "is easy to agree with Mayer's (2004) recommendation that we "move educational reform efforts from the fuzzy and nonproductive world of ideology—which sometimes hides under the various banners of constructivism—to the sharp and productive world of theory-based research on how people learn" (p. 18). Finally Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) cite Mayer to conclude fifty years of empirical results do not support unguided instruction.
Specific approaches
Specific approaches to education that are based on constructivism include the following:
Constructionism
An approach to learning based on the constructivist learning ideologies presented by Jean Piaget (Harel & Papert, 1991). In this approach, the individual is consciously engaged in the construction of a product (Li, Cheng, & Liu, 2013). The utilization of constructionism in educational settings has been shown to promote higher-order thinking skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking (Li et al., 2013).
Guided instruction
A learning approach in which the educator uses strategically placed prompts, cues, questions, direct explanations, and modeling to guide student thinking and facilitate an increased responsibility for the completion of a task.
Problem-based learning
A structured educational approach which consists of large and small group discussions (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). Problem-based learning begins with an educator presenting a series of carefully constructed problems or issues to small groups of students (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). The problems or issues typically pertain to phenomena or events to which students possess limited prior knowledge (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). The first component of problem-based learning is to discuss prior knowledge and ask questions related to the specific problems or issues (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). Following the class discussion, there is typically time in which students individually research or reflect on the newly acquired information and/or seek out areas requiring further exploration (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). After a pre-determined amount of time (as outlined by the educator), students will meet in the same small groups that were composed prior to the class discussion (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). In the first meeting, groups will spend between one and three hours further discussing the problems or issues from class in addition to presenting any new information collected during individual research (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). Following the first meeting, students will independently reflect on the group discussion, specifically in comparing thoughts regarding the problems or issues in question (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). Typically, groups will meet a second time to critically analyse individual and group thoughts and discussions and will attempt to synthesize the information in order to draw conclusions about the given problem or issue (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). Within the educational setting, problem-based learning has enabled students to actively construct individual understandings of a topic using both prior and newly acquired knowledge (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007). Moreover, students also develop self-directed and group learning skills which ultimately facilitates the comprehension of the problems or issues (Schmidt & Loyens, 2007).
Inquiry-based learning
An educational approach associated with problem-based learning in which the student learns through investigating issues or scenarios (Hakverdi-Can & Sonmez, 2012). In this approach, students pose and answer questions individually and/or collaboratively in order to draw conclusions regarding the specific issues or scenarios (Hakverdi-Can & Sonmez, 2012). Within the educational setting, inquiry-based learning has been beneficial in developing student inquiry, investigation, and collaboration skills, in turn, increasing overall comprehension of the issue or scenario (Hakverdi-Can & Sonmez, 2012).
Effective essential questions include student thought and research, connect to student's reality and can be solved in different ways (Crane, 2009). There are no incorrect answers to essential questions, rather answers reveal student understanding(Crane, 2009).
Anchored instruction
An educational approach associated with problem-based learning in which the educator introduces an 'anchor' or theme in which students will be able to explore (Kariuki & Duran, 2004). The 'anchor' acts as a focal point for the entire task, allowing students to identify, define, and explore problems while exploring the topic from a variety of different perspectives (Kariuki & Duran, 2004).
Cooperative learning
A variety of educational approaches focusing on individuals working together to achieve a specific learning outcome (Hsiung, 2012).
Reciprocal Peer Teaching
A cooperative learning approach wherein students alternate roles as teacher and learner (Krych, March, Bryan, Peake, Wojciech, & Carmichael, 2005). The utilization of Reciprocal Peer Teaching (RPT) in educational settings has been effective in the development of teamwork, leadership, and communication skills in addition to improving students' understanding of course content (Krych et al., 2005).
Jigsaw
A highly structured cooperative learning approach which is implemented in four stages: introduction, focused exploration, reporting and re-shaping, and integration and evaluation. In the introduction stage, the class is divided into heterogeneous 'home' groups consisting of between three and seven students. Upon establishing the 'home' groups, the teacher will discuss the subtopics pertaining to the subject matter. In the focused exploration stage, each student within all 'home' groups selects one of the subtopics. Students from each 'home' group that have selected the same subtopic will form a 'jigsaw' group. It is in the 'jigsaw' group that students will explore the material pertaining to the subtopic and will prepare for teaching it to their 'home' group, the reporting and re-shaping stage. The approach concludes in the fourth stage, integration and evaluation, wherein each of the 'home' groups combine the learning of each subtopic together to create the completed piece of work
See also
Constructivism in science education
Constructivist epistemology
Marian Small
Montessori method
References
Laffey, J., Tupper, T., Musser, D., & Wedman, J. (1997). A computer-mediated support system for project-based learning. Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
Taber, K. S. (2011). Constructivism as educational theory: Contingency in learning, and optimally guided instruction. In J. Hassaskhah (Ed.), Educational Theory (pp. 39–61). New York: Nova. Available from https://camtools.cam.ac.uk/wiki/eclipse/Constructivism.html.
Wood, & Middleton, (1975). A study of assisted problem solving. British Journal of Psychology, 66(2), 181–191.
Thirteen Ed Online (2004). Constructivism as a paradigm for teaching and learning. http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/constructivism/index.html
Durmus, Y. T. (2016). Effective Learning Environment Characteristics as a requirement of Constructivist Curricula: Teachers' Needs and School Principals' Views . International Journal of Instruction, 9(2).
Cross, K. P. (1987). Teaching for learning. AAHE Bulletin, 39(8).
Winkler, T., Kritzenberger, H., & Herczeg, M. (2002). Mixed Reality Environments as Collaborative and Constructive Learning Spaces for Elementary School Children.
External links
Constructivist Teaching and Learning Models
SSTA Research Centre Report on Constructivist Teaching and Learning
Constructivist Teaching
Association for Constructivist Teaching
Constructivist Teaching Practices: Perceptions of Teachers and Students
Constructivist Learning and Teaching
Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning
A follow up critique of constructivism by Eric Scerri
Learning theory (education)
Constructivism (psychological school) | 0.797096 | 0.9803 | 0.781394 |
Learning styles | Learning styles refer to a range of theories that aim to account for differences in individuals' learning. Although there is ample evidence that individuals express personal preferences on how they prefer to receive information, few studies have found validity in using learning styles in education. Many theories share the proposition that humans can be classified according to their "style" of learning, but differ on how the proposed styles should be defined, categorized and assessed. A common concept is that individuals differ in how they learn.
The idea of individualized learning styles became popular in the 1970s. This has greatly influenced education despite the criticism that the idea has received from some researchers. Proponents recommend that teachers run a needs analysis to assess the learning styles of their students and adapt their classroom methods to best fit each student's learning style. Critics claim that there is no consistent evidence that better student outcomes result from identifying an individual student's learning style and teaching for specific learning styles. Since 2012, learning styles have often been referred to as a "neuromyth" in education. There is evidence of empirical and pedagogical problems related to forcing learning tasks to "correspond to differences in a one-to-one fashion". Studies contradict the widespread "meshing hypothesis" that a student will learn best if taught in a method deemed appropriate for the student's learning style. However, a 2020 systematic review suggested that a majority (89%) of educators around the world continue to believe that the meshing hypothesis is correct.
Studies further show that teachers cannot assess the learning style of their students accurately. In one study, students were asked to take an inventory of their learning styles. After nearly 400 students completed the inventory, 70% did not use study habits that matched their preferred learning method. This study also indicated that students who used study methods that matched their preferred learning style performed no better on tests than students who did not.
Overview of models
There are many different learning styles models; one literature review identified 71 different models. Only a few models are described below.
David Kolb's model
David A. Kolb's model is based on his experiential learning model, as explained in his book Experiential Learning. Kolb's model outlines two related approaches toward grasping experience: Concrete Experience and Abstract Conceptualization, as well as two related approaches toward transforming experience: Reflective Observation and Active Experimentation. According to Kolb's model, the ideal learning process engages all four of these modes in response to situational demands; they form a learning cycle from experience to observation to conceptualization to experimentation and back to experience. In order for learning to be effective, Kolb postulated, all four of these approaches must be incorporated. As individuals attempt to use all four approaches, they may tend to develop strengths in one experience-grasping approach and one experience-transforming approach, leading them to prefer one of the following four learning styles:
Accommodator = Concrete Experience + Active Experiment: strong in "hands-on" practical doing (e.g., physical therapists)
Converger = Abstract Conceptualization + Active Experiment: strong in practical "hands-on" application of theories (e.g., engineers)
Diverger = Concrete Experience + Reflective Observation: strong in imaginative ability and discussion (e.g., social workers)
Assimilator = Abstract Conceptualization + Reflective Observation: strong in inductive reasoning and creation of theories (e.g., philosophers)
Kolb's model gave rise to the Learning Style Inventory, an assessment method used to determine an individual's learning style. According to this model, individuals may exhibit a preference for one of the four styles—Accommodating, Converging, Diverging and Assimilating—depending on their approach to learning in Kolb's experiential learning model.
Although Kolb's model is widely used, a 2013 study pointed out that Kolb's Learning Style Inventory, among its other weaknesses, incorrectly dichotomizes individuals on the abstract/concrete and reflective/action dimensions of experiential learning (in much the same way as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator does in a different context), and proposed instead that these dimensions be treated as continuous rather than dichotomous/binary variables.
In an article that addressed Kolb's work through 2005, Mark K. Smith reviewed some critiques of Kolb's model, and identified six key issues regarding the model:
The model doesn't adequately address the process of reflection;
The claims it makes about the four learning styles are extravagant;
It doesn't sufficiently address the fact of different cultural conditions and experiences;
The idea of stages/steps doesn't necessarily match reality;
It has only weak empirical evidence;
The relationship between learning processes and knowledge is more complex than Kolb draws it.
Peter Honey and Alan Mumford's model
Peter Honey and Alan Mumford adapted Kolb's experiential learning model. First, they renamed the stages in the learning cycle to accord with managerial experiences: having an experience, reviewing the experience, concluding from the experience, and planning the next steps. Second, they aligned these stages to four learning styles named:
Activist
Reflector
Theorist
Pragmatist
These learning styles are not innate to an individual but rather are developed based on an individual's experiences and preferences. Based on this model, the Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) was developed to allow individuals to assess and reflect on how they consume information and learn from their experiences. It serves as an alternative to Kolb's LSI as it directly asks about common behaviors found in the workplace compared to judging how an individual learns. Having completed the self-assessment, managers are encouraged to focus on strengthening underutilized styles in order to become better equipped to learn from a wide range of everyday experiences. A MORI survey commissioned by The Campaign for Learning in 1999 found the Honey and Mumford LSQ to be the most widely used system for assessing preferred learning styles in the local government sector in the UK.
Learning modalities
Walter Burke Barbe and colleagues proposed three learning modalities (often identified by the acronym VAK):
Visualizing modality
Auditory modality
Kinesthetic modality
Barbe and colleagues reported that learning modality strengths can occur independently or in combination (although the most frequent modality strengths, according to their research, are visual or mixed), they can change over time, and they become integrated with age. They also pointed out that learning modality strengths are different from preferences; a person's self-reported modality preference may not correspond to their empirically measured modality strength. This disconnect between strengths and preferences was confirmed by a subsequent study. Nevertheless, some scholars have criticized the VAK model. Psychologist Scott Lilienfeld and colleagues have argued that much use of the VAK model is nothing more than pseudoscience or a psychological urban legend.
Neil Fleming's VAK/VARK model
Neil Fleming's VARK model and inventory expanded upon earlier notions of sensory modalities such as the VAK model of Barbe and colleagues and the representational systems (VAKOG) in neuro-linguistic programming. The four sensory modalities in Fleming's model are:
Visual learning
Aural learning
Reading/writing learning
Kinesthetic learning
While the fifth modality isn't considered one of the four learning styles, it covers those who fit equally among two or more areas, or without one frontrunner:
Multimodality (MM)
Fleming claimed that visual learners have a preference for seeing (visual aids that represent ideas using methods other than words, such as graphs, charts, diagrams, symbols, etc.). Subsequent neuroimaging research has suggested that visual learners convert words into images in the brain and vice versa, but some psychologists have argued that this "is not an instance of learning styles, rather, it is an instance of ability appearing as a style". Likewise, Fleming claimed that auditory learners best learn through listening (lectures, discussions, tapes, etc.), and tactile/kinesthetic learners prefer to learn via experience—moving, touching, and doing (active exploration of the world, science projects, experiments, etc.). Students can use the model and inventory to identify their preferred learning style and, it is claimed, improve their learning by focusing on the mode that benefits them the most. Fleming's model also posits two types of multimodality. This means that not everyone has one defined preferred modality of learning; some people may have a mixture that makes up their preferred learning style. There are two types of multimodality learners: VARK type one learners are able to assimilate their learning style to those around them. VARK type two learners need to receive input or output in all of their preferred styles. They will continue to work until all preferred learning areas have been met.
Gregorc & Butler's model
Anthony Gregorc and Kathleen Butler organized a model describing different learning styles rooted in the way individuals acquire and process information differently. This model posits that an individual's perceptual abilities are the foundation of his or her specific learning strengths, or learning styles.
In this model, there are two perceptual qualities: concrete and abstract, and two ordering abilities: random and sequential. Concrete perceptions involve registering information through the five senses, while abstract perceptions involve the understanding of ideas, qualities, and concepts which cannot be seen. In regard to the two ordering abilities, sequential ordering involves the organization of information in a linear, logical way, and random ordering involves the organization of information in chunks and in no specific order. The model posits that both of the perceptual qualities and both of the ordering abilities are present in each individual, but some qualities and ordering abilities are more dominant within certain individuals.
There are four combinations of perceptual qualities and ordering abilities based on dominance: concrete sequential, abstract random, abstract sequential, and concrete random. The model posits that individuals with different combinations learn in different ways—they have different strengths, different things make sense to them, different things are difficult for them, and they ask different questions throughout the learning process.
The validity of Gregorc's model has been questioned by Thomas Reio and Albert Wiswell following experimental trials. Gregorc argues that his critics have "scientifically-limited views" and that they wrongly repudiate the "mystical elements" of "the spirit" that can only be discerned by a "subtle human instrument".
Cognitive approaches
Anthony Grasha and Sheryl Riechmann, in 1974, formulated the Grasha-Reichmann Learning Style Scale. It was developed to analyze the attitudes of students and how they approach learning. The test was originally designed to provide teachers with insight on how to approach instructional plans for college students. Grasha's background was in cognitive processes and coping techniques. Unlike some models of cognitive styles which are relatively nonjudgmental, Grasha and Riechmann distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive styles. The names of Grasha and Riechmann's learning styles are:
avoidant
participative
competitive
collaborative
dependent
independent
Aiming to explain why aptitude tests, school grades, and classroom performance often fail to identify real ability, Robert Sternberg listed various cognitive dimensions in his book Thinking Styles. Several other models are also often used when researching cognitive styles; some of these models are described in books that Sternberg co-edited, such as Perspectives on Thinking, Learning, and Cognitive Styles.
NASSP model
In the 1980s, the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) formed a task force to study learning styles. The task force defined three broad categories of style—cognitive, affective, and physiological—and 31 variables, including the perceptual strengths and preferences from the VAK model of Barbe and colleagues, but also many other variables such as need for structure, types of motivation, time of day preferences, and so on. They defined a learning style as "a gestalt—not an amalgam of related characteristics but greater than any of its parts. It is a composite of internal and external operations based in neurobiology, personality, and human development and reflected in learner behavior."
Cognitive styles are preferred ways of perception, organization and retention.
Affective styles represent the motivational dimensions of the learning personality; each learner has a personal motivational approach.
Physiological styles are bodily states or predispositions, including sex-related differences, health and nutrition, and reaction to physical surroundings, such as preferences for levels of light, sound, and temperature.
According to the NASSP task force, styles are hypothetical constructs that help to explain the learning (and teaching) process. They posited that one can recognize the learning style of an individual student by observing his or her behavior. Learning has taken place only when one observes a relatively stable change in learner behavior resulting from what has been experienced.
Assessment methods
A 2004 non-peer-reviewed literature review criticized most of the main instruments used to identify an individual's learning style. In conducting the review, Frank Coffield and his colleagues selected 13 of the most influential models of the 71 models they identified, including most of the models described in this article. They examined the theoretical origins and terms of each model, and the instrument that purported to assess individuals against the learning styles defined by the model. They analyzed the claims made by the author(s), external studies of these claims, and independent empirical evidence of the relationship between the learning style identified by the instrument and students' actual learning. Coffield's team found that none of the most popular learning style theories had been adequately validated through independent research. This means that even if the underlying theories were sound, educators are frequently unable to correctly identify the theoretically correct learning style for any given student, so the theory would end up being misapplied in practice.
Learning Style Inventory
The Learning Style Inventory (LSI) is connected with David A. Kolb's model and is used to determine a student's learning style. Previous versions of the LSI have been criticized for problems with validity, reliability, and other issues. Version 4 of the Learning Style Inventory replaces the four learning styles of previous versions with nine new learning styles: initiating, experiencing, imagining, reflecting, analyzing, thinking, deciding, acting, and balancing. The LSI is intended to help employees or students "understand how their learning style impacts upon problem solving, teamwork, handling conflict, communication and career choice; develop more learning flexibility; find out why teams work well—or badly—together; strengthen their overall learning."
A completely different Learning Styles Inventory is associated with a binary division of learning styles, developed by Richard Felder and Linda Silverman. In Felder and Silverman's model, learning styles are a balance between pairs of extremes such as: Active/Reflective, Sensing/Intuitive, Verbal/Visual, and Sequential/Global. Students receive four scores describing these balances. Like the LSI mentioned above, this inventory provides overviews and synopses for teachers.
NASSP Learning Style Profile
The NASSP Learning Style Profile (LSP) is a second-generation instrument for the diagnosis of student cognitive styles, perceptual responses, and study and instructional preferences. The LSP is a diagnostic tool intended as the basis for comprehensive style assessment with students in the sixth to twelfth grades. It was developed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals research department in conjunction with a national task force of learning style experts. The Profile was developed in four phases with initial work undertaken at the University of Vermont (cognitive elements), Ohio State University (affective elements), and St. John's University (physiological/environmental elements). Rigid validation and normative studies were conducted using factor analytic methods to ensure strong construct validity and subscale independence.
The LSP contains 23 scales representing four higher order factors: cognitive styles, perceptual responses, study preferences and instructional preferences (the affective and physiological elements). The LSP scales are: analytic skill, spatial skill, discrimination skill, categorizing skill, sequential processing skill, simultaneous processing skill, memory skill, perceptual response: visual, perceptual response: auditory, perceptual response: emotive, persistence orientation, verbal risk orientation, verbal-spatial preference, manipulative preference, study time preference: early morning, study time preference: late morning, study time preference: afternoon, study time preference: evening, grouping preference, posture preference, mobility preference, sound preference, lighting preference, temperature preference.
Other methods
Other methods (usually questionnaires) used to identify learning styles include Neil Fleming's VARK Questionnaire and Jackson's Learning Styles Profiler. Many other tests have gathered popularity and various levels of credibility among students and teachers.
In the classroom
For a teacher to use the learning styles model, the teacher has to be able to correctly match each student to a learning style. This is a generally unsuccessful exercise due to inappropriate tools. For an assessment tool to be useful, it needs to be a valid test, which is to say that it actually has to put all of the "style A" students in the "A" group, all of the "style B" students in the "B" group, and so forth. Research indicates that very few, if any, of the psychometric tests promoted in conjunction with the learning styles idea have the necessary validity to be useful in practice. Some models, such as Anthony Gregorc's Gregorc Style Delineator, are "theoretically and psychometrically flawed" and "not suitable for the assessment of individuals".
Furthermore, knowing a student's learning style does not seem to have any practical value for the student. In 2019, the American Association of Anatomists published a study that investigated whether learning styles had any effect on the final outcomes of an anatomy course. The study found that even when being told they had a specific learning style, the students did not change their study habits, and those students that did use their theoretically dominant learning style had no greater success in the course; specific study strategies, unrelated to learning style, were positively correlated with final course grade.
Dunn and Dunn
Various researchers have attempted to hypothesize ways in which learning style theory can be used in the classroom. Two such scholars are Rita Dunn and Kenneth Dunn, who build upon a learning modalities approach.
Although learning styles will inevitably differ among students in the classroom, Dunn and Dunn say that teachers should try to make changes in their classroom that will be beneficial to every learning style. Some of these changes include room redesign, the development of small-group techniques, and the development of "contract activity packages". Redesigning the classroom involves locating dividers that can be used to arrange the room creatively (such as having different learning stations and instructional areas), clearing the floor area, and incorporating students' thoughts and ideas into the design of the classroom.
Dunn and Dunn's "contract activity packages" are educational plans that use: a clear statement of the learning need; multisensory resources (auditory, visual, tactile, kinesthetic); activities through which the newly mastered information can be used creatively; the sharing of creative projects within small groups; at least three small-group techniques; a pre-test, a self-test, and a post-test.
Dunn and Dunn's learning styles model is widely used in schools in the United States, and 177 articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals referring to this model. However, the conclusion of a review by Coffield and colleagues was: "Despite a large and evolving research programme, forceful claims made for impact are questionable because of limitations in many of the supporting studies and the lack of independent research on the model."
Sprenger's Differentiation
Another scholar who believes that learning styles should have an effect on the classroom is Marilee Sprenger in Differentiation through Learning Styles and Memory. She bases her work on three premises:
Teachers can be learners, and learners teachers. We are all both.
Everyone can learn under the right circumstances.
Learning is fun! Make it appealing.
Sprenger details how to teach in visual, auditory, or tactile/kinesthetic ways. Methods for visual learners include ensuring that students can see words written, using pictures, and drawing timelines for events. Methods for auditory learners include repeating words aloud, small-group discussion, debates, listening to books on tape, oral reports, and oral interpretation. Methods for tactile/kinesthetic learners include hands-on activities (experiments, etc.), projects, frequent breaks to allow movement, visual aids, role play, and field trips. By using a variety of teaching methods from each of these categories, teachers cater to different learning styles at once, and improve learning by challenging students to learn in different ways.
James W. Keefe and John M. Jenkins have incorporated learning style assessment as a basic component in their "personalized instruction" model of schooling. Six basic elements constitute the culture and context of personalized instruction. The cultural components—teacher role, student learning characteristics, and collegial relationships—establish the foundation of personalization and ensure that the school prizes a caring and collaborative environment. The contextual factors—interactivity, flexible scheduling, and authentic assessment—establish the structure of personalization.
According to Keefe and Jenkins, cognitive and learning style analysis have a special role in the process of personalizing instruction. The assessment of student learning style, more than any other element except the teacher role, establishes the foundation for a personalized approach to schooling: for student advisement and placement, for appropriate retraining of student cognitive skills, for adaptive instructional strategy, and for the authentic evaluation of learning. Some learners respond best in instructional environments based on an analysis of their perceptual and environmental style preferences: most individualized and personalized teaching methods reflect this point of view. Other learners, however, need help to function successfully in any learning environment. If a youngster cannot cope under conventional instruction, enhancing his cognitive skills may make successful achievement possible.
Many of the student learning problems that learning style diagnosis attempts to solve relate directly to elements of the human information processing system. Processes such as attention, perception and memory, and operations such as integration and retrieval of information are internal to the system. Any hope for improving student learning necessarily involves an understanding and application of information processing theory. Learning style assessment can provide a window to understanding and managing this process.
At least one study evaluating teaching styles and learning styles, however, has found that congruent groups have no significant differences in achievement from incongruent groups. Furthermore, learning style in this study varied by demography, specifically by age, suggesting a change in learning style as one gets older and acquires more experience. While significant age differences did occur, as well as no experimental manipulation of classroom assignment, the findings do call into question the aim of congruent teaching–learning styles in the classroom.
Educational researchers Eileen Carnell and Caroline Lodge concluded that learning styles are not fixed and that they are dependent on circumstance, purpose and conditions.
Criticism
Learning style theories have been criticized by many scholars and researchers. Some psychologists and neuroscientists have questioned the scientific basis for separating out students based on learning style. According to Susan Greenfield the practice is "nonsense" from a neuroscientific point of view: "Humans have evolved to build a picture of the world through our senses working in unison, exploiting the immense interconnectivity that exists in the brain." Similarly, Christine Harrington argued that since all students are multisensory learners, educators should teach research-based general learning skills.
Many educational psychologists have shown that there is little evidence for the efficacy of most learning style models, and furthermore, that the models often rest on dubious theoretical grounds. According to professor of education Steven Stahl, there has been an "utter failure to find that assessing children's learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any effect on their learning." Professor of education Guy Claxton has questioned the extent that learning styles such as VARK are helpful, particularly as they can have a tendency to label children and therefore restrict learning. Similarly, psychologist Kris Vasquez pointed out a number of problems with learning styles, including the lack of empirical evidence that learning styles are useful in producing student achievement, but also her more serious concern that the use of learning styles in the classroom could lead students to develop self-limiting implicit theories about themselves that could become self-fulfilling prophecies that are harmful, rather than beneficial, to the goal of serving student diversity.
Some research has shown that long-term retention can better be achieved under conditions that seem more difficult, and that teaching students only in their preferred learning style is not effective.
Psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Barry Beyerstein, and colleagues listed as one of the "50 great myths of popular psychology" the idea that "students learn best when teaching styles are matched to their learning styles", and they summarized some relevant reasons not to believe this "myth".
Other critiques
Coffield and his colleagues and Mark Smith are not alone in their judgements. In 2005, Demos, a UK think tank, published a report on learning styles prepared by a group chaired by David Hargreaves that included Usha Goswami from the University of Cambridge and David Wood from the University of Nottingham. The Demos report said that the evidence for learning styles was "highly variable", and that practitioners were "not by any means always frank about the evidence for their work".
Cautioning against interpreting neuropsychological research as supporting the applicability of learning style theory, John Geake, Professor of Education at the UK's Oxford Brookes University, and a research collaborator with Oxford University's Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, commented in 2005: "We need to take extreme care when moving from the lab to the classroom. We do remember things visually and aurally, but information isn't defined by how it was received."
The work of Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist, has argued that there is not enough evidence to support a theory describing the differences in learning styles amongst students. In his 2009 book Why Don't Students Like School, he claimed that a cognitive styles theory must have three features: "it should consistently attribute to a person the same style, it should show that people with different abilities think and learn differently, and it should show that people with different styles do not, on average, differ in ability". He concluded that there are no theories that have these three crucial characteristics, not necessarily implying that cognitive styles don't exist but rather stating that psychologists have been unable to "find them". In a 2008 self-published YouTube video titled "Learning Styles Don't Exist", Willingham concluded by saying: "Good teaching is good teaching and teachers don't need to adjust their teaching to individual students' learning styles."
2009 APS critique
In late 2009, the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) published a report on the scientific validity of learning styles practices. The panel of experts that wrote the article, led by Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego, concluded that an adequate evaluation of the learning styles hypothesis—the idea that optimal learning demands that students receive instruction tailored to their learning styles—requires a particular kind of study. Specifically, students should be grouped into the learning style categories that are being evaluated (e.g., visual learners vs. verbal learners), and then students in each group must be randomly assigned to one of the learning methods (e.g., visual learning or verbal learning), so that some students will be "matched" and others will be "mismatched". At the end of the experiment, all students must sit for the same test. If the learning style hypothesis is correct, then, for example, visual learners should learn better with the visual method, whereas auditory learners should learn better with the auditory method. As disclosed in the report, the panel found that studies utilizing this essential research design were virtually absent from the learning styles literature. In fact, the panel was able to find only a few studies with this research design, and all but one of these studies were negative findings—that is, they found that the same learning method was superior for all kinds of students. Examples of such negative findings include the research of Laura J. Massa and Richard E. Mayer, as well as more recent research since the 2009 review.
Furthermore, the panel noted that, even if the requisite finding were obtained, the benefits would need to be large, and not just statistically significant, before learning style interventions could be recommended as cost-effective. That is, the cost of evaluating and classifying students by their learning style, and then providing customized instruction would need to be more beneficial than other interventions (e.g., one-on-one tutoring, after school remediation programs, etc.).
As a consequence, the panel concluded, "at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number."
The article incited critical comments from some defenders of learning styles. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Robert Sternberg from Tufts University spoke out against the paper: "Several of the most-cited researchers on learning styles, Mr. Sternberg points out, do not appear in the paper's bibliography." This charge was also discussed by Science, which reported that Pashler said, "Just so... most of [the evidence] is 'weak'." The Chronicle reported that even David A. Kolb partly agreed with Pashler; Kolb said: "The paper correctly mentions the practical and ethical problems of sorting people into groups and labeling them. Tracking in education has a bad history."
Subsequent critiques
A 2015 review paper examined the studies of learning styles completed after the 2009 APS critique, giving particular attention to studies that used the experimental methods advocated for by Pashler et al. The findings were similar to those of the APS critique: the evidence for learning styles was virtually nonexistent while evidence contradicting it was both more prevalent and used more sound methodology. Follow-up studies concluded that learning styles had no effect on student retention of material whereas another explanation, dual coding, had a substantial impact on it and held more potential for practical application in the classroom.
A 2017 research paper from the UK found that 90% of academics agreed there are "basic conceptual flaws" with learning styles theory, yet 58% agreed that students "learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style", and 33% reported that they used learning styles as a method in the past year. It concluded that it might be better to use methods that are "demonstrably effective".
See also
References
Further reading
External links
The Biggest Myth In Education by Veritasium
Different Types Of Learning Styles According To The VARK Model
Learning theory (education)
Alternative therapies for developmental and learning disabilities | 0.78453 | 0.995973 | 0.781371 |
Zone of proximal development | The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a concept in educational psychology. It represents the space between what a learner is capable of doing unsupported and what the learner cannot do even with support. It is the range where the learner is able to perform, but only with support from a teacher or a peer with more knowledge or expertise (a "more knowledgeable other"). The concept was introduced, but not fully developed, by psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) during the last three years of his life. Vygotsky argued that a child gets involved in a dialogue with the "more knowledgeable other", such as a peer or an adult, and gradually, through social interaction and sense-making, develops the ability to solve problems independently and do certain tasks without help. Following Vygotsky, some educators believe that the role of education is to give children experiences that are within their zones of proximal development, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning skills and strategies.
Origins
The concept of the zone of proximal development was originally developed by Vygotsky to argue against the use of academic, knowledge-based tests as a means to gauge students' intelligence. He also created ZPD to further develop Jean Piaget's theory of children being lone and autonomous learners. Vygotsky spent a lot of time studying the impact of school instruction on children and noted that children grasp language concepts quite naturally, but that math and writing did not come as naturally. Essentially, he concluded that because these concepts were taught in school settings with unnecessary assessments, they were more difficult for learners. Piaget believed that there was a clear distinction between development and teaching. He said that development is a spontaneous process that is initiated and completed by the children, stemming from their own efforts. Piaget was a proponent of independent thinking and critical of the standard teacher-led instruction that was common practice in schools.
Alternatively, Vygotsky saw natural, spontaneous development as important, but not all-important. He believed that children would not advance very far if they were left to discover everything on their own It is crucial for a child's development that they are able to interact with more knowledgeable others: they are not able to expand on what they know if this is not possible. The term more knowledgeable others (MKO) is used to describe someone who has a better understanding or higher ability level than the learner, in reference to the specific task, idea, or concept. He noted cultural experiences where children are greatly helped by knowledge and tools handed down from previous generations. Vygotsky noted that good teachers should not present material that is too difficult and "pull the students along."
Vygotsky argued that, rather than examining what a student knows to determine intelligence, it is better to examine their ability to solve problems independently and ability to solve problems with an adult's help. He proposed a question: "if two children perform the same on a test, are their levels of development the same?" He concluded that they were not. However, Vygotsky's untimely death interrupted his work on the zone of proximal development, and it remained mostly incomplete.
Definition
Since Vygotsky's original conception, the definition for the zone of proximal development has been expanded and modified. The zone of proximal development is an area of learning that occurs when a person is assisted by a teacher or peer with a higher skill set. The person learning the skill set cannot complete it without the assistance of the teacher or peer. The teacher then helps the student attain the skill the student is trying to master, until the teacher is no longer needed for that task.
Any function within the zone of proximal development matures within a particular internal context that includes not only the function's actual level but also how susceptible the child is to types of help, the sequence in which these types of help are offered, the flexibility or rigidity of previously formed stereotypes, how willing the child is to collaborate, along with other factors. This context can impact the diagnosis of a function's potential level of development.
Vygotsky stated that one cannot just look at what students are capable of doing on their own; one must look at what they are capable of doing in a social setting. In many cases students are able to complete a task within a group before they are able to complete it on their own. He notes that the teacher's job is to move the child's mind forward step-by-step (teachers cannot teach complex chemical equations to six-year-olds, for example). At the same time, teachers cannot teach all children equally; they must determine which students are ready for which lessons. An example is the often-used accelerated reading program in schools. Students are assessed and given a reading level and a range. Books rated below their level are easy to read, while books above their level challenge the student. Sometimes students are not even allowed to check out books from the school library that are outside their range. Vygotsky argued that a major shortcoming of standardized tests is that they only measure what students are capable of on their own, not in a group setting where their minds are being pushed by other students.
In the context of second language learning, the ZPD can be useful to many adult users. Prompted by this fact as well as the finding that adult peers do not necessarily need to be more capable to provide assistance in the ZPD, Vygotsky's definition has been adapted to better suit the adult L2 developmental context.
Scaffolding
The concept of the ZPD is widely used to study children's mental development as it relates to educational context. The ZPD concept is seen as a scaffolding, a structure of "support points" for performing an action. This refers to the help or guidance received from an adult or more competent peer to permit the child to work within the ZPD. Although Vygotsky himself never mentioned the term, scaffolding was first developed by Jerome Bruner, David Wood, and Gail Ross, while applying Vygotsky's concept of ZPD to various educational contexts. According to Wass and Golding, giving students the hardest tasks they can do with scaffolding leads to the greatest learning gains.
Scaffolding is a process through which a teacher or a more competent peer helps a student in their ZPD as necessary and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary—much as workers remove a scaffold from a building after they complete construction. "Scaffolding [is] the way the adult guides the child's learning via focused questions and positive interactions." This concept has been further developed by Mercedes Chaves Jaime, Ann Brown, among others. Several instructional programs were developed based on this interpretation of the ZPD, including reciprocal teaching and dynamic assessment. For scaffolding to be effective, one must start at the child's level of knowledge and build from there.
One example of children using ZPD is when they are learning to speak. As their speech develops, it influences the way the child thinks, which in turn influences the child's manner of speaking. This process opens more doors for the child to expand their vocabulary. As they learn to convey their thoughts in a more effective way, they receive more sophisticated feedback, therefore increasing their vocabulary and their speaking skills. Wells gives the example of dancing: when a person is learning how to dance, they look to others around them on the dance floor and imitate their moves. A person does not copy the dance moves exactly, but takes what they can and adds their own personality to it.
In mathematics, proximal development uses mathematical exercises for which students have seen one or more worked examples. In secondary school some scaffolding is provided, and generally much less at the tertiary level. Ultimately students must find library resources or a tutor when presented with challenges beyond the zone.
Another example of scaffolding is learning to drive. Parents and driving instructors guide driving students along the way by showing them the mechanics of how the car operates, the correct hand positions on the steering wheel, the technique of scanning the roadway, etc. As the student progresses, less and less instruction is needed, until they are ready to drive on their own.
The concept of scaffolding can be observed in various life situations and arguably in the basis of how everyone learns. One does not (normally) begin knowing everything that there is to know about a subject. The basics must be learned first so one can build on prior knowledge towards mastery of a particular subject or skill.
Implications for educators
Various investigations, using different approaches and research frameworks have proved collaborative learning to be effective in many kinds of settings and contexts. Teachers should assign tasks that students cannot do on their own, but which they can do with assistance; they should provide just enough assistance so that students learn to complete the tasks independently and then provide an environment that enables students to do harder tasks than would otherwise be possible. Teachers can also allow students with more knowledge to assist students who need more assistance. Especially in the context of collaborative learning, group members who have higher levels of understanding can help the less advanced members learn within their zone of proximal development. In the context of adults, peers should challenge each other in order to support collaboration and success. Utilizing student's ZPD can assist especially with early childhood learning by guiding each child through challenges and using their student collaboration as a tool for success. Meyer used the concepts of Cognitive Evolutionary Pressure and Cognitive Empathetic Resonance to provide a theoretical underpinning for how and why the zone of proximal development arises, and this also has implications for how scaffolding can best be used.
Challenges
Scaffolding in education does have some boundaries. One of the largest hurdles to overcome when providing ample support for student learning is managing multiple students. While scaffolding is meant to be a relatively independent process for students, the initial phase of providing individual guidance can easily be overseen when managing large classrooms. Thus, time becomes a critical factor in a scaffolding lesson plan. In order to accommodate more learners, teachers are often faced with cutting parts of lessons or dedicating less time to each student. In turn, this hastened class time might result in loss of interest in students or even invalid peer-teaching. Cognitive abilities of the student also play a significant role in the success of scaffolding. Ideally, students are able to learn within this zone of proximal development, but this is often not the case. Recognizing students' individual abilities and foundation knowledge can be a challenge of successful scaffolding. If students are evidently less prepared for this learning approach and begin to compare themselves to their peers, their self-efficacy and motivation to learn can be hindered. These hurdles of scaffolding and the zone of proximal development are important to acknowledge so that teachers can find solutions to the problems or alter their teaching methods.
See also
Constructivism (learning theory)
Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT)
Curse of knowledge
Educational psychology
Four stages of competence
Shuhari
Social constructivism (learning theory)
Sociocultural theory
References
Sources
Chaiklin, S. (2003). "The Zone of Proximal Development in Vygotsky's analysis of learning and instruction." In Kozulin, A., Gindis, B., Ageyev, V. & Miller, S. (Eds.) Vygotsky's educational theory and practice in cultural context. 39–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Mayer, R. E. (2008). Learning and instruction. (2nd ed., pp. 462–463). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Developmental psychology
Developmental stage theories | 0.784259 | 0.996281 | 0.781342 |
Educational management | Educational management refers to the administration of the education system in which a group combines human and material resources to supervise, plan, strategise, and implement structures to execute an education system. Education is the equipping of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, habits, and attitudes with learning experiences. The education system is an ecosystem of professionals in educational institutions, such as government ministries, unions, statutory boards, agencies, and schools. The education system consists of political heads, principals, teaching staff, non-teaching staff, administrative personnel and other educational professionals working together to enrich and enhance. At all levels of the educational ecosystem, management is required; management involves the planning, organising, implementation, review, evaluation, and integration of an institution. Research in educational management should explore the dynamic interplay among educational leaders, their followers, and the broader community to enhance the quality of teaching and learning outcomes.
Scope
Co-curricular activities
Co-curricular activities help students maintain a holistic education, expressing their interests and talents. The activities help foster a sense of social integration, and add a sense of commitment and belonging to one's community and country. Co-curricular activities include science-oriented talent-development programmes, clubs and societies, sports, uniformed groups, and visual- and performing-arts groups. Co-curricular activities may also include advocacy, botany, personal-care, innovation, research-methodology and current-affairs groups.
Curriculum planning and development
Curriculum planning and development involves "the design and development of integrated plans for learning, and the evaluation of plans, their implementation and the outcomes of the learning experience". It designs and reviews curriculum, promotes teaching and assessment strategies aligned with curriculum, formulates special curriculum programmes, creates clear, observable objectives, and generates useful assessment rubrics.
Curriculum development can be described as a three-stage process encompassing planned, delivered and experienced curriculum. It may be shaped by pedagogical approaches contributed by theorists and researchers, such as John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, and Albert Bandura.
Preschool
Curriculum development at the preschool level is based on several schools of thought. The Kindergarten was established by Friedrich Fröbel in Germany in 1837. Froebel described three forms of knowledge which he viewed as essential to all learning: knowledge of life, which includes an appreciation of gardening, animals and domestic tasks; knowledge of mathematics, such as geometry; and knowledge of beauty, which includes colour and shape, harmony and movement. The goals of Froebel's kindergarten are to awaken a child's physical senses through learning experiences and provide a common ground for individuals to advance.
Margaret and Rachel McMillan were social reformers in England who spent their lives trying to address poverty and founded the Open-Air Nursery School and Training Centre in London. Their goals were to provide loving care, health support, nourishment and physical welfare to children. Assistance was provided to parents to aid them in caring for, and interacting with, their children. Pedagogical models on how to engage and interact with young children were provided. The pedagogical principles of the Nursery School may be found in educational frameworks requiring teachers to nurture and teach a curriculum which covers an exploration of the world, aesthetics, music and movement, and literacy.
John Dewey formulated the theory of progressive education. His progressive-education philosophy embraces the idea that children should be taught how to think. Dewey was opposed to assessments, since they cannot measure whether or not a child is educated. The school community should offer learning opportunities which are interesting and meaningful and prepare individuals to live in a democratic society. Children learn through doing, cooperation, problem-solving and collaboration, with the teacher acting as a guide. Projects in Dewey's curriculum encourage exploration, self-discovery and sensorial experiences which provide a holistic approach, focuses on the children's interests, and are developmentally appropriate.
Montessori education was developed by Maria Montessori, who believed that children go through sensitive periods known as "windows of opportunity". Everything in a Montessori classroom enhances and develops a child's growth. Materials address children's interests and the natural environment. The learning environment is focused on the child. The curriculum trains children to be responsive, and promotes a desire for skills mastery.
Waldorf education, created by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, focuses on the whole child: body, mind, and spirit. The curriculum is designed to provoke thought processes, develop sensitivity, and enhance creative and artistic fluency. The Waldorf curriculum consists of storytelling, aesthetics (arts), practical work, imaginative play, and discovery of nature. Modern schools adopting Waldorf education are independent and self-governing.
The Reggio Emilia approach developed in the small north-Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Influenced by constructivist theories and the progressive-education movement, it is committed to uphold the rights of individuals. Key concepts in a Reggio Emilia school include a child's right to education, the importance of interpersonal relationships amongst children, teachers and parents, and children's interactions in work and play. Its curriculum emerges from the children's interest, and is developed through projects and inquiry. Each individual plays an important role in the school, and parental involvement is a key aspect of the child's learning and development.
Primary education
Curriculum development at the primary level focuses on the foundations of subjects, covering subject disciplines, knowledge skills and character development. Subject disciplines are the cores and foundations of language, science, humanities, the arts, technology, and social studies. Knowledge skills are personal skills and attributes such as communication, critical thinking, teamwork and judgement, which are developed through learning experiences based on the school's pedagogical practices. Character development, according to Elliot Eisner, is the implicit curriculum: the school's hidden agenda. Character traits and attributes include resilience, self-discipline, empathy and compassion, focusing on the social and emotional development of each student. The curriculum development is a springboard towards personal and social capability, ethical and intercultural understanding, and sound moral judgement.
Secondary education
Curriculum development varies at the secondary level, based on the course (or stream) in which a student is enrolled. Curriculum focuses on core subjects such as language, mathematics, science and the humanities. Learning experiences, strategic goals, national frameworks and school philosophy are also considered in curriculum development; schools consider values and progressive skills in the development of a holistic curriculum. Elective and vocational programmes are offered, which include social studies, art and music, design, and technology and computer studies. Specialized schools integrate programmes with corporate partners in information and communication technology, entrepreneurship, art, design, media and Da Vinci Learning. Enhanced programmes in sports, arts, and language are also offered.
Tertiary education
Curriculum at the tertiary education level involves specific course design and development. Griffith University describes planning as based on previously-collected evidence; the process also involves assessment, technologically-informed learning and discipline-based capabilities. The process aims to prepare students for the workforce while enhancing their understanding of a subject. Griffith University considers four key elements in curriculum development: learning analytics, external peer review, peer-based professional learning and professional learning workshops.
Educational technology
Educational technology involves the integration, planning, implementation and management of information and communications technology (ICT) for effective learning and teaching. The educational-technology branch of an education system conceptualizes and develops ICT in education, integrating it with curriculum frameworks, staff development and management.
The focus of educational technology has shifted to online and web-based applications, learning portals, flipped classrooms and a variety of social networks for teaching and learning. Although educational technology includes ICT, it is not limited to hardware and educational theoretics. It encompasses several domains including collaborative learning, learning theory, linear learning, online portal learning, and (where mobile technologies are used) m-learning. These domains contribute to a personalized learning model and promote self-directed learning, as students take charge of their education.
Finances
This department oversees the financial policies of the educational institutes which provide administrative support to schools: financial assistance, revenue operations and school funds. Financial assistance includes government subsidies, allowances and grants which are applied according to income levels and other factors, such as age or institution. Scholarships and awards are distributed by merit or to categories of students.
Health and physical development
This department's primary role is to develop safe and effective programmes to educate students on healthy living and physical education, and involves mastery of a sport and acquiring basic movement skills. The department develops a curriculum based on sequential outcomes and the physical abilities of students. An instructional model may be used as a plan which includes a theoretical foundation, learning outcomes, sequenced activities and task structures. The department may promote parental involvement through partnerships with families and communities, and may rely on support from dieticians, physiotherapists, community health services and sports associations.
Human resources
The primary goals of the human-resources department are attracting, developing, and retaining staff in the education ministry. It formulates operational policies and systems which directly affect staff performance and attitudes. Departmental objectives include a review of organisational structures and procedures, staff skills development and enhancement, and leadership succession and transition. These aim to foster greater staff involvement and expansion, eventually reaching the education system's overall goals.
Information technology
Information technology harnesses technology to facilitate efficient administration, management and education. This requires frequent staff training to ensure that educators at all levels are fully equipped with the needed skill set, and managers must identify and conceptualise relevant information for instruction. IT systems must be reliable, accessible and assimilated by educators, and are vulnerable to hacking and malware. A period of close examination during integration may be necessary to ensure that educators are using new applications correctly.
Special education
Special education aims to facilitate a healthy learning environment for children with special needs or disabilities, giving all children an insightful and fruitful learning experience. Special education may be provided in mainstream schools or specialised schools. The appropriate choice of learning institution depends on the child's needs and the services available. Children may display learning difficulties or require additional materials for learning. Relevant courses are designed for children on the autism spectrum or with intellectual disabilities, visual impairment, hearing loss or cerebral palsy. Additional assistance may be provided by social-service, non-governmental and voluntary welfare organisations and corporate partners.
The department tries to ensure that students with disabilities can participate in the school curriculum on the same basis as their peers. It encompasses all education, including specialised schools and support classes; this is key to ensuring student diversity. Special support services include accommodations, consultations, and personalised learning. Allied educators provide a high level of interaction with each child. A multidisciplinary team of psychologists, special educators, and therapists fosters appropriate, meaningful learning.
Student development
This department's primary role is to create curriculum and programmes which promote character, arts, citizenship, moral education, and global awareness. Its mission is to promote individual student excellence, encourage collaboration and discovery and challenge students to take responsibility, equipping students with future-ready qualities and competencies. Schools focus on values, collaboration, culture, and integration in approaching student-development programmes. Overseas learning opportunities can be integrated to enable students to become aware of diverse cultures and backgrounds, with the goals of global connectivity and collaboration.
Objectives
Educator level
Teachers plan and implement lessons based on pedagogical practices in an educational framework, managing and updating student portfolios to recognise and assess diverse domains of development: social, emotional, intellectual, physical, moral and aesthetic. Pedagogical practices are supported by the curriculum philosophy, the goals and objectives of the subject matter, and individual student learning and developmental needs. Although educational management at the educator level is similar to that of the education ministry, its planning, development and monitoring focuses on individual students. Teachers adopt classroom-management strategies and incorporate instructional approaches which promote independence, discipline, and a positive learning mindset. A teacher's classroom-management style influences many aspects of the learning environment. The four general styles of classroom management are authoritarian, authoritative, permissive and disengaged. Teachers use a variety of positive guidance and disciplinary strategies to refocus a student's attention or manage conflicts.
Ministerial-departmental level
Ministries and departments of education are responsible for the "design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of educational legislation, policies, and programmes". They provide structured support in strategic leadership, human resources, budgeting and administrative management to ensure that the educational system functions effectively and efficiently.
Institutional level
The board of education and principals are responsible for managing an educational institution's daily operations.
The school board formulates policies and has decision-making powers. Their responsibilities include regulating the school budget, formulating its strategic vision and mission, and reviewing and enhancing school policies. The board also monitors school performance, reporting to stakeholders (such as parents and the director-general) and collaborating with parents, government and non-governmental organisations. The board of education can make legal decisions on behalf of the school, entering contracts and providing land.
The principal has a professional and administrative role in the school. With the school board, they chart the school's strategic goals reflecting its mission, vision, and philosophy. The principal supervises teaching and non-teaching staff, coordinating and managing day-to-day operations. They are tasked with procuring resources for the school to achieve its strategic goals and ensuring that staff are trained and equipped with specialised skills, such as first aid. Principals are also required to engage with parents and community partners and provide performance indicators to the ministry (or department) of education. Principals "build school culture", sustaining enhancement programmes and campaigns in the school.
Strategic goals for a school include excellence and engagement in learning, building character and leadership and developing staff competencies, collaborative partnerships, holistic education, quality student outcomes and lifelong, future-ready learners.
National examples
Australia
Education in Australia is bureaucratic in nature. The national and state departments of education are responsible for the regulation of funding of education. Australia's educational system is governed by the Department of Education and Training, which is responsible for national policies and programmes. The department reports to two ministers; secretaries are responsible for the delivery of departmental services, which include corporate strategy, early-childhood education and childcare, higher education, research, and skills and training. Each state is responsible for the delivery and coordination of its programmes and policies:
Department of Education (New South Wales)
Department of Education (Western Australia)
Department of Education and Training (Queensland)
Department for Education (South Australia)
Department of Education and Training (Victoria)
Department of Education (Tasmania)
Finland
Education in Finland is also bureaucratic in nature. The Ministry of Education and Culture consists of departments of general education and early-childhood education; vocational education and training; higher education and science policy; art and cultural policy; youth and sport policy, and a
unit for upper-secondary-school reform. Common ministry functions are performed by administrative, finance and communications units and a secretariat for international relations.
Singapore
Education in Singapore is functional in structure, and is managed by the Ministry of Education (MOE). Its organisational structure consists of:
Political leaders
The Academy of Singapore Teachers, a professional organisation
The Communications and Engagement Group has two divisions: communications, and engagement and research. The communications division manages strategic messaging and promotes the communication of education policies and programmes to the media and the public. The engagement and research division interacts with key MOE stakeholders.
The Curriculum Planning and Development Division's goal is to meet national, community and individual needs. Its responsibilities include syllabus design and review, teaching approaches and assessment, programmes, resources, library services, language centers, and consulting services.
The Curriculum Policy Office develops and reviews policies involved in the national curriculum and facilitates sound, balanced, purposeful and effective curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment practices.
The Educational Technology Division provides strategic direction, leadership, conceptualization and development of ICT integration into the educational master plan.
The Finance and Procurement division has two departments: finance and procurement. The finance department manages the ministry's budget and oversees and formulates policies. The procurement department manages contracts and tenders.
The Higher Education Group formulates, implements and reviews policies relating to tertiary institutions, such as universities and polytechnics.
The Human Resource Group "oversee recruitment and appointment, management of establishment matters for Education Officers, Executive & Administrative Staff, Allied Educators (EO/EAS/AED), employee engagement and HR partnerships with schools and HQ Divisions".
The Information Technology Branch integrates technology with different educational levels and includes administration and management. They provide advice and support on the distribution of information and communication technologies for teaching and learning, and provide the MOE with the processes and procedures to implement IT strategically and effectively.
Infrastructure and Facility Services has three branches. The School Campus Department deals with infrastructure planning with building and upgrade programmes, and monitors and reviews the Urban Redevelopment Authority's policies and plans for land use. The HQ Services Branch oversees policies and planning of physical infrastructure in the MOE HQ purview, and provide administrative policy support for services in schools. The Safety, Security and Emergency Branch oversees the emergency operations and procedures of schools and the MOE HQ, developing and implementing a "safety culture" in school programmes.
The Internal Audit Branch provides checks and balances in the educational system and ministry, independently monitoring and conducting financial and operational audits, investigations and reviews.
The Planning Department's main role is to "manage and analyse key MOE data to support MOE management in decision-making". It has three divisions: the Education Policy Branch, the Corporate Planning Office, and the International Cooperation Branch.
The Research and Management Information Department conducts research and analyses data essential for MOE strategic goals. It consists of the Management Information Branch, the Psychological Assessment Research Branch, the Research and Evaluation Branch, and the Corporate Management Branch.
The Schools Department ensures quality leadership in schools. It consists of the Schools Division; the School Branch North, South, East and West; the Pre-school Education Branch; the School Appraisal Branch, and the School Cockpit Administration Centre. The branches have management, administrative-support, implementation and consulting, and integration role.
Special Educational Needs serve and support students in inclusive environments and special-education institutions, charting the MOE's course in supporting students with special educational needs and developing and reviewing curriculum.
The Student Placement and Services Division's primary role is the management and administration of admissions and scholarships. They also manage the MOE HQ's Customer Service Centre to "improve the quality of service delivery across all MOE public touch points".
Student Development Curriculum delivers a curriculum which meets the goals and vision of Singapore's education system. They oversee the curriculum and co-curricular programme, collaborate with key stakeholders to review and revise curriculum, ensure the successful implementation of national programmes, and enhance student talent and development.
See also
Educational leadership
References
Further reading
The Difference Between Educational Management and Educational Leadership and the Importance of Educational Responsibility in Educational Management Administration & Leadership by Michael Connolly, Chris James and Michael Fertig.
Theories of Educational Management and Leadership: A Review by Majid Ghasemy and Sufean Hussin.
What is Educational Management? by Learn.org
Universal Concepts, Nature, and Basic Principles of Educational Management: Implication for Present Day School Management by Nwachukwu Prince Ololube, Erebagha Theophilus, Ingiabuna Ii, and Comfort N. Agbor.
Educational administration
Educational stages | 0.786606 | 0.993077 | 0.781161 |
Emic and etic | In anthropology, folkloristics, linguistics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic and etic refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.
The "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs, values, and practices of a particular culture from the perspective of the people who live within that culture. This approach aims to understand the cultural meaning and significance of a particular behavior or practice, as it is understood by the people who engage in it.
The "etic" approach, on the other hand, is an outsider's perspective, which looks at a culture from the perspective of an outside observer or researcher. This approach tends to focus on the observable behaviors and practices of a culture, and aims to understand them in terms of their functional or evolutionary significance. The etic approach often involves the use of standardized measures and frameworks to compare different cultures and may involve the use of concepts and theories from other disciplines, such as psychology or sociology.
The emic and etic approaches each have their own strengths and limitations, and each can be useful in understanding different aspects of culture and behavior. Some anthropologists argue that a combination of both approaches is necessary for a complete understanding of a culture, while others argue that one approach may be more appropriate depending on the specific research question being addressed.
Definitions
"The emic approach investigates how local people think...". How they perceive and categorize the world, their rules for behavior, what has meaning for them, and how they imagine and explain things. "The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts the focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. The etic approach realizes that members of a culture often are too involved in what they are doing... to interpret their cultures impartially. When using the etic approach, the ethnographer emphasizes what he or she considers important."
Although emics and etics are sometimes regarded as inherently in conflict and one can be preferred to the exclusion of the other, the complementarity of emic and etic approaches to anthropological research has been widely recognized, especially in the areas of interest concerning the characteristics of human nature as well as the form and function of human social systems.
Emic and etic approaches of understanding behavior and personality fall under the study of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology states that people are shaped by their cultures and their subcultures, and we must account for this in the study of personality. One way is looking at things through an emic approach. This approach "is culture specific because it focuses on a single culture and it is understood on its own terms." As explained below, the term "emic" originated from the specific linguistic term "phonemic", from phoneme, which is a language-specific way of abstracting speech sounds.
An 'emic' account is a description of behavior or a belief in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic account comes from a person within the culture. Almost anything from within a culture can provide an emic account.
An 'etic' account is a description of a behavior or belief by a social analyst or scientific observer (a student or scholar of anthropology or sociology, for example), in terms that can be applied across cultures; that is, an etic account attempts to be 'culturally neutral', limiting any ethnocentric, political or cultural bias or alienation by the observer.
When these two approaches are combined, the "richest" view of a culture or society can be understood. On its own, an emic approach would struggle with applying overarching values to a single culture. The etic approach is helpful in enabling researchers to see more than one aspect of one culture, and in applying observations to cultures around the world.
History
The terms were coined in 1954 by linguist Kenneth Pike, who argued that the tools developed for describing linguistic behaviors could be adapted to the description of any human social behavior. As Pike noted, social scientists have long debated whether their knowledge is objective or subjective. Pike's innovation was to turn away from an epistemological debate, and turn instead to a methodological solution. Emic and etic are derived from the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic, respectively, where a phone is a distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words, whereas a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another phoneme, could change one word to another. The possibility of a truly objective description was discounted by Pike himself in his original work; he proposed the emic-etic dichotomy in anthropology as a way around philosophic issues about the very nature of objectivity.
The terms were also championed by anthropologists Ward Goodenough and Marvin Harris with slightly different connotations from those used by Pike. Goodenough was primarily interested in understanding the culturally specific meaning of specific beliefs and practices; Harris was primarily interested in explaining human behavior.
Pike, Harris, and others have argued that cultural "insiders" and "outsiders" are equally capable of producing emic and etic accounts of their culture. Some researchers use "etic" to refer to objective or outsider accounts, and "emic" to refer to subjective or insider accounts.
Margaret Mead was an anthropologist who studied the patterns of adolescence in Samoa. She discovered that the difficulties and the transitions that adolescents faced are culturally influenced. The hormones that are released during puberty can be defined using an etic framework, because adolescents globally have the same hormones being secreted. However, Mead concluded that how adolescents respond to these hormones is greatly influenced by their cultural norms. Through her studies, Mead found that simple classifications about behaviors and personality could not be used because peoples’ cultures influenced their behaviors in such a radical way. Her studies helped create an emic approach of understanding behaviors and personality. Her research deduced that culture has a significant impact in shaping an individual's personality.
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, is a researcher who took an emic approach in his studies. Jung studied mythology, religion, ancient rituals, and dreams, leading him to believe that there are archetypes that can be identified and used to categorize people's behaviors. Archetypes are universal structures of the collective unconscious that refer to the inherent way people are predisposed to perceive and process information. The main archetypes that Jung studied were the persona (how people choose to present themselves to the world), the anima and animus (part of people experiencing the world in viewing the opposite sex, that guides how they select their romantic partner), and the shadow (dark side of personalities because people have a concept of evil; well-adjusted people must integrate both good and bad parts of themselves). Jung looked at the role of the mother and deduced that all people have mothers and see their mothers in a similar way; they offer nurture and comfort. His studies also suggest that "infants have evolved to suck milk from the breast, it is also the case that all children have inborn tendencies to react in certain ways." This way of looking at the mother is an emic way of applying a concept cross-culturally and universally.
Importance as regards personality
Emic and etic approaches are important to understanding personality because problems can arise "when concepts, measures, and methods are carelessly transferred to other cultures in attempts to make cross-cultural generalizations about personality." It is hard to apply certain generalizations of behavior to people who are so diverse and culturally different. One example of this is the F-scale (Macleod). The F-scale, which was created by Theodor Adorno, is used to measure authoritarian personality, which can, in turn, be used to predict prejudiced behaviors. This test, when applied to Americans accurately depicts prejudices towards black individuals. However, when a study was conducted in South Africa using the F-Scale, (Pettigrew and Friedman) results did not predict any prejudices towards black individuals. This study used emic approaches of study by conducting interviews with the locals and etic approaches by giving participants generalized personality tests.
See also
Exonym and endonym
Other explorations of the differences between reality and humans' models of it:
Blind men and an elephant
Emic and etic units
Internalism and externalism
Map–territory relation
References
Further reading
External links
Emic and Etic Standpoints for the Description of Behavior, chapter 2 in Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, vol 2, by Kenneth Pike (published in 1954 by Summer Institute of Linguistics)
Anthropology
Dichotomies
Ethnography
Folklore
Metatheory | 0.78509 | 0.994972 | 0.781143 |
Reflexivity (social theory) | In epistemology, and more specifically, the sociology of knowledge, reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief structures. A reflexive relationship is multi-directional when the causes and the effects affect the reflexive agent in a layered or complex sociological relationship. The complexity of this relationship can be furthered when epistemology includes religion.
Within sociology more broadly—the field of origin—reflexivity means an act of self-reference where existence engenders examination, by which the thinking action "bends back on", refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. It commonly refers to the capacity of an agent to recognise forces of socialisation and alter their place in the social structure. A low level of reflexivity would result in individuals shaped largely by their environment (or "society"). A high level of social reflexivity would be defined by individuals shaping their own norms, tastes, politics, desires, and so on. This is similar to the notion of autonomy. (See also structure and agency and social mobility.)
Within economics, reflexivity refers to the self-reinforcing effect of market sentiment, whereby rising prices attract buyers whose actions drive prices higher still until the process becomes unsustainable. This is an instance of a positive feedback loop. The same process can operate in reverse leading to a catastrophic collapse in prices.
Overview
In social theory, reflexivity may occur when theories in a discipline should apply equally to the discipline itself; for example, in the case that the theories of knowledge construction in the field of sociology of scientific knowledge should apply equally to knowledge construction by sociology of scientific knowledge practitioners, or when the subject matter of a discipline should apply equally to the individual practitioners of that discipline (e.g., when psychological theory should explain the psychological processes of psychologists). More broadly, reflexivity is considered to occur when the observations of observers in the social system affect the very situations they are observing, or when theory being formulated is disseminated to and affects the behaviour of the individuals or systems the theory is meant to be objectively modelling. Thus, for example, an anthropologist living in an isolated village may affect the village and the behaviour of its citizens under study. The observations are not independent of the participation of the observer.
Reflexivity is, therefore, a methodological issue in the social sciences analogous to the observer effect. Within that part of recent sociology of science that has been called the strong programme, reflexivity is suggested as a methodological norm or principle, meaning that a full theoretical account of the social construction of, say, scientific, religious or ethical knowledge systems, should itself be explainable by the same principles and methods as used for accounting for these other knowledge systems. This points to a general feature of naturalised epistemologies, that such theories of knowledge allow for specific fields of research to elucidate other fields as part of an overall self-reflective process: any particular field of research occupied with aspects of knowledge processes in general (e.g., history of science, cognitive science, sociology of science, psychology of perception, semiotics, logic, neuroscience) may reflexively study other such fields yielding to an overall improved reflection on the conditions for creating knowledge.
Reflexivity includes both a subjective process of self-consciousness inquiry and the study of social behaviour with reference to theories about social relationships.
History
The principle of reflexivity was perhaps first enunciated by the sociologists William I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, in their 1928 book The child in America: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences". The theory was later termed the "Thomas theorem".
Sociologist Robert K. Merton (1948, 1949) built on the Thomas principle to define the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy: that once a prediction or prophecy is made, actors may accommodate their behaviours and actions so that a statement that would have been false becomes true or, conversely, a statement that would have been true becomes false - as a consequence of the prediction or prophecy being made. The prophecy has a constitutive impact on the outcome or result, changing the outcome from what would otherwise have happened.
Reflexivity was taken up as an issue in science in general by Karl Popper (1957), who in his book The poverty of historicism highlighted the influence of a prediction upon the event predicted, calling this the 'Oedipus effect' in reference to the Greek tale in which the sequence of events fulfilling the Oracle's prophecy is greatly influenced by the prophecy itself. Popper initially considered such self-fulfilling prophecy a distinguishing feature of social science, but later came to see that in the natural sciences, particularly biology and even molecular biology, something equivalent to expectation comes into play and can act to bring about that which has been expected. It was also taken up by Ernest Nagel (1961). Reflexivity presents a problem for science because if a prediction can lead to changes in the system that the prediction is made in relation to, it becomes difficult to assess scientific hypotheses by comparing the predictions they entail with the events that actually occur. The problem is even more difficult in the social sciences.
Reflexivity has been taken up as the issue of "reflexive prediction" in economic science by Grunberg and Modigliani (1954) and Herbert A. Simon (1954), has been debated as a major issue in relation to the Lucas critique, and has been raised as a methodological issue in economic science arising from the issue of reflexivity in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) literature.
Reflexivity has emerged as both an issue and a solution in modern approaches to the problem of structure and agency, for example in the work of Anthony Giddens in his structuration theory and Pierre Bourdieu in his genetic structuralism.
Giddens, for example, noted that constitutive reflexivity is possible in any social system, and that this presents a distinct methodological problem for the social sciences. Giddens accentuated this theme with his notion of "reflexive modernity" – the argument that, over time, society is becoming increasingly more self-aware, reflective, and hence reflexive.
Bourdieu argued that the social scientist is inherently laden with biases, and only by becoming reflexively aware of those biases can the social scientists free themselves from them and aspire to the practice of an objective science. For Bourdieu, therefore, reflexivity is part of the solution, not the problem.
Michel Foucault's The order of things can be said to touch on the issue of Reflexivity. Foucault examines the history of Western thought since the Renaissance and argues that each historical epoch (he identifies three and proposes a fourth) has an episteme, or "a historical a priori", that structures and organises knowledge. Foucault argues that the concept of man emerged in the early 19th century, what he calls the "Age of Man", with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He finishes the book by posing the problem of the age of man and our pursuit of knowledge- where "man is both knowing subject and the object of his own study"; thus, Foucault argues that the social sciences, far from being objective, produce truth in their own mutually exclusive discourses.
In economics
Economic philosopher George Soros, influenced by ideas put forward by his tutor, Karl Popper (1957), has been an active promoter of the relevance of reflexivity to economics, first propounding it publicly in his 1987 book The alchemy of finance. He regards his insights into market behaviour from applying the principle as a major factor in the success of his financial career.
Reflexivity is inconsistent with general equilibrium theory, which stipulates that markets move towards equilibrium and that non-equilibrium fluctuations are merely random noise that will soon be corrected. In equilibrium theory, prices in the long run at equilibrium reflect the underlying economic fundamentals, which are unaffected by prices. Reflexivity asserts that prices do in fact influence the fundamentals and that these newly influenced sets of fundamentals then proceed to change expectations, thus influencing prices; the process continues in a self-reinforcing pattern. Because the pattern is self-reinforcing, markets tend towards disequilibrium. Sooner or later they reach a point where the sentiment is reversed and negative expectations become self-reinforcing in the downward direction, thereby explaining the familiar pattern of boom and bust cycles. An example Soros cites is the procyclical nature of lending, that is, the willingness of banks to ease lending standards for real estate loans when prices are rising, then raising standards when real estate prices are falling, reinforcing the boom and bust cycle. He further suggests that property price inflation is essentially a reflexive phenomenon: house prices are influenced by the sums that banks are prepared to advance for their purchase, and these sums are determined by the banks' estimation of the prices that the property would command.
Soros has often claimed that his grasp of the principle of reflexivity is what has given him his "edge" and that it is the major factor contributing to his successes as a trader. For several decades there was little sign of the principle being accepted in mainstream economic circles, but there has been an increase of interest following the crash of 2008, with academic journals, economists, and investors discussing his theories.
Economist and former columnist of the Financial Times, Anatole Kaletsky, argued that Soros' concept of reflexivity is useful in understanding China's economy and how the Chinese government manages it.
In 2009, Soros funded the launch of the Institute for New Economic Thinking with the hope that it would develop reflexivity further. The Institute works with several types of heterodox economics, particularly the post-Keynesian branch.
In sociology
Margaret Archer has written extensively on laypeople's reflexivity. For her, human reflexivity is a mediating mechanism between structural properties, or the individual's social context, and action, or the individual's ultimate concerns. Reflexive activity, according to Archer, increasingly takes the place of habitual action in late modernity since routine forms prove ineffective in dealing with the complexity of modern life trajectories.
While Archer emphasises the agentic aspect of reflexivity, reflexive orientations can themselves be seen as being "socially and temporally embedded". For example, Elster points out that reflexivity cannot be understood without taking into account the fact that it draws on background configurations (e.g., shared meanings, as well as past social engagement and lived experiences of the social world) to be operative.
In anthropology
In anthropology, reflexivity has come to have two distinct meanings, one that refers to the researcher's awareness of an analytic focus on his or her relationship to the field of study, and the other that attends to the ways that cultural practices involve consciousness and commentary on themselves.
The first sense of reflexivity in anthropology is part of social science's more general self-critique in the wake of theories by Michel Foucault and others about the relationship of power and knowledge production. Reflexivity about the research process became an important part of the critique of the colonial roots and scientistic methods of anthropology in the "writing cultures" movement associated with James Clifford and George Marcus, as well as many other anthropologists. Rooted in literary criticism and philosophical analysis of the relationship among the anthropologists, the people represented in texts, and their textual representations, this approach has fundamentally changed ethical and methodological approaches in anthropology. As with the feminist and anti-colonial critiques that provide some of reflexive anthropology's inspiration, the reflexive understanding of the academic and political power of representations, analysis of the process of "writing culture" has become a necessary part of understanding the situation of the ethnographer in the fieldwork situation. Objectification of people and cultures and analysis of them only as objects of study has been largely rejected in favor of developing more collaborative approaches that respect local people's values and goals. Nonetheless, many anthropologists have accused the "writing cultures" approach of muddying the scientific aspects of anthropology with too much introspection about fieldwork relationships, and reflexive anthropology have been heavily attacked by more positivist anthropologists. Considerable debate continues in anthropology over the role of postmodernism and reflexivity, but most anthropologists accept the value of the critical perspective, and generally only argue about the relevance of critical models that seem to lead anthropology away from its earlier core foci.
The second kind of reflexivity studied by anthropologists involves varieties of self-reference in which people and cultural practices call attention to themselves. One important origin for this approach is Roman Jakobson in his studies of deixis and the poetic function in language, but the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival has also been important. Within anthropology, Gregory Bateson developed ideas about meta-messages (subtext) as part of communication, while Clifford Geertz's studies of ritual events such as the Balinese cock-fight point to their role as foci for public reflection on the social order. Studies of play and tricksters further expanded ideas about reflexive cultural practices. Reflexivity has been most intensively explored in studies of performance, public events, rituals, and linguistic forms but can be seen any time acts, things, or people are held up and commented upon or otherwise set apart for consideration. In researching cultural practices, reflexivity plays an important role, but because of its complexity and subtlety, it often goes under-investigated or involves highly specialised analyses.
One use of studying reflexivity is in connection to authenticity. Cultural traditions are often imagined as perpetuated as stable ideals by uncreative actors. Innovation may or may not change tradition, but since reflexivity is intrinsic to many cultural activities, reflexivity is part of tradition and not inauthentic. The study of reflexivity shows that people have both self-awareness and creativity in culture. They can play with, comment upon, debate, modify, and objectify culture through manipulating many different features in recognised ways. This leads to the metaculture of conventions about managing and reflecting upon culture.
In international relations
In international relations, the question of reflexivity was first raised in the context of the so-called ‘Third Debate’ of the late 1980s. This debate marked a break with the positivist orthodoxy of the discipline. The post-positivist theoretical restructuring was seen to introduce reflexivity as a cornerstone of critical scholarship. For Mark Neufeld, reflexivity in International Relations was characterized by 1) self-awareness of underlying premises, 2) an acknowledgment of the political-normative dimension of theoretical paradigms, and 3) the affirmation that judgement about the merits of paradigms is possible despite the impossibility of neutral or apolitical knowledge production.
Since the nineties, reflexivity has become an explicit concern of constructivist, poststructuralist, feminist, and other critical approaches to International Relations. In The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson identified reflexivity of one of the four main methodologies into which contemporary International Relations research can be divided, alongside neopositivism, critical realism, and analyticism.
Reflexivity and the status of the social sciences
Flanagan has argued that reflexivity complicates all three of the traditional roles that are typically played by a classical science: explanation, prediction and control. The fact that individuals and social collectivities are capable of self-inquiry and adaptation is a key characteristic of real-world social systems, differentiating the social sciences from the physical sciences. Reflexivity, therefore, raises real issues regarding the extent to which the social sciences may ever be viewed as "hard" sciences analogous to classical physics, and raises questions about the nature of the social sciences.
Methods for the implementation of reflexivity
A new generation of scholars has gone beyond (meta-)theoretical discussion to develop concrete research practices for the implementation of reflexivity. These scholars have addressed the ‘how to’ question by turning reflexivity from an informal process into a formal research practice. While most research focuses on how scholars can become more reflexive toward their positionality and situatedness, some have sought to build reflexive methods in relation to other processes of knowledge production, such as the use of language. The latter has been advanced by the work of Professor Audrey Alejandro in a trilogy on reflexive methods. The first article of the trilogy develops what is referred to as Reflexive Discourse Analysis, a critical methodology for the implementation of reflexivity that integrates discourse theory. The second article further expands the methodological tools for practicing reflexivity by introducing a three-stage research method for problematizing linguistic categories. The final piece of the trilogy adds a further method for linguistic reflexivity, namely the Reflexive Review. This method provides four steps that aim to add a linguistic and reflexive dimension to the practice of writing a literature review.
See also
References
Further reading
Bryant, C. G. A. (2002). "George Soros's theory of reflexivity: a comparison with the theories of Giddens and Beck and a consideration of its practical value", Economy and society, 31 (1), pp. 112–131.
Flanagan, O. J. (1981). "Psychology, progress, and the problem of reflexivity: a study in the epistemological foundations of psychology", Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 17, pp. 375–386.
Gay, D. (2009). Reflexivity and development economics. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Grunberg, E. and F. Modigliani (1954). "The predictability of social events", Journal of political economy, 62 (6), pp. 465–478.
Merton, R. K. (1948). "The self-fulfilling prophecy", Antioch Review, 8, pp. 193–210.
Merton, R. K. (1949/1957), Social theory and social structure. Rev. ed. The Free Press, Glencoe, IL.
Nagel, E. (1961), The structure of science: problems in the logic of scientific explanation, Harcourt, New York.
Popper, K. (1957), The poverty of historicism, Harper and Row, New York.
Simon, H. (1954). "Bandwagon and underdog effects of election predictions", Public opinion quarterly, 18, pp. 245–253.
Soros, G (1987) The alchemy of finance (Simon & Schuster, 1988) (paperback: Wiley, 2003; )
Soros, G (2008) The new paradigm for financial markets: the credit crisis of 2008 and what it means (PublicAffairs, 2008)
Soros, G (2006) The age of fallibility: consequences of the war on terror (PublicAffairs, 2006)
Soros, G The bubble of American supremacy: correcting the misuse of American power (PublicAffairs, 2003) (paperback; PublicAffairs, 2004; )
Soros, G George Soros on globalization (PublicAffairs, 2002) (paperback; PublicAffairs, 2005; )
Soros, G (2000) Open society: reforming global capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2001)
Thomas, W. I. (1923), The unadjusted girl : with cases and standpoint for behavior analysis, Little, Brown, Boston, MA.
Thomas, W. I. and D. S. Thomas (1928), The child in America : behavior problems and programs, Knopf, New York.
Tsekeris, C. (2013). "Toward a chaos-friendly reflexivity", Entelequia, 16, pp. 71–89.
Woolgar, S. (1988). Knowledge and reflexivity: new frontiers in the sociology of knowledge. London and Beverly Hills: Sage.
Sociological terminology
Sociological theories
George Soros
Self-reference | 0.785224 | 0.994522 | 0.780922 |
Polymath | A polymath (; ) or polyhistor is an individual whose knowledge spans many different subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.
Embodying a basic tenet of Renaissance humanism that humans are limitless in their capacity for development, the concept led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible. This is expressed in the term Renaissance man, often applied to the gifted people of that age who sought to develop their abilities in all areas of accomplishment: intellectual, artistic, social, physical, and spiritual.
Etymology
In Western Europe, the first work to use the term polymathy in its title was published in 1603 by Johann von Wowern, a Hamburg philosopher. Von Wowern defined polymathy as "knowledge of various matters, drawn from all kinds of studies ... ranging freely through all the fields of the disciplines, as far as the human mind, with unwearied industry, is able to pursue them". Von Wowern lists erudition, literature, philology, philomathy, and polyhistory as synonyms.
The earliest recorded use of the term in the English language is from 1624, in the second edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton; the form polymathist is slightly older, first appearing in the Diatribae upon the first part of the late History of Tithes of Richard Montagu in 1621. Use in English of the similar term polyhistor dates from the late 16th century.
Renaissance man
The term "Renaissance man" was first recorded in written English in the early 20th century. It is used to refer to great thinkers living before, during, or after the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". Many notable polymaths lived during the Renaissance period, a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th through to the 17th century that began in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spread to the rest of Europe. These polymaths had a rounded approach to education that reflected the ideals of the humanists of the time. A gentleman or courtier of that era was expected to speak several languages, play a musical instrument, write poetry, and so on, thus fulfilling the Renaissance ideal.
The idea of a universal education was essential to achieving polymath ability, hence the word university was used to describe a seat of learning. However, the original Latin word refers in general to "a number of persons associated into one body, a society, company, community, guild, corporation, etc". At this time, universities did not specialize in specific areas, but rather trained students in a broad array of science, philosophy, and theology. This universal education gave them a grounding from which they could continue into apprenticeship toward becoming a master of a specific field.
When someone is called a "Renaissance man" today, it is meant that rather than simply having broad interests or superficial knowledge in several fields, the individual possesses a more profound knowledge and a proficiency, or even an expertise, in at least some of those fields. Some dictionaries use the term "Renaissance man" to describe someone with many interests or talents, while others give a meaning restricted to the Renaissance and more closely related to Renaissance ideals.
In academia
Robert Root-Bernstein and colleagues
Robert Root-Bernstein is considered the principal responsible for rekindling interest in polymathy in the scientific community. His works emphasize the contrast between the polymath and two other types: the specialist and the dilettante. The specialist demonstrates depth but lacks breadth of knowledge. The dilettante demonstrates superficial breadth but tends to acquire skills merely "for their own sake without regard to understanding the broader applications or implications and without integrating it". Conversely, the polymath is a person with a level of expertise that is able to "put a significant amount of time and effort into their avocations and find ways to use their multiple interests to inform their vocations".
A key point in the work of Root-Bernstein and colleagues is the argument in favor of the universality of the creative process. That is, although creative products, such as a painting, a mathematical model or a poem, can be domain-specific, at the level of the creative process, the mental tools that lead to the generation of creative ideas are the same, be it in the arts or science. These mental tools are sometimes called intuitive tools of thinking. It is therefore not surprising that many of the most innovative scientists have serious hobbies or interests in artistic activities, and that some of the most innovative artists have an interest or hobbies in the sciences.
Root-Bernstein and colleagues' research is an important counterpoint to the claim by some psychologists that creativity is a domain-specific phenomenon. Through their research, Root-Bernstein and colleagues conclude that there are certain comprehensive thinking skills and tools that cross the barrier of different domains and can foster creative thinking: "[creativity researchers] who discuss integrating ideas from diverse fields as the basis of creative giftedness ask not 'who is creative?' but 'what is the basis of creative thinking?' From the polymathy perspective, giftedness is the ability to combine disparate (or even apparently contradictory) ideas, sets of problems, skills, talents, and knowledge in novel and useful ways. Polymathy is therefore the main source of any individual's creative potential". In "Life Stages of Creativity", Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein suggest six typologies of creative life stages. These typologies are based on real creative production records first published by Root-Bernstein, Bernstein, and Garnier (1993).
Type 1 represents people who specialize in developing one major talent early in life (e.g., prodigies) and successfully exploit that talent exclusively for the rest of their lives.
Type 2 individuals explore a range of different creative activities (e.g., through worldplay or a variety of hobbies) and then settle on exploiting one of these for the rest of their lives.
Type 3 people are polymathic from the outset and manage to juggle multiple careers simultaneously so that their creativity pattern is constantly varied.
Type 4 creators are recognized early for one major talent (e.g., math or music) but go on to explore additional creative outlets, diversifying their productivity with age.
Type 5 creators devote themselves serially to one creative field after another.
Type 6 people develop diversified creative skills early and then, like Type 5 individuals, explore these serially, one at a time.
Finally, his studies suggest that understanding polymathy and learning from polymathic exemplars can help structure a new model of education that better promotes creativity and innovation: "we must focus education on principles, methods, and skills that will serve them [students] in learning and creating across many disciplines, multiple careers, and succeeding life stages".
Peter Burke
Peter Burke, Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, discussed the theme of polymathy in some of his works. He has presented a comprehensive historical overview of the ascension and decline of the polymath as, what he calls, an "intellectual species".
He observes that in ancient and medieval times, scholars did not have to specialize. However, from the 17th century on, the rapid rise of new knowledge in the Western world—both from the systematic investigation of the natural world and from the flow of information coming from other parts of the world—was making it increasingly difficult for individual scholars to master as many disciplines as before. Thus, an intellectual retreat of the polymath species occurred: "from knowledge in every [academic] field to knowledge in several fields, and from making original contributions in many fields to a more passive consumption of what has been contributed by others".
Given this change in the intellectual climate, it has since then been more common to find "passive polymaths", who consume knowledge in various domains but make their reputation in one single discipline, than "proper polymaths", who—through a feat of "intellectual heroism"—manage to make serious contributions to several disciplines. However, Burke warns that in the age of specialization, polymathic people are more necessary than ever, both for synthesis—to paint the big picture—and for analysis. He says: "It takes a polymath to 'mind the gap' and draw attention to the knowledges that may otherwise disappear into the spaces between disciplines, as they are currently defined and organized".
Bharath Sriraman
Bharath Sriraman, of the University of Montana, also investigated the role of polymathy in education. He poses that an ideal education should nurture talent in the classroom and enable individuals to pursue multiple fields of research and appreciate both the aesthetic and structural/scientific connections between mathematics, arts and the sciences.
In 2009, Sriraman published a paper reporting a 3-year study with 120 pre-service mathematics teachers and derived several implications for mathematics pre-service education as well as interdisciplinary education. He utilized a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to recreate the emotions, voices and struggles of students as they tried to unravel Russell's paradox presented in its linguistic form. They found that those more engaged in solving the paradox also displayed more polymathic thinking traits. He concludes by suggesting that fostering polymathy in the classroom may help students change beliefs, discover structures and open new avenues for interdisciplinary pedagogy.
Michael Araki
Michael Araki is a professor at the UNSW Business School at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He sought to formalize in a general model how the development of polymathy takes place. His Developmental Model of Polymathy (DMP) is presented in a 2018 article with two main objectives:
organize the elements involved in the process of polymathy development into a structure of relationships that is wed to the approach of polymathy as a life project, and;
provide an articulation with other well-developed constructs, theories, and models, especially from the fields of giftedness and education.
The model, which was designed to reflect a structural model, has five major components:
polymathic antecedents
polymathic mediators
polymathic achievements
intrapersonal moderators
environmental moderators
Regarding the definition of the term polymathy, the researcher, through an analysis of the extant literature, concluded that although there are a multitude of perspectives on polymathy, most of them ascertain that polymathy entails three core elements: breadth, depth and integration.
Breadth refers to comprehensiveness, extension and diversity of knowledge. It is contrasted with the idea of narrowness, specialization, and the restriction of one's expertise to a limited domain. The possession of comprehensive knowledge at very disparate areas is a hallmark of the greatest polymaths. Depth refers to the vertical accumulation of knowledge and the degree of elaboration or sophistication of one's sets of one's conceptual network. Like Robert Root-Bernstein, Araki uses the concept of dilettancy as a contrast to the idea of profound learning that polymathy entails.
Integration, although not explicit in most definitions of polymathy, is also a core component of polymathy according to the author. Integration involves the capacity of connecting, articulating, concatenating or synthesizing different conceptual networks, which in non-polymathic persons might be segregated. In addition, integration can happen at the personality level, when the person is able to integrate their diverse activities in a synergic whole, which can also mean a psychic (motivational, emotional and cognitive) integration.
Finally, the author also suggests that, via a psychoeconomic approach, polymathy can be seen as a "life project". That is, depending on a person's temperament, endowments, personality, social situation and opportunities (or lack thereof), the project of a polymathic self-formation may present itself to the person as more or less alluring and more or less feasible to be pursued.
Kaufman, Beghetto and colleagues
James C. Kaufman, from the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut, and Ronald A. Beghetto, from the same university, investigated the possibility that everyone could have the potential for polymathy as well as the issue of the domain-generality or domain-specificity of creativity.
Based on their earlier four-c model of creativity, Beghetto and Kaufman proposed a typology of polymathy, ranging from the ubiquitous mini-c polymathy to the eminent but rare Big-C polymathy, as well as a model with some requirements for a person (polymath or not) to be able to reach the highest levels of creative accomplishment. They account for three general requirements—intelligence, motivation to be creative, and an environment that allows creative expression—that are needed for any attempt at creativity to succeed. Then, depending on the domain of choice, more specific abilities will be required. The more that one's abilities and interests match the requirements of a domain, the better. While some will develop their specific skills and motivations for specific domains, polymathic people will display intrinsic motivation (and the ability) to pursue a variety of subject matters across different domains.
Regarding the interplay of polymathy and education, they suggest that rather than asking whether every student has multicreative potential, educators might more actively nurture the multicreative potential of their students. As an example, the authors cite that teachers should encourage students to make connections across disciplines, use different forms of media to express their reasoning/understanding (e.g., drawings, movies, and other forms of visual media).
Waqas Ahmed
In his 2018 book The Polymath, British author Waqas Ahmed defines polymaths as those who have made significant contributions to at least three different fields. Rather than seeing polymaths as exceptionally gifted, he argues that every human being has the potential to become one: that people naturally have multiple interests and talents. He contrasts this polymathic nature against what he calls "the cult of specialisation". For example, education systems stifle this nature by forcing learners to specialise in narrow topics. The book argues that specialisation encouraged by the production lines of the Industrial Revolution is counter-productive both to the individual and wider society. It suggests that the complex problems of the 21st century need the versatility, creativity, and broad perspectives characteristic of polymaths.
For individuals, Ahmed says, specialisation is dehumanising and stifles their full range of expression whereas polymathy "is a powerful means to social and intellectual emancipation" which enables a more fulfilling life. In terms of social progress, he argues that answers to specific problems often come from combining knowledge and skills from multiple areas, and that many important problems are multi-dimensional in nature and cannot be fully understood through one specialism. Rather than interpreting polymathy as a mix of occupations or of intellectual interests, Ahmed urges a breaking of the "thinker"/"doer" dichotomy and the art/science dichotomy. He argues that an orientation towards action and towards thinking support each other, and that human beings flourish by pursuing a diversity of experiences as well as a diversity of knowledge. He observes that successful people in many fields have cited hobbies and other "peripheral" activities as supplying skills or insights that helped them succeed.
Ahmed examines evidence suggesting that developing multiple talents and perspectives is helpful for success in a highly specialised field. He cites a study of Nobel Prize-winning scientists which found them 25 times more likely to sing, dance, or act than average scientists. Another study found that children scored higher in IQ tests after having drum lessons, and he uses such research to argue that diversity of domains can enhance a person's general intelligence.
Ahmed cites many historical claims for the advantages of polymathy. Some of these are about general intellectual abilities that polymaths apply across multiple domains. For example, Aristotle wrote that full understanding of a topic requires, in addition to subject knowledge, a general critical thinking ability that can assess how that knowledge was arrived at. Another advantage of a polymathic mindset is in the application of multiple approaches to understanding a single issue. Ahmed cites biologist E. O. Wilson's view that reality is approached not by a single academic discipline but via a consilience between them. One argument for studying multiple approaches is that it leads to open-mindedness. Within any one perspective, a question may seem to have a straightforward, settled answer. Someone aware of different, contrasting answers will be more open-minded and aware of the limitations of their own knowledge. The importance of recognising these limitations is a theme that Ahmed finds in many thinkers, including Confucius, Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Nicolas of Cusa. He calls it "the essential mark of the polymath." A further argument for multiple approaches is that a polymath does not see diverse approaches as diverse, because they see connections where other people see differences. For example da Vinci advanced multiple fields by applying mathematical principles to each.
Related terms
Aside from Renaissance man, similar terms in use are (Latin) and (Italian), which translate to 'universal man'. The related term generalist—contrasted with a specialist—is used to describe a person with a general approach to knowledge.
The term universal genius or versatile genius is also used, with Leonardo da Vinci as the prime example again. The term is used especially for people who made lasting contributions in at least one of the fields in which they were actively involved and when they took a universality of approach.
When a person is described as having encyclopedic knowledge, they exhibit a vast scope of knowledge. However, this designation may be anachronistic in the case of persons such as Eratosthenes, whose reputation for having encyclopedic knowledge predates the existence of any encyclopedic object.
See also
Amateur
Competent man
Creative class
Genius
Interdisciplinarity
Jack of all trades, master of none
Multipotentiality
Opsimath
Philomath
Polyglotism
Polygraph (author)
Polymatheia – a muse of knowledge in Greek mythology
References and notes
Further reading
Edmonds, David (August 2017). Does the world need polymaths? , BBC.
Frost, Martin, "Polymath: A Renaissance Man".
Grafton, A, "The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism", Central European History, 18: 31–47. (1985).
Jaumann, Herbert, "Was ist ein Polyhistor? Gehversuche auf einem verlassenen Terrain", Studia Leibnitiana, 22: 76–89. (1990) .
Mirchandani, Vinnie, "The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations" , John Wiley & Sons. (2010).
Twigger, Robert, "Anyone can be a Polymath" We live in a one-track world, but anyone can become a polymath Aeon Essays.
Waquet, F, (ed.) "Mapping the World of Learning: The 'Polyhistor' of Daniel Georg Morhof" (2000) ISBN 978-3447043991.
Brown, Vincent Polymath-Info Portal .
Age of Enlightenment
Giftedness
Renaissance | 0.78101 | 0.999759 | 0.780822 |
Definitions of education | Definitions of education aim to describe the essential features of education. A great variety of definitions has been proposed. There is wide agreement that education involves, among other things, the transmission of knowledge. But there are deep disagreements about its exact nature and characteristics. Some definitions see education as a process exemplified in events like schooling, teaching, and learning. Others understand it not as a but as the of such processes, i.e. as what characterizes educated persons. Various attempts have been made to give precise definitions listing its necessary and sufficient conditions. The failure of such attempts, often in the form of being unable to account for various counter examples, has led many theorists to adopt less precise conceptions based on family resemblance. On this view, different forms of education are similar by having overlapping features but there is no set of features shared by all forms. Clarity about the nature of education is central for various issues, for example, to coherently talk about the subject and to determine how to achieve and measure it.
An important discussion in the academic literature is about whether evaluative aspects are already part of the definition of education and, if so, what roles they play. Thin definitions are value-neutral while thick definitions include evaluative and normative components, for example, by holding that education implies that the person educated has changed for the better. Descriptive conceptions try to capture how the term "education" is used by competent speakers. Prescriptive conceptions, on the other hand, stipulate what education be like or what constitutes education.
Thick and prescriptive conceptions often characterize education in relation to the goals it aims to realize. These goals are sometimes divided into epistemic goods, like knowledge and understanding, skills, like rationality and critical thinking, and character traits, like kindness and honesty. Some theorists define education in relation to an overarching purpose, like socialization or helping the learner lead a good life. The more specific aims can then be understood as means to achieve this overarching purpose. Various researchers emphasize the role of critical thinking to distinguish education from indoctrination.
Traditional accounts of education characterize it mainly from the teacher's perspective, usually by describing it as a process in which they transmit knowledge and skills to their students. Student-centered definitions, on the other hand, emphasize the student's experience, for example, based on how education transforms and enriches their subsequent experience. Some conceptions take both the teacher's and the student's point of view into account by focusing on their shared experience of a common world.
General characteristics, disagreements, and importance
Definitions of education try to determine the essential features of education. Many general characteristics have been ascribed to education. However, there are several disagreements concerning its exact definition and a great variety of definitions have been proposed by theorists belonging to diverse fields. There is wide agreement that education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims. In this sense, education involves the transmission of knowledge. But it is often pointed out that this factor alone is not sufficient and needs to be accompanied by other factors, such as the acquisition of practical skills or instilling moral character traits.
Many definitions see education as a task or a process. In this regard, the conception of education is based on what happens during events like schooling, training, instructing, teaching, and learning. This process may in turn be understood either from the perspective of the teacher or with a focus on the student's experience instead. However, other theorists focus mainly on education as an achievement, a state, or a product that results as a consequence of the process of being educated. Such approaches are usually based on the features, mental states, and character traits exemplified by educated persons. In this regard, being educated implies having an encompassing familiarity with various topics. So one does not become an educated person just by undergoing specialized training in one specific field. Besides these two meanings, the term "education" may also refer to the academic field studying the methods and processes involved in teaching and learning or to social institutions employing these processes.
Education is usually understood as a very general term that has a wide family of diverse instances. Nonetheless, some attempts have been made to give a precise definition of the essential features shared by all forms of education. An influential early attempt was made by R. S. Peters in his book "Ethics and Education", where he suggests three criteria that constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions of education: (1) it is concerned with the transmission of knowledge and understanding; (2) this transmission is worthwhile and (3) done in a morally appropriate manner in tune with the student's interests. This definition has received a lot of criticism in the academic literature. While there is wide agreement that many forms of education fall under these three criteria, opponents have rejected that they are true for all of them by providing various counterexamples. For example, in regard to the third criterion, it may be sometimes necessary to educate children about certain facts even though they are not interested in learning about these facts. And regarding the second criterion, not everyone agrees that education is always desirable. Because of the various difficulties and counterexamples with this and other precise definitions, some theorists have argued that there is no one true definition of education. In this regard, the different forms of education may be seen as a group of loosely connected topics and "different groups within a society may have differing legitimate conceptions of education".
Some theorists have responded to this by defining education in terms of family resemblance. This is to say that there is no one precise set of features shared by all and only by forms of education. Instead, there is a group of many features characteristic of education. Some of these features apply to one form of education while slightly different ones are exemplified by another form of education. In this sense, any two forms of education are similar and their characteristic features overlap without being identical. This is closely related to the idea that words are like tools used in language games. On this view, there may be various language games or contexts in which the term "education" is used, in each one with a slightly different meaning. Following this line of thought, it has been suggested that definitions of education should limit themselves to a specific context without claiming to be true for all possible uses of the term. The most paradigmatic form of education takes place in schools. Many researchers have specifically this type of education in mind and some define it explicitly as the discipline investigating the methods of teaching and learning in a formal setting, like schools. But in its widest sense, it encompasses many other forms as well, including informal and non-formal education.
Clarity about the nature of education is important for various concerns. In a general sense, it is needed to identify and coherently talk about education. In this regard, all the subsequent academic discourse on topics like the aims of education, the psychology of education, or the role of education in society, depends on this issue. For example, when trying to determine what good education is like, one has to already assume some idea of what education is to decide what constitutes a good instance. It is also central for questions about how to achieve and measure the results of educational processes. The importance of providing an explicit definition is further increased by the fact that education initially seems to be a straightforward and common-sense concept that people usually use outside the academic discourse without much controversy. This impression hides various conceptual confusions and disagreements that only come to light in the attempt to make explicit the common pre-understanding associated with the term.
Many concrete definitions of education have been proposed. According to John Dewey, education involves the transmission of habits, ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, and opinions from one generation to the next. R. S. Peters revised his earlier definitions and understands education in his later philosophy as a form of initiation in which teachers share the experience of a common world with their students and convey worthwhile forms of thought and awareness to them. For Lawrence Cremin, "[e]ducation is the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, provoke or acquire knowledge, values, attitudes, skills or sensibilities as well as any learning that results from the effort". Another definition sees education as "a serious and sustained programme of learning, for the benefit of people qua people rather than only qua role-fillers or functionaries, above the level of what people might pick up for themselves in their daily lives'". The English word "education" has its etymological root in the Latin word "educare", which means "to train", "to mold", or "to lead out".
Role of values
There are various disagreements about whether evaluative and normative aspects should already be included in the definition of education and, if so, what roles they play. An important distinction in this regard is between thin and thick definitions. Thin definitions aim to provide a value-neutral description of what education is, independent of whether and to whom it is useful. Thick definitions, on the other hand, include various evaluative and normative components in their characterization, for example, the claim that education implies that the person educated has changed for the better. Otherwise, the process would not deserve the label "education". However, different thick definitions of education may still disagree with each other on what kind of values are involved and in which sense the change in question is an improvement. A closely related distinction is that between descriptive and prescriptive or programmatic conceptions. Descriptive definitions aim to provide a description of how the term "education" is actually used. They contrast with prescriptive definitions, which stipulate what education be like or what constitutes education. Some theorists also include an additional category for stipulative definitions, which are sometimes used by individual researchers as shortcuts for what they mean when they use the term without claiming that these are the essential features commonly associated with all forms of education. Thick and prescriptive conceptions are closely related to the aims of education in the sense that they understand education as a process aimed at a certain valuable goal that constitutes an improvement of the learner. Such improvements are often understood in terms of mental states fostered by the educational process.
Role of aims
Many conceptions of education, in particular thick and prescriptive accounts, base their characterizations on the aims of education, i.e. in relation to the purpose that the process of education tries to realize. The transmission of knowledge has a central role in this regard, but most accounts include other aims as well, such as fostering the student's values, attitudes, skills, and sensibilities. However, it has been argued that picking up certain skills and know-how without the corresponding knowledge and conceptual scheme does not constitute education, strictly speaking. But the same limitation may also be true for pure knowledge that is not accompanied by positive practical effects on the individual's life. The various specific aims are sometimes divided into epistemic goods, skills, and character traits. Examples of epistemic goods are truth, knowledge, and understanding. Skill-based accounts, on the other hand, hold that the goal of education is to develop skills like rationality and critical thinking. For character-based accounts, its main purpose is to foster certain character traits or virtues, like kindness, justice, and honesty. Some theorists try to provide a wide overarching framework. The various specific goals are then seen as aims of education to the extent that they serve this overarching purpose. When this purpose is understood in relation to society, education may be defined as the process of transmitting, from one generation to the next, the accumulated knowledge and skills needed to function as a regular citizen in a specific society. In this regard, education is equivalent to socialization or enculturation. More liberal or person-centered definitions, on the other hand, see the overarching purpose in relation to the individual learner instead: education is to help them develop their potential in order to lead a good life or the life they wish to lead, independently of the social ramifications of this process.
Various conceptions emphasize the aim of critical thinking in order to differentiate education from indoctrination. Critical thinking is a form of thinking that is reasonable, reflective, careful, and focused on determining what to believe or how to act. It includes the metacognitive component of monitoring and assessing its achievements in regard to the standards of rationality and clarity. Many theorists hold that fostering this disposition distinguishes education from indoctrination, which only tries to instill beliefs in the student's mind without being interested in their evidential status or fostering the ability to question those beliefs. But not all researchers accept this hard distinction. A few hold that, at least in the early stages of education, some forms of indoctrination are necessary until the child's mind has developed sufficiently to assess and evaluate reasons for and against particular claims and thus employ critical thinking. In this regard, critical thinking may still be an important aim of education but not an essential feature characterizing all forms of education.
Teacher- or student-centered
Most conceptions of education either explicitly or implicitly hold that education involves the relation between teacher and student. Some theorists give their characterization mainly from the teacher's perspective, usually emphasizing the act of transmitting knowledge or other skills, while others focus more on the learning experience of the student. The teacher-centered perspective on education is often seen as the traditional position. An influential example is found in the early philosophy of R. S. Peters. In it, he considers education to be the transmission of knowledge and skills while emphasizing that teachers should achieve this in a morally appropriate manner that reflects the student's interests. A student-centered definition is given by John Dewey, who sees education as the "reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience". This way, the student's future experience is enriched and the student thereby undergoes a form of growth. Opponents of this conception have criticized its lack of a normative component. For example, the increase of undesirable abilities, like learning how to become an expert burglar, should not be understood as a form of education even though it is a reorganization of experience that directs the course of subsequent experience.
Other theories aim to provide a more encompassing perspective that takes both the teacher's and the student's point of view into account. Peters, in response to the criticism of his initially proposed definition, has changed his conception of education by giving a wider and less precise definition, seeing it as a type of initiation in which worthwhile forms of thought and awareness are conveyed from teachers to their students. This is based on the idea that both teachers and students participate in the shared experience of a common world. The teachers are more familiar with this world and try to guide the students by passing on their knowledge and understanding. Ideally, this process is motivated by curiosity and excitement on the part of the students to discover what there is and what it is like so that they may one day themselves become authorities on the subject. This conception can be used for answering questions about the contents of the curriculum or what should be taught: whatever the students need most for discovering and participating in the common world.
The shared perspective of both teachers and students is also emphasized by Paulo Freire. In his influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he rejects teacher-centered definitions, many of which characterize education using what he refers to as the banking model of education. According to the banking model, students are seen as empty vessels in analogy to piggy banks. It is the role of the teacher to deposit knowledge into the passive students, thereby shaping their character and outlook on the world. Instead, Freire favors a libertarian conception of education. On this view, teachers and students work together in a common activity of posing and solving problems. The goal of this process is to discover a shared and interactive reality, not by consuming ideas created by others but by producing and acting upon one's own ideas. Students and teachers are co-investigators of reality and the role of the teacher is to guide this process by representing the universe instead of merely lecturing about it.
References
Definitions
Education
Education studies
Philosophy of education | 0.789571 | 0.988518 | 0.780505 |
Social change | Social change is the alteration of the social order of a society which may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours or social relations. Sustained at a larger scale, it may lead to social transformation or societal transformation.
Definition
Social change may not refer to the notion of social progress or sociocultural evolution, the philosophical idea that society moves forward by evolutionary means. It may refer to a paradigmatic change in the socio-economic structure, for instance the transition from feudalism to capitalism, or hypothetical future transition to some form of post-capitalism.
Social development is the people that develop social and emotional skills across the lifespan, with particular attention to childhood and adolescence. Healthy social development allows us to form positive relationships with family, friends, teachers, and other people in our lives.
Accordingly, it may also refer to social revolution, such as the Socialist revolution presented in Marxism, or to other social movements, such as women's suffrage or the civil rights movement. Social change may be driven through cultural, religious, economic, environmental, scientific or technological forces.
Prominent theories
Change comes from two sources. One source is unique factors such as climate, weather, or the presence of specific groups of people. Another source is systematic factors. For example, successful development generally has the same requirements, such as a stable and flexible government, enough free and available resources, and a diverse social organization of society. On the whole, social change is usually a combination of systematic factors along with some random or unique factors.
Many theories attempt to explain social change. One view suggests that a theory of change should include elements such as structural aspects of change (like population shifts), processes and mechanisms of social change, and directions of change.
Christian: In Christianity & Judaism social change is seen in terms of God's blessings on faithfulness or curses on disobedience. See Deuteronomy chapter 28.
Hegelian: The classic Hegelian dialectic model of change is based on the interaction of opposing forces. Starting from a point of momentary stasis, Thesis countered by Antithesis first yields conflict, then it subsequently results in a new Synthesis.
Marxist: Marxism presents a dialectical and materialist concept of history, seeing humankind's history as a fundamental "struggle between social classes".
Kuhnian: The philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn argues in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with respect to the Copernican Revolution that people are likely to continue utilizing an apparently unworkable paradigm until a better paradigm is commonly accepted. A Kuhnian approach to the study of societies is provided by the critical juncture approach to social order and change.
Heraclitan: The Greek philosopher Heraclitus used the metaphor of a river to speak of change thus: "On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow" (DK22B12). What Heraclitus seems to be suggesting here, later interpretations notwithstanding, is that, in order for the river to remain the river, change must constantly be taking place. Thus one may think of the Heraclitan model as parallel to that of a living organism, which, in order to remain alive, must constantly change. A contemporary application of this approach is shown in the social-change theory SEED-SCALE which builds off of the complexity theory subfield of emergence.
Daoist: The Chinese philosophical work Dao De Jing, I.8 and II.78 uses the metaphor of water as the ideal agent of change. Water, although soft and yielding, will eventually wear away stone. Change, in this model, is to be natural, harmonious and steady, albeit imperceptible.
Types of change
Social changes can vary according to speed and scope and impetus.
Some research on the various types of social change focuses on social organizations such as corporations.
Different manifestations of change include:
Fabian change – gradual and reformist incremental amelioration after the manner of the Fabian Society
radical change – improvements root and branch in the style of political radicalism
revolutionary change – abrupt, radical and drastic change, with implications of violence and of starting afresh (perhaps most popular as a political bogeyman)
transformational change – a New-age version of radical change, and thus difficult to define
continuous change, open-ended change – change (allegedly) for the sake of change
top-down change – reliance on leadership
bottom-up change – reliance on the huddled masses
socio-tectonic change – postulated deep-seated fundamental social shifts
Current examples
Global demographic shifts
One of the most obvious changes currently occurring is the change in the relative global population distribution between countries. In recent decades, developing countries have become a larger proportion of the world population, increasing from 68% in 1950 to 82% in 2010, and the population of the developed countries has declined from 32% of the total world population in 1950 to 18% in 2010. China and India continue to be the largest countries, followed by the US as a distant third. However, population growth throughout the world is slowing. Population growth among developed countries has been slowing since the 1950s and is now at 0.3% annual growth. Population growth among the less developed countries excluding the least developed ones has also been slowing since 1960 and is now at 1.3% annually. Population growth among the least developed countries has slowed relatively little; as of 2022, the annual growth rate is 2.33%.
Gendered patterns of work and care
In much of the developed world, changes from distinct men's work and women's work to more gender equal patterns have been economically important since the mid-20th century. Both men and women are considered to be great contributors to social change worldwide.
See also
Accelerating change
Activism
Alternative movement
Comparative historical research
Constitutional economics
Critical juncture theory
Culture change
Decadence
Global Social Change Research Project
Globalization
Historical sociology
Industrialisation
Lifestyle (sociology)
Modernization theory
Reform movement
Reformism
Revolution
Secularization
Social conservatism
Social degeneration
Social development theory
Social movement
Social progress
Social relation
Social revolution
Social transformation
Societal collapse
Societal transformation
Sociocultural evolution
References
Further reading
Eisenstadt, S. N. (1973). Tradition, Change, and Modernity. Krieger Publishing.
Giddens, Anthony (2006). Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Haralambos, Michael and Holborn, Martin (2008). Sociology: Themes and Perspectives. London: HarperCollins.
Harper, C. L. (1993). Exploring Social Change. New Jersey: Engelwood Cliffs.
Milstein, T. & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (2020). "Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity." London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840.
Talcott Parsons, The Social System (1951). New York: The Free Press
Polanyi, Karl (1944). The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Tilly, Charles (1988). "Misreading, then Rereading, Nineteenth-Century Social Change." Pp. 332–58 in Social Structures: A Network Approach, eds. Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, Charles (2004). Social Movements, 1768-2004. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. .
Vago, Steven (1999). Social Change, 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. .
External links
Understanding The World Today – reports about global social, political, economic, demographic and technological change
Social Change Collection from Georgia State University
Social movements | 0.782333 | 0.997251 | 0.780182 |
Informal learning | Informal learning is characterized "by a low degree of planning and organizing in terms of the learning context, learning support, learning time, and learning objectives". It differs from formal learning, non-formal learning, and self-regulated learning, because it has no set objective in terms of learning outcomes, but an intent to act from the learner's standpoint (e.g., to solve a problem). Typical mechanisms of informal learning include trial and error or learning-by-doing, modeling, feedback, and reflection. For learners this includes heuristic language building, socialization, enculturation, and play. Informal learning is a pervasive ongoing phenomenon of learning via participation or learning via knowledge creation, in contrast with the traditional view of teacher-centered learning via knowledge acquisition. Estimates suggest that about 70-90 percent of adult learning takes place informally and outside educational institutions.
The term is often conflated, however, with non-formal learning, and self-directed learning. It is widely used in the context of corporate training and education in relation to return on investment (ROI), or return on learning (ROL). It is also widely used when referring to science education, in relation to citizen science, or informal science education. The conflated meaning of informal and non-formal learning explicates mechanisms of learning that organically occur outside the realm of traditional instructor-led programs, e.g., reading self-selected books, participating in self-study programs, navigating performance support materials and systems, incidental skills practice, receptivity of coaching or mentoring, seeking advice from peers, or participation in communities of practice, to name a few. Informal learning is common in communities where individuals have opportunities to observe and participate in social activities. Advantages of informal learning cited include flexibility and adaptation to learning needs, direct transfer of learning into practice, and rapid resolution of (work-related) problems. For improving employees' performance, task execution is considered the most important source of learning.
Characterizations
Informal learning can be characterized as the following:
It usually takes place outside educational establishments;
It does not follow a specified curriculum and is not often professionally organized but rather originates accidentally, sporadically, in association with certain occasions, from changing practical requirements;
It is not necessarily planned pedagogically, systematically according to fixed subjects, test and qualification-oriented, but rather, either unconsciously incidental or consciously intended intuition, holistically problem-related, and related to actual situations and fitness for life;
It is experienced directly in its "natural" function of everyday life.
It is often spontaneous and creative.
It is a key component to an alternative learning system coined, Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI), which is based on the learning methods observed to be common in many Indigenous American communities.
History
The origin of informal learning has been traced back to John Dewey through his theories about learning from experience. The American philosopher Mary Parker Follett broadened the context of informal education from school to all areas of everyday life and described education as a continuous life task. Building on this work by Dewey and Follett, the American educator Eduard C. Lindemann first used the term "informal learning". The term was later introduced by Malcolm Knowles when he published his work, Informal Adult Education in 1950.
At first, informal learning was only delimited from formal school learning and nonformal learning in courses. Marsick and Watkins take up this approach and go one step further in their definition. They, too, begin with the organizational form of learning and call those learning processes informal which are non-formal or not formally organized and are not financed by institutions. An example for a wider approach is Livingstone's definition which is oriented towards autodidactic and self-directed learning and places special emphasis on the self-definition of the learning process by the learner. Livingstone explained that explicit informal learning is distinguished from tacit informal learning and socialization in the sense that the individual seeks learning in this setting and creates the conditions for it by putting himself in situations or engaging with others so that learning is possible.
Differences between informal and non-formal learning
As noted above, informal learning is often confused with non-formal learning. Non-formal learning has been used to often describe organized learning outside of the formal education system, either being short-term, voluntary, and having, few if any, prerequisites. However, they typically have a curriculum and often a facilitator. As stated on the non-formal learning page, non-formal learning can be seen in various structured learning situations, such as swimming lessons, community-based sports programs and conference style seminars.
Decius' 2020 work points out that non-formal learning is more of a subordinate type of formal learning and less similar to informal learning, using the following example: A learner would acquire language skills in a non-formal way by voluntarily attending an adult education course. Depending on the level of requirements, this would differ little or not at all from a comparable formal university course in terms of structure, content and learning support. The only difference here would be that students attend the course as part of their "job" (studies), but the voluntary learner attends in his or her free time. Thus, the supposed difference between formal and non-formal learning is rather a social-normative—not learning-theoretical—demarcation.
Other perspective
Merriam et al. in 2007 stated:
In 2012, Bennett extended Schugurenksky's conceptualization from 2000 of informal learning by recommending four modes of informal learning:
self-directed, which is conscious and intentional
incidental, which is conscious and unintentional
tacit, which replaces socialization and is both nonconscious and unintentional
integrative, which is nonconscious and intentional.
Drawing upon implicit processing literature, she further defined integrative learning as "a learning process that combines intentional nonconscious processing of tacit knowledge with conscious access to learning products and mental images" and she theorized two possible sub-processes: knowledge shifting and knowledge sublimation, which describe limited access learners have to tacit knowledge.
However, the assumption that informal learning can also be non-intentional contradicts more recent definitions of informal learning. For a meaningful distinction from incidental learning, scholars argued that informal learning can be viewed as a conscious process, but one in which the learner does not set a learning goal, but rather has an intention to act. In contrast, if the learning person has a learning goal in mind and independently monitors goal achievement, it is self-regulated learning.
In American Indigenous communities
People in many Indigenous communities of the Americas often learn through observation and participation in everyday life of their respective communities and families. Barbara Rogoff, a professor of psychology, and her colleagues describe the ways in which children in Indigenous communities can learn by observing and participating in community endeavors, having an eagerness to contribute, fulfilling valuable roles, and finding a sense of belonging in their community. These learning experiences rely on children's incorporation in the community and the child's attentiveness. This form of informal learning allows the children to collaborate in social endeavors, which grants the child the opportunity to learn by pitching in.
Learning occurs through socialization processes in one's culture and community. Learning by observing and pitching in (LOPI) is an Informal learning model often seen in many Indigenous communities of the Americas. Children can be seen participating alongside adults in many daily activities within the community. An example is the process where children learn slash-and-burn agriculture by being present in the situation and contributing when possible. Noteworthy is children's own initiative and assumption of responsibility to perform tasks for the households' benefit. Many Indigenous communities provide self-paced opportunities to kids, and allow exploration and education without parental coercion. Collaborative input is highly encouraged and valued. Both children and adults are actively involved in shared endeavors. Their roles as learner and expert are flexible, while the observer participates with active concentration. Indigenous ways of learning include practices such as observation, experiential learning, and apprenticeship.
Child work, alongside and combined with play, occupies an important place in American Indigenous children's time and development. The interaction of a Navajo girl assisting her mother weaving and who eventually becomes a master weaver herself illustrates how the child's presence and the availability of these activities allow the child to learn through observation. Children start at the periphery, observing and imitating those around them, before moving into the center of activities under supervision and guidance. An example of two-year-old Indigenous Mexican girl participating in digging-the-holes project with her mother highlights children's own initiation to help, after watching, and enthusiasm to share the task with family and community. Work is part of a child's development from an early age, starting with simple tasks that merge with play and develop to various kinds of useful work. The circumstances of everyday routine create opportunities for the culturally meaningful activities and sensitive interactions on which a child's development depends. Children of the Chillihuani observe their environment as a place of respect, and learn from observation. Many of them become herders by informal learning in observation.
Children in Nicaragua will often learn to work the land or learn to become street vendors by watching other individuals in their community perform it. These activities provide opportunities for children to learn and develop through forms of social learning which are made up of everyday experiences rather than a deliberate curriculum, and contain ordinary setting in which children's social interaction and behavior occur. Informal learning for children in American Indigenous communities can take place at work where children are expected to contribute.
Nonverbal communication as a learning tool
In terms of the cultural variation between traditional Indigenous American and European-American middle class, the prevalence of nonverbal communication can be viewed as being dependent on each culture's definition of achievement. Often in mainstream middle-class culture, success in school and work settings is gained through practicing competitiveness and working for personal gain. The learning and teaching practices of traditional Indigenous Americans generally prioritize harmony and cooperation over personal gain. In order to achieve mutual respect in teachings, what is often relied on in Indigenous American culture is nonverbal communication.
Nonverbal communication in Indigenous communities creates pathways of knowledge by watching and then doing. An example where nonverbal behavior can be used as a learning tool can be seen in Chillihuani culture. Children in this community learn about growing crops by observing the actions and respect adults have for the land. They learn that caring for their crops is vital for them to grow and in turn for the community to thrive. Similarly, when children participate in rituals, they learn the importance of being part of the community by watching how everyone interacts. This again needs no explicit verbal communication, it relies solely on observing the world around. Chillihuani culture does not explicitly verbalize expectations. Their knowledge is experienced rather than explained through modeled behavior for community benefit.
In the indigenous culture of the Matsigenka, infants are kept in close proximity to their mother and members of the community. The infant does not go far from the mother at any time. In this way, the child is encouraged to explore away from the mother and other family members who will still keep watch. As the child wanders he may come to a place that is unknown and potentially dangerous but the mother will not stop him, she will just watch as he explores. The lack of verbal reprimand or warning from an adult or elder enable the child to assimilate his surroundings more carefully.
Formal and informal education
To fully understand informal learning it is useful to define the terms "formal" and "informal" education. Formal education can be defined as a setting that is highly institutionalized, can be possibly bureaucratic, while being curriculum driven, and formally recognized with grades, diplomas, or other forms of certifications. Informal education is closely tied in with informal learning, which occurs in a variety of places, such as at home, work, and through daily interactions and shared relationships among members of society. Informal learning often takes place outside educational establishments, and does not follow a specified curriculum and may originate accidentally, or sporadically, in association with certain occasions, although that is not always the case. Informal education can occur in the formal arena when concepts are adapted to the unique needs of individual students.
Research and data
Merriam and others (2007) state: "studies of informal learning, especially those asking about adults' self-directed learning projects, reveal that upwards of 90 percent of adults are engaged in hundreds of hours of informal learning. It has also been estimated that the great majority (upwards of 70 percent) of learning in the workplace is informal ... although billions of dollars each year are spent by business and industry on formal training programs". Both formal and informal learning are considered integral processes for Virtual Human Resource Development, with informal learning the stronger form.
Coffield uses the metaphor of an iceberg to illustrate the dominant status of informal learning, which at the same time has much lower visibility in the education sector compared to formal learning: The part of the iceberg that is visibly above the water surface and makes up one third represents formal learning; the two thirds below the water surface that are invisible at first glance represent informal learning. While formal learning can be compared to a bus ride—the route is predetermined and the same for all passengers—informal learning is more like a ride on a bicycle, where the person riding can determine the route and speed individually.
The Octagon Model of informal learning
According to the Octagon Model of informal learning by Decius, Schaper, and Seifert from 2019, informal learning comprises eight components.
The octagon model is based on the dynamic model of informal learning by Tannenbaum et al. from 2010. The dynamic model contains the four factors "experience/action", "feedback", "reflection", and "learning intention". According to the model, each factor can trigger another factor and thus precede it, but can also follow any other factor. Accordingly, the model does not contain a fixed starting or ending point, which is intended to illustrate the dynamic nature of learning. The learner may go through each factor in the informal learning process one or more times. However, the learning process is considered most efficient when all four factors are involved in it.
The octagon model extends the dynamic model by dividing the four factors into two components each. This allows the components of informal learning to be described more precisely. The factor "experience/action" from the dynamic model is divided into "trying and applying own ideas" (i.e., trial and error) and "model learning" (i.e., observing and adopting successful behaviors of other persons) in the octagon model. The factor "feedback" includes the components "direct feedback" (i.e., obtaining feedback on one's own behavior) and "vicarious feedback" (i.e., exchanging experiences with other people on success-critical work and life situations). The "reflection" factor includes the components "anticipatory reflection" (i.e., planning task steps while considering possible obstacles) and "subsequent reflection" (i.e., thinking about ways to improve after completing a work task). The factor "learning intention" consists of the components "Intrinsic intent to learn" (i.e., learning for the pleasure of the learning process) as well as "Extrinsic intent to learn" (i.e., learning due to external incentives such as praise from other people or—in the work context—the prospect of positive career development).
Experiences and examples
Informal knowledge is information that has not been externalized or captured and the primary locus of the knowledge may be inside someone's head. For example, in the cause of language acquisition, a mother may teach a child basic concepts of grammar and language at home, prior to the child entering a formal education system. In such a case, the mother has a tacit understanding of language structures, syntax and morphology, but she may not be explicitly aware of what these are. She understands the language and passes her knowledge on to her offspring.
Other examples of informal knowledge transfer include instant messaging, a spontaneous meeting on the Internet, a phone call to someone who has information you need, a live one-time-only sales meeting introducing a new product, a chat-room in real time, a chance meeting by the water cooler, a scheduled Web-based meeting with a real-time agenda, a tech walking you through a repair process, or a meeting with your assigned mentor or manager.
Experience indicates that much of the learning for performance is informal. Those who transfer their knowledge to a learner are usually present in real time. Such learning can take place over the telephone or through the Internet, as well as in person.
In the UK, the government formally recognized the benefits of informal learning in "The Learning Revolution" White Paper published on March 23, 2009. The Learning Revolution Festival ran in October 2009 and funding has been used by libraries—which offer a host of informal learning opportunities such as book groups, "meet the author" events and family history sessions—to run activities such as The North East Festival of Learning.
Trends in formal and informal learning
40% of adults have self-taught themselves at some point and respondents in a survey indicated that they were twice as likely to participate in independent learning as traditional learning.
The average adult spends 10 hours a week (500 hours a year) on informal learning practices.
As a whole, this type of knowledge is more learner-centered and situational in response to the interests or needed application of the skill to a particular workforce. Formal training programs have limited success in increasing basic skills for individuals older than age 25, therefore, these individuals rely mostly on on-the-job training.
Although rates of formal education have increased, many adults entering the workforce are lacking the basic math, reading and interpersonal skills that the "unskilled" labor force requires. The lines between formal and informal learning have been blurred due to the higher rates of college attendance. The largest increase in population for manual or low-skilled labor is in individuals who attended college but did not receive a degree. A recent collection of cross-sectional surveys were conducted and polled employers across the United States to gauge which skills are required for jobs which do not require college degrees. These surveys concluded that 70% require some kind of customer service aspect, 61% require reading or writing paragraphs, 65% require math, 51% require the use of computers. In regards to training and academic credentials, 71% require a high school diploma, 61% require specific vocational experience. The rates of men entering the low-skilled labor force have remained static over the last fifty years, indicating a shift of less than 1%. Women's participation in the unskilled labor force has steadily increased and projections indicate that this trend will continue.
Business perspective
The majority of companies that provide training are currently involved only with the formal side of the continuum. Most of today's investments are on the formal side. The net result is that companies spend the most money on the smallest part—25%—of the learning equation. The other 75% of learning happens as the learner creatively "adopts and adapts to ever changing circumstances". The informal piece of the equation is not only larger, it's crucial to learning how to do anything.
Fostering informal workplace learning
Managers often wonder how they can promote informal learning of their employees. However, a direct support of informal learning is considered difficult, because learning happens within the work process and cannot be planned by companies. An indirect support of learning by providing a positive learning environment is however possible. Social support by colleagues and managers should be mentioned in particular. More experienced colleagues can act as learning experts and mentors. Managers can act as role models with regard to obtaining and offering feedback on their own work performance. Admitting own failures and dealing with failures constructively also encourages employees to take advantage of learning opportunities at work. Training interventions can strengthen the meta-competence "learning to learn" among employees. The goal of such interventions is to perceive dynamic and unexpected situations as learning opportunities and to use problems and mistakes positively for one's own competence acquisition. In the long term, strategic personnel selection also makes it possible to preferentially hire applicants who are curious and self-learning-oriented.
Summary
Lifelong learning, as defined by the OECD, includes a combination of formal, non-formal and informal learning. Of these three, informal learning may be the most difficult to quantify or prove, but it remains critical to an individual's overall cognitive and social development throughout the lifespan.
See also
Networked learning
Unschooling
References
Further reading
Ainsworth, Heather L. and Eaton, Sarah (2010). "Formal, Non-formal and Informal Learning in the Sciences".
Airing, Monika and Brand, Betsy (1998). "The Teaching Firm: Where Productive Work and Learning Converge". Report on Research Findings and Implications. Center for Workforce Development: Education Development Center (EDC). Newton, MA January 1998.
Bersin, Josh (2005). The Blended Learning Book, Best Practices, Proven Methodologies, Lessons Learned.
Coombs, P.H. (1985). The World Crisis in Education: A View from the Eighties. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eaton, Sarah (2010). "Formal, Non-Formal and Informal learning: The Case of Literacy, Essential Skills, and Language Learning in Canada".
Grebow, David. (2002). At the Watercooler of Learning. Retrieved June 9, 2009.
Livingstone, D.W. (2001). Adults' Informal Learning: Definitions, Findings, Gaps and Future Research. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
Livingstone, D.W. (2002). Mapping the Iceberg. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development / Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Economiques (OECD). (n.d.) "Recognition of Non-formal and Informal Learning - Home"
Schugurensky, D. (2000). The Forms of Informal Learning: Towards a Conceptualization of the Field. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
Sommerlad, E., & Stern, E. (1999). Workplace Learning, Culture and Performance. London.
External links
Cedefop European guidelines for validating non-formal and informal learning - 2nd edition, 2015
infed - the encyclopaedia of informal education
Informal Learning blog
Teacher Blog about Informal Learning
Learning Revolution White Paper
North East Festival of Learning
Validation of self-aCquired learning and cREdits trAnsfer in web design and compuTEr animation /CREATE/
Applied learning | 0.790403 | 0.98659 | 0.779804 |
Socratic questioning | Socratic questioning (or Socratic maieutics) is an educational method named after Socrates that focuses on discovering answers by asking questions of students. According to Plato, Socrates believed that "the disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning enables the scholar/student to examine ideas and be able to determine the validity of those ideas". Plato explains how, in this method of teaching, the teacher assumes an ignorant mindset in order to compel the student to assume the highest level of knowledge. Thus, a student is expected to develop the ability to acknowledge contradictions, recreate inaccurate or unfinished ideas, and critically determine necessary thought.
Socratic questioning is a form of disciplined questioning that can be used to pursue thought in many directions and for many purposes, including: to explore complex ideas, to get to the truth of things, to open up issues and problems, to uncover assumptions, to analyze concepts, to distinguish what we know from what we do not know, to follow out logical consequences of thought or to control discussions. Socratic questioning is based on the foundation that thinking has structured logic, and allows underlying thoughts to be questioned. The key to distinguishing Socratic questioning from questioning per se is that the former is systematic, disciplined, deep and usually focuses on fundamental concepts, principles, theories, issues or problems.
Pedagogy
When teachers use Socratic questioning in teaching, their purpose may be to probe student thinking, to determine the extent of student knowledge on a given topic, issue or subject, to model Socratic questioning for students or to help students analyze a concept or line of reasoning. It is suggested that students should learn the discipline of Socratic questioning so that they begin to use it in reasoning through complex issues, in understanding and assessing the thinking of others and in following-out the implications of what they and others think. In fact, Socrates himself thought that questioning was the only defensible form of teaching.
In teaching, teachers can use Socratic questioning for at least two purposes:
To deeply probe student thinking, to help students begin to distinguish what they know or understand from what they do not know or understand (and to help them develop intellectual humility in the process).
To foster students' abilities to ask Socratic questions, to help students acquire the powerful tools of Socratic dialogue, so that they can use these tools in everyday life (in questioning themselves and others). To this end, teachers can model the questioning strategies they want students to emulate and employ. Moreover, teachers need to directly teach students how to construct and ask deep questions. Beyond that, students need practice to improve their questioning abilities.
Socratic questioning illuminates the importance of questioning in learning. This includes differentiating between systematic and fragmented thinking, while forcing individuals to understand the root of their knowledge and ideas. Educators who support the use of Socratic questioning in educational settings argue that it helps students become active and independent learners. Examples of Socratic questions that are used for students in educational settings:
Getting students to clarify their thinking and explore the origin of their thinking
e.g., 'Why do you say that?', 'Could you explain further?'
Challenging students about assumptions
e.g., 'Is this always the case?', 'Why do you think that this assumption holds here?'
Providing evidence as a basis for arguments
e.g., 'Why do you say that?', 'Is there reason to doubt this evidence?'
Discovering alternative viewpoints and perspectives and conflicts between contentions
e.g., 'What is the counter-argument?', 'Can/did anyone see this another way?'
Exploring implications and consequences
e.g., 'But if...happened, what else would result?', 'How does...affect...?'
Questioning the question
e.g., 'Why do you think that I asked that question?', 'Why was that question important?', 'Which of your questions turned out to be the most useful?'
Socratic questioning and critical thinking
The art of Socratic questioning is intimately connected with critical thinking because the art of questioning is important to excellence of thought. Socrates argued for the necessity of probing individual knowledge, and acknowledging what one may not know or understand. Critical thinking has the goal of reflective thinking that focuses on what should be believed or done about a topic. Socratic questioning adds another level of thought to critical thinking, by focusing on extracting depth, interest and assessing the truth or plausibility of thought. Socrates argued that a lack of knowledge is not bad, but students must strive to make known what they don't know through the means of a form of critical thinking.
Critical thinking and Socratic questioning both seek meaning and truth. Critical thinking provides the rational tools to monitor, assess, and perhaps reconstitute or re-direct our thinking and action. This is what educational reformer John Dewey described as reflective inquiry: "in which the thinker turns a subject over in the mind, giving it serious and consecutive consideration." Socratic questioning is an explicit focus on framing self-directed, disciplined questions to achieve that goal.
The technique of questioning or leading discussion is spontaneous, exploratory, and issue-specific. The Socratic educator listens to the viewpoints of the student and considers the alternative points of view. It is necessary to teach students to sift through all the information, form a connection to prior knowledge, and transform the data to new knowledge in a thoughtful way. Some qualitative research shows that the use of the Socratic questioning within a traditional Yeshiva education setting helps students succeed in law school, although it remains an open question as to whether that relationship is causal or merely correlative.
It has been proposed in different studies that the "level of thinking that occurs is influenced by the level of questions asked". Thus, utilizing the knowledge that students don't know stimulates their ability to ask more complex questions. This requires educators to create conducive learning environments that promote and value the role of critical thinking, mobilising their ability to form complex thoughts and questions.
Psychology
Socratic questioning has also been used in psychotherapy, most notably as a cognitive restructuring technique in classical Adlerian psychotherapy, logotherapy, rational emotive behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, and logic-based therapy. The purpose is to help uncover the assumptions and evidence that underpin people's thoughts in respect of problems. A set of Socratic questions in cognitive therapy aim to deal with automatic thoughts that distress the patient:
Revealing the issue: 'What evidence supports this idea? And what evidence is against its being true?'
Conceiving reasonable alternatives: 'What might be another explanation or viewpoint of the situation? Why else did it happen?'
Examining various potential consequences: 'What are worst, best, bearable and most realistic outcomes?'
Evaluate those consequences: 'What's the effect of thinking or believing this? What could be the effect of thinking differently and no longer holding onto this belief?'
Distancing: 'Imagine a specific friend/family member in the same situation or if they viewed the situation this way, what would I tell them?'
Careful use of Socratic questioning enables a therapist to challenge recurring or isolated instances of a person's illogical thinking while maintaining an open position that respects the internal logic to even the most seemingly illogical thoughts.
See also
Argument map
Argumentation theory
Cross-examination
Inquiry
Intellectual virtue
Interrogation
Issue map
Socratic method
References
Questioning
Learning
Problem solving methods
Educational psychology
School qualifications
Education reform
Critical thinking skills
Philosophical methodology
Legal reasoning
de:Mäeutik | 0.783309 | 0.995348 | 0.779665 |
Psychopedagogy | Psychopedagogy is a combination of two main branches of study, pedagogy and psychology.
Some of the most influential authors in this field are Jean Piaget, David Ausubel, Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky. Important contributions have also been made by Mary Warnock.
See also
Developmental psychology
Educational psychology
Learning theory (education)
External links
Associação Brasileira de Psicopedagogia
Espacio Psicopedagógico de Buenos Aires
Centro Latinoamericano de Psicopedagogía
https://web.archive.org/web/20110203052216/http://us.macmillan.com/psychopedagogy
Psychopedagogy Degree
Polskie Towarzystwo Psychopedagogiczne (Polish Society Psychopedagogical)
Pedagogical disciplines
Educational psychology | 0.80043 | 0.973698 | 0.779377 |
Montessori education | The Montessori method of education is a type of educational method that involves children's natural interests and activities rather than formal teaching methods. A Montessori classroom places an emphasis on hands-on learning and developing real-world skills. It emphasizes independence and it views children as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a sufficiently supportive and well-prepared learning environment. It also discourages some conventional measures of achievement, such as grades and tests.
The method was started in the early 20th century by Italian physician Maria Montessori, who developed her theories through scientific experimentation with her students; the method has since been used in many parts of the world, in public and private schools alike.
A range of practices exist under the name "Montessori", which is not trademarked. Popular elements include mixed-age classrooms, student freedom (including their choices of activity), long blocks of uninterrupted work time, specially trained teachers, and prepared environment. Scientific studies regarding the Montessori method are mostly positive, with a 2017 review stating that "broad evidence" exists for its efficacy.
History
Maria Montessori initially resisted a career in teaching, one of only a few professions open to women in that time period. She became one of the first women to become a medical doctor in Italy in the 19th century, and specialized in psychiatry and pediatrics. Maria Montessori began developing her educational philosophy and methods in 1897, attending courses in pedagogy at the University of Rome and learning educational theory. While visiting Rome's mental asylums during her schooling with a teacher, Montessori observed that confined children were in need of more stimulation from their environment. In 1907, she opened her first classroom, the Casa dei Bambini, or Children's House, in a tenement building in Rome. From the beginning, Montessori based her work on her observations of children and experimentation with the environment, materials, and lessons available to them. She frequently referred to her work as "scientific pedagogy".
In 1901, Maria Montessori met the prominent education reformers Alice and Leopoldo Franchetti. Maria Montessori was invited to hold her first course for teachers and to set up a "Casa dei Bambini" at Villa Montesca, the home of the Franchettis in Città di Castello. Montessori lived with the Franchettis for two years and refined her methodology together with Alice Franchetti. In 1909, she documented her theories in Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica (later translated into English as The Montessori Method in 1912). The Franchetti Barons financed the publication of the book, and the methodology had the name "Method Franchetti-Montessori".
Montessori education had spread to the United States by 1912 and became widely known in educational and popular publications. In 1913 Narcissa Cox Vanderlip and Frank A. Vanderlip founded the Scarborough School, the first Montessori school in the U.S. However, conflict arose between Montessori and the American educational establishment. The 1914 critical booklet The Montessori System Examined by influential education teacher William Heard Kilpatrick limited the spread of Montessori's ideas, and they languished after 1914. Montessori education returned to the United States in 1960 and has since spread to thousands of schools there. Montessori continued to extend her work during her lifetime, developing a comprehensive model of psychological development from birth to age 24, as well as educational approaches for children ages 0 to 3, 3 to 6, and 6 to 12.
Montessori education also spread throughout the world, including Southeast Asia and India, where Maria Montessori was interned during World War II. In October 1931, Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi met with Maria Montessori in London. At the time, Gandhi was very interested in the role the Montessori method might play in helping to build an independent nation. Thus, initially, Montessori education in India was connected to the Indian independence movement. Later, elite, private Montessori schools also arose, and in the 1950s, some Montessori schools opened to serve children from lower-socioeconomic families, a trend that continues today with foundation and government-funded schools.
The Montessori method was adapted for Christian education by Sofia Cavaletti and Gianna Gobbi, in The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Their method was further adapted by Jerome Berryman, in Godly Play.
Methods
Montessori education is based on a model of human development. This educational style operates abiding by two beliefs: that psychological self-construction in children and developing adults occurs through environmental interactions, and that children (especially under the age of six) have an innate path of psychological development. Based on her observations, Montessori believed that children who are at liberty to choose and act freely within an environment prepared according to her model would act spontaneously for optimal development.
Although a range of practices exists under the "Montessori" name, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) and the American Montessori Society (AMS) cite these elements as essential:
Mixed-age classrooms: classrooms for children ages or 3 to 6 years old are by far the most common, but 0–3, 3–6, 6–9, 9–12, 12–15, and 15–18-year-old classrooms exist as well
Student choice of activity from within a prescribed range of optional choices
Uninterrupted blocks of work time, ideally three hours long
A constructivist or "discovery" model, in which students learn concepts from working with materials rather than by direct instruction
Specialized educational materials are often made out of natural, aesthetic materials such as wood, rather than plastic
A thoughtfully prepared environment where materials are organized by subject area, is accessible to children, and is appropriately sized
Freedom, within limits
A trained teacher experienced in observing a child's characteristics, tendencies, innate talents, and abilities
Montessori education involves free activity within a "prepared environment", meaning an educational environment tailored to basic human characteristics, to the specific characteristics of children at different ages, and to the individual personalities of each child. The function of the environment is to help and allow the child to develop independence in all areas according to their inner psychological directives. In addition to offering access to the Montessori materials appropriate to the age of the children, the environment should exhibit the following characteristics:
Education practices
Infant and toddler programs
Montessori classrooms for children under three fall into several categories, with a number of terms being used. A , Italian for "nest", serves a small number of children from around two months to around 14 months, or when the child is confidently walking. A "Young Child Community" serves a larger number of children from around one year to or 3 years old. Both environments emphasize materials and activities scaled to the children's size and abilities, opportunities to develop movement, and activities to develop independence. The development of independence in toileting is typically emphasized as well. Some schools also offer "Parent-Infant" classes, in which parents participate with their very young children.
Preschool and kindergarten
Montessori classrooms for children from or 3 to 6 years old are often called Children's Houses, after Montessori's first school, the Casa dei Bambini in Rome in 1906. A typical classroom serves 20 to 30 children in mixed-age groups, staffed by a fully trained lead teacher and assistants. Classrooms are usually outfitted with child-sized tables and chairs arranged singly or in small clusters, with classroom materials on child-height shelves throughout the room. Activities are for the most part initially presented by the teacher, after which they may be chosen more or less freely by the children as interest dictates. A teacher's role within a Montessori classroom is to guide and consult students individually by letting each child create their own learning pathway. Classroom materials usually include activities for engaging in practical skills such as pouring and spooning, washing up, scrubbing tables and sweeping. Also materials for the development of the senses, mathematical materials, language materials, music, art and cultural materials, including more science-based activities like 'sink and float', Magnetic and Non magnetic and candle and air.
Activities in Children's Houses are typically hands-on, tactile materials to teach concepts. For example, to teach writing, students use sandpaper letters. These are letters created by cutting letters out of sandpaper and placing them on wooden blocks. The children then trace these letters with their fingers to learn the shape and sound of each letter. Another example is the use of bead chains to teach math concepts, specifically multiplication. Specifically for multiples of 10, there is one bead that represents one unit, a bar of ten beads put together that represents 1×10, then a flat shape created by fitting 10 of the bars together to represent 10×10, and a cube created by fitting 10 of the flats together to represent 10×10×10. These materials help build a concrete understanding of basic concepts upon which much is built in the later years.
One of the most important benefits of a Montessori school experience is that each child is understood as an individual learner who will naturally seek to excel when their strengths, weaknesses, and interests are understood and taken into account.
Elementary classrooms
Elementary school classrooms usually serve mixed-age 6- to 9-year-old and 9- to 12-year-old groupings; 6- to 12-year-old groups are also used. Lessons are typically presented to small groups of children, who are then free to follow up with independent work of their own as interest and personal responsibility dictate. Montessori educators give interdisciplinary lessons examining subjects ranging from biology and history to theology, which they refer to as "great lessons". These lessons are typically given near the beginning of the school term and provide the basis for learning throughout the year. The lessons also offer inspiration and open doors to new areas of investigation.
Lessons include work in language, mathematics, history, the sciences, the arts, etc. Student-directed explorations of resources outside the classroom are integral to education. Montessori used the term "cosmic education" to indicate both the universal scope of lessons to be presented and the idea that education should help children realize the human role in the interdependent functioning of the universe.
Montessori schools are more flexible than traditional schools. In traditional schools, the students sit at tables or desks to do their work. At a Montessori school, the child gets to decide where they would like to work whether that is at a table or on the floor. It is about them going where they feel most comfortable. Anything a child would need during their learning experience is placed on a shelf that the student can easily get to. This promotes not only their learning, but also their independence because they do not need to ask for help as much. Montessori classrooms have an age range so that the younger students can look up to the older students and the older students can help the younger students as needed. It gives all age groups a chance to learn from one another.
Middle and high school
Montessori education for this level is less developed than programs for younger children. Montessori did not establish a teacher training program or a detailed plan of education for adolescents during her lifetime. However, a number of schools have extended their programs for younger children to the middle school and high school levels. In addition, several Montessori organizations have developed teacher training or orientation courses and a loose consensus on the plan of study is emerging. Montessori wrote that "The essential reform of our plan from this point of view may be defined as follows: during the difficult time of adolescence it is helpful to leave the accustomed environment of the family in town and to go to quiet surroundings in the country, close to nature".
Digital technology
With the development of mobile touchscreen devices, some Montessori activities have been made into mobile apps. Mobile applications have been criticized due to the lack of physical interaction with objects.
Although not supported by all, most Montessori schools include new technologies with the purpose of preparing students for their future use. Ideally, digital technology is not used in the same way it would be used in most other contemporary classrooms. Instead it is used "in meaningful ways," not simply to replace "real-world activities with high-tech ones."
Devices are not commonly used when students are being taught. When students have a question about something, they try to solve it themselves instead of turning to a device to try to figure out an answer. When a device is used by a student, the teacher expects them to use it in a meaningful way. There has to be a specific purpose behind using technology. Before using a device, the student should ask themselves if using this device is the best way or if it is the only way to do a certain task. If the answer is yes to both of those questions, then that would be considered using technology in a meaningful way.
Montessori's philosophy
Psychology
Montessori perceived specific elements of human psychology which her son and collaborator Mario Montessori identified as "human tendencies" in 1957. There is some debate about the exact list, but the following are clearly identified:
"Planes" of development
Montessori observed four distinct periods, or "planes", in human development, extending from birth to 6 years, from 6 to 12, from 12 to 18, and from 18 to 24. She saw different characteristics, learning modes, and developmental imperatives active in each of these planes and called for educational approaches specific to each period.
The first plane extends from birth to around six years of age. During this period, Montessori observed that the child undergoes striking physical and psychological development. The first-plane child is seen as a concrete, sensorial explorer and learner engaged in the developmental work of psychological self-construction and building functional independence. Montessori introduced several concepts to explain this work, including the absorbent mind, sensitive periods, and normalization.
Montessori described the young child's behavior of effortlessly assimilating the sensorial stimuli of his or her environment, including information from the senses, language, culture, and the development of concepts with the term "absorbent mind". She believed that this is a power unique to the first plane, and that it fades as the child approached age six. Montessori also observed and discovered periods of special sensitivity to particular stimuli during this time which she called the "sensitive periods". In Montessori education, the classroom environment responds to these periods by making appropriate materials and activities available while the periods are active in each individual young child. She identified the following periods and their durations:
Social behavior—from around to 4 years old
Sensory refinement—from birth to around 4 years old
Order—from around 1 to 3 years old
Interest in small objects—from around 18 months to 3 years old
Acquisition of language—from birth to around 6 years old
Finally, Montessori observed in children from three to six years old a psychological state she termed "normalization". Normalization arises from concentration and focus on activity which serves the child's developmental needs, and is characterized by the ability to concentrate as well as "spontaneous discipline, continuous and happy work, social sentiments of help and sympathy for others".
The second plane of development extends from around six years to twelve years old. During this period, Montessori observed physical and psychological changes in children, and she developed a classroom environment, lessons, and materials, to respond to these new characteristics. Physically, she observed the loss of baby teeth and the lengthening of the legs and torso at the beginning of the plane, and a period of uniform growth following. Psychologically, she observed the "herd instinct", or the tendency to work and socialize in groups, as well as the powers of reason and imagination. Developmentally, she believed the work of the second-plane child is the formation of intellectual independence, of moral sense, and of social organization.
The third plane of development extends from around twelve years to around eighteen years of age, encompassing the period of adolescence. Montessori characterized the third plane by the physical changes of puberty and adolescence, but also psychological changes. She emphasized the psychological instability and difficulties in the concentration of this age, as well as the creative tendencies and the development of "a sense of justice and a sense of personal dignity". She used the term "valorization" to describe the adolescents' drive for an externally derived evaluation of their worth. Developmentally, Montessori believed that the work of the third plane child is the construction of the adult self in society.
The fourth plane of development extends from around eighteen years to around twenty-four years old. Montessori wrote comparatively little about this period and did not develop an educational program for the age. She envisioned young adults prepared by their experiences in Montessori education at the lower levels ready to fully embrace the study of culture and the sciences in order to influence and lead civilization. She believed that economic independence in the form of work for money was critical for this age, and felt that an arbitrary limit to the number of years in university-level study was unnecessary, as the study of culture could go on throughout a person's life.
Relationship to peace
Montessori believed that education had an important role in achieving world peace, stating in her 1936 book Education and Peace that "[p]reventing conflicts is the work of politics; establishing peace is the work of education". She felt that children allowed to develop according to their inner laws of development would give rise to a more peaceful and enduring civilization. From the 1930s to the end of her life, she gave a number of lectures and addresses on the subject.
Studies
A 2017 review on evaluations of Montessori education studies states that broad evidence exists that certain elements of the Montessori method (e.g. teaching early literacy through a phonics approach embedded in a rich language context, providing a sensorial foundation for mathematics education) are effective, although these studies suffer from several methodological limitations. At the same time, it was concluded that while some evidence exists that children may benefit cognitively and socially from Montessori education that sticks to original principles, it is less clear whether modern adapted forms of Montessori education are as effective. In 2017, Lillard also reviewed research on the outcomes of Montessori education.
A 1975 study published in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development showed that every year over a four-year period from Pre-K to Grade 2 children under a Montessori program had higher mean scores on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales than those in DARCEE or traditional programs.
A 1981 study published in Young Children found that while Montessori programs could not be considered to have undergone detailed evaluation, they performed equal to or better than other programs in certain areas. A 2006 study published in Science magazine found that "when strictly implemented, Montessori education fosters social and academic skills that are equal or superior to those fostered by a pool of other types of schools". Another study in the Milwaukee Public Schools found that children who had attended Montessori from ages 3–11 outperformed their high school classmates several years later on mathematics and science; another found that Montessori had some of the largest positive effects on the achievement of all programs evaluated.
Some studies have not found positive outcomes for children in Montessori classrooms. For example, a 2005 study in a Buffalo public Montessori magnet school "failed to support the hypothesis that enrollment in a Montessori school was associated with higher academic achievement". Explicitly comparing outcomes of Montessori classrooms in which children spent extra time with Montessori materials, a standard amount of time with the Montessori materials ('classic Montessori'), or no time at all with the materials (because they were in conventional classrooms), Lillard (2012) found the best outcomes for children in classic Montessori.
A 2017 study published by The Hechinger Report claims that despite financial background, students in Montessori schools did score higher on academic tests than their peers in the same economic classes who did not attend Montessori schools.
Trademark and branding
In 1967, the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled that "the term 'Montessori' has a generic and/or descriptive significance". According to many Montessori advocates, the lack of trademark protection has led to public misconceptions of the method due to some schools' using the term without adhering to Montessorian principles.
In the Philippines, the Department of Education (DepED) has noted the proliferation of private schools which misuse the term "Montessori" similar to how educational institutes present themselves as "international schools". As per Department of Education, Culture and Sports (DECS; now DepED) Order 65 issued in June 1997, the education department along with the Securities and Exchange Commission shall allow schools to use the term "Montessori" only if they satisfy certain guidelines by the Federation of Philippine Montessori Schools.
See also
List of Montessori schools
References
Further reading
External links
Association Montessori Internationale (AMI)
The International Montessori Index (AMI)
Association Montessori International/USA (AMI/USA)
American Montessori Society (AMS)
The Montessori Foundation
Digitized library book copy of The Montessori System Examined on Internet Archive
Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education
Montessori Bibliography Online
Montessori Education Related Articles
Education theory
Educational practices
Pedagogical movements and theories
Philosophy of education
Italian inventions | 0.779279 | 0.999615 | 0.778979 |
Inquiry-based learning | Inquiry-based learning (also spelled as enquiry-based learning in British English) is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios. It contrasts with traditional education, which generally relies on the teacher presenting facts and their knowledge about the subject. Inquiry-based learning is often assisted by a facilitator rather than a lecturer. Inquirers will identify and research issues and questions to develop knowledge or solutions. Inquiry-based learning includes problem-based learning, and is generally used in small-scale investigations and projects, as well as research. The inquiry-based instruction is principally very closely related to the development and practice of thinking and problem-solving skills.
History
Inquiry-based learning is primarily a pedagogical method, developed during the discovery learning movement of the 1960s as a response to traditional forms of instruction—where people were required to memorize information from instructional materials, such as direct instruction and rote learning. The philosophy of inquiry based learning finds its antecedents in constructivist learning theories, such as the work of Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, and Freire among others, and can be considered a constructivist philosophy. Generating information and making meaning of it based on personal or societal experience is referred to as constructivism. Dewey's experiential learning pedagogy (that is, learning through experiences) comprises the learner actively participating in personal or authentic experiences to make meaning from it. Inquiry can be conducted through experiential learning because inquiry values the same concepts, which include engaging with the content/material in questioning, as well as investigating and collaborating to make meaning. Vygotsky approached constructivism as learning from an experience that is influenced by society and the facilitator. The meaning constructed from an experience can be concluded as an individual or within a group.
In the 1960s Joseph Schwab called for inquiry to be divided into three distinct levels. This was later formalized by Marshall Herron in 1971, who developed the Herron Scale to evaluate the amount of inquiry within a particular lab exercise. Since then, there have been a number of revisions proposed and inquiry can take various forms. There is a spectrum of inquiry-based teaching methods available.
Inquiry learning has been used as a teaching and learning tool for thousands of years, however, the use of inquiry within public education has a much briefer history. Ancient Greek and Roman educational philosophies focused much more on the art of agricultural and domestic skills for the middle class and oratory for the wealthy upper class. It was not until the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, during the late 17th and 18th century that the subject of Science was considered a respectable academic body of knowledge. Up until the 1900s the study of science within education had a primary focus on memorizing and organizing facts.
John Dewey, a well-known philosopher of education at the beginning of the 20th century, was the first to criticize the fact that science education was not taught in a way to develop young scientific thinkers. Dewey proposed that science should be taught as a process and way of thinking – not as a subject with facts to be memorized. While Dewey was the first to draw attention to this issue, much of the reform within science education followed the lifelong work and efforts of Joseph Schwab.
Joseph Schwab was an educator who proposed that science did not need to be a process for identifying stable truths about the world that we live in, but rather science could be a flexible and multi-directional inquiry driven process of thinking and learning.
Schwab believed that science in the classroom should more closely reflect the work of practicing scientists. Schwab developed three levels of open inquiry that align with the breakdown of inquiry processes that we see today.
Students are provided with questions, methods and materials and are challenged to discover relationships between variables
Students are provided with a question, however, the method for research is up to the students to develop
Phenomena are proposed but students must develop their own questions and method for research to discover relationships among variables
The graduated levels of scientific inquiry outlined by Schwab demonstrate that students need to develop thinking skills and strategies prior to being exposed to higher levels of inquiry. Effectively, these skills need to be scaffolded by the teacher or instructor until students are able to develop questions, methods, and conclusions on their own.
Characteristics
Specific learning processes that people engage in during inquiry-learning include:
Creating questions of their own
Obtaining supporting evidence to answer the question(s)
Explaining the evidence collected
Connecting the explanation to the knowledge obtained from the investigative process
Creating an argument and justification for the explanation
Inquiry learning involves developing questions, making observations, doing research to find out what information is already recorded, developing methods for experiments, developing instruments for data collection, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data, outlining possible explanations and creating predictions for future study.
Levels
There are many different explanations for inquiry teaching and learning and the various levels of inquiry that can exist within those contexts. The article titled The Many Levels of Inquiry by Heather Banchi and Randy Bell (2008) clearly outlines four levels of inquiry.
Level 1: Confirmation inquiry
The teacher has taught a particular science theme or topic. The teacher then develops questions and a procedure that guides students through an activity where the results are already known. This method is great to reinforce concepts taught and to introduce students into learning to follow procedures, collect and record data correctly and to confirm and deepen understandings.
Level 2: Structured inquiry
The teacher provides the initial question and an outline of the procedure. Students are to formulate explanations of their findings through evaluating and analyzing the data that they collect.
Level 3: Guided inquiry
The teacher provides only the research question for the students. The students are responsible for designing and following their own procedures to test that question and then communicate their results and findings.
Level 4: Open/true inquiry
Students formulate their own research question(s), design and follow through with a developed procedure, and communicate their findings and results. This type of inquiry is often seen in science fair contexts where students drive their own investigative questions.
Banchi and Bell (2008) explain that teachers should begin their inquiry instruction at the lower levels and work their way to open inquiry in order to effectively develop students' inquiry skills. Open inquiry activities are only successful if students are motivated by intrinsic interests and if they are equipped with the skills to conduct their own research study.
Open/true inquiry learning
An important aspect of inquiry-based learning is the use of open learning, as evidence suggests that only utilizing lower level inquiry is not enough to develop critical and scientific thinking to the full potential. Open learning has no prescribed target or result that people have to achieve. There is an emphasis on the individual manipulating information and creating meaning from a set of given materials or circumstances. In many conventional and structured learning environments, people are told what the outcome is expected to be, and then they are simply expected to 'confirm' or show evidence that this is the case.
Open learning has many benefits. It means students do not simply perform experiments in a routine like fashion, but actually think about the results they collect and what they mean. With traditional non-open lessons there is a tendency for students to say that the experiment 'went wrong' when they collect results contrary to what they are told to expect. In open learning there are no wrong results, and students have to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the results they collect themselves and decide their value.
Open learning has been developed by a number of science educators including the American John Dewey and the German Martin Wagenschein. Wagenschein's ideas particularly complement both open learning and inquiry-based learning in teaching work. He emphasized that students should not be taught bald facts, but should understand and explain what they are learning. His most famous example of this was when he asked physics students to tell him what the speed of a falling object was. Nearly all students would produce an equation, but no students could explain what this equation meant. Wagenschein used this example to show the importance of understanding over knowledge.
Although both guided and open/true inquiry were found to promote science literacy and interest, each has its own advantages. While open/true inquiry may contribute to students' initiative, flexibility and adaptability better than guided inquiry in the long run, some claim that it may lead to high cognitive load and that guided inquiry is more efficient in terms of time and content learning.
Inquisitive learning
Sociologist of education Phillip Brown defined inquisitive learning as learning that is intrinsically motivated (e.g. by curiosity and interest in knowledge for its own sake), as opposed to acquisitive learning that is extrinsically motivated (e.g. by acquiring high scores on examinations to earn credentials). However, occasionally the term inquisitive learning is simply used as a synonym for inquiry-based learning.
Inquiry-based learning in academic disciplines
Science education
History
A catalyst for reform within North American science education was the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the Soviet Union satellite. This historical scientific breakthrough caused a great deal of concern around the science and technology education the American students were receiving. In 1958 the U.S. congress developed and passed the National Defense Education Act in order to provide math and science teachers with adequate teaching materials.
Science standards
America's Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) embrace student centered inquiry-based pedagogy by implementing a three-part approach to science education: Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs), and Cross Cutting Concepts (CCCs). The standards are designed so that students learn science by performing scientific practices in the classroom. Students use practices such as asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, collaborating, collecting and analyzing data, and arguing from evidence to learn the core ideas and concepts in scientific content areas. These practices are comparable to the 21st century skills that have been shown to be indicators of success in modern societies and workplaces regardless of whether that field is science based.
Pedagogical applications
Inquiry-based pedagogy in science education has been shown to increase students' scientific knowledge and literacy when compared to when students are taught using more traditional pedagogical methods. However, even though students in inquiry-based classrooms are shown to have higher scientific knowledge, they have also been shown to have increased frustration and decreased confidence in scientific ability when compared to their peers taught using traditional methods. Research has also shown that while inquiry-based pedagogy has been shown to improve students' science achievement, social contexts must be taken into account. This is because achievement gaps among students may be as likely to widen as they are to decrease due to differences in student readiness for inquiry-based learning based on social and economic status differences.
In cases where students' scientific knowledge in an inquiry based classroom was not significantly different than their peers taught in traditional methods, student problem solving ability was found to be improved for inquiry learning students. Inquiry as a pedagogical framework and learning process fits within many educational models including Problem Based Learning and the 5E Model of Education.
Problem-based learning
Inquiry as a pedagogical framework has been shown to be especially effective when used along problem-based learning (PBL) assignments. As a student-centered strategy, problem-based learning fits well within an inquiry based classroom. Students learn science by performing science: asking questions, designing experiments, collecting data, making claims, and using data to support claims. By creating a culture and community of inquiry in a science classroom, students learn science by working collaboratively with their peers to investigate the world around them and ways to solve problems affecting their communities. Students confronted with real world problems that affect their everyday lives are shown to have increased engagement and feel more encouraged to solve the problems posed to them.
5E Model of Science Education
The 5E Model of Science Education is a planning structure that helps science teachers develop student centered inquiry-based lessons and units. In the 5E model, students learn science by exploring their questions using the same approach scientists explore their questions. By using this approach, science teachers help their students connect scientific content learned in the classroom with phenomena from their own lives and apply that learning to new areas, in science and beyond.
The 5E Model is broken into the following sections which may repeat and occur at various stages of the learning process.
Engage: This is generally considered to be the opening stage of the 5E Model and is used to inspire student curiosity and should help students connect new phenomena to prior learning. This stage of the 5E model also aims to identify student misconceptions that need to be addressed through the lessons designed by the teacher.
Explore: In this stage, students investigate the phenomena observed during the engage stage and answer any questions they have generated based on their observations. The level of inquiry (i.e. fully open vs. guided) may vary based on the level, age, and readiness of students
Explain: In this stage, the teacher helps students piece together the information they gathered during the explore stage. Again, the level of direct teacher instruction and explanation may vary based on the level, age, and readiness of students.
Elaborate/Expand: This stage determines if students are truly able to apply the information they have learned to new areas and to the solution of real world problems.
Evaluate: In this stage students evaluate their own learning and the teacher evaluates student understanding and ability to apply knowledge to multiple areas.
Collaboration and communication
Effective collaboration and communication is an integral part of scientists' and engineers' everyday lives and their importance is reflected in the representation of these skills in the science and engineering practices of the Next Generation Science Standards. Inquiry education supports these skills, especially when students take part in a community of inquiry. Students who are actively collaborating and communicating in an inquiry based science class exhibit and develop many of these skills. Specifically, these students:
make observations and ask questions with their peers
work with peers to design solutions to problems
analyze claims of their peers
argue from evidence
support their peers' growth and search for knowledge
Social studies and history
The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards was a joint collaboration among states and social studies organizations, including the National Council for the Social Studies, designed to focus social studies education on the practice of inquiry, emphasizing "the disciplinary concepts and practices that support students as they develop the capacity to know, analyze, explain, and argue about interdisciplinary challenges in our social world." The C3 Framework recommends an "Inquiry Arc" incorporating four dimensions: 1. developing questions and planning inquiries; 2. applying disciplinary concepts and tools; 3. evaluating primary sources and using evidence; and 4. communicating conclusions and taking informed action. For example, a theme for this approach could be an exploration of etiquette today and in the past. Students might formulate their own questions or begin with an essential question such as "Why are men and women expected to follow different codes of etiquette?" Students explore change and continuity of manners over time and the perspectives of different cultures and groups of people. They analyze primary source documents such as books of etiquette from different time periods and form conclusions that answer the inquiry questions. Students finally communicate their conclusions in formal essays or creative projects. They may also take action by recommending solutions for improving school climate.
Robert Bain in How Students Learn described a similar approach called "problematizing history". First a learning curriculum is organized around central concepts. Next, a question and primary sources are provided, such as eyewitness historical accounts. The task for inquiry is to create an interpretation of history that will answer the central question. Students will form a hypothesis, collect and consider information and revisit their hypothesis as they evaluate their data.
Ontario's kindergarten program
After Charles Pascal's report in 2009, the Canadian province of Ontario's Ministry of Education decided to implement a full day kindergarten program that focuses on inquiry and play-based learning, called The Early Learning Kindergarten Program. As of September 2014, all primary schools in Ontario started the program. The curriculum document outlines the philosophy, definitions, process and core learning concepts for the program. Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Piaget's child development theory and Dewey's experiential learning are the heart of the program's design. As research shows, children learn best through play, whether it is independently or in a group. Three forms of play are noted in the curriculum document, pretend or "pretense" play, socio-dramatic play and constructive play. Through play and authentic experiences, children interact with their environment (people and/or objects) and question things; thus leading to inquiry learning. A chart on page 15 clearly outlines the process of inquiry for young children, including initial engagement, exploration, investigation, and communication. The new program supports holistic approach to learning. For further details, please see the curriculum document.
Since the program is extremely new, there is limited research on its success and areas of improvement. One government research report was released with the initial groups of children in the new kindergarten program. The Final Report: Evaluation of the Implementation of the Ontario Full-Day Early-Learning Kindergarten Program from Vanderlee, Youmans, Peters, and Eastabrook (2012) conclude with primary research that high-need children improved more compared to children who did not attend Ontario's new kindergarten program. As with inquiry-based learning in all divisions and subject areas, longitudinal research is needed to examine the full extent of this teaching/learning method.
Learning to read in the Netherlands
Since 2013, Dutch children have participated in a curriculum of learning to read through an inquiry-based pedagogical program. The program, from the Dutch developmental psychologist Ewald Vervaet, is named (OLL; 'Discovery Learning to Read') and has three parts. As of 2019, OLL is only available in Dutch.
OLL's main characteristic is that it is for children who are reading mature. Reading maturity is assessed with the Reading Maturity Test. It is a descriptive test that consists of two subtests.
Misconceptions
There are several common misconceptions regarding inquiry-based science, the first being that inquiry science is simply instruction that teaches students to follow the scientific method. Many teachers had the opportunity to work within the constraints of the scientific method as students themselves and assume inquiry learning must be the same. Inquiry science is not just about solving problems in six simple steps but much more broadly focused on the intellectual problem-solving skills developed throughout a scientific process. Additionally, not every hands-on lesson can be considered inquiry.
Some educators believe that there is only one true method of inquiry, which would be described as the level four: Open Inquiry. While open inquiry may be the most authentic form of inquiry, there are many skills and a level of conceptual understanding that the students must have developed before they can be successful at this high level of inquiry. While inquiry-based science is considered to be a teaching strategy that fosters higher order thinking in students, it should be one of several methods used. A multifaceted approach to science keeps students engaged and learning.
Not every student is going to learn the same amount from an inquiry lesson; students must be invested in the topic of study to authentically reach the set learning goals. Teachers must be prepared to ask students questions to probe their thinking processes in order to assess accurately. Inquiry-science requires a lot of time, effort, and expertise, however, the benefits outweigh the cost when true authentic learning can take place.
Neuroscience complexity
The literature states that inquiry requires multiple cognitive processes and variables, such as causality and co-occurrence that enrich with age and experience.
Kuhn, et al. (2000) used explicit training workshops to teach children in grades six to eight in the United States how to inquire through a quantitative study. By completing an inquiry-based task at the end of the study, the participants demonstrated enhanced mental models by applying different inquiry strategies. In a similar study, Kuhan and Pease (2008) completed a longitudinal quantitative study following a set of American children from grades four to six to investigate the effectiveness of scaffolding strategies for inquiry. Results demonstrated that children benefitted from the scaffolding because they outperformed the grade seven control group on an inquiry task. Understanding the neuroscience of inquiry learning the scaffolding process related to it should be reinforced for Ontario's primary teachers as part of their training.
Necessity for teacher training
There is a necessity for professional collaboration when executing a new inquiry program (Chu, 2009; Twigg, 2010). The teacher training and process of using inquiry learning should be a joint mission to ensure the maximal amount of resources are used and that the teachers are producing the best learning scenarios. The scholarly literature supports this notion. Twigg's (2010) education professionals who participated in her experiment
emphasized year round professional development sessions, such as workshops, weekly meetings and observations, to ensure inquiry is being implemented in the class correctly. Another example is Chu's (2009) study, where the participants appreciated the professional collaboration of educators, information technicians and librarians to provide more resources and expertise for preparing the structure and resources for the inquiry project. To establish a professional collaboration and researched training methods, administration support is required for funding.
Criticism
Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) review of literature found that although constructivists often cite each other's work, empirical evidence is not often cited. Nonetheless the constructivist movement gained great momentum in the 1990s, because many educators began to write about this philosophy of learning.
Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn cite several studies supporting the success of the constructivist problem-based and inquiry learning methods. For example, they describe a project called GenScope, an inquiry-based science software application. Students using the GenScope software showed significant gains over the control groups, with the largest gains shown in students from basic courses.
In contrast, Hmelo-Silver et al. also cite a large study by Geier on the effectiveness of inquiry-based science for middle school students, as demonstrated by their performance on high-stakes standardized tests. The improvement was 14% for the first cohort of students and 13% for the second cohort. This study also found that inquiry-based teaching methods greatly reduced the achievement gap for African-American students.
In a 2006 article, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's president, Chester E. Finn Jr., was quoted as saying "But like so many things in education, it gets carried to excess... [the approach is] fine to some degree." The organization ran a study in 2005 concluding that the emphasis states put on inquiry-based learning is too great.
Richard E. Mayer from the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote in 2004 that there was sufficient research evidence to make any reasonable person skeptical about the benefits of discovery learning—practiced under the guise of cognitive constructivism or social constructivism—as a preferred instructional method. He reviewed research on discovery of problem-solving rules culminating in the 1960s, discovery of conservation strategies culminating in the 1970s, and discovery of LOGO programming strategies culminating in the 1980s. In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer.
It should be cautioned that inquiry-based learning takes a lot of planning before implementation. It is not something that can be put into place in the classroom quickly. Measurements must be put in place for how students knowledge and performance will be measured and how standards will be incorporated. The teacher's responsibility during inquiry exercises is to support and facilitate student learning (Bell et al., 769–770). A common mistake teachers make is lacking the vision to see where students' weaknesses lie. According to Bain, teachers cannot assume that students will hold the same assumptions and thinking processes as a professional within that discipline (p. 201).
While some see inquiry-based teaching as increasingly mainstream, it can be perceived as in conflict with standardized testing common in standards-based assessment systems which emphasise the measurement of student knowledge, and meeting of pre-defined criteria, for example the shift towards "fact" in changes to the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a result of the American No Child Left Behind program.
Additional scholarly research literature
Chu (2009) used a mixed method design to examine the outcome of an inquiry project completed by students in Hong Kong with the assistance of multiple educators. Chu's (2009) results show that the children were more motivated and academically successful compared to the control group.
Cindy Hmelo-Silver reviewed a number of reports on a variety studies into problem based learning.
Edelson, Gordin and Pea describe five significant challenges to implementing inquiry-based learning and present strategies for addressing them through the design of technology and curriculum. They present a design history covering four generations of software and curriculum to show how these challenges arise in classrooms and how the design strategies respond to them.
See also
Action learning
Design-based learning
Discovery learning
Networked learning
Phenomenon-based learning
POGIL
Problem-based learning
Progressive inquiry
Project-based learning
Scientific literacy
Three-part lesson
Notes
References and further reading
External links
Inquiry-based middle school lesson plan: "Born to Run: Artificial Selection Lab"
Teaching Inquiry-based Science
What is Inquiry?
Applied learning
Philosophy of education
Education reform
Standards-based education
Inquiry
Educational practices | 0.784018 | 0.99337 | 0.77882 |
Culture change | Culture change is a term used in public policy making and in workplaces that emphasizes the influence of cultural capital on individual and community behavior. It has been sometimes called repositioning of culture, which means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society. It places stress on the social and cultural capital determinants of decision making and the manner in which these interact with other factors like the availability of information or the financial incentives facing individuals to drive behavior.
These cultural capital influences include the role of parenting, families and close associates; organizations such as schools and workplaces; communities and neighborhoods; and wider social influences such as the media. It is argued that this cultural capital manifests into specific values, attitudes or social norms which in turn guide the behavioral intentions that individuals adopt in regard to particular decisions or courses of action. These behavioral intentions interact with other factors driving behavior such as financial incentives, regulation and legislation, or levels of information, to drive actual behavior and ultimately feed back into underlying cultural capital.
In general, cultural stereotypes present great resistance to change and to their own redefinition. Culture, often appears fixed to the observer at any one point in time because cultural mutations occur incrementally. Cultural change is a long-term process. Policymakers need to make a great effort to improve some basics aspects of a society's cultural traits.
Culture
Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, nudging indigenization, and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.
Cultural invention
Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.
Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change. (See structuration.)
Social conflict
Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.
Diffusion
Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct borrowing," on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.
Acculturation
Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.
Achieving culture change
The term is used by Knott et al. of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit in their 2008 publication Achieving Culture Change: A Policy Framework. The paper sets out how public policy can achieve social and cultural change through 'downstream' interventions including fiscal incentives, legislation, regulation and information provision and also 'upstream' interventions such as parenting, peer and mentoring programs, or development of social and community networks.
The key concepts the paper is based on include:
Cultural capital - such as the attitudes, values, aspirations and sense of self-efficacy which influence behavior. Cultural capital is itself influenced by behavior over time
The shifting social zeitgeist - whereby social norms and values that predominate within the cultural capital in society evolve in over time
The process by which political narrative and new ideas and innovations shift the social zeitgeist over time within the constraint of the 'elastic band' of public opinion
The process of behavioral normalization - whereby behavior and actions pass through into social and cultural norms (for example, Knott et al. argue that the UK experience of seat belt enforcement established and reinforced this as a social norm)
The use of customer insight
The importance of tailoring policy programmes around an ecological model of human behavior to account for how policy will interact with cultural capital and affect it over time.
Knott et al. use examples from a range of policy areas to demonstrate how the culture change framework can be applied to policymaking. for example:
To encourage educational aspiration they recommend more use of early years and parenting interventions, an improved childhood offer, and development of positive narratives on education as well as integrated advisory systems, financial assistance and targeted social marketing approaches.
To promote healthy living and personal responsibility they recommend building healthy living into community infrastructure, building partnerships with schools and employers, more one-to-one support for wellbeing alongside use of regulation and legislation on unhealthy products, provision of robust health information and health marketing to promote adaptive forms of behaviour.
To develop environmentally sustainable norms they recommend reinforcing sustainability throughout policy narratives, using schools and the voluntary sector to promote environmental messages, development of infrastructure that make sustainable choices easy, together with a wider package of measures on fiscal incentives, regulation, advisory services and coalition movements.
See also
Behavioural economics
Cultural economics
Cultural geography
Cultural psychology
Social psychology
Cultural capital
Market failure
Mediatization (media)
Social change
Sociocultural evolution
Theory of planned behavior
Cultural engineering document
Notes
References
Groh, Arnold (2019). Theories of Culture. London: Routledge, .
Knott, David; Muers, Stephen; Aldridge, Stephen (2008).
GSR Behaviour Change Knowledge Review (2008). Reference Report: An overview of behaviour change models and their uses
External links
Baconbutty on Culture Change
Cut crime with drink tax, Gordon Brown told, Daily Telegraph
The naughty nation, New Statesman
Winning Hearts and Minds
Transformer une culture : un cadre d'action pour les politiques publiques (in French)
Leading Teams on Culture Change
Policy
Change
Social psychology
Cultural geography
Cultural economics | 0.785594 | 0.991073 | 0.778581 |
Suggestopedia | Suggestopedia, a portmanteau of "suggestion" and "pedagogy" is a teaching method used to learn foreign languages developed by the Bulgarian psychiatrist Georgi Lozanov. It is also known as desuggestopedia.
First developed in the 1970s, suggestopedia utilised positive suggestions in teaching language. In 1978, Lozanov presented the method to a commission in Paris at UNESCO. Two years later in 1980, UNESCO issued their final report with various mixed views on the theory. On the one hand, it affirmed suggestopedia as a language learning technique for second-language speakers, but the report also included various criticisms of the theory.
Practice
Suggestopedia asserts that the physical surroundings and atmosphere of classroom are vital factors in making sure that "students feel comfortable and confident". It also promotes various techniques, including art and music, in teaching languages. The pedagogy of suggestopedia consists of three phases: deciphering, concert session, and elaboration.
Deciphering: In the deciphering phase, a teacher introduces to their students some written or spoken content. In most materials the foreign-language text is on the left half of the page with a translation on the right half.
Concert session: The concert session phase consists of active and passive sessions. In the active session, the teacher reads the text at a normal speed, while their students follow. In the passive session, the students relax and listen to the teacher reading the text. Baroque music is played in the background.
Elaboration: The students express what they have learned through acting, songs, and games.
A fourth phrase, production, is also sometimes used.
Production: The students spontaneously speak and interact in the target language without interruption or correction.
Suggestopedia teachers
Suggestopedia asserts that teachers should not act in a directive way. For example, teachers should act as partners to their students, participating in activities such as games and songs "naturally" and "genuinely". Lozanov asserts that teachers should be versed in the "communication in the spirit of love, respect for man as a human being, the specific humanitarian way of applying their 'techniques' ".
Suggestopedia for children
The suggestopedia pedagogy for adult learners includes long sessions without movement, and other techniques that Lozanov claims are effective for adults. Lozanov asserts that children have brains that are more delicate than those of adults, and another approach should be applied to children. Suggestopedia lessons for children are shorter in order to keep children away from the negative pedagogical suggestions of society.
Claims
Its proponents claim that suggestopedia imparts better health and intellectual abilities onto its learners. Lozanov claims that the effect of suggestopedia is in not only language learning but also producing favourable side effects on health, the social and psychological relations, and the subsequent success in other subjects.
Criticism
Suggestopedia has been called a "pseudo-science". In response, Lozanov claimed that suggestopedia cannot be compared to a placebo as he regarded placebos as being effective. Another point of criticism is brought forward by Baur, who claims that in suggestopedia students only receive input by listening, reading and musical-emotional backing, while other important factors of language acquisition are being neglected. Several other features of the method – like the 'nonconscious' acquisition of language, or bringing the learner into a childlike state – are questioned by critics. Lukesch also claims that suggestopedia lacks scientific backing and is criticized by psychologists as being based on pseudoscience.
Later variations
Suggestopedia yielded four main offshoots. The first – still called Suggestopedia, and developed in eastern Europe – used different techniques from Lozanov's original version. The other three are named Superlearning, Suggestive Accelerated Learning and Teaching (SALT), and Psychopädie. Superlearning and SALT originated in North America, while Psychopädie was developed in West Germany. While all four are slightly different from the original suggestopedia and from each other, they still share the common traits of music, relaxation, and suggestion.
References
Idiomos Aprendizagem Acelerada = http://www.idiomos.com
Edelmann, Walter, Suggestgopädie/Superlearning, Heidelberg: Ansanger, 1998.
Lozanov, Georgi, Suggestology and Outlines of Suggestopedy, New York: Gordon & Breach 1978 (Translation of: ).
Meier, Josef, Mehr Freude und Erfolg beim Englischlernen mit innovativen Lern- und Mentaltechniken, München:IBS, 1999.
Riedel, Katja, Persönlichkeitsentfaltung durch Suggestopädie, Hohengehren: Schneider, 1995.
Schiffler, Ludger, Suggestopädie und Superlearning - empirisch geprüft. Einführung und Weiterentwicklung für Schule und Erwachsenenbildung, Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1989.
Schiffler, Ludger, La Suggestopédie et le Superlearning - Mise à l'épreuve statistique, Paris: Didier Erudition, 1991.
Schiffler, Ludger: "Suggestopedic Methods and Applications", Philadelphia, Tokyo, Paris etc.: Gordon & Breach Science Publisher, 1992.
Schiffler, Ludger, Effektiver Fremdsprachen lehren und lernen - Beide Gehirnhälften aktivieren, Donauwörth: Auer, 2002.
Schiffler, Ludger, Interhemispheric Foreign Language Learning - Activating Both Sides of the Brain, online 2003 (732KB )(download available: http://www.ludger-schiffler.de).
Negrete, Paulo Sergio, Accelerating the Foreign Language Teaching Through Suggestopedia/Neuropedia, published in 2015.
External links
Language-teaching methodology
Pseudoscience | 0.788839 | 0.986361 | 0.77808 |
Learning through play | Learning through play is a term used in education and psychology to describe how a child can learn to make sense of the world around them. Through play children can develop social and cognitive skills, mature emotionally, and gain the self-confidence required to engage in new experiences and environments.
Key ways that young children learn include playing, being with other people, being active, exploring and new experiences, talking to themselves, communication with others, meeting physical and mental challenges, being shown how to do new things, practicing and repeating skills and having fun.
Definitions of work and play
Play enables children to make sense of their world, as children possess a natural curiosity to explore and play acts as a medium to do so.
Definitions of play
In Einstein Never Used FlashCards five elements of children's play are outlined
Play must be pleasurable and enjoyable.
Play must have no extrinsic goals.
Play is spontaneous and voluntary.
Play involves active engagement.
Play involves an element of make-believe.
Additionally, play is characterized by Creativity and Imagination. Creativity is evident in role play, construction activities, and other forms of imaginative play. Imagination allows children to create mental images related to their feelings, thoughts, and ideas, which they then incorporate into their play.
Researchers Beverlie Dietze and Diane Kashin in Playing and Learning seven common characteristics of play include:
Play is active.
Play is child-initiated.
Play is process-oriented.
Play is intrinsic.
Play is episodic.
Play is rule-governed.
Play is symbolic.
Contrasted with Work
There are important distinctions between play and work in the context of children's activities. Play is generally a self-directed activity chosen by the child and is centered around exploration and enjoyment. In contrast, work typically involves structured tasks with specific goals and outcomes.
According to researchers, Dietze and Kashin, play is characterized by internal control, the ability to adapt or create new realities, and intrinsic motivation. When adults impose specific objectives on an activity and label it as play, it can blur the line between play and work. For example, using flash cards to help a child memorize information may be more closely associated with work due to its structured nature and goal orientation.
Understanding the distinction between play and work can have implications for child development. While structured activities can provide learning opportunities, play fosters creativity, problem-solving, and autonomy. Educators and parents mindful of these differences can create environments that support children's holistic development.
Play offers an opportunity for children to build new knowledge from previous experiences. Researchers have differentiated between work and play in various ways:
Primary Activities: a child's action is work if it adds immediate value to the family unit, even if the culture perceives the action as play.
Parental Perspective: Parents from different cultures have varying views on what constitutes work or play in children's actions. For instance, a Mayan mother may see her daughter setting up a fruit stand as play, while many Western cultures might view it as work if the child successfully sells the fruit.
Child's Perspective: Children may have different perceptions of play and work compared to adults, which can influence how they engage in and interpret various activities.
Classical, modern and contemporary perspectives
There are three main groups of play theories:
Classical Theories
Classical theorists such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Fredrich Froebel, and John Dewey had a significant impact on changing societal views of childhood. They emphasized the importance of play in children's learning and development. These theorists promoted children's learning experiences through direct interaction with nature and life.
Classical theories of play also include concepts such as burning off excess energy, recreation and relaxation, replenishing energy after hard work, practicing future roles, and recapitulation theory. Herbert Spencer proposed that play allows humans to expend excess energy not required for survival.
Modern Theories
Modern theories focus on play's role in cognitive development. Jean Piaget emphasized how children construct knowledge through play-based stages of development, which has influenced many early childhood education programs. Fredrich Froebel's idea of play as 'serious work' aligns with modern perspectives on play's educational value.
Modern perspectives also examine play's impact on a child's development. For example, Dietze and Kashin view the learner as an active constructor of meaning.
Contemporary Theories
Contemporary theories emphasize the role of social and cultural contexts in children's learning and development. Rousseau's work on children's rights and the need for protection due to their innocence is an aspect of contemporary perspectives. Dewey's view of the child as an active agent in learning also aligns with contemporary theories that focus on empowering children through play.
Contemporary theories address the relationship between play, diversity, and social justice in daily life and learning. Children learn through their daily living experiences and are influenced by various contexts such as family, community, culture, and broader society. Lev Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development suggests that children need activities that support past learning while encouraging new challenges. Social engagement and collaboration with others can transform children's thinking. Urie Bronfenbrenner highlights the impact of the person-environment relationship on child development (Khuluqo 2016,Bodrova & Leong 2015).
Cultural Perspectives
Cross-Cultural Perspectives
While play has been studied extensively in Western cultures, including by Susan Isaacs in the first half of the 20th century, experts like Gunilla Dahlberg and Fleer challenge the universality of Western perspectives on play. Fleer's work with Australian Aboriginal children suggests that not all cultures emphasize play in the same way. Different cultures and communities have distinct ways of encouraging play. For instance, some may discourage adult involvement in play or expect children to play in mixed age groups away from adults. Additionally, some cultures may expect children to outgrow play by a certain age.
The Yucatec Maya culture offers a unique approach to play and learning, emphasizing reality-based activities and observation.
Learning through Play
Yucatec Maya children engage in play that is closely tied to real-life activities such as making tortillas, weaving, and cleaning clothing. They often learn through "Intent Community Participation," which involves observation and participation in community activities. Unlike children in many Western cultures, Yucatec Maya children do not engage in extensive pretend play, as it is considered akin to lying because it involves representing something that isn't real". For example, a Mayan mother told an ethnographer that she would "tolerate" her child pretending that the leaves in a bowl were a form of food. Instead, their play mirrors everyday life.
Age Groups and Interaction
Yucatec Maya children play and interact with individuals of all ages, rather than focusing on age-segregated play typical in some Western cultures. This approach helps them model adult behaviors and explore realistic representations of their culture.
Observational Learning
Observation plays a crucial role in Yucatec Maya children's learning process. They actively participate by observing and modeling useful activities within the community. Accordingly," It is inherently integrated into the daily activities of the compound."
Importance
Play is sufficiently important to the UN that it has recognized it as a specific right for all children. Children need the freedom to explore and play. Play also contributes to brain development. Play enables developmental in the prefrontal cortex of mammals, including humans. Evidence from neuroscience shows that the early years of a child's development (from birth to age six) set the basis for learning, behavior and health throughout life. A child's neural pathways are influenced in their development through the exploration, thinking, problem-solving and language expression which occur during play episodes. According to the Canadian Council on Learning, "Play nourishes every aspect of children's development – it forms the foundation of intellectual, social, physical, and emotional skills necessary for success in school and in life. Play 'paves the way for learning'”.
Learning occurs when children play with blocks, paint a picture or play make-believe. During play children try new things, solve problems, invent, create, test ideas and explore. Children need unstructured, creative playtime; in other words, children need time to learn through their play. The level of emotional arousal enacted during play is ideal for consolidation and integration of neural pathways. Allowing the child to direct the play means allowing the child to find the place most comfortable, allowing the promotion of neuroplasticity. Children engaged in self-directed play can create their own schemas allowing the integration of affect and cognition. Play also promotes neuroplasticity development by allowing children to co-construct wordless narratives of self-awareness and transformation.
According to Pascel, "Play is serious business for the development of young learners. This is such an important understanding. A deliberate and effective play-based approach supports young children's cognitive development. When well designed, such an approach taps into children's individual interests, draws out their emerging capacities, and responds to their sense of inquiry and exploration of the world around them. It generates highly motivated children enjoying an environment where the learning outcomes of a curriculum are more likely to be achieved”.
In childhood
Play is strongly linked to learning in young children, especially in areas such as problem-solving, language acquisition, literacy, numeracy, and social, physical, and emotional skills. Through learning-based play, children actively explore their environment and the world around them. Play is essential for a child's optimal social, cognitive, physical, and emotional development. Researchers agree that play establishes a foundation for intellectual growth, creativity, and basic academic knowledge.
According to Dorothy Singer, make-believe games allow children to imagine different roles and scenarios. Through sociodramatic play, children learn to manage emotions, understand the world, and navigate social interactions such as sharing and cooperation.
Purposeful, quality play experiences build critical skills for cognitive development and academic achievement. These include verbalization, language comprehension, vocabulary, imagination, questioning, problem-solving, observation, empathy, cooperation, and understanding others' perspectives.
Play also helps children develop social skills, creativity, hand-eye coordination, problem solving, and imagination. These skills are often more effectively learned through play than through flashcards or academic drills. Additionally, Slovak researchers Gmitrova and Gmitrov emphasize the importance of pretend play as a medium for children to progress beyond the educational curriculum.
Social play boosts children's confidence when trying new activities and enhances their ability to work with different symbols creatively. The benefits of play are so extensive that it is considered an evolutionary and developmentally important activity, helping children engage in socially appropriate behaviors that benefit them into adulthood.
Beliefs about the play-learning relationship
Linda Longley and colleagues found differing beliefs about the relationship between play and learning. While parents often see structured play activities (e.g., educational videos) as more valuable for learning, experts regard unstructured activities (such as pretend play) as more beneficial.
Even though teachers may recognize the value of play-based learning, research across several countries (such as China, India, and Ireland) suggests a gap between their beliefs and classroom practices. For example, in some settings, teachers who value play-based learning still rely more on traditional instruction methods. This may be due to factors such as accountability pressures or a lack of resources.
These challenges demonstrate a notable gap between teachers' beliefs about play-based learning and their classroom practices. This discrepancy can affect students' opportunities for growth and development through play-based activities, which support early literacy, language, mathematics, and socio-emotional skills.(Lynch, 2015)
Play-based learning
Play-based learning is an educational approach that supports children's development and learning. Through play, children can develop content knowledge, social skills, competences, and a positive disposition to learn.
This approach is rooted in Lev Vygotsky's model of scaffolding, where teachers focus on specific aspects of play activities and offer encouragement and feedback on children's learning. Play can challenge children's thinking, especially when they engage in real-life and imaginary activities. Sensitive intervention and adult support can be provided during play-based learning when necessary.
Children learn best through first-hand experiences in play-based learning. This approach motivates and stimulates children while supporting the development of skills, concepts, language acquisition, communication skills, and concentration. It also offers opportunities for children to develop positive attitudes and consolidate recent learning, skills, and competencies.
The DCSG outlined benefits of play-based learning in early childhood education. Playful children use and apply their knowledge, skills, and understanding in different ways and contexts. Practitioners also engage children in activities that help them learn and develop positive dispositions for learning. Practitioners should not plan children's play directly, as this can interfere with the choice and control central to play. Instead, they should plan for play by creating high-quality learning environments and ensuring uninterrupted periods for children to engage in play
According to researchers Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, adults playing with children can positively impact the quality and variety of play. When adults join in, they guide and extend play without controlling it, which allows children to follow their own interests and engage in cognitive development more effectively. Play is the language and currency of children
Here are several ways educators, parents, and guardians can facilitate children's learning during play.
Model Positive Attitudes: Adults can encourage play by providing a balance of indoor and outdoor activities throughout the year. By participating in play, adults guide and shape the experience without dominating it.
Create an Engaging Environment: Select a variety of toys, materials, and equipment to suit different skill levels and interests. This approach motivates children's exploration and discovery.
Observe and Respond: Ongoing observation of how children interact with toys and materials can provide insights into their interests and abilities, guiding further learning and development.
Engage Thoughtfully: Adults should carefully join in play activities without overshadowing children's initiatives, allowing children to take the lead.
Extend Play: Listening, repeating, extending, and asking questions at the right moments can help expand and enhance play. Adults can provide the language needed for children to articulate their observations.
Encourage Social and Cognitive Skills: By providing social knowledge and opportunities for children to explore physical and logico- mathematical knowledge, adults help children understand the world around them and solve problems.
By using these approaches, adults can create a supportive environment that nurtures children's natural curiosity and cognitive growth during play.
Criticism of play-based learning
Knowledge acquisition
Research over the past forty years has shown a positive correlation between play and children's learning, indicating that play can benefit children's education. However, some findings suggest that play may be more closely associated with procedural knowledge(skills and strategies) rather than declarative knowledge (facts and information). Correlational research alone cannot definitively determine the extent to which play influences learning outcomes. While play can help children develop important procedural knowledge, which can later support the acquisition of declarative knowledge, the relationship between play and declarative learning is not yet fully established.
Pretend Play: Creativity, Intelligence, and Problem-Solving:
Regarding creativity, evidence from meta-analyses on pretend play is mixed, with some studies suggesting a relationship with creativity and others finding little impact. The connection between play and intelligence remains unclear, as research cannot conclusively determine whether play promotes intelligence or if intelligence encourages play. In terms of problem-solving, construction play is correlated with solving puzzles and other similar tasks.
Recent studies indicate that engaging in playful interactions with peers helps children develop essential life skills such as problem-solving abilities and conflict resolution. Play also fosters self-confidence and emotional regulation, promoting collaboration, communication, and the expression of ideas and feelings. Additionally, play provides caregivers with opportunities to observe children's behavior and intervene if necessary, offering support for developmental delays or trauma.
Pretend Play:
Pretend play, or "make-believe play," involves acting out scenarios and exploring different perspectives. While some studies question the impact of pretend play on child development, others suggest it can enhance language usage, awareness of others' perspectives, and self-regulation in areas such as empathy and delayed gratification. Pretend play may also improve social skills, such as problem-solving and communication. Play-based learning experiences provide caregivers with valuable insights into children's behavior, enabling early interventions when necessary.
Play-based learning programs
Play-based learning programs encompass a variety of educational approaches that enhance children's learning experiences through engaging play activities. These programs emphasize the development of skills such as listening, concentration, communication, and self-direction.
Enriched Curriculum
The Enriched Curriculum is designed to enhance children's learning experiences by incorporating play-based learning. This curriculum combines outdoor physical activities with indoor play in smaller group settings to promote children's development. Critics have expressed concerns about the Enriched Curriculum, particularly its potential to delay reading and writing lessons, needing extra resources and its ability to cater to different types of learners.
Notable Play-Based Learning Programs
High/Scope-is a cognitive approach that involves children actively in their own learning. It offers 58 key experiences and uses a plan-do-review approach during learning center time. This method helps children take responsibility for their own learning while adults serve as facilitators of play.
Creative Curriculum-Creative Curriculum is an early childhood teaching approach that emphasizes social and emotional development. It uses project-based investigations to allow children to apply skills and addresses four areas of development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language.
Montessori Method-The Montessori Method promotes self-directed activity and clinical observation on the part of the teacher. This approach adapts the learning environment to the child's development level, encouraging children to learn through play.
Ontario Full Day Early Learning Kindergarten Program-This program for 4- and 5-year-olds consists of exploration, investigation, and guided and explicit instruction.
Ontario Early Years Centres-These centers focus on play-based learning through parent-child interaction. Parents and caregivers can stay with the child and access information about available programs and services.
Reggio Emilia approach-is a child-directed curriculum model that follows the children's interests. It emphasizes purposeful progression and emergent curriculum without a predetermined teacher-directed sequence.
Project Approach- The Project Approach involves preschoolers in studies of nearby topics that interest them. This teacher-instructed approach introduces new vocabulary and provides opportunities for informal conversation (Dfuss,2019).
Benefits of Different Types of Play in Child Development
Free Play
Free play is observed when children engage in activities based on their preferences, making their own choices regarding what they do and how they do it. It often occurs spontaneously, is enjoyable, and encourages imaginative thinking. This type of play typically unfolds without specific rules imposed by adults, allowing children the freedom to explore, express creativity, and experiment with different approaches.
This type of play is believed to allow children to tap into their creativity and problem-solving abilities as they tackle different tasks and obstacles independently. It also offers them opportunities to express themselves and participate in imaginative scenarios, potentially boosting cognitive development and fostering positive social interactions with peers. Some research suggests that free play may nurture imagination and social skills, which are seen as important for overall growth (Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff, 2013).
Examples of how free play might foster imagination include
Playing to Learn Words
Some studies indicate that children from less privileged backgrounds may benefit from playful learning in vocabulary acquisition (Han, Moore, Vukelich, & Buell, 2010).
Learning by Exploring
Research suggests that children may perform better academically when they receive some guidance while exploring independently, compared to being left entirely on their own (Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, & Tenenbaum, 2010).
Shapes and Play
Studies have found that children may grasp concepts like shapes more effectively when they engage in playful activities (Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Newcombe, & Golinkoff).
Teacher-directed play
This type of play allows teachers to lead structured activities to teach new concepts and skills. It promotes valuable learning opportunities, teamwork, following instructions,and cooperative learning among children.
Mutually directed play
Hope-Southcott(2013) and McLennan(2012), Introduce a type of play that entails collaboration between children and teachers in play activities, fostering learning through shared experiences and interaction. Additionally, encourage communication, negotiation, and decision-making skills while promoting positive teacher-student relationships and peer interactions.
Examples of how mutually directed play is beneficial for both children and adults
Environmental Preparation
Adults set up the play environment with specific toys or materials to support learning. For example, a teacher might choose toys for a classroom activity, or a museum might design exhibits for children to explore.
Scaffolding Children’s Actions
Adults can help children during play by asking questions like "What do you think would happen if...". These questions gently guide children towards learning without rushing them.
Incorporating Objects
Adults introduce new objects during play to spark children's curiosity. For instance, they might say, "I wonder what would happen if you try using this one?" This lets children explore while still focusing on learning.
Diverse Play Adaptations: Enhancing Learning and Development.
Adapting Play to Meet the Needs of Children with Disabilities
Teachers can adapt play to meet the needs of children with disabilities or special needs in various ways. According to Sharifah & Aliza 2013, effective lesson planning tailored to students' specific needs and abilities can enhance the educational experience for all students. Selecting suitable techniques and strategies for each lesson topic and learning objective supports the diverse needs of students. Utilizing appropriate learning aids, such as visual or tactile resources, can also improve accessibility and engagement. Researcher Nor Azlinah (2010) ,found that encouraging collaborative learning allows students to work in groups and benefit from social interaction.
Benefits of Play-Based Learning for Children with Disabilities
Play-based learning offers numerous benefits for children with various types of disabilities. It supports cognitive and language development, particularly for children with autism spectrum disorders. Play-based learning also promotes emotional and social development by fostering positive interactions and cooperation among students. By considering different approaches and techniques, teachers can create inclusive learning environments that support the diverse needs of their students.
These insights provide an overview of how play can be adapted to meet the needs of children with disabilities and how play-based learning benefits children with various types of disabilities.
See also
Children's street culture
Educational entertainment
Home zone / Play street
References
Further reading
The Creative Curriculum for Preschool. (2013, March).
Dfuoss. (2019). Project Approach for Preschoolers.
Alternative education
Learning
Psychology of learning
Play (activity) | 0.788782 | 0.986266 | 0.77795 |
Social construction of gender | The social construction of gender is a theory in the humanities and social sciences about the manifestation of cultural origins, mechanisms, and corollaries of gender perception and expression in the context of interpersonal and group social interaction. Specifically, the social construction of gender theory stipulates that gender roles are an achieved "status" in a social environment, which implicitly and explicitly categorize people and therefore motivate social behaviors.
Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge that explores the interplay between reality and human perception, asserting that reality is shaped by social interactions and perceptions. This theory contrasts with objectivism, particularly in rejecting the notion that empirical facts alone define reality. Social constructionism emphasizes the role of social perceptions in creating reality, often relating to power structures and hierarchies.
Gender, a key concept in social constructionism, distinguishes between biological sex and socialized gender roles. Feminist theory views gender as an achieved status, shaped by social interactions and normative beliefs. The World Health Organization highlights that gender intersects with social and economic inequalities, a concept known as intersectionality. Gender roles are socially constructed and vary across cultures and contexts, with empirical studies indicating more similarities than differences between genders. Judith Butler's distinction between gender performativity and gender roles underscores the performative aspect of gender, influenced by societal norms and individual expression.
Gender identity refers to an individual's internal sense of their own gender, influenced by social contexts and personal experiences. This identity intersects with other social identities, such as race and class, affecting how individuals navigate societal expectations. The accountability for gender performance is omnirelevant, meaning it is constantly judged in social interactions. Some studies show that gender roles and expectations are learned from early childhood and reinforced throughout life, impacting areas like the workplace, where gender dynamics and discrimination are evident.
In education and media, gender construction plays a significant role in shaping individuals' identities and societal expectations. Teachers and media representations influence how gender roles are perceived and enacted, often perpetuating stereotypes. The concept of gender performativity suggests that gender is an ongoing performance shaped by societal norms, rather than a fixed trait. This performative view of gender challenges traditional binary understandings and opens up discussions on the fluidity of gender and the impact of socialization on gender identity.
Basic concepts
Social constructionism
Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge which describes the relationship between the objectivity of reality and the capacity of human senses and cognition. Specifically it asserts that reality exists as the summation of social perceptions and expression; and that the reality which is perceived is the only reality worth consideration. This is accompanied by the corollaries that any perceived reality is valid, that reality is subject to manipulation via control over social perceptions and expressions.
The social constructionist movement emerged in relation to both criticism and rejection of Objectivism developed by Russian-American writer Ayn Rand. Specifically, in the assumption of a positivist basis for knowledge; which is to say that social constructionism rejects the notion that empirical facts can be known about reality, where as objectivism is defined by it. Though not explicitly reliant on it, much literature on the subject of social constructionism focuses on its relationship in many facets to hierarchy and power. This intimacy demonstrates the close inspirational source of Marxist doctrine, as utilized in the works of Foucault and his writings on discourse.
The work The Blank Slate of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, argues for the existence of socially constructed categories such as "money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States." which "exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist." However they are not in support of social constructionism as the sole means of understanding reality, rather as a specific context for specific phenomena, and support the consideration of empirical scientific data in our understanding of the nature of human existence. In this manner, Pinker explicitly contradicts social constructionist scholars Marecek, Crawford & Popp who in "On the Construction of Gender, Sex, and Sexualities", argue against the idea that socially organized patterns can emerge from isolated origins and favor instead the theory of Tabula rasa, which states that knowledge and meaning are generated exclusively as a collective effort and that the individual is incapable of doing so independently. In essence, the creation of meaning is a shared effort even when achieved by an individual in solitary conditions, because individuality is an illusion found at the intersection of myriad external influences being filtered through Id, Ego, and Super-ego.
Fitzsimmons & Lennon also note that the constructionist accounts of gender creation can be divided into two main streams:
Materialist theories, which underline the structural aspects of the social environment that are responsible for perpetuating certain gender roles;
Discursive theories, which stress the creation, through language and culture, of meanings that are associated with gender.
They also argue that both the materialist and discursive theories of social construction of gender can be either essentialist or non-essentialist. This means that some of these theories assume a clear biological division between women and men when considering the social creation of masculinity and femininity, while other contest the assumption of the biological division between the sexes as independent of social construction.
Theories that imply that gendered behavior is totally or mostly due to social conventions and culture represent an extreme nurture position in the nature versus nurture debate. Other theories have offered a mediating perspective claiming that both nature and nurture influence gender behavior.
Gender
Gender is used as a means of describing the distinction between the biological sex and socialized aspects of femininity and masculinity. According to West and Zimmerman, is not a personal trait; it is "an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements, and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society."
According to Kessler and McKenna, a world of two "sexes" is a result of the socially shared, taken-for-granted methods that members use to construct reality.
As a social construct, gender is considered an achieved status by feminist theory, typically (though not exclusively) one which is achieved very early in childhood. The view as achieved is supported by the contemporary constructionist perspective, as proposed by Fenstermaker and West, asserts regarding gender as an activity ("doing") of utilizing normative prescriptions and beliefs about sex categories based on situational variables. These "gender activities" constitute sets of behavior, such as masculine and feminine, which are associated with their sexual counterpart and thus define concepts such as "man" and "woman" respectively. It is noted, however, that the perception as masculine or feminine is not limited or guaranteed to match the expression's typical or intended nature. Hence, gender can be understood as external to the individual, consisting of a series of ongoing judgements and evaluations by others, as well as of others.
Status and hierarchy
The World Health Organization stated in 2023 that
In the context of feminist theory, the word status deviates from its colloquial usage meaning rank or prestige but instead refers to a series of strata or categories by which societies are divided, in some ways synonymous with "labels" or "roles". The semantic distinctions of "labels" and "roles" are homogenized into the term "status" and then re-differentiated by the division into "ascribed status" and "achieved status" respectively.
Gender roles
Gender roles are a continuation of the gender status, consisting of other achieved statuses that are associated with a particular gender status. In less theoretical terms, gender roles are functional position in a social dynamic for which fulfillment is a part of "doing gender"
Empirical investigations suggest that gender roles are "social constructs that vary significantly across time, context, and culture". Ronald F. Levant and Kathleen Alto write:
American philosopher Judith Butler makes a distinction between gender performativity and gender roles, which delineates between the social behaviors of the individual seeking to express the behavior which articulate their own perception of their gender; and behavior which creates the perception of compliance with societal gender expressions in aggregate. This is not to imply that participation in gender performativity cannot correspond to pressure to fulfill a gender role, nor that fulfillment of a gender role cannot satisfy the desire for gender performativity. The distinction refers primarily to context and motivation, rather than particular behaviors and consequences- which are often closely linked. Research by Liva and Arqueros describes gendered behaviors being taught. In Argentina, missionaries intending to educate the Qom people reinforced a conversion to gender norms and European modernity on the indigenous community.
In some subdomains of feminism, such as intersectional feminism, gender is a major though not solitary axis along which factors of oppression are considered, as expressed by Berkowitz, who wrote "The gender order is hierarchical in that, overall, men dominate women in terms of power and privilege; yet multiple and conflicting sources of power and oppression are intertwined, and not all men dominate all women. Intersectionality theorizes how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and nation in variegated and situationally contingent ways".
Berkowitz also asserts that gender at large, especially gender roles, contribute greatly as a prolific and potent avenue by which manipulations of social perceptions and expression manifest reality. Specifically, a reality in which women are typically oppressed by men within a social structure that establishes roles for women, which are of explicitly lesser capacity for accruing and exercising arbitrary power. The system which manifest and exercises this power, is typically referred to as "patriarchy". To clarify, the term arbitrary here is used to denote the source of power as being derived from status as feminist theory describes it. The particular model of patriarchy prescribed, does not make any distinction of stratification or power originating from competence or prestige.
Anthropologist Catherine L. Besteman observes the differences in gender roles in the context of parenting by Somali Bantu refugees in Lewiston, Maine; The separate roles communicate the agency of individuals based on their gender – agency in which males tend to be favored in terms of social power. Girls seemed to be "under increasing scrutiny to behave respectably as parents attempted to protect them from America's public sexual culture in the only way they know: early arranged marriage and lots of responsibilities for domestic tasks". Boys, however, were given less responsibilities and more freedom. The distinction between the responsibilities of boys and girls define the refugees' children's understanding of what it means to belong to a particular gender in America with association to "parental authority". Besteman observed the contrast to be a result of a lack traditional male chores in America compared to Somalia, such as farm work, while the traditional female chores were able to be maintained.
Gender identity
Gender identity is a related concept, which instead of referring to the external social understanding developed between persons, gender identity refers to the internal sense of ones own gender on an individual scale. According to Alsop, Fitzsimmons & Lennon, "Gender is part of an identity woven from a complex and specific social whole, and requiring very specific and local readings". Thus, gender identity can be defined as part of socially situated understanding of gender. LaFrance, Paluck and Brescoll note that as a term, "gender identity" allows individuals to express their attitude towards and stance in relation to their current status as either women or men. Turning the scope of gender from a social consensus to objectivity to one's self-identification with a certain gender expression leaves much more space for describing variation among individuals.
Intersections of gender identity with other identities
While men and women are held accountable for normative conceptions of gender, this accountability can differ in content based on ethnicity, race, age, class, etc. Hurtado argues that white women and women of color experience gender differently because of their relationship to males of different races and that both groups of women have traditionally been used to substantiate male power in different ways. Fenstermaker says that some women of color are subordinated through rejection, or denial of the "patriarchal invitation to privilege". For instance, some white men may see women of color as workers and objects of sexual aggression; this would allow the men to display power and sexual aggression without the emotional attachment that they have to white women. White women are accountable for their gendered display as traditionally subservient to white men while women of color may be held accountable for their gendered performance as sexual objects and as recalcitrant and bawdy women in relations with white men. West and Fenstermaker conclude that doing gender involves different versions of accountability, depending on women's "relational position" to white men.
Gender in the workplace
Moroccan women in Belgium with high-skill jobs report struggling to find a work–life balance; they leave ethnicity out of the discussed influences on professional identity, but do discuss gender. Portrayals of gender can be advantageous or disadvantageous for Moroccan women in the Belgian workplace. Disadvantages include the view of women in their twenties as busy with homemaking and child-rearing, and the Islamic tradition of wearing a headscarf leading to discrimination. Advantages include second generation immigrant women receiving less discrimination than men, and being highly educated further reduces chances of discrimination.
In the U.S., changes in gender ideology relate to changes in an individual's life, such as becoming a parent, getting a job, and other milestones. Racial differences and gender are determiners of treatment in the workplace; African American mothers suffer a wage penalty if they are married with big families, while white women are penalized upon becoming a mother. African American husbands are not seen as serious economic providers, and do not receive a wage premium for parenthood, while white fathers do. Current, full-time working women have a more egalitarian gender ideology than non-working or part-time women. Men relate work to providing roles and only shift to a more egalitarian gender ideology when opportunities are blocked and they learn to redefine success; blocked opportunities are more prevalent for black men.
Sexuality/sexual orientation
In recent years, elementary schools in the U.S. have started carrying chapter books that include either non-traditional families with same-sex parents, homosexual role models, or (in fewer cases) an adolescent who is discovering and accepting their own sexuality/sexual orientation. Hermann-Wilmarth and Ryan acknowledge this rise in representation, while critiquing the way that the limited selection of books present these characters with an eye towards popularized characterizations of homosexuality. The authors characterize this style of representation as "homonormative", and in the only example of a book where the protagonist questions their gender identity, it is left ambiguous as to whether or not they are a trans man or that they were simply pretending.
Diamond and Butterworth argue that gender identity and sexual identity are fluid and do not always fall into two essentialist categories (man or woman and gay or straight); they came to this conclusion via interviewing women that fall into a sexual minority group over the course of ten years. One woman had a relatively normal early childhood but around adolescence questioned her sexuality and remained stable in her gender and sexual identity until she started working with men and assumed a masculine "stance" and started to question her gender identity. When 'she' became a 'he' he began to find men attractive and gradually identified as a homosexual man.
The perception of sexuality by others is an extension of others' perceptions of one's gender. Heterosexuality is assumed for those individuals who appear to act appropriately masculine or appropriately feminine. If one wants to be perceived as a lesbian, one must first be perceived as a woman; if one wants to be seen as a gay man, one has to be seen as a man.
Interactionism
In Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978), Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna famously proposed gender as an accomplishment. Their analysis, which was heavily based in the observation of transsexuality, is one of the earliest affirmations of the everyday production of gender in social interactions, and was further developed by West and Zimmerman. Accomplishment is "the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one's sex category". People do not have to be in mixed gender groups or in groups at all for the performance of gender to occur; the production of gender occurs with others and is even performed alone, in the imagined presence of others. "Doing gender" is not just about conforming to stereotypical gender roles – it is the active engagement in any behavior that is gendered, or behavior that may be evaluated as gendered.
The performance of gender varies given the context: time, space, social interaction, etc. The enactment of gender roles is context dependent – roles are "situated identities" instead of "master identities". The sociology of knowledge must first of all concern itself with what people "know" as "reality" in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives. In other words, individual perceptions of ""knowledge" or reality...must be the central focus." These performances normalize the essentialism of sex categories: by doing gender, we reinforce the essential categories of gender – that there are only two categories that are mutually exclusive. The idea that men and women are essentially different is what makes men and women behave in ways that appear essentially different. Though sex categorization is based on biological sex, it is maintained as a category through socially constructed displays of gender (for example, one could identify a transgender person as female even though she was assigned male at birth).
Institutions also create normative conceptions of gender. In other words, gender is simultaneously created and maintained – "both a process and a product, medium and outcome of such power relations". In his examination of blue and white-collar workers, Mumby argued that hegemonic or dominant masculinity provides a standard of acceptable behavior for men, and at the same time, is the product of men's behavior. This can be said for constructions of any identity in certain contexts (e.g. femininity, race, Black femininity, etc.).
Because gender is "done" or constructed, it can also be "undone" or deconstructed. The study of the interactional level could expand beyond simply documenting the persistence of inequality to examine: (1) when and how social interactions become less gendered, not just differently gendered, (2) the conditions under which gender is irrelevant in social interactions, (3) whether all gendered interactions reinforce inequality, (4) how the structural (institutional) and interactional levels might work together to produce change, and (5) interaction as the site of change.
Accountability
People hold themselves and each other accountable for their presentations of gender (how they 'measure up'). They are aware that others may evaluate and characterize their behavior. This is an interactional process (not just an individual one). Social constructionism asserts that gender is a category that people evaluate as omnirelevant to social life. Gender as omnirelevant means that people can always be judged by what they do as a man or as a woman. This is the basis for the reasoning that people are always performing gender and that gender is always relevant in social situations.
Accountability can apply to behaviors that do conform to cultural conceptions as well as those behaviors that deviate – it is the possibility of being held accountable that is important in social constructionism. For example, Stobbe examined the rationale that people gave for why there were small numbers of women in the auto industry. Men cited the idea that such dirty work was unsuitable for women and women were unable to train because of family duties. Stobbe argues that the male workers created a machismo masculinity to distinguish themselves from women who might have been qualified to work in the auto shop. Women who do work in male-dominated professions have to carefully maintain and simultaneously balance their femininity and professional credibility.
Even though gender seems more salient in some situations – for instance, when a woman enters a male-dominated profession – gender categories also become salient in contexts in which gender is less obvious. For instance, gender is maintained before the woman enters the male-dominated group through conceptions of masculinity.
Race, class, and other oppressions can also be omnirelevant categories, though they are not all identically salient in every set of social relationships in which inequality is done. People have preconceived notions about what particular racial groups look like (although there is no biological component to this categorization). Accountability is interactional because it does not occur solely within the individual. It is also institutional because individuals may be held accountable for their behaviors by institutions or by others in social situations, as a member of any social group (gender, race, class, etc.). This notion of accountability makes gender dynamic because what is considered appropriate behavior for men and women changes and is reproduced over time and is reproduced differently depending on context. Gender is created in different ways among uneducated and educated African Americans.
Social cognitive theory
Gender features strongly in most societies and is a significant aspect of self-definition for most people. One way to analyze the social influences that affect the development of gender is through the perspective of the social cognitive theory. According to Kay Bussey, social cognitive theory describes "how gender conceptions are developed and transformed across the life span". The social cognitive theory views gender roles as socially constructed ideas that are obtained over one's entire lifetime. These gender roles are "repeatedly reinforced through socialization". Hackman verifies that these gender roles are instilled in us from "the moment we are born". For the individual, gender construction starts with assignments to a sex category on the basis of biological genitalia at birth. Following this sexual assignment, parents begin to influence gender identity by dressing children in ways that clearly display this biological category. Therefore, biological sex becomes associated with a gender through naming, dress, and the use of other gender markers. Gender development continues to be affected by the outlooks of others, education institutions, parenting, media, etc. These variations of social interactions force individuals to "learn what is expected, see what is expected, act and react in expected ways, and thus simultaneously construct and maintain the gender order".
Gender-based harassment
It is very common for gender-based harassment to occur throughout the academic years of a person's life. This serves as a form of gender boundary policing. Women are expected to conform to stereotypical gendered appearances, as are men. Students regularly take part in policing gender boundaries through bullying. Male students frequently harass male and female students, while female students generally only harass other female students. The practice of male students bullying other male students is explicitly linked to machismo, which is the notion that boys are expected to subscribe to in order to be constructed and related to as 'normal' boys. Many girls report that boys tease and ridicule them on the basis of their appearance, which is linked to boys asserting masculine power through sexist practices of denigrating girls. This also serves to perpetuate the idea that appearance is a female's most important asset. In their study, "Correlates and Consequences of Peer Victimization: Gender Differences in Direct and Indirect Forms of Bullying", Lopez, Esbensen & Brick state that "boys were more likely to experience direct or physical forms of bullying and girls were more likely to report being teased or joked about." This can be interpreted as females typically harassing other females in more of a mental, emotional, and psychological torment while males take more of a physical and aggressive approach. Unique appearances and attempts to stand out among girls are regarded very negatively. This type of female on female bullying sets the standard for norms on appearance and the importance of conforming to the societal expectations of that appearance for females. Overall, gender-based harassment serves to define and enforce gender boundaries of students by students.
Adolescent view of adulthood
Gender is a cultural construction which creates an environment where an adolescent's performance in high school is related to their life goals and expectations. Because some young women believe that they want to be mothers and wives, the choice of professions and future goals can be inherently flawed by the gender constraints. Because a girl may want to be a mother later, her academics in high school can create clear gender differences because "higher occupational expectations, educational expectations, and academic grades were more strongly associated with the expected age of parenthood for girls than for boys". With "young women recognizing potential conflicts between the demands of work and family", they will not try as hard in high school allowing males to achieve higher academic achievement then girls. Crocket and Beal in their article "The Life Course in the Making: Gender and the Development of Adolescents", "gender differences in the anticipated timing of future role transitions, the impact of expectations and values on these expected timings, and the extent to which expectations foreshadow actual behavior". The actions of a youth in high school greatly impact the choices the individual will have over a lifetime. Women especially are constrained in the way they view their adulthood even at a young age because of motherhood.
Males can also be subject to gender construction due to social expectations of masculinity. According to Jack Halberstam (under the name Judith), people correlate masculinity with "maleness and to power to domination", something that he believes is a result of patriarchy. In a 2015 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers stated that gender construct can differ depending on the man's race or ethnicity and stated that for white men there was an emphasis on "education, employment, and socioeconomic status" whereas the expectations for black men focused on "sexual prowess, physical dominance, and gamesmanship". These expectations can make it harder for males to display emotions without receiving criticism and being seen as less of a man.
Adolescents view on adulthood is also determined by their employment in high school. Many boys work during high school and "unlike young women, young men who had not worked during high school did not quite match their peers". Because many other boys are working, those who do not work may not be as successful after graduation. In the book Working and Growing Up in America, Jeylan T. Mortimer explains "youth who work during high school, and those who devote more hours to work, are more vocationally successful after leaving high school". This creates a distinct gender difference in which men are more likely to be employed after high school than women if they have worked during high school. This means women may be at an academic advantage if they do not work in high school and focus on school work.
Body image
There are many different factors that affect body image, "including sex, media, parental relationship, and puberty as well as weight and popularity". The intersectionality of these factors causes individualistic experiences for adolescents during this period within their lives. As their body changes, so does the environment in which they live in. Body image is closely linked to psychological well-being during adolescence and can cause harmful effects when a child has body dissatisfaction. In the article "Body Image and Psychological Well-Being in Adolescents: The Relationship between Gender and School Type", Helen Winfield explains that an adolescent's high school experience is closely linked to their perceived body image. She analyzed over 336 teenagers and found "ratings of physical attractiveness and body image remain relatively stable across the early teenage years, but become increasingly negative around age 15–18 years because of pubertal changes". This shift during the high school years may cause serious psychological problems for adolescents. These psychological problems can manifest into eating disorders causing serious lifelong problems. Due to these findings, it is shown that these body image issues are especially prevalent in girls but as boys enter puberty, expectations of height and muscle mass change as well. Geoffrey H. Cohane, Harrison G. Pope Jr. in their article, "Body image in boys: A review of the literature", claim that "girls typically wanted to be thinner, boys frequently wanted to be bigger". This statistic displays that gender difference in body image cause different beauty ideals. Gender can have an impact of affecting an adolescent's body image and potentially their high school experience.
Education
Due to the amount of time that children spend in school, "teachers are influential role models for many aspects of children's educational experiences, including gender socialization". Teachers who endorse the culturally dominant gender-role stereotype regarding the distribution of talent between males and females distort their perception of their students' mathematical abilities and effort resources in mathematics, in a manner that is consistent with their gender-role stereotype and to a greater extent than teachers who do not endorse the stereotype.
According to the 1994 report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns by the American Psychological Association, "[m]ost standard tests of intelligence have been constructed so that there are no overall score differences between females and males." Differences have been found, however, in specific areas such as mathematics and verbal measures. Even within mathematics, it is noted that significant differences in performance as a result of gender do not occur until late in high school, a result of biological differences, the exhibition of stereotypes by teachers, and the difference in chosen coursework between individual students. While, on average, boys and girls perform similarly in math, boys are over represented among the very best performers as well as the very worst. Teachers have found that when certain types of teaching (such as experiments that reflect daily life), work for girls, they generally work for boys as well.
Although little difference in mathematics performance was found among younger students, a study of students grade 1–3 by Fennema et al. noted that significant differences in problem-solving strategies were found, with girls tending to use more standard algorithms than the boys. They suggest that this may be due to both the teachers' stereotypical beliefs about mathematics and gender, as well as the study's design permitting "the children's stereotypical beliefs to influence strategy use and thus the development of understanding in these classrooms". A study conducted at Illinois State University examined the effects of gender stereotypes on the teaching practices of three third grade teachers, noting that "[the teachers] claimed gender neutrality, yet they expressed numerous beliefs about gender difference during the study", such as allowing boys (but not girls) to respond to questions without raising their hand or providing reading selections that promoted women in non-traditional roles, but not doing the same for men.
Overall, differences in student performance that arise from gender tend to be smaller than that of other demographic differences, such as race or socioeconomic class. The results of the 1992 NAEP 12th grade science tests, on a 500-point scale, show that the differences of scores between white and African American students were around 48 points, while differences between male and female students were around 11 points.
Media
Social gender construction (specifically for younger audiences) is also influenced by media. In the 21st century, modern technology is abundant in developed countries. In 2018, roughly 42% of tweens and teens experience feelings of anxiety when not near their phones. There is a growing amount of teens that spend an average of 6.5 hours on media daily. This data reflects how much of a teenager's personality is dependent on media. Media influencing gender construction can be seen in advertising, social networking, magazines, television, music, and music videos.
These platforms can affect how a developing human views themselves and those around them. There is both positive and negative media and each type can be perceived differently. Media will often portray men and women in a stereotypical manner, reflecting their "ideal image" for society. These images often act as an extreme expectation for many developing teenagers.
Men are typically portrayed as assertive, powerful, and strong. Particularly in television, men are usually shown as being nonemotional and detached. Women are often portrayed as the opposite. Gender roles are generally more enforced for women in media than they are for men. Women are typically represented as the backbone of the household, the caretaker, and as stay at home mothers. Women in media are often given weak, dependent, and passive personalities. Media presence often perpetuates that men are not allowed to be caring and that women are not allowed to be strong and demanding. These gender influences from the media can mislead a growing child or teenager because while they are still trying to construct their identities and genders in a social environment, they are surrounded by biased influences.
The Internet reflects the values of offline society, and the jokes made online reveal the values and opinions reflected in those jokes, despite them being couched in humor. Memes are used to make sexist ideas into 'jokes', reinforcing sexist gender stereotypes, making threats against women, and mocking transgender people. Many of these views, when questioned or concerns are raised about them, are hidden, saying it was just a joke or a meme. However, memes and internet communities are also very common in feminist and transgender spaces, where jokes about gender are kinder and come from within the community rather than outside of it.
Gender performativity
The term gender performativity was first coined by American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler in their 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. In the book, Butler sets out to criticize what they consider to be an outdated perception of gender. This outdated perception, according to Butler, is limiting in that it adheres to the dominant societal constraints that label gender as binary. In scrutinizing gender, Butler introduces a nuanced perception in which they unite the concepts of performativity and gender. In chapter one, Butler introduces the unification of the terms gender and performativity in stating that "gender proves to be performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed".
In demystifying this concept, Butler sets out to clarify that there is indeed a difference in the terms gender performance and gender performativity. In a 2011 interview, Butler stated it this way:
Thus, Butler perceives gender as being constructed through a set of acts that are said to be in compliance with dominant societal norms. Butler is, however, not stating that gender is a sort of performance in which an individual can terminate the act; instead, what Butler is stating is that this performance is ongoing and out of an individual's control. In fact, rather than an individual producing the performance, the opposite is true. The performance is what produces the individual. Specifically, Butler approvingly quotes Nietzsche's claim that "there is no 'being' behind doing... 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything", Thus, the emphasis is placed not on the individual producing the deed but on the deed itself, and its cessation becomes as problematic as the eagle rendering itself a mere lamb in Nietzsche's respective analogy. Butler, in fact, goes on to stress in their own words: “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”. Overall, they may be said to have been thoroughly influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy of subjectivity.
Amelia Jones proposes that this mode of viewing gender offered a way to move beyond the theories of the gaze and sexual fetishism, which had attained much prominence in academic feminism, but which by the 1980s Jones viewed as outdated methods of understanding women's societal status. Jones believes the performative power to act out gender is extremely useful as a framework, offering new ways to consider images as enactments with embodied subjects rather than inanimate objects for men's viewing pleasure.
Applications
Infancy and young childhood
The idea around gender performativity, when applied to infancy and young childhood, deals with the idea that from the moment one is conceived, arguably even before that, who they are and who they will become is predetermined. Children learn at a very young age what it means to be a boy or girl in our society. Individuals are either given masculine or feminine names based on their sex, are assigned colors that are deemed appropriate only when utilized by a particular sex and are even given toys that will aid them in recognizing their proper places in society. According to Barbara Kerr and Karen Multon, many parents would be puzzled to know "the tendency of little children to think that it is their clothing or toys that make them boy or girl". Parents are going as far as coordinating their daughter with the color pink because it is feminine, or blue for their son because it is masculine. In discussing these points, Penelope Eckert, in her text titled Language and Gender, states: "the first thing people want to know about a baby is its sex, and social convention provides a myriad of props to reduce the necessity of asking". Thus, this reinforces the importance and emphasis that society places not only on sex but also on ways in which to point towards one's sex without implicitly doing so. Eckert furthers this in stating that determining sex at one's birth is also vital of how one presents themselves in society at an older age because "sex determination sets the stage for a lifelong process of gendering". Eckert's statement points to Judith Butler's view of gender as being performative. Similar to Butler, Eckert is hinting to the fact that gender is not an internal reality that cannot be changed. What Eckert is instead stating is that this is a common misconception that a majority of the population unknowingly reinforces, which sees its emergence during infancy.
Butler suggests in both "Critically Queer" and "Melancholy Gender" that the child/subject's ability to grieve the loss of the same-sex parent as a viable love object is barred. Following from Sigmund Freud's notion of melancholia, such a repudiation results in a heightened identification with the Other that cannot be loved, resulting in gender performances which create allegories of, and internalize the lost love that the subject is subsequently unable to acknowledge or grieve. Butler explains that "a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed (taken on, assumed) through the fantasy which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love, an exclusion never grieved, but 'preserved' through the heightening of feminine identification itself".
Teen years
One's teen years are the prime time in which socialization occurs as well as the time in which how one presents themselves in society is of high concern. Often, this is the time in which one's ability to master their gender performance labels them as successful, and thus normal, or unsuccessful, and thus strange and unfitting. One of the sources that demonstrate how successful performance is acted out is magazines, specifically magazines targeting young girls. According to Eckert, "When we are teenagers, the teen magazines told girls how to make conversation with boys...". This not only emphasizes the fact that gender is something that is taught to us and is continuously being shaped by society's expectations, but it also points to one of the ways in which individuals are being subconsciously trained to be ideal participants in the gender binary. Thus calling back to Butler's perception that gender is not a fact about us but is something that is taught to us and is being constantly reinforced. This idea that gender is constantly shaped by expectations is relevant in the online community. Teenagers are easily able to formulate relationships and friendships online, thus increasing the probability of a teenager's delicate identity to be manipulated and distorted. Teenagers often come across situations in real life and online that cause them to question themselves when facing society, including gender performance.
Queer identity
The Butlerian model presents a queer perspective on gender performance and explores the possible intersection between socially constructed gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality. This model diverges from the hegemonic analytical framework of gender that many claim is heteronormative, contending with the ways in which queer actors problematize the traditional construction of gender. Butler adapts the psychoanalytical term of melancholia to conceptualize homoerotic subtext as it exists in western literature and especially the relationship between women writers, their gender, and their sexuality. Melancholia deals with mourning, but for homosexual couples it is not just mourning the death of the relationship, instead it is the societal disavowal of the relationship itself and the ability to mourn, thus leading to repression of these feelings. This idea is reflected in the activism organized by political groups such as ACT UP during the AIDS crisis. Many of the survivors that participated in this activism were homosexuals who had lost their partners to the disease. The survivors commemorated the dead by quilting together their rags, repurposing their possessions, and displaying their own bodies for premature mourning. All of these protests amounted to a message that some part of them will be left in the world after they have expired.
Criticism
Feminist theory
Elizabeth Grosz states that the sex–gender distinction maintained by some constructionist feminists is still based on essentialism:
Martha Nussbaum criticizes gender performativity as a misguided retreat from engaging with real-world concerns:
Transgender studies
In Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (2010), Gayle Salamon examined trans studies' affinity with feminist and queer theorizing of gender.
Such objections can be found in the works of Jay Prosser, Viviane Namaste, and Henry Rubin, often in relation to Butler's theory of gender performativity. Salamon interprets their arguments as misreadings of social constructionism, while Jack Halberstam identifies a "recommitment to essentialism within transexual theory".
Conversely, Susan Stryker affirmed that gender performativity "became central to the self-understandings of many transgender people" and is in line with Sandy Stone's posttranssexual call.
See also
Notes
References
Further reading
Gender roles
Gender
Feminist theory | 0.781628 | 0.994857 | 0.777608 |
Macrosociology | Macrosociology is a large-scale approach to sociology, emphasizing the analysis of social systems and populations at the structural level, often at a necessarily high level of theoretical abstraction. Though macrosociology does concern itself with individuals, families, and other constituent aspects of a society, it does so in relation to larger social system of which such elements are a part. The approach is also able to analyze generalized collectivities (e.g. "the city", "the church").
In contrast, microsociology focuses on the individual social agency. Macrosociology, however, deals with broad societal trends that can later be applied to smaller features of society, or vice versa. To differentiate, macrosociology deals with issues such as war as a whole; 'distress of Third-World countries'; poverty on a national/international level; and environmental deprivation, whereas microsociology analyses issues such as the individual features of war (e.g. camaraderie, one's pleasure in violence, etc.); the role of women in third-world countries; poverty's effect on "the family"; and how immigration impacts a country's environment.
A "society" can be considered as a collective of human populations that are politically autonomous, in which members engage in a broad range of cooperative activities. The people of Germany, for example, can be deemed "a society", whereas people with German heritage as a whole, including those who populate other countries, would not be considered a society, per se.
Theoretical strategies
There are a number of theoretical strategies within contemporary macrosociology, though four approaches, in particular, have the most influence:
Idealist Strategy: Attempts to explain the basic features of social life by reference to the creative capacity of the human mind. "Idealists believe that human uniqueness lies in the fact that humans attach symbolic meanings to their actions."
Materialist Strategy: Attempts to explain the basic features of human social life in terms of the practical, material conditions of their existence, including the nature of a physical environment; the level of technology; and the organization of an economic system.
Functionalist Strategy (or structural functionalism): Functionalism essentially states that societies are complex systems of interrelated and interdependent parts, and each part of a society significantly influences the others. Moreover, each part of society exists because it has a specific function to perform in contributing to the society as a whole. As such, societies tend toward a state of equilibrium or homeostasis, and if there is a disturbance in any part of the society then the other parts will adjust to restore the stability of the society as a whole.
Conflict Theoretical Strategy (or conflict theory): Rejects the idea that societies tend toward some basic consensus of harmony in which the features of society work for everyone's good. Rather, the basic structure of society is determined by individuals and groups acquiring scarce resources to satisfy their own needs and wants, thus creating endless conflicts.
Historical macrosociology
Historical macrosociology can be understood as an approach that uses historical knowledge to try to solve some of the problems seen in the field of macrosociology. As globalization has affected the world, it has also influenced historical macrosociology, leading to the development of two distinct branches:
Comparative and historical sociology (CHS): a branch of historical macrosociology that bases its analysis on states, searching for "generalizations about common properties and principles of variation among instances across time and space." As of recently, it has been argued that globalization poses a threat to the CHS way of thinking because it often leads to the dissolution of distinct states.
Political Economy of the World-Systems (PEWS): a branch of historical macrosociology that bases its analysis on the systems of states, searching for "generalizations about interdependencies among a system's components and of principles of variation among systemic conditions across time and space."
Historical macrosociologists include:
Charles Tilly: developed theory of CHS, in which analysis is based on national states.
Immanuel Wallerstein: developed world systems theory, in which analysis is based on world capitalist systems.
Linking micro- and macro-sociology
Perhaps the most highly developed integrative effort to link micro- and macro-sociological phenomena is found in Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration, in which "social structure is defined as both constraining and enabling of human activity as well as both internal and external to the actor."
Attempts to link micro and macro phenomena are evident in a growing body of empirical research. Such work appears to follow Giddens' view of the constraining and enabling nature of social structure for human activity and the need to link structure and action. "It appears safe to say that while macrosociology will always remain a central component of sociological theory and research, increasing effort will be devoted to creating workable models that link it with its microcounterpart."
See also
Base and superstructure
Cliodynamics
General systems theory
Modernization theory
Sociocybernetics
Structure and agency
Systems philosophy
References
Further reading
Tilly, Charles. 1995. "Macrosociology Past and Future." In Newsletter of the Comparative & Historical Sociology 8(1&2):1,3–4. American Sociological Association.
Francois, P., J. G. Manning, Harvey Whitehouse, Rob Brennan, et al. 2016. "A Macroscope for Global History. Seshat Global History Databank: A Methodological Overview." Digital Humanities Quarterly Journal 4(26).
Methods in sociology | 0.79549 | 0.977435 | 0.77754 |
Open education | Open education is an educational movement founded on openness, with connections to other educational movements such as critical pedagogy, and with an educational stance which favours widening participation and inclusiveness in society. Open education broadens access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems and is typically (but not necessarily) offered through online and distance education. The qualifier "open" refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. One aspect of openness or "opening up" education is the development and adoption of open educational resources in support of open educational practices.
An example of an institutional practice in line with open education would be decreasing barriers to entry, for example, eliminating academic admission requirements. Universities which follow such practices include the Open University in Britain, Athabasca University and Thompson Rivers University, Open Learning in Canada and the Open University of Catalonia, in Spain, among many others (see full list here). Massive open online courses (MOOC) and OpenCourseWare are among the most recent and visible approaches to open education, adopted by universities worldwide. Although many MOOC's have free enrolment, the costs of acquiring a certification may be a barrier. Many open education institutes offer free certification schemes accredited by organizations like UKAS in the UK and ANAB in the United States; others offer a badge.
Origins of open education
Open education is part of a broader openness movement. It has origins, particularly in higher education, to the 17th century in the thinking of John Amos Comenius, who proposed open access to education as a core goal. Some authors have noted scholarly discussion of open education originating in the progressive pedagogy movements of early childhood education, related to the openness of teaching methods and the promotion of learner autonomy within and outside the classroom. Returning to openness in higher education, the postwar era of the 1960s and 1970s faced a "world-wide crisis in education" as education systems responded slowly to the demand for higher education in an era of scientific and economic prosperity requiring new models to meet the needs of a much larger and diversified group of lifelong learners. These conditions led to the establishment of open and distance education systems globally, which itself developed many innovative and progressive ideas of how to meet the educational needs of large and diverse learner populations. The establishment of open education today as a growing part of mainstream education, particularly in higher education, is directly linked to the development of open education universities beginning in the 1970s.
The interconnectedness of open education and scientific and economic progress is no coincidence. Openness in education is connected to the changing needs of societies, cultures, and economies, and in particular to the rapid evolution of digital and networked technologies. Technology, pedagogy, and related socioeconomic developments have a symbiotic relationship with open and distance education, including in the intellectual and theoretical foundations which define its practice.
The most recent emergence of open education is related to the ability to share resources on the web at little cost compared to the distribution of copy righted material common within higher education. Early examples of this are the OpenCourseWare program, established in 2002 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which was followed by more than 200 universities and organisations, and Connexions, established at Rice University in 1999, which transformed into OpenStax. Similar to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities from the Open Access movement, are the goals and intentions from open education specified in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. MOOC is a more recent form of online course based on principles of openness which has gotten increasing attention since the early 2010's, exemplified by online platforms such edX, Coursera and Udacity.
Common features of open education
Open education is often considered an unequivocal good, part of a larger movement of openness in society (i.e. open knowledge, open government, open access, open data, open source, and open culture). However, critical approaches to open education have also been developed which underline differing perspectives and the need for a nuanced examination of the contexts of openness, a focus on issues of participation, power and social justice, a move beyond the binaries of open and closed as well as examining relationships between formal, non-formal and informal forms of open education and the relationships between teachers and learners. Openness in education is considered both a comprehensible and a contested term with multiple layers and dimensions. It can be characterised as an adaptive, flexible, and evolving concept. Advocates of openness in education argue that to fully realise the benefits of open education, there is a need to focus on open educational practices (OEP). By using OEP, open educators recognise the ubiquity of knowledge across networks and orchestrate learning that aims to promote learner agency, empowerment, and global civic participation. Likewise, there are other parallel movements in education which support openness, included networked learning, connected learning, and social technologies, among others.
Common features of open education in practice attempt to build opportunities for learners to:
access education, open educational resources, open textbooks, and open scholarship
collaborate with others, across the boundaries of institutions, institutional systems, and geographic locations
create and co-create knowledge openly
integrate formal and informal learning practices, networks, and identities
Theoretical foundations of open education
Open education is motivated by a belief that learners want to exercise agency in their studies, particularly from a lifelong learning perspective. Throughout its history, open education has been associated with multiple meanings: access, flexibility, equity, collaboration, agency, democratisation, social justice, transparency, and removing barriers. Researchers and practitioners in the field of open education have adopted generic educational theories such as social constructivism, behaviourism, and cognitivism, and then generated their own theoretical foundations following the emergence of open universities and the emergence of powerful and sophisticated digital technologies, such as networked learning or connectivism. Open education has also been influenced by the philosophy of openness, characterised by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. Initial conceptualisations of open education were characterised by independent study, where learners are independent of time and space through asynchronous learning, but also independent in developing their own learning strategies and practices, focused on personalised learning and learner autonomy and agency.
More recently, theories which support open education have developed in line with the rapid evolution of networked digital technologies and the sophistication of social software. The community of inquiry (CoI) model proposed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) was developed to provide conceptual order and act as a heuristic tool for the use of computer-mediated communication in support of educational experiences, particularly relevant for online and open education. The CoI model argues that a meaningful online learning experience is created through a combination of and interaction between cognitive, social, and teaching presence.
A range of other theories and conceptual frameworks relate to open education, including connectivism which adopts a non-linear approach to learning, influenced by complexity theory, where communities of knowledge are formed through connections forged in a networked learning environment. Connectivism relates to openness through its emphasis on learner autonomy and agency and its use of OER. The study of self-determined learning, known as heutagogy also relates to open education, founded on the principles of self-efficacy and capability, meta-cognition and reflection, and non-linear learning. Self determined learning is often viewed as part of a continuum experience between pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy, reflecting a shift from teacher-centred to learner-determined environments and activities. A learning ecologies framework supports open education through both a lifelong and lifewide learning perspective, which is learning in different places simultaneously across the multiple contexts one inhabits. A learning ecologies approach rests on the possibilities of new technologies in facilitating self-sustaining, interest-driven and boundary crossing learning, interrelated with the openness in education movement. A rhizomatic learning approach can also underlie forms of open education, characterised as an organic process where the curriculum is connected to the community and the learner navigates diversely connected learning environments by making links, negotiating the learning process, and adapting to change. In the most recent theoretical foundations of open education, including connectivism, heutagogy, and rhizomatic learning, openness arises from the learner-centred and non-linear design of learning contexts and resources and the promotion of learner agency and autonomy.
Technology utilized
Available technologies for open education are important in the overall efficiency of the program. They promote an absolute openness in the dissemination of education, eliminating barriers including, but not limited to, cost and access to free and relevant resources. After available technologies have been found, there need to be appropriate applications on the technologies for the specific online education program.
Since open education usually occurs at a different time and different place for most individuals across the world, certain technologies need to be utilized to enhance the program. These technologies are primarily online and serve a variety of purposes. Websites and other computer-based training may be used to provide lecture notes, assessments, and other course materials. Videos are provided and feature speakers, class events, topic discussions, and faculty interviews. YouTube and iTunesU are often used for this purpose. Students may interact through computer conferencing with Skype, e-mail, online study groups, or annotations on social bookmarking sites. Other course content may be provided through tapes, print, and CDs.
Governments, institutions, and people realize the importance of education. Human knowledge is crucial to producing competent leaders, innovators, and teachers. Educational systems must provide each individual the chance in building a better life. Technology has made the expansion of educational opportunities easier. Through the Internet, students can easily find information practically on any topic while mentors are capable of sharing their expertise with any student within seconds. Educational materials are disseminated to a global audience without additional costs. Evolving technology makes it possible for learners to interact with the global community in the comfort of their homes. Under distance learning, universities and colleges expand their impact through online courses that people in any country can take.
Open education includes resources such as practices and tools that are not hampered by financial, technical, and legal impediments. These resources are used and shared easily within the digital settings. Technology revolutionized techniques in sending receiving information on a daily basis particularly in education. Availability of web resources has transformed everything. Open education is founded on Open Educational Resources (OER) comprised or learning, teaching, and research sources. With Open Education, the costs of textbooks which surged over three times the rate of inflation for many years must not hinder education. Based on the NBC News review of the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics data, prices of student books increased three times inflation rates from January 1977 until June 2015 reflecting an increase of 1,041 percent.
OER can possibly address this problem since materials are free online and economical in printed form. Resources intended for buying textbooks can be rechanneled towards technology, enhancing the medium of instructions, and lowering debt. Research studies also showed many students learn more because of their access to quality materials. Technology also has unlimited potentials in raising teaching and learning to a higher level.
See also
Free education
Open educational practices
Open educational resources
Outline of open education
Personalized learning
Renewable assignments
Virginia Open Education Foundation
References
Education theory
Free culture movement
Educational technology
Philosophy of education | 0.778146 | 0.999208 | 0.77753 |
Nominal group technique | The nominal group technique (NGT) is a group process involving problem identification, solution generation, and decision-making. It can be used in groups of many sizes, who want to make their decision quickly, as by a vote, but want everyone's opinions taken into account (as opposed to traditional voting, where only the largest group is considered). The method of tallying is difference. First, every member of the group gives their view of the solution, with a short explanation. Then, duplicate solutions are eliminated from the list of all solutions, and the members proceed to rank the solutions, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and so on.
Some facilitators will encourage the sharing and discussion of reasons for the choices made by each group member, thereby identifying common ground and a plurality of ideas and approaches. This diversity often allows the creation of a hybrid idea (combining parts of two or more ideas), often found to be even better than those ideas being initially considered.
In the basic method, the numbers each solution receives are totaled, and the solution with the highest (i.e. most favored) total ranking is selected as the final decision. There are variations in how this technique is used. For example, it can identify strengths versus areas in need of development, rather than be used as a decision-making voting alternative. Also, options do not always have to be ranked but may be evaluated more subjectively.
This technique was originally developed by Andre Delbecq and Andrew H. Van de Ven, and has been applied to adult education program planning by Vedros, and has also been employed as a useful technique in curriculum design and evaluation in educational institutions.
Taking cue from the technique, Tunde Varga-Atkins, Jaye McIsaac and Ian Willis found that a two-stage combination of focus group and the nominal group technique, coined as nominal focus group, was particularly effective as an evaluation method.
Effects
NGT has been shown to enhance one or more dimensions of effectiveness of decision-making groups. Requiring individuals to write down their ideas silently and independently prior to a group discussion increased the number of solutions generated by groups. Round-robin polling also resulted in a larger number of inputs and fostered more equal participation. The increased number of heterogeneous inputs led to high-quality decisions.
As compared to interacting groups the NGT groups provide more unique ideas, more balanced participation between group members, increased feelings of accomplishment, and greater satisfaction with idea quality and group efficiency.
These findings are consistent with a 1958 study
which found that, in response to three different problems requiring creative thinking, the number of ideas produced by "nominal groups" (whose members were actually working alone) was greater than the number of ideas produced by real, face-to-face groups. The ideas generated by the nominal and real groups were rated qualitatively and for originality, and the nominal groups scored better on both of those measures.
Usage
The nominal group technique is particularly useful:
When some group members are much more vocal than others.
When some group members think better in silence.
When there is concern about some members not participating.
When the group does not easily generate quantities of ideas.
When all or some group members are new to the team.
When the issue is controversial or there is heated conflict.
When there is a power-imbalance between facilitator and participants or participants: the structure of the NGT session can balance these out.
When stakeholders like a(/some) quantitative output of the process.
Standard procedure
Routinely, the NGT involves five stages:
Introduction and explanation: The facilitator welcomes the participants and explains to them the purpose and procedure of the meeting.
Silent generation of ideas: The Facilitator provides each participant with a sheet of paper with the question to be addressed and ask them to write down all ideas that come to mind when considering the question. During this period, the facilitator asks participants not to consult or discuss their ideas with others. This stage lasts approximately 10 minutes.
Sharing ideas: The Facilitator invites participants to share the ideas they have generated. She records each idea on a flip chart using the words spoken by the participant. The round robin process continues until all ideas have been presented. There is no debate about items at this stage and participants are encouraged to write down any new ideas that may arise from what others share. This process ensures all participants get an opportunity to make an equal contribution and provides a written record of all ideas generated by the group. This stage may take 15–30 minutes.
Group discussion: Participants are invited to seek verbal explanation or further details about any of the ideas that colleagues have produced that may not be clear to them. The facilitator's task is to ensure that each person is allowed to contribute and that discussion of all ideas is thorough without spending too long on a single idea. It is important to ensure that the process is as neutral as possible, avoiding judgment and criticism. The group may suggest new items for discussion and combine items into categories, but no ideas should be eliminated. This stage lasts 30–45 minutes.
Voting and ranking: This involves prioritizing the recorded ideas in relation to the original question. Following the voting and ranking process, immediate results in response to the question is available to participants so the meeting concludes having reached a specific outcome.
The number of nominal group meetings to be held will depend on the nature of the question and accessibility to the key stakeholders best suited to help address the problem.
Advantages and disadvantages
One major advantage of NGT is that it avoids two problems caused by group interaction. First, some members are reluctant to suggest ideas because they are concerned about being criticized, or are reticent and shy. Second, some members are reluctant to create conflict in groups. (Many people want to maintain a pleasant climate.) NGT overcomes these problems (e.g.). NGT has the clear advantage in ensuring relatively equal participation. It may also, in many cases be a time-saving technique. Other advantages include producing a large number of ideas and providing a sense of closure that is often not found in less-structured group methods.
A major disadvantage of NGT is that the method lacks flexibility by being able to deal with only one problem at a time. Also, there must be a certain amount of conformity on the part of the members involved in NGT. Everyone must feel comfortable with the amount of structure involved. Another disadvantage is the amount of time needed to prepare for the activity. There is no spontaneity involved with this method. Facilities must be arranged and carefully planned. Opinions may not converge in the voting process, cross-fertilization of ideas may be constrained, and the process may appear to be too mechanical.
One of the key issues about 'nominal' group technique is that it does not depend on normal group processes. It is a method to work with a collection of people and involve them in decision making but does not depend on existing group processes. This is according to the originators an advantage in decision making using this tool.
Adaptation for ill-structured problems
Modification of NGT, undertaken by Bartunek and Murnighan, helps to deal with ill-structured problems. Normal ideas are generated and listed, followed by the facilitator questioning if the ideas are relevant to the same problem. If not, the problem is said to be ill-structured, and the ideas generated are clustered into coherent groups. These clusters of ill-structured ideas are then treated as problems in their own right, and the NGT procedure is applied to them. Regular breaks are taken by the participants to ensure that the group feels they are still working on the original problem.
See also
Brainstorming
Creative problem solving
Creativity techniques
Delphi method
Group decision making
Social choice theory
Voting paradox
Voting system
Footnotes
Further reading
George & Cowan. Handbook of Techniques for Formative Evaluation. FALMER/KP. 1999.
Nancy R. Tague (2004) The Quality Toolbox, Second Edition, ASQ Quality Press, pages 364-365.
Jon Neal Gresham (1986). "Expressed Satisfaction with the Nominal Group Technique Among Change Agents". PhD thesis, Texas A&M University,
Stewart, David W. & Shamdasani, Prem N. Focus Groups: Theory and Practise. Sage Publications. 2004.
Varga-Atkins, T; McIsaac, J; Bunyan, N. & Fewtrell, R (2011) Using the nominal group technique with clickers to research student experiences of e-learning: a project report. Written for the ELESIG Small Grants Scheme. Liverpool: University of Liverpool.
Group problem solving methods
Creativity techniques
Group decision-making
Collaboration | 0.790529 | 0.983287 | 0.777317 |
Sociology | Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. Regarded as a part of both the social sciences and humanities, sociology uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. Sociological subject matter ranges from micro-level analyses of individual interaction and agency to macro-level analyses of social systems and social structure. Applied sociological research may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, whereas theoretical approaches may focus on the understanding of social processes and phenomenological method.
Traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, sexuality, gender, and deviance. Recent studies have added socio-technical aspects of the digital divide as a new focus. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to other subjects and institutions, such as health and the institution of medicine; economy; military; punishment and systems of control; the Internet; sociology of education; social capital; and the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge.
The range of social scientific methods has also expanded, as social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-20th century, especially, have led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophical approaches towards the analysis of society. Conversely, the turn of the 21st century has seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically, and computationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.
Social research has influence throughout various industries and sectors of life, such as among politicians, policy makers, and legislators; educators; planners; administrators; developers; business magnates and managers; social workers; non-governmental organizations; and non-profit organizations, as well as individuals interested in resolving social issues in general.
History
Sociological reasoning predates the foundation of the discipline itself. Social analysis has origins in the common stock of universal, global knowledge and philosophy, having been carried out from as far back as the time of old comic poetry which features social and political criticism, and ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For instance, the origin of the survey can be traced back to at least the Domesday Book in 1086, while ancient philosophers such as Confucius wrote about the importance of social roles.
Medieval Arabic writings encompass a rich tradition that unveils early insights into the field of sociology. Some sources consider Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century Muslim scholar from Tunisia, to have been the father of sociology, although there is no reference to his work in the writings of European contributors to modern sociology. Khaldun's Muqaddimah was considered to be amongst the first works to advance social-scientific reasoning on social cohesion and social conflict.
Etymology
The word sociology derives part of its name from the Latin word socius ('companion' or 'fellowship'). The suffix -logy ('the study of') comes from that of the Greek -λογία, derived from λόγος (, 'word' or 'knowledge').
The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in an unpublished manuscript. Sociology was later defined independently by French philosopher of science Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in 1838 as a new way of looking at society. Comte had earlier used the term social physics, but it had been subsequently appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavored to unify history, psychology, and economics through the scientific understanding of social life. Writing shortly after the malaise of the French Revolution, he proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in the Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842), later included in A General View of Positivism (1848). Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era in the progression of human understanding, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases. In observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and having classified the sciences, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.
Marx
Both Comte and Karl Marx set out to develop scientifically justified systems in the wake of European industrialization and secularization, informed by various key movements in the philosophies of history and science. Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to develop a "science of society" nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, even though Marx did not consider himself to be a sociologist, he may be regarded as the "true father" of modern sociology, "in so far as anyone can claim the title."To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men's minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without creating obviously artificial links between the two, was the principal achievement of Marx's theory. The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.
Spencer
Herbert Spencer was one of the most popular and influential 19th-century sociologists. It is estimated that he sold one million books in his lifetime, far more than any other sociologist at the time. So strong was his influence that many other 19th-century thinkers, including Émile Durkheim, defined their ideas in relation to his. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is to a large extent an extended debate with Spencer from whose sociology Durkheim borrowed extensively.
Also a notable biologist, Spencer coined the term survival of the fittest. While Marxian ideas defined one strand of sociology, Spencer was a critic of socialism, as well as a strong advocate for a laissez-faire style of government. His ideas were closely observed by conservative political circles, especially in the United States and England.
Foundations of the academic discipline
The first formal Department of Sociology in the world was established in 1892 by Albion Small—from the invitation of William Rainey Harper—at the University of Chicago. The American Journal of Sociology was founded shortly thereafter in 1895 by Small as well.
The institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline, however, was chiefly led by Émile Durkheim, who developed positivism as a foundation for practical social research. While Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895). For Durkheim, sociology could be described as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning."
Durkheim's monograph Suicide (1897) is considered a seminal work in statistical analysis by contemporary sociologists. Suicide is a case study of variations in suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, and served to distinguish sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy. It also marked a major contribution to the theoretical concept of structural functionalism. By carefully examining suicide statistics in different police districts, he attempted to demonstrate that Catholic communities have a lower suicide rate than that of Protestants, something he attributed to social (as opposed to individual or psychological) causes. He developed the notion of objective social facts to delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to study. Through such studies he posited that sociology would be able to determine whether any given society is healthy or pathological, and seek social reform to negate organic breakdown, or "social anomie".
Sociology quickly evolved as an academic response to the perceived challenges of modernity, such as industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and the process of rationalization. The field predominated in continental Europe, with British anthropology and statistics generally following on a separate trajectory. By the turn of the 20th century, however, many theorists were active in the English-speaking world. Few early sociologists were confined strictly to the subject, interacting also with economics, jurisprudence, psychology and philosophy, with theories being appropriated in a variety of different fields. Since its inception, sociological epistemology, methods, and frames of inquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged.
Durkheim, Marx, and the German theorist Max Weber are typically cited as the three principal architects of sociology. Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Lester F. Ward, W. E. B. Du Bois, Vilfredo Pareto, Alexis de Tocqueville, Werner Sombart, Thorstein Veblen, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Jane Addams and Karl Mannheim are often included on academic curricula as founding theorists. Curricula also may include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marianne Weber, Harriet Martineau, and Friedrich Engels as founders of the feminist tradition in sociology. Each key figure is associated with a particular theoretical perspective and orientation.
Further developments
The first college course entitled "Sociology" was taught in the United States at Yale in 1875 by William Graham Sumner. In 1883, Lester F. Ward, who later became the first president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), published Dynamic Sociology—Or Applied social science as based upon statical sociology and the less complex sciences, attacking the laissez-faire sociology of Herbert Spencer and Sumner. Ward's 1,200-page book was used as core material in many early American sociology courses. In 1890, the oldest continuing American course in the modern tradition began at the University of Kansas, lectured by Frank W. Blackmar. The Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago was established in 1892 by Albion Small, who also published the first sociology textbook: An introduction to the study of society. George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, who had met at the University of Michigan in 1891 (along with John Dewey), moved to Chicago in 1894. Their influence gave rise to social psychology and the symbolic interactionism of the modern Chicago School. The American Journal of Sociology was founded in 1895, followed by the ASA in 1905.
The sociological canon of classics with Durkheim and Max Weber at the top owes its existence in part to Talcott Parsons, who is largely credited with introducing both to American audiences. Parsons consolidated the sociological tradition and set the agenda for American sociology at the point of its fastest disciplinary growth. Sociology in the United States was less historically influenced by Marxism than its European counterpart, and to this day broadly remains more statistical in its approach.
The first sociology department established in the United Kingdom was at the London School of Economics and Political Science (home of the British Journal of Sociology) in 1904. Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse and Edvard Westermarck became the lecturers in the discipline at the University of London in 1907. Harriet Martineau, an English translator of Comte, has been cited as the first female sociologist. In 1909, the German Sociological Association was founded by Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, among others. Weber established the first department in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1919, having presented an influential new antipositivist sociology. In 1920, Florian Znaniecki set up the first department in Poland. The Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt (later to become the Frankfurt School of critical theory) was founded in 1923. International co-operation in sociology began in 1893, when René Worms founded the Institut International de Sociologie, an institution later eclipsed by the much larger International Sociological Association (ISA), founded in 1949.
Theoretical traditions
Positivism and anti-positivism
Positivism
The overarching methodological principle of positivism is to conduct sociology in broadly the same manner as natural science. An emphasis on empiricism and the scientific method is sought to provide a tested foundation for sociological research based on the assumption that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only arrive by positive affirmation through scientific methodology.
The term has long since ceased to carry this meaning; there are no fewer than twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred to as positivism. Many of these approaches do not self-identify as "positivist", some because they themselves arose in opposition to older forms of positivism, and some because the label has over time become a pejorative term by being mistakenly linked with a theoretical empiricism. The extent of antipositivist criticism has also diverged, with many rejecting the scientific method and others only seeking to amend it to reflect 20th-century developments in the philosophy of science. However, positivism (broadly understood as a scientific approach to the study of society) remains dominant in contemporary sociology, especially in the United States.
Loïc Wacquant distinguishes three major strains of positivism: Durkheimian, Logical, and Instrumental. None of these are the same as that set forth by Comte, who was unique in advocating such a rigid (and perhaps optimistic) version. While Émile Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method. Durkheim maintained that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisted that they should retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. He developed the notion of objective sui generis "social facts" to serve as unique empirical objects for the science of sociology to study.
The variety of positivism that remains dominant today is termed instrumental positivism. This approach eschews epistemological and metaphysical concerns (such as the nature of social facts) in favour of methodological clarity, replicability, reliability and validity. This positivism is more or less synonymous with quantitative research, and so only resembles older positivism in practice. Since it carries no explicit philosophical commitment, its practitioners may not belong to any particular school of thought. Modern sociology of this type is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld, who pioneered large-scale survey studies and developed statistical techniques for analysing them. This approach lends itself to what Robert K. Merton called middle-range theory: abstract statements that generalize from segregated hypotheses and empirical regularities rather than starting with an abstract idea of a social whole.
Antipositivism
The German philosopher Hegel criticised traditional empiricist epistemology, which he rejected as uncritical, and determinism, which he viewed as overly mechanistic. Karl Marx's methodology borrowed from Hegelian dialecticism but also a rejection of positivism in favour of critical analysis, seeking to supplement the empirical acquisition of "facts" with the elimination of illusions. He maintained that appearances need to be critiqued rather than simply documented. Early hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science ('Geisteswissenschaft'). Various neo-Kantian philosophers, phenomenologists and human scientists further theorized how the analysis of the social world differs to that of the natural world due to the irreducibly complex aspects of human society, culture, and being.
In the Italian context of development of social sciences and of sociology in particular, there are oppositions to the first foundation of the discipline, sustained by speculative philosophy in accordance with the antiscientific tendencies matured by critique of positivism and evolutionism, so a tradition Progressist struggles to establish itself.
At the turn of the 20th century, the first generation of German sociologists formally introduced methodological anti-positivism, proposing that research should concentrate on human cultural norms, values, symbols, and social processes viewed from a resolutely subjective perspective. Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a science as it is able to identify causal relationships of human "social action"—especially among "ideal types", or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena. As a non-positivist, however, Weber sought relationships that are not as "historical, invariant, or generalisable" as those pursued by natural scientists. Fellow German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, theorised on two crucial abstract concepts with his work on "gemeinschaft and gesellschaft". Tönnies marked a sharp line between the realm of concepts and the reality of social action: the first must be treated axiomatically and in a deductive way ("pure sociology"), whereas the second empirically and inductively ("applied sociology").
Both Weber and Georg Simmel pioneered the "Verstehen" (or 'interpretative') method in social science; a systematic process by which an outside observer attempts to relate to a particular cultural group, or indigenous people, on their own terms and from their own point of view. Through the work of Simmel, in particular, sociology acquired a possible character beyond positivist data-collection or grand, deterministic systems of structural law. Relatively isolated from the sociological academy throughout his lifetime, Simmel presented idiosyncratic analyses of modernity more reminiscent of the phenomenological and existential writers than of Comte or Durkheim, paying particular concern to the forms of, and possibilities for, social individuality. His sociology engaged in a neo-Kantian inquiry into the limits of perception, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?'
Classical theory
The contemporary discipline of sociology is theoretically multi-paradigmatic in line with the contentions of classical social theory. Randall Collins' well-cited survey of sociological theory retroactively labels various theorists as belonging to four theoretical traditions: Functionalism, Conflict, Symbolic Interactionism, and Utilitarianism.
Accordingly, modern sociological theory predominantly descends from functionalist (Durkheim) and conflict (Marx and Weber) approaches to social structure, as well as from symbolic-interactionist approaches to social interaction, such as micro-level structural (Simmel) and pragmatist (Mead, Cooley) perspectives. Utilitarianism (also known as rational choice or social exchange), although often associated with economics, is an established tradition within sociological theory.
Lastly, as argued by Raewyn Connell, a tradition that is often forgotten is that of Social Darwinism, which applies the logic of Darwinian biological evolution to people and societies. This tradition often aligns with classical functionalism, and was once the dominant theoretical stance in American sociology, from , associated with several founders of sociology, primarily Herbert Spencer, Lester F. Ward, and William Graham Sumner.
Contemporary sociological theory retains traces of each of these traditions and they are by no means mutually exclusive.
Functionalism
A broad historical paradigm in both sociology and anthropology, functionalism addresses the social structure—referred to as "social organization" by the classical theorists—with respect to the whole as well as the necessary function of the whole's constituent elements. A common analogy (popularized by Herbert Spencer) is to regard norms and institutions as 'organs' that work towards the proper functioning of the entire 'body' of society. The perspective was implicit in the original sociological positivism of Comte but was theorized in full by Durkheim, again with respect to observable, structural laws.
Functionalism also has an anthropological basis in the work of theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown. It is in the latter's specific usage that the prefix "structural" emerged. Classical functionalist theory is generally united by its tendency towards biological analogy and notions of social evolutionism, in that the basic form of society would increase in complexity and those forms of social organization that promoted solidarity would eventually overcome social disorganization. As Giddens states:Functionalist thought, from Comte onwards, has looked particularly towards biology as the science providing the closest and most compatible model for social science. Biology has been taken to provide a guide to conceptualizing the structure and the function of social systems and to analyzing processes of evolution via mechanisms of adaptation. Functionalism strongly emphasizes the pre-eminence of the social world over its individual parts (i.e. its constituent actors, human subjects).
Conflict theory
Functionalist theories emphasize "cohesive systems" and are often contrasted with "conflict theories", which critique the overarching socio-political system or emphasize the inequality between particular groups. The following quotes from Durkheim and Marx epitomize the political, as well as theoretical, disparities, between functionalist and conflict thought respectively:
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interaction—often associated with interactionism, phenomenology, dramaturgy, interpretivism—is a sociological approach that places emphasis on subjective meanings and the empirical unfolding of social processes, generally accessed through micro-analysis. This tradition emerged in the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s, which, prior to World War II, "had been the center of sociological research and graduate study." The approach focuses on creating a framework for building a theory that sees society as the product of the everyday interactions of individuals. Society is nothing more than the shared reality that people construct as they interact with one another. This approach sees people interacting in countless settings using symbolic communications to accomplish the tasks at hand. Therefore, society is a complex, ever-changing mosaic of subjective meanings. Some critics of this approach argue that it only looks at what is happening in a particular social situation, and disregards the effects that culture, race or gender (i.e. social-historical structures) may have in that situation. Some important sociologists associated with this approach include Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, George Homans, and Peter Blau. It is also in this tradition that the radical-empirical approach of ethnomethodology emerges from the work of Harold Garfinkel.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is often referred to as exchange theory or rational choice theory in the context of sociology. This tradition tends to privilege the agency of individual rational actors and assumes that within interactions individuals always seek to maximize their own self-interest. As argued by Josh Whitford, rational actors are assumed to have four basic elements:
"a knowledge of alternatives;"
"a knowledge of, or beliefs about the consequences of the various alternatives;"
"an ordering of preferences over outcomes;" and
"a decision rule, to select among the possible alternatives"
Exchange theory is specifically attributed to the work of George C. Homans, Peter Blau and Richard Emerson. Organizational sociologists James G. March and Herbert A. Simon noted that an individual's rationality is bounded by the context or organizational setting. The utilitarian perspective in sociology was, most notably, revitalized in the late 20th century by the work of former ASA president James Coleman.
20th-century social theory
Following the decline of theories of sociocultural evolution in the United States, the interactionist thought of the Chicago School dominated American sociology. As Anselm Strauss describes, "we didn't think symbolic interaction was a perspective in sociology; we thought it was sociology." Moreover, philosophical and psychological pragmatism grounded this tradition. After World War II, mainstream sociology shifted to the survey-research of Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University and the general theorizing of Pitirim Sorokin, followed by Talcott Parsons at Harvard University. Ultimately, "the failure of the Chicago, Columbia, and Wisconsin [sociology] departments to produce a significant number of graduate students interested in and committed to general theory in the years 1936–45 was to the advantage of the Harvard department." As Parsons began to dominate general theory, his work primarily referenced European sociology—almost entirely omitting citations of both the American tradition of sociocultural-evolution as well as pragmatism. In addition to Parsons' revision of the sociological canon (which included Marshall, Pareto, Weber and Durkheim), the lack of theoretical challenges from other departments nurtured the rise of the Parsonian structural-functionalist movement, which reached its crescendo in the 1950s, but by the 1960s was in rapid decline.
By the 1980s, most functionalist perspectives in Europe had broadly been replaced by conflict-oriented approaches, and to many in the discipline, functionalism was considered "as dead as a dodo:" According to Giddens:The orthodox consensus terminated in the late 1960s and 1970s as the middle ground shared by otherwise competing perspectives gave way and was replaced by a baffling variety of competing perspectives. This third 'generation' of social theory includes phenomenologically inspired approaches, critical theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and theories written in the tradition of hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy.
Pax Wisconsana
While some conflict approaches also gained popularity in the United States, the mainstream of the discipline instead shifted to a variety of empirically oriented middle-range theories with no single overarching, or "grand", theoretical orientation. John Levi Martin refers to this "golden age of methodological unity and theoretical calm" as the Pax Wisconsana, as it reflected the composition of the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: numerous scholars working on separate projects with little contention. Omar Lizardo describes the pax wisconsana as "a Midwestern flavored, Mertonian resolution of the theory/method wars in which [sociologists] all agreed on at least two working hypotheses: (1) grand theory is a waste of time; [and] (2) good theory has to be good to think with or goes in the trash bin." Despite the aversion to grand theory in the latter half of the 20th century, several new traditions have emerged that propose various syntheses: structuralism, post-structuralism, cultural sociology and systems theory. Some sociologists have called for a return to 'grand theory' to combat the rise of scientific and pragmatist influences within the tradition of sociological thought (see Duane Rousselle).
Structuralism
The structuralist movement originated primarily from the work of Durkheim as interpreted by two European scholars: Anthony Giddens, a sociologist, whose theory of structuration draws on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure; and Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist. In this context, 'structure' does not refer to 'social structure', but to the semiotic understanding of human culture as a system of signs. One may delineate four central tenets of structuralism:
Structure is what determines the structure of a whole.
Structuralists believe that every system has a structure.
Structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws that deal with coexistence rather than changes.
Structures are the 'real things' beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.
The second tradition of structuralist thought, contemporaneous with Giddens, emerges from the American School of social network analysis in the 1970s and 1980s, spearheaded by the Harvard Department of Social Relations led by Harrison White and his students. This tradition of structuralist thought argues that, rather than semiotics, social structure is networks of patterned social relations. And, rather than Levi-Strauss, this school of thought draws on the notions of structure as theorized by Levi-Strauss' contemporary anthropologist, Radcliffe-Brown. Some refer to this as "network structuralism", and equate it to "British structuralism" as opposed to the "French structuralism" of Levi-Strauss.
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralist thought has tended to reject 'humanist' assumptions in the construction of social theory. Michel Foucault provides an important critique in his Archaeology of the Human Sciences, though Habermas (1986) and Rorty (1986) have both argued that Foucault merely replaces one such system of thought with another. The dialogue between these intellectuals highlights a trend in recent years for certain schools of sociology and philosophy to intersect. The anti-humanist position has been associated with "postmodernism", a term used in specific contexts to describe an era or phenomena, but occasionally construed as a method.
Central theoretical problems
Overall, there is a strong consensus regarding the central problems of sociological theory, which are largely inherited from the classical theoretical traditions. This consensus is: how to link, transcend or cope with the following "big three" dichotomies:
subjectivity and objectivity, which deal with knowledge;
structure and agency, which deal with action;
and synchrony and diachrony, which deal with time.
Lastly, sociological theory often grapples with the problem of integrating or transcending the divide between micro, meso, and macro-scale social phenomena, which is a subset of all three central problems.
Subjectivity and objectivity
The problem of subjectivity and objectivity can be divided into two parts: a concern over the general possibilities of social actions, and the specific problem of social scientific knowledge. In the former, the subjective is often equated (though not necessarily) with the individual, and the individual's intentions and interpretations of the objective. The objective is often considered any public or external action or outcome, on up to society writ large. A primary question for social theorists, then, is how knowledge reproduces along the chain of subjective-objective-subjective, that is to say: how is intersubjectivity achieved? While, historically, qualitative methods have attempted to tease out subjective interpretations, quantitative survey methods also attempt to capture individual subjectivities. Qualitative methods take an approach to objective description known as in situ, meaning that descriptions must have appropriate contextual information to understand the information.
The latter concern with scientific knowledge results from the fact that a sociologist is part of the very object they seek to explain, as Bourdieu explains:
Structure and agency
Structure and agency, sometimes referred to as determinism versus voluntarism, form an enduring ontological debate in social theory: "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" In this context, agency refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices, whereas structure relates to factors that limit or affect the choices and actions of individuals (e.g. social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc.). Discussions over the primacy of either structure or agency relate to the core of sociological epistemology (i.e. "what is the social world made of?", "what is a cause in the social world, and what is an effect?"). A perennial question within this debate is that of "social reproduction": how are structures (specifically, structures producing inequality) reproduced through the choices of individuals?
Synchrony and diachrony
Synchrony and diachrony (or statics and dynamics) within social theory are terms that refer to a distinction that emerged through the work of Levi-Strauss who inherited it from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Synchrony slices moments of time for analysis, thus it is an analysis of static social reality. Diachrony, on the other hand, attempts to analyse dynamic sequences. Following Saussure, synchrony would refer to social phenomena as a static concept like a language, while diachrony would refer to unfolding processes like actual speech. In Anthony Giddens' introduction to Central Problems in Social Theory, he states that, "in order to show the interdependence of action and structure…we must grasp the time space relations inherent in the constitution of all social interaction." And like structure and agency, time is integral to discussion of social reproduction.
In terms of sociology, historical sociology is often better positioned to analyse social life as diachronic, while survey research takes a snapshot of social life and is thus better equipped to understand social life as synchronized. Some argue that the synchrony of social structure is a methodological perspective rather than an ontological claim. Nonetheless, the problem for theory is how to integrate the two manners of recording and thinking about social data.
Research methodology
Sociological research methods may be divided into two broad, though often supplementary, categories:
Qualitative designs emphasize understanding of social phenomena through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual and subjective accuracy over generality.
Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, and often rely on statistical analysis of many cases (or across intentionally designed treatments in an experiment) to establish valid and reliable general claims.
Sociologists are often divided into camps of support for particular research techniques. These disputes relate to the epistemological debates at the historical core of social theory. While very different in many aspects, both qualitative and quantitative approaches involve a systematic interaction between theory and data. Quantitative methodologies hold the dominant position in sociology, especially in the United States. In the discipline's two most cited journals, quantitative articles have historically outnumbered qualitative ones by a factor of two. (Most articles published in the largest British journal, on the other hand, are qualitative.) Most textbooks on the methodology of social research are written from the quantitative perspective, and the very term "methodology" is often used synonymously with "statistics". Practically all sociology PhD programmes in the United States require training in statistical methods. The work produced by quantitative researchers is also deemed more 'trustworthy' and 'unbiased' by the general public, though this judgment continues to be challenged by antipositivists.
The choice of method often depends largely on what the researcher intends to investigate. For example, a researcher concerned with drawing a statistical generalization across an entire population may administer a survey questionnaire to a representative sample population. By contrast, a researcher who seeks full contextual understanding of an individual's social actions may choose ethnographic participant observation or open-ended interviews. Studies will commonly combine, or 'triangulate', quantitative and qualitative methods as part of a 'multi-strategy' design. For instance, a quantitative study may be performed to obtain statistical patterns on a target sample, and then combined with a qualitative interview to determine the play of agency.
Sampling
Quantitative methods are often used to ask questions about a population that is very large, making a census or a complete enumeration of all the members in that population infeasible. A 'sample' then forms a manageable subset of a population. In quantitative research, statistics are used to draw inferences from this sample regarding the population as a whole. The process of selecting a sample is referred to as 'sampling'. While it is usually best to sample randomly, concern with differences between specific subpopulations sometimes calls for stratified sampling. Conversely, the impossibility of random sampling sometimes necessitates nonprobability sampling, such as convenience sampling or snowball sampling.
Methods
The following list of research methods is neither exclusive nor exhaustive:
Archival research (or the Historical method): Draws upon the secondary data located in historical archives and records, such as biographies, memoirs, journals, and so on.
Content analysis: The content of interviews and other texts is systematically analysed. Often data is 'coded' as a part of the 'grounded theory' approach using qualitative data analysis (QDA) software, such as Atlas.ti, MAXQDA, NVivo, or QDA Miner.
Experimental research: The researcher isolates a single social process and reproduces it in a laboratory (for example, by creating a situation where unconscious sexist judgements are possible), seeking to determine whether or not certain social variables can cause, or depend upon, other variables (for instance, seeing if people's feelings about traditional gender roles can be manipulated by the activation of contrasting gender stereotypes). Participants are randomly assigned to different groups that either serve as controls—acting as reference points because they are tested with regard to the dependent variable, albeit without having been exposed to any independent variables of interest—or receive one or more treatments. Randomization allows the researcher to be sure that any resulting differences between groups are the result of the treatment.
Longitudinal study: An extensive examination of a specific person or group over a long period of time.
Observation: Using data from the senses, the researcher records information about social phenomenon or behaviour. Observation techniques may or may not feature participation. In participant observation, the researcher goes into the field (e.g. a community or a place of work), and participates in the activities of the field for a prolonged period of time in order to acquire a deep understanding of it. Data acquired through these techniques may be analysed either quantitatively or qualitatively. In the observation research, a sociologist might study global warming in some part of the world that is less populated.
Program Evaluation is a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using information to answer questions about projects, policies and programs, particularly about their effectiveness and efficiency. In both the public and private sectors, stakeholders often want to know whether the programs they are funding, implementing, voting for, or objecting to are producing the intended effect. While program evaluation first focuses on this definition, important considerations often include how much the program costs per participant, how the program could be improved, whether the program is worthwhile, whether there are better alternatives, if there are unintended outcomes, and whether the program goals are appropriate and useful.
Survey research: The researcher gathers data using interviews, questionnaires, or similar feedback from a set of people sampled from a particular population of interest. Survey items from an interview or questionnaire may be open-ended or closed-ended. Data from surveys is usually analysed statistically on a computer.
Computational sociology
Sociologists increasingly draw upon computationally intensive methods to analyse and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, text mining, complex statistical methods, and new analytic approaches like social network analysis and social sequence analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modelling of social interactions.
Although the subject matter and methodologies in social science differ from those in natural science or computer science, several of the approaches used in contemporary social simulation originated from fields such as physics and artificial intelligence. By the same token, some of the approaches that originated in computational sociology have been imported into the natural sciences, such as measures of network centrality from the fields of social network analysis and network science. In relevant literature, computational sociology is often related to the study of social complexity. Social complexity concepts such as complex systems, non-linear interconnection among macro and micro process, and emergence, have entered the vocabulary of computational sociology. A practical and well-known example is the construction of a computational model in the form of an "artificial society", by which researchers can analyse the structure of a social system.
Subfields
Culture
Sociologists' approach to culture can be divided into "sociology of culture" and "cultural sociology"—terms which are similar, though not entirely interchangeable. Sociology of culture is an older term, and considers some topics and objects as more or less "cultural" than others. Conversely, cultural sociology sees all social phenomena as inherently cultural. Sociology of culture often attempts to explain certain cultural phenomena as a product of social processes, while cultural sociology sees culture as a potential explanation of social phenomena.
For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." While early theorists such as Durkheim and Mauss were influential in cultural anthropology, sociologists of culture are generally distinguished by their concern for modern (rather than primitive or ancient) society. Cultural sociology often involves the hermeneutic analysis of words, artefacts and symbols, or ethnographic interviews. However, some sociologists employ historical-comparative or quantitative techniques in the analysis of culture, Weber and Bourdieu for instance. The subfield is sometimes allied with critical theory in the vein of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other members of the Frankfurt School. Loosely distinct from the sociology of culture is the field of cultural studies. Birmingham School theorists such as Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall questioned the division between "producers" and "consumers" evident in earlier theory, emphasizing the reciprocity in the production of texts. Cultural Studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture (e.g. white working class youth in London) would consider the social practices of the group as they relate to the dominant class. The "cultural turn" of the 1960s ultimately placed culture much higher on the sociological agenda.
Art, music and literature
Sociology of literature, film, and art is a subset of the sociology of culture. This field studies the social production of artistic objects and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire (1992). None of the founding fathers of sociology produced a detailed study of art, but they did develop ideas that were subsequently applied to literature by others. Marx's theory of ideology was directed at literature by Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Weber's theory of modernity as cultural rationalization, which he applied to music, was later applied to all the arts, literature included, by Frankfurt School writers such as Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. Durkheim's view of sociology as the study of externally defined social facts was redirected towards literature by Robert Escarpit. Bourdieu's own work is clearly indebted to Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
Criminality, deviance, law and punishment
Criminologists analyse the nature, causes, and control of criminal activity, drawing upon methods across sociology, psychology, and the behavioural sciences. The sociology of deviance focuses on actions or behaviours that violate norms, including both infringements of formally enacted rules (e.g., crime) and informal violations of cultural norms. It is the remit of sociologists to study why these norms exist; how they change over time; and how they are enforced. The concept of social disorganization is when the broader social systems leads to violations of norms. For instance, Robert K. Merton produced a typology of deviance, which includes both individual and system level causal explanations of deviance.
Sociology of law
The study of law played a significant role in the formation of classical sociology. Durkheim famously described law as the "visible symbol" of social solidarity. The sociology of law refers to both a sub-discipline of sociology and an approach within the field of legal studies. Sociology of law is a diverse field of study that examines the interaction of law with other aspects of society, such as the development of legal institutions and the effect of laws on social change and vice versa. For example, an influential recent work in the field relies on statistical analyses to argue that the increase in incarceration in the US over the last 30 years is due to changes in law and policing and not to an increase in crime; and that this increase has significantly contributed to the persistence of racial stratification.
Communications and information technologies
The sociology of communications and information technologies includes "the social aspects of computing, the Internet, new media, computer networks, and other communication and information technologies."
Internet and digital media
The Internet is of interest to sociologists in various ways, most practically as a tool for research and as a discussion platform. The sociology of the Internet in the broad sense concerns the analysis of online communities (e.g. newsgroups, social networking sites) and virtual worlds, meaning that there is often overlap with community sociology. Online communities may be studied statistically through network analysis or interpreted qualitatively through virtual ethnography. Moreover, organizational change is catalysed through new media, thereby influencing social change at-large, perhaps forming the framework for a transformation from an industrial to an informational society. One notable text is Manuel Castells' The Internet Galaxy—the title of which forms an inter-textual reference to Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. Closely related to the sociology of the Internet is digital sociology, which expands the scope of study to address not only the internet but also the impact of the other digital media and devices that have emerged since the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Media
As with cultural studies, media study is a distinct discipline that owes to the convergence of sociology and other social sciences and humanities, in particular, literary criticism and critical theory. Though neither the production process nor the critique of aesthetic forms is in the remit of sociologists, analyses of socializing factors, such as ideological effects and audience reception, stem from sociological theory and method. Thus the 'sociology of the media' is not a subdiscipline per se, but the media is a common and often indispensable topic.
Economic sociology
The term "economic sociology" was first used by William Stanley Jevons in 1879, later to be coined in the works of Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel between 1890 and 1920. Economic sociology arose as a new approach to the analysis of economic phenomena, emphasizing class relations and modernity as a philosophical concept. The relationship between capitalism and modernity is a salient issue, perhaps best demonstrated in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (1900). The contemporary period of economic sociology, also known as new economic sociology, was consolidated by the 1985 work of Mark Granovetter titled "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness". This work elaborated the concept of embeddedness, which states that economic relations between individuals or firms take place within existing social relations (and are thus structured by these relations as well as the greater social structures of which those relations are a part). Social network analysis has been the primary methodology for studying this phenomenon. Granovetter's theory of the strength of weak ties and Ronald Burt's concept of structural holes are two of the best known theoretical contributions of this field.
Work, employment, and industry
The sociology of work, or industrial sociology, examines "the direction and implications of trends in technological change, globalization, labour markets, work organization, managerial practices and employment relations to the extent to which these trends are intimately related to changing patterns of inequality in modern societies and to the changing experiences of individuals and families the ways in which workers challenge, resist and make their own contributions to the patterning of work and shaping of work institutions."
Education
The sociology of education is the study of how educational institutions determine social structures, experiences, and other outcomes. It is particularly concerned with the schooling systems of modern industrial societies. A classic 1966 study in this field by James Coleman, known as the "Coleman Report", analysed the performance of over 150,000 students and found that student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending). The controversy over "school effects" ignited by that study has continued to this day. The study also found that socially disadvantaged black students profited from schooling in racially mixed classrooms, and thus served as a catalyst for desegregation busing in American public schools.
Environment
Environmental sociology is the study of human interactions with the natural environment, typically emphasizing human dimensions of environmental problems, social impacts of those problems, and efforts to resolve them. As with other sub-fields of sociology, scholarship in environmental sociology may be at one or multiple levels of analysis, from global (e.g. world-systems) to local, societal to individual. Attention is paid also to the processes by which environmental problems become defined and known to humans. As argued by notable environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster, the predecessor to modern environmental sociology is Marx's analysis of the metabolic rift, which influenced contemporary thought on sustainability. Environmental sociology is often interdisciplinary and overlaps with the sociology of risk, rural sociology and the sociology of disaster.
Human ecology
Human ecology deals with interdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments. In addition to Environmental sociology, this field overlaps with architectural sociology, urban sociology, and to some extent visual sociology. In turn, visual sociology—which is concerned with all visual dimensions of social life—overlaps with media studies in that it uses photography, film and other technologies of media.
Social pre-wiring
Social pre-wiring deals with the study of fetal social behavior and social interactions in a multi-fetal environment. Specifically, social pre-wiring refers to the ontogeny of social interaction. Also informally referred to as, "wired to be social". The theory questions whether there is a propensity to socially oriented action already present before birth. Research in the theory concludes that newborns are born into the world with a unique genetic wiring to be social.
Circumstantial evidence supporting the social pre-wiring hypothesis can be revealed when examining newborns' behavior. Newborns, not even hours after birth, have been found to display a preparedness for social interaction. This preparedness is expressed in ways such as their imitation of facial gestures. This observed behavior cannot be attributed to any current form of socialization or social construction. Rather, newborns most likely inherit to some extent social behavior and identity through genetics.
Principal evidence of this theory is uncovered by examining Twin pregnancies. The main argument is, if there are social behaviors that are inherited and developed before birth, then one should expect twin foetuses to engage in some form of social interaction before they are born. Thus, ten foetuses were analyzed over a period of time using ultrasound techniques. Using kinematic analysis, the results of the experiment were that the twin foetuses would interact with each other for longer periods and more often as the pregnancies went on. Researchers were able to conclude that the performance of movements between the co-twins were not accidental but specifically aimed.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis was proved correct: The central advance of this study is the demonstration that 'social actions' are already performed in the second trimester of gestation. Starting from the 14th week of gestation twin foetuses plan and execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin. These findings force us to predate the emergence of social behavior: when the context enables it, as in the case of twin foetuses, other-directed actions are not only possible but predominant over self-directed actions.
Family, gender, and sexuality
Family, gender and sexuality form a broad area of inquiry studied in many sub-fields of sociology. A family is a group of people who are related by kinship ties :- Relations of blood / marriage / civil partnership or adoption. The family unit is one of the most important social institutions found in some form in nearly all known societies. It is the basic unit of social organization and plays a key role in socializing children into the culture of their society. The sociology of the family examines the family, as an institution and unit of socialization, with special concern for the comparatively modern historical emergence of the nuclear family and its distinct gender roles. The notion of "childhood" is also significant. As one of the more basic institutions to which one may apply sociological perspectives, the sociology of the family is a common component on introductory academic curricula. Feminist sociology, on the other hand, is a normative sub-field that observes and critiques the cultural categories of gender and sexuality, particularly with respect to power and inequality. The primary concern of feminist theory is the patriarchy and the systematic oppression of women apparent in many societies, both at the level of small-scale interaction and in terms of the broader social structure. Feminist sociology also analyses how gender interlocks with race and class to produce and perpetuate social inequalities. "How to account for the differences in definitions of femininity and masculinity and in sex role across different societies and historical periods" is also a concern.
Health, illness, and the body
The sociology of health and illness focuses on the social effects of, and public attitudes toward, illnesses, diseases, mental health and disabilities. This sub-field also overlaps with gerontology and the study of the ageing process. Medical sociology, by contrast, focuses on the inner-workings of the medical profession, its organizations, its institutions and how these can shape knowledge and interactions. In Britain, sociology was introduced into the medical curriculum following the Goodenough Report (1944).
The sociology of the body and embodiment takes a broad perspective on the idea of "the body" and includes "a wide range of embodied dynamics including human and non-human bodies, morphology, human reproduction, anatomy, body fluids, biotechnology, genetics". This often intersects with health and illness, but also theories of bodies as political, social, cultural, economic and ideological productions. The ISA maintains a Research Committee devoted to "the Body in the Social Sciences".
Death, dying, bereavement
A subfield of the sociology of health and illness that overlaps with cultural sociology is the study of death, dying and bereavement, sometimes referred to broadly as the sociology of death. This topic is exemplified by the work of Douglas Davies and Michael C. Kearl.
Knowledge and science
The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. The term first came into widespread use in the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking theorists, most notably Max Scheler, and Karl Mannheim, wrote extensively on it. With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied much more closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality). The "archaeological" and "genealogical" studies of Michel Foucault are of considerable contemporary influence.
The sociology of science involves the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing "with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." Important theorists in the sociology of science include Robert K. Merton and Bruno Latour. These branches of sociology have contributed to the formation of science and technology studies. Both the ASA and the BSA have sections devoted to the subfield of Science, Knowledge and Technology. The ISA maintains a Research Committee on Science and Technology.
Leisure
Sociology of leisure is the study of how humans organize their free time. Leisure includes a broad array of activities, such as sport, tourism, and the playing of games. The sociology of leisure is closely tied to the sociology of work, as each explores a different side of the work–leisure relationship. More recent studies in the field move away from the work–leisure relationship and focus on the relation between leisure and culture. This area of sociology began with Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.
Peace, war, and conflict
This subfield of sociology studies, broadly, the dynamics of war, conflict resolution, peace movements, war refugees, conflict resolution and military institutions. As a subset of this subfield, military sociology aims towards the systematic study of the military as a social group rather than as an organization. It is a highly specialized sub-field which examines issues related to service personnel as a distinct group with coerced collective action based on shared interests linked to survival in vocation and combat, with purposes and values that are more defined and narrower than within civil society. Military sociology also concerns civilian-military relations and interactions between other groups or governmental agencies. Topics include the dominant assumptions held by those in the military, changes in military members' willingness to fight, military unionization, military professionalism, the increased utilization of women, the military industrial-academic complex, the military's dependence on research, and the institutional and organizational structure of military.
Political sociology
Historically, political sociology concerned the relations between political organization and society. A typical research question in this area might be: "Why do so few American citizens choose to vote?" In this respect questions of political opinion formation brought about some of the pioneering uses of statistical survey research by Paul Lazarsfeld. A major subfield of political sociology developed in relation to such questions, which draws on comparative history to analyse socio-political trends. The field developed from the work of Max Weber and Moisey Ostrogorsky.
Contemporary political sociology includes these areas of research, but it has been opened up to wider questions of power and politics. Today political sociologists are as likely to be concerned with how identities are formed that contribute to structural domination by one group over another; the politics of who knows how and with what authority; and questions of how power is contested in social interactions in such a way as to bring about widespread cultural and social change. Such questions are more likely to be studied qualitatively. The study of social movements and their effects has been especially important in relation to these wider definitions of politics and power.
Political sociology has also moved beyond methodological nationalism and analysed the role of non-governmental organizations, the diffusion of the nation-state throughout the Earth as a social construct, and the role of stateless entities in the modern world society. Contemporary political sociologists also study inter-state interactions and human rights.
Population and demography
Demographers or sociologists of population study the size, composition and change over time of a given population. Demographers study how these characteristics impact, or are impacted by, various social, economic or political systems. The study of population is also closely related to human ecology and environmental sociology, which studies a population's relationship with the surrounding environment and often overlaps with urban or rural sociology. Researchers in this field may study the movement of populations: transportation, migrations, diaspora, etc., which falls into the subfield known as mobilities studies and is closely related to human geography. Demographers may also study spread of disease within a given population or epidemiology.
Public sociology
Public sociology refers to an approach to the discipline which seeks to transcend the academy in order to engage with wider audiences. It is perhaps best understood as a style of sociology rather than a particular method, theory, or set of political values. This approach is primarily associated with Michael Burawoy who contrasted it with professional sociology, a form of academic sociology that is concerned primarily with addressing other professional sociologists. Public sociology is also part of the broader field of science communication or science journalism.
Race and ethnic relations
The sociology of race and of ethnic relations is the area of the discipline that studies the social, political, and economic relations between races and ethnicities at all levels of society. This area encompasses the study of racism, residential segregation, and other complex social processes between different racial and ethnic groups. This research frequently interacts with other areas of sociology such as stratification and social psychology, as well as with postcolonial theory. At the level of political policy, ethnic relations are discussed in terms of either assimilationism or multiculturalism. Anti-racism forms another style of policy, particularly popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
Religion
The sociology of religion concerns the practices, historical backgrounds, developments, universal themes and roles of religion in society. There is particular emphasis on the recurring role of religion in all societies and throughout recorded history. The sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that sociologists do not set out to assess the validity of religious truth-claims, instead assuming what Peter L. Berger has described as a position of "methodological atheism". It may be said that the modern formal discipline of sociology began with the analysis of religion in Durkheim's 1897 study of suicide rates among Roman Catholic and Protestant populations. Max Weber published four major texts on religion in a context of economic sociology and social stratification: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915), The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (1915), and Ancient Judaism (1920). Contemporary debates often centre on topics such as secularization, civil religion, the intersection of religion and economics and the role of religion in a context of globalization and multiculturalism.
Social change and development
The sociology of change and development attempts to understand how societies develop and how they can be changed. This includes studying many different aspects of society, for example demographic trends, political or technological trends, or changes in culture. Within this field, sociologists often use macrosociological methods or historical-comparative methods. In contemporary studies of social change, there are overlaps with international development or community development. However, most of the founders of sociology had theories of social change based on their study of history. For instance, Marx contended that the material circumstances of society ultimately caused the ideal or cultural aspects of society, while Weber argued that it was in fact the cultural mores of Protestantism that ushered in a transformation of material circumstances. In contrast to both, Durkheim argued that societies moved from simple to complex through a process of sociocultural evolution. Sociologists in this field also study processes of globalization and imperialism. Most notably, Immanuel Wallerstein extends Marx's theoretical frame to include large spans of time and the entire globe in what is known as world systems theory. Development sociology is also heavily influenced by post-colonialism. In recent years, Raewyn Connell issued a critique of the bias in sociological research towards countries in the Global North. She argues that this bias blinds sociologists to the lived experiences of the Global South, specifically, so-called, "Northern Theory" lacks an adequate theory of imperialism and colonialism.
There are many organizations studying social change, including the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, and the Global Social Change Research Project.
Social networks
A social network is a social structure composed of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes", which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. Social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. An underlying theoretical assumption of social network analysis is that groups are not necessarily the building blocks of society: the approach is open to studying less-bounded social systems, from non-local communities to networks of exchange. Drawing theoretically from relational sociology, social network analysis avoids treating individuals (persons, organizations, states) as discrete units of analysis, it focuses instead on how the structure of ties affects and constitutes individuals and their relationships. In contrast to analyses that assume that socialization into norms determines behaviour, network analysis looks to see the extent to which the structure and composition of ties affect norms. On the other hand, recent research by Omar Lizardo also demonstrates that network ties are shaped and created by previously existing cultural tastes. Social network theory is usually defined in formal mathematics and may include integration of geographical data into sociomapping.
Social psychology
Sociological social psychology focuses on micro-scale social actions. This area may be described as adhering to "sociological miniaturism", examining whole societies through the study of individual thoughts and emotions as well as behaviour of small groups. One special concern to psychological sociologists is how to explain a variety of demographic, social, and cultural facts in terms of human social interaction. Some of the major topics in this field are social inequality, group dynamics, prejudice, aggression, social perception, group behaviour, social change, non-verbal behaviour, socialization, conformity, leadership, and social identity. Social psychology may be taught with psychological emphasis. In sociology, researchers in this field are the most prominent users of the experimental method (however, unlike their psychological counterparts, they also frequently employ other methodologies). Social psychology looks at social influences, as well as social perception and social interaction.
Stratification, poverty and inequality
Social stratification is the hierarchical arrangement of individuals into social classes, castes, and divisions within a society. Modern Western societies stratification traditionally relates to cultural and economic classes arranged in three main layers: upper class, middle class, and lower class, but each class may be further subdivided into smaller classes (e.g. occupational). Social stratification is interpreted in radically different ways within sociology. Proponents of structural functionalism suggest that, since the stratification of classes and castes is evident in all societies, hierarchy must be beneficial in stabilizing their existence. Conflict theorists, by contrast, critique the inaccessibility of resources and lack of social mobility in stratified societies.
Karl Marx distinguished social classes by their connection to the means of production in the capitalist system: the bourgeoisie own the means, but this effectively includes the proletariat itself as the workers can only sell their own labour power (forming the material base of the cultural superstructure). Max Weber critiqued Marxist economic determinism, arguing that social stratification is not based purely on economic inequalities, but on other status and power differentials (e.g. patriarchy). According to Weber, stratification may occur among at least three complex variables:
Property (class): A person's economic position in a society, based on birth and individual achievement. Weber differs from Marx in that he does not see this as the supreme factor in stratification. Weber noted how managers of corporations or industries control firms they do not own; Marx would have placed such a person in the proletariat.
Prestige (status): A person's prestige, or popularity in a society. This could be determined by the kind of job this person does or wealth.
Power (political party): A person's ability to get their way despite the resistance of others. For example, individuals in state jobs, such as an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or a member of the United States Congress, may hold little property or status but they still hold immense power.
Pierre Bourdieu provides a modern example in the concepts of cultural and symbolic capital. Theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf have noted the tendency towards an enlarged middle-class in modern Western societies, particularly in relation to the necessity of an educated work force in technological or service-based economies. Perspectives concerning globalization, such as dependency theory, suggest this effect owes to the shift of workers to the developing countries.
Urban and rural sociology
Urban sociology involves the analysis of social life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a discipline seeking to provide advice for planning and policy making. After the Industrial Revolution, works such as Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) focused on urbanization and the effect it had on alienation and anonymity. In the 1920s and 1930s The Chicago School produced a major body of theory on the nature of the city, important to both urban sociology and criminology, utilizing symbolic interactionism as a method of field research. Contemporary research is commonly placed in a context of globalization, for instance, in Saskia Sassen's study of the "global city". Rural sociology, by contrast, is the analysis of non-metropolitan areas. As agriculture and wilderness tend to be a more prominent social fact in rural regions, rural sociologists often overlap with environmental sociologists.
Community sociology
Often grouped with urban and rural sociology is that of community sociology or the sociology of community. Taking various communities—including online communities—as the unit of analysis, community sociologists study the origin and effects of different associations of people. For instance, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between two types of human association: gemeinschaft (usually translated as "community") and gesellschaft ("society" or "association"). In his 1887 work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Tönnies argued that Gemeinschaft is perceived to be a tighter and more cohesive social entity, due to the presence of a "unity of will". The 'development' or 'health' of a community is also a central concern of community sociologists also engage in development sociology, exemplified by the literature surrounding the concept of social capital.
Other academic disciplines
Sociology overlaps with a variety of disciplines that study society, in particular social anthropology, political science, economics, social work and social philosophy. Many comparatively new fields such as communication studies, cultural studies, demography and literary theory, draw upon methods that originated in sociology. The terms "social science" and "social research" have both gained a degree of autonomy since their origination in classical sociology. The distinct field of social anthropology or anthroposociology is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and much of Europe (France in particular), where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology (or under the relatively new designation of sociocultural anthropology).
Sociology and applied sociology are connected to the professional and academic discipline of social work. Both disciplines study social interactions, community and the effect of various systems (i.e. family, school, community, laws, political sphere) on the individual. However, social work is generally more focused on practical strategies to alleviate social dysfunctions; sociology in general provides a thorough examination of the root causes of these problems. For example, a sociologist might study why a community is plagued with poverty. The applied sociologist would be more focused on practical strategies on what needs to be done to alleviate this burden. The social worker would be focused on action; implementing theses strategies "directly" or "indirectly" by means of mental health therapy, counselling, advocacy, community organization or community mobilization.
Social anthropology is the branch of anthropology that studies how contemporary living human beings behave in social groups. Practitioners of social anthropology, like sociologists, investigate various facets of social organization. Traditionally, social anthropologists analyzed non-industrial and non-Western societies, whereas sociologists focused on industrialized societies in the Western world. In recent years, however, social anthropology has expanded its focus to modern Western societies, meaning that the two disciplines increasingly converge.
Sociocultural anthropology, which includes linguistic anthropology, is concerned with the problem of difference and similarity within and between human populations. The discipline arose concomitantly with the expansion of European colonial empires, and its practices and theories have been questioned and reformulated along with processes of decolonization. Such issues have re-emerged as transnational processes have challenged the centrality of the nation-state to theorizations about culture and power. New challenges have emerged as public debates about multiculturalism, and the increasing use of the culture concept outside of the academy and among peoples studied by anthropology. These times are not "business-as-usual" in the academy, in anthropology, or in the world, if ever there were such times.
Irving Louis Horowitz, in his The Decomposition of Sociology (1994), has argued that the discipline, while arriving from a "distinguished lineage and tradition", is in decline due to deeply ideological theory and a lack of relevance to policy making: "The decomposition of sociology began when this great tradition became subject to ideological thinking, and an inferior tradition surfaced in the wake of totalitarian triumphs." Furthermore: "A problem yet unmentioned is that sociology's malaise has left all the social sciences vulnerable to pure positivism—to an empiricism lacking any theoretical basis. Talented individuals who might, in an earlier time, have gone into sociology are seeking intellectual stimulation in business, law, the natural sciences, and even creative writing; this drains sociology of much needed potential." Horowitz cites the lack of a 'core discipline' as exacerbating the problem. Randall Collins, the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History journal, has voiced similar sentiments: "we have lost all coherence as a discipline, we are breaking up into a conglomerate of specialities, each going on its own way and with none too high regard for each other."
In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide published a list of 'The most cited authors of books in the Humanities' (including philosophy and psychology). Seven of the top ten are listed as sociologists: Michel Foucault (1), Pierre Bourdieu (2), Anthony Giddens (5), Erving Goffman (6), Jürgen Habermas (7), Max Weber (8), and Bruno Latour (10).
Journals
The most highly ranked general journals which publish original research in the field of sociology are the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. The Annual Review of Sociology, which publishes original review essays, is also highly ranked. Many other generalist and specialized journals exist.
See also
Bibliography of sociology
Critical juncture theory
Cultural theory
Engaged theory
Historic recurrence
History of the social sciences
List of sociologists
Outline of sociology
Political sociology
Post-industrial society
Social theory
Social psychology
Sociological Francoism
Notes
References
Citations
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<ref name="transformation325">Harriss, John. The Second Great Transformation? Capitalism at the End of the Twentieth Century in Allen, T. and Thomas, Alan (eds) Poverty and Development in the 21st Century', Oxford University Press, Oxford. p. 325.</ref>
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Sources
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C. Wright Mills, Intellectual Craftsmanship Advices how to Work for young Sociologist Collins, Randall. 1994. Four Sociological Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coser, Lewis A. 1971. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. .
Giddens, Anthony. 2006. Sociology (5th ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
House, J. S., & Mortimer, J. (1990). Social structure and the individual: Emerging themes and new directions. Social Psychology Quarterly, 71–80.
Lipset, Seymour Martin and Everett Carll Ladd. "The Politics of American Sociologists", American Journal of Sociology (1972) 78#1 pp. 67–104
Merton, Robert K. 1959. Social Theory and Social Structure. Toward the codification of theory and research (revised & enlarged ed.). Glencoe, IL.
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination
Nisbet, Robert A. 1967. The Sociological Tradition, London, Heinemann Educational Books.
Ritzer, George, and Douglas J. Goodman. 2004. Sociological Theory (6th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
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Willis, Evan. 1996. The Sociological Quest: An introduction to the study of social life''. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
External links
American Sociological Association (ASA)
Eastern Sociological Society (ESS)
Australian Sociological Association (TASA)
Bangladesh Sociological Society (BSS)
British Sociological Association (BSA)
Canadian Association of French-speaking Sociologists and Anthropologists
Canadian Sociological Association (CSA)
European Sociological Association (ESA)
French Sociological Association
German Sociological Association (DGS)
Guide to the University of Chicago Department of Sociology Interviews 1972 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
Guide to the University of Chicago Department of Sociology Records 1924-2001 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
Indian Sociological Society (ISS)
International Institute of Sociology (IIS)
International Sociological Association (ISA)
Latin American Sociological Association (ALAS)
Observatory of International Research (OOIR): Latest Papers and Trends in Sociology
Portuguese Sociological Association (APS)
Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI)
The Nordic Sociological Association (NSA)
The Swedish Sociological Association(in swedish) | 0.777515 | 0.999715 | 0.777294 |
Learning-by-doing | Learning by doing is a theory that places heavy emphasis on student engagement and is a hands-on, task-oriented, process to education. The theory refers to the process in which students actively participate in more practical and imaginative ways of learning. This process distinguishes itself from other learning approaches as it provides many pedagogical advantages to more traditional learning styles, such those which privilege inert knowledge. Learning-by-doing is related to other types of learning such as adventure learning, action learning, cooperative learning, experiential learning, peer learning, service-learning, and situated learning.
Main Contributors
Much of what is known about the learning by doing theory was thanks to the contributions of historic minds that changed education today. The theory has been expounded and popularized by famous American philosopher and educational crusader John Dewey and Brazilian pedagogy Paulo Freire. Dewey, considered as one of the founding fathers of modern-day functional psychology, implemented this idea by setting up the University of Chicago Laboratory School. His views have been important in establishing practices of progressive education. He was an advocate for progressive education as opposed to traditional education. Dewey believed that effective learning is done through interactions and that school is a social institution where these interactions take place. In an ideal classroom in which learning by doing is implemented, the classroom is a space for children to learn and problem solve as a community in their own way, at their own pace, through teacher instructions that take the children into consideration. This fosters a healthy and responsive learning community where students actively engage in the learning process. Learning by doing not only focuses on academic growth, but social, intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual growth.
Freire on the other hand, highlighted the important role of the individual development seeking to generate awareness and nurture critical skills based on his most influential pieces known as Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Dewey advocated for education as a means of preserving democracy and sound government because he was raised in advanced and civilized New York City. While in Brazil during the dictatorship, Freire experienced crushing poverty and a wretched lifestyle. Therefore, he advocated for education as a means of awareness and liberation from the problems associated with underdevelopment. Thus resulting these experiences to be the contributing factor to how he would construct his ideas on education.
Other Contributors
Besides Freire and Dewey there were other key contributors to the learn-by-doing theory including Richard DuFour, who adopted and applied it to the development of professional learning communities. Richard DuFour was an education consultant and author who wanted to improve the education system in America. He was a leading voice in the movement to improve schools through professional learning communities, in which teachers come together to analyze and improve their classroom practice.
Despite being born blind it did not stop Jeremy Bruner from becoming successful, as he was able to get a Phd in psychology and taught in Harvard, Oxford and NY University. Bruner was always focused on the American educational system and finding ways to improve it. He introduced the concepts of discovery learning and spiral curriculum. Discovery learning is depicted as a way for students to learn the given curriculum on their own accord and built upon it with their experiences. Spiral learning was Bruner's idea that similar topics can be taught to any age, but according to the stage of thought.
David Kolb drew inspiration from Kurt Lewin, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget to create an experiential learning model. Kolb believed that effective learners need to have concrete experience abilities (CE), reflective observation abilities (RO), abstract conceptualization (AC), and active experimentation (AE) abilities. Concrete experience is being involved and actively engaged in new experiences. Reflective observation is asking questions and discussing the experience. Abstract conceptualization is when the learner thinks and starts to make conclusions. Active experimentation is reapplying their conclusions to the task at hand to make decisions and solve problems.
The American economist and mathematician Kenneth Arrow highlights the importance of learning by doing as a means of increasing productivity. In the article he writes, “But one empirical generalization is so clear that all schools of thought must accept it, although they interpret it in different fashions: learning is the product of experience. learning can only take place throughout the attempt to solve a problem and therefore only takes place during activity” - Kenneth J. Arrow (The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing).
Sherlock I & II
Sherlock, developed by Alan M. Lesgold and Sherrie P. Gott, is an intelligent tutoring system designed to help airmen understand cognitive tasks in the Air Force. Sherlock's speedy and efficient approach provides a means of practicing with support and feedback. Sherlock provides help when a student loses track of what they have done. This help includes hints when a student does not know how to proceed to overcome knowledge gaps and critical insights and feedback to help the student continue towards efficient performance. Sherlock tracks the student's work using two models:
Competence model: How well each goal has been achieved. Any divergence of student performance from the predictions can be considered in updating the student's competence model.
Performance model: How well the student is expected to do at each point of the abstracted problem space. Influences how Sherlock will be providing help at specific points in a problem
Based on the student's expected performance, the performance model provides hints. The hints come in the form of: Action, Outcome, Conclusion, and Option
Level 1: First time asking a hint. Recapitulation hint
Level 2: Good Job rating
Level 3: Okay rating
Level 4: Bad rating
Additional requests result in higher level hints until the problem is solved. If there are no more Conclusion hints, Option hints will be provided.
An Empirical Study
According to the study “Learning by Doing: An Empirical Study of Active Teaching Techniques”, it was suggested that the passive method is not the most effective technique to promote successful engagement within a learning environment. The contemporary research advocates have stated that stimulating the energy of the classroom could serve a more effective purpose compared to the traditional lecture. The current study created by Jana Hackathorn, Erin D. Solomon, Kate L. Blankmeyer, Rachel E. Tenniel, and Amy M. Garczyński presented the four teaching techniques: lecture, demonstrations, discussions, and in-class activities by measuring the effectiveness of each to prove the one which stands out the most.
Lecture
Lecture refers to the phrase “information dump” which means the majority of the class time is taken up by receiving loads of details/ideas which does not allow individuals to interact with the environment while the lessons taken from the class generally eradicates the opportunities of mastering the informative exams. The lack of performing a task limits the chance of improvement. Sometimes the lectures consist of the constructs which provide a sense of support for comprehending the new topics which are introduced.
Hypothesis: For lecture, although it was considered the least effective method of retaining knowledge in an intelligible manner, it could be considered somewhat constructive when it comes to utilizing vocabulary terms. The official hypothesis signifies that the percentage of correct answers on the knowledge level questions would be drastically higher than the comprehension questions.
Demonstrations
Demonstrations are clear presentations performed by individuals in the classroom as a “means of” showing how something works out. The “demonstrations” technique serves an important principle within the classroom as it appears as more “active” for students to get the chance of “first-hand” experiment. The demonstration process engages several students to remain focused upon the occurrence in front of them with the limit of parameters/specific principles.
Hypothesis: The evidence of DEMOS increasing the attention is very minimal as it limits the number of students who are allowed to perform the given task. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the constructs who use the DEMOS technique, students would score less on the knowledge and application and score higher on the comprehension section.
Discussions
Discussions refers to a hybrid form of teaching; students give out information while they also receive from their peers and teachers. This is displayed as the significant core principle of active engagement. The discussions present a stronger sense of knowledge as it allows people to think about what others have stated and then build upon those conceptions mentioned.
Hypothesis: The discussion approach of learning is a more collaborative communication which involves all students in the classroom. The analytical thesis that was made denotes the effectiveness of comprehension level learning improving within this sort of essence which then leads to the drop of knowledge/application related answers turning out accurate during the empirical study.
In-class activities
In class activities are known as the most active form of learning in a classroom environment. Whether individuals work by themselves and then share with their peers and teachers or in large groups that consist of circulating different ideas into one, students are able to visualize the “phenomena” unraveling. This phenomenon could then be utilized in an empirical environment. In some cases, students may seem perplexed by the complexity of topics which could be comprehensible through a form of activities.
Hypothesis: In class activities allow students to exploit and practice administering information to one self for effectual comprehension. Therefore, it was hypothesized that constructs that utilized the ICA method, the students would perform effectively on both comprehension and application level questions rather than the knowledge ones.
The Initial Method
For the performance of proving which method is the most effective, various constructs were instructed to teach a social psychology course throughout a certain period of time. The learning was assessed through the six quizzes and four exams which presented the three constructs of Bloom's intelligible level.
Participants
The participants of this empirical study consisted of 18 men and 33 women who had a GPA of 3.31. About 46% of students were psychology majors and 28% were double majoring in psychology.
The Process
The procedure of the study consisted of a duration of an entire semester. The constructs of each method were not forced upon the instructors, rather they had free will. The assistants who were unaware of the hypotheses were trained before the start of the semester to distinguish between the techniques. In addition there were two researchers that created the quizzes, and were supervised nearly every three weeks. The quizzes which were assigned had a variety of alternatives such as multiple choice, true and false and short response questions. Each construct of the quiz had three questions of each level of Bloom's taxonomy. The instructors over the duration of the semester created the four complex exams which ended up being a part of the student's overall grade.
Measures
Each quiz question consisted of answers that were either marked accurate or inaccurate(no half credit given). The exam grades were just a part of the class syllabus. The same criteria of grading was utilized to mark the exam with a slight difference; the multiple choice was either graded as completely correct or completely incorrect but the short response questions consisted of partial credit. Blank answers were not given any sort of credit.
Results
In order to scrutinize each of the techniques such as lectures, demonstrations, discussions and in class activities, the four repeated measures of ANOVAs were utilized to differentiate the results in between the three levels of Bloom's taxonomy.Using the Mauchly's test it was identified that for the LECT approach, the correct scores on the knowledge level computation turned out to be much lower than comprehension and application. The hypothesis was completely inaccurate. For the DEMO approach, the Mauchly's test significantly indicated that scores on the application level computation were higher than knowledge and somewhat higher than comprehension. The hypothesis was partially accurate. Although the third hypothesis emphasizes that DISC would be most effective for comprehension level computation, this was not accurate according to the results. The results portrayed that the scores on both knowledge and application were significantly higher than comprehension. For the final approach, the results for ICA displayed that scores on comprehension and application were higher than knowledge. This hypothesis turned out to be fully accurate.
Closing Remarks
For the first hypothesis, it was first assumed that the lecture technique would be effective upon the knowledge leveled questions but it was proven wrong with the Mauchly's test. Despite the fact that lectures are known to increase comprehensible skill sets and application related principles, the consciousness of retaining content throughout the semester could be quite challenging. Students tend to complain about the lack of entertainment and knowledge gained at the end of the day. For the second hypothesis of demonstrations being the most efficient for comprehension purposes. The actuality of demonstrations allowing students to apply the information they retain was quite astonishing due to the fact that there are limitations of students who could hands on experience the study while others just sit there and observe. The discussion technique was surprisingly not efficient for comprehending lessons; rather, it was more effective for increasing knowledge and applying information. Although individuals could argue that in a discussion, students tend to retain more information through the sense of understanding one another, this assumption was proven otherwise. In the recent research, it was discovered that students could misguide one another with falsity of information in which the instructor would have to reintegrate the truth to eradicate the misstatement. In certain circumstances, proving the accurate details could be challenging as the false information has been introduced to the students already. The results of the fourth and final hypothesis were notably accurate; it was determined that both comprehension and application level questions were effective upon the increase of mastering the information to a high extent. To conclude, the statement of in class activities being the most efficient for utilizing new facts to further apply it to the real world.
See also
Learning by teaching
4-H
Active learning
Experiential learning
Project-based learning
Procedural knowledge
Trial and error
Vocational education
References
Education theory | 0.785471 | 0.989578 | 0.777285 |
Ecology | Ecology is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history.
Ecology is a branch of biology, and is the study of abundance, biomass, and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment. It encompasses life processes, interactions, and adaptations; movement of materials and energy through living communities; successional development of ecosystems; cooperation, competition, and predation within and between species; and patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes.
Ecology has practical applications in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agroecology, agriculture, forestry, agroforestry, fisheries, mining, tourism), urban planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, basic and applied science, and human social interaction (human ecology).
The word ecology was coined in 1866 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel. The science of ecology as we know it today began with a group of American botanists in the 1890s. Evolutionary concepts relating to adaptation and natural selection are cornerstones of modern ecological theory.
Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living (abiotic) components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, nutrient cycling, and niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment. Ecosystems have biophysical feedback mechanisms that moderate processes acting on living (biotic) and abiotic components of the planet. Ecosystems sustain life-supporting functions and provide ecosystem services like biomass production (food, fuel, fiber, and medicine), the regulation of climate, global biogeochemical cycles, water filtration, soil formation, erosion control, flood protection, and many other natural features of scientific, historical, economic, or intrinsic value.
Levels, scope, and scale of organization
The scope of ecology contains a wide array of interacting levels of organization spanning micro-level (e.g., cells) to a planetary scale (e.g., biosphere) phenomena. Ecosystems, for example, contain abiotic resources and interacting life forms (i.e., individual organisms that aggregate into populations which aggregate into distinct ecological communities). Because ecosystems are dynamic and do not necessarily follow a linear successional route, changes might occur quickly or slowly over thousands of years before specific forest successional stages are brought about by biological processes. An ecosystem's area can vary greatly, from tiny to vast. A single tree is of little consequence to the classification of a forest ecosystem, but is critically relevant to organisms living in and on it. Several generations of an aphid population can exist over the lifespan of a single leaf. Each of those aphids, in turn, supports diverse bacterial communities. The nature of connections in ecological communities cannot be explained by knowing the details of each species in isolation, because the emergent pattern is neither revealed nor predicted until the ecosystem is studied as an integrated whole. Some ecological principles, however, do exhibit collective properties where the sum of the components explain the properties of the whole, such as birth rates of a population being equal to the sum of individual births over a designated time frame.
The main subdisciplines of ecology, population (or community) ecology and ecosystem ecology, exhibit a difference not only in scale but also in two contrasting paradigms in the field. The former focuses on organisms' distribution and abundance, while the latter focuses on materials and energy fluxes.
Hierarchy
The scale of ecological dynamics can operate like a closed system, such as aphids migrating on a single tree, while at the same time remaining open about broader scale influences, such as atmosphere or climate. Hence, ecologists classify ecosystems hierarchically by analyzing data collected from finer scale units, such as vegetation associations, climate, and soil types, and integrate this information to identify emergent patterns of uniform organization and processes that operate on local to regional, landscape, and chronological scales.
To structure the study of ecology into a conceptually manageable framework, the biological world is organized into a nested hierarchy, ranging in scale from genes, to cells, to tissues, to organs, to organisms, to species, to populations, to guilds, to communities, to ecosystems, to biomes, and up to the level of the biosphere. This framework forms a panarchy and exhibits non-linear behaviors; this means that "effect and cause are disproportionate, so that small changes to critical variables, such as the number of nitrogen fixers, can lead to disproportionate, perhaps irreversible, changes in the system properties."
Biodiversity
Biodiversity (an abbreviation of "biological diversity") describes the diversity of life from genes to ecosystems and spans every level of biological organization. The term has several interpretations, and there are many ways to index, measure, characterize, and represent its complex organization. Biodiversity includes species diversity, ecosystem diversity, and genetic diversity and scientists are interested in the way that this diversity affects the complex ecological processes operating at and among these respective levels. Biodiversity plays an important role in ecosystem services which by definition maintain and improve human quality of life. Conservation priorities and management techniques require different approaches and considerations to address the full ecological scope of biodiversity. Natural capital that supports populations is critical for maintaining ecosystem services and species migration (e.g., riverine fish runs and avian insect control) has been implicated as one mechanism by which those service losses are experienced. An understanding of biodiversity has practical applications for species and ecosystem-level conservation planners as they make management recommendations to consulting firms, governments, and industry.
Habitat
The habitat of a species describes the environment over which a species is known to occur and the type of community that is formed as a result. More specifically, "habitats can be defined as regions in environmental space that are composed of multiple dimensions, each representing a biotic or abiotic environmental variable; that is, any component or characteristic of the environment related directly (e.g. forage biomass and quality) or indirectly (e.g. elevation) to the use of a location by the animal." For example, a habitat might be an aquatic or terrestrial environment that can be further categorized as a montane or alpine ecosystem. Habitat shifts provide important evidence of competition in nature where one population changes relative to the habitats that most other individuals of the species occupy. For example, one population of a species of tropical lizard (Tropidurus hispidus) has a flattened body relative to the main populations that live in open savanna. The population that lives in an isolated rock outcrop hides in crevasses where its flattened body offers a selective advantage. Habitat shifts also occur in the developmental life history of amphibians, and in insects that transition from aquatic to terrestrial habitats. Biotope and habitat are sometimes used interchangeably, but the former applies to a community's environment, whereas the latter applies to a species' environment.
Niche
Definitions of the niche date back to 1917, but G. Evelyn Hutchinson made conceptual advances in 1957 by introducing a widely adopted definition: "the set of biotic and abiotic conditions in which a species is able to persist and maintain stable population sizes." The ecological niche is a central concept in the ecology of organisms and is sub-divided into the fundamental and the realized niche. The fundamental niche is the set of environmental conditions under which a species is able to persist. The realized niche is the set of environmental plus ecological conditions under which a species persists. The Hutchinsonian niche is defined more technically as a "Euclidean hyperspace whose dimensions are defined as environmental variables and whose size is a function of the number of values that the environmental values may assume for which an organism has positive fitness."
Biogeographical patterns and range distributions are explained or predicted through knowledge of a species' traits and niche requirements. Species have functional traits that are uniquely adapted to the ecological niche. A trait is a measurable property, phenotype, or characteristic of an organism that may influence its survival. Genes play an important role in the interplay of development and environmental expression of traits. Resident species evolve traits that are fitted to the selection pressures of their local environment. This tends to afford them a competitive advantage and discourages similarly adapted species from having an overlapping geographic range. The competitive exclusion principle states that two species cannot coexist indefinitely by living off the same limiting resource; one will always out-compete the other. When similarly adapted species overlap geographically, closer inspection reveals subtle ecological differences in their habitat or dietary requirements. Some models and empirical studies, however, suggest that disturbances can stabilize the co-evolution and shared niche occupancy of similar species inhabiting species-rich communities. The habitat plus the niche is called the ecotope, which is defined as the full range of environmental and biological variables affecting an entire species.
Niche construction
Organisms are subject to environmental pressures, but they also modify their habitats. The regulatory feedback between organisms and their environment can affect conditions from local (e.g., a beaver pond) to global scales, over time and even after death, such as decaying logs or silica skeleton deposits from marine organisms. The process and concept of ecosystem engineering are related to niche construction, but the former relates only to the physical modifications of the habitat whereas the latter also considers the evolutionary implications of physical changes to the environment and the feedback this causes on the process of natural selection. Ecosystem engineers are defined as: "organisms that directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to other species, by causing physical state changes in biotic or abiotic materials. In so doing they modify, maintain and create habitats."
The ecosystem engineering concept has stimulated a new appreciation for the influence that organisms have on the ecosystem and evolutionary process. The term "niche construction" is more often used in reference to the under-appreciated feedback mechanisms of natural selection imparting forces on the abiotic niche. An example of natural selection through ecosystem engineering occurs in the nests of social insects, including ants, bees, wasps, and termites. There is an emergent homeostasis or homeorhesis in the structure of the nest that regulates, maintains and defends the physiology of the entire colony. Termite mounds, for example, maintain a constant internal temperature through the design of air-conditioning chimneys. The structure of the nests themselves is subject to the forces of natural selection. Moreover, a nest can survive over successive generations, so that progeny inherit both genetic material and a legacy niche that was constructed before their time.
Biome
Biomes are larger units of organization that categorize regions of the Earth's ecosystems, mainly according to the structure and composition of vegetation. There are different methods to define the continental boundaries of biomes dominated by different functional types of vegetative communities that are limited in distribution by climate, precipitation, weather, and other environmental variables. Biomes include tropical rainforest, temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, temperate deciduous forest, taiga, tundra, hot desert, and polar desert. Other researchers have recently categorized other biomes, such as the human and oceanic microbiomes. To a microbe, the human body is a habitat and a landscape. Microbiomes were discovered largely through advances in molecular genetics, which have revealed a hidden richness of microbial diversity on the planet. The oceanic microbiome plays a significant role in the ecological biogeochemistry of the planet's oceans.
Biosphere
The largest scale of ecological organization is the biosphere: the total sum of ecosystems on the planet. Ecological relationships regulate the flux of energy, nutrients, and climate all the way up to the planetary scale. For example, the dynamic history of the planetary atmosphere's CO2 and O2 composition has been affected by the biogenic flux of gases coming from respiration and photosynthesis, with levels fluctuating over time in relation to the ecology and evolution of plants and animals. Ecological theory has also been used to explain self-emergent regulatory phenomena at the planetary scale: for example, the Gaia hypothesis is an example of holism applied in ecological theory. The Gaia hypothesis states that there is an emergent feedback loop generated by the metabolism of living organisms that maintains the core temperature of the Earth and atmospheric conditions within a narrow self-regulating range of tolerance.
Population ecology
Population ecology studies the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the wider environment. A population consists of individuals of the same species that live, interact, and migrate through the same niche and habitat.
A primary law of population ecology is the Malthusian growth model which states, "a population will grow (or decline) exponentially as long as the environment experienced by all individuals in the population remains constant." Simplified population models usually starts with four variables: death, birth, immigration, and emigration.
An example of an introductory population model describes a closed population, such as on an island, where immigration and emigration does not take place. Hypotheses are evaluated with reference to a null hypothesis which states that random processes create the observed data. In these island models, the rate of population change is described by:
where N is the total number of individuals in the population, b and d are the per capita rates of birth and death respectively, and r is the per capita rate of population change.
Using these modeling techniques, Malthus' population principle of growth was later transformed into a model known as the logistic equation by Pierre Verhulst:
where N(t) is the number of individuals measured as biomass density as a function of time, t, r is the maximum per-capita rate of change commonly known as the intrinsic rate of growth, and is the crowding coefficient, which represents the reduction in population growth rate per individual added. The formula states that the rate of change in population size will grow to approach equilibrium, where, when the rates of increase and crowding are balanced, . A common, analogous model fixes the equilibrium, as K, which is known as the "carrying capacity."
Population ecology builds upon these introductory models to further understand demographic processes in real study populations. Commonly used types of data include life history, fecundity, and survivorship, and these are analyzed using mathematical techniques such as matrix algebra. The information is used for managing wildlife stocks and setting harvest quotas. In cases where basic models are insufficient, ecologists may adopt different kinds of statistical methods, such as the Akaike information criterion, or use models that can become mathematically complex as "several competing hypotheses are simultaneously confronted with the data."
Metapopulations and migration
The concept of metapopulations was defined in 1969 as "a population of populations which go extinct locally and recolonize". Metapopulation ecology is another statistical approach that is often used in conservation research. Metapopulation models simplify the landscape into patches of varying levels of quality, and metapopulations are linked by the migratory behaviours of organisms. Animal migration is set apart from other kinds of movement because it involves the seasonal departure and return of individuals from a habitat. Migration is also a population-level phenomenon, as with the migration routes followed by plants as they occupied northern post-glacial environments. Plant ecologists use pollen records that accumulate and stratify in wetlands to reconstruct the timing of plant migration and dispersal relative to historic and contemporary climates. These migration routes involved an expansion of the range as plant populations expanded from one area to another. There is a larger taxonomy of movement, such as commuting, foraging, territorial behavior, stasis, and ranging. Dispersal is usually distinguished from migration because it involves the one-way permanent movement of individuals from their birth population into another population.
In metapopulation terminology, migrating individuals are classed as emigrants (when they leave a region) or immigrants (when they enter a region), and sites are classed either as sources or sinks. A site is a generic term that refers to places where ecologists sample populations, such as ponds or defined sampling areas in a forest. Source patches are productive sites that generate a seasonal supply of juveniles that migrate to other patch locations. Sink patches are unproductive sites that only receive migrants; the population at the site will disappear unless rescued by an adjacent source patch or environmental conditions become more favorable. Metapopulation models examine patch dynamics over time to answer potential questions about spatial and demographic ecology. The ecology of metapopulations is a dynamic process of extinction and colonization. Small patches of lower quality (i.e., sinks) are maintained or rescued by a seasonal influx of new immigrants. A dynamic metapopulation structure evolves from year to year, where some patches are sinks in dry years and are sources when conditions are more favorable. Ecologists use a mixture of computer models and field studies to explain metapopulation structure.
Community ecology
Community ecology is the study of the interactions among a collection of species that inhabit the same geographic area. Community ecologists study the determinants of patterns and processes for two or more interacting species. Research in community ecology might measure species diversity in grasslands in relation to soil fertility. It might also include the analysis of predator-prey dynamics, competition among similar plant species, or mutualistic interactions between crabs and corals.
Ecosystem ecology
Ecosystems may be habitats within biomes that form an integrated whole and a dynamically responsive system having both physical and biological complexes. Ecosystem ecology is the science of determining the fluxes of materials (e.g. carbon, phosphorus) between different pools (e.g., tree biomass, soil organic material). Ecosystem ecologists attempt to determine the underlying causes of these fluxes. Research in ecosystem ecology might measure primary production (g C/m^2) in a wetland in relation to decomposition and consumption rates (g C/m^2/y). This requires an understanding of the community connections between plants (i.e., primary producers) and the decomposers (e.g., fungi and bacteria).
The underlying concept of an ecosystem can be traced back to 1864 in the published work of George Perkins Marsh ("Man and Nature"). Within an ecosystem, organisms are linked to the physical and biological components of their environment to which they are adapted. Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems where the interaction of life processes form self-organizing patterns across different scales of time and space. Ecosystems are broadly categorized as terrestrial, freshwater, atmospheric, or marine. Differences stem from the nature of the unique physical environments that shapes the biodiversity within each. A more recent addition to ecosystem ecology are technoecosystems, which are affected by or primarily the result of human activity.
Food webs
A food web is the archetypal ecological network. Plants capture solar energy and use it to synthesize simple sugars during photosynthesis. As plants grow, they accumulate nutrients and are eaten by grazing herbivores, and the energy is transferred through a chain of organisms by consumption. The simplified linear feeding pathways that move from a basal trophic species to a top consumer is called the food chain. Food chains in an ecological community create a complex food web. Food webs are a type of concept map that is used to illustrate and study pathways of energy and material flows.
Empirical measurements are generally restricted to a specific habitat, such as a cave or a pond, and principles gleaned from small-scale studies are extrapolated to larger systems. Feeding relations require extensive investigations, e.g. into the gut contents of organisms, which can be difficult to decipher, or stable isotopes can be used to trace the flow of nutrient diets and energy through a food web. Despite these limitations, food webs remain a valuable tool in understanding community ecosystems.
Food webs illustrate important principles of ecology: some species have many weak feeding links (e.g., omnivores) while some are more specialized with fewer stronger feeding links (e.g., primary predators). Such linkages explain how ecological communities remain stable over time and eventually can illustrate a "complete" web of life.
The disruption of food webs may have a dramatic impact on the ecology of individual species or whole ecosystems. For instance, the replacement of an ant species by another (invasive) ant species has been shown to affect how elephants reduce tree cover and thus the predation of lions on zebras.
Trophic levels
A trophic level (from Greek troph, τροφή, trophē, meaning "food" or "feeding") is "a group of organisms acquiring a considerable majority of its energy from the lower adjacent level (according to ecological pyramids) nearer the abiotic source." Links in food webs primarily connect feeding relations or trophism among species. Biodiversity within ecosystems can be organized into trophic pyramids, in which the vertical dimension represents feeding relations that become further removed from the base of the food chain up toward top predators, and the horizontal dimension represents the abundance or biomass at each level. When the relative abundance or biomass of each species is sorted into its respective trophic level, they naturally sort into a 'pyramid of numbers'.
Species are broadly categorized as autotrophs (or primary producers), heterotrophs (or consumers), and Detritivores (or decomposers). Autotrophs are organisms that produce their own food (production is greater than respiration) by photosynthesis or chemosynthesis. Heterotrophs are organisms that must feed on others for nourishment and energy (respiration exceeds production). Heterotrophs can be further sub-divided into different functional groups, including primary consumers (strict herbivores), secondary consumers (carnivorous predators that feed exclusively on herbivores), and tertiary consumers (predators that feed on a mix of herbivores and predators). Omnivores do not fit neatly into a functional category because they eat both plant and animal tissues. It has been suggested that omnivores have a greater functional influence as predators because compared to herbivores, they are relatively inefficient at grazing.
Trophic levels are part of the holistic or complex systems view of ecosystems. Each trophic level contains unrelated species that are grouped together because they share common ecological functions, giving a macroscopic view of the system. While the notion of trophic levels provides insight into energy flow and top-down control within food webs, it is troubled by the prevalence of omnivory in real ecosystems. This has led some ecologists to "reiterate that the notion that species clearly aggregate into discrete, homogeneous trophic levels is fiction." Nonetheless, recent studies have shown that real trophic levels do exist, but "above the herbivore trophic level, food webs are better characterized as a tangled web of omnivores."
Keystone species
A keystone species is a species that is connected to a disproportionately large number of other species in the food-web. Keystone species have lower levels of biomass in the trophic pyramid relative to the importance of their role. The many connections that a keystone species holds means that it maintains the organization and structure of entire communities. The loss of a keystone species results in a range of dramatic cascading effects (termed trophic cascades) that alters trophic dynamics, other food web connections, and can cause the extinction of other species. The term keystone species was coined by Robert Paine in 1969 and is a reference to the keystone architectural feature as the removal of a keystone species can result in a community collapse just as the removal of the keystone in an arch can result in the arch's loss of stability.
Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) are commonly cited as an example of a keystone species because they limit the density of sea urchins that feed on kelp. If sea otters are removed from the system, the urchins graze until the kelp beds disappear, and this has a dramatic effect on community structure. Hunting of sea otters, for example, is thought to have led indirectly to the extinction of the Steller's sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas). While the keystone species concept has been used extensively as a conservation tool, it has been criticized for being poorly defined from an operational stance. It is difficult to experimentally determine what species may hold a keystone role in each ecosystem. Furthermore, food web theory suggests that keystone species may not be common, so it is unclear how generally the keystone species model can be applied.
Complexity
Complexity is understood as a large computational effort needed to piece together numerous interacting parts exceeding the iterative memory capacity of the human mind. Global patterns of biological diversity are complex. This biocomplexity stems from the interplay among ecological processes that operate and influence patterns at different scales that grade into each other, such as transitional areas or ecotones spanning landscapes. Complexity stems from the interplay among levels of biological organization as energy, and matter is integrated into larger units that superimpose onto the smaller parts. "What were wholes on one level become parts on a higher one." Small scale patterns do not necessarily explain large scale phenomena, otherwise captured in the expression (coined by Aristotle) 'the sum is greater than the parts'.
"Complexity in ecology is of at least six distinct types: spatial, temporal, structural, process, behavioral, and geometric." From these principles, ecologists have identified emergent and self-organizing phenomena that operate at different environmental scales of influence, ranging from molecular to planetary, and these require different explanations at each integrative level. Ecological complexity relates to the dynamic resilience of ecosystems that transition to multiple shifting steady-states directed by random fluctuations of history. Long-term ecological studies provide important track records to better understand the complexity and resilience of ecosystems over longer temporal and broader spatial scales. These studies are managed by the International Long Term Ecological Network (LTER). The longest experiment in existence is the Park Grass Experiment, which was initiated in 1856. Another example is the Hubbard Brook study, which has been in operation since 1960.
Holism
Holism remains a critical part of the theoretical foundation in contemporary ecological studies. Holism addresses the biological organization of life that self-organizes into layers of emergent whole systems that function according to non-reducible properties. This means that higher-order patterns of a whole functional system, such as an ecosystem, cannot be predicted or understood by a simple summation of the parts. "New properties emerge because the components interact, not because the basic nature of the components is changed."
Ecological studies are necessarily holistic as opposed to reductionistic. Holism has three scientific meanings or uses that identify with ecology: 1) the mechanistic complexity of ecosystems, 2) the practical description of patterns in quantitative reductionist terms where correlations may be identified but nothing is understood about the causal relations without reference to the whole system, which leads to 3) a metaphysical hierarchy whereby the causal relations of larger systems are understood without reference to the smaller parts. Scientific holism differs from mysticism that has appropriated the same term. An example of metaphysical holism is identified in the trend of increased exterior thickness in shells of different species. The reason for a thickness increase can be understood through reference to principles of natural selection via predation without the need to reference or understand the biomolecular properties of the exterior shells.
Relation to evolution
Ecology and evolutionary biology are considered sister disciplines of the life sciences. Natural selection, life history, development, adaptation, populations, and inheritance are examples of concepts that thread equally into ecological and evolutionary theory. Morphological, behavioural, and genetic traits, for example, can be mapped onto evolutionary trees to study the historical development of a species in relation to their functions and roles in different ecological circumstances. In this framework, the analytical tools of ecologists and evolutionists overlap as they organize, classify, and investigate life through common systematic principles, such as phylogenetics or the Linnaean system of taxonomy. The two disciplines often appear together, such as in the title of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. There is no sharp boundary separating ecology from evolution, and they differ more in their areas of applied focus. Both disciplines discover and explain emergent and unique properties and processes operating across different spatial or temporal scales of organization. While the boundary between ecology and evolution is not always clear, ecologists study the abiotic and biotic factors that influence evolutionary processes, and evolution can be rapid, occurring on ecological timescales as short as one generation.
Behavioural ecology
All organisms can exhibit behaviours. Even plants express complex behaviour, including memory and communication. Behavioural ecology is the study of an organism's behaviour in its environment and its ecological and evolutionary implications. Ethology is the study of observable movement or behaviour in animals. This could include investigations of motile sperm of plants, mobile phytoplankton, zooplankton swimming toward the female egg, the cultivation of fungi by weevils, the mating dance of a salamander, or social gatherings of amoeba.
Adaptation is the central unifying concept in behavioural ecology. Behaviours can be recorded as traits and inherited in much the same way that eye and hair colour can. Behaviours can evolve by means of natural selection as adaptive traits conferring functional utilities that increases reproductive fitness.
Predator-prey interactions are an introductory concept into food-web studies as well as behavioural ecology. Prey species can exhibit different kinds of behavioural adaptations to predators, such as avoid, flee, or defend. Many prey species are faced with multiple predators that differ in the degree of danger posed. To be adapted to their environment and face predatory threats, organisms must balance their energy budgets as they invest in different aspects of their life history, such as growth, feeding, mating, socializing, or modifying their habitat. Hypotheses posited in behavioural ecology are generally based on adaptive principles of conservation, optimization, or efficiency. For example, "[t]he threat-sensitive predator avoidance hypothesis predicts that prey should assess the degree of threat posed by different predators and match their behaviour according to current levels of risk" or "[t]he optimal flight initiation distance occurs where expected postencounter fitness is maximized, which depends on the prey's initial fitness, benefits obtainable by not fleeing, energetic escape costs, and expected fitness loss due to predation risk."
Elaborate sexual displays and posturing are encountered in the behavioural ecology of animals. The birds-of-paradise, for example, sing and display elaborate ornaments during courtship. These displays serve a dual purpose of signalling healthy or well-adapted individuals and desirable genes. The displays are driven by sexual selection as an advertisement of quality of traits among suitors.
Cognitive ecology
Cognitive ecology integrates theory and observations from evolutionary ecology and neurobiology, primarily cognitive science, in order to understand the effect that animal interaction with their habitat has on their cognitive systems and how those systems restrict behavior within an ecological and evolutionary framework. "Until recently, however, cognitive scientists have not paid sufficient attention to the fundamental fact that cognitive traits evolved under particular natural settings. With consideration of the selection pressure on cognition, cognitive ecology can contribute intellectual coherence to the multidisciplinary study of cognition." As a study involving the 'coupling' or interactions between organism and environment, cognitive ecology is closely related to enactivism, a field based upon the view that "...we must see the organism and environment as bound together in reciprocal specification and selection...".
Social ecology
Social-ecological behaviours are notable in the social insects, slime moulds, social spiders, human society, and naked mole-rats where eusocialism has evolved. Social behaviours include reciprocally beneficial behaviours among kin and nest mates and evolve from kin and group selection. Kin selection explains altruism through genetic relationships, whereby an altruistic behaviour leading to death is rewarded by the survival of genetic copies distributed among surviving relatives. The social insects, including ants, bees, and wasps are most famously studied for this type of relationship because the male drones are clones that share the same genetic make-up as every other male in the colony. In contrast, group selectionists find examples of altruism among non-genetic relatives and explain this through selection acting on the group; whereby, it becomes selectively advantageous for groups if their members express altruistic behaviours to one another. Groups with predominantly altruistic members survive better than groups with predominantly selfish members.
Coevolution
Ecological interactions can be classified broadly into a host and an associate relationship. A host is any entity that harbours another that is called the associate. Relationships between species that are mutually or reciprocally beneficial are called mutualisms. Examples of mutualism include fungus-growing ants employing agricultural symbiosis, bacteria living in the guts of insects and other organisms, the fig wasp and yucca moth pollination complex, lichens with fungi and photosynthetic algae, and corals with photosynthetic algae. If there is a physical connection between host and associate, the relationship is called symbiosis. Approximately 60% of all plants, for example, have a symbiotic relationship with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi living in their roots forming an exchange network of carbohydrates for mineral nutrients.
Indirect mutualisms occur where the organisms live apart. For example, trees living in the equatorial regions of the planet supply oxygen into the atmosphere that sustains species living in distant polar regions of the planet. This relationship is called commensalism because many others receive the benefits of clean air at no cost or harm to trees supplying the oxygen. If the associate benefits while the host suffers, the relationship is called parasitism. Although parasites impose a cost to their host (e.g., via damage to their reproductive organs or propagules, denying the services of a beneficial partner), their net effect on host fitness is not necessarily negative and, thus, becomes difficult to forecast. Co-evolution is also driven by competition among species or among members of the same species under the banner of reciprocal antagonism, such as grasses competing for growth space. The Red Queen Hypothesis, for example, posits that parasites track down and specialize on the locally common genetic defense systems of its host that drives the evolution of sexual reproduction to diversify the genetic constituency of populations responding to the antagonistic pressure.
Biogeography
Biogeography (an amalgamation of biology and geography) is the comparative study of the geographic distribution of organisms and the corresponding evolution of their traits in space and time. The Journal of Biogeography was established in 1974. Biogeography and ecology share many of their disciplinary roots. For example, the theory of island biogeography, published by the Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson in 1967 is considered one of the fundamentals of ecological theory.
Biogeography has a long history in the natural sciences concerning the spatial distribution of plants and animals. Ecology and evolution provide the explanatory context for biogeographical studies. Biogeographical patterns result from ecological processes that influence range distributions, such as migration and dispersal. and from historical processes that split populations or species into different areas. The biogeographic processes that result in the natural splitting of species explain much of the modern distribution of the Earth's biota. The splitting of lineages in a species is called vicariance biogeography and it is a sub-discipline of biogeography. There are also practical applications in the field of biogeography concerning ecological systems and processes. For example, the range and distribution of biodiversity and invasive species responding to climate change is a serious concern and active area of research in the context of global warming.
r/K selection theory
A population ecology concept is r/K selection theory, one of the first predictive models in ecology used to explain life-history evolution. The premise behind the r/K selection model is that natural selection pressures change according to population density. For example, when an island is first colonized, density of individuals is low. The initial increase in population size is not limited by competition, leaving an abundance of available resources for rapid population growth. These early phases of population growth experience density-independent forces of natural selection, which is called r-selection. As the population becomes more crowded, it approaches the island's carrying capacity, thus forcing individuals to compete more heavily for fewer available resources. Under crowded conditions, the population experiences density-dependent forces of natural selection, called K-selection.
In the r/K-selection model, the first variable r is the intrinsic rate of natural increase in population size and the second variable K is the carrying capacity of a population. Different species evolve different life-history strategies spanning a continuum between these two selective forces. An r-selected species is one that has high birth rates, low levels of parental investment, and high rates of mortality before individuals reach maturity. Evolution favours high rates of fecundity in r-selected species. Many kinds of insects and invasive species exhibit r-selected characteristics. In contrast, a K-selected species has low rates of fecundity, high levels of parental investment in the young, and low rates of mortality as individuals mature. Humans and elephants are examples of species exhibiting K-selected characteristics, including longevity and efficiency in the conversion of more resources into fewer offspring.
Molecular ecology
The important relationship between ecology and genetic inheritance predates modern techniques for molecular analysis. Molecular ecological research became more feasible with the development of rapid and accessible genetic technologies, such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The rise of molecular technologies and the influx of research questions into this new ecological field resulted in the publication Molecular Ecology in 1992. Molecular ecology uses various analytical techniques to study genes in an evolutionary and ecological context. In 1994, John Avise also played a leading role in this area of science with the publication of his book, Molecular Markers, Natural History and Evolution. Newer technologies opened a wave of genetic analysis into organisms once difficult to study from an ecological or evolutionary standpoint, such as bacteria, fungi, and nematodes. Molecular ecology engendered a new research paradigm for investigating ecological questions considered otherwise intractable. Molecular investigations revealed previously obscured details in the tiny intricacies of nature and improved resolution into probing questions about behavioural and biogeographical ecology. For example, molecular ecology revealed promiscuous sexual behaviour and multiple male partners in tree swallows previously thought to be socially monogamous. In a biogeographical context, the marriage between genetics, ecology, and evolution resulted in a new sub-discipline called phylogeography.
Human ecology
Ecology is as much a biological science as it is a human science. Human ecology is an interdisciplinary investigation into the ecology of our species. "Human ecology may be defined: (1) from a bioecological standpoint as the study of man as the ecological dominant in plant and animal communities and systems; (2) from a bioecological standpoint as simply another animal affecting and being affected by his physical environment; and (3) as a human being, somehow different from animal life in general, interacting with physical and modified environments in a distinctive and creative way. A truly interdisciplinary human ecology will most likely address itself to all three." The term was formally introduced in 1921, but many sociologists, geographers, psychologists, and other disciplines were interested in human relations to natural systems centuries prior, especially in the late 19th century.
The ecological complexities human beings are facing through the technological transformation of the planetary biome has brought on the Anthropocene. The unique set of circumstances has generated the need for a new unifying science called coupled human and natural systems that builds upon, but moves beyond the field of human ecology. Ecosystems tie into human societies through the critical and all-encompassing life-supporting functions they sustain. In recognition of these functions and the incapability of traditional economic valuation methods to see the value in ecosystems, there has been a surge of interest in social-natural capital, which provides the means to put a value on the stock and use of information and materials stemming from ecosystem goods and services. Ecosystems produce, regulate, maintain, and supply services of critical necessity and beneficial to human health (cognitive and physiological), economies, and they even provide an information or reference function as a living library giving opportunities for science and cognitive development in children engaged in the complexity of the natural world. Ecosystems relate importantly to human ecology as they are the ultimate base foundation of global economics as every commodity, and the capacity for exchange ultimately stems from the ecosystems on Earth.
Restoration Ecology
Ecology is an employed science of restoration, repairing disturbed sites through human intervention, in natural resource management, and in environmental impact assessments. Edward O. Wilson predicted in 1992 that the 21st century "will be the era of restoration in ecology". Ecological science has boomed in the industrial investment of restoring ecosystems and their processes in abandoned sites after disturbance. Natural resource managers, in forestry, for example, employ ecologists to develop, adapt, and implement ecosystem based methods into the planning, operation, and restoration phases of land-use. Another example of conservation is seen on the east coast of the United States in Boston, MA. The city of Boston implemented the Wetland Ordinance, improving the stability of their wetland environments by implementing soil amendments that will improve groundwater storage and flow, and trimming or removal of vegetation that could cause harm to water quality. Ecological science is used in the methods of sustainable harvesting, disease, and fire outbreak management, in fisheries stock management, for integrating land-use with protected areas and communities, and conservation in complex geo-political landscapes.
Relation to the environment
The environment of ecosystems includes both physical parameters and biotic attributes. It is dynamically interlinked and contains resources for organisms at any time throughout their life cycle. Like ecology, the term environment has different conceptual meanings and overlaps with the concept of nature. Environment "includes the physical world, the social world of human relations and the built world of human creation." The physical environment is external to the level of biological organization under investigation, including abiotic factors such as temperature, radiation, light, chemistry, climate and geology. The biotic environment includes genes, cells, organisms, members of the same species (conspecifics) and other species that share a habitat.
The distinction between external and internal environments, however, is an abstraction parsing life and environment into units or facts that are inseparable in reality. There is an interpenetration of cause and effect between the environment and life. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, apply to ecology by means of its physical state. With an understanding of metabolic and thermodynamic principles, a complete accounting of energy and material flow can be traced through an ecosystem. In this way, the environmental and ecological relations are studied through reference to conceptually manageable and isolated material parts. After the effective environmental components are understood through reference to their causes; however, they conceptually link back together as an integrated whole, or holocoenotic system as it was once called. This is known as the dialectical approach to ecology. The dialectical approach examines the parts but integrates the organism and the environment into a dynamic whole (or umwelt). Change in one ecological or environmental factor can concurrently affect the dynamic state of an entire ecosystem.
Disturbance and resilience
A disturbance is any process that changes or removes biomass from a community, such as a fire, flood, drought, or predation. Disturbances are both the cause and product of natural fluctuations within an ecological community. Biodiversity can protect ecosystems from disturbances.
The effect of a disturbance is often hard to predict, but there are numerous examples in which a single species can massively disturb an ecosystem. For example, a single-celled protozoan has been able to kill up to 100% of sea urchins in some coral reefs in the Red Sea and Western Indian Ocean. Sea urchins enable complex reef ecosystems to thrive by eating algae that would otherwise inhibit coral growth. Similarly, invasive species can wreak havoc on ecosystems. For instance, invasive Burmese pythons have caused a 98% decline of small mammals in the Everglades.
Metabolism and the early atmosphere
The Earth was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. As it cooled and a crust and oceans formed, its atmosphere transformed from being dominated by hydrogen to one composed mostly of methane and ammonia. Over the next billion years, the metabolic activity of life transformed the atmosphere into a mixture of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. These gases changed the way that light from the sun hit the Earth's surface and greenhouse effects trapped heat. There were untapped sources of free energy within the mixture of reducing and oxidizing gasses that set the stage for primitive ecosystems to evolve and, in turn, the atmosphere also evolved.
Throughout history, the Earth's atmosphere and biogeochemical cycles have been in a dynamic equilibrium with planetary ecosystems. The history is characterized by periods of significant transformation followed by millions of years of stability. The evolution of the earliest organisms, likely anaerobic methanogen microbes, started the process by converting atmospheric hydrogen into methane (4H2 + CO2 → CH4 + 2H2O). Anoxygenic photosynthesis reduced hydrogen concentrations and increased atmospheric methane, by converting hydrogen sulfide into water or other sulfur compounds (for example, 2H2S + CO2 + hv → CH2O + H2O + 2S). Early forms of fermentation also increased levels of atmospheric methane. The transition to an oxygen-dominant atmosphere (the Great Oxidation) did not begin until approximately 2.4–2.3 billion years ago, but photosynthetic processes started 0.3 to 1 billion years prior.
Radiation: heat, temperature and light
The biology of life operates within a certain range of temperatures. Heat is a form of energy that regulates temperature. Heat affects growth rates, activity, behaviour, and primary production. Temperature is largely dependent on the incidence of solar radiation. The latitudinal and longitudinal spatial variation of temperature greatly affects climates and consequently the distribution of biodiversity and levels of primary production in different ecosystems or biomes across the planet. Heat and temperature relate importantly to metabolic activity. Poikilotherms, for example, have a body temperature that is largely regulated and dependent on the temperature of the external environment. In contrast, homeotherms regulate their internal body temperature by expending metabolic energy.
There is a relationship between light, primary production, and ecological energy budgets. Sunlight is the primary input of energy into the planet's ecosystems. Light is composed of electromagnetic energy of different wavelengths. Radiant energy from the sun generates heat, provides photons of light measured as active energy in the chemical reactions of life, and also acts as a catalyst for genetic mutation. Plants, algae, and some bacteria absorb light and assimilate the energy through photosynthesis. Organisms capable of assimilating energy by photosynthesis or through inorganic fixation of H2S are autotrophs. Autotrophs—responsible for primary production—assimilate light energy which becomes metabolically stored as potential energy in the form of biochemical enthalpic bonds.
Physical environments
Water
Diffusion of carbon dioxide and oxygen is approximately 10,000 times slower in water than in air. When soils are flooded, they quickly lose oxygen, becoming hypoxic (an environment with O2 concentration below 2 mg/liter) and eventually completely anoxic where anaerobic bacteria thrive among the roots. Water also influences the intensity and spectral composition of light as it reflects off the water surface and submerged particles. Aquatic plants exhibit a wide variety of morphological and physiological adaptations that allow them to survive, compete, and diversify in these environments. For example, their roots and stems contain large air spaces (aerenchyma) that regulate the efficient transportation of gases (for example, CO2 and O2) used in respiration and photosynthesis. Salt water plants (halophytes) have additional specialized adaptations, such as the development of special organs for shedding salt and osmoregulating their internal salt (NaCl) concentrations, to live in estuarine, brackish, or oceanic environments. Anaerobic soil microorganisms in aquatic environments use nitrate, manganese ions, ferric ions, sulfate, carbon dioxide, and some organic compounds; other microorganisms are facultative anaerobes and use oxygen during respiration when the soil becomes drier. The activity of soil microorganisms and the chemistry of the water reduces the oxidation-reduction potentials of the water. Carbon dioxide, for example, is reduced to methane (CH4) by methanogenic bacteria. The physiology of fish is also specially adapted to compensate for environmental salt levels through osmoregulation. Their gills form electrochemical gradients that mediate salt excretion in salt water and uptake in fresh water.
Gravity
The shape and energy of the land are significantly affected by gravitational forces. On a large scale, the distribution of gravitational forces on the earth is uneven and influences the shape and movement of tectonic plates as well as influencing geomorphic processes such as orogeny and erosion. These forces govern many of the geophysical properties and distributions of ecological biomes across the Earth. On the organismal scale, gravitational forces provide directional cues for plant and fungal growth (gravitropism), orientation cues for animal migrations, and influence the biomechanics and size of animals. Ecological traits, such as allocation of biomass in trees during growth are subject to mechanical failure as gravitational forces influence the position and structure of branches and leaves. The cardiovascular systems of animals are functionally adapted to overcome the pressure and gravitational forces that change according to the features of organisms (e.g., height, size, shape), their behaviour (e.g., diving, running, flying), and the habitat occupied (e.g., water, hot deserts, cold tundra).
Pressure
Climatic and osmotic pressure places physiological constraints on organisms, especially those that fly and respire at high altitudes, or dive to deep ocean depths. These constraints influence vertical limits of ecosystems in the biosphere, as organisms are physiologically sensitive and adapted to atmospheric and osmotic water pressure differences. For example, oxygen levels decrease with decreasing pressure and are a limiting factor for life at higher altitudes. Water transportation by plants is another important ecophysiological process affected by osmotic pressure gradients. Water pressure in the depths of oceans requires that organisms adapt to these conditions. For example, diving animals such as whales, dolphins, and seals are specially adapted to deal with changes in sound due to water pressure differences. Differences between hagfish species provide another example of adaptation to deep-sea pressure through specialized protein adaptations.
Wind and turbulence
Turbulent forces in air and water affect the environment and ecosystem distribution, form, and dynamics. On a planetary scale, ecosystems are affected by circulation patterns in the global trade winds. Wind power and the turbulent forces it creates can influence heat, nutrient, and biochemical profiles of ecosystems. For example, wind running over the surface of a lake creates turbulence, mixing the water column and influencing the environmental profile to create thermally layered zones, affecting how fish, algae, and other parts of the aquatic ecosystem are structured. Wind speed and turbulence also influence evapotranspiration rates and energy budgets in plants and animals. Wind speed, temperature and moisture content can vary as winds travel across different land features and elevations. For example, the westerlies come into contact with the coastal and interior mountains of western North America to produce a rain shadow on the leeward side of the mountain. The air expands and moisture condenses as the winds increase in elevation; this is called orographic lift and can cause precipitation. This environmental process produces spatial divisions in biodiversity, as species adapted to wetter conditions are range-restricted to the coastal mountain valleys and unable to migrate across the xeric ecosystems (e.g., of the Columbia Basin in western North America) to intermix with sister lineages that are segregated to the interior mountain systems.
Fire
Plants convert carbon dioxide into biomass and emit oxygen into the atmosphere. By approximately 350 million years ago (the end of the Devonian period), photosynthesis had brought the concentration of atmospheric oxygen above 17%, which allowed combustion to occur. Fire releases CO2 and converts fuel into ash and tar. Fire is a significant ecological parameter that raises many issues pertaining to its control and suppression. While the issue of fire in relation to ecology and plants has been recognized for a long time, Charles Cooper brought attention to the issue of forest fires in relation to the ecology of forest fire suppression and management in the 1960s.
Native North Americans were among the first to influence fire regimes by controlling their spread near their homes or by lighting fires to stimulate the production of herbaceous foods and basketry materials. Fire creates a heterogeneous ecosystem age and canopy structure, and the altered soil nutrient supply and cleared canopy structure opens new ecological niches for seedling establishment. Most ecosystems are adapted to natural fire cycles. Plants, for example, are equipped with a variety of adaptations to deal with forest fires. Some species (e.g., Pinus halepensis) cannot germinate until after their seeds have lived through a fire or been exposed to certain compounds from smoke. Environmentally triggered germination of seeds is called serotiny. Fire plays a major role in the persistence and resilience of ecosystems.
Soils
Soil is the living top layer of mineral and organic dirt that covers the surface of the planet. It is the chief organizing centre of most ecosystem functions, and it is of critical importance in agricultural science and ecology. The decomposition of dead organic matter (for example, leaves on the forest floor), results in soils containing minerals and nutrients that feed into plant production. The whole of the planet's soil ecosystems is called the pedosphere where a large biomass of the Earth's biodiversity organizes into trophic levels. Invertebrates that feed and shred larger leaves, for example, create smaller bits for smaller organisms in the feeding chain. Collectively, these organisms are the detritivores that regulate soil formation. Tree roots, fungi, bacteria, worms, ants, beetles, centipedes, spiders, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and other less familiar creatures all work to create the trophic web of life in soil ecosystems. Soils form composite phenotypes where inorganic matter is enveloped into the physiology of a whole community. As organisms feed and migrate through soils they physically displace materials, an ecological process called bioturbation. This aerates soils and stimulates heterotrophic growth and production. Soil microorganisms are influenced by and are fed back into the trophic dynamics of the ecosystem. No single axis of causality can be discerned to segregate the biological from geomorphological systems in soils. Paleoecological studies of soils places the origin for bioturbation to a time before the Cambrian period. Other events, such as the evolution of trees and the colonization of land in the Devonian period played a significant role in the early development of ecological trophism in soils.
Biogeochemistry and climate
Ecologists study and measure nutrient budgets to understand how these materials are regulated, flow, and recycled through the environment. This research has led to an understanding that there is global feedback between ecosystems and the physical parameters of this planet, including minerals, soil, pH, ions, water, and atmospheric gases. Six major elements (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus; H, C, N, O, S, and P) form the constitution of all biological macromolecules and feed into the Earth's geochemical processes. From the smallest scale of biology, the combined effect of billions upon billions of ecological processes amplify and ultimately regulate the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth. Understanding the relations and cycles mediated between these elements and their ecological pathways has significant bearing toward understanding global biogeochemistry.
The ecology of global carbon budgets gives one example of the linkage between biodiversity and biogeochemistry. It is estimated that the Earth's oceans hold 40,000 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon, that vegetation and soil hold 2070 Gt, and that fossil fuel emissions are 6.3 Gt carbon per year. There have been major restructurings in these global carbon budgets during the Earth's history, regulated to a large extent by the ecology of the land. For example, through the early-mid Eocene volcanic outgassing, the oxidation of methane stored in wetlands, and seafloor gases increased atmospheric CO2 (carbon dioxide) concentrations to levels as high as 3500 ppm.
In the Oligocene, from twenty-five to thirty-two million years ago, there was another significant restructuring of the global carbon cycle as grasses evolved a new mechanism of photosynthesis, C4 photosynthesis, and expanded their ranges. This new pathway evolved in response to the drop in atmospheric CO2 concentrations below 550 ppm. The relative abundance and distribution of biodiversity alters the dynamics between organisms and their environment such that ecosystems can be both cause and effect in relation to climate change. Human-driven modifications to the planet's ecosystems (e.g., disturbance, biodiversity loss, agriculture) contributes to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. Transformation of the global carbon cycle in the next century is projected to raise planetary temperatures, lead to more extreme fluctuations in weather, alter species distributions, and increase extinction rates. The effect of global warming is already being registered in melting glaciers, melting mountain ice caps, and rising sea levels. Consequently, species distributions are changing along waterfronts and in continental areas where migration patterns and breeding grounds are tracking the prevailing shifts in climate. Large sections of permafrost are also melting to create a new mosaic of flooded areas having increased rates of soil decomposition activity that raises methane (CH4) emissions. There is concern over increases in atmospheric methane in the context of the global carbon cycle, because methane is a greenhouse gas that is 23 times more effective at absorbing long-wave radiation than CO2 on a 100-year time scale. Hence, there is a relationship between global warming, decomposition and respiration in soils and wetlands producing significant climate feedbacks and globally altered biogeochemical cycles.
History
Early beginnings
Ecology has a complex origin, due in large part to its interdisciplinary nature. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Hippocrates and Aristotle were among the first to record observations on natural history. However, they viewed life in terms of essentialism, where species were conceptualized as static unchanging things while varieties were seen as aberrations of an idealized type. This contrasts against the modern understanding of ecological theory where varieties are viewed as the real phenomena of interest and having a role in the origins of adaptations by means of natural selection. Early conceptions of ecology, such as a balance and regulation in nature can be traced to Herodotus (died c. 425 BC), who described one of the earliest accounts of mutualism in his observation of "natural dentistry". Basking Nile crocodiles, he noted, would open their mouths to give sandpipers safe access to pluck leeches out, giving nutrition to the sandpiper and oral hygiene for the crocodile. Aristotle was an early influence on the philosophical development of ecology. He and his student Theophrastus made extensive observations on plant and animal migrations, biogeography, physiology, and their behavior, giving an early analogue to the modern concept of an ecological niche.
Ernst Haeckel (left) and Eugenius Warming (right), two founders of ecology
Ecological concepts such as food chains, population regulation, and productivity were first developed in the 1700s, through the published works of microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) and botanist Richard Bradley (1688?–1732). Biogeographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an early pioneer in ecological thinking and was among the first to recognize ecological gradients, where species are replaced or altered in form along environmental gradients, such as a cline forming along a rise in elevation. Humboldt drew inspiration from Isaac Newton, as he developed a form of "terrestrial physics". In Newtonian fashion, he brought a scientific exactitude for measurement into natural history and even alluded to concepts that are the foundation of a modern ecological law on species-to-area relationships. Natural historians, such as Humboldt, James Hutton, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (among others) laid the foundations of the modern ecological sciences. The term "ecology" was coined by Ernst Haeckel in his book Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866). Haeckel was a zoologist, artist, writer, and later in life a professor of comparative anatomy.
Opinions differ on who was the founder of modern ecological theory. Some mark Haeckel's definition as the beginning; others say it was Eugenius Warming with the writing of Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities (1895), or Carl Linnaeus' principles on the economy of nature that matured in the early 18th century. Linnaeus founded an early branch of ecology that he called the economy of nature. His works influenced Charles Darwin, who adopted Linnaeus' phrase on the economy or polity of nature in The Origin of Species. Linnaeus was the first to frame the balance of nature as a testable hypothesis. Haeckel, who admired Darwin's work, defined ecology in reference to the economy of nature, which has led some to question whether ecology and the economy of nature are synonymous.
From Aristotle until Darwin, the natural world was predominantly considered static and unchanging. Prior to The Origin of Species, there was little appreciation or understanding of the dynamic and reciprocal relations between organisms, their adaptations, and the environment. An exception is the 1789 publication Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White (1720–1793), considered by some to be one of the earliest texts on ecology. While Charles Darwin is mainly noted for his treatise on evolution, he was one of the founders of soil ecology, and he made note of the first ecological experiment in The Origin of Species. Evolutionary theory changed the way that researchers approached the ecological sciences.
Since 1900
Modern ecology is a young science that first attracted substantial scientific attention toward the end of the 19th century (around the same time that evolutionary studies were gaining scientific interest). The scientist Ellen Swallow Richards adopted the term "oekology" (which eventually morphed into home economics) in the U.S. as early as 1892.
In the early 20th century, ecology transitioned from a more descriptive form of natural history to a more analytical form of scientific natural history. Frederic Clements published the first American ecology book in 1905, presenting the idea of plant communities as a superorganism. This publication launched a debate between ecological holism and individualism that lasted until the 1970s. Clements' superorganism concept proposed that ecosystems progress through regular and determined stages of seral development that are analogous to the developmental stages of an organism. The Clementsian paradigm was challenged by Henry Gleason, who stated that ecological communities develop from the unique and coincidental association of individual organisms. This perceptual shift placed the focus back onto the life histories of individual organisms and how this relates to the development of community associations.
The Clementsian superorganism theory was an overextended application of an idealistic form of holism. The term "holism" was coined in 1926 by Jan Christiaan Smuts, a South African general and polarizing historical figure who was inspired by Clements' superorganism concept. Around the same time, Charles Elton pioneered the concept of food chains in his classical book Animal Ecology. Elton defined ecological relations using concepts of food chains, food cycles, and food size, and described numerical relations among different functional groups and their relative abundance. Elton's 'food cycle' was replaced by 'food web' in a subsequent ecological text. Alfred J. Lotka brought in many theoretical concepts applying thermodynamic principles to ecology.
In 1942, Raymond Lindeman wrote a landmark paper on the trophic dynamics of ecology, which was published posthumously after initially being rejected for its theoretical emphasis. Trophic dynamics became the foundation for much of the work to follow on energy and material flow through ecosystems. Robert MacArthur advanced mathematical theory, predictions, and tests in ecology in the 1950s, which inspired a resurgent school of theoretical mathematical ecologists. Ecology also has developed through contributions from other nations, including Russia's Vladimir Vernadsky and his founding of the biosphere concept in the 1920s and Japan's Kinji Imanishi and his concepts of harmony in nature and habitat segregation in the 1950s. Scientific recognition of contributions to ecology from non-English-speaking cultures is hampered by language and translation barriers.
Ecology surged in popular and scientific interest during the 1960–1970s environmental movement. There are strong historical and scientific ties between ecology, environmental management, and protection. The historical emphasis and poetic naturalistic writings advocating the protection of wild places by notable ecologists in the history of conservation biology, such as Aldo Leopold and Arthur Tansley, have been seen as far removed from urban centres where, it is claimed, the concentration of pollution and environmental degradation is located. Palamar (2008) notes an overshadowing by mainstream environmentalism of pioneering women in the early 1900s who fought for urban health ecology (then called euthenics) and brought about changes in environmental legislation. Women such as Ellen Swallow Richards and Julia Lathrop, among others, were precursors to the more popularized environmental movements after the 1950s.
In 1962, marine biologist and ecologist Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring helped to mobilize the environmental movement by alerting the public to toxic pesticides, such as DDT, bioaccumulating in the environment. Carson used ecological science to link the release of environmental toxins to human and ecosystem health. Since then, ecologists have worked to bridge their understanding of the degradation of the planet's ecosystems with environmental politics, law, restoration, and natural resources management.
See also
Carrying capacity
Chemical ecology
Climate justice
Circles of Sustainability
Cultural ecology
Dialectical naturalism
Ecological death
Ecological empathy
Ecological overshoot
Ecological psychology
Ecology movement
Ecosophy
Ecopsychology
Human ecology
Industrial ecology
Information ecology
Landscape ecology
Natural resource
Normative science
Philosophy of ecology
Political ecology
Theoretical ecology
Sensory ecology
Sexecology
Spiritual ecology
Sustainable development
Lists
Glossary of ecology
Index of biology articles
List of ecologists
Outline of biology
Terminology of ecology
Notes
References
External links
The Nature Education Knowledge Project: Ecology
Biogeochemistry
Emergence | 0.777909 | 0.999069 | 0.777185 |
Community of practice | A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger significantly expanded on this concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.
A CoP can form around members' shared interests or goals. Through being part of a CoP, the members learn from each other and develop their identities.
CoPs can engage in community practices in physical settings (for example, in a lunchroom at work, an office, a factory floor), but CoP members are not necessarily co-located. They can form a "virtual community of practice" (VCoP) when the CoP is primarily located in online spaces such as discussion boards, newsgroups, or social media. Similar to a VCoP, a "mobile community of practice" (MCoP) forms when members primarily engage in community practices via mobile phones.
Communities of practice have existed for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences through storytelling. The idea is rooted in American pragmatism, especially C. S. Peirce's concept of the "community of inquiry", as well as John Dewey's principle of learning through occupation.
Overview
For Etienne Wenger, learning in a CoP is central to identity because learning is conceptualized as social participation – the individual actively participates in the practices of social communities, thus developing their role and identity within the community. In this context, a community of practice is a group of individuals with shared interests or goals who develop both their individual and shared identities through community participation.
The structural characteristics of a community of practice are redefined to a domain of knowledge, a notion of community and a practice:
Domain: A domain of knowledge creates common ground, inspires participation, guides learning, and gives meaning to the actions of the individuals and community.
Community: The notion of a community creates the social fabric for learning. A strong community fosters interactions and encourages people to collaborate and share ideas.
Practice: While the domain provides a shared community interest or goal, the practice is the specific focus around which the community develops, shares and maintains its core of knowledge.
In many organizations, communities of practice are integral to the organization structure. These communities take on knowledge stewarding tasks that were previously covered by more formal organizational structures. Both formal and informal communities of practice may be established in an organization. There is a great deal of interest within organizations to encourage, support, and sponsor communities of practice to benefit from shared knowledge that may lead to higher productivity. Communities of practice are viewed by many within business settings as a means to explicate tacit knowledge, or the "know-how" that is difficult to articulate.
An important aspect and function of communities of practice is increasing organization performance. Lesser and Storck identify four areas of organizational performance that can be affected by communities of practice:
Decreasing the learning curve for new employees
Responding more rapidly to customer needs and inquiries
Reducing rework and preventing "reinvention of the wheel"
Generating new ideas for products and services
Types
Compared to functional or project teams
Collaboration constellations differ in various ways. Some are under organizational control (e.g., teams), whereas others, like CoPs, are self-organized or under the control of individuals. Researchers have studied how collaboration types vary in their temporal or boundary focus, and the basis of their members' relationships.
A project team differs from a community of practice in several ways.
A project team is driven by deliverables with shared goals, milestones and results.
Similar to a CoP, a project team meets to share and exchange information and experiences, but team membership is defined by the task.
A project team typically has designated members who have consistent roles during the project.
A project team is dissolved once its mission is accomplished.
By contrast,
A community of practice is often organically created, with as many objectives as members of that community.
Community membership is defined by the knowledge of its members.
CoP membership tend to change more often, with members taking on new roles within the community as interests and needs arise.
A community of practice can exist as long as the members believe they have something to contribute to or gain.
Versus communities of interest
In some cases, it may be useful to differentiate CoP from a community of interest (CoI).
Community of interest
A group of people interested in sharing information and discussing a topic that interests them.
Members are not necessarily experts or practitioners of the topic around which the CoI has formed.
The purpose of the CoI is to provide a place for people with common interests to exchange information, ask questions, and express their opinions about the topic.
CoI membership is not dependent on expertise – one only needs to be interested in the subject.
Community of practice
In contrast, a CoP is a group of active practitioners.
The purpose of a CoP is to provide a way for practitioners to share practices, ask questions, and support each other.
Membership is dependent on expertise – members may have some experience performing in the role or subject area of the CoP.
Benefits
Social capital
Social capital is a multi-dimensional concept with public and private facets. That is, social capital may provide value to both the individual and the group as a whole. As participants build informal connections in their community of practice, they also share their expertise, learn from others, participate in the group, and demonstrate their expertise - all of which can be viewed as acquiring social capital.
Knowledge management
Wasko and Faraj describe three kinds of knowledge: knowledge as object, knowledge embedded within individuals, and knowledge embedded in a community. CoPs are associated with finding, sharing, transferring, and archiving knowledge, as well as making explicit "expertise", or articulating tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is considered to be valuable context-based experiences that cannot easily be captured, codified and stored.
Because knowledge management is seen "primarily as a problem of capturing, organizing, and retrieving information, evoking notions of databases, documents, query languages, and data mining", the community of practice is viewed as a potential rich source for helpful information in the form of actual experiences; in other words, best practices. Thus, for knowledge management, if community practices within a CoP can be codified and archived, they provide rich content and contexts that can be accessed for future use.
Factors
Individuals
Members of CoPs are thought to be more efficient and effective conduits of information and experiences. While organizations tend to provide manuals to meet employee training needs, CoPs help foster the process of storytelling among colleagues, which helps them strengthen their skills.
Studies have shown that workers spend a third of their time looking for information and are five times more likely to turn to a co-worker than an explicit source of information (book, manual, or database). Conferring with CoP members saves time because community members have tacit knowledge, which can be difficult to store and retrieve for people unfamiliar with the CoP. For example, someone might share one of their best ways of responding to a situation based on their experiences, which may enable another person to avoid mistakes, thus shortening the learning curve. In a CoP, members can openly discuss and brainstorm about a project, which can lead to new capabilities. The type of information that is shared and learned in a CoP is boundless. Paul Duguid distinguishes tacit knowledge (knowing how) from explicit knowledge (knowing what). Performing optimally in a job requires the application of theory into practice. CoPs help individuals bridge the gap between knowing what and knowing how.
As members of CoPs, individuals report increased communication with people (professionals, interested parties, hobbyists), less dependence on geographic proximity, and the generation of new knowledge. This assumes that interactions occur naturally when individuals come together. However, social and interpersonal factors play a role in the interaction, and research shows that some individuals share or withhold knowledge and expertise from others because their knowledge relates to their professional identities, position, and interpersonal relationships.
Social presence
Communicating with others in a CoP involves creating social presence. Chih-Hsiung defines social presence as "the degree of salience of another person in an interaction and the consequent salience of an interpersonal relationship". Social presence may affect the likelihood for an individual to participate in a CoP (especially in online environments and virtual communities of practice). CoP management often encounter barriers that inhibit knowledge exchange between members. Reasons for these barriers may include egos and personal attacks, large overwhelming CoPs, and time constraints.
Motivation
Motivation to share knowledge is critical to success in communities of practice. Studies show that members are motivated to become active participants in a CoP when they view knowledge as a public good, a moral obligation and/or a community interest. CoP members can also be motivated to participate through tangible returns (promotion, raises or bonuses), intangible returns (reputation, self-esteem) and community interest (exchange of practice related knowledge, interaction).
Collaboration
Collaboration is essential to ensure that communities of practice thrive. In a study on knowledge exchange in a business network, Sveiby and Simons found that more seasoned colleagues tend to foster a more collaborative culture. Additionally they noted that a higher educational level predicted a tendency to favor collaboration.
Cultivating successful CoPs
What makes a community of practice succeed depends on the purpose and objective of the community as well as the interests and resources of community members. Wenger identified seven actions to cultivate communities of practice:
Design the community to evolve naturally – Because the nature of a community of practice is dynamic, in that the interests, goals, and members are subject to change, CoP forums should be designed to support shifts in focus.
Create opportunities for open dialog within and with outside perspectives – While the members and their knowledge are the CoP's most valuable resource, it is also beneficial to look outside of the CoP to understand different possibilities for achieving their learning goals.
Welcome and allow different levels of participation – Wenger identifies 3 main levels of participation. 1) The core group that participates intensely in the community through discussions and projects. This group typically takes on leadership roles in guiding the group. 2) The active group that attends and participates regularly, but not to the level of the core group. 3) The peripheral group who, while passive participants in the community, still learn from their level of involvement. Wenger notes that the third group typically represents the majority of the community.
Develop both public and private community spaces – While CoPs typically operate in public spaces where all members share, discuss and explore ideas, they should also offer private exchanges. Different CoP members could coordinate relationships among members and resources in an individualized approach based on specific needs.
Focus on the value of the community – CoPs should create opportunities for participants to explicitly discuss the value and productivity of their participation in the group.
Combine familiarity and excitement – CoPs should offer the expected learning opportunities as part of their structure, and opportunities for members to shape their learning experience together by brainstorming and examining the conventional and radical wisdom related to their topic.
Find and nurture a regular rhythm for the community – CoPs should coordinate a thriving cycle of activities and events that allow members to regularly meet, reflect, and evolve. The rhythm, or pace, should maintain an anticipated level of engagement to sustain the vibrancy of the community, yet not so fast-paced that it becomes unwieldy and overwhelming.
History
Since the publication of "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation", communities of practice have been the focus of attention, first as a theory of learning and later as part of the field of knowledge management. Andrew Cox offers a more critical view of the different ways in which the term communities of practice can be interpreted.
Early years
To understand how learning occurs outside the classroom, Lave and Wenger studied how newcomers or novices become established community members within an apprenticeship. Lave and Wenger first used the term communities of practice to describe learning through practice and participation, which they described as situated learning.
The process by which a community member becomes part of a community occurs through legitimate peripheral participation. Legitimation and participation define ways of belonging to a community, whereas peripherality and participation are concerned with location and identity in the social world.
Lave and Wenger's research examined how a community and its members learn within apprenticeships. When newcomers join an established community, they initially observe and perform simple tasks in basic roles while they learn community norms and practices. For example, an apprentice electrician might watch and learn through observation before doing any electrical work, but would eventually take on more complicated electrical tasks. Lave and Wenger described this socialization process as legitimate peripheral participation. Lave and Wenger referred to a "community of practice" as a group that shares a common interest and desire to learn from and contribute to the community.
Later years
In his later work, Wenger shifted his focus from legitimate peripheral participation toward tensions that emerge from dualities. He identifies four dualities that exist in communities of practice: participation-reification, designed-emergent, identification-negotiability and local-global. The participation-reification duality has been a particular focus in the field of knowledge management.
Wenger describes three dimensions of practice that support community cohesion: mutual engagement, negotiation of a joint enterprise and shared repertoire.
Mutual Engagement: Through participation in the community, members establish norms and build relationships. In doing so, they develop a shared understanding for how to interpret ideas or events. For example, community members might share similar technical jargon or inside jokes, but new members need to learn about their meaning through mutual engagement. These relationships bind the community members as a social entity.
Joint Enterprise: Community members share similar goals, but they may have different motivations. Joint enterprise refers to the negotiation of those goals as a community, hence "joint". When community members negotiate a joint enterprise, they also develop mutual accountability for their actions within the community. These actions include how to directly attain their goals, as well as more implicit norms such as what topics can or cannot be discussed; what tools can or cannot be used; or what actions can or cannot be taken in different circumstances.
Shared Repertoire: The community produces communal resources known as shared repertoire. This is used in the pursuit of their joint enterprise and can include both literal and symbolic meanings. For example, shared repertoire can include physical tools like a communal document or manual, or intangible tools like community routines and concepts.
Society and culture
Examples
The communities Lave and Wenger studied were naturally forming as practitioners of craft and skill-based activities met to share experiences and insights.
Lave and Wenger observed situated learning within a community of practice among Yucatán midwives, Liberian tailors, navy quartermasters and meat cutters, and insurance claims processors. Other fields have used the concept of CoPs in education, sociolinguistics, material anthropology, medical education, second language acquisition, Parliamentary Budget Offices, health care and business sectors, and child mental health practice (AMBIT).
A famous example of a community of practice within an organization is the Xerox customer service representatives who repaired machines. The Xerox reps began exchanging repair tips and tricks in informal meetings over breakfast or lunch. Eventually, Xerox saw the value of these interactions and created the Eureka project, which allowed these interactions to be shared across its global network of representatives. The Eureka database is estimated to have saved the corporation $100 million.
Examples of large virtual CoPs include:
Wikipedia
Healthcare Information For All (HIFA)
Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA)
See also
Adaptive management
Discourse community
Distributed leadership
Duality (CoPs)
Guild
Knowledge transfer
Knowledge tagging
Landscape of practice
Learning community
Learning organization
Network of practice
Organizational learning
Personal network
Professional learning community
Social environment
Situated cognition
Situated learning
Teamwork
Thought collective
Value network
Value network analysis
Virtual community of practice
References
Further reading
Gannon-Leary, P.M. & Fontainha, E. "Communities of Practice and virtual learning communities: benefits, barriers and success factors" ELearning Papers 26 Sept 2007 [Accessed Nov 2007]
Lesser, E.L., Fontaine, M.A. & Slusher J.A., Knowledge and Communities, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000
Saint-Onge, H & Wallace, D, Leveraging Communities of Practice, Butterworth Heinemann, 2003.
1991 introductions
Learning
Practice
Educational psychology
Community building
Management | 0.782203 | 0.993491 | 0.777112 |
Situation, task, action, result | The situation, task, action, result (STAR) format is a technique used by interviewers to gather all the relevant information about a specific capability that the job requires.
Situation: The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenging situation in which you found yourself.
Task: What were you required to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation. Some performance development methods use “Target” rather than “Task”. Job interview candidates who describe a “Target” they set themselves instead of an externally imposed “Task” emphasize their own intrinsic motivation to perform and to develop their performance.
Action: What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it and what the alternatives were.
Results: What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions? Did you meet your objectives? What did you learn from this experience? Have you used this learning since?
The STAR technique is similar to the SOARA technique (Situation, Objective, Action, Result, Aftermath).
The STAR technique is also often complemented with an additional R on the end STARR or STAR(R) with the last R resembling reflection. This R aims to gather insight and interviewee's ability to learn and iterate. Whereas the STAR reveals how and what kind of result on an objective was achieved, the STARR with the additional R helps the interviewer to understand what the interviewee learned from the experience and how they would assimilate experiences. The interviewee can define what they would do (differently, the same, or better) next time being posed with a situation.
Common questions that the STAR technique can be applied to include conflict management, time management, problem solving and interpersonal skills.
References
External links
The ‘STAR’ technique to answer behavioral interview questions
The STAR method explained
Job interview
Logical consequence
Schedule (project_management) | 0.781878 | 0.993806 | 0.777035 |
Critical discourse analysis | Critical discourse analysis (CDA) uncovers the hidden meanings embedded in texts and conversations. It analyses the way the language used reinforces power relationships, social hierarchies, and ideologies.
CDA is a critical theory approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice. CDA combines critique of discourse and explanation of how it figures within and contributes to the existing social reality, as a basis for action to change that existing reality in particular respects. Scholars working in the tradition of CDA generally argue that (non-linguistic) social practice and linguistic practice constitute one another and focus on investigating how societal power relations are established and reinforced through language use. In this sense, it differs from discourse analysis in that it highlights issues of power asymmetries, manipulation, exploitation, and structural inequities in domains such as education, media, and politics.
Background
Critical discourse analysis emerged from 'critical linguistics' developed at the University of East Anglia by Roger Fowler and fellow scholars in the 1970s, and the terms are now often interchangeable. Research in the field of sociolinguistics was paying little attention to social hierarchy and power. CDA was first developed by the Lancaster school of linguists of which Norman Fairclough was the most prominent figure. Ruth Wodak has also made a major contribution to this field of study.
In addition to linguistic theory, the approach draws from social theory, critical theory and contributions from Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu—in order to examine ideologies and power relations involved in discourse. Language connects with the social through being the primary domain of ideology, and through being both a site of, and a stake in, struggles for power. Ideology has been called the basis of the social representations of groups, and, in psychological versions of CDA developed by Teun A. van Dijk and Ruth Wodak, there is assumed to be a sociocognitive interface between social structures and discourse structures. The historical dimension in critical discourse studies also plays an important role.
Methodology
CDA is an application of discourse analysis; it is generally agreed that methods from discourse studies, the humanities and social sciences may be used in CDA research. This is on the condition that it is able to adequately and relevantly produce insights into the way discourse reproduces (or resists) social and political inequality, power abuse or domination. Examples of power being used by mainstream media have been identified in the work of Stephen Teo in Australia where he found numerous examples of racism in crime reports of Vietnamese youth. He describes the use of headlines used to control the opinions of readers to see and read about crime using what David Altheide calls fear discourse. CDA does not limit its analysis to specific structures of text or talk, but systematically relates these to structures of the sociopolitical context. This was further examined by Pamela D Schulz in her book linking Media reporting of Courts in Australia and in western democracies. Her book "Courts and Judges on Trial: Analysing and Managing Discourses of Disapproval" showed a strong connection between political manipulation of media to encourage "tougher sentencing" while at the same time refraining from changing legislation to ensure that it happens. CDA has been used to examine rhetoric in political speech acts, and any forms of speech that may be used to manipulate the impression given to the audience. However, there have been flaws noted with CDA. For example, it has been said that it is simultaneously too broad to distinctly identify manipulations within the rhetoric, yet is also not powerful enough to appropriately find all that researchers set out to establish.
Norman Fairclough discussed the term CDA in his book Language and Power. Fairclough introduced the concepts that are now viewed as vital in CDA such as "discourse, power, ideology, social practice and common sense." He argues that language should be analyzed as a social practice through the lens of discourse in both speaking and writing.
Fairclough developed a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse, where the aim is to map three separate forms of analysis onto one another: analysis of (spoken or written) language texts, analysis of discourse practice (processes of text production, distribution and consumption) and analysis of discursive events as instances of socio-cultural practice. Particularly, he combines micro, meso and macro-level interpretation. At the micro-level, the analyst considers various aspects of textual/linguistic analysis, for example syntactic analysis, use of metaphor and rhetorical devices. The meso-level or "level of discursive practice" involves studying issues of production and consumption, for instance, which institution produced a text, who is the target audience, etc. At the macro-level, the analyst is concerned with intertextual and interdiscursive elements and tries to take into account the broad, societal currents that are affecting the text being studied.
Teun A. van Dijk's approach to critical discourse analysis combines cognitive theories with linguistic and social theories. Van Dijk uses cognition as the middle layer of a three-layer approach consisting of discourse, cognitive and society. By integrating a cognitive approach, researchers are better able to understand how larger social phenomenon are reinforced through popular, everyday discourse. Critics of this practice point out that his approach focuses on the reproduction of ideologies rather than the transformation.
Ruth Wodak has developed a framework based on the systemic collection of sample texts on a topic to better understand the interrelationship of discourses that exist within the field. This framework allows for the discussion and analysis of ideologies involved in a set of discourses. The macro level of analysis is helpful in understanding how macro-structures of inequality persist through discursive processes across multiple sites and texts.
Applications
CDA has been applied to media studies, advertisements texts English language teaching, heritage language, power and ideology, socialization and environmental sciences to name a few.
Notable academics
Notable writers include Norman Fairclough, Michał Krzyżanowski, Paul Chilton, Teun A. van Dijk, Ruth Wodak, , John E. Richardson, Phil Graham, Theo Van Leeuwen, , , James Paul Gee, Roger Fowler, Gunther Kress, Mary Talbot, Lilie Chouliaraki, Thomas Huckin, Hilary Janks, Veronika Koller, Christopher Hart, Bob Hodge, and William Feighery.
See also
Bibliography
Notes
References
Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa, and Coulthard, Malcolm, (editors) (1996) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge.
Chouliaraki, Lilie & Norman Fairclough (1999). Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Norman Fairclough (1995). Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Norman Fairclough (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
Jaworski, Adam, & Coupland, Nikolas (Eds.) (2002). The Discourse Reader. New York: Routledge.
Lazar, Michelle (Ed.) (2005). Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology In Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Rogers, Rebecca (2003). A Critical Discourse Analysis of Family Literacy Practices: Power in and Out of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rogers, Rebecca (Ed.) (2003). An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Talbot, Mary, Atkinson, Karen and Atkinson, David (2003). Language and Power in the Modern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Toolan, Michael (Ed.) (2002). Critical Discourse Analysis: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Vol I: Precursors and Inspirations). London: Routledge.
Toolan, Michael (Ed.) (2002). Critical Discourse Analysis: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Vol II: Leading Advocates). London: Routledge.
Toolan, Michael (Ed.) (2002). Critical Discourse Analysis: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Vol III: Concurrent Analyses and Critiques). London: Routledge.
Toolan, Michael (Ed.) (2002). Critical Discourse Analysis: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Vol IV: Current Debates and New Directions). London: Routledge.
Teun A. Van Dijk. (1993). Elite discourse and racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Teun A. Van Dijk. (2005). Racism and discourse in Spain and Latin America. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Teun A. Van Dijk. (2008). Discourse and Power. Houndsmills: Palgrave.
Weiss, Gilbert & Wodak, Ruth (Eds.) (2003). Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Palgrave.
Young, Lynne & Harrison, Claire (Eds.) (2004). Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Social Change. London: Continuum.
Anna Duszak, Juliane House, Łukasz Kumięga: Globalization, Discourse, Media: In a Critical Perspective / Globalisierung, Diskurse, Medien: eine kritische Perspektive. Warsaw University Press, 2010
Further reading
Amoussou, F., & Allagbe, A. A. (2018). Principles, Theories and Approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis. International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature, 6(1), 11–18.
Henry Widdowson (1995). Review of Fairclough's Discourse and Social Change. Applied Linguistics 16(4): 510–516.
Norman Fairclough (1996). A Reply to Henry Widdowson's 'Discourse Analysis: A Critical View. Language & Literature 5(1): 49–56.
Henry Widdowson (1996). Reply to Fairclough: Discourse and Interpretation: Conjectures and Refutations. Language & Literature 5(1): 57–69.
Henry Widdowson (1998). "The Theory and Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis." Applied Linguistics 19(1): 136–151.
O'Halloran, Kieran A. (2003) Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Cognition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Beaugrande, Robert de (2001). "Interpreting the Discourse of H.G. Widdowson: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis. Applied Linguistics 22(1): 104–121.
Toolan, Michael (1997). What Is Critical Discourse Analysis and Why Are People Saying Such Terrible Things About It? Language & Literature 6(2): 83–103.
Stubbs, Michael (1998). Whorf's Children: Critical Comments on Critical Discourse Analysis. In Ryan, A. & Wray, A. (Eds.), Evolving Models of Language: British Studies in Applied Linguistics 12, Clevedon: BAAL/Multilingual Matters.
Blommaert, Jan & Bulcaen, Chris (2000). Critical Discourse Analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 447–466.
Blommaert, Jan, Collins, James, Heller, Monica, Rampton, Ben, Slembrouck, Stef & Jef Verschueren. Discourse and Critique. Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 21(1): 5–107 and 21(2): 117–183.
Slembrouck, Stef (2001). Explanation, Interpretation and Critique in the Analysis of Discourse. Critique of Anthropology, 21: 33–57.
Slembrouck, Stef (2005). Discourse, critique and ethnography: class-oriented coding in accounts of child protection. Language Sciences 27:619–650.
Threadgold, Terry (2003). Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: Histories, Remembering and Futures. Linguistik Online 14(2).
Tyrwhitt-Drake, Hugh (1999). Resisting the Discourse of Critical Discourse Analysis: Reopening a Hong Kong Case Study. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 1081–1088.
External links
Discourseanalysis.net Research portal and mailing list
Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines Research portal and conference
Discourses.org Website of Teun van Dijk
Norman Fairclough's profile page
Associated research groups
Language, Ideology and Power research group at Lancaster University
Newcastle Critical Discourse Group
Discourse and Rhetoric group at Loughborough University
Associated journals
Discourse & Society (from 1990)
Social Semiotics (from 1990)
Journal of Language and Politics (from 2002)
Critical Discourse Studies (from 2004)
Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (peer-reviewed free online journal, from 2007)
Sociolinguistics
Critical theory
Discourse analysis
Social science methodology | 0.782991 | 0.99238 | 0.777025 |
Multiliteracy | Multiliteracy (plural: multiliteracies) is an approach to literacy theory and pedagogy coined in the mid-1990s by the New London Group. The approach is characterized by two key aspects of literacy – linguistic diversity and multimodal forms of linguistic expressions and representation. It was coined in response to two major changes in the globalized environment. One such change was the growing linguistic and cultural diversity due to increased transnational migration. The second major change was the proliferation of new mediums of communication due to advancement in communication technologies e.g. the internet, multimedia, and digital media. As a scholarly approach, multiliteracy focuses on the new "literacy" that is developing in response to the changes in the way people communicate globally due to technological shifts and the interplay between different cultures and languages.
Multiliteracy refers to the ability to understand and effectively use multiple forms of literacy and communication in a variety of contexts. This includes traditional literacy (reading and writing), digital literacy (using technology and digital media), visual literacy (interpreting images and visuals), and other forms of communication. It is essential in today's world where various modes of communication are prevalent. It goes beyond traditional notions of literacy, which typically focus on reading and writing skills, to encompass a broader range of literacies that have become increasingly relevant in the digital age.
In summary, multiliteracy is an evolving concept that reflects the complex nature of communication in the digital age. It emphasizes the ability to critically engage with information, adapt to evolving communication technologies, and understand the diversity of voices and perspectives in contemporary society. Multiliteracy recognizes that individuals need to be proficient in various literacies to navigate and succeed in the complex, information-rich, and digitally connected world.
Overview
As a pedagogical approach, multiliteracy is based on the New London Group's proposition consisting of a balanced classroom design containing four key aspects – situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. Situated practice focuses on the connection between classroom topics and real world experiences, building upon students' personal experiences. Overt instruction focuses on student conceptualization and scaffolding of new concepts to provide focus for new concepts. Critical framing focuses on analyzing the sociocultural contexts in which a concept, literature, or text was developed within. Transformed practice uses the previous three aspects to encourage reflection and apply these teachings in a new context, achieving a personal goal.
Key aspects of multiliteracy include:
Multimodal literacy: In the digital age, communication often involves multiple modes, including text, images, videos, and interactive elements.
Digital literacy: This is a core component of multiliteracy.
Media literacy: Multiliteracy involves being able to critically analyze and interpret media messages, whether they come from traditional sources like newspapers and television or from new media such as social networks and online news sites.
Information literacy: In an era of information overload, being information literate is essential. It means knowing how to find, evaluate, and use information effectively and ethically.
Cultural literacy: Understanding and appreciating cultural differences and diverse perspectives is a vital aspect of multiliteracy.
Critical literacy: Critical literacy skills enable individuals to analyze and question information, sources, and underlying assumptions.
Visual literacy: In an age of visual communication, being visually literate involves interpreting and creating visual elements, such as images, infographics, and data visualizations.
Intertextuality: Multiliteracy recognizes the interconnected nature of texts, media, and communication.
Rhetorical awareness: Being aware of how communication is constructed and tailored for specific audiences and purposes is important in multiliteracy.
Applications
There are two major topics that demonstrate the way multiliteracies can be used. The first is due to the world becoming smaller, communication between other cultures and languages is necessary to anyone. The usage of the English language is also being changed. While it seems that English is the common, global language, there are different dialects and subcultures that all speak different Englishes. The way English is spoken in Australia, South Africa, India or any other country is different from how it is spoken in the original English speaking countries in the UK.
The second way to incorporate the term multiliteracies is the way technology and multimedia is changing how we communicate. These days, text and speech are not the only and main ways to communicate. The definition of media is being extended to include text combined with sounds, and images which are being incorporated into movies, billboards, almost any site on the internet, and television. All these ways of communication require the ability to understand a multimedia world.
The formulation of "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" by the New London Group expanded the focus of literacy from reading and writing to an understanding of multiple discourses and forms of representation in public and professional domains. The new literacy pedagogy was developed to meet the learning needs of students to allow them to navigate within these altered technological, cultural, and linguistically diverse communities. The concept of multiliteracies has been applied within various contexts and includes oral vernacular genres, visual literacies, information literacy, emotional literacy, and scientific multiliteracies and numeracy.
To real-world contexts
Due to changes in the world, especially globalization and an increase in immigration, a debate has arisen about the way students are instructed and learning in school. English, and all subjects, should evolve to incorporate multimodal ways of communication. The New London Group (1996) proposes the teaching of all representations of meaning including, linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, and gestural, which are subsumed under the category of multimodal. A pedagogy of multiliteracies includes a balanced classroom design of Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing and Transformed Practice. Students need to draw on their own experiences and semiotic literacy practices to represent and communicate meaning.
The changes that transpire through the field of education affect learning processes, while the application of learning processes affects the use of multiliteracies (Selber, 2004). These include the functional, critical, and rhetorical skills that are applied in diverse fields and disciplines.
Educational pedagogies, including purpose-driven education, integrate the use of multi-literacy by encouraging student learning through exploration of their passions using their senses, technology, vernaculars, as well as alternative forms of communication.
New London Group
The New London Group is a group of ten academics who met at New London, New Hampshire, in the United States in September 1994, to develop a new literacy pedagogy that would serve concerns facing educators as the existing literacy pedagogy did not meet the learning needs of students. Their focus was on replacing the existing monolingual, monocultural, and standardized literacy pedagogy that prioritized reading and writing, with a pedagogy that used multiple modes of meaning making. They emphasised the use of multiple modes of communication, languages, and multiple Englishes to reflect the impact of new technologies and linguistic and cultural diversity, instead of developing competence in a single national language and standardized form of English. The ten academics brought to the discussion their expertise and personal experience from different national and professional contexts. Courtney Cazden from the United States has worked in the areas of classroom discourse and multilingual teaching and learning; Bill Cope from Australia, on literacy pedagogy and linguistic diversity, and new technologies of representation and communication; Mary Kalantzis from Australia, on experimental social education and citizenship education; Norman Fairclough from the United Kingdom, on critical discourse analysis, social practices and discourse, and the relationship between discursive change and social and cultural change; Gunther Kress from the United Kingdom, on social semiotics, visual literacy, discourse analysis, and multimodal literacy; James Gee from the United States, on psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language and literacy; Allan Luke from Australia on critical literacy and applied linguistics; Carmen Luke from Australia, on feminism and critical pedagogy; Sarah Michaels from the United States, on classroom discourse; and Martin Nataka on indigenous education and higher education curriculum. The article "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures", published in 1996, documents the New London Group's "manifesto" of literacy pedagogy that is recommended for use in educational institutions, in the community, and within organizations.
"A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies"
The multiliteracies pedagogical approach involves four key aspects: situated practice, critical framing, overt instruction, and transformed practice. Situated practice involves learning that is grounded in students' own life experiences. Critical framing supports students in questioning common sense assumptions found within discourses. Overt instruction is the direct teaching of "metalanguages" in order to help learners understand the components of expressive forms or grammars. Transformed practice is where learners engage in situated practices based in new understandings of literacy practices.
Situated practice
Situated practice, originally formulated by the New London Group (1996) as one of the related components of multiliteracies pedagogy, is constituted by immersion in meaningful practices within a community of learners who are culturally and linguistically diversified. It involves situating meaning making in real-world contexts and taking account of the affective and sociocultural needs of learners. This aspect of the curriculum needs to draw on the lifeworld experiences of students, as well as their out-of-school communities and discourses, as an integral part of the learning experience. In order to apply situated practice to curriculum realities, Cope and Kalantzis (2009) reframed it as "experiencing" (p. 184). They believe human cognition is situated and contextual, and meanings are grounded in the real world of patterns of experience, action and subjective interest. Experiencing takes two forms.
Experiencing the known–learners bring their own, invariably diverse knowledge, experiences, interests and life-texts to the learning context. Activities of experiencing the known involve showing or talking about something familiar: listen, view, watch and visit, reflecting on learners' own experiences, interests and perspectives (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015).
Experiencing the new–learners are immersed in new situations or information, observing or taking part in something that is new or unfamiliar, but within the zone of intelligibility and close to their own life-worlds. For example, teachers introduce something new but which makes sense by immersion in experiments, field trips and investigations in projects (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015).
Situated practice/experiencing connects with a tradition called 'authentic pedagogy'. Authentic pedagogy was first formulated as a direct counterpoint to didactic pedagogy in the twentieth century, initially through the work of John Dewey in the United States and Maria Montessori in Italy. It focuses on the learner's own meanings, the texts that are relevant to them in their everyday lives. When it comes to reading and writing, authentic literacy pedagogy promotes a process of natural language growth that begins when a child learns to speak, with a focus on internalized understanding rather than the formalities of rules. It is learner-centered and aims to provide space for self-expression.
However, the New London Group (1996) points out limitations to situated practice. First, while situated learning can lead to mastery in practice, learners immersed in rich and complex practices can vary significantly from each other and situated practice does not necessarily lead to conscious control and awareness of what one knows and does. Second, situated practice does not necessarily create learners who can critique what they are learning in terms of historical, cultural, political, ideological, or value-centered relations. Third, there is the question of putting knowledge into action. Learners might be incapable of reflexively enacting their knowledge in practice. Therefore, they clarify that situated practice must be supplemented by other components and powerful learning arises from weaving between situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice in a purposeful way.
Critical framing
Critical framing in multiliteracies requires an investigation of the socio-cultural contexts and purposes of learning and designs of meaning. Cope and Kalantzis (2001) discuss this in the context of our increasingly diverse and globally interconnected lives where the forces of migration, multiculturalism, and global economic integration intensify the processes of change. The act of meaning-making is also diversifying as digital interfaces level the playing field.
Mills (2009) discusses how multiliteracies can help us go beyond heritage print texts that reproduce and sustain dominant cultural values by creating affordances for thinking about textual practices that construct and produce culture. Another dimension of this critical framing may be extended to the diverse types and purposes of literacy in contemporary society. The traditional curricula operates on various rules of inclusion and exclusion in the hierarchical ordering of textual practices, often dismissing text types such as picture books or popular fiction. Similarly, items like blogs, emails, websites, visual literacies, and oral discourses may often be overlooked as "inferior literacies". In excluding them from mainstream literacy practices, we become prone to disenfranchise groups and may lose out on opportunities to sensitize learners to consider underlying issues of power, privilege, and prejudice, both in terms of identifying these in societal practices, as well as in questioning dominant discourses that normalize these. Mills also states how some scholars such as Unsworth (2006a, 2006b) and Mackey (1998) suggest an increased blurring of 'popular culture' and 'quality literature' facilitated by classical literature made available in electronic formats and supported by online communities and forums.
In addition to acknowledging increased socio-cultural contextualization and diversification of text-types, multiliteracies pedagogies also enable us to critically frame and reconceptualize traditional notions of writing, calling into question issues of authority, authorship, power, and knowledge. Domingo, Jewitt, and Kress (2014) address these concepts through a study of template designs on websites and blogs that empowers the readers through non-linear readings paths, with the modular layout allowing them to choose their own reading paths. They also discuss the varying affordances of different modes and how writing become just one part of the multimodal ensemble.
Multiliteracies transcend conventional print literacies and the centrality of cultures that have historically extolled it, offering much scope for arts-based approaches in decolonizing initiatives (Flicker et al., 2014) or reflexive visual methodologies in situated contexts (Mitchell, DeLange, Moletsane, Stuart, & Buthelezi, 2005). However, in so far as access to digital tools and infrastructures is concerned, we still need to take into account issues of agency, capital, socioeconomic status, and digital epistemologies (Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012).
Overt instruction
Original view
In the original formulation of the New London Group, overt instruction was one of the major dimensions of literacy pedagogy that was identified. The original view of overt instruction includes the teachers and other experts' supporting students through scaffolding and focusing the students on the important features of their experiences and activities within the community of learners (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 33). Cope and Kalantiz argue teachers and other experts allow the learner to gain explicit information at times by building on and using what the learner already knows and has achieved. Overt instruction is not, as it is often misrepresented, direct transmission, drills, and rote learning. It includes the kinds of collaborative efforts between teacher and student in which the student can do a task that is much more complex than the task they can do individually. According to Cope and Kalantzis, "Overt Instruction introduces an often overlooked element-the connection of the element of the importance of contextualization of learning experiences to conscious understanding of elements of language meaning and design" (p. 116) Use of metalanguages, Cope and Kalantzis argue, is one of the key features of Overt Instruction. Metalanguages refer to "languages of reflective generalization that describe the form, content, and function of the discourses of practice" (p. 34).
Updated view
After applying overt instruction orientation to curriculum practices for around a decade, this dimension of literacy pedagogy was reframed and translated in the Learning by Design project into the 'knowledge process' of conceptualizing (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, 2015).
Conceptualizing involves "the development of abstract, generalizing concepts and theoretical synthesis of these concepts" (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015, p. 19). Using these Knowledge Processes, learners can categorize terms, and collect these into the mental models. Conceptualizing, according to Cope and Kalantzis (p. 19) occurs in two ways:
Conceptualizing by naming-categorization is a knowledge process by means of which the learner learns to use abstract, generalizing terms. A concept not only names the particular; it also abstracts something general from that particular. Activity type: define terms, make a glossary, label a diagram, sort or categorize like or unlike things.
Conceptualizing with theory-schematization is a knowledge process by means of which learners make generalizations and put the key terms together into interpretative framework. They build mental models, abstract frameworks and transferable disciplinary schemas (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 185). Activity type: draw a diagram, make a concept map, or write a summary, theory or formula which puts the concepts together
Transformed practice
Transformed practice, originally framed by the New London Group (1996) as part of the four components of multiliteracies pedagogy, is embedded in authentic learning, where activities are re-created according to the lifeworld of learners. Transformed practice is transfer in meaning-making practice, which involves applied learning, real-world meanings, communication in practice, and applying understanding gained from situated practice, overt instruction, and critical framing to a new context. Once learners are aware of how context affects their learning, the "theory becomes reflective practice" (The New London Group, 1996, p. 87). In other words, learners can reflect on what they have learned while they engage in reflective practice based on their personal goals and values in new contexts. For instance, learners design a personalized research project on a specific topic.
Transformed practice subsequently underwent reformation and was renamed "applying" as part of "knowledge processes" (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 184), formerly known as multiliteracy pedagogy. Applying is considered as the typical focus of the tradition of applied or competency-based learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). While learners actively learn by applying experiential, conceptual or critical knowledge in the real world, learners act on the basis of knowing something of the world, and learning something new from the experience of acting. That is, applying occurs more or less unconsciously or incidentally everyday in the lifeworld, since learners are usually doing things and learning by doing them. Applying can occur in two ways:
Applying appropriately concerns how knowledge is perceived in a typical or predictable way in a particular situation. For instance, meanings are expressed in a way that corresponds to the conventions of a semiotic or meaning-making setting (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). Applying appropriately also involves the application of knowledge and understanding of the complexity of real-world situations. Learners then examine if they are valid. Examples of activities include writing, drawing, solving a problem, or behaving in the usual and expected manner in a real-world situation or simulation (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015).
Applying creatively involves the way learners transform knowledge they have learned from a familiar context and use it in a different context, unfamiliar to learners. As applying creatively is related to being active in the innovative and creative world, learners' interests, experiences, and aspirations can be promoted. Examples of activities are taking an intellectual risk, applying knowledge to a different setting, suggesting a new problem, and translating knowledge into a different mix of modes of meaning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015).
See also
Aesthetic Journalism (book)
Comics studies
Media literacy
Visual literacy
Footnotes
References
Literacy
Media studies | 0.794738 | 0.977711 | 0.777025 |
Kolb's experiential learning | David A. Kolb published his experiential learning theory (ELT) in 1984, inspired by the work of the gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, as well as John Dewey and Jean Piaget. The approach works on two levels: a four-stage learning cycle and four distinct learning styles. Kolb's experiential learning theory has a holistic perspective which includes experience, perception, cognition and behaviour. It is a method where a person's skills and job requirements can be assessed in the same language that its commensurability can be measured.
The experiential learning cycle
The learning cycle has four stages: concrete learning, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization and active experimentation. Effective learning can be seen when the learner progresses through the cycle. The learner can enter the cycle at any stage.
The first stage is concrete learning, where the learner encounters a new experience or reinterprets an existing experience. This is followed by reflective observation, where the learner reflects on the experience on a personal basis. After this comes abstract conceptualization, where the learner forms new ideas, or modifies existing abstract ideas, based on the reflections arising from the reflective observation stage. Lastly, in the active experimentation stage the learner applies the new ideas to see if anything changes. This second experience becomes the concrete experience for the beginning of the next cycle. This process can happen over a short or long time.
Kolb's learning styles
Kolb's learning style is explained on the basis of two dimensions: they are how a person understands and processes the information. This perceived information is then classified as concrete experience or abstract conceptualization, and processed information as active experimentation or reflective observation.
Diverging:
Individuals of this kind of learning style look at things in a different perspective. They prefer watching to doing, also they have strong imagination capacity, emotional, strong in arts, prefer to work in groups, open minded to take feedback and they have broad interests in different cultures and people. The learning characteristic is of concrete experience and reflective observation.
Assimilating:
People of this kind of learning style prefer good clear information, they can logically format the given information and explore analytic models. They are more interested in concepts and abstracts than in people. Characteristics include abstract conceptualization and reflective observation.
Converging:
Converging type of learners solve problems. They apply their learning to practical issues. Also, they prefer technical tasks, and they experiment with new ideas. They tend to be unemotional. The learning characteristics are abstract conceptualization and active experimentation.
Accommodating:
Individuals with this kind of learning style prefer to do things practically. They are attracted to new challenges and solve problems intuitively. The learning characteristics are concrete experience and active experimentation.
Educational implications
The educational implications of the experiential learning theory are that ELT:
helps teachers develop more appropriate learning opportunities for target learners;
helps teachers design activities that will give opportunities to learners to learn in ways that suit the learners' learning styles; and
focuses on activities that enable learners to go through each of the four stages of the experiential learning cycle.
Criticisms
Some critics have argued that Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle is too simplistic in nature and fails to capture the importance of observation; it also only works in abstract isolation. This has led Ryder and Downs (2022) to argue for an approach that embraces change and emphasises the orientation of the observer as critical to decision-making both in education and work.
See also
Learning theory (education)
Experiential learning
References
Learning theory (education) | 0.787509 | 0.986638 | 0.776986 |
Critical thinking | Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation. In modern times, the use of the phrase critical thinking can be traced to John Dewey, who used the phrase reflective thinking. The application of critical thinking includes self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of the mind; thus, a critical thinker is a person who practices the skills of critical thinking or has been trained and educated in its disciplines. Philosopher Richard W. Paul said that the mind of a critical thinker engages the person's intellectual abilities and personality traits. Critical thinking presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use in effective communication and problem solving, and a commitment to overcome egocentrism and sociocentrism.
History
In the classical period (5th c.–4th c. BC) of Ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato (428–347 BC) indicated that the teachings of Socrates (470–399 BC) are the earliest records of what today is called critical thinking. In an early dialogue by Plato, the philosopher Socrates debates several speakers about the ethical matter of the rightness or wrongness of Socrates escaping from prison. Upon consideration, Plato concluded that to escape prison would violate everything he believes to be greater than himself: the laws of Athens and the guiding voice that Socrates claims to hear.
Socrates established the unreliability of Authority and of authority figures to possess knowledge and consequent insight; that for an individual man or woman to lead a good life that is worth living, that person must ask critical questions and possess an interrogative soul, which seeks evidence and then closely examines the available facts, and then follows the implications of the statement under analysis, thereby tracing the implications of thought and action.
As a form of co-operative argumentation, Socratic questioning requires the comparative judgment of facts, which answers then would reveal the person's irrational thinking and lack of verifiable knowledge. Socrates also demonstrated that Authority does not ensure accurate, verifiable knowledge; thus, Socratic questioning analyses beliefs, assumptions, and presumptions, by relying upon evidence and a sound rationale.
In modern times, the phrase critical thinking was coined by Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in his book How We Think. As a type of intellectualism, the development of critical thinking is a means of critical analysis that applies rationality to develop a critique of the subject matter. According to the Foundation for Critical Thinking, in 1987 the U.S. National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defined critical thinking as the "intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."
Etymology and origin of critical thinking
In the term critical thinking, the word critical, (Grk. κριτικός = kritikos = "critic") derives from the word critic and implies a critique; it identifies the intellectual capacity and the means "of judging", "of judgement", "for judging", and of being "able to discern". The intellectual roots of critical thinking are as ancient as its etymology, traceable, ultimately, to the critical reasoning of the Presocractic philosophers, as well as the teaching practice and vision of Socrates 2,500 years ago who discovered by a method of probing questioning that people could not rationally justify their confident claims to knowledge.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the exact term “critical thinking” first appeared in 1815, in the British literary journal The Critical Review, referring to critical analysis in the literary context. The meaning of "critical thinking" gradually evolved and expanded to mean a desirable general thinking skill by the end of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Definitions
Traditionally, critical thinking has been variously defined as follows:
"The intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."
"Disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence"
"Purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based"
"Includes a commitment to using reason in the formulation of our beliefs"
The skill and propensity to engage in an activity with reflective scepticism (McPeck, 1981)
Thinking about one's thinking in a manner designed to organize and clarify, raise the efficiency of, and recognize errors and biases in one's own thinking. Critical thinking is not 'hard' thinking nor is it directed at solving problems (other than 'improving' one's own thinking). Critical thinking is inward-directed with the intent of maximizing the rationality of the thinker. One does not use critical thinking to solve problems—one uses critical thinking to improve one's process of thinking.
"An appraisal based on careful analytical evaluation"
"Critical thinking is a type of thinking pattern that requires people to be reflective, and pay attention to decision-making which guides their beliefs and actions. Critical thinking allows people to deduct with more logic, to process sophisticated information and look at various sides of an issue so they can produce more solid conclusions."
Critical thinking has seven critical features: being inquisitive and curious, being open-minded to different sides, being able to think systematically, being analytical, being persistent to truth, being confident about critical thinking itself, and lastly, being mature.
Although critical thinking could be defined in several different ways, there is a general agreement in its key component—the desire to reach for a satisfactory result, and this should be achieved by rational thinking and result-driven manner. Halpern thinks that critical thinking firstly involves learned abilities such as problem-solving, calculation and successful probability application. It also includes a tendency to engage the thinking process. In recent times, Stanovich believed that modern IQ testing could hardly measure the ability of critical thinking.
"Critical thinking is essentially a questioning, challenging approach to knowledge and perceived wisdom. It involves ideas and information from an objective position and then questioning this information in the light of our own values, attitudes and personal philosophy."
Contemporary critical thinking scholars have expanded these traditional definitions to include qualities, concepts, and processes such as creativity, imagination, discovery, reflection, empathy, connecting knowing, feminist theory, subjectivity, ambiguity, and inconclusiveness. Some definitions of critical thinking exclude these subjective practices.
According to Ennis, "Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action." This definition Ennis provided is highly agreed by Harvey Siegel, Peter Facione, and Deanna Kuhn.
According to Ennis' definition, critical thinking requires a lot of attention and brain function. When a critical thinking approach is applied to education, it helps the student's brain function better and understand texts differently.
Different fields of study may require different types of critical thinking. Critical thinking provides more angles and perspectives upon the same material.
Logic and rationality
The study of logical argumentation is relevant to the study of critical thinking. Logic is concerned with the analysis of arguments, including the appraisal of their correctness or incorrectness. In the field of epistemology, critical thinking is considered to be logically correct thinking, which allows for differentiation between logically true and logically false statements.
In "First wave" logical thinking, the thinker is removed from the train of thought, and the analysis of connections between concepts or points in thought is ostensibly free of any bias. In his essay Beyond Logicism in Critical Thinking Kerry S. Walters describes this ideology thus: "A logistic approach to critical thinking conveys the message to students that thinking is legitimate only when it conforms to the procedures of informal (and, to a lesser extent, formal) logic and that the good thinker necessarily aims for styles of examination and appraisal that are analytical, abstract, universal, and objective. This model of thinking has become so entrenched in conventional academic wisdom that many educators accept it as canon". Such principles are concomitant with the increasing dependence on a quantitative understanding of the world.
In the 'second wave' of critical thinking, authors consciously moved away from the logocentric mode of critical thinking characteristic of the 'first wave'. Although many scholars began to take a less exclusive view of what constitutes critical thinking, rationality and logic remain widely accepted as essential bases for critical thinking. Walters argues that exclusive logicism in the first wave sense is based on "the unwarranted assumption that good thinking is reducible to logical thinking".
Deduction, abduction and induction
There are three types of logical reasoning. Informally, two kinds of logical reasoning can be distinguished in addition to formal deduction, which are induction and abduction.
Deduction
Deduction is the conclusion drawn from the structure of an argument's premises, by use of rules of inference formally those of propositional calculus. For example: X is human and all humans have a face, so X has a face.
Induction
Induction is drawing a conclusion from a pattern that is guaranteed by the strictness of the structure to which it applies. For example: The sum of even integers is even. Let then are even by definition. If , then , which is even; so summing two even numbers results in an even number.
Abduction
Abduction is drawing a conclusion using a heuristic that is likely, but not inevitable given some foreknowledge. For example: I observe sheep in a field, and they appear white from my viewing angle, so sheep are white. Contrast with the deductive statement: Some sheep are white on at least one side.
Critical thinking and rationality
Kerry S. Walters, an emeritus philosophy professor from Gettysburg College, argues that rationality demands more than just logical or traditional methods of problem solving and analysis or what he calls the "calculus of justification" but also considers "cognitive acts such as imagination, conceptual creativity, intuition and insight". These "functions" are focused on discovery, on more abstract processes instead of linear, rules-based approaches to problem-solving. The linear and non-sequential mind must both be engaged in the rational mind.
The ability to critically analyze an argument — to dissect structure and components, thesis and reasons — is essential. But so is the ability to be flexible and consider non-traditional alternatives and perspectives. These complementary functions are what allow for critical thinking to be a practice encompassing imagination and intuition in cooperation with traditional modes of deductive inquiry.
Functions
The list of core critical thinking skills includes observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition. According to Reynolds (2011), an individual or group engaged in a strong way of critical thinking gives due consideration to establish for instance:
Evidence through reality
Context skills to isolate the problem from context
Relevant criteria for making the judgment well
Applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment
Applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand
In addition to possessing strong critical-thinking skills, one must be disposed to engage problems and decisions using those skills. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, and fairness.
Critical thinking calls for the ability to:
Recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems
Understand the importance of prioritization and order of precedence in problem-solving
Gather and marshal pertinent (relevant) information
Recognize unstated assumptions and values
Comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discernment
Interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments
Recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions
Draw warranted conclusions and generalizations
Put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives
Reconstruct one's patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience
Render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life
In sum:
"A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports or refutes it and the further conclusions to which it tends."
Habits or traits of the mind
The habits of mind that characterize a person strongly disposed toward critical thinking include a desire to follow reason and evidence wherever they may lead, a systematic approach to problem-solving, inquisitiveness, even-handedness, and confidence in reasoning.
According to a definition analysis by Kompf & Bond (2001), critical thinking involves problem-solving, decision making, metacognition, rationality, rational thinking, reasoning, knowledge, intelligence and also a moral component such as reflective thinking. Critical thinkers therefore need to have reached a level of maturity in their development, possess a certain attitude as well as a set of taught skills.
There is a postulation by some writers that the tendencies from habits of mind should be thought as virtues to demonstrate the characteristics of a critical thinker. These intellectual virtues are ethical qualities that encourage motivation to think in particular ways towards specific circumstances. However, these virtues have also been criticized by skeptics who argue that the evidence is lacking for a specific mental basis underpinning critical thinking.
Research in critical thinking
After undertaking research in schools, Edward M. Glaser proposed in 1941 that the ability to think critically involves three elements:
An attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one's experiences
Knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning
Some skill in applying those methods.
Educational programs aimed at developing critical thinking in children and adult learners, individually or in group problem solving and decision making contexts, continue to address these same three central elements.
The Critical Thinking project at Human Science Lab, London, is involved in the scientific study of all major educational systems in prevalence today to assess how the systems are working to promote or impede critical thinking.
Contemporary cognitive psychology regards human reasoning as a complex process that is both reactive and reflective. This presents a problem that is detailed as a division of a critical mind in juxtaposition to sensory data and memory.
The psychological theory disposes of the absolute nature of the rational mind, in reference to conditions, abstract problems and discursive limitations. Where the relationship between critical-thinking skills and critical-thinking dispositions is an empirical question, the ability to attain causal domination exists, for which Socrates was known to be largely disposed against as the practice of Sophistry. Accounting for a measure of "critical-thinking dispositions" is the California Measure of Mental Motivation and the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory. The Critical Thinking Toolkit is an alternative measure that examines student beliefs and attitudes about critical thinking.
Education
John Dewey is one of many educational leaders who recognized that a curriculum aimed at building thinking skills would benefit the individual learner, the community, and the entire democracy.
Critical thinking is significant in the learning process of internalization, in the construction of basic ideas, principles, and theories inherent in content. And critical thinking is significant in the learning process of application, whereby those ideas, principles, and theories are implemented effectively as they become relevant in learners' lives.
Each discipline adapts its use of critical-thinking concepts and principles. The core concepts are always there, but they are embedded in subject-specific content. For students to learn content, intellectual engagement is crucial. All students must do their own thinking, their own construction of knowledge. Good teachers recognize this and therefore focus on the questions, readings, activities that stimulate the mind to take ownership of key concepts and principles underlying the subject.
Historically, the teaching of critical thinking focused only on logical procedures such as formal and informal logic. This emphasized to students that good thinking is equivalent to logical thinking. However, a second wave of critical thinking, urges educators to value conventional techniques, meanwhile expanding what it means to be a critical thinker. In 1994, Kerry Walters compiled a conglomeration of sources surpassing this logical restriction to include many different authors' research regarding connected knowing, empathy, gender-sensitive ideals, collaboration, world views, intellectual autonomy, morality and enlightenment. These concepts invite students to incorporate their own perspectives and experiences into their thinking.
In the English and Welsh school systems, Critical Thinking is offered as a subject that 16- to 18-year-olds can take as an A-Level. Under the OCR exam board, students can sit two exam papers for the AS: "Credibility of Evidence" and "Assessing and Developing Argument". The full Advanced GCE is now available: in addition to the two AS units, candidates sit the two papers "Resolution of Dilemmas" and "Critical Reasoning". The A-level tests candidates on their ability to think critically about, and analyze, arguments on their deductive or inductive validity, as well as producing their own arguments. It also tests their ability to analyze certain related topics such as credibility and ethical decision-making. However, due to its comparative lack of subject content, many universities do not accept it as a main A-level for admissions. Nevertheless, the AS is often useful in developing reasoning skills, and the full Advanced GCE is useful for degree courses in politics, philosophy, history or theology, providing the skills required for critical analysis that are useful, for example, in biblical study.
There used to also be an Advanced Extension Award offered in Critical Thinking in the UK, open to any A-level student regardless of whether they have the Critical Thinking A-level. Cambridge International Examinations have an A-level in Thinking Skills.
From 2008, Assessment and Qualifications Alliance has also been offering an A-level Critical Thinking specification.
OCR exam board have also modified theirs for 2008. Many examinations for university entrance set by universities, on top of A-level examinations, also include a critical-thinking component, such as the LNAT, the UKCAT, the BioMedical Admissions Test and the Thinking Skills Assessment.
In Qatar, critical thinking was offered by Al-Bairaq - an outreach, non-traditional educational program that targeted high school students and focussed on a curriculum based on STEM fields. The idea behind this was to offer high school students the opportunity to connect with the research environment in the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM) at Qatar University. Faculty members train and mentor the students and help develop and enhance their critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork skills.
Effectiveness
In 1995, a meta-analysis of the literature on teaching effectiveness in higher education was undertaken.
The study noted concerns from higher education, politicians, and business that higher education was failing to meet society's requirements for well-educated citizens. It concluded that although faculty may aspire to develop students' thinking skills, in practice they have tended to aim at facts and concepts utilizing lowest levels of cognition, rather than developing intellect or values.
In a more recent meta-analysis, researchers reviewed 341 quasi- or true-experimental studies, all of which used some form of standardized critical-thinking measure to assess the outcome variable. The authors describe the various methodological approaches and attempt to categorize differing assessment tools, which include standardized tests (and second-source measures), tests developed by teachers, tests developed by researchers, and tests developed by teachers who also serve the role as the researcher. The results emphasized the need for exposing students to real-world problems and the importance of encouraging open dialogue within a supportive environment. Effective strategies for teaching critical thinking are thought to be possible in a wide variety of educational settings. One attempt to assess the humanities' role in teaching critical thinking and reducing belief in pseudoscientific claims was made at North Carolina State University. Some success was noted and the researchers emphasized the value of the humanities in providing the skills to evaluate current events and qualitative data in context.
Scott Lilienfeld notes that there is some evidence to suggest that basic critical-thinking skills might be successfully taught to children at a younger age than previously thought.
Importance in academics
Critical thinking is an important element of all professional fields and academic disciplines (by referencing their respective sets of permissible questions, evidence sources, criteria, etc.). Within the framework of scientific skepticism, the process of critical thinking involves the careful acquisition and interpretation of information and use of it to reach a well-justified conclusion. The concepts and principles of critical thinking can be applied to any context or case but only by reflecting upon the nature of that application. Critical thinking forms, therefore, a system of related, and overlapping, modes of thought such as anthropological thinking, sociological thinking, historical thinking, political thinking, psychological thinking, philosophical thinking, mathematical thinking, chemical thinking, biological thinking, ecological thinking, legal thinking, ethical thinking, musical thinking, thinking like a painter, sculptor, engineer, business person, etc. In other words, though critical-thinking principles are universal, their application to disciplines requires a process of reflective contextualization. Psychology offerings, for example, have included courses such as Critical Thinking about the Paranormal, in which students are subjected to a series of cold readings and tested on their belief of the "psychic", who is eventually announced to be a fake.
Critical thinking is considered important in the academic fields for enabling one to analyze, evaluate, explain, and restructure thinking, thereby ensuring the act of thinking without false belief. However, even with knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, mistakes occur, and due to a thinker's inability to apply the methodology consistently, and because of overruling character traits such as egocentrism. Critical thinking includes identification of prejudice, bias, propaganda, self-deception, distortion, misinformation, etc. Given research in cognitive psychology, some educators believe that schools should focus on teaching their students critical-thinking skills and cultivation of intellectual traits.
Critical-thinking skills can be used to help nurses during the assessment process. Through the use of critical thinking, nurses can question, evaluate, and reconstruct the nursing care process by challenging the established theory and practice. Critical-thinking skills can help nurses problem solve, reflect, and make a conclusive decision about the current situation they face. Critical thinking creates "new possibilities for the development of the nursing knowledge". Due to the sociocultural, environmental, and political issues that are affecting healthcare delivery, it would be helpful to embody new techniques in nursing. Nurses can also engage their critical-thinking skills through the Socratic method of dialogue and reflection. This practice standard is even part of some regulatory organizations such as the College of Nurses of Ontario's Professional Standards for Continuing Competencies (2006).
It requires nurses to engage in Reflective Practice and keep records of this continued professional development for possible review by the college.
Critical thinking is also considered important for human rights education for toleration. The Declaration of Principles on Tolerance adopted by UNESCO in 1995 affirms that "education for tolerance could aim at countering factors that lead to fear and exclusion of others, and could help young people to develop capacities for independent judgement, critical thinking and ethical reasoning".
Online communication
The advent and rising popularity of online courses have prompted some to ask if computer-mediated communication (CMC) promotes, hinders, or has no effect on the amount and quality of critical thinking in a course (relative to face-to-face communication). There is some evidence to suggest a fourth, more nuanced possibility: that CMC may promote some aspects of critical thinking but hinder others. For example, Guiller et al. (2008) found that, relative to face-to-face discourse, online discourse featured more justifications, while face-to-face discourse featured more instances of students expanding on what others had said. The increase in justifications may be due to the asynchronous nature of online discussions, while the increase in expanding comments may be due to the spontaneity of 'real-time' discussion. Newman et al. (1995) showed similar differential effects. They found that while CMC boasted more important statements and linking of ideas, it lacked novelty. The authors suggest that this may be due to difficulties participating in a brainstorming-style activity in an asynchronous environment. Rather, the asynchrony may promote users to put forth "considered, thought out contributions".
Researchers assessing critical thinking in online discussion forums often employ a technique called Content Analysis, where the text of online discourse (or the transcription of face-to-face discourse) is systematically coded for different kinds of statements relating to critical thinking. For example, a statement might be coded as "Discuss ambiguities to clear them up" or "Welcoming outside knowledge" as positive indicators of critical thinking. Conversely, statements reflecting poor critical thinking may be labeled as "Sticking to prejudice or assumptions" or "Squashing attempts to bring in outside knowledge". The frequency of these codes in CMC and face-to-face discourse can be compared to draw conclusions about the quality of critical thinking.
Searching for evidence of critical thinking in discourse has roots in a definition of critical thinking put forth by Kuhn (1991), which emphasizes the social nature of discussion and knowledge construction. There is limited research on the role of social experience in critical thinking development, but there is some evidence to suggest it is an important factor. For example, research has shown that three- to four-year-old children can discern, to some extent, the differential credibility and expertise of individuals. Further evidence for the impact of social experience on the development of critical-thinking skills comes from work that found that 6- to 7-year-olds from China have similar levels of skepticism to 10- and 11-year-olds in the United States. If the development of critical-thinking skills was solely due to maturation, it is unlikely we would see such dramatic differences across cultures.
See also
References
Further reading
Books
Damer, T. Edward. (2005) Attacking Faulty Reasoning, 6th Edition, Wadsworth.
Dauer, Francis Watanabe. Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Reasoning, 1989,
Fisher, Alec and Scriven, Michael. (1997) Critical Thinking: Its Definition and Assessment, Center for Research in Critical Thinking (UK) / Edgepress (US).
Hamby, B.W. (2007) The Philosophy of Anything: Critical Thinking in Context, Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, Dubuque Iowa.
Vincent F. Hendricks. (2005) Thought 2 Talk: A Crash Course in Reflection and Expression, New York: Automatic Press / VIP.
(a.k.a. Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era)
Moore, Brooke Noel and Parker, Richard. (2012) Critical Thinking. 10th ed. Published by McGraw-Hill. .
Paul, Richard. (1995) Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World. 4th ed. Foundation for Critical Thinking. .
Paul, Richard and Elder, Linda. (2006) Critical Thinking Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Publishing. .
Sagan, Carl. (1995) The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark. Ballantine Books.
Theodore Schick & Lewis Vaughn "How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age" (2010)
van den Brink-Budgen, R (2010) Critical Thinking for Students, How To Books.
Whyte, J. (2003) Bad Thoughts – A Guide to Clear Thinking, Corvo. .
David Carl Wilson (2020) A Guide to Good Reasoning: Cultivating Intellectual Virtues (2nd edition) University of Minnesota Libraries Ebook Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/goodreasoning/
Zeigarnik, B.V. (1927). "On finished and unfinished tasks". In English translation Edited by Willis D. Ellis; with an introduction by Kurt Koffka. (1997). A source book of Gestalt psychology, xiv, 403 p. : ill.; 22 cmHighland, N.Y: Gestalt Journal Press. "This Gestalt Journal Press edition is a verbatim reprint of the book as originally published in 1938" – T.p. verso. .
Articles
- See at ResearchGate
Facione, P. 2007. Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts – 2007 Update
Kompf, M., & Bond, R. (2001). Critical reflection in adult education. In T. Barer-Stein & M. Kompf(Eds.), The craft of teaching adults (pp. 21–38). Toronto, ON: Irwin.
McPeck, J. (1992). Thoughts on subject specificity. In S. Norris (Ed.), The generalizability of critical thinking (pp. 198–205). New York: Teachers College Press.
Twardy, Charles R. (2003) Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking. Teaching Philosophy 27:2 June 2004.
Patty Souza (2023) Critical Thinking. Teaching 11:5 June 2023.
External links
Critical Thinking: What Is It Good for? (In Fact, What Is It?) by Howard Gabennesch, Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
Glossary of Critical Thinking Terms
Critical Thinking Web
Analysis
Evaluation
Skepticism
Social concepts
Thought
Virtue
Philosophy of education
John Dewey | 0.777821 | 0.998852 | 0.776928 |
Modus operandi | A (often shortened to M.O. or MO) is an individual's habits of working, particularly in the context of business or criminal investigations, but also generally. It is a Latin phrase, approximately translated as .
Term
The term is often used in police work when discussing crime and addressing the methods employed by criminals. It is also used in criminal profiling, where it can help in finding clues to the offender's psychology. It largely consists of examining the actions used by the individuals to execute the crime, prevent its detection and facilitate escape. A suspect's modus operandi can assist in their identification, apprehension, or repression, and can also be used to determine links between crimes.
In business, modus operandi is used to describe a firm's preferred means of executing business and interacting with other firms.
Plural
The plural is . The word is a gerund in the genitive case, "of operating"; gerunds can never be pluralised in Latin, as opposed to gerundives. When a noun with an attribute in the genitive is pluralised, only the head noun normally changes, just as in English with "of": "a fact of life, two facts of life" (unlike, for instance, in French).
See also
References
Further reading
Levinson, D. Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment (SAGE, 2002). .
Carlo, P. The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez (Pinnacle Books 1996). .
External links
Criminal investigation
Criminology
Latin words and phrases
Offender profiling | 0.777673 | 0.999033 | 0.776921 |
Conditions of Learning | Conditions of Learning, by Robert M. Gagné, was originally published in 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and describes eight kinds of learning and nine events of instruction. This theory of learning involved two steps. The theory stipulates that there are several different types or levels of learning. The significance of these classifications is that each different type requires different types of instruction. Gagné identifies five major categories of learning: verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills and attitudes. Different internal and external conditions are necessary for each type of learning. For example, for cognitive strategies to be learned, there must be a chance to practice developing new solutions to problems; to learn attitudes, the learner must be exposed to a credible role model or persuasive arguments.
Gagné suggests that learning tasks for intellectual skills can be organized in a hierarchy according to complexity: stimulus recognition, response generation, procedure following, use of terminology, discrimination, concept formation, rule application, and problem solving. The primary significance of the hierarchy is to identify prerequisites that should be completed to facilitate learning at each level. Prerequisites are identified by doing a task analysis of a learning/training task. Learning hierarchies provide a basis for the sequencing of instruction.
In addition, the theory outlines nine instructional events and corresponding cognitive processes:
Gaining attention (reception)
Informing learners of the objective (expectancy)
Stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)
Presenting the stimulus (selective perception)
Providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)
Eliciting performance (responding)
Providing feedback (reinforcement)
Assessing performance (retrieval)
Enhancing retention and transfer (generalization)
These events should satisfy or provide the necessary conditions for learning and serve as the basis for designing instruction and selecting appropriate media (Gagné, Briggs & Wager, 1992).
Application
While Gagné's theoretical framework covers all aspects of learning, the focus of the theory is on intellectual skills. The theory has been applied to the design of instruction in all domains (Gagné & Driscoll, 1988). In its original formulation (Gagné, 1 962), special attention was given to military training settings. Gagné (1987) addresses the role of instructional technology in learning.
References
1965 non-fiction books
Books about education
Holt, Rinehart and Winston books | 0.803589 | 0.966655 | 0.776793 |
Language pedagogy | Language pedagogy is the discipline concerned with the theories and techniques of teaching language. It has been described as a type of teaching wherein the teacher draws from their own prior knowledge and actual experience in teaching language. The approach is distinguished from research-based methodologies.
There are several methods in language pedagogy but they can be classified into three: structural, functional, and interactive. Each of these encompasses a number of methods that can be utilised in order to teach and learn languages.
Development
The development of language pedagogy came in three stages. In the late 1800s and most of the 1900s, it was usually conceived in terms of method. In 1963, the University of Michigan Linguistics Professor Edward Mason Anthony Jr. formulated a framework to describe them into three levels: approach, method, and technique. It has been expanded by Richards and Rodgers in 1982 to approach, design, and procedure.
Methodology
In the late 1800s and most of the 1900s, language teaching was usually conceived in terms of method. In seeking to improve teaching practices, teachers and researchers would typically try to find out which method was the most effective. However, method is an ambiguous concept in language teaching and has been used in many different ways. According to Bell, this variety in use "offers a challenge for anyone wishing to enter into the analysis or deconstruction of methods".
The methods of teaching language may be characterized into three principal views:
The structural view treats language as a system of structurally related elements to code meaning (e.g. grammar).
The functional view sees language as a vehicle to express or accomplish certain functions, (e.g. making a request, giving information or asking for information).
The interactive view sees language as a vehicle for the creation and maintenance of social relations, focusing on patterns of moves, acts, negotiation and interaction found in conversational exchanges. This view has been fairly dominant since the 1980s.
Additionally, there is an abundance of proprietary methods tied to particular companies or schools that are not as widely used in mainstream teaching. The most notable being specific computer courses which use programming and speech recognition to give feedback to participants.
Approach, method and technique
In 1963, the University of Michigan Linguistics Professor Edward Mason Anthony Jr. formulated a framework to describe various language teaching methods, which consisted of three levels: approach, method, and technique. According to Anthony, "The arrangement is hierarchical. The organizational key is that techniques carry out a method which is consistent with an approach." His concept of approach was of a set of principles or ideas about the nature of language learning which would be consistent over time; "an approach is axiomatic". His method was more procedural; "an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, no part of which contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the selected approach." Finally, his concept of technique referred to the actual implementation in the language classroom; "a particular trick, stratagem, or contrivance used to accomplish an immediate objective." He saw techniques as being consistent with a given method and by extension, with a given approach.
A method is a plan for presenting the language material to be learned and should be based upon a selected approach. In order for an approach to be translated into a method, an instructional system must be designed considering the objectives of the teaching/learning, how the content is to be selected and organized, the types of tasks to be performed, the roles of students, and the roles of teachers. A technique is a very specific, concrete stratagem or trick designed to accomplish an immediate objective. Such are derived from the controlling method, and less directly, with the approach.
Anthony's framework was welcomed by the language teaching community when it was introduced, and it was seen as a useful way of classifying different teaching practices. However, it did not clearly define the difference between approach, method, and technique, and Kumaravadivelu reports that due to this ambiguity there was "widespread dissatisfaction" with it. Anthony himself recognized the limitations of his framework, and was open to the idea of improvements being made to it.
Approach, design and procedure
Richards and Rodgers' 1982 approach expanded on Anthony's three-level framework; however, instead of approach, method, and technique, they chose the terms approach, design, and procedure. Their concept of approach was similar to Anthony's, but their design and procedure were of broader scope than Anthony's method and technique. Their design referred to all major practical implications in the classroom, such as syllabus design, types of activities to be used in the classroom, and student and teacher roles; procedure referred to different behaviors, practices, and techniques observed in the classroom. These new terms were intended to address limitations in Anthony's framework, and also gave them specific criteria by which they could evaluate different "methods". This evaluation process was a key way that their formulation differed from Anthony's, as Anthony's framework was intended as purely descriptive.
Despite Richards and Rodgers' efforts to clearly define approach, design, and procedure, their framework has been criticized by Kumaravadivelu for having "an element of artificiality in its conception and an element of subjectivity in its operation". Kumaravadivelu also points to similar objections raised by Pennyworth and by the Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning. Brown also questions the suitability of Richards and Rodgers' term design; he points out that in English teaching design is usually used to refer specifically to curriculum design, rather than the broad definition Richards and Rodgers used. Most current teacher training manuals favor the terms approach, method, and technique.
Structural methods
The structural approach treats language as "a system of structurally related elements for the coding of meaning" and emphasizes competencies in phonological units, grammatical and lexical items. It examines language products such as sounds, morphemes, words, sentences, and vocabulary, among others.
Grammar–translation method
The grammar translation method instructs students in grammar, and provides vocabulary with direct translations to memorize. It was the predominant method in Europe from the 1840s to the 1940s. Most instructors now acknowledge that this method is ineffective by itself. It is now most commonly used in the traditional instruction of the classical languages, however it remains the most commonly practiced method of English teaching in Japan.
At school, the teaching of grammar consists of a process of training in the rules of a language which must make it possible for all the students to correctly express their opinion, to understand the remarks which are addressed to them and to analyze the texts which they read.
The objective is that by the time they leave college, the pupil controls the tools of the language which are the vocabulary, grammar and the orthography, to be able to read, understand and write texts in various contexts. The teaching of grammar examines texts, and develops awareness that language constitutes a system which can be analyzed.
This knowledge is acquired gradually, by traversing the facts of language and the syntactic mechanisms, going from simplest to the most complex. The exercises according to the program of the course must untiringly be practiced to allow the assimilation of the rules stated in the course. That supposes that the teacher corrects the exercises. The pupil can follow his progress in practicing the language by comparing his results. Thus can he adapt the grammatical rules and control little by little the internal logic of the syntactic system. The grammatical analysis of sentences constitutes the objective of the teaching of grammar at the school. Its practice makes it possible to recognize a text as a coherent whole and conditions the training of a foreign language. Grammatical terminology serves this objective. Grammar makes it possible for each pupil to understand how his mother tongue functions, in order to give him the capacity to communicate his thought.
Audio-lingual method
The audio-lingual method – also known as Aural-Oral Method – was developed in the United States around World War II. The government realized that they needed more people who could conduct conversations fluently in a variety of languages, work as interpreters, code-room assistants, and translators. However, since foreign language instruction in that country was heavily focused on reading instruction, no textbooks, other materials or courses existed at the time, so new methods and materials had to be devised. Soldiers needed to converse with people in lands they were stationed so they had to learn new languages quickly. The U.S. Army Specialized Training Program created intensive programs based on the techniques Leonard Bloomfield and other linguists devised for Native American languages, where students interacted intensively with native speakers and a linguist in guided conversations designed to decode its basic grammar and learn the vocabulary. This "informant method" had great success with its small class sizes and motivated learners.
The U.S. Army Specialized Training Program only lasted a few years, but it gained a lot of attention from the popular press and the academic community. Charles C. Fries set up the first English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, to train English as a second language for foreign language teachers. Similar programs were created later at Georgetown University, University of Texas among others based on the methods and techniques used by the military. The developing method had much in common with the British oral approach although the two developed independently. The main difference was the developing audio-lingual methods allegiance to structural linguistics, focusing on grammar and contrastive analysis to find differences between the student's native language and the target language in order to prepare specific materials to address potential problems. These materials strongly emphasized drill as a way to avoid or eliminate these problems.
This first version of the method was originally called the oral method, the aural-oral method or the structural approach. The audio-lingual method truly began to take shape near the end of the 1950s, this time due government pressure resulting from the space race. Courses and techniques were redesigned to add insights from behaviorist psychology to the structural linguistics and constructive analysis already being used. Under this method, students listen to or view recordings of language models acting in situations. Students practice with a variety of drills, and the instructor emphasizes the use of the target language at all times. The idea is that by reinforcing 'correct' behaviors, students will make them into habits.
The typical structure of a chapter employing the Audio-Lingual-Method (ALM—and there was even a text book entitled ALM [1963]) was usually standardized as follows: 1. First item was a dialog in the foreign language (FL) to be memorized by the student. The teacher would go over it the day before. 2. There were then questions in the FL about the dialog to be answered by the student(s) in the target language. 3. Often a brief introduction to the grammar of the chapter was next, including the verb(s) and conjugations. 4. The mainstay of the chapter was "pattern practice," which were drills expecting "automatic" responses from the student(s) as a noun, verb conjugation, or agreeing adjective was to be inserted in the blank in the text (or during the teacher's pause). The teacher could have the student use the book or not use it, relative to how homework was assigned. Depending on time, the class could respond as a chorus, or the teacher could pick individuals to respond. Julian Dakin, in 'The Language Laboratory and Language Learning' (Longman 1973), coined the phrase 'meaningless drills' to describe this kind of pattern practice, which others have also described as "mimicry-memorization." 5. There was a vocabulary list, sometimes with translations to the mother tongue. 6. The chapter usually ended with a short reading exercise.
Due to weaknesses in performance, and more importantly because of Noam Chomsky's theoretical attack on language learning as a set of habits, audio-lingual methods are rarely the primary method of instruction today. However, elements of the method still survive in many textbooks.
Functional methods
The oral approach and situational language teaching
The oral approach was developed from the 1930s to the 1960s by British applied linguists such as Harold Palmer and A.S. Hornsby. They were familiar with the direct method as well as the work of 19th-century applied linguists such as Otto Jespersen and Daniel Jones but attempted to formally develop a more scientifically founded approach to teaching English than was evidenced by the direct method.
A number of large-scale investigations about language learning and the increased emphasis on reading skills in the 1920s led to the notion of "vocabulary control". It was discovered that languages have a core basic vocabulary of about 2,000 words that occur frequently in written texts, and it was assumed that mastery of these would greatly aid reading comprehension. Parallel to this was the notion of "grammar control", emphasizing the sentence patterns most commonly found in spoken conversation. Such patterns were incorporated into dictionaries and handbooks for students. The principal difference between the oral approach and the direct method was that methods devised under this approach would have theoretical principles guiding the selection of content, gradation of difficulty of exercises and the presentation of such material and exercises. The main proposed benefit was that such theoretically based organization of content would result in a less-confusing sequence of learning events with better contextualization of the vocabulary and grammatical patterns presented. Last but not least, all language points were to be presented in "situations". Emphasis on this point led to the approach's second name. Proponents claim that this approach leads to students' acquiring good habits to be repeated in their corresponding situations. These teaching methods stress PPP: presentation (introduction of new material in context), practice (a controlled practice phase) and production (activities designed for less-controlled practice).
Although this approach is all but unknown among language teachers today, elements of it have had long-lasting effects on language teaching, being the basis of many widely used English as a Second/Foreign Language textbooks as late as the 1980s and elements of it still appear in current texts. Many of the structural elements of this approach were called into question in the 1960s, causing modifications of this method that led to communicative language teaching. However, its emphasis on oral practice, grammar and sentence patterns still finds widespread support among language teachers and remains popular in countries where foreign language syllabuses are still heavily based on grammar.
Directed practice
Directed practice has students repeat phrases. This method is used by U.S. diplomatic courses. It can quickly provide a phrasebook-type knowledge of the language. Within these limits, the student's usage is accurate and precise. However the student's choice of what to say is not flexible.
Interactive methods
Direct method
The direct method, sometimes also called natural method, is a method that refrains from using the learners' native language and just uses the target language. It was established in Germany and France around 1900 and is best represented by the methods devised by Berlitz and de Sauzé, although neither claims originality and it has been re-invented under other names.
The direct method operates on the idea that second language learning must be an imitation of first language learning, as this is the natural way humans learn any language: a child never relies on another language to learn its first language, and thus the mother tongue is not necessary to learn a foreign language. This method places great stress on correct pronunciation and the target language from outset. It advocates teaching of oral skills at the expense of every traditional aim of language teaching. Such methods rely on directly representing an experience into a linguistic construct rather than relying on abstractions like mimicry, translation and memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary.
According to this method, printed language and text must be kept away from second language learners for as long as possible, just as a first language learner does not use printed words until he has good grasp of speech. Learning of writing and spelling should be delayed until after the printed word has been introduced, and grammar and translation should also be avoided because this would involve the application of the learner's first language. All above items must be avoided because they hinder the acquisition of a good oral proficiency.
The method relies on a step-by-step progression based on question-and-answer sessions which begin with naming common objects such as doors, pencils, floors, etc. It provides a motivating start as the learner begins using a foreign language almost immediately. Lessons progress to verb forms and other grammatical structures with the goal of learning about thirty new words per lesson.
The series method
In the 19th century, François Gouin went to Hamburg to learn German. Based on his experience as a Latin teacher, he thought the best way to do this would be memorize a German grammar book and a table of its 248 irregular verbs. However, when he went to the academy to test his new language skills, he was disappointed to find out that he could not understand anything. Trying again, he similarly memorized the 800 root words of the language as well as re-memorizing the grammar and verb forms. However, the results were the same. During this time, he had isolated himself from people around him, so he tried to learn by listening, imitating and conversing with the Germans around him, but found that his carefully constructed sentences often caused native German speakers to laugh. Again, he tried a more classical approach, translation, and even memorizing the entire dictionary but had no better luck.
His three-year-old nephew who has learned to speak French inspired him. Gouin noticed the boy was curious about everything in the world and enjoyed sharing his experience to whoever would listen or himself. Gouin decided that language learning was a matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions, using language to represent what one experiences. Language is not an arbitrary set of conventions but a way of thinking and representing the world to oneself. It is not a conditioning process, but one in which the learner actively organizes his perceptions into linguistics concepts.
The series method is a variety of the direct method in that experiences are directly connected to the target language. There are three reasons that Gouin preceded psycholinguistic theory of the 20th century. Firstly, in Gouin's opinion, transferring the experience into words will make language easier to understand. Secondly, Gouin noticed that children organize concepts in succession of time, relating a sequence of concepts in the same order. Gouin found that if the series of sentences are shuffled, their memorization becomes nearly impossible. He also found that people will memorize events in a logical sequence, even if they are not presented in that order. He discovered a second insight into memory called "incubation". Linguistic concepts take time to settle in the memory. The learner must use the new concepts frequently after presentation, either by thinking or by speaking, in order to master them. His last observation was that language was learned in sentences with the verb as the most crucial component. Gouin would write a series in two columns: one with the complete sentences and the other with only the verb. With only the verb elements visible, he would have students recite the sequence of actions in full sentences of no more than twenty-five sentences. Another exercise involved having the teacher solicit a sequence of sentences by basically ask him/her what s/he would do next. While Gouin believed that language was rule-governed, he did not believe it should be explicitly taught.
His course was organized on elements of human society and the natural world. He estimated that a language could be learned with 800 to 900 hours of instruction over a series of 4000 exercises and no homework. The idea was that each of the exercises would force the student to think about the vocabulary in terms of its relationship with the natural world. While there is evidence that the method can work extremely well, it has some serious flaws. One of which is the teaching of subjective language, where the students must make judgments about what is experienced in the world (e.g., "bad" and "good") as such do not relate easily to one single common experience. However, the real weakness is that the method is entirely based on one experience of a three-year-old. Gouin did not observe the child's earlier language development such as naming (where only nouns are learned) or the role that stories have in human language development. What distinguishes the series method from the direct method is that vocabulary must be learned by translation from the native language, at least in the beginning.
Communicative language teaching
Communicative language teaching (CLT), also known as the Communicative Approach, emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. Despite a number of criticisms it continues to be popular, particularly in Europe, where constructivist views on language learning and education in general dominate academic discourse. Although the 'Communicative Language Teaching' is not so much a method on its own as it is an approach.
In recent years, task-based language learning (TBLL), also known as task-based language teaching (TBLT) or task-based instruction (TBI), has grown steadily in popularity. TBLL is a further refinement of the CLT approach, emphasizing the successful completion of tasks as both the organizing feature and the basis for assessment of language instruction. Dogme language teaching shares a philosophy with TBL, although differs in approach. Dogme is a communicative approach and encourages teaching without published textbooks and instead focusing on conversational communication among the learners and the teacher.
Language immersion
Language immersion in school contexts delivers academic content through the medium of a foreign language, providing support for L2 learning and first language maintenance. There are three main types of immersion education programs in the United States: foreign language immersion, dual immersion, and indigenous immersion.
Foreign language immersion programs in the U.S. are designed for students whose home language is English. In the early immersion model, for all or part of the school day elementary school children receive their content (academic) instruction through the medium of another language: Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, etc. In early total immersion models, children receive all the regular kindergarten and first grade content through the medium of the immersion language; English reading is introduced later, often in the second grade. Most content (math, science, social studies, art, music) continues to be taught through the immersion language. In early partial immersion models, part of the school day (usually 50%) delivers content through the immersion language, and part delivers it through English. French-language immersion programs are common in Canada in the provincial school systems, as part of the drive towards bilingualism and are increasing in number in the United States in public school systems (Curtain & Dahlbert, 2004). Branaman & Rhodes (1998) report that between 1987 and 1997 the percentage of elementary programs offering foreign language education in the U.S. through immersion grew from 2% to 8% and Curtain & Dahlberg (2004) report 278 foreign language immersion programs in 29 states. Research by Swain and others (Genesee 1987) demonstrate much higher levels of proficiency achieved by children in foreign language immersion programs than in traditional foreign language education elementary school models.
Dual immersion programs in the U.S. are designed for students whose home language is English as well as for students whose home language is the immersion language (usually Spanish). The goal is bilingual students with mastery of both English and the immersion language. As in partial foreign language immersion academic content is delivered through the medium of the immersion language for part of the school day, and through English the rest of the school day.
Indigenous immersion programs in the U.S. are designed for American Indian communities desiring to maintain the use of the native language by delivering elementary school content through the medium of that language. Hawaiian Immersion programs are the largest and most successful in this category.
Silent Way
The Silent Way is a discovery learning approach, invented by Caleb Gattegno in the late 1950s. The teacher is largely silent, giving more space for the students to explore the language. Students are responsible for their own learning and are encouraged to express themselves; beginners talk about what they see, more advanced students talk about their lives and what they think. The role of the teacher is not to model the language but to correct mistakes by giving sensitive feedback. With respect to teaching pronunciation, the Silent Way is a good example of the Articulatory Approach.
Community language learning
The community language learning (CLL) is a method proposed by Charles A. Curran during the 1970s. It is based on the counseling approach in which the teacher is seen as a counselor. It emphasizes the sense of community in the learning group, encourages interaction as a vital aspect of learning, and it considers as a priority the students' feelings and the recognition of struggles in language acquisition. There is no syllabus or textbook to follow, and it is the students themselves who determine the content of the lesson. Notably, it incorporates translation and recording techniques.
Suggestopedia
Suggestopedia was a method that experienced popularity especially in past years, with both staunch supporters and very strong critics, some claiming it is based on pseudoscience.
Natural approach
The natural approach is a language teaching method developed by Stephen Krashen and Tracy D. Terrell. They emphasise the learner receiving large amounts of comprehensible input. The Natural Approach can be categorized as part of the comprehension approach to language teaching.
Total physical response
In total physical response (TPR), the instructor gives the students commands in the target language and the students act those commands out using whole-body responses. This can be categorized as part of the comprehension approach to language teaching.
Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling
Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPR Storytelling or TPRS) was developed by Blaine Ray, a language teacher in California, in the 1990s. At first it was an offshoot of Total Physical Response that also included storytelling, but it has evolved into a method in its own right and has gained a large following among teachers, particularly in the United States. TPR Storytelling can be categorized as part of the comprehension approach to language teaching.
Dogme language teaching
Dogme language teaching is considered to be both a methodology and a movement. Dogme is a communicative approach to language teaching and encourages teaching without published textbooks and instead focusing on conversational communication among the learners and the teacher. It has its roots in an article by the language education author, Scott Thornbury. The Dogme approach is also referred to as “Dogme ELT”, which reflects its origins in the ELT (English language teaching) sector. Although Dogme language teaching gained its name from an analogy with the Dogme 95 film movement (initiated by Lars von Trier), the connection is not considered close.
Growing Participator Approach
The Growing Participator Approach (GPA) is an alternative way of thinking about second language acquisition, developed by Greg Thomson. GPA as an approach is usually implemented using Thomson's Six Phase Program (SPP) method, which involves 1,500 hours of special growth participation activities, supported by a local native language speaker, and targeted towards the learner's growth zone (zone of proximal development). The Six Phase Program utilises a number of techniques, such as TPR, to quickly grow the leaners comprehension ability without the use of English. The goal is to help learners continually 'grow' in their ability to meaningful 'participate' in the host culture. GPA influences include Vygotsky, as well as "the psycholinguistics of comprehension and production, usage-based approaches to language, linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis."
Proprietary methods
Some methods are tied to a particular company or school and are not used in mainstream teaching. Besides those mentioned below, there are dozens of competitors, each slightly different. Notable are the computer courses which use speech recognition to give feedback on pronunciation.
Pimsleur method
Pimsleur language learning system is based on the research of and model programs developed by American language teacher Paul Pimsleur. It involves recorded 30-minute lessons to be done daily, with each lesson typically featuring a dialog, revision, and new material. Students are asked to translate phrases into the target language, and occasionally to respond in the target language to lines spoken in the target language. The instruction starts in the student's language but gradually changes to the target language. Several all-audio programs now exist to teach various languages using the Pimsleur Method. The syllabus is the same in all languages.
Michel Thomas method
Michel Thomas Method is an audio-based teaching system developed by Michel Thomas, a language teacher in the US. It was originally done in person, although since his death it is done via recorded lessons. The instruction is done entirely in the student's own language, although the student's responses are always expected to be in the target language. The method focuses on constructing long sentences with correct grammar and building student confidence. There is no listening practice, and there is no reading or writing. The syllabus is ordered around the easiest and most useful features of the language, and as such is different for each language.
Other
Appropedia is increasingly being used to as a method to enable service learning in language education.
Computer assisted language learning (CALL) is a method that includes a combination of methods and techniques using the resources available on the internet, as well as a variety of language learning software.
There is a lot of language learning software using the multimedia capabilities of computers.
Learning by teaching (LdL)
Learning by teaching is a widespread method in Germany, developed by Jean-Pol Martin. The students take the teacher's role and teach their peers.
See also
Language education
Notes
References
Further reading
Language education
Pedagogical disciplines | 0.788021 | 0.985676 | 0.776734 |
Student-centered learning | Student-centered learning, also known as learner-centered education, broadly encompasses methods of teaching that shift the focus of instruction from the teacher to the student. In original usage, student-centered learning aims to develop learner autonomy and independence by putting responsibility for the learning path in the hands of students by imparting to them skills, and the basis on how to learn a specific subject and schemata required to measure up to the specific performance requirement. Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving. Student-centered learning theory and practice are based on the constructivist learning theory that emphasizes the learner's critical role in constructing meaning from new information and prior experience.
Student-centered learning puts students' interests first, acknowledging student voice as central to the learning experience. In a student-centered learning space, students choose what they will learn, how they will pace their learning, and how they will assess their own learning by playing the role of the facilitator of the classroom. This is in contrast to traditional education, also dubbed "teacher-centered learning", which situates the teacher as the primarily "active" role while students take a more "passive", receptive role. In a teacher-centered classroom, teachers choose what the students will learn, how the students will learn, and how the students will be assessed on their learning. In contrast, student-centered learning requires students to be active, responsible participants in their own learning and with their own pace of learning.
Usage of the term "student-centered learning" may also simply refer to educational mindsets or instructional methods that recognize individual differences in learners. In this sense, student-centered learning emphasizes each student's interests, abilities, and learning styles, placing the teacher as a facilitator of learning for individuals rather than for the class as a whole.
Background
Theorists like John Dewey, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, whose collective work focused on how students learn, have informed the move to student-centered learning. Dewey was an advocate for progressive education, and he believed that learning is a social and experiential process by making learning an active process as children learn by doing. He believed that a classroom environment in which students could learn to think critically and solve real world problems was the best way to prepare learners for the future.
Carl Rogers's ideas about the formation of the individual also contributed to student-centered learning. Rogers wrote that "the only learning which significantly influences behavior [and education] is self discovered". Maria Montessori was also a forerunner of student-centered learning, where preschool children learn through independent self-directed interaction with previously presented activities.
Self-determination theory focuses on the degree to which an individual's behavior is self-motivated and 'self-determined'. When students are allowed to gauge their learning, learning becomes an incentive, thus more meaningful. Placing students at the center of the classroom allows them to gauge their own self-worth which creates a higher degree of intrinsic motivation.
Student-centered learning means inverting the traditional teacher-centered understanding of the learning process and putting students at the center of the learning process. In the teacher-centered classroom, teachers are the primary source for knowledge. On the other hand, in student-centered classrooms, active learning is strongly encouraged. Armstrong (2012) claimed that "traditional education ignores or suppresses learner responsibility".
A further distinction from a teacher-centered classroom to that of a student-centered classroom is when the teacher acts as a facilitator, as opposed to an instructor. In essence, the teacher's goal in the learning process is to guide students into making new interpretations of the learning material, thereby 'experiencing' content, reaffirming Rogers' notion that "significant learning is acquired through doing".
Through peer-to-peer interaction, collaborative thinking can lead to an abundance of knowledge. In placing a teacher closer to a peer level, knowledge and learning is enhanced, benefitting the student and classroom overall. According to Lev Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), students typically learn vicariously through one another. Scaffolding is important when fostering independent thinking skills. Vygotsky proclaims, "Learning which is oriented toward developmental levels that have already been reached is ineffective from the viewpoint of the child's overall development. It does not aim for a new stage of the developmental process, but rather lags behind this process."
Student-centered assessment
One of the most critical differences between student-centered learning and teacher-centered learning is in assessment. Student-centered learning typically involves more formative assessment and less summative assessment than teacher-centered learning. In student-centered learning, students participate in the evaluation of their learning. This means that students are involved in deciding how to demonstrate their learning. Developing assessment that supports learning and motivation is essential to the success of student-centered approaches.
Application to Elementary and Secondary Education
In the U.S. the principles of student-centered instruction have been promoted as a way to improve engagement and boost achievement through their inclusion in the Common Core. Student-centered instruction has been shown to be related to increased mathematics engagement. Additionally, there is evidence that using student-centered instruction raises mathematics achievement.
Application to higher education
Student-centered learning environments have been shown to be effective in higher education. They have been defined specifically within higher education as both a mindset and a culture within a given educational institution and as a learning approach broadly related to, and supported by, constructivist theories of learning. They are characterised by innovative methods of teaching which aim to promote learning in communication with teachers and other learners and which take students seriously as active participants in their own learning and foster transferable skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and reflective thinking. The revised European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG) approved by the Ministerial Conference in Yerevan on 15 May 2015 include the following passage on student-centred learning: "Institutions should ensure that the programmes are delivered in a way that encourages students to take an active role in creating the learning process, and [should ensure] that the assessment of students reflects this approach."
A research university in Hong Kong sought to promote student-centered learning across the entire university by employing the following methods:
Analysis of good practice by award-winning teachers, in all faculties, to show how they made use of active forms of student learning.
Subsequent use of the analysis to promote wider use of good practice.
A compulsory teacher training course for new junior teachers, which encouraged student-centered learning.
Projects funded through teaching development grants, of which 16 were concerned with the introduction of active learning experiences.
A program-level quality enhancement initiative that utilized a student survey to identify strengths and potential areas for improvement.
Development of a model of a broadly based teaching and learning environment influencing the development of generic capabilities to provide evidence of the need for an interactive learning environment.
The introduction of program reviews as a quality assurance measure.
The success of this initiative was evaluated by surveying the students. After two years, the mean ratings indicating the students' perception of the quality of the teaching and learning environment at the university all rose significantly. The study is one of many examining the process of implementing student-centered pedagogies in large institutions of higher education.
See also
Constructivism (learning theory)
Educational progressivism
Experiential education
Inquiry-based learning
Learning environment
Personal learning environment
Phenomenon-based learning
Problem-based learning
Project-based learning
Public sphere pedagogy
Purpose-centered education
Reggio Emilia approach
SCALE-UP
Teaching method
Notes
References
External links
A paper from the Teaching and Learning Forum 2000 titled: "Student-centred learning: Is it possible?"
"Student-Centered Learning Environments: How and Why"
"Helping You Talk to the World: Student-Centered Teaching"
Curricula
Philosophy of education
Pedagogy
Education reform
Progressive education | 0.782052 | 0.993117 | 0.776669 |
Active learning | Active learning is "a method of learning in which students are actively or experientially involved in the learning process and where there are different levels of active learning, depending on student involvement." states that "students participate [in active learning] when they are doing something besides passively listening." According to Hanson and Moser (2003) using active teaching techniques in the classroom can create better academic outcomes for students. Scheyvens, Griffin, Jocoy, Liu, & Bradford (2008) further noted that "by utilizing learning strategies that can include small-group work, role-play and simulations, data collection and analysis, active learning is purported to increase student interest and motivation and to build students ‘critical thinking, problem-solving and social skills". In a report from the Association for the Study of Higher Education, authors discuss a variety of methodologies for promoting active learning. They cite literature that indicates students must do more than just listen in order to learn. They must read, write, discuss, and be engaged in solving problems. This process relates to the three learning domains referred to as knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA). This taxonomy of learning behaviors can be thought of as "the goals of the learning process." In particular, students must engage in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Nature of active learning
There are a wide range of alternatives for the term active learning and specific strategies, such as: learning through play, technology-based learning, activity-based learning, group work, project method, etc. The common factors in these are some significant qualities and characteristics of active learning. Active learning is the opposite of passive learning; it is learner-centered, not teacher-centered, and requires more than just listening; the active participation of each and every student is a necessary aspect in active learning. Students must be doing things and simultaneously think about the work done and the purpose behind it so that they can enhance their higher order thinking capabilities.
Many research studies have proven that active learning as a strategy has promoted achievement levels and some others say that content mastery is possible through active learning strategies. However, some students as well as teachers find it difficult to adapt to the new learning technique.
There are intensive uses of scientific and quantitative literacy across the curriculum, and technology-based learning is also in high demand in concern with active learning.
Barnes (1989) suggested principles of active learning:
Purposive: the relevance of the task to the students' concerns.
Reflective: students' reflection on the meaning of what is learned.
Negotiated: negotiation of goals and methods of learning between students and teachers.
Critical: students appreciate different ways and means of learning the content.
Complex: students compare learning tasks with complexities existing in real life and making reflective analysis.
Situation-driven: the need of the situation is considered in order to establish learning tasks.
Engaged: real life tasks are reflected in the activities conducted for learning.
Active learning requires appropriate learning environments through the implementation of correct strategy. Characteristics of learning environment are:
Aligned with constructivist strategies and evolved from traditional philosophies.
Promoting research based learning through investigation and contains authentic scholarly content.
Encouraging leadership skills of the students through self-development activities.
Creating atmosphere suitable for collaborative learning for building knowledgeable learning communities.
Cultivating a dynamic environment through interdisciplinary learning and generating high-profile activities for a better learning experience.
Integration of prior with new knowledge to incur a rich structure of knowledge among the students.
Task-based performance enhancement by giving the students a realistic practical sense of the subject matter learnt in the classroom.
Teacher's characteristics in active learning
A study by Jerome I. Rotgans and Henk G. Schmidt showed a correlation between three teachers' characteristics and students' situational interest in an active learning classroom.
Situational interest is defined as "focused attention and an affective reaction that is triggered in the moment by environmental stimuli, which may or may not last over time" according to Hidi and Renninger.
students' situational interest is inspired by three teacher traits as represented in the study. The three traits are social congruence, subject-matter expertise, and cognitive congruence:
When a teacher is socially congruent which means that he/she has a harmonious interaction with the student, the positive relationship allows students to express their opinions and participate without fear of making mistakes. Also, students will ask questions when the topic is not clear; as a result, they become more interested in the classroom.
Subject-matter expertise: When a teacher is an expert and has a broad knowledge of the subject being taught, students are expected to work harder and put more effort into their work. In contrast, If a teacher is less knowledgeable, students might lose interest in learning. Moreover, expert teachers are more helpful to their students in an effective way. This trait will positively impact student's success during the active learning process.
Cognitive congruence: This happens when a teacher can simplify hard concepts and use simple terms, so students can easily understand the topic. The teacher guides the students in the learning process by asking questions and allowing students to share their thoughts without interruption. As a result, students will trust their ability to learn on their own and will develop an organized way of thinking about a topic. Therefore, they will be more engaged in an active learning classroom.
Ensuring that all students are actively learning
Total participation offers two major techniques for teachers to apply in their classrooms. These techniques motivate students and allow them to understand the learning materials deeply. The first helpful tool is asking students higher-order questions instead of lower-order questions. According to Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy, a higher-order question will allow students to go beyond their basic knowledge, opening the door for their thinking to dive into new topics, and make connections related to real life. When students make these connections and analyze the topic that needs to be learned, the topic will become unforgettable. In contrast, lower-order questions are straightforward questions based on memorized facts or predictable conclusions. These types of questions may engage all students to participate but will not allow students to expand their thinking. They will likely forget the concept later because it lacks connections to real life, and their thinking didn't go through deep analysis. The second tool is called "The Ripple." This technique will ensure that every student will participate and come up with an answer regarding a higher-order question because it gives a student the time needed to think independently and generate ideas. The drawback of the traditional teaching method is that it only allows some students to respond to the prompt, while others may need extra time to develop ideas. "The Ripple" will motivate students through different stages. First, the students think independently, then they expand their ideas with peers, and finally, this discussion will expand to the whole class.
Constructivist framework
Active learning coordinates with the principles of constructivism which are, cognitive, meta-cognitive, evolving and effective in nature. Studies have shown that immediate results in construction of knowledge is not possible through active learning as the child first goes through the process of knowledge construction, knowledge recording and then knowledge absorption. This process of knowledge construction is dependent on previous knowledge of the learner where the learner is self-aware of the process of cognition and can control and regulate it by themselves. There are several aspects of learning and some of them are:
Learning through meaningful reception, influenced by David Ausubel, who emphasizes the previous knowledge the learner possesses and considers it a key factor in learning.
Learning through discovery, influenced by Jerome Bruner, where students learn through discovery of ideas with the help of situations provided by the teacher.
Conceptual change: misconceptions takes place as students discover knowledge without any guidance; teachers provide knowledge keeping in mind the common misconceptions about the content and keep an evaluatory check on the knowledge constructed by the students.
Constructivism, influenced by researchers such as Lev Vygotsky, suggests collaborative group work within the framework of cognitive strategies like questioning, clarifying, predicting and summarizing.
Science of active learning
Active learning can be used effectively for teaching comprehension and memory. The reason it is efficient is that it draws on underlying characteristics of how the brain operates during learning. These characteristics have been documented by thousands of empirical studies (e.g., Smith & Kosslyn, 2011) and have been organized into a set of principles. Each of these principles can be drawn on by various active learning exercises. They also offer a framework for designing activities that will promote learning; when used systematically, Stephen Kosslyn (2017) notes these principles enable students to "learn effectively—sometimes without even trying to learn".
The principles of learning
One way to organize the empirical literature on learning and memory specifies 16 distinct principles, which fall under two umbrella "maxims". The first maxim, "Think it Through", includes principles related to paying close attention and thinking deeply about new information. The second, "Make and Use Associations", focuses on techniques for organizing, storing, and retrieving information.
The principles can be summarized as follows.
Maxim I: Think it through
Evoking deep processing: extending thinking beyond "face value" of information (Craig et al., 2006; Craik & Lockhart, 1972)
Using desirable difficulty: ensuring that the activity is neither too easy nor too hard (Bjork, 1988, 1999; VanLehn et al., 2007)
Eliciting the generation effect: requiring recall of relevant information (Butler & Roediger, 2007; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006)
Engaging in deliberate practice: promoting practice focused on learning from errors (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014; Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993)
Using interleaving: intermixing different problem types
Inducing dual coding: presenting information both verbally and visually (Kosslyn, 1994; Mayer, 2001; Moreno & Valdez, 2005)
Evoking emotion: generating feelings to enhance recall (Erk et al., 2003; Levine & Pizarro, 2004; McGaugh, 2003, 2004)
Maxim II: Make and use associations
Promoting chunking: collecting information into organized units (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014; Mayer & Moreno, 2003)
Building on prior associations: connecting new information to previously stored information (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Glenberg & Robertson, 1999; Mayer, 2001)
Presenting foundational material first: providing basic information as a structural "spine" onto which new information can be attached (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Wandersee, Mintzes, & Novak, 1994)
Exploiting appropriate examples: offering examples of the same idea in multiple contexts (Hakel & Halpern, 2005)
Relying on principles, not rote: explicitly characterizing the dimensions, factors or mechanisms that underlie a phenomenon (Kozma & Russell, 1997; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000)
Creating associative chaining: sequencing chunks of information into stories (Bower & Clark, 1969; Graeser, Olde, & Klettke, 2002)
Using spaced practice: spreading learning out over time (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014; Cepeda et al., 2006, 2008; Cull, 2000)
Establishing different contexts: associating material with a variety of settings (Hakel & Halpern, 2005; Van Merrienboer et al., 2006)
Avoiding interference: incorporating distinctive retrieval cues to avoid confusion (Adams, 1967; Anderson & Neely, 1996)
Active learning typically draws on combinations of these principles. For example, a well-run debate will draw on virtually all, with the exceptions of dual coding, interleaving, and spaced practice. In contrast, passively listening to a lecture rarely draws on any.
Active learning exercises
Bonwell and Eison (1991) suggested learners work collaboratively, discuss materials while role-playing, debate, engage in case study, take part in cooperative learning, or produce short written exercises, etc. The argument is "when should active learning exercises be used during instruction?". Numerous studies have shown that introducing active learning activities (such as simulations, games, contrasting cases, labs,..) before, rather than after lectures or readings, results in deeper learning, understanding, and transfer. The degree of instructor guidance students need while being "active" may vary according to the task and its place in a teaching unit.
In an active learning environment learners are immersed in experiences within which they engage in meaning-making inquiry, action, imagination, invention, interaction, hypothesizing and personal reflection (Cranton 2012).
Examples of "active learning" activities include
A class discussion may be held in person or in an online environment. Discussions can be conducted with any class size, although it is typically more effective in smaller group settings. This environment allows for instructor guidance of the learning experience. Discussion requires the learners to think critically on the subject matter and use logic to evaluate their and others' positions. As learners are expected to discuss material constructively and intelligently, a discussion is a good follow-up activity given the unit has been sufficiently covered already. Some of the benefits of using discussion as a method of learning are that it helps students explore a diversity of perspectives, it increases intellectual agility, it shows respect for students' voices and experiences, it develops habits of collaborative learning, it helps students develop skills of synthesis and integration (Brookfield 2005). In addition, by having the teacher actively engage with the students, it allows for them to come to class better prepared and aware of what is taking place in the classroom.
A think-pair-share activity is when learners take a minute to ponder the previous lesson, later to discuss it with one or more of their peers, finally to share it with the class as part of a formal discussion. It is during this formal discussion that the instructor should clarify misconceptions. However students need a background in the subject matter to converse in a meaningful way. Therefore, a "think-pair-share" exercise is useful in situations where learners can identify and relate what they already know to others. It can also help teachers or instructors to observe students and see if they understand the material being discussed. This is not a good strategy to use in large classes because of time and logistical constraints (Bonwell and Eison, 1991). Think-pair-share is helpful for the instructor as it enables organizing content and tracking students on where they are relative to the topic being discussed in class, saves time so that he/she can move to other topics, helps to make the class more interactive, provides opportunities for students to interact with each other (Radhakrishna, Ewing, and Chikthimmah, 2012).
A learning cell is an effective way for a pair of students to study and learn together. The learning cell was developed by Marcel Goldschmid of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Goldschmid, 1971). A learning cell is a process of learning where two students alternate asking and answering questions on commonly read materials. To prepare for the assignment, the students read the assignment and write down questions that they have about the reading. At the next class meeting, the teacher randomly puts students in pairs. The process begins by designating one student from each group to begin by asking one of their questions to the other. Once the two students discuss the question, the other student ask a question and they alternate accordingly. During this time, the teacher goes from group to group giving feedback and answering questions. This system is also called a student dyad.
A short written exercise that is often used is the "one-minute paper". This is a good way to review materials and provide feedback. However a "one-minute paper" does not take one minute and for students to concisely summarize it is suggested that they have at least 10 minutes to work on this exercise. (See also: .)
A collaborative learning group is a successful way to learn different material for different classes. It is where you assign students in groups of 3-6 people and they are given an assignment or task to work on together. To create participation and draw on the wisdom of all the learners the classroom arrangement needs to be flexible seating to allow for the creation of small groups. (Bens, 2005)
A student debate is an active way for students to learn because they allow students the chance to take a position and gather information to support their view and explain it to others.
A reaction to a video is also an example of active learning.
A small group discussion is also an example of active learning because it allows students to express themselves in the classroom. It is more likely for students to participate in small group discussions than in a normal classroom lecture because they are in a more comfortable setting amongst their peers, and from a sheer numbers perspective, by dividing the students up more students get opportunities to speak out. There are so many different ways a teacher can implement small group discussion in to the class, such as making a game out of it, a competition, or an assignment. Statistics show that small group discussions is more beneficial to students than large group discussions when it comes to participation, expressing thoughts, understanding issues, applying issues, and overall status of knowledge.
Just-in-time teaching promotes active learning by using pre-class questions to create common ground among students and teachers before the class period begins. These warmup exercises are generally open ended questions designed to encourage students to prepare for class and to elicit student's thoughts on learning goals.
A class game is also considered an energetic way to learn because it not only helps the students to review the course material before a big exam but it helps them to enjoy learning about a topic. Different games such as Jeopardy! and crossword puzzles always seem to get the students' minds going.
Learning by teaching is also an example of active learning because students actively research a topic and prepare the information so that they can teach it to the class. This helps students learn their own topic even better and sometimes students learn and communicate better with their peers than their teachers.
Gallery walk is where students in groups move around the classroom or workshop actively engaging in discussions and contributing to other groups and finally constructing knowledge on a topic and sharing it.
In a learning factory production-related subjects can be learned interactively in a realistic learning environment.
Problem based learning or "PBL" is an active learning strategy that provides students with the problem first and has been found as an effective strategy with topics as advanced as medicine.
Effective strategies in large classes
Transformational Active Learning Experience (TALE) could be challenging in large classes where students may exceed 200, typically found in universities.
Examples of some challenges in large classes:
Student's grades and academic performance might be decreased.
The student's ability to think critically might be lower.
The professor's feedback and instructions might be minimized.
The students will become less active in the learning process.
Despite the challenges, obvious benefits can be seen; in a large class, many ideas could be generated with multiple opinions. The diverse population could expand and create strong connections and relationships between classmates.
1- Using software for students' participation without revealing their identities could be a solution to students' discomfort with representing their thoughts in front of a large population.
2-What is called the "one minute paper" could be a useful strategy for students to respond. When the teacher asks a question related to a topic that has been taught, students will write their answers individually within 60 seconds.
3- "Think-pair-share" is a method that has been used to walk students through three ways of learning. First, every student will come up with an answer regarding a question presented by the instructor. Then, Each student will share the answer with another peer for analysis and deeper thinking. Lastly, the entire class will discuss their responses together.
Elements of High-Impact Practices
George D. Kuh identified High-Impact practices (HIPs) as " a Specific set of practices that tended to lead to meaningful experiences for students." Kuh and his coworkers identified several elements that were important and could be applied in a wide range of learning opportunities.
Breaking down the skills that need to be taught, one step at a time, is more beneficial than teaching a large amount of knowledge all at the same time. This concept was developed based on the Zone of Proximal Development theory by Lev Vygotsky (1978). In practice, students start a lesson with higher expectations and in a positive class environment. As a result, all students will picture their goals as achievable, leading them to trust their abilities and be encouraged to participate actively in their learning process. When lower-level students start to face some challenges, the teacher's role becomes crucial to provide new resources and techniques to increase students' performance.
Reaching effective learning will be a common result of "spaced learning". This idea was first introduced by Hermann Ebbinghaus (1913) in his book: Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. He identified spaced learning as the process of learning new information over a long period in multiple ways using different activities.
High-quality learning could be achievable when students have a positive relationship with their classmates and teachers. Students are more likely to get motivated and reach their goals when connecting with teachers and classmates who are supportive and helpful.
Having diverse backgrounds in a class allows students to be exposed to different opinions and generate new ideas when connecting with peers from different identities.
Use of technology
The use of multimedia and technology tools helps enhance the atmosphere of the classroom, thus enhancing the active learning experience. In this way, each student actively engages in the learning process. Teachers can use movies, videos, games, and other fun activities to enhance the effectiveness of the active learning process. The use of technology also stimulates the "real-world" idea of active learning as it mimics the use of technology outside of the classroom. Incorporating technology combined with active learning have been researched and found a relationship between the use and increased positive behavior, an increase in effective learning, "motivation" as well as a connecting between students and the outside world. The theoretical foundations of this learning process are:
Flow: Flow is a concept to enhance the focus level of the student as each and every individual becomes aware and completely involved in the learning atmosphere. In accordance with one's own capability and potential, through self-awareness, students perform the task at hand. The first methodology to measure flow was Csikszentmihalyi's Experience Sampling.
Learning styles: Acquiring knowledge through one's own technique is called learning style. Learning occurs in accordance with potential as every child is different and has particular potential in various areas. It caters to all kinds of learners: visual, kinesthetic, cognitive and affective.
Locus of control: Ones with high internal locus of control believe that every situation or event is attributable to their resources and behavior. Ones with high external locus of control believe that nothing is under their control.
Intrinsic motivation: Intrinsic motivation is a factor that deals with self-perception concerning the task at hand. Interest, attitude, and results depend on the self-perception of the given activity.
Research evidence
Numerous studies have shown evidence to support active learning, given adequate prior instruction.
A meta-analysis of 225 studies comparing traditional lecture to active learning in university math, science, and engineering courses found that active learning reduces failure rates from 32% to 21%, and increases student performance on course assessments and concept inventories by 0.47 standard deviations. Because the findings were so robust with regard to study methodology, extent of controls, and subject matter, the National Academy of Sciences publication suggests that it might be unethical to continue to use traditional lecture approach as a control group in such studies. The largest positive effects were seen in class sizes under 50 students and among students under-represented in STEM fields.
Richard Hake (1998) reviewed data from over 6000 physics students in 62 introductory physics courses and found that students in classes that utilized active learning and interactive engagement techniques improved 25 percent points, achieving an average gain of 48% on a standard test of physics conceptual knowledge, the Force Concept Inventory, compared to a gain of 23% for students in traditional, lecture-based courses.
Similarly, Hoellwarth & Moelter (2011) showed that when instructors switched their physics classes from traditional instruction to active learning, student learning improved 38 percent points, from around 12% to over 50%, as measured by the Force Concept Inventory, which has become the standard measure of student learning in physics courses.
In "Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research", Prince (2004) found that "there is broad but uneven support for the core elements of active, collaborative, cooperative and problem-based learning" in engineering education.
Michael (2006), in reviewing the applicability of active learning to physiology education, found a "growing body of research within specific scientific teaching communities that supports and validates the new approaches to teaching that have been adopted".
In a 2012 report titled "Engage to Excel", the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology described how improved teaching methods, including engaging students in active learning, will increase student retention and improve performance in STEM courses. One study described in the report found that students in traditional lecture courses were twice as likely to leave engineering and three times as likely to drop out of college entirely compared with students taught using active learning techniques. In another cited study, students in a physics class that used active learning methods learned twice as much as those taught in a traditional class, as measured by test results.
Active learning has been implemented in large lectures and it has been shown that both domestic and International students perceive a wide array of benefits. In a recent study, broad improvements were shown in student engagement and understanding of unit material among international students.
Active learning approaches have also been shown to reduce the contact between students and faculty by two thirds, while maintaining learning outcomes that were at least as good, and in one case, significantly better, compared to those achieved in traditional classrooms. Additionally, students' perceptions of their learning were improved and active learning classrooms were demonstrated to lead to a more efficient use of physical space.
A 2019 study by Deslauriers et al. claimed that students have a biased perception of active learning and they feel they learn better with traditional teaching methods than active learning activities. It can be corrected by early preparation and continuous persuasion that the students are benefiting from active instruction.
In a different study conducted by Wallace et al. (2021), they came to the conclusion that in a comparison between students being taught by an active-learning instructor vs. a traditional learning instructor, students who engaged in active-learning outperformed their counterparts in exam environments. In this setting, the instructor focused on active-learning was a first-time instructor, and the individual who was teaching the traditional style of learning was a long-time instructor. The researchers acknowledged the limitations of this study in that individuals may have done better because of depth in specific sections of the class, so the researchers removed questions that could be favoring one section more than the other out of this analysis.
See also
Action teaching
Design-based learning
Experiential learning
Inquisitive learning
Learning environment
Learning space
Organizational learning
Oswego Movement
School organizational models
Sloyd
References
Citations
Works cited
Bens, I. (2005). Understanding participation. In Facilitating with ease! Core skills for facilitators, team leaders and members, managers, consultants, and trainers (2nd ed., pp. 69–77). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Brookfield, S. D. (2005). Discussion as the way of teaching: Tools and techniques for democratic classrooms (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Cranton, P. (2012). Planning instruction for adult learners (3rd ed.). Toronto: Wall & Emerson.
Hanson, S., & Moser, S. (2003). Reflections on a discipline-wide project: Developing active learning modules on the human dimensions of global change. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 27(1), 17-38.
Further references
External links
—A developing open-source Wikibook related to learning as discussed in this article.
Applied learning
Curricula
Educational practices
Learning methods
Management education
Simulation games | 0.78172 | 0.99347 | 0.776615 |
Dogme language teaching | Dogme language teaching is considered to be both a methodology and a movement. Dogme is a communicative approach to language teaching that encourages teaching without published textbooks and focuses instead on conversational communication among learners and teacher. It has its roots in an article by the language education author, Scott Thornbury. The Dogme approach is also referred to as "Dogme ELT", which reflects its origins in the ELT (English language teaching) sector. Although Dogme language teaching gained its name from an analogy with the Dogme 95 film movement (initiated by Lars von Trier) in which the directors, actors, and actresses commit a "vow of chastity" to minimize their reliance on special effects that may create unauthentic feelings from the viewers, the connection is not considered close.
Key principles
Dogme has ten key principles.
Interactivity: the most direct route to learning is to be found in the interactivity between teachers and students and amongst the students themselves.
Engagement: students are most engaged by content they have created themselves.
Dialogic processes: learning is social and dialogic, where knowledge is co-constructed.
Scaffolded conversations: learning takes place through conversations, where the learner and teacher co-construct the knowledge and skills.
Emergence: language and grammar emerge from the learning process. This is seen as distinct from the 'acquisition' of language.
Affordances: the teacher's role is to optimize language learning affordances through directing attention to emergent language.
Voice: the learner's voice is given recognition along with the learner's beliefs and knowledge.
Empowerment: students and teachers are empowered by freeing the classroom of published materials and textbooks.
Relevance: materials (e.g. texts, audios and videos) should have relevance for the learners.
Critical use: teachers and students should use published materials and textbooks in a critical way that recognizes their cultural and ideological biases.
Main precepts
There are three precepts (later described by Thornbury as the "three pillars" of Dogme ) that emerge from the ten key principles.
Conversation-driven teaching
Conversation is seen as central to language learning within the Dogme framework, because it is the "fundamental and universal form of language" and so is considered to be "language at work". Since real life conversation is more interactional than it is transactional, Dogme places more value on communication that promotes social interaction. Dogme also places more emphasis on a discourse-level (rather than sentence-level) approach to language, as it is considered to better prepare learners for real-life communication, where the entire conversation is more relevant than the analysis of specific utterances. Dogme considers that the learning of a skill is co-constructed within the interaction between the learner and the teacher. In this sense, teaching is a conversation between the two parties. As such, Dogme is seen to reflect Tharp's view that "to most truly teach, one must converse; to truly converse is to teach".
Revision to the concept of Dogme as being conversation driven
The immutability of conversation as one of the "pillars" of Dogme was called into question by Scott Thornbury himself in a 2020 interview. When asked what might happen should a student not wish to engage in classroom conversation, Thornbury suggested that saying Dogme had to be "conversation driven" might have been a "mistake": I think one of the mistakes we made was making conversation part of the... "three pillars", and what really should be said, is that Dogme is driven not by conversations, but by texts... texts meaning both written and spoken. Arguably, this suggestion that Dogme language teaching should be seen as being "text-driven", rather than "conversation-driven", caters to more reflective learners.
Materials light approach
The Dogme approach considers that student-produced material is preferable to published materials and textbooks, to the extent of inviting teachers to take a 'vow of chastity' (which Thornbury and Meddings have since pointed out was "tongue-in-cheek") and not use textbooks. Dogme teaching has therefore been criticized as not offering teachers the opportunity to use a complete range of materials and resources. However, there is a debate over the extent to which Dogme is actually anti-textbook or anti-technology. Meddings and Thornbury focus their critique of textbooks on their tendency to focus on grammar more than on communicative competency and also on the cultural biases often found in textbooks, especially those aimed at global markets. Indeed, Dogme can be seen as a pedagogy that is able to address the lack of availability or affordability of materials in many parts of the world. Proponents of a Dogme approach argue that they are not so much anti-materials as pro-learner, and thus align themselves with other forms of learner-centered instruction and critical pedagogy.
Emergent language
Dogme considers language learning to be a process where language emerges rather than one where it is acquired. Dogme shares this belief with other approaches to language education, such as task-based learning. Language is considered to emerge in two ways. Firstly classroom activities lead to collaborative communication amongst the students. Secondly, learners produce language that they were not necessarily taught. The teacher's role, in part, is to facilitate the emergence of language. However, Dogme does not see the teacher's role as merely to create the right conditions for language to emerge. The teacher must also encourage learners to engage with this new language to ensure learning takes place. The teacher can do this in a variety of ways, including rewarding, repeating and reviewing it. As language emerges rather than is acquired, there is no need to follow a syllabus that is externally set. Indeed, the content of the syllabus is covered (or 'uncovered') throughout the learning process. Ali ketabi (TESOL holder)
Pedagogical foundations
First, Dogme is based not only on theories of language teaching and learning but also on progressive, critical, and humanist educational theories. Adopting the Dialogic model, Dogme encourages students and teachers to communicate in order to exchange ideas, which is the prerequisite for education to occur.
Dogme also has its roots in communicative language teaching (in fact Dogme sees itself as an attempt to restore the communicative aspect to communicative approaches). Dogme has been noted for its compatibility with reflective teaching and for its intention to "humanize the classroom through a radical pedagogy of dialogue". It also shares many qualities with task-based language learning and only differs with task-based learning in terms of methodology rather than philosophy. Research evidence for Dogme is limited but Thornbury argues that the similarities with task-based learning suggest that Dogme likely leads to similar results. An example is the findings that learners tend to interact, produce language and collaboratively co-construct their learning when engaged in communicative tasks.
Another significant milestone that contributed to the birth of Dogme was the introduction of Emergentism. Dogme follows the same idea of language emergence through dialogs, which allows learners to enhance the effectiveness of communication. Later on, through the action of language awareness-raising activities and focus-on-form tasks, learners can refine the interlanguage and get more proximate to the target language
As a critical pedagogy
Although Thornbury notes that Dogme is not inherently seeking social change and therefore does not fulfill generally held criteria for a critical pedagogy, Dogme can be seen as critical in terms of its anti-establishment approach to language teaching.
Technology and web 2.0
Although Dogme teaching has been seen to be anti-technology, Thornbury maintains that he does not see Dogme as being opposed to technology as such, rather that the approach is critical of using technology that does not enable teaching that is both learner centered and is based upon authentic communication. Indeed, more recent attempts to map Dogme principles on to language learning with web 2.0 tools (under the term "Dogme 2.0") are considered evidence of Dogme being in transition and therefore of being compatible with new technology. However, although there is not a clear consensus among Dogme teachers on this issue (see discussions on the ELT Dogme Yahoo Group), there is a dominant view that the physical classroom will be preferable to attempts to substitute physical presence with communication via digital technology. Dogme can combine with different technological tools as our society is constantly changing. Teachers can combine Dogme philosophy with the other methods such as flipped classrooms or e-learning environments. However, what matters is that Dogme, as critical pedagogy, is transformative and seeks social changes
Criticism
Dogme has come under criticism from a wide range of teachers and educators for its perceived rejection of both published textbooks and modern technology in language lessons. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the initial call for a 'vow of chastity' is unnecessarily purist, and that a weaker adoption of Dogme principles would allow teachers the freedom to choose resources according to the needs of a particular lesson. Maley also presents Dogme as an approach that "[increases] the constraints on teachers". Christensen notes that adoption of Dogme practices may face greater cultural challenges in countries outside of Europe, such as Japan. Questions have also been raised about the appropriateness of Dogme in low resource contexts and where students are preparing for examinations that have specific syllabi.
In general, the criticisms and concerns that Dogme encounters revolve around several major issues: the theoretical foundation of the conversation-driven perspective, the under-preparedness of lesson structure, and the potential pressure on teachers and students in various learning contexts. Dogme can challenge inexperienced teachers who have an inadequate pedagogical repertoire, and limited access to resources. It may also face challenges regarding its applicability in classes of students with low levels of proficiency. Low-level students cannot interact with the teacher and peers effectively in the target language.
Notes
References
Language-teaching methodology | 0.800523 | 0.970109 | 0.776595 |
Ontology | Ontology is the philosophical study of being. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it. To articulate the basic structure of being, ontology examines what all entities have in common and how they are divided into fundamental classes, known as categories. An influential distinction is between particular and universal entities. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, like the person Socrates. Universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green. Another contrast is between concrete objects existing in space and time, like a tree, and abstract objects existing outside space and time, like the number 7. Systems of categories aim to provide a comprehensive inventory of reality, employing categories such as substance, property, relation, state of affairs, and event.
Ontologists disagree about which entities exist on the most basic level. Platonic realism asserts that universals have objective existence. Conceptualism says that universals only exist in the mind while nominalism denies their existence. There are similar disputes about mathematical objects, unobservable objects assumed by scientific theories, and moral facts. Materialism says that, fundamentally, there is only matter while dualism asserts that mind and matter are independent principles. According to some ontologists, there are no objective answers to ontological questions but only perspectives shaped by different linguistic practices.
Ontology uses diverse methods of inquiry. They include the analysis of concepts and experience, the use of intuitions and thought experiments, and the integration of findings from natural science. Applied ontology employs ontological theories and principles to study entities belonging to a specific area. It is of particular relevance to information and computer science, which develop conceptual frameworks of limited domains. These frameworks are used to store information in a structured way, such as a college database tracking academic activities. Ontology is closely related to metaphysics and relevant to the fields of logic, theology, and anthropology.
The origins of ontology lie in the ancient period with speculations about the nature of being and the source of the universe, including ancient Indian, Chinese, and Greek philosophy. In the modern period, philosophers conceived ontology as a distinct academic discipline and coined its name.
Definition
Ontology is the study of being. It is the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. It aims to discover the foundational building blocks of the world and characterize reality as a whole in its most general aspects. In this regard, ontology contrasts with individual sciences like biology and astronomy, which restrict themselves to a limited domain of entities, such as living entities and celestial phenomena. In some contexts, the term ontology refers not to the general study of being but to a specific ontological theory within this discipline. It can also mean a conceptual scheme or inventory of a particular domain.
Ontology is closely related to metaphysics but the exact relation of these two disciplines is disputed. According to a traditionally influential characterization, metaphysics is the study of fundamental reality in the widest sense while ontology is the subdiscipline of metaphysics that restricts itself to the most general features of reality. This view sees ontology as general metaphysics, which is to be distinguished from special metaphysics focused on more specific subject matters, like God, mind, and value. A different conception understands ontology as a preliminary discipline that provides a complete inventory of reality while metaphysics examines the features and structure of the entities in this inventory. Another conception says that metaphysics is about real being while ontology examines possible being or the concept of being. It is not universally accepted that there is a clear boundary between metaphysics and ontology. Some philosophers use both terms as synonyms.
The word ontology has its roots in the ancient Greek terms (, meaning ) and (, meaning ), literally, . The ancient Greeks did not use the term ontology, which was coined by philosophers in the 17th century.
Basic concepts
Being
Being, or existence, is the main topic of ontology. It is one of the most general and fundamental concepts, encompassing the whole of reality and every entity within it. In its widest sense, being only contrasts with non-being or nothingness. It is controversial whether a more substantial analysis of the concept or meaning of being is possible. One proposal understands being as a property possessed by every entity. Critics of this view argue that an entity without being cannot have any properties, meaning that being cannot be a property since properties presuppose being. A different suggestion says that all beings share a set of essential features. According to the Eleatic principle, "power is the mark of being", meaning that only entities with a causal influence truly exist. According to a controversial proposal by philosopher George Berkeley, all existence is mental, expressed in his slogan "to be is to be perceived".
Depending on the context, the term being is sometimes used with a more limited meaning to refer only to certain aspects of reality. In one sense, being is unchanging and impermanent and is distinguished from becoming, which implies change. Another contrast is between being, as what truly exists, and phenomena, as what merely appears to exist. In some contexts, being expresses the fact that something is while essence expresses its qualities or what it is like.
Ontologists often divide being into fundamental classes or highest kinds, called categories of being. Proposed categories include substance, property, relation, state of affairs, and event. They can be used to provide systems of categories, which offer a comprehensive inventory of reality in which every entity belongs to exactly one category. Some philosophers, like Aristotle, say that entities belonging to different categories exist in distinct ways. Others, like John Duns Scotus, insist that there are no differences in the mode of being, meaning that everything exists in the same way. A related dispute is whether some entities have a higher degree of being than others, an idea already found in Plato's work. The more common view in contemporary philosophy is that a thing either exists or not with no intermediary states or degrees.
The relation between being and non-being is a frequent topic in ontology. Influential issues include the status of nonexistent objects and why there is something rather than nothing.
Particulars and universals
A central distinction in ontology is between particular and universal entities. Particulars, also called individuals, are unique, non-repeatable entities, like Socrates, the Taj Mahal, and Mars. Universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green, the form circularity, and the virtue courage. Universals express aspects or features shared by particulars. For example, Mount Everest and Mount Fuji are particulars characterized by the universal mountain.
Universals can take the form of properties or relations. Properties express what entities are like. They are features or qualities possessed by an entity. Properties are often divided into essential and accidental properties. A property is essential if an entity must have it; it is accidental if the entity can exist without it. For instance, having three sides is an essential property of a triangle while being red is an accidental property. Relations are ways how two or more entities stand to one another. Unlike properties, they apply to several entities and characterize them as a group. For example, being a city is a property while being east of is a relation, as in "Kathmandu is a city" and "Kathmandu is east of New Delhi". Relations are often divided into internal and external relations. Internal relations depend only on the properties of the objects they connect, like the relation of resemblance. External relations express characteristics that go beyond what the connected objects are like, such as spatial relations.
Substances play an important role in the history of ontology as the particular entities that underlie and support properties and relations. They are often considered the fundamental building blocks of reality that can exist on their own, while entities like properties and relations cannot exist without substances. Substances persist through changes as they acquire or lose properties. For example, when a tomato ripens, it loses the property green and acquires the property red.
States of affairs are complex particular entities that have several other entities as their components. The state of affairs "Socrates is wise" has two components: the individual Socrates and the property wise. States of affairs that correspond to reality are called facts. Facts are truthmakers of statements, meaning that whether a statement is true or false depends on the underlying facts.
Events are particular entities that occur in time, like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first moon landing. They usually involve some kind of change, like the lawn becoming dry. In some cases, no change occurs, like the lawn staying wet. Complex events, also called processes, are composed of a sequence of events.
Concrete and abstract objects
Concrete objects are entities that exist in space and time, such as a tree, a car, and a planet. They have causal powers and can affect each other, like when a car hits a tree and both are deformed in the process. Abstract objects, by contrast, are outside space and time, such as the number 7 and the set of integers. They lack causal powers and do not undergo changes. It is controversial whether or in what sense abstract objects exist and how people can know about them.
Concrete objects encountered in everyday life are complex entities composed of various parts. For example, a book is made up of two covers and pages between them. Each of these components is itself constituted of smaller parts, like molecules, atoms, and elementary particles. Mereology studies the relation between parts and wholes. One position in mereology says that every collection of entities forms a whole. According to a different view, this is only the case for collections that fulfill certain requirements, for instance, that the entities in the collection touch one another. The problem of material constitution asks whether or in what sense a whole should be considered a new object in addition to the collection of parts composing it.
Abstract objects are closely related to fictional and intentional objects. Fictional objects are entities invented in works of fiction. They can be things, like the One Ring in J. R. R. Tolkien's book series The Lord of the Rings, and people, like the Monkey King in the novel Journey to the West. Some philosophers say that fictional objects are one type of abstract object, existing outside space and time. Others understand them as artifacts that are created as the works of fiction are written. Intentional objects are entities that exist within mental states, like perceptions, beliefs, and desires. For example, if a person thinks about the Loch Ness Monster then the Loch Ness Monster is the intentional object of this thought. People can think about existing and non-existing objects, making it difficult to assess the ontological status of intentional objects.
Other concepts
Ontological dependence is a relation between entities. An entity depends ontologically on another entity if the first entity cannot exist without the second entity. For instance, the surface of an apple cannot exist without the apple. An entity is ontologically independent if it does not depend on anything else, meaning that it is fundamental and can exist on its own. Ontological dependence plays a central role in ontology and its attempt to describe reality on its most fundamental level. It is closely related to metaphysical grounding, which is the relation between a ground and facts it explains.
An ontological commitment of a person or a theory is an entity that exists according to them. For instance, a person who believes in God has an ontological commitment to God. Ontological commitments can be used to analyze which ontologies people explicitly defend or implicitly assume. They play a central role in contemporary metaphysics when trying to decide between competing theories. For example, the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument defends mathematical Platonism, asserting that numbers exist because the best scientific theories are ontologically committed to numbers.
Possibility and necessity are further topics in ontology. Possibility describes what can be the case, as in "it is possible that extraterrestrial life exists". Necessity describes what must be the case, as in "it is necessary that three plus two equals five". Possibility and necessity contrast with actuality, which describes what is the case, as in "Doha is the capital of Qatar". Ontologists often use the concept of possible worlds to analyze possibility and necessity. A possible world is a complete and consistent way how things could have been. For example, Haruki Murakami was born in 1949 in the actual world but there are possible worlds in which he was born at a different date. Using this idea, possible world semantics says that a sentence is possibly true if it is true in at least one possible world. A sentence is necessarily true if it is true in all possible worlds.
In ontology, identity means that two things are the same. Philosophers distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity. Two entities are qualitatively identical if they have exactly the same features, such as perfect identical twins. This is also called exact similarity and indiscernibility. Numerical identity, by contrast, means that there is only a single entity. For example, if Fatima is the mother of Leila and Hugo then Leila's mother is numerically identical to Hugo's mother. Another distinction is between synchronic and diachronic identity. Synchronic identity relates an entity to itself at the same time. Diachronic identity relates an entity to itself at different times, as in "the woman who bore Leila three years ago is the same woman who bore Hugo this year".
Branches
There are different and sometimes overlapping ways to divide ontology into branches. Pure ontology focuses on the most abstract topics associated with the concept and nature of being. It is not restricted to a specific domain of entities and studies existence and the structure of reality as a whole. Pure ontology contrasts with applied ontology, also called domain ontology. Applied ontology examines the application of ontological theories and principles to specific disciplines and domains, often in the field of science. It considers ontological problems in regard to specific entities such as matter, mind, numbers, God, and cultural artifacts.
Social ontology, a major subfield of applied ontology, studies social kinds, like money, gender, society, and language. It aims to determine the nature and essential features of these concepts while also examining their mode of existence. According to a common view, social kinds are useful constructions to describe the complexities of social life. This means that they are not pure fictions but, at the same time, lack the objective or mind-independent reality of natural phenomena like elementary particles, lions, and stars. In the fields of computer science, information science, and knowledge representation, applied ontology is interested in the development of formal frameworks to encode and store information about a limited domain of entities in a structured way. A related application in genetics is Gene Ontology, which is a comprehensive framework for the standardized representation of gene-related information across species and databases.
Formal ontology is the study of objects in general while focusing on their abstract structures and features. It divides objects into different categories based on the forms they exemplify. Formal ontologists often rely on the tools of formal logic to express their findings in an abstract and general manner. Formal ontology contrasts with material ontology, which distinguishes between different areas of objects and examines the features characteristic of a specific area. Examples are ideal spatial beings in the area of geometry and living beings in the area of biology.
Descriptive ontology aims to articulate the conceptual scheme underlying how people ordinarily think about the world. Prescriptive ontology departs from common conceptions of the structure of reality and seeks to formulate a new and better conceptualization.
Another contrast is between analytic and speculative ontology. Analytic ontology examines the types and categories of being to determine what kinds of things could exist and what features they would have. Speculative ontology aims to determine which entities actually exist, for example, whether there are numbers or whether time is an illusion.
Metaontology studies the underlying concepts, assumptions, and methods of ontology. Unlike other forms of ontology, it does not ask "what exists" but "what does it mean for something to exist" and "how can people determine what exists". It is closely related to fundamental ontology, an approach developed by philosopher Martin Heidegger that seeks to uncover the meaning of being.
Schools of thought
Realism and anti-realism
The term realism is used for various theories that affirm that some kind of phenomenon is real or has mind-independent existence. Ontological realism is the view that there are objective facts about what exists and what the nature and categories of being are. Ontological realists do not make claims about what those facts are, for example, whether elementary particles exist. They merely state that there are mind-independent facts that determine which ontological theories are true. This idea is denied by ontological anti-realists, also called ontological deflationists, who say that there are no substantive facts one way or the other. According to philosopher Rudolf Carnap, for example, ontological statements are relative to language and depend on the ontological framework of the speaker. This means that there are no framework-independent ontological facts since different frameworks provide different views while there is no objectively right or wrong framework.
In a more narrow sense, realism refers to the existence of certain types of entities. Realists about universals say that universals have mind-independent existence. According to Platonic realists, universals exist not only independent of the mind but also independent of particular objects that exemplify them. This means that the universal red could exist by itself even if there were no red objects in the world. Aristotelian realism, also called moderate realism, rejects this idea and says that universals only exist as long as there are objects that exemplify them. Conceptualism, by contrast, is a form of anti-realism, stating that universals only exist in the mind as concepts that people use to understand and categorize the world. Nominalists defend a strong form of anti-realism by saying that universals have no existence. This means that the world is entirely composed of particular objects.
Mathematical realism, a closely related view in the philosophy of mathematics, says that mathematical facts exist independently of human language, thought, and practices and are discovered rather than invented. According to mathematical Platonism, this is the case because of the existence of mathematical objects, like numbers and sets. Mathematical Platonists say that mathematical objects are as real as physical objects, like atoms and stars, even though they are not accessible to empirical observation. Influential forms of mathematical anti-realism include conventionalism, which says that mathematical theories are trivially true simply by how mathematical terms are defined, and game formalism, which understands mathematics not as a theory of reality but as a game governed by rules of string manipulation.
Modal realism is the theory that in addition to the actual world, there are countless possible worlds as real and concrete as the actual world. The primary difference is that the actual world is inhabited by us while other possible worlds are inhabited by our counterparts. Modal anti-realists reject this view and argue that possible worlds do not have concrete reality but exist in a different sense, for example, as abstract or fictional objects.
Scientific realists say that the scientific description of the world is an accurate representation of reality. It is of particular relevance in regard to things that cannot be directly observed by humans but are assumed to exist by scientific theories, like electrons, forces, and laws of nature. Scientific anti-realism says that scientific theories are not descriptions of reality but instruments to predict observations and the outcomes of experiments.
Moral realists claim that there exist mind-independent moral facts. According to them, there are objective principles that determine which behavior is morally right. Moral anti-realists either claim that moral principles are subjective and differ between persons and cultures, a position known as moral relativism, or outright deny the existence of moral facts, a view referred to as moral nihilism.
By number of categories
Monocategorical theories say that there is only one fundamental category, meaning that every single entity belongs to the same universal class. For example, some forms of nominalism state that only concrete particulars exist while some forms of bundle theory state that only properties exist. Polycategorical theories, by contrast, hold that there is more than one basic category, meaning that entities are divided into two or more fundamental classes. They take the form of systems of categories, which list the highest genera of being to provide a comprehensive inventory of everything.
The closely related discussion between monism and dualism is about the most fundamental types that make up reality. According to monism, there is only one kind of thing or substance on the most basic level. Materialism is an influential monist view; it says that everything is material. This means that mental phenomena, such as beliefs, emotions, and consciousness, either do not exist or exist as aspects of matter, like brain states. Idealists take the converse perspective, arguing that everything is mental. They may understand physical phenomena, like rocks, trees, and planets, as ideas or perceptions of conscious minds. Neutral monism occupies a middle ground by saying that both mind and matter are derivative phenomena. Dualists state that mind and matter exist as independent principles, either as distinct substances or different types of properties. In a slightly different sense, monism contrasts with pluralism as a view not about the number of basic types but the number of entities. In this sense, monism is the controversial position that only a single all-encompassing entity exists in all of reality. Pluralism is more commonly accepted and says that several distinct entities exist.
By fundamental categories
The historically influential substance-attribute ontology is a polycategorical theory. It says that reality is at its most fundamental level made up of unanalyzable substances that are characterized by universals, such as the properties an individual substance has or relations that exist between substances. The closely related to substratum theory says that each concrete object is made up of properties and a substratum. The difference is that the substratum is not characterized by properties: it is a featureless or bare particular that merely supports the properties.
Various alternative ontological theories have been proposed that deny the role of substances as the foundational building blocks of reality. Stuff ontologies say that the world is not populated by distinct entities but by continuous stuff that fills space. This stuff may take various forms and is often conceived as infinitely divisible. According to process ontology, processes or events are the fundamental entities. This view usually emphasizes that nothing in reality is static, meaning that being is dynamic and characterized by constant change. Bundle theories state that there are no regular objects but only bundles of co-present properties. For example, a lemon may be understood as a bundle that includes the properties yellow, sour, and round. According to traditional bundle theory, the bundled properties are universals, meaning that the same property may belong to several different bundles. According to trope bundle theory, properties are particular entities that belong to a single bundle.
Some ontologies focus not on distinct objects but on interrelatedness. According to relationalism, all of reality is relational at its most fundamental level. Ontic structural realism agrees with this basic idea and focuses on how these relations form complex structures. Some structural realists state that there is nothing but relations, meaning that individual objects do not exist. Others say that individual objects exist but depend on the structures in which they participate. Fact ontologies present a different approach by focusing on how entities belonging to different categories come together to constitute the world. Facts, also known as states of affairs, are complex entities; for example, the fact that the Earth is a planet consists of the particular object the Earth and the property being a planet. Fact ontologies state that facts are the fundamental constituents of reality, meaning that objects, properties, and relations cannot exist on their own and only form part of reality to the extent that they participate in facts.
In the history of philosophy, various ontological theories based on several fundamental categories have been proposed. One of the first theories of categories was suggested by Aristotle, whose system includes ten categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, date, posture, state, action, and passion. An early influential system of categories in Indian philosophy, first proposed in the Vaisheshika school, distinguishes between six categories: substance, quality, motion, universal, individuator, and inherence. Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism includes a system of twelve categories, which Kant saw as pure concepts of understanding. They are subdivided into four classes: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. In more recent philosophy, theories of categories were developed by C. S. Peirce, Edmund Husserl, Samuel Alexander, Roderick Chisholm, and E. J. Lowe.
Others
The dispute between constituent and relational ontologies concerns the internal structure of concrete particular objects. Constituent ontologies say that objects have an internal structure with properties as their component parts. Bundle theories are an example of this position: they state that objects are bundles of properties. This view is rejected by relational ontologies, which say that objects have no internal structure, meaning that properties do not inhere in them but are externally related to them. According to one analogy, objects are like pin-cushions and properties are pins that can be stuck to objects and removed again without becoming a real part of objects. Relational ontologies are common in certain forms of nominalism that reject the existence of universal properties.
Hierarchical ontologies state that the world is organized into levels. Entities on all levels are real but low-level entities are more fundamental than high-level entities. This means that they can exist without high-level entities while high-level entities cannot exist without low-level entities. One hierarchical ontology says that elementary particles are more fundamental than the macroscopic objects they compose, like chairs and tables. Other hierarchical theories assert that substances are more fundamental than their properties and that nature is more fundamental than culture. Flat ontologies, by contrast, deny that any entity has a privileged status, meaning that all entities exist on the same level. For them, the main question is only whether something exists rather than identifying the level at which it exists.
The ontological theories of endurantism and perdurantism aim to explain how material objects persist through time. Endurantism is the view that material objects are three-dimensional entities that travel through time while being fully present in each moment. They remain the same even when they gain or lose properties as they change. Perdurantism is the view that material objects are four-dimensional entities that extend not just through space but also through time. This means that they are composed of temporal parts and, at any moment, only one part of them is present but not the others. According to perdurantists, change means that an earlier part exhibits different qualities than a later part. When a tree loses its leaves, for instance, there is an earlier temporal part with leaves and a later temporal part without leaves.
Differential ontology is a poststructuralist approach interested in the relation between the concepts of identity and difference. It says that traditional ontology sees identity as the more basic term by first characterizing things in terms of their essential features and then elaborating differences based on this conception. Differential ontologists, by contrast, privilege difference and say that the identity of a thing is a secondary determination that depends on how this thing differs from other things.
Object-oriented ontology belongs to the school of speculative realism and examines the nature and role of objects. It sees objects as the fundamental building blocks of reality. As a flat ontology, it denies that some entities have a more fundamental form of existence than others. It uses this idea to argue that objects exist independently of human thought and perception.
Methods
Methods of ontology are ways of conducting ontological inquiry and deciding between competing theories. There is no single standard method; the diverse approaches are studied by metaontology.
Conceptual analysis is a method to understand ontological concepts and clarify their meaning. It proceeds by analyzing their component parts and the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a concept applies to an entity. This information can help ontologists decide whether a certain type of entity, such as numbers, exists. Eidetic variation is a related method in phenomenological ontology that aims to identify the essential features of different types of objects. Phenomenologists start by imagining an example of the investigated type. They proceed by varying the imagined features to determine which ones cannot be changed, meaning they are essential. The transcendental method begins with a simple observation that a certain entity exists. In the following step, it studies the ontological repercussions of this observation by examining how it is possible or which conditions are required for this entity to exist.
Another approach is based on intuitions in the form of non-inferential impressions about the correctness of general principles. These principles can be used as the foundation on which an ontological system is built and expanded using deductive reasoning. A further intuition-based method relies on thought experiments to evoke new intuitions. This happens by imagining a situation relevant to an ontological issue and then employing counterfactual thinking to assess the consequences of this situation. For example, some ontologists examine the relation between mind and matter by imagining creatures identical to humans but without consciousness.
Naturalistic methods rely on the insights of the natural sciences to determine what exists. According to an influential approach by Willard Van Orman Quine, ontology can be conducted by analyzing the ontological commitments of scientific theories. This method is based on the idea that scientific theories provide the most reliable description of reality and that their power can be harnessed by investigating the ontological assumptions underlying them.
Principles of theory choice offer guidelines for assessing the advantages and disadvantages of ontological theories rather than guiding their construction. The principle of Ockham's Razor says that simple theories are preferable. A theory can be simple in different respects, for example, by using very few basic types or by describing the world with a small number of fundamental entities. Ontologists are also interested in the explanatory power of theories and give preference to theories that can explain many observations. A further factor is how close a theory is to common sense. Some ontologists use this principle as an argument against theories that are very different from how ordinary people think about the issue.
In applied ontology, ontological engineering is the process of creating and refining conceptual models of specific domains. Developing a new ontology from scratch involves various preparatory steps, such as delineating the scope of the domain one intends to model and specifying the purpose and use cases of the ontology. Once the foundational concepts within the area have been identified, ontology engineers proceed by defining them and characterizing the relations between them. This is usually done in a formal language to ensure precision and, in some cases, automatic computability. In the following review phase, the validity of the ontology is assessed using test data. Various more specific instructions for how to carry out the different steps have been suggested. They include the Cyc method, Grüninger and Fox's methodology, and so-called METHONTOLOGY. In some cases, it is feasible to adapt a pre-existing ontology to fit a specific domain and purpose rather than creating a new one from scratch.
Related fields
Ontology overlaps with many disciplines, including logic, the study of correct reasoning. Ontologists often employ logical systems to express their insights, specifically in the field of formal ontology. Of particular interest to them is the existential quantifier, which is used to express what exists. In first-order logic, for example, the formula states that dogs exist. Some philosophers study ontology by examining the structure of thought and language, saying that they reflect the structure of being. Doubts about the accuracy of natural language have led some ontologists to seek a new formal language, termed ontologese, for a better representation of the fundamental structure of reality.
Ontologies are often used in information science to provide a conceptual scheme or inventory of a specific domain, making it possible to classify objects and formally represent information about them. This is of specific interest to computer science, which builds databases to store this information and defines computational processes to automatically transform and use it. For instance, to encode and store information about clients and employees in a database, an organization may use an ontology with categories such as person, company, address, and name. In some cases, it is necessary to exchange information belonging to different domains or to integrate databases using distinct ontologies. This can be achieved with the help of upper ontologies, which are not limited to one specific domain. They use general categories that apply to most or all domains, like Suggested Upper Merged Ontology and Basic Formal Ontology.
Similar applications of ontology are found in various fields seeking to manage extensive information within a structured framework. Protein Ontology is a formal framework for the standardized representation of protein-related entities and their relationships. Gene Ontology and Sequence Ontology serve a similar purpose in the field of genetics. Environment Ontology is a knowledge representation focused on ecosystems and environmental processes. Friend of a Friend provides a conceptual framework to represent relations between people and their interests and activities.
The topic of ontology has received increased attention in anthropology since the 1990s, sometimes termed the "ontological turn". This type of inquiry is focused on how people from different cultures experience and understand the nature of being. Specific interest has been given to the ontological outlook of Indigenous people and how it differs from a Western perspective. As an example of this contrast, it has been argued that various indigenous communities ascribe intentionality to non-human entities, like plants, forests, or rivers. This outlook is known as animism and is also found in Native American ontologies, which emphasize the interconnectedness of all living entities and the importance of balance and harmony with nature.
Ontology is closely related to theology and its interest in the existence of God as an ultimate entity. The ontological argument, first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, attempts to prove the existence of the divine. It defines God as the greatest conceivable being. From this definition it concludes that God must exist since God would not be the greatest conceivable being if God lacked existence. Another overlap in the two disciplines is found in ontological theories that use God or an ultimate being as the foundational principle of reality. Heidegger criticized this approach, terming it ontotheology.
History
The roots of ontology in ancient philosophy are speculations about the nature of being and the source of the universe. Discussions of the essence of reality are found in the Upanishads, ancient Indian scriptures dating from as early as 700 BCE. They say that the universe has a divine foundation and discuss in what sense ultimate reality is one or many. Samkhya, the first orthodox school of Indian philosophy, formulated an atheist dualist ontology based on the Upanishads, identifying pure consciousness and matter as its two foundational principles. The later Vaisheshika school proposed a comprehensive system of categories. In ancient China, Laozi's (6th century BCE) Taoism examines the underlying order of the universe, known as Tao, and how this order is shaped by the interaction of two basic forces, yin and yang. The philosophical movement of Xuanxue emerged in the 3rd century CE and explored the relation between being and non-being.
Starting in the 6th century BCE, Presocratic philosophers in ancient Greece aimed to provide rational explanations of the universe. They suggested that a first principle, such as water or fire, is the primal source of all things. Parmenides (c. 515–450 BCE) is sometimes considered the founder of ontology because of his explicit discussion of the concepts of being and non-being. Inspired by Presocratic philosophy, Plato (427–347 BCE) developed his theory of forms. It distinguishes between unchangeable perfect forms and matter, which has a lower degree of existence and imitates the forms. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) suggested an elaborate system of categories that introduced the concept of substance as the primary kind of being. The school of Neoplatonism arose in the 3rd century CE and proposed an ineffable source of everything, called the One, which is more basic than being itself.
The problem of universals was an influential topic in medieval ontology. Boethius (477–524 CE) suggested that universals can exist not only in matter but also in the mind. This view inspired Peter Abelard (1079–1142 CE), who proposed that universals exist only in the mind. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274 CE) developed and refined fundamental ontological distinctions, such as the contrast between existence and essence, between substance and accidents, and between matter and form. He also discussed the transcendentals, which are the most general properties or modes of being. John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) argued that all entities, including God, exist in the same way and that each entity has a unique essence, called haecceity. William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347 CE) proposed that one can decide between competing ontological theories by assessing which one uses the smallest number of elements, a principle known as Ockham's razor.
In Arabic-Persian philosophy, Avicenna (980–1037 CE) combined ontology with theology. He identified God as a necessary being that is the source of everything else, which only has contingent existence. In 8th-century Indian philosophy, the school of Advaita Vedanta emerged. It says that only a single all-encompassing entity exists, stating that the impression of a plurality of distinct entities is an illusion. Starting in the 13th century CE, the Navya-Nyāya school built on Vaisheshika ontology with a particular focus on the problem of non-existence and negation. 9th-century China saw the emergence of Neo-Confucianism, which developed the idea that a rational principle, known as li, is the ground of being and order of the cosmos.
René Descartes (1596–1650) formulated a dualist ontology at the beginning of the modern period. It distinguishes between mind and matter as distinct substances that causally interact. Rejecting Descartes's dualism, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) proposed a monist ontology according to which there is only a single entity that is identical to God and nature. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), by contrast, said that the universe is made up of many simple substances, which are synchronized but do not interact with one another. John Locke (1632–1704) proposed his substratum theory, which says that each object has a featureless substratum that supports the object's properties. Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was influential in establishing ontology as a distinct discipline, delimiting its scope from other forms of metaphysical inquiry. George Berkeley (1685–1753) developed an idealist ontology according to which material objects are ideas perceived by minds.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) rejected the idea that humans can have direct knowledge of independently existing things and their nature, limiting knowledge to the field of appearances. For Kant, ontology does not study external things but provides a system of pure concepts of understanding. Influenced by Kant's philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) linked ontology and logic. He said that being and thought are identical and examined their foundational structures. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) rejected Hegel's philosophy and proposed that the world is an expression of a blind and irrational will. Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) saw absolute spirit as the ultimate and all-encompassing reality while denying that there are any external relations.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) developed phenomenology and employed its method, the description of experience, to address ontological problems. This idea inspired his student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to clarify the meaning of being by exploring the mode of human existence. Jean-Paul Sartre responded to Heidegger's philosophy by examining the relation between being and nothingness from the perspective of human existence, freedom, and consciousness. Based on the phenomenological method, Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) developed a complex hierarchical ontology that divides reality into four levels: inanimate, biological, psychological, and spiritual.
Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) articulated a controversial ontological theory that includes nonexistent objects as part of being. Arguing against this theory, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) formulated a fact ontology known as logical atomism. This idea was further refined by the early Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and inspired D. M. Armstrong's (1926–2014) ontology. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), by contrast, developed a process ontology. Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) questioned the objectivity of ontological theories by claiming that what exists depends on one's linguistic framework. He had a strong influence on Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), who analyzed the ontological commitments of scientific theories to solve ontological problems. Quine's student David Lewis (1941–2001) formulated the position of modal realism, which says that possible worlds are as real and concrete as the actual world. Since the end of the 20th century, interest in applied ontology has risen in computer and information science with the development of conceptual frameworks for specific domains.
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Differentiated instruction | Differentiated instruction and assessment, also known as differentiated learning or, in education, simply, differentiation, is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing all students within their diverse classroom community of learners a range of different avenues for understanding new information (often in the same classroom) in terms of: acquiring content; processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and developing teaching materials and assessment measures so that all students within a classroom can learn effectively, regardless of differences in their ability. Differentiated instruction means using different tools, content, and due process in order to successfully reach all individuals. Differentiated instruction, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson, is the process of "ensuring that what a student learns, how he or she learns it, and how the student demonstrates what he or she has learned is a match for that student's readiness level, interests, and preferred mode of learning." According to Boelens et al. (2018), differentiation can be on two different levels: the administration level and the classroom level. The administration level takes the socioeconomic status and gender of students into consideration. At the classroom level, differentiation revolves around content, processing, product, and effects. On the content level, teachers adapt what they are teaching to meet the needs of students. This can mean making content more challenging or simplified for students based on their levels. The process of learning can be differentiated as well. Teachers may choose to teach individually at a time, assign problems to small groups, partners or the whole group depending on the needs of the students. By differentiating product, teachers decide how students will present what they have learned. This may take the form of videos, graphic organizers, photo presentations, writing, and oral presentations. All these take place in a safe classroom environment where students feel respected and valued—effects.
When language is the factor for differentiation, Echevarria et al. (2017), proponents of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) strongly supports and guides teachers to differentiate instruction to English as a Second Language Learners (ELLs) who have a range of learning ability levels—beginning, intermediate and advanced. Here, differentiated instruction will mean adapting a whole new instructional strategy that a teacher of a typical classroom of native speakers of English would not have a need to.
Differentiated classrooms have also been described as ones that respond to student variety in readiness levels, interests, and learning profiles. It is a classroom that includes and allows all students to be successful. To do this, a teacher sets different expectations for task completion for students, specifically based upon their individual needs. Teachers can differentiate in four ways: 1) through content, 2) process, 3) product, and 4) learning environment based on the individual learner. Differentiation stems from beliefs about differences among learners, how they learn, learning preferences, and individual interests (Algozzine & Anderson, 2007). Therefore, differentiation is an organized, yet flexible way of proactively adjusting teaching and learning methods to accommodate each child's learning needs and preferences to achieve maximum growth as a learner.
Pre-assessment
An important part of differentiated instruction and assessment is determining what students already know so as not to cover material students have mastered, or use methods that would be ineffective for students. The goal of pre-assessment is to determine a student's knowledge, understanding and skill prior to the unit of study. These are assessments for learning and include diagnostic or pre-assessments that the teacher uses to help guide instruction and benefit each learner. They are informal and provide qualitative feedback to teachers and students to address strengths and needs during the unit. Pre-assessments should be conducted several weeks before the unit of study and should not be graded. Chapman and King (2005) note that when "teachers strategically administer pre-assessments before planning their lessons, they can address the students' strengths and needs during instruction." Pre-assessment can be conducted in two ways: 1) by identifying learning preferences and interests (i.e. Gardner's Multiple Intelligence test, or Visual, Auditory, or Kinesthetic learner), and 2) by identifying knowledge of student understandings (i.e. checklists, quizzes, class discussion, portfolios, entry/exit cards, anticipation guides, journals, self-reflections). Both of these types of pre-assessment are used to design student tasks, particularly when a student might require support, enrichment, or have different learning styles, intelligence, or interests. Teachers can also determine, locate, and compile appropriate resources and decide timelines/priorities for upcoming units.
The goal of differentiated instruction is to develop engaging tasks that challenge and enhance learning for each student. Instructional activities are flexible and based and evaluated on content, process, product, and learning environment. This instructional approach and choice of content are driven by the data from students' assessment results and from the outcomes of other screening tools. Pre-assessments can gather information about each student's strengths, comforts, or areas of weakness. This leads to appropriate differentiation that accommodates each student's learning needs and preferences. Assessments should be used as a tool to create clear and meaningful instruction that guides each student towards challenging but not frustrating activities.
Ongoing assessment
Assessment is the process of gathering information from a variety of sources such as assignments, teacher observations, class discussions, and tests and quizzes. Teachers must assess regularly to inform instructional strategies, learn about each student's readiness, interests, and learning preferences and to improve student learning. This information can be gathered through diagnostic (pre-assessments), formative, and summative assessments, as well as Individual Education Plans, Ontario Student Records, student interest surveys, and multiple intelligence or learning style inventories.
Assessment for learning not only includes diagnostic or pre-assessment measures but also formative assessment. Formative assessments are used during a unit to provide understanding about what the student is learning, and continually guide instructional decisions. Assessment as learning takes place when students self-assess their work and reflect on their growth as learners. Earl (2003) says this is the process in metacognition, and "occurs when students personally monitor what they are learning and use feedback . . . to make adjustments, adaptations, and . . . changes in what they understand." Differentiation can be used when applying, demonstrating, extending knowledge, or practicing skills and attitudes to monitor achievement of goals. This might include peer/ self-assessments, and peer/teacher conferences. Assessment of learning is the culminating task or summative assessment, which takes place after the learning has occurred and students can show what concepts and/or skills they learned. Differentiation can also be used here through a variety of strategies such as tests, projects, demonstrations, writing performances, and more.
All these ongoing assessments help the teacher know students and their needs so they can select effective teaching and learning strategies and interventions that maximize student achievement. Consistent program review and diagnosis of whole-class and individual student responses not only provides ongoing feedback to enhance teaching and learning for teachers but students and parents as well. Teachers use ongoing assessments to gather information about a student's knowledge and capabilities, to direct future planning, to monitor student progress, and to evaluate student achievement. Students and parents can also use these assessments to reflect and understand their own learning preferences and level of achievement.
Content
The content of lessons may be differentiated based on what students already know. The most basic content of a lesson should cover the standards of learning set by the district or state. Some students in a class may be completely unfamiliar with the concepts in a lesson, some students may have partial mastery of the content – or display mistaken ideas about the content, and some students may show mastery of the content before the lesson begins. The teacher may differentiate the content by designing activities for groups of students that cover different areas of Bloom's taxonomy. For example, students who are unfamiliar with the concepts may be required to complete tasks on the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, and application. Students with partial mastery may be asked to complete tasks in the application, analysis and evaluation areas, and students who have high levels of mastery may be asked to complete tasks in evaluation and synthesis.
When teachers differentiate content, they may adapt what they want students to learn or how students access the knowledge, understanding, and skills (Anderson, 2007). In these instances, educators are not varying student objectives or lowering performance standards for students. They use different texts, novels, or short stories at a reading level appropriate for each individual student. Another example would be including visuals, maps, or graphic organizers to introduce or reinforce concepts as opposed to only providing written or oral text. This provides students with different methods of viewing, considering and absorbing content. Teachers can also use flexible groups and have students assigned to like groups listening to audiobooks or accessing specific internet sources. Students could have a choice to work in pairs, groups, or individually, but all students are working towards the same standards and objectives.
Understanding by Design
Understanding by Design (UbD), which was developed by Grant Wiggins is an educational strategy that may be used to inform content in a differentiated classroom. This model was further refined by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe, who maintained that UbD and differentiated instruction (DI) form an essential partnership. Their position is that learning occurs not at the individual level or to the individual but within the individual students as they are engaged in exploring concepts. The combination of UbD and differentiated instruction is expected to allow educators to simultaneously "craft powerful curriculum in a standards-dominated era and ensure academic success for the full spectrum of learners."
UbD is described as a backward design model that emphasizes the beginning with the end in mind. Here, planning the courses, units, and individual lessons is undertaken based on the desired result. For instance, when teaching a literary piece, the teacher first decides the goal and how the students will be assessed to determine if such goal is achieved. The framework also recognizes the importance of assessment and employs evaluative or summative assessment models as the bases of grading.
Process
To understand how students learn and what they know, pre-assessment and ongoing assessment are essential. This provides feedback for both teacher and student, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. Delivery of instruction in the past often followed a "one size fits all" approach. In contrast, differentiation is individually student centered, with a focus on appropriate instructional and assessment tools that are fair, flexible, challenging, and engage students in the curriculum in meaningful ways.
Students vary in culture, socioeconomic status, language, gender, motivation, ability, disability, learning styles, personal interests and more, and teachers must be aware of these varieties as they plan in accordance with the curricula. By considering varied learning needs, teachers can develop personalized instruction so that all children in the classroom can learn effectively.
The process of how the material in a lesson is learned may be differentiated for students based on their learning styles, taking into account what standards of performance are required for the age level. This stage of differentiation allows students to learn based either on what method is easiest for them to gain knowledge, or what may challenge them most: some students may prefer to read about a topic (or may require practice in reading), and others may prefer to listen (or require practice in listening), or acquire knowledge by manipulating objects associated with the content. Information may be presented in multiple ways by the teacher, and may be based on any available methods or materials. Many teachers use areas of Multiple Intelligences to provide learning opportunities.
Commonalities in the assessment results lead to grouping practices that are designed to meet the students' needs. "How" a teacher plans to deliver the instruction is based on assessment results that show the needs, learning styles, interests, and levels of prior knowledge. The grouping practices must be flexible, as groups change with regard to the need that must be addressed. Regardless of whether the differentiation of instruction is based upon student readiness, interests, or needs, the dynamic flow of grouping and regrouping is one of the foundations of differentiated instruction. It is important for a differentiated classroom to allow some students to work alone, if this is their best modality for a particular task. (Nunley, 2004)
Differentiating by process refers to how a student comes to understand and assimilate facts, concepts and skills (Anderson, 2007). After teaching a lesson, a teacher might break students into small "ability" groups based on their readiness. The teacher would then give each group a series of questions, based on each group's appropriate level of readiness-skills, related to the objectives of the lesson. Another way to group the students could be based on the students' learning styles. The main idea behind this is that students are at different levels and learn in different ways, so a teacher can't teach them all the same way.
Another model of differentiation, layered curriculum, offers student a choice of assignments but requires that they demonstrate learning to pass the assignment. This eliminates the need for pre-assessment and is useful for teachers with large class loads, such as in high school (Nunley, 2004).
Product
The product is essentially what the student produces at the end of the lesson to demonstrate the mastery of the content: tests, evaluations, projects, reports, or other activities. Based on students' skill levels and educational standards, teachers may assign students to complete activities that demonstrate mastery of an educational concept (writing a report), or in a method the student prefers (composing an original song about the content, or building a 3-dimensional object that explains mastery of concepts in the lesson or unit). The product is an integral component of the differentiated model, as preparation of the assessments determines both the 'what' and 'how' of instruction delivery.
When an educator differentiates by product or performance, they are affording students various ways of demonstrating what they have learned from the lesson or unit (Anderson, 2007; Nunley, 2006). It is done by using menu unit sheets, choice boards or open-ended lists of final product options. It is meant to allow students to show what they learned based on their learning preferences, interests and strengths.
Examples of differentiated structures include Layered Curriculum, tiered instruction, tic-tac-toe extension menus, Curry/Samara models, RAFT writing activities, and similar designs. (See external links below.)
In differentiated instruction, teachers respond to students' readiness, instructional needs, interests and learning preferences and provide opportunities for students to work in varied instructional formats. A classroom that utilizes differentiated instruction is a learner-responsive, teacher-facilitated classroom where all students have the opportunity to meet curriculum foundation objectives. Lessons may be on inquiry based, problem based and project based instruction.
While significant research has shown the effectiveness of product based differentiated instruction at primary and secondary level, effective use has also been demonstrated in higher education in some circumstances.
Learning environment
Differentiating through the environment is important as it creates the conditions for optimal learning to take place. According to Tomlinson (2003), "Environment will support or deter the student's quest for affirmation, contribution, power, purpose, and challenge in the classroom," (p. 37). The learning environment includes the physical layout of the classroom, the way that the teacher uses the space, environmental elements and sensitivities including lighting, as well as the overall atmosphere of the classroom. The teacher's goal is to create an environment that is positive, structured, and supportive for each student. The physical environment should be a place that is flexible with varied types of furniture and arrangements, and areas for quiet individual work as well as areas for group work and collaboration. This supports a variety of ways to engage in flexible and dynamic learning. Flexible seating is a method used to differentiate seating assignments within the learning environment. In the flexible seating model, students choose the type of seating and location in the classroom that will allow them to learn best. Each student chooses for themselves within teacher guidelines. Teachers should be sensitive and alert to ways that the classroom environment supports students' ability to interact with others individually, in small groups, and as a whole class. They should employ classroom management techniques that support a safe and supportive learning environment.
Helping parents learn about differentiated instruction
According to Carol Ann Tomlinson, most parents are eager for their students to learn, grow, succeed and feel accepted in school. Sharing these goals is important. A differentiated classroom may "look different" from what parents expect. The teacher can help them develop a clear, positive understanding of differentiated instruction and how it benefits their children by letting parents know that:
The goal of differentiated instruction is to make certain that everyone grows in all key skills and knowledge areas, encouraging student to move on from their starting points and to become more independent learners.
In a differentiated classroom, the teacher closely assesses and monitors skills, knowledge levels, interests to determine effective ways for all students to learn; the teacher's lesson plan is drawn up with those various skills, levels, and interests in mind.
Differentiated lessons reflect the teacher's best understanding of what will best help a child to grow in understanding and skill at a given moment. That understanding evolves as the course continues, as the child develops, and as parents contribute to teachers' understanding.
When parents come to school and talk about their children, they share their perspectives with the teacher. The teacher views the student more broadly, specifically in relation to students of the same age and in light of developmental benchmarks. The parent, on the other hand, has a deeper sense of the student's interests, feelings, and changes over time. The combination of the wide-angle lens viewpoint of the teacher with the close up lens of the parents results in a fuller picture for everyone.
Criticism
Education critics on theories of different learning styles have used this as an avenue to also criticize differentiated instruction. One source includes Mike Schmoker of Education Week, who claims that after a lengthy email exchange with an architect of DI, she conceded "There [is] no solid research or school evidence" in support of DI. In Educational Research, John Geake states, "the evidence consistently shows that modifying a teaching approach to cater for differences in learning styles does not result in any improvement in learning outcomes," and that implementing learning styles, citing VAK specifically, does "not reflect how our brains actually learn, nor the individual differences we observe in classrooms." In Psychological Science for the Public Interest, Pashler et al. note, "the literature fails to provide adequate support for applying learning-style assessments in school settings. Moreover, several studies that used appropriate research designs found evidence that contradicted the learning-styles hypothesis...[W]e feel that the widespread use of learning-style measures in educational settings is unwise and a wasteful use of limited resources."
See also
Tracking (education)
References
Further reading
Allan, S. D., & Tomlinson, C. A. (2000). Leadership for differentiating schools and classrooms. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Fountain, Heather. Differentiated Instruction in Art. Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, Inc., 2013.
Heacox, D. (2002). Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom. Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing Inc.
Jackson, R. (2008) The Differentiation Workbook: A Step-by-step guide to planning lessons that ensure that your students meet or exceed the standards. Washington, DC: Mindsteps
Nunley, K. (2004). Layered curriculum (2nd ed.). Amherst, NH: Brains.org
Nunley, K. (2006). Differentiating the high school classroom: Solution strategies for 18 common obstacles. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corbin.
Rebora, A. (2008). Making a difference. Teacher Magazine, 2(1), 26, 28–31.
Tomlinson, C.A. (2001). How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms. Virginia: ASCD.
Smets, W. and Struyven,K. (2018), Aligning with complexity: system-theoretical principles for research on differentiated instruction, Frontline Learning research, 6 (2), doi: 10.14786/flr.v6i2.340
External links
Differentiated Instruction Resources from ASCD
Information on developing RAFT activities
Carol Tomlinson: Differentiation Expert
Differentiated Instruction – Reading Rockets and American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
Differentiating for High Ability Students – Lesson Planet
A journal paper describing how differentiated lab exercises were used to teach undergraduates programming
Pre-assessment
Teaching
Pedagogy
Educational practices
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Degrowth | Degrowth is an academic and social movement critical of the concept of growth in gross domestic product as a measure of human and economic development. The idea of degrowth is based on ideas and research from economic anthropology, ecological economics, environmental sciences, and development studies. It argues that modern capitalism's unitary focus on growth causes widespread ecological damage and is unnecessary for the further increase of human living standards. Degrowth theory has been met with both academic acclaim and considerable criticism.
Degrowth's main argument is that an infinite expansion of the economy is fundamentally contradictory to the finiteness of material resources on Earth. It argues that economic growth measured by GDP should be abandoned as a policy objective. Policy should instead focus on economic and social metrics such as life expectancy, health, education, housing, and ecologically sustainable work as indicators of both ecosystems and human well-being. Degrowth theorists posit that this would increase human living standards and ecological preservation even as GDP growth slows.
Degrowth theory is highly critical of free market capitalism, and it highlights the importance of extensive public services, care work, self-organization, commons, relational goods, community, and work sharing.
Degrowth theory partly orients itself as a critique of green capitalism or as a radical alternative to the market-based, sustainable development goal (SDG) model of addressing ecological overshoot and environmental collapse.
A 2024 review of degrowth studies over the past 10 years showed that most were of poor quality: almost 90% were opinions rather than analysis, few used quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones used formal modelling; the latter used small samples or a focus on non-representative cases. Also most studies offered subjective policy advice, but lacked policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies.
Background
The "degrowth" movement arose from concerns over the consequences of the productivism and consumerism associated with industrial societies (whether capitalist or socialist) including:
The reduced availability of energy sources (see peak oil);
The destabilization of Earth's ecosystems upon which all life on Earth depends (see Holocene Extinction, Anthropocene, global warming, pollution, current biodiversity loss);
The rise of negative societal side-effects (unsustainable development, poorer health, poverty); and
The ever-expanding use of resources by Global North countries to satisfy lifestyles that consume more food and energy, and produce greater waste, at the expense of the Global South (see neocolonialism).
A 2017 review of the research literature on degrowth, found that it focused on three main goals: (1) reduction of environmental degradation; (2) redistribution of income and wealth locally and globally; (3) promotion of a social transition from economic materialism to participatory culture.
Decoupling
The concept of decoupling denotes decoupling economic growth, usually measured in GDP growth, GDP per capita growth or GNI per capita growth from the use of natural resources and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Absolute decoupling refers to GDP growth coinciding with a reduction in natural resource use and GHG emissions, while relative decoupling describes an increase in resource use and GHG emissions lower than the increase in GDP growth. The degrowth movement heavily critiques this idea and argues that absolute decoupling is only possible for short periods, specific locations, or with small mitigation rates. In 2021 NGO European Environmental Bureau called stated that "not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown", and that reported cases of existing eco-economic decouplings either depict relative decoupling and/or are observed only temporarily and/or only on a local scale, arguing that alternatives to eco-economic decoupling are needed. This is supported by several other studies which state that absolute decoupling is highly unlikely to be achieved fast enough to prevent global warming over 1.5 °C or 2 °C, even under optimistic policy conditions.
Major criticism of this view points out that Degrowth is politically unpalatable, defaulting towards the more free market green growth orthodoxy as a set of solutions that is more politically tenable. The problems with the SDG process are political rather than technical, Ezra Klein of the New York Times claims in summary of these criticisms, and degrowth has less plausibility than green growth as a democratic political platform. However, in a recent review of efforts toward Sustain Development Goals by the Council of Foreign Relations in 2023 it was found that progress toward 50% of the minimum viable SDG's have stalled and 30% of these verticals have reversed (or are getting worse, rather than better). Thus, while it may be true that Degrowth will be 'a difficult sell' (per Ezra Klein) to introduce via democratic voluntarism, the critique of SDG's and decoupling against green capitalism leveled by Degrowth theorists appear to have predictive power.
Resource depletion
Degrowth proponents argue that economic expansion must be met with a corresponding increase in resource consumption. Non-renewable resources, like petroleum, have a limited supply and can eventually be exhausted. Similarly, renewable resources can also be depleted if they are harvested at unsustainable rates for prolonged periods. An example of this depletion is evident in the case of caviar production in the Caspian Sea.
Supporters of degrowth contend that reducing demand is the sole permanent solution to bridging the demand gap. To sustain renewable resources, both demand and production must be regulated to levels that avert depletion and ensure environmental sustainability. Transitioning to a society less reliant on oil is crucial for averting societal collapse as non-renewable resources dwindle. Degrowth can also be interpreted as a plea for resource reallocation, aiming to halt unsustainable practices of transforming certain entities into resources, such as non-renewable natural resources. Instead, the focus shifts towards identifying and utilizing alternative resources, such as renewable human capabilities.
Ecological footprint
The ecological footprint measures human demand on the Earth's ecosystems by comparing human demand with the Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area required to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste.
According to a 2005 Global Footprint Network report, inhabitants of high-income countries live off of 6.4 global hectares (gHa), while those from low-income countries live off of a single gHa. For example, while each inhabitant of Bangladesh lives off of what they produce from 0.56 gHa, a North American requires 12.5 gHa. Each inhabitant of North America uses 22.3 times as much land as a Bangladeshi. According to the same report, the average number of global hectares per person was 2.1, while current consumption levels have reached 2.7 hectares per person. For the world's population to attain the living standards typical of European countries, the resources of between three and eight planet Earths would be required with current levels of efficiency and means of production. For world economic equality to be achieved with the currently available resources, proponents say rich countries would have to reduce their standard of living through degrowth. The constraints on resources would eventually lead to a forced reduction in consumption. A controlled reduction of consumption would reduce the trauma of this change, assuming no technological changes increase the planet's carrying capacity. Multiple studies now demonstrate that in many affluent countries per-capita energy consumption could be decreased substantially and quality living standards still be maintained.
Sustainable development
Degrowth ideology opposes all manifestations of productivism, which advocates that economic productivity and growth should be the primary objectives of human organization. Consequently, it stands in opposition to the prevailing model of sustainable development. While the concept of sustainability aligns with some aspects of degrowth philosophy, sustainable development, as conventionally understood, is based on mainstream development principles focused on augmenting economic growth and consumption. Degrowth views sustainable development as contradictory because any development reliant on growth within a finite and ecologically strained context is deemed intrinsically unsustainable. Development based on growth in a finite, environmentally stressed world is viewed as inherently unsustainable.
Critics of degrowth argue that a slowing of economic growth would result in increased unemployment, increased poverty, and decreased income per capita. Many who believe in negative environmental consequences of growth still advocate for economic growth in the South, even if not in the North. Slowing economic growth would fail to deliver the benefits of degrowth — self-sufficiency and material responsibility — and would indeed lead to decreased employment. Rather, degrowth proponents advocate the complete abandonment of the current (growth) economic model, suggesting that relocalizing and abandoning the global economy in the Global South would allow people of the South to become more self-sufficient and would end the overconsumption and exploitation of Southern resources by the North. Supporters of degrowth view it as a potential method to shield ecosystems from human exploitation. Within this concept, there is an emphasis on communal stewardship of the environment, fostering a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Degrowth recognizes ecosystems as valuable entities beyond their utility as mere sources of resources. During the Second International Conference on degrowth, discussions encompassed concepts like implementing a maximum wage and promoting open borders. Degrowth advocates an ethical shift that challenges the notion that high-resource consumption lifestyles are desirable. Additionally, alternative perspectives on degrowth include addressing perceived historical injustices perpetrated by the global North through centuries of colonization and exploitation, advocating for wealth redistribution. Determining the appropriate scale of action remains a focal point of debate within degrowth movements.
Some researchers believe that the world is poised to experience a Great Transformation, either by disastrous events or intentional design. They maintain that ecological economics must incorporate Postdevelopment theories, Buen vivir, and degrowth to affect the change necessary to avoid these potentially catastrophic events.
A 2022 paper by Mark Diesendorf found that limiting global warming to 1,5 degrees with no overshoot would require a reduction of energy consumption. It describes (chapters 4–5) degrowth toward a steady state economy as possible and probably positive. The study ends with the words: "The case for a transition to a steady-state economy with low throughput and low emissions, initially in the high-income economies and then in rapidly growing economies, needs more serious attention and international cooperation.
"Rebound effect"
Technologies designed to reduce resource use and improve efficiency are often touted as sustainable or green solutions. Degrowth literature, however, warns about these technological advances due to the "rebound effect", also known as Jevons paradox. This concept is based on observations that when a less resource-exhaustive technology is introduced, behavior surrounding the use of that technology may change, and consumption of that technology could increase or even offset any potential resource savings. In light of the rebound effect, proponents of degrowth hold that the only effective "sustainable" solutions must involve a complete rejection of the growth paradigm and a move to a degrowth paradigm. There are also fundamental limits to technological solutions in the pursuit of degrowth, as all engagements with technology increase the cumulative matter-energy throughput. However, the convergence of digital commons of knowledge and design with distributed manufacturing technologies may arguably hold potential for building degrowth future scenarios.
Mitigation of climate change and determinants of 'growth'
Scientists report that degrowth scenarios, where economic output either "declines" or declines in terms of contemporary economic metrics such as current GDP, have been neglected in considerations of 1.5 °C scenarios reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finding that investigated degrowth scenarios "minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability compared to technology-driven pathways" with a core problem of such being feasibility in the context of contemporary decision-making of politics and globalized rebound- and relocation-effects. However, structurally realigning 'economic growth' and socioeconomic activity determination-structures may not be widely debated in both the degrowth community and in degrowth research which may largely focus on reducing economic growth either more generally or without structural alternative but with e.g. nonsystemic political interventions. Similarly, many green growth advocates suggest that contemporary socioeconomic mechanisms and metrics – including for economic growth – can be continued with forms of nonstructural "energy-GDP decoupling". A study concluded that public services are associated with higher human need satisfaction and lower energy requirements while contemporary forms of economic growth are linked with the opposite, with the contemporary economic system being fundamentally misaligned with the twin goals of meeting human needs and ensuring ecological sustainability, suggesting that prioritizing human well-being and ecological sustainability would be preferable to overgrowth in current metrics of economic growth. The word 'degrowth' was mentioned 28 times in the United Nations IPCC Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group III published in April 2022.
Open Localism
Open localism is a concept that has been promoted by the degrowth community when envisioning an alternative set of social relations and economic organization. It builds upon the political philosophies of localism and is based on values such as diversity, ecologies of knowledge, and openness. Open localism does not look to create an enclosed community but rather to circulate production locally in an open and integrative manner.
Open localism is a direct challenge to the acts of closure regarding identitarian politics. By producing and consuming as much as possible locally, community members enhance their relationships with one another and the surrounding environment.
Degrowth's ideas around open localism share similarities with ideas around the commons while also having clear differences. On the one hand, open localism promotes localized, common production in cooperative-like styles similar to some versions of how commons are organized. On the other hand, open localism does not impose any set of rules or regulations creating a defined boundary, rather it favours a cosmopolitan approach.
Feminism
The degrowth movement builds on feminist economics that has criticized measures of economic growth like the GDP as it excludes work mainly done by women such as unpaid care work (the work performed to fulfill people's needs) and reproductive work (the work sustaining life), first argued by Marilyn Waring. Further, degrowth draws on the critique of socialist feminists like Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser claiming that capitalist growth builds on the exploitation of women's work. Instead of devaluing it, degrowth centers the economy around care, proposing that care work should be organized as a commons.
Centering care goes hand in hand with changing society's time regimes. Degrowth scholars propose a working time reduction. As this does not necessarily lead to gender justice, the redistribution of care work has to be equally pushed. A concrete proposal by Frigga Haug is the 4-in-1 perspective that proposes 4 hours of wage work per day, freeing time for 4 hours of care work, 4 hours of political activities in a direct democracy, and 4 hours of personal development through learning.
Furthermore, degrowth draws on materialist ecofeminisms that state the parallel of the exploitation of women and nature in growth-based societies and proposes a subsistence perspective conceptualized by Maria Mies and Ariel Salleh. Synergies and opportunities for cross-fertilization between degrowth and feminism were proposed in 2022, through networks including the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA). FaDA argued that the 2023 launch of Degrowth Journal created "a convivial space for generating and exploring knowledge and practice from diverse perspectives".
Decolonialism
A relevant concept within the theory of degrowth is decolonialism, which refers to putting an end to the perpetuation of political, social, economic, religious, racial, gender, and epistemological relations of power, domination, and hierarchy of the global north over the global south.
The foundation of this relationship lies in the claim that the imminent socio-ecological collapse is caused by capitalism, which is sustained by economic growth. This economic growth in turn can only be maintained under the eaves of colonialism and extractivism, perpetuating asymmetric power relationships between territories. Colonialism is understood as the appropriation of common goods, resources, and labor, which is antagonistic to degrowth principles.
Through colonial domination, capital depresses the prices of inputs and colonial cheapening occurs to the detriment of the oppressed countries. Degrowth criticizes these appropriation mechanisms and enclosure of one territory over another and proposes a provision of human needs through disaccumulation, de-enclosure, and decommodification. It also reconciles with social movements and seeks to recognize the ecological debt to achieve the catch-up, which is postulated as impossible without decolonization.
In practice, decolonial practices close to degrowth are observed, such as the movement of Buen vivir or sumak kawsay by various indigenous peoples.
Policies
There is a wide range of policy proposals associated with degrowth. In 2022, Nick Fitzpatrick, Timothée Parrique and Inês Cosme conducted a comprehensive survey of degrowth literature from 2005 to 2020 and found 530 specific policy proposals with "50 goals, 100 objectives, 380 instruments". The survey found that the ten most frequently cited proposals were: universal basic incomes, work-time reductions, job guarantees with a living wage, maximum income caps, declining caps on resource use and emissions, not-for-profit cooperatives, holding deliberative forums, reclaiming the commons, establishing ecovillages, and housing cooperatives.
To address the common criticism that such policies are not realistically financeable, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel sees an opportunity to learn from modern monetary theory, which argues that monetary sovereign states can issue the money needed to pay for anything available in the national economy without the need to first tax their citizens for the requisite funds. Taxation, credit regulations and price controls could be used to mitigate the inflation this may generate, while also reducing consumption.
Origins of the movement
The contemporary degrowth movement can trace its roots back to the anti-industrialist trends of the 19th century, developed in Great Britain by John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement (1819–1900), in the United States by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and in Russia by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910).
Degrowth movements draw on the values of humanism, enlightenment, anthropology and human rights.
Club of Rome reports
In 1968, the Club of Rome, a think tank headquartered in Winterthur, Switzerland, asked researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a report on the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity. The report, called The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, became the first significant study to model the consequences of economic growth.
The reports (also known as the Meadows Reports) are not strictly the founding texts of the degrowth movement, as these reports only advise zero growth, and have also been used to support the sustainable development movement. Still, they are considered the first studies explicitly presenting economic growth as a key reason for the increase in global environmental problems such as pollution, shortage of raw materials, and the destruction of ecosystems. The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update was published in 2004, and in 2012, a 40-year forecast from Jørgen Randers, one of the book's original authors, was published as 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. In 2021, Club of Rome committee member Gaya Herrington published an article comparing the proposed models' predictions against empirical data trends. The BAU2 ("Business as Usual 2") scenario, predicting "collapse through pollution", as well as the CT ("Comprehensive Technology") scenario, predicting exceptional technological development and gradual decline, were found to align most closely with data observed as of 2019. In September 2022, the Club of Rome released updated predictive models and policy recommendations in a general-audiences book titled Earth for all – A survival guide to humanity.
Lasting influence of Georgescu-Roegen
The degrowth movement recognises Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen as the main intellectual figure inspiring the movement. In his 1971 work, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Georgescu-Roegen argues that economic scarcity is rooted in physical reality; that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity; that the carrying capacity of Earth—that is, Earth's capacity to sustain human populations and consumption levels—is bound to decrease sometime in the future as Earth's finite stock of mineral resources is presently being extracted and put to use; and consequently, that the world economy as a whole is heading towards an inevitable future collapse.
Georgescu-Roegen's intellectual inspiration to degrowth dates back to the 1970s. When Georgescu-Roegen delivered a lecture at the University of Geneva in 1974, he made a lasting impression on the young, newly graduated French historian and philosopher, Jacques Grinevald, who had earlier been introduced to Georgescu-Roegen's works by an academic advisor. Georgescu-Roegen and Grinevald became friends, and Grinevald devoted his research to a closer study of Georgescu-Roegen's work. As a result, in 1979, Grinevald published a French translation of a selection of Georgescu-Roegen's articles entitled Demain la décroissance: Entropie – Écologie – Économie ('Tomorrow, the Decline: Entropy – Ecology – Economy'). Georgescu-Roegen, who spoke French fluently, approved the use of the term décroissance in the title of the French translation. The book gained influence in French intellectual and academic circles from the outset. Later, the book was expanded and republished in 1995 and once again in 2006; however, the word Demain ('tomorrow') was removed from the book's title in the second and third editions.
By the time Grinevald suggested the term décroissance to form part of the title of the French translation of Georgescu-Roegen's work, the term had already permeated French intellectual circles since the early 1970s to signify a deliberate political action to downscale the economy on a permanent and voluntary basis. Simultaneously, but independently, Georgescu-Roegen criticised the ideas of The Limits to Growth and Herman Daly's steady-state economy in his article, "Energy and Economic Myths", delivered as a series of lectures from 1972, but not published before 1975. In the article, Georgescu-Roegen stated the following:
When reading this particular passage of the text, Grinevald realised that no professional economist of any orientation had ever reasoned like this before. Grinevald also realised the congruence of Georgescu-Roegen's viewpoint and the French debates occurring at the time; this resemblance was captured in the title of the French edition. The translation of Georgescu-Roegen's work into French both fed on and gave further impetus to the concept of décroissance in France—and everywhere else in the francophone world—thereby creating something of an intellectual feedback loop.
By the 2000s, when décroissance was to be translated from French back into English as the catchy banner for the new social movement, the original term "decline" was deemed inappropriate and misdirected for the purpose: "Decline" usually refers to an unexpected, unwelcome, and temporary economic recession, something to be avoided or quickly overcome. Instead, the neologism "degrowth" was coined to signify a deliberate political action to downscale the economy on a permanent, conscious basis—as in the prevailing French usage of the term—something good to be welcomed and maintained, or so followers believe.
When the first international degrowth conference was held in Paris in 2008, the participants honoured Georgescu-Roegen and his work. In his manifesto on Petit traité de la décroissance sereine ("Farewell to Growth"), the leading French champion of the degrowth movement, Serge Latouche, credited Georgescu-Roegen as the "main theoretical source of degrowth". Likewise, Italian degrowth theorist Mauro Bonaiuti considered Georgescu-Roegen's work to be "one of the analytical cornerstones of the degrowth perspective".
Schumacher and Buddhist economics
E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful predates a unified degrowth movement but nonetheless serves as an important basis for degrowth ideas. In this book he critiques the neo-liberal model of economic development, arguing that an increasing "standard of living", based on consumption is absurd as a goal of economic activity and development. Instead, under what he refers to as Buddhist economics, we should aim to maximize well-being while minimizing consumption.
Ecological and social issues
In January 1972, Edward Goldsmith and Robert Prescott-Allen—editors of The Ecologist—published A Blueprint for Survival, which called for a radical programme of decentralisation and deindustrialization to prevent what the authors referred to as "the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet".
In 2019, a summary for policymakers of the largest, most comprehensive study to date of biodiversity and ecosystem services was published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The report was finalised in Paris. The main conclusions:
Over the last 50 years, the state of nature has deteriorated at an unprecedented and accelerating rate.
The main drivers of this deterioration have been changes in land and sea use, exploitation of living beings, climate change, pollution and invasive species. These five drivers, in turn, are caused by societal behaviors, from consumption to governance.
Damage to ecosystems undermines 35 of 44 selected UN targets, including the UN General Assembly's Sustainable Development Goals for poverty, hunger, health, water, cities' climate, oceans and land. It can cause problems with food, water and humanity's air supply.
To fix the problem, humanity needs transformative change, including sustainable agriculture, reductions in consumption and waste, fishing quotas and collaborative water management. Page 8 of the report proposes "enabling visions of a good quality of life that do not entail ever-increasing material consumption" as one of the main measures. The report states that "Some pathways chosen to achieve the goals related to energy, economic growth, industry and infrastructure and sustainable consumption and production (Sustainable Development Goals 7, 8, 9 and 12), as well as targets related to poverty, food security and cities (Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2 and 11), could have substantial positive or negative impacts on nature and therefore on the achievement of other Sustainable Development Goals".
In a June 2020 paper published in Nature Communications, a group of scientists argue that "green growth" or "sustainable growth" is a myth: "we have to get away from our obsession with economic growth—we really need to start managing our economies in a way that protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no or even negative growth." They conclude that a change in economic paradigms is imperative to prevent environmental destruction, and suggest a range of ideas from the reformist to the radical, with the latter consisting of degrowth, eco-socialism and eco-anarchism.
In June 2020, the official site of one of the organizations promoting degrowth published an article by Vijay Kolinjivadi, an expert in political ecology, arguing that the emergence of COVID-19 is linked to the ecological crisis.
The 2019 World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency and its 2021 update have asserted that economic growth is a primary driver of the overexploitation of ecosystems, and to preserve the biosphere and mitigate climate change civilization must, in addition to other fundamental changes including stabilizing population growth and adopting largely plant-based diets, "shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality." In an opinion piece published in Al Jazeera, Jason Hickel states that this paper, which has more than 11,000 scientist cosigners, demonstrates that there is a "strong scientific consensus" towards abandoning "GDP as a measure of progress."
In a 2022 comment published in Nature, Hickel, Giorgos Kallis, Juliet Schor, Julia Steinberger and others say that both the IPCC and the IPBES "suggest that degrowth policies should be considered in the fight against climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, respectively".
Movement
Conferences
The movement has included international conferences promoted by the network Research & Degrowth (R&D). The First International Conference on Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in Paris (2008) was a discussion about the financial, social, cultural, demographic, and environmental crisis caused by the deficiencies of capitalism and an explanation of the main principles of degrowth. Further conferences were in Barcelona (2010), Montreal (2012), Venice (2012), Leipzig (2014), Budapest (2016), Malmö (2018), and Zagreb (2023). The 10th International Degrowth Conference will be held in Pontevedra in June 2024. Separately, two conferences have been organised as cross-party initiatives of Members of the European Parliament: the Post-Growth 2018 Conference and the Beyond Growth 2023 Conference, both held in the European Parliament in Brussels.
International Degrowth Network
The conferences have also been accompanied by informal degrowth assemblies since 2018, to build community between degrowth groups across countries. The 4th Assembly in Zagreb in 2023 discussed a proposal to create a more intentional organisational structure and led to the creation of the International Degrowth Network, which organised the 5th assembly in June 2024.
Relation to other social movements
The degrowth movement has a variety of relations to other social movements and alternative economic visions, which range from collaboration to partial overlap. The Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas), which hosted the 2014 international Degrowth conference in Leipzig, has published a project entitled "Degrowth in movement(s)" in 2017, which maps relationships with 32 other social movements and initiatives. The relation to the environmental justice movement is especially visible.
Although not explicitly called degrowth, movements inspired by similar concepts and terminologies can be found around the world, including Buen Vivir in Latin America, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Kurdish Rojava or Eco-Swaraj in India, and the sufficiency economy in Thailand. The Cuban economic situation has also been of interest to degrowth advocates because its limits on growth were socially imposed (although as a result of geopolitics), and has resulted in positive health changes.
Another set of movements the degrowth movement finds synergy with is the wave of initiatives and networks inspired by the commons, where resources are sustainably shared in a decentralised and self-managed manner, instead of through capitalist organization. For example, initiatives inspired by commons could be food cooperatives, open-source platforms, and group management of resources such as energy or water. Commons-based peer production also guides the role of technology in degrowth, where conviviality and socially useful production are prioritised over capital gain. This could happen in the form of cosmolocalism, which offers a framework for localising collaborative forms of production while sharing resources globally as digital commons, to reduce dependence on global value chains.
Criticisms, challenges and dilemmas
Critiques of degrowth concern the poor study quality of degrowth studies, negative connotation that the term "degrowth" imparts, the misapprehension that growth is seen as unambiguously bad, the challenges and feasibility of a degrowth transition, as well as the entanglement of desirable aspects of modernity with the growth paradigm.
Criticisms
According to a highly cited scientific paper of environmental economist Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh, degrowth is often seen as an ambiguous concept due to its various interpretations, which can lead to confusion rather than a clear and constructive debate on environmental policy. Many interpretations of degrowth do not offer effective strategies for reducing environmental impact or transitioning to a sustainable economy. Additionally, degrowth is unlikely to gain significant social or political support, making it an ineffective strategy for achieving environmental sustainability.
Ineffectiveness and better alternatives
In his scientific paper, Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh concludes that a degrowth strategy, which focuses on reducing the overall scale of the economy or consumption, tends to overlook the significance of changes in production composition and technological innovation.
Van den Bergh also highlights that a focus solely on reducing consumption (or consumption degrowth) may lead to rebound effects. For instance, reducing consumption of certain goods and services might result in an increase in spending on other items, as disposable income remains unchanged. Alternatively, it could lead to savings, which would provide additional funds for others to borrow and spend.
He emphasizes the importance of (global) environmental policies, such as pricing externalities through taxes or permits, which incentivize behavior changes that reduce environmental impact and which provide essential information for consumers and help manage rebound effects. Effective environmental regulation through pricing is crucial for transitioning from polluting to cleaner consumption patterns.
Study quality
A 2024 review of degrowth studies over the past 10 years showed that most were of poor quality: almost 90% were opinions rather than analysis, few used quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones used formal modelling; the latter used small samples or a focus on non-representative cases. Also most studies offered subjective policy advice, but lacked policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies.
Negative connotation
The use of the term "degrowth" is criticized for being detrimental to the degrowth movement because it could carry a negative connotation, in opposition to the positively perceived "growth". "Growth" is associated with the "up" direction and positive experiences, while "down" generates the opposite associations. Research in political psychology has shown that the initial negative association of a concept, such as of "degrowth" with the negatively perceived "down", can bias how the subsequent information on that concept is integrated at the unconscious level. At the conscious level, degrowth can be interpreted negatively as the contraction of the economy, although this is not the goal of a degrowth transition, but rather one of its expected consequences. In the current economic system, a contraction of the economy is associated with a recession and its ensuing austerity measures, job cuts, or lower salaries. Noam Chomsky commented on the use of the term: "When you say 'degrowth' it frightens people. It's like saying you're going to have to be poorer tomorrow than you are today, and it doesn't mean that."
Since "degrowth" contains the term "growth", there is also a risk of the term having a backfire effect, which would reinforce the initial positive attitude toward growth. "Degrowth" is also criticized for being a confusing term, since its aim is not to halt economic growth as the word implies. Instead, "a-growth" is proposed as an alternative concept that emphasizes that growth ceases to be an important policy objective, but that it can still be achieved as a side-effect of environmental and social policies.
Systems theoretical critique
In stressing the negative rather than the positive side(s) of growth, the majority of degrowth proponents remain focused on (de-)growth, thus giving continued attention to the issue of growth, leading to continued attention to the arguments that sustainable growth is possible. One way to avoid giving attention to growth might be extending from the economic concept of growth, which proponents of both growth and degrowth commonly adopt, to a broader concept of growth that allows for the observation of growth in other sociological characteristics of society. A corresponding "recoding" of "growth-obsessed", capitalist organizations was proposed by Steffen Roth.
Marxist critique
Traditional Marxists distinguish between two types of value creation: that which is useful to mankind, and that which only serves the purpose of accumulating capital. Traditional Marxists consider that it is the exploitative nature and control of the capitalist production relations that is the determinant and not the quantity. According to Jean Zin, while the justification for degrowth is valid, it is not a solution to the problem. Other Marxist writers have adopted positions close to the de-growth perspective. For example, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, in common with David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Sweezy and others focus on endless capital accumulation as the basic principle and goal of capitalism. This is the source of economic growth and, in the view of these writers, results in an unsustainable growth imperative. Foster and Magdoff develop Marx's own concept of the metabolic rift, something he noted in the exhaustion of soils by capitalist systems of food production, though this is not unique to capitalist systems of food production as seen in the Aral Sea. Many degrowth theories and ideas are based on neo-Marxist theory. Foster emphasizes that degrowth "is not aimed at austerity, but at finding a 'prosperous way down' from our current extractivist, wasteful, ecologically unsustainable, maldeveloped, exploitative, and unequal, class-hierarchical world."
Challenges
Lack of macroeconomics for sustainability
It is reasonable for society to worry about recession as economic growth has been the unanimous goal around the globe in the past decades. However, in some advanced countries, there are attempts to develop a model for a regrowth economy. For instance, the Cool Japan strategy has proven to be instructive for Japan, which has been a static economy for almost decades.
Political and social spheres
According to some scholars in Sociology, the growth imperative is deeply entrenched in market capitalist societies such that it is necessary for their stability. Moreover, the institutions of modern societies, such as the nation state, welfare, labor market, education, academia, law and finance, have co-evolved with growth to sustain them. A degrowth transition thus requires not only a change of the economic system but of all the systems on which it relies. As most people in modern societies are dependent on those growth-oriented institutions, the challenge of a degrowth transition also lies in individual resistance to move away from growth.
Land privatisation
Baumann, Alexander and Burdon suggest that "the Degrowth movement needs to give more attention to land and housing costs, which are significant barriers hindering true political and economic agency and any grassroots driven degrowth transition."
They claim that land – a necessity like land and air – privatisation creates an absolute economic growth determinant. They point out that even one who is fully committed to degrowth nevertheless has no option but decades of market growth participation to pay rent or mortgage. Because of this, land privatisation is a structural impediment to moving forward that makes degrowth economically and politically unviable. They conclude that without addressing land privatisation (the market's inaugural privatisation – primitive accumulation) the degrowth movement's strategies cannot succeed. Just as land enclosure (privatisation) initiated capitalism (economic growth), degrowth must start with reclaiming land commons.
Agriculture
When it comes to agriculture, a degrowth society would require a shift from industrial agriculture to less intensive and more sustainable agricultural practices such as permaculture or organic agriculture. Still, it is not clear if any of those alternatives could feed the current and projected global population. In the case of organic agriculture, Germany, for example, would not be able to feed its population under ideal organic yields over all of its arable land without meaningful changes to patterns of consumption, such as reducing meat consumption and food waste. Moreover, labour productivity of non-industrial agriculture is significantly lower due to the reduced use or absence of fossil fuels, which leaves much less labour for other sectors. Potential solutions to this challenge include scaling up approaches such as community-supported agriculture (CSA).
Dilemmas
Given that modernity has emerged with high levels of energy and material throughput, there is an apparent compromise between desirable aspects of modernity (e.g., social justice, gender equality, long life expectancy, low infant mortality) and unsustainable levels of energy and material use. Some researchers, however, argue that the decline in income inequality and rise in social mobility occurring under capitalism from the late 1940s to the 1960s was a product of the heavy bargaining power of labor unions and increased wealth and income redistribution during that time; while also pointing to the rise in income inequality in the 1970s following the collapse of labor unions and weakening of state welfare measures. Others also argue that modern capitalism maintains gender inequalities by means of advertising, messaging in consumer goods, and social media.
Another way of looking at the argument that the development of desirable aspects of modernity require unsustainable energy and material use is through the lens of the Marxist tradition, which relates the superstructure (culture, ideology, institutions) and the base (material conditions of life, division of labor). A degrowth society, with its drastically different material conditions, could produce equally drastic changes in society's cultural and ideological spheres. The political economy of global capitalism has generated a lot of social and environmental bads, such as socioeconomic inequality and ecological devastation, which in turn have also generated a lot of goods through individualization and increased spatial and social mobility. At the same time, some argue the widespread individualization promulgated by a capitalist political economy is a bad due to its undermining of solidarity, aligned with democracy as well as collective, secondary, and primary forms of caring, and simultaneous encouragement of mistrust of others, highly competitive interpersonal relationships, blame of failure on individual shortcomings, prioritization of one's self-interest, and peripheralization of the conceptualization of human work required to create and sustain people. In this view, the widespread individuation resulting from capitalism may impede degrowth measures, requiring a change in actions to benefit society rather than the individual self.
Some argue the political economy of capitalism has allowed social emancipation at the level of gender equality, disability, sexuality and anti-racism that has no historical precedent. However, others dispute social emancipation as being a direct product of capitalism or question the emancipation that has resulted. The feminist writer Nancy Holmstrom, for example, argues that capitalism's negative impacts on women outweigh the positive impacts, and women tend to be hurt by the system. In her examination of China following the Chinese Communist Revolution, Holmstrom notes that women were granted state-assisted freedoms to equal education, childcare, healthcare, abortion, marriage, and other social supports. Thus, whether the social emancipation achieved in Western society under capitalism may coexist with degrowth is ambiguous.
Doyal and Gough allege that the modern capitalist system is built on the exploitation of female reproductive labor as well as that of the Global South, and sexism and racism are embedded in its structure. Therefore, some theories (such as Eco-Feminism or political ecology) argue that there cannot be equality regarding gender and the hierarchy between the Global North and South within capitalism.
The structural properties of growth present another barrier to degrowth as growth shapes and is enforced by institutions, norms, culture, technology, identities, etc. The social ingraining of growth manifests in peoples' aspirations, thinking, bodies, mindsets, and relationships. Together, growth's role in social practices and in socio-economic institutions present unique challenges to the success of the degrowth movement. Another potential barrier to degrowth is the need for a rapid transition to a degrowth society due to climate change and the potential negative impacts of a rapid social transition including disorientation, conflict, and decreased well-being.
In the United States, a large barrier to the support of the degrowth movement is the modern education system, including both primary and higher learning institutions. Beginning in the second term of the Reagan administration, the education system in the US was restructured to enforce neoliberal ideology by means of privatization schemes such as commercialization and performance contracting, implementation of standards and accountability measures incentivizing schools to adopt a uniform curriculum, and higher education accreditation and curricula designed to affirm market values and current power structures and avoid critical thought concerning the relations between those in power, ethics, authority, history, and knowledge. The degrowth movement, based on the empirical assumption that resources are finite and growth is limited, clashes with the limitless growth ideology associated with neoliberalism and the market values affirmed in schools, and therefore faces a major social barrier in gaining widespread support in the US.
Nevertheless, co-evolving aspects of global capitalism, liberal modernity, and the market society, are closely tied and will be difficult to separate to maintain liberal and cosmopolitan values in a degrowth society. At the same time, the goal of the degrowth movement is progression rather than regression, and researchers point out that neoclassical economic models indicate neither negative nor zero growth would harm economic stability or full employment. Several assert the main barriers to the movement are social and structural factors clashing with implementing degrowth measures.
Healthcare
It has been pointed out that there is an apparent trade-off between the ability of modern healthcare systems to treat individual bodies to their last breath and the broader global ecological risk of such an energy and resource intensive care. If this trade-off exists, a degrowth society must choose between prioritizing the ecological integrity and the ensuing collective health or maximizing the healthcare provided to individuals. However, many degrowth scholars argue that the current system produces both psychological and physical damage to people. They insist that societal prosperity should be measured by well-being, not GDP.
See also
A Blueprint for Survival
Agrowth
Anti-consumerism
Critique of political economy
Degrowth advocates (category)
Political ecology
Postdevelopment theory
Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
Paradox of thrift
The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries
Post-capitalism
Productivism
Prosperity Without Growth
Slow movement
Steady-state economy
Transition town
Uneconomic growth
References
Reference details
Further reading
External links
List of International Degrowth conferences on degrowth.info
Research and Degrowth
International Degrowth Network
Degrowth Journal
Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development. Monthly Reviewissue on "Planned Degrowth". July 1, 2023.
Simple living
Sustainability
Green politics
Ecological economics
Environmental movements
Environmental ethics
Environmental economics
Environmental social science concepts | 0.778871 | 0.996878 | 0.77644 |
VUCA | VUCA is an acronym based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, to describe or to reflect on the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of general conditions and situations. The U.S. Army War College introduced the concept of VUCA in 1987, to describe a more complex multilateral world perceived as resulting from the end of the Cold War. More frequent use and discussion of the term began from 2002. It has subsequently spread to strategic leadership in organizations, from for-profit corporations to education.
Meaning
The VUCA framework provides a lens through which organizations can interpret their challenges and opportunities. It emphasizes strategic foresight, insight, and the behavior of entities within organizations. Furthermore, it highlights both systemic and behavioral failures often associated with organizational missteps.
V = Volatility: Characterizes the rapid and unpredictable nature of change.
U = Uncertainty: Denotes the unpredictability of events and issues.
C = Complexity: Describes the intertwined forces and issues, making cause-and-effect relationships unclear.
A = Ambiguity: Points to the unclear realities and potential misunderstandings stemming from mixed messages.
These elements articulate how organizations perceive their current and potential challenges. They establish the parameters for planning and policy-making. Interacting in various ways, they can either complicate decision-making or enhance the ability to strategize, plan, and progress. Essentially, VUCA lays the groundwork for effective management and leadership.
The VUCA framework is a conceptual tool that underscores the conditions and challenges organizations face when making decisions, planning, managing risks, driving change, and solving problems. It primarily shapes an organization's ability to:
Anticipate the key issues that emerge.
Understand the repercussions of particular issues and actions.
Appreciate how variables interrelate.
Prepare for diverse scenarios and challenges.
Interpret and tackle pertinent opportunities.
VUCA serves as a guideline for fostering awareness and preparedness in various sectors, including business, the military, education, and government. It provides a roadmap for organizations to develop strategies for readiness, foresight, adaptation, and proactive intervention.
Themes
VUCA, as a system of thought, revolves around an idea expressed by Andrew Porteous: "Failure in itself may not be a catastrophe. Still, failure to learn from failure is." This perspective underlines the significance of resilience and adaptability in leadership. It suggests that beyond mere competencies, it is behavioural nuances, like the ability to learn from failures and adapt, that distinguish exceptional leaders from average ones. Leaders using VUCA as a guide often see change not just as inevitable but as something to anticipate.
Within VUCA, several thematic areas of consideration emerge, providing a framework for introspection and evaluation:
Knowledge management and sense-making: An exploration into how we organize and interpret information.
Planning and readiness considerations: A reflection on our preparedness for unforeseen challenges.
Process management and resource systems: A contemplation on our efficiency in resource utilization and system deployment.
Functional responsiveness and impact models: Understanding our capacity to adapt to changes.
Recovery systems and forward practices: An inquiry into our resilience and future-oriented strategies.
Systemic failures: A philosophical dive into organizational vulnerabilities.
Behavioural failures: Exploring the human tendencies that lead to mistakes.
Within the VUCA system of thought, an organization's ability to navigate these challenges is closely tied to its foundational beliefs, values, and aspirations. Those enterprises that consider themselves prepared and resolved align their strategic approach with VUCA's principles, signaling a holistic awareness.
The essence of VUCA philosophy also emphasizes the need for a deep-rooted understanding of one's environment, spanning technical, social, political, market, and economic realms.
Psychometrics which measure fluid intelligence by tracking information processing when faced with unfamiliar, dynamic, and vague data can predict cognitive performance in VUCA environments.
Social categorization
Volatility
Volatility is the V component of VUCA, which refers to the different situational social-categorizations of people due to specific traits or reactions that stand out in particular situations. When people act based on a specific situation, there is a possibility that the public categorizes them into a different group than they were in a previous situation. These people might respond differently to individual situations due to social or environmental cues. The idea that situational occurrences cause certain social categorization is known as volatility and is one of the main aspects of self-categorization theory.
Sociologists use volatility to better understand the impacts of stereotypes and social categorization on the situation at hand and any external forces that may cause people to perceive others differently. Volatility is the changing dynamic of social categorization in environmental situations. The dynamic can change due to any shift in a situation, whether social, technical, biological, or anything else. Studies have been conducted, but finding the specific component that causes the change in situational social categorization has proven challenging.
Two distinct components link individuals to their social identities. The first component is normative fit, which pertains to how a person aligns with the stereotypes and norms associated with their particular identity. For instance, when a Hispanic woman is cleaning the house, people often associate gender stereotypes with the situation, while her ethnicity is not a central concern. However, when this same woman eats an enchilada, ethnicity stereotypes come to the forefront, while her gender is not the focal point. The second social cue is comparative fit. This is when a specific characteristic or trait of a person is prominent in certain situations compared to others. For example, as mentioned by Bodenhausen and Peery, when there is one woman in a room full of men. She stands out, because she is the only one of her gender. However, all of the men are clumped together because they do not have any specific traits that stand out. Comparative fit shows that people categorize others based on the relative social context. In a particular situation, particular characteristics are made obvious because others around that individual do not possess that characteristic. However, in other cases, this characteristic may be the norm and would not be a key characteristic in the categorization process.
People can be less critical of the same person in different scenarios. For example, when looking at an African American man on the street in a low-income neighborhood and the same man inside a school in a high-income neighborhood, people will be less judgmental when seeing him in school. Nothing else has changed about this man, other than his location. When individuals are spotted in certain social contexts, the basic-level categories are forgotten, and the more partial categories are brought to light. This helps to describe the problems of situational social-categorization. This also illustrates how stereotypes can shift the perspectives of those around an individual.
Uncertainty
Uncertainty in the VUCA framework occurs when the availability or predictability of information in events is unknown. Uncertainty often occurs in volatile environments consisting of complex unanticipated interactions. Uncertainty may occur with the intention to imply causation or correlation between the events of a social perceiver and a target. Situations where there is either a lack of information to prove why perception is in occurrence or informational availability but lack of causation, are where uncertainty is salient.
The uncertainty component of the framework serves as a grey area and is compensated by the use of social categorization and/or stereotypes. Social categorization can be described as a collection of people that have no interaction but tend to share similar characteristics. People tend to engage in social categorization, especially when there is a lack of information surrounding the event. Literature suggests that default categories tend to be assumed in the absence of any clear data when referring to someone's gender or race in the essence of a discussion.
Individuals often associate general references (e.g. people, they, them, a group) with the male gender, meaning people = male. This usually occurs when there is insufficient information to distinguish someone's gender clearly. For example, when discussing a written piece of information, most assume the author is male. If an author's name is unavailable (due to lack of information), it is difficult to determine the gender of the author through the context of whatever was written. People automatically label the author as male without having any prior basis of gender, thus placing the author in a social category. This social categorization happens in this example, but people will also assume someone is male if the gender is not known in many other situations as well.
Social categorization occurs in the realm of not only gender, but also race. Default assumptions may be made, like in gender, to the race of an individual or a group based on prior known stereotypes. For example, race-occupation combinations such as basketball or golf players usually receive race assumptions. Without any information on the individual's race, people usually assume a basketball player is black, and a golf player is white. This is based upon stereotypes because each sport tends to be dominated by a single race. In reality, there are other races within each sport.
Complexity
Complexity is the C component of VUCA, which refers to the interconnectivity and interdependence of multiple parts in a system. When conducting research, complexity is a component that scholars have to keep in mind. The results of a deliberately controlled environment are unexpected because of the non-linear interaction and interdependencies within different groups and categories.
In a sociological aspect, the VUCA framework is utilized in research to understand social perception in the real world and how that plays into social categorization and stereotypes. Galen V. Bodenhausen and Destiny Peery's article, Social Categorization and Stereotyping In vivo: The VUCA Challenge, focused on researching how social categories impacted the process of social cognition and perception. The strategy used to conduct the research is to manipulate or isolate a single identity of a target while keeping all other identities constant. This method clearly shows how a specific identity in a social category can change one's perception of other identities, thus creating stereotypes.
There are problems with categorizing an individual's social identity due to the complexity of an individual's background. This research fails to address the complexity of the real world and the results from this highlighted an even greater picture of social categorization and stereotyping. Complexity adds many layers of different components to an individual's identity and creates challenges for sociologists trying to examine social categories. In the real world, people are far more complex than a modified social environment. Individuals identify with more than one social category, which opens the door to a more profound discovery about stereotyping. Results from research conducted by Bodenhausen reveal that specific identities are more dominant than others. Perceivers who recognize these distinct identities latch on to them and associate their preconceived notion of such identity and make initial assumptions about the individuals and hence stereotypes are created.
Conversely, perceivers who share some identities with the target tend to be more open-minded. They consider multiple social identities simultaneously, a phenomenon known as cross-categorization effects. Some social categories are nested within larger categorical structures, making subcategories more salient to perceivers. Cross-categorization can trigger both positive and negative effects. On the positive side, perceivers become more open-minded and motivated to delve deeper into their understanding of the target, moving beyond dominant social categories. However, cross-categorization can also result in social invisibility, where some cross-over identities diminish the visibility of others, leading to "intersectional invisibility" where neither social identity stands out distinctly and is overlooked.
Ambiguity
Ambiguity is the A component of VUCA. This refers to when the general meaning of something is unclear even when an appropriate amount of information is provided. Many get confused about the meaning of ambiguity. It is similar to the idea of uncertainty, but they have different factors. Uncertainty is when relevant information is unavailable and unknown, and ambiguity where relevant information is available but the overall meaning is still unknown. Both uncertainty and ambiguity exist in our culture today. Sociologists use ambiguity to determine how and why an answer has been developed. Sociologists focus on details such as if there was enough information present and if the subject had the full knowledge necessary to make a decision. and why did he/she come to their specific answer.
Ambiguity is considered one of the leading causes of conflict within organizations.
Ambiguity often prompts individuals to make assumptions, including those related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and even class stereotypes. When people possess some information but lack a complete answer, they tend to generate their own conclusions based on the available relevant information. For instance, as Bodenhausen notes, we may occasionally encounter individuals who possess a degree of androgyny, making it challenging to determine their gender. In such cases, brief exposure might lead to misclassifications based on gender-atypical features, such as very long hair on a man or very short hair on a woman. Ambiguity can result in premature categorizations, potentially leading to inaccurate conclusions due to the absence of crucial details.
Sociologists suggest that ambiguity can fuel racial stereotypes and discrimination. In a South African study, white participants were shown images of racially mixed faces and asked to categorize them as European or African. Since all the participants were white, they struggled to classify these mixed-race faces as European and instead labeled them as African. This difficulty arose due to the ambiguity present in the images. The only information available to the participants was the subjects' skin tone and facial features. Despite having this information, the participants still couldn't confidently determine the ethnicity because the individuals didn't precisely resemble their own racial group.
Responses and revisions
Levent Işıklıgöz has suggested that the C of VUCA be changed from complexity to chaos, arguing that it is more suitable according to our era.
Bill George, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, argues that VUCA calls for a leadership response which he calls VUCA 2.0: Vision, understanding, courage and adaptability.
George's response seems a minor adaptation of Bob Johansen's VUCA prime: Vision, understanding, clarity and agility
German academic Ali Aslan Gümüsay adds "paradox" to the acronym, calling it VUCA + paradox or VUCAP.
See also
Antifragile (disambiguation)
Cynefin framework
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)
Global Simplicity Index
Goldilocks process
Innovation butterfly
Software bug
References
Business models | 0.779538 | 0.995773 | 0.776243 |
Educational research | Educational research refers to the systematic collection and analysis of evidence and data related to the field of education. Research may involve a variety of methods and various aspects of education including student learning, interaction, teaching methods, teacher training, and classroom dynamics.
Educational researchers generally agree that research should be rigorous and systematic. However, there is less agreement about specific standards, criteria and research procedures. As a result, the value and quality of educational research has been questioned. Educational researchers may draw upon a variety of disciplines including psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. Methods may be drawn from a range of disciplines. Conclusions drawn from an individual research study may be limited by the characteristics of the participants who were studied and the conditions under which the study was conducted.
General characteristics
Gary Anderson outlined ten aspects of educational research:
Attempt to discover cause and effect.
Research involves gathering new data from primary or first-hand sources or using existing data for a new purpose.
Research is based upon observable experience or empirical evidence.
Research demands accurate observation and description.
Research generally employs carefully designed procedures and rigorous analysis.
Research emphasizes the development of generalizations, principles or theories that will help in understanding, prediction and/or control.
Research requires expertise—familiarity with the field; competence in methodology; technical skill in collecting and analyzing the data.
Research attempts to find an objective, unbiased solution to the problem and takes great pains to validate the procedures employed.
Research is a deliberate and unhurried activity which is directional but often refines the problem or ques
Approaches
There are different approaches to educational research. One is a basic approach, also referred to as an academic research approach. Another approach is applied research or a contract research approach. These approaches have different purposes which influence the nature of the respective research.
Basic approach
Basic, or academic research focuses on the search for truth or the development of educational theory. Researchers with this background "design studies that can test, refine, modify, or develop theories". Generally, these researchers are affiliated with an academic institution and are performing this research as part of their graduate or doctoral work.
Applied approach
The pursuit of information that can be directly applied to practice is aptly known as applied or contractual research. Researchers in this field are trying to find solutions to existing educational problems. The approach is much more utilitarian and pragmatic as it strives to find information that will directly influence practice. Applied researchers are often commissioned by a sponsor and are responsible for addressing the needs presented by their employer. The goal of this research is "to determine the applicability of educational theory and principles by testing hypotheses within specific settings".
Comparison of basic and applied research
The following are several defining characteristics written by Gary Anderson to compare basic (academic) and applied (contract) research.
Methodology
The basis for educational research is the scientific method. The scientific method uses directed questions and manipulation of variables to systematically find information about the teaching and learning process. In this scenario questions are answered by the analysis of data that is collected specifically for the purpose of answering these questions. Hypotheses are written and subsequently proved or disproved by data which leads to the creation of new hypotheses. The two main types of data that are used under this method are qualitative and quantitative.
Qualitative research
Qualitative research uses the data which is descriptive in nature. Tools that educational researchers use in collecting qualitative data include: observations, conducting interviews, conducting document analysis, and analyzing participant products such as journals, diaries, images or blogs.
Types of qualitative research
Case study
Ethnography
Phenomenological research
Narrative research
Historical research
Quantitative research
Quantitative research uses data that is numerical and is based on the assumption that the numbers will describe a single reality. Statistics are often applied to find relationships between variables.
Types of quantitative research
Descriptive survey research
Experimental research
Single-subject research
Causal-comparative research
Correlational research
Meta-analysis
Mixed methods (Pragmatic)
There also exists a new school of thought that these derivatives of the scientific method are far too reductionist in nature. Since educational research includes other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, science, and philosophy and refers to work done in a wide variety of contexts it is proposed that researchers should use "multiple research approaches and theoretical constructs." This could mean using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as common methodology from the fields mentioned above. In social research this phenomenon is referred to as triangulation (social science). This idea is well summarized by the work of Barrow in his text An introduction to philosophy of education:
Types of mixed methods
Action research
Program evaluation
In analysis of mixed methods, the following ways might be used;
Explanatory mixed method: starts with quantitative followed by qualitative data and results
Exploratory mixed method: starts with qualitative followed by quantitative data and results
Triangulation mixed method: all data and results are concurrently analysed
Organization of research fields
Discipline-based education research (DBER) is an interdisciplinary research enterprise that "investigates learning and teaching in a discipline [normally from the STEM fields] from a perspective that reflects the discipline's priorities, worldview, knowledge, and practices."
Examples include:
Astronomy education research (AER)
Biology education research (BER)
Chemistry education research (CER)
Computer science education research (CSER), also computing education research
Engineering education research (EER)
Geoscience education research (GER)
Mathematics education research (MER)
Physics education research (PER)
Educational research can also be organized by the subject or object of focus, as in school, teacher, student, etc., the relationship between actors such as student-teacher, teacher-principal, school-home, etc. by educational outcomes, such as motivation, learning of core subjects, learning of 21st century skills, attitudes, etc.
Results
In response to increased attention to the replicability of experimental findings in the sciences and medicine, in 2014, Educational Researcher published a review of the entire publication history of the 100 education journals with the highest five-year impact factors that found that out of 164,589 articles published only 221 articles (or 0.13 percent) were attempted replications of previous studies. Only 28.5 percent of the replication studies were direct replications rather than conceptual replications (i.e. usage of a different experimental method to test the same hypothesis). 48.2 percent of the replications were performed by the same research team as produced the original study, and when the same research team published the replication studies in the same journals, 88.7 percent of replications were successful while only 70.6 percent were successful when published in a different journal. When different researchers attempted to replicate the findings, only 54 percent of replications were successful.
, among more than 300 other psychology and medical journals, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, the British Journal of Educational Psychology, the Canadian Journal of School Psychology, Exceptional Children, Frontiers in Education, the Gifted Child Quarterly, the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, the Journal of Advanced Academics, the Journal of Cognition and Development, the Journal of Educational Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JMIR Medical Education, the Journal of Numerical Cognition, the Journal of Research in Reading, Language Learning, Learning and Instruction, Mind, Brain, and Education, and Scientific Studies of Reading have adopted result-blind peer review (i.e. where studies are accepted not on the basis of their findings and after the studies are completed, but before the studies are conducted and upon the basis of the methodological rigor of their experimental designs and the theoretical justifications for their statistical analysis techniques before data collection or analysis is done) as part of an initiative organized by the Center for Open Science in response to concerns about publication bias and p-hacking. Early analysis of such reforms in psychology journals has estimated that 61 percent of result-blind studies have led to null results, in contrast to an estimated 5 to 20 percent in earlier psychological research.
See also
Related fields
Education theory
Educational psychology
School psychology
Educational technology
Scholarship of teaching and learning
Research in science education
Educational research communities and organizations
American Educational Research Association
American Institutes for Research
Education Resources Information Center
Educational Testing Service
Institute of Education Sciences
WestEd
International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement
Other
Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)
Online credentials for learning
References
Further reading
Furlong, J. and Oancea, A. (2008) Assessing Quality in Applied and Practice Based Research. Continuing the Debate. London, Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Assessing-quality-in-applied-and-practice-based-research-in-education/Furlong-Oancea/p/book/9780415448017.
Educational psychology | 0.782962 | 0.99109 | 0.775986 |
Youth empowerment | Youth empowerment is a process where children and young people are encouraged to take charge of their lives. They do this by addressing their situation and then take action in order to improve their access to resources and transform their consciousness through their beliefs, values, and attitudes. Youth empowerment aims to improve quality of life. Youth empowerment is achieved through participation in youth empowerment programs. However scholars argue that children's rights implementation should go beyond learning about formal rights and procedures to give birth to a concrete experience of rights. There are numerous models that youth empowerment programs use that help youth achieve empowerment. A variety of youth empowerment initiatives are underway around the world. These programs can be through non-profit organizations, government organizations, schools or private organizations.
Youth empowerment is different from youth development because development is centered on developing individuals, while empowerment is focused on creating greater community change relies on the development of individual capacity.
Empowerment movements, including youth empowerment, originate, gain momentum, become viable, and become institutionalized. Youth empowerment is often addressed as a gateway to intergenerational equity, civic engagement and democracy building. Activities may focus on youth-led media, youth rights, youth councils, youth activism, youth involvement in community decision-making, and other methods.
Elements of empowerment
Empowerment theory
Empowerment theory focuses on processes that enable participation; enhance control through shared decision making; and create opportunities to learn, practice, and increase skills. Empowerment theory suggests that engaging youth in pro-social, meaningful, and community-enhancing activities that the youth themselves define and control, helps youth gain vital skills, responsibilities, and confidence necessary to become productive and healthy adults.
Types of empowerment
Youth empowerment examines six interdependent dimensions: psychological, community, organizational, economic, social and cultural. Psychological empowerment enhances individual's consciousness, belief in self-efficacy, awareness and knowledge of problems and solutions and of how individuals can address problems that harm their quality of life. This dimension aims to create self-confidence and give youth the skills to acquire knowledge. Community empowerment focuses on enhancing the community through leadership development, improving communication, and creating a network of support to mobilize the community to address concerns. Organizational empowerment aims to create a base of resources for a community, including voluntary organizations, unions and associations that aim to protect, promote and advocate for the powerless. Economic empowerment teaches entrepreneurial skills, how to take ownership of their assets and how to have income security. Social empowerment teaches youth about social inclusion and literacy as well as helping kids find the resources to be proactive in their communities. Cultural empowerment aims to recreate cultural practices and redefine cultural rules and norms for youth. Through these dimensions of empowerment, programs can work on empowering youth in one or more aspects of their lives.
Goals of empowerment
Youth empowerment programs are aimed at creating healthier and higher qualities of life for underprivileged or at-risk youth. The five competencies of a healthy youth are: (1) positive sense of self, (2) self- control, (3) decision-making skills, (4) a moral system of belief, and (5) pro-social connectedness. Developmental interventions and programs have to be anchored on these competencies that define positive outcomes of healthy youth.
Measurable empowerment
Over the last two decades, quality of life (QOL) has emerged as an important unit of measurement to evaluate the success of empowerment programs. It is used as a goal of programs and as well as an indicator of effectiveness. However, there is no standard definition of QOL. A person's QOL is dependent upon subjective evaluation of the individual aspects of that individual's life.
Positive development settings
Youth empowerment programs thrive in positive developmental settings. Positive developmental settings promote youth competence, confidence and connections. Two features of the positive developmental youth settings are supportive relationships and support for efficacy and mattering. Supportive relationships are those that are between youth and non-familial adults that foster trust and respect. Support for efficacy and mattering specifically focuses on youth being active, instrumental agents of change in their communities, collective decision-making and adults listen to and respect their voice.
Youth empowerment programs
There are various types of empowerment programs across the globe that empower youth through many different tactics and programs. Programs can operate in a variety of settings. The majority of programs operate in more than one setting, which may be a key factor in their success. The beneficial outcomes to youth empowerment programs are improved social skills, improved behavior, increased academic achievement, increased self-esteem and increased self-efficacy.
There are programs are aimed at just empowering women and young girls. Regardless of specific goals or methods, empowering effects include improving women's wellbeing, self-esteem, and self-efficacy, and enhancing social status by teaching technical and organizational skills.
Other youth empowerment programs are focused on poverty alleviation. Living standards are for those living in poverty are declining causing forms of deprivation as it relates to food, resources and education. Programs aimed at empowering poor youth, work toward livelihood protection or livelihood promotion.
There are also empowerment movements that use the social action model, aiming for disadvantaged people to become empowered, organized, and educated so that they may create change. These programs advocate for constructive confrontations to enhance the social power of people who are considered disadvantaged. Another model is the 5C's model that focuses on emphasizing competence, confidence, connection, character and caring. A sixth C of contribution to society was later added. This model focuses primarily on engagement as a key marker of positive youth development, emphasizing the need to foster initiative. Youth-adult partnerships are another type of empowerment method used around the world. This method has been defined as a developmental process and a community practice. The partnership involves people of different ages working together on community issues over a period of time. The method emphasizes reciprocity among adults and youth with a focus on shared decision making and reflective learning. The concept of shared control is key for empowering youth.It is the courage to do good things.
Youth empowerment has also been used as a framework to prevent and reduce youth violence. Research shows that these youth empowerment programs can improve conflict avoidance and resolution skills, increase group leadership skills, and civic efficacy and improve ethnic identity and reduce racial conflict.
Examples of youth empowerment programs
Around the globe there are various empowerment programs focused on a wide variety of things and this is not a comprehensive list. Unsuccessful youth empowerment programs have not been carefully documented or published in case studies.
In India, Youth Empowerment Foundation, a not for profit organization is focused at uplifting the underprivileged young generation of the society right from providing them with basic education to create a strong foundation for their careers, to developing personality skills, because the youth is the future of the country.
In Namibia, one popular empowerment program is Pots of Hope. Pots of Hope's main goal is to reduce the vulnerability youth to HIV and Aids through education, information and awareness, as well as income security projects. Pots of Hope works by educating, and providing counseling to those in rural settings who do not have access to those resources. This program focuses on organizational empowerment within the community.
Within the United States there are countless empowerment programs for youth. Urban 4-H is a culturally responsive, community-based practice that authentically engages families, youth and the community in the development of youth. Urban 4-H is an example of community empowerment that focuses on the economic and social dimensions of empowerment. The program helps youth build skills to enable them to overcome economic and social barriers while recognizing the importance of self-directed learning for youth. Urban 4-H focuses on empowering youth to think critically, communicate across cultural boundaries and lead others.
In India, youth empowerment has been taken up by other organizations run by young people. Young India Foundation has been working on youth empowerment by directly engaging young people and electoral politics, a first for an organization to do in India.
The United Nations has numerous development programs, one of them being youth empowerment programs. The United Nations provides support to national policy development surrounding empowerment within the five regions. They do this by providing evidence-based policy guidance and programmatic support by promoting the active participation of youth in society. The UNDP promotes inclusive youth participation in effective and democratic governance, economic empowerment of youth, strengthened youth engagement in building resilience in their communities, inclusion of youth in the future development agenda, including through consultations and discussions. The United Nations youth empowerment programs examine all four dimensions of youth empowerment and seeks to improve all of them.
USAID has youth empowerment programs set up around the world that are aimed at civic engagement, access to resources and opportunities for education and employment.
For a more comprehensive list: List of youth empowerment organizations
Government involvement in empowerment
Youth empowerment is often addressed as a gateway to intergenerational equity, civic engagement and democracy building. Local, state, provincial, regional, national, and international government agencies and nonprofit community-based organizations provide programs centered on youth empowerment. Activities involved therein may focus on youth-led media, youth rights, youth councils, youth activism, youth involvement in community decision-making, and other methods.
Each major political party in the United States, including the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Green Party, as well as several major European, African, South American (Peru), and Australian political parties have statements supporting youth empowerment. Youth empowerment is also a central tenet of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which every country in the world (minus the United States and South Sudan) has signed into law.
The European Union
"Youth" in the European Union (EU) is defined as those between the ages of 15 and 29 by the European Institutions.
The EU has been the birthplace of many cultural youth empowerment movements across the past century. Most recently these have included, Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and the 2009 Austrian Student Protests. But has also historically had a connection to youth empowerment through cultural movements such as the punk subculture.
The basis for youth empowerment in the EU is based in articles 165 and 166 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The youth empowerment objectives of the treaty aimed at encouraging the development of youth exchanges and exchanges between socio-educational instructors (i.e. youth workers) and to encourage the participation of young people in democratic life in Europe.
The European Commission and the European Parliament are the institutions mainly tasked with youth engagement and empowerment. These institutions have set in place various initiatives and projects to achieve these aims including the; Erasmus Programme, Youth Guarantee, European Solidarity Corps, European Youth Week, European Youth Event, Youth Conference and Structured Dialogue.
The Council of Europe also have youth empowerment mechanisms such as the Advisory Council on Youth and the European Youth Centres network.
Youth empowerment projects by EU Institutions is carried out in close cooperation with international NGOs, such as the European Youth Forum, and National Youth Councils.
United States
Youth empowerment occurs in homes, at schools, through youth organizations, government policy-making and community organizing campaigns. Major structural activities where youth empowerment happens throughout society include community decision-making, organizational planning, and education reform.
Educational activities that cite youth empowerment as an aim include student-centered learning, popular education, and service learning. Free schools and youth-led media organizations often state their intention to empower youth, as well as youth voice, community youth development, and youth leadership programs. Youth empowerment is studied by a variety of scholars including Shawn Ginwright, Henry Giroux, Barry Checkoway, and Mike Males. Their research is highlighted by advocacy from notable activists such as William Upski Wimsatt, Alex Koroknay-Palicz, Salome Chasnoff and Adam Fletcher. One prominent initiative in the United States is the Youth Empowerment Initiative, sponsored by the Obama Foundation Youth Group.
Republic of Ireland
In 2002 Comhairle na nÓg was established in each local authority area as part of the National Children's strategy. Comhairle na nÓg is Irish for Youth Council. These councils are encouraged to include the participation of young people from all walks of life and to tackle local issues affecting young people. It is run by the local county or city councils under the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. It is a recognized political organisation by the Irish Government. An extension of Comhairle na nÓg is the Comhairle na nÓg National Executive. The National Executive has one "youth councillor" from every Comhairle na nÓg and deal with issues important to young people. These issues are nominated by young people themselves at an AGM every two years. The Comhairle na nÓg National Executive has the opportunity to express there views in a form of a researched report, ad-campaign, conferences, seminars and to put those views to policy makers.
Commonwealth
The 53 member countries of the Commonwealth of Nations have all signed up to the Commonwealth Plan of Action for Youth Empowerment (2007–2015). The Plan of Action underpins the work of the Commonwealth Youth Programme (CYP). On the Commonwealth definition, "Young people are empowered when they acknowledge that they have or can create choices in life, are aware of the implications of those choices, make an informed decision freely, take action based on that decision and accept responsibility for the consequences of those actions. Empowering young people means creating and supporting the enabling conditions under which young people can act on their own behalf, and on their own terms, rather than at the direction of others."
The Plan of Action for Youth Empowerment was developed by the Commonwealth Secretariat, working closely with Ministers of Youth and young people themselves. It encourages youth mainstreaming and contains thirteen action points for governments. The first of these is: "Develop and implement measures to promote the economic enfranchisement of young people" through a range of measures ranging from micro-credit and entrepreneurship education through to reviewing macro-economic planning and trade regimes and how they affect young people. Other action points address gender equality, HIV/AIDS, education, the environment, youth participation in decision-making, and democracy and human rights.
Benefits of empowerment
When youth participate in established empowerment programs they see a variety of benefits. The practices of youth involvement and empowerment become embedded within the organizational culture and the community culture. Adults and organizations also benefit from empowerment programs. They both become more communicable and responsive to youth in the community, which leads to program improvements as well as increased participation from youth.
Critiques of youth empowerment
One major critique of youth empowerment is that most programs take a risk-focused approach. There has been a major emphasis on what is going wrong for youth in their lives rather than what goes right. This portrays young people as a problem that need to be fixed and displays the process of development as a process of overcoming risk. This may deter youth from joining youth development programs. The risked-based model can obscure the fact that adolescence is a time when young people master skills and concepts.
See also
List of youth empowerment organizations
Youth activism
Youth suffrage
Youth voice
Youth work
Mature minor doctrine
Positive youth development
Giovinezza
References
Further reading
Harris, A., Wyn, J. & Younes, S. (2010). Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary' young people and contemporary forms of participation, Young, 18, 1, 9-32.
Sukarieh, M. & Tannock, S. (2011). The positive imperative: a critical look at the ‘new' youth development movement, Journal of Youth Studies, 14, 6, 675–691.
Evans S. (2007) Youth Sense of community: voice and power in community context, Journal of Community Psychology, 35, No. 6, 693–709.
Morsillo J., Prilleltensky I. (2007) Social Action with youth: interventions, evaluation and psychopolitical validity, Journal of Community Psychology, 35, No. 6, 725–740
Tsekoura, M. (2016). Spaces for Youth Participation and Youth Empowerment Case Studies from the UK and Greece. Young, DOI: 10.1177/1103308815618505.
Zeldin S., Petrokubi, MacNeil C. (2008) Youth-Adult Partnerships in Decision Making: Disseminating and Implementing an Innovative Idea into Established Organizations and Communities, American Journal of Community Psychology, 41, 262–277.
(Council of Europe and European Union Report)
Empowerment
Empowerment
Empowerment
Egalitarianism | 0.784507 | 0.988929 | 0.775821 |
The Fifth Discipline | The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is a book by Peter Senge (a senior lecturer at MIT) focusing on group problem solving using the systems thinking method in order to convert companies into learning organizations that learn to create results that matter as an organization. The five disciplines represent classical approaches (theories and methods) for developing three core and timeless learning capabilities: fostering aspiration, developing reflective conversation, and understanding complexity.
Content
The Five Disciplines
The five disciplines of what the book refers to as a "learning organization" discussed in the book are:
"Personal mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively."
"Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action."
"Building shared vision - a practice of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance."
"Team learning starts with 'dialogue', the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into genuine 'thinking together'."
"Systems thinking - The Fifth Discipline that integrates the other four."
Senge describes extensively the role of what he refers to as "mental models," which he says are integral in order to "focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings" in perceptions. The book also focuses on "team learning" with the goal of developing "the skills of groups of people to look for the larger picture beyond individual perspectives." In addition to these principles, the author stresses the importance of "personal mastery" to foster "the personal motivation to continually learn how [...] actions affect [the] world."
The Learning Disabilities
In addition to "disciplines," which Senge suggests are beneficial to what he describes as a "learning organization," Senge also posits several perceived deleterious habits or mindsets, which he refers to as "learning disabilities."
"I am my position."
"The enemy is out there."
The Illusion of Taking Charge
The Fixation on Events
The Parable of the Boiling frog
The Delusion of Learning from Experience
The Myth of the Management Team
The 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline
Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions."
The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
The easy way out usually leads back in.
The cure can be worse than the disease.
Faster is slower.
Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
Small changes can produce big results...but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
You can have your cake and eat it too ---but not all at once.
Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
There is no blame.
The Architecture of a Learning Organization
How do we learn to create learning organizations?
[Extracted from the TFD Fieldbook, pg 15-83. A compelling essay on the conceptual map to guide your own decisions on how to proceed to build Learning Organisations by Dr. Peter Senge]
How do you know what to do first, second, or third in thinking strategically about building learning organizations?
At its core, learning organizations build great teams – the trust, the relationships, the acceptance, the synergy, and the results that they achieve. It has a strong ability to learn, adjust and change in response to new realities. It can alter functions and departments when demanded by changes in the work environment or by poor performance. The distinguishing characteristics of a learning organization include a learning culture, a spirit of flexibility and experimentation, people orientation, continuous system-level learning, knowledge generation and sharing, and critical, systemic thinking.
When we look more closely at the development of such teams, we see that people are changed, often profoundly. There is a deep learning cycle.
Team members develop new skills, and capabilities which alter what they can do and understand. As new capabilities develop, so too do new awareness and sensibilities. Over time, as people start to see and experience the world differently, new beliefs and assumptions begin to form, which enables further development of skills and capabilities.
This deep learning cycle constitutes the essence of a learning organization – the development not just of new capacities, but of fundamental shifts of mind, individually and collectively. The five basic learning disciplines are the means by which this deep learning cycle is activated. Sustained commitment to the disciplines keeps the cycle going. When this cycle begins to operate, the resulting changes are significant and enduring.
The real work of building learning organizations occurs within a "shell", an architecture. What makes up the architecture?
- Guiding Ideas.
- Theory, methods, and tools.
- Innovations in infrastructure.
Without guiding ideas, there is no passion, no overarching sense of direction or purpose.
Without theory, methods, and tools, people cannot develop the new skills and capabilities required for deep learning.
Without innovations in infrastructure, inspiring ideas and powerful tools lack credibility because people have neither the opportunity nor resources to pursue their visions or apply the tools.
Leaders intent on developing learning organizations must focus on all three of the architectural design elements. Without all three, the triangle collapses.
Reception
In 1997, Harvard Business Review identified The Fifth Discipline as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years.
See also
Agile management
Learning agenda
Organizational learning
System archetype
References
External links
1990 non-fiction books
Systems theory books
Books about organizations | 0.783073 | 0.990578 | 0.775695 |
Alternative education | Alternative education encompasses educational philosophy differing from mainstream pedagogy and evidence-based education. Such alternative learning environments may be found within state, charter, and independent schools as well as home-based learning environments. Many educational alternatives emphasize small class sizes, close relationships between students and teachers and a sense of community.
The legal framework for such education varies by locality, and determines any obligation to conform with mainstream standard tests and grades.
Alternative pedagogical approaches may include different structures, as in the open classroom, different teacher-student relationships, as in the Quaker and free schools, and/or differing curricula and teaching methods, as in the Waldorf and Montessori schools. Synonyms for "alternative" in this context include "non-traditional" and "non-conventional". Alternative educators use terms such as "holistic".
History
Alternative education grew up in response to the establishment of standardized and compulsory education over the last two to three centuries. Educators including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swiss humanitarian Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi; the American transcendentalists Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau; founders of progressive education John Dewey and Francis Parker, and educational pioneers such as Friedrich Fröbel, Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner believed that education should cultivate the developing child on many levels: not only intellectually, but also morally and spiritually, emotionally and psychologically, and physically. After World War II an alternative Reggio Emilia approach to early-childhood education was developed in Italy, introduced by Loris Malaguzzi.
Cultural critics such as John Caldwell Holt, Paul Goodman, Frederick Mayer and George Dennison have examined education from individualist, anarchist, and libertarian perspectives. Other writers, from Paulo Freire to American educators Herbert Kohl and Jonathan Kozol, have criticized mainstream Western education from the viewpoint of liberal and radical politics. The argument for an approach catering to the interests and learning style of an individual is supported by research suggesting that a learner-responsible model is more effective than a teacher-responsible one. Ron Miller has identified five elements common to educational alternatives:
Respect for the person
Balance
Decentralization of authority
Noninterference among the political, economic, and cultural spheres of society
A holistic worldview.
In modern times, at least in some localities, the legal right to provide educational alternatives has become established alongside a duty to provide education for school age children.
Localities
Canada
Education in Canada falls under the jurisdiction of the provincial government. Alternative education is provided in some public schools, such as Mountainview Montessori School and Trille des Bois Waldorf school in Ottawa, as well as in independent schools, such as Toronto Montessori Schools and Vancouver Waldorf School.
Origins
Alternative education in Canada stems from two philosophical educational points of view, Progressive and Libertarian. According to Levin, 2006 the term "alternative" was adopted partly to distinguish these schools from the independent, parent-student-teacher-run "free" schools that preceded them (and from which some of the schools actually evolved) and to emphasize the boards' commitment to options within the public school system. Progressive educational tradition places emphasis on both the need to incorporate curriculum and teaching to match the stages of child development and the gradual integration of the child into adult society through planned experiential learning. The sources of stimulus would be from the philosopher John Dewey in the United States, from post WW1 New Schools in Great Britain and the Steiner/Waldorf schools in Europe. The Libertarian tradition focuses on the rights of the parents and children to make their own educational and life choices. As noted by Levin "It is rooted in the belief to uphold the individual freedom and the innate goodness of the child against institutional and social conformity and the corrupting influences of modern society."
School types
The 1980s saw a shift to special schools and/or programs for those students that excelled in academia, were artistically talented, or through programs linking schooling with the workplace in a co-operative venture. It might be considered as a natural evolution of education to offer options and not a regimented one size fits all approach. Most alternative high schools falling under public jurisdiction offered independent study programs, basic-skills programs, and were mini-high schools with a mixture of conventional and nonconventional courses, and schools with an arts focus. They also offered smaller classes, closer and more informal relations with teachers, and greater flexibility in course selection and timetabling. The most recent development within alternative education in Canada may be to follow the United States in their "Charter School" movement. In the US specific states have passed legislation permitting their departments of education or local school boards to issue "charters" directly to individual schools wishing to operate autonomously. Alberta is the first province that has already embraced this model.
India
Since the early 20th century, educators have discussed and implemented alternative forms of education, such as Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University, Sri Aurobindo's Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Jiddu Krishnamurti Schools. Traditional learning in India involved students living in gurukulas, where they received free food, shelter and education from a guru ("teacher" in Sanskrit). Progress was based on tests given by the gurus, and the system aimed to nurture students' creativity and personality development. Although mainstream education in India is based on the system introduced by Lord Macaulay, a few projects aim to rejuvenate the earlier method. Some students in these (and similar) projects conduct research in Sanskrit studies, Vedic studies, Vedic science, yoga and ayurveda. Others, after completing their education in a gurukula, enter mainstream higher education.
Japan
Japanese education is a nationwide, standardized system under the Ministry of Education. The only alternative options have been accredited, private schools with more freedom of curricula (including textbook choice; public schools are limited to government-approved textbooks), teaching methods and hiring guidelines. Nearly all private schools require a competitive entrance examination and charge tuition, with few scholarships available. Interest in alternative education was sparked during the 1980s by student violence and bullying, school refusal, social anxiety disorder and, in the worst cases, suicide; the desire to enable young people to keep up with a globalized economy is an additional impetus.
A free school is a non-profit group (or independent school) which specializes in the care and education of children who refuse to attend standard schools. The first democratic school was founded in 1985 as a shelter for children avoiding the school environment, and a number of other such schools have been established. In 1987 the first of seven Waldorf schools in Japan was founded, and other alternatives include a growing homeschooling movement.
In 1992 Dr Shinichiro Hori, formerly Professor of Education at Osaka City University, founded the first, Kinokuni Children's Village in Wakayama Prefecture, of several alternative, democratic schools. In all he created six schools in Fukui prefecture, Kitakyushu, and Yamanashi prefecture. As friend and Japanese translator of A.S. Neill his work has been inspired by Summerhill School.
In 2003 Japan introduced Special Zones for Structural Reform (構造改革特別区域), based on China's Special Economic Zone policy, which enable the opening of government-accredited schools providing alternative education. Two years later, the first such school was founded.
Despite the schools' high tuition, some parents send their children to international schools to acquire fluency in a foreign language (usually English). Although international schools are not certified by the Japanese government, many are approved by their native country (the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Korea and China) and some offer an International Baccalaureate program.
Philippines
Taiwan
Founded after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, the was the first alternative education school in Taiwan. It seeks to diverge from traditional Chinese education methodology and requires parents of their students to not hit or scold their children. The term 'forest school' has become a generalized term used by schools with alternative education approaches. There is also the case of the Caterpillar, which – like the Forest School – is housed in an unconventional campus and follows a creative and more fluid curriculum. Both these schools charge expensive tuition fees but more personalized instruction.
There is also alternative education that caters to learners with special needs such as the Taipei County's Seedling Elementary School, which opened in 1994. This school caters to native students, who need a different and less stressful learning environment. It integrates traditional courses with strategies that focus on enhancing the learner's bond with nature and aboriginal culture. Another example is the so-called "third-way" education that serves the needs of students that are not local but also not foreign such as the Taipei American School, which provides instruction to Taiwanese students with family in the United States or those with occupations that took them, including their children, abroad.
United Kingdom
In 2003, there were about 70 schools in the United Kingdom offering education based on philosophies differing from that of the mainstream pedagogy, about half of which are Steiner-Waldorf schools. Summerhill School, established by A.S. Neill in 1921, was the first democratic school; most have since closed, except for Summerhill, Sands School, Hebden Bridge School and democratic schools for children and young people. Though most alternative schools were until recently all fee-paying, state-funded Free Schools were introduced in 2011, only two of which alternative education: the Steiner Academy Frome, Somerset, and the Steiner Academy Hereford.
The United Kingdom also has alternative provision schools and centres, designed to prevent exclusions from mainstream school, or improve behavioural problems so that students can re-access mainstream education. Since 1993, some of the centres have been referred to as Pupil Referral Units (PRU). These units are run by the local authority.
In recent years, in addition to Pupil Referral Units, many privately funded units (operated by businesses or charities) have set up versions of PRUs. These are known as private providers of alternative provision.
The influx of private businesses entering the sector has led to concerns being raised by Ofsted and the Department for Education in relation to so called illegal schools operating. Illegal schools refer to alternative provision centres providing students with a full time education without first registering properly as a school. Operating in this way means that providers avoid inspection by Ofsted.
United States
A variety of educational alternatives exist at the elementary, secondary and tertiary level in four categories: school choice, independent schools and home-based education. The U.S. Department of Education's document State Regulation of Private Schools reports on the legal requirements that apply to K-12 private schools in each of the states, including any curriculum requirements. The report states that it is intended as a reference for public and nonpublic school officials and state policy-makers. The report confirms that similar areas of education are approached in a variety of ways. Trade schools and vocational colleges are also an alternate route to four year traditional college programs.
School choice
Public-school alternatives in the U.S. include separate schools, classes, programs and semi-autonomous "schools within schools". Public school-choice options are open to all students, although some have waiting lists. Among these are charter schools, combining private initiatives and state funding, and magnet schools, which attract students to a particular program (such as the performing arts).
Independent schools
Independent, or private, schools have flexibility in staff selection and educational approach. Many are Montessori and Waldorf schools (the latter also known as Steiner schools, after their founder Rudolf Steiner). Other independent schools include democratic or free schools, such as Clonlara School, which is the oldest, continually operating K-12 alternative school in the country, the Sudbury schools, open classroom schools, those based on experiential education and schools using an international curriculum such as the International Baccalaureate and Round Square schools.
Homeschooling
Families seeking alternatives for educational, philosophical or religious reasons, or if there is no nearby educational alternative may opt for home-based education. A minor branch is unschooling, an approach based on interest rather than a curriculum. Others enroll in umbrella schools which provide a curriculum. Homeschool courses give students in-depth, personal attention in any subject with which they struggle or excel. Some homeschool families form a cooperative, where parents with expertise in a subject may teach children from a number of families while their children are taught by other parents. There is great variation amongst families who homeschool, from parents who set up in-home "classrooms" and hold class for a set amount of time each day, to families that focus on experiential learning opportunities.
Self-education
Self-directed inquiry is recognized at all levels of education, from the "unschooling" of children to the autodidacticism of adults, and may occur separately from (or with) traditional forms of education.
See also
Alternative schools
Alternative university
Anarchism and education
Education
Education policy
Education reform#Alternatives to public education
European Convention on Human Rights, Article 2
Experiential education
Freedom of education
Free school movement
Homeschooling
Progressive education
Right to education
Special education
UnCollege
Unschooling
Forms and approaches of alternative education
Anarchistic free school
Artful Learning
Democratic education
Deschooling
Free school movement
Forest kindergarten
Jiddu Krishnamurti Schools
Sudbury school
Thomas Jefferson Education
Modern School Movement
Montessori education
Vocational education
Educators
John Dewey
Célestin Freinet
Friedrich Fröbel
Ivan Illich
Joseph Jacotot
Deborah Meier
Maria Montessori
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rudolf Steiner
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Bill Nye
Organizations
European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC)
Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA)
Media
The Forbidden Education, a documentary film about alternative education
Public law on education in the US
Bennett Law
Oregon Compulsory Education Act
Meyer v. Nebraska
References
Further reading
Churchill, Christian J. and Gerald E. Levy. (2012) The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
External links
Map of alternative education schools and projects by REEVO, Alternative Education Network
Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO)
International Association for Learning Alternatives
Informal Education
Special Education in Alternative Education Programs (ERIC Digest E585)
National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools
National Association for the Legal Support of Alternative Schools
Reggio Children Foundation
Eklavya (Indian educational NGO)
Iowa Association of Alternative Education
Oklahoma Technical Assistance Center
Learning for a Cause (in Japanese)
Alternative education
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Culture theory | Culture theory is the branch of comparative anthropology and semiotics that seeks to define the heuristic concept of culture in operational and/or scientific terms.
Overview
In the 19th century, "culture" was used by some to refer to a wide array of human activities, and by some others as a synonym for "civilization". In the 20th century, anthropologists began theorizing about culture as an object of scientific analysis. Some used it to distinguish human adaptive strategies from the largely instinctive adaptive strategies of animals, including the adaptive strategies of other primates and non-human hominids, whereas others used it to refer to symbolic representations and expressions of human experience, with no direct adaptive value. Both groups understood culture as being definitive of human nature.
According to many theories that have gained wide acceptance among anthropologists, culture exhibits the way that humans interpret their biology and their environment. According to this point of view, culture becomes such an integral part of human existence that it is the human environment, and most cultural change can be attributed to human adaptation to historical events. Moreover, given that culture is seen as the primary adaptive mechanism of humans and takes place much faster than human biological evolution, most cultural change can be viewed as culture adapting to itself.
Although most anthropologists try to define culture in such a way that it separates human beings from other animals, many human traits are similar to those of other animals, particularly the traits of other primates. For example, chimpanzees have big brains, but human brains are bigger. Similarly, bonobos exhibit complex sexual behaviour, but human beings exhibit much more complex sexual behaviours. As such, anthropologists often debate whether human behaviour is different from animal behaviour in degree rather than in kind; they must also find ways to distinguish cultural behaviour from sociological behaviour and psychological behavior.
Acceleration and amplification of these various aspects of culture change have been explored by complexity economist, W. Brian Arthur. In his book, The Nature of Technology, Arthur attempts to articulate a theory of change that considers that existing technologies (or material culture) are combined in unique ways that lead to novel new technologies. Behind that novel combination is a purposeful effort arising in human motivation. This articulation would suggest that we are just beginning to understand what might be required for a more robust theory of culture and culture change, one that brings coherence across many disciplines and reflects an integrating elegance.
See also
Cultural studies
Culturology
Cultural behavior
Culture industry
Critical theory
Dual inheritance theory
Engaged theory
Intercultural relations
Popular culture studies
Semiotics of culture
Structuralism
Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School
References
Groh, Arnold A. Theories of Culture. Routledge, London. 2020.
Ogburn, William F. Social Change. 1922. Reprint. Dell, New York. 1966.
Rogers, G.F.C. The Nature of the Engineering: A Philosophy of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1983.
Schumpeter, Joseph. The Theory of Economic Development. 1912. Reprint. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1966. 1934.
Cultural anthropology
Cultural studies
Theories | 0.789787 | 0.981653 | 0.775297 |
Learning | Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved.
Human learning starts at birth (it might even start before) and continues until death as a consequence of ongoing interactions between people and their environment. The nature and processes involved in learning are studied in many established fields (including educational psychology, neuropsychology, experimental psychology, cognitive sciences, and pedagogy), as well as emerging fields of knowledge (e.g. with a shared interest in the topic of learning from safety events such as incidents/accidents, or in collaborative learning health systems). Research in such fields has led to the identification of various sorts of learning. For example, learning may occur as a result of habituation, or classical conditioning, operant conditioning or as a result of more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals. Learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness. Learning that an aversive event cannot be avoided or escaped may result in a condition called learned helplessness. There is evidence for human behavioral learning prenatally, in which habituation has been observed as early as 32 weeks into gestation, indicating that the central nervous system is sufficiently developed and primed for learning and memory to occur very early on in development.
Play has been approached by several theorists as a form of learning. Children experiment with the world, learn the rules, and learn to interact through play. Lev Vygotsky agrees that play is pivotal for children's development, since they make meaning of their environment through playing educational games. For Vygotsky, however, play is the first form of learning language and communication, and the stage where a child begins to understand rules and symbols. This has led to a view that learning in organisms is always related to semiosis, and is often associated with representational systems/activity.
Types
There are various functional categorizations of memory which have developed. Some memory researchers distinguish memory based on the relationship between the stimuli involved (associative vs non-associative) or based to whether the content can be communicated through language (declarative/explicit vs procedural/implicit). Some of these categories can, in turn, be parsed into sub-types. For instance, declarative memory comprises both episodic and semantic memory.
Non-associative learning
Non-associative learning refers to "a relatively permanent change in the strength of response to a single stimulus due to repeated exposure to that stimulus." This definition exempts the changes caused by sensory adaptation, fatigue, or injury.
Non-associative learning can be divided into habituation and sensitization.
Habituation
Habituation is an example of non-associative learning in which one or more components of an innate response (e.g., response probability, response duration) to a stimulus diminishes when the stimulus is repeated. Thus, habituation must be distinguished from extinction, which is an associative process. In operant extinction, for example, a response declines because it is no longer followed by a reward. An example of habituation can be seen in small song birds—if a stuffed owl (or similar predator) is put into the cage, the birds initially react to it as though it were a real predator. Soon the birds react less, showing habituation. If another stuffed owl is introduced (or the same one removed and re-introduced), the birds react to it again as though it were a predator, demonstrating that it is only a very specific stimulus that is habituated to (namely, one particular unmoving owl in one place). The habituation process is faster for stimuli that occur at a high rather than for stimuli that occur at a low rate as well as for the weak and strong stimuli, respectively. Habituation has been shown in essentially every species of animal, as well as the sensitive plant Mimosa pudica and the large protozoan Stentor coeruleus. This concept acts in direct opposition to sensitization.
Sensitization
Sensitization is an example of non-associative learning in which the progressive amplification of a response follows repeated administrations of a stimulus. This is based on the notion that a defensive reflex to a stimulus such as withdrawal or escape becomes stronger after the exposure to a different harmful or threatening stimulus. An everyday example of this mechanism is the repeated tonic stimulation of peripheral nerves that occurs if a person rubs their arm continuously. After a while, this stimulation creates a warm sensation that can eventually turn painful. This pain results from a progressively amplified synaptic response of the peripheral nerves. This sends a warning that the stimulation is harmful. Sensitization is thought to underlie both adaptive as well as maladaptive learning processes in the organism.
Active learning
Active learning occurs when a person takes control of his/her learning experience. Since understanding information is the key aspect of learning, it is important for learners to recognize what they understand and what they do not. By doing so, they can monitor their own mastery of subjects. Active learning encourages learners to have an internal dialogue in which they verbalize understandings. This and other meta-cognitive strategies can be taught to a child over time. Studies within metacognition have proven the value in active learning, claiming that the learning is usually at a stronger level as a result. In addition, learners have more incentive to learn when they have control over not only how they learn but also what they learn. Active learning is a key characteristic of student-centered learning. Conversely, passive learning and direct instruction are characteristics of teacher-centered learning (or traditional education).
Associative learning
Associative learning is the process by which a person or animal learns an association between two stimuli or events. In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with a reflex-eliciting stimulus until eventually the neutral stimulus elicits a response on its own. In operant conditioning, a behavior that is reinforced or punished in the presence of a stimulus becomes more or less likely to occur in the presence of that stimulus.
Operant conditioning
Operant conditioning is a way in which behavior can be shaped or modified according to the desires of the trainer or head individual. Operant conditioning uses the thought that living things seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that an animal or human can learn through receiving either reward or punishment at a specific time called trace conditioning. Trace conditioning is the small and ideal period of time between the subject performing the desired behavior, and receiving the positive reinforcement as a result of their performance. The reward needs to be given immediately after the completion of the wanted behavior.
Operant conditioning is different from classical conditioning in that it shapes behavior not solely on bodily reflexes that occur naturally to a specific stimulus, but rather focuses on the shaping of wanted behavior that requires conscious thought, and ultimately requires learning.
Punishment and reinforcement are the two principal ways in which operant conditioning occurs. Punishment is used to reduce unwanted behavior, and ultimately (from the learner's perspective) leads to avoidance of the punishment, not necessarily avoidance of the unwanted behavior. Punishment is not an appropriate way to increase wanted behavior for animals or humans. Punishment can be divided into two subcategories, positive punishment and negative punishment. Positive punishment is when an aversive aspect of life or thing is added to the subject, for this reason it is called positive punishment. For example, the parent spanking their child would be considered a positive punishment, because a spanking was added to the child. Negative punishment is considered the removal of something loved or desirable from the subject. For example, when a parent puts his child in time out, in reality, the child is losing the opportunity to be with friends, or to enjoy the freedom to do as he pleases. In this example, negative punishment is the removal of the child's desired rights to play with his friends etc.
Reinforcement on the other hand is used to increase a wanted behavior either through negative reinforcement or positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is defined by removing an undesirable aspect of life, or thing. For example, a dog might learn to sit as the trainer scratches his ears, which ultimately is removing his itches (undesirable aspect). Positive reinforcement is defined by adding a desirable aspect of life or thing. For example, a dog might learn to sit if he receives a treat. In this example the treat was added to the dog's life.
Classical conditioning
The typical paradigm for classical conditioning involves repeatedly pairing an unconditioned stimulus (which unfailingly evokes a reflexive response) with another previously neutral stimulus (which does not normally evoke the response). Following conditioning, the response occurs both to the unconditioned stimulus and to the other, unrelated stimulus (now referred to as the "conditioned stimulus"). The response to the conditioned stimulus is termed a conditioned response. The classic example is Ivan Pavlov and his dogs. Pavlov fed his dogs meat powder, which naturally made the dogs salivate—salivating is a reflexive response to the meat powder. Meat powder is the unconditioned stimulus (US) and the salivation is the unconditioned response (UR). Pavlov rang a bell before presenting the meat powder. The first time Pavlov rang the bell, the neutral stimulus, the dogs did not salivate, but once he put the meat powder in their mouths they began to salivate. After numerous pairings of bell and food, the dogs learned that the bell signaled that food was about to come, and began to salivate when they heard the bell. Once this occurred, the bell became the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the salivation to the bell became the conditioned response (CR). Classical conditioning has been demonstrated in many species. For example, it is seen in honeybees, in the proboscis extension reflex paradigm. It was recently also demonstrated in garden pea plants.
Another influential person in the world of classical conditioning is John B. Watson. Watson's work was very influential and paved the way for B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorism. Watson's behaviorism (and philosophy of science) stood in direct contrast to Freud and other accounts based largely on introspection. Watson's view was that the introspective method was too subjective and that we should limit the study of human development to directly observable behaviors. In 1913, Watson published the article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views", in which he argued that laboratory studies should serve psychology best as a science. Watson's most famous, and controversial, experiment was "Little Albert", where he demonstrated how psychologists can account for the learning of emotion through classical conditioning principles.
Observational learning
Observational learning is learning that occurs through observing the behavior of others. It is a form of social learning which takes various forms, based on various processes. In humans, this form of learning seems to not need reinforcement to occur, but instead, requires a social model such as a parent, sibling, friend, or teacher with surroundings.
Imprinting
Imprinting is a kind of learning occurring at a particular life stage that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behavior. In filial imprinting, young animals, particularly birds, form an association with another individual or in some cases, an object, that they respond to as they would to a parent. In 1935, the Austrian Zoologist Konrad Lorenz discovered that certain birds follow and form a bond if the object makes sounds.
Play
Play generally describes behavior with no particular end in itself, but that improves performance in similar future situations. This is seen in a wide variety of vertebrates besides humans, but is mostly limited to mammals and birds. Cats are known to play with a ball of string when young, which gives them experience with catching prey. Besides inanimate objects, animals may play with other members of their own species or other animals, such as orcas playing with seals they have caught. Play involves a significant cost to animals, such as increased vulnerability to predators and the risk of injury and possibly infection. It also consumes energy, so there must be significant benefits associated with play for it to have evolved. Play is generally seen in younger animals, suggesting a link with learning. However, it may also have other benefits not associated directly with learning, for example improving physical fitness.
Play, as it pertains to humans as a form of learning is central to a child's learning and development. Through play, children learn social skills such as sharing and collaboration. Children develop emotional skills such as learning to deal with the emotion of anger, through play activities. As a form of learning, play also facilitates the development of thinking and language skills in children.
There are five types of play:
Sensorimotor play aka functional play, characterized by the repetition of an activity
Roleplay occurs starting at the age of three
Rule-based play where authoritative prescribed codes of conduct are primary
Construction play involves experimentation and building
Movement play aka physical play
These five types of play are often intersecting. All types of play generate thinking and problem-solving skills in children. Children learn to think creatively when they learn through play. Specific activities involved in each type of play change over time as humans progress through the lifespan. Play as a form of learning, can occur solitarily, or involve interacting with others.
Enculturation
Enculturation is the process by which people learn values and behaviors that are appropriate or necessary in their surrounding culture. Parents, other adults, and peers shape the individual's understanding of these values. If successful, enculturation results in competence in the language, values, and rituals of the culture. This is different from acculturation, where a person adopts the values and societal rules of a culture different from their native one.
Multiple examples of enculturation can be found cross-culturally. Collaborative practices in the Mazahua people have shown that participation in everyday interaction and later learning activities contributed to enculturation rooted in nonverbal social experience. As the children participated in everyday activities, they learned the cultural significance of these interactions. The collaborative and helpful behaviors exhibited by Mexican and Mexican-heritage children is a cultural practice known as being "acomedido". Chillihuani girls in Peru described themselves as weaving constantly, following behavior shown by the other adults.
Episodic learning
Episodic learning is a change in behavior that occurs as a result of an event. For example, a fear of dogs that follows being bitten by a dog is episodic learning. Episodic learning is so named because events are recorded into episodic memory, which is one of the three forms of explicit learning and retrieval, along with perceptual memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory remembers events and history that are embedded in experience and this is distinguished from semantic memory, which attempts to extract facts out of their experiential context or – as some describe – a timeless organization of knowledge. For instance, if a person remembers the Grand Canyon from a recent visit, it is an episodic memory. He would use semantic memory to answer someone who would ask him information such as where the Grand Canyon is. A study revealed that humans are very accurate in the recognition of episodic memory even without deliberate intention to memorize it. This is said to indicate a very large storage capacity of the brain for things that people pay attention to.
Multimedia learning
Multimedia learning is where a person uses both auditory and visual stimuli to learn information. This type of learning relies on dual-coding theory.
E-learning and augmented learning
Electronic learning or e-learning is computer-enhanced learning. A specific and always more diffused e-learning is mobile learning (m-learning), which uses different mobile telecommunication equipment, such as cellular phones.
When a learner interacts with the e-learning environment, it is called augmented learning. By adapting to the needs of individuals, the context-driven instruction can be dynamically tailored to the learner's natural environment. Augmented digital content may include text, images, video, audio (music and voice). By personalizing instruction, augmented learning has been shown to improve learning performance for a lifetime. See also minimally invasive education.
Moore (1989) purported that three core types of interaction are necessary for quality, effective online learning:
Learner–learner (i.e. communication between and among peers with or without the teacher present),
Learner–instructor (i.e. student-teacher communication), and
Learner–content (i.e. intellectually interacting with content that results in changes in learners' understanding, perceptions, and cognitive structures).
In his theory of transactional distance, Moore (1993) contented that structure and interaction or dialogue bridge the gap in understanding and communication that is created by geographical distances (known as transactional distance).
Rote learning
Rote learning is memorizing information so that it can be recalled by the learner exactly the way it was read or heard. The major technique used for rote learning is learning by repetition, based on the idea that a learner can recall the material exactly (but not its meaning) if the information is repeatedly processed. Rote learning is used in diverse areas, from mathematics to music to religion.
Meaningful learning
Meaningful learning is the concept that learned knowledge (e.g., a fact) is fully understood to the extent that it relates to other knowledge. To this end, meaningful learning contrasts with rote learning in which information is acquired without regard to understanding. Meaningful learning, on the other hand, implies there is a comprehensive knowledge of the context of the facts learned.
Evidence-based learning
Evidence-based learning is the use of evidence from well designed scientific studies to accelerate learning. Evidence-based learning methods such as spaced repetition can increase the rate at which a student learns.
Formal learning
Formal learning is a deliberate way attaining of knowledge, which takes place within a teacher-student environment, such as in a school system or work environment. The term formal learning has nothing to do with the formality of the learning, but rather the way it is directed and organized. In formal learning, the learning or training departments set out the goals and objectives of the learning and oftentimes learners will be awarded with a diploma, or a type of formal recognition.
Non-formal learning
Non-formal learning is organized learning outside the formal learning system. For example, learning by coming together with people with similar interests and exchanging viewpoints, in clubs or in (international) youth organizations, and workshops. From the organizer's point of reference, non-formal learning does not always need a main objective or learning outcome. From the learner's point of view, non-formal learning, although not focused on outcomes, often results in an intentional learning opportunity.
Informal learning
Informal learning is less structured than "non-formal learning". It may occur through the experience of day-to-day situations (for example, one would learn to look ahead while walking because of the possible dangers inherent in not paying attention to where one is going). It is learning from life, during a meal at the table with parents, during play, and while exploring etc.. For the learner, informal learning is most often an experience of happenstance, and not a deliberately planned experience. Thus this does not require enrollment into any class. Unlike formal learning, informal learning typically does not lead to accreditation. Informal learning begins to unfold as the learner ponders his or her situation. This type of learning does not require a professor of any kind, and learning outcomes are unforeseen following the learning experience.
Informal learning is self-directed and because it focuses on day-to-day situations, the value of informal learning can be considered high. As a result, information retrieved from informal learning experiences will likely be applicable to daily life. Children with informal learning can at times yield stronger support than subjects with formal learning in the topic of mathematics. Daily life experiences take place in the workforce, family life, and any other situation that may arise during one's lifetime. Informal learning is voluntary from the learner's viewpoint, and may require making mistakes and learning from them. Informal learning allows the individual to discover coping strategies for difficult emotions that may arise while learning. From the learner's perspective, informal learning can become purposeful, because the learner chooses which rate is appropriate to learn and because this type of learning tends to take place within smaller groups or by oneself.
Nonformal learning and combined approaches
The educational system may use a combination of formal, informal, and nonformal learning methods. The UN and EU recognize these different forms of learning (cf. links below). In some schools, students can get points that count in the formal-learning systems if they get work done in informal-learning circuits. They may be given time to assist international youth workshops and training courses, on the condition they prepare, contribute, share, and can prove this offered valuable new insight, helped to acquire new skills, a place to get experience in organizing, teaching, etc.
To learn a skill, such as solving a Rubik's Cube quickly, several factors come into play at once:
Reading directions helps a player learn the patterns that solve the Rubik's Cube.
Practicing the moves repeatedly helps build "muscle memory" and speed.
Thinking critically about moves helps find shortcuts, which speeds future attempts.
Observing the Rubik's Cube's six colors help anchor solutions in the mind.
Revisiting the cube occasionally helps retain the skill.
Tangential learning
Tangential learning is the process by which people self-educate if a topic is exposed to them in a context that they already enjoy. For example, after playing a music-based video game, some people may be motivated to learn how to play a real instrument, or after watching a TV show that references Faust and Lovecraft, some people may be inspired to read the original work. Self-education can be improved with systematization. According to experts in natural learning, self-oriented learning training has proven an effective tool for assisting independent learners with the natural phases of learning.
Extra Credits writer and game designer James Portnow was the first to suggest games as a potential venue for "tangential learning". Mozelius et al. points out that intrinsic integration of learning content seems to be a crucial design factor, and that games that include modules for further self-studies tend to present good results. The built-in encyclopedias in the Civilization games are presented as an example – by using these modules gamers can dig deeper for knowledge about historical events in the gameplay. The importance of rules that regulate learning modules and game experience is discussed by Moreno, C., in a case study about the mobile game Kiwaka. In this game, developed by Landka in collaboration with ESA and ESO, progress is rewarded with educational content, as opposed to traditional education games where learning activities are rewarded with gameplay.
Dialogic learning
Dialogic learning is a type of learning based on dialogue.
Incidental learning
In incidental teaching learning is not planned by the instructor or the student, it occurs as a byproduct of another activity — an experience, observation, self-reflection, interaction, unique event (e.g. in response to incidents/accidents), or common routine task. This learning happens in addition to or apart from the instructor's plans and the student's expectations. An example of incidental teaching is when the instructor places a train set on top of a cabinet. If the child points or walks towards the cabinet, the instructor prompts the student to say "train". Once the student says "train", he gets access to the train set.
Here are some steps most commonly used in incidental teaching:
An instructor will arrange the learning environment so that necessary materials are within the student's sight, but not within his reach, thus impacting his motivation to seek out those materials.
An instructor waits for the student to initiate engagement.
An instructor prompts the student to respond if needed.
An instructor allows access to an item/activity contingent on a correct response from the student.
The instructor fades out the prompting process over a period of time and subsequent trials.
Incidental learning is an occurrence that is not generally accounted for using the traditional methods of instructional objectives and outcomes assessment. This type of learning occurs in part as a product of social interaction and active involvement in both online and onsite courses. Research implies that some un-assessed aspects of onsite and online learning challenge the equivalency of education between the two modalities. Both onsite and online learning have distinct advantages with traditional on-campus students experiencing higher degrees of incidental learning in three times as many areas as online students. Additional research is called for to investigate the implications of these findings both conceptually and pedagogically.
Domains
Benjamin Bloom has suggested three domains of learning in his taxonomy which are:
Cognitive: To recall, calculate, discuss, analyze, problem solve, etc.
Psychomotor: To dance, swim, ski, dive, drive a car, ride a bike, etc.
Affective: To like something or someone, love, appreciate, fear, hate, worship, etc.
These domains are not mutually exclusive. For example, in learning to play chess, the person must learn the rules (cognitive domain)—but must also learn how to set up the chess pieces and how to properly hold and move a chess piece (psychomotor). Furthermore, later in the game the person may even learn to love the game itself, value its applications in life, and appreciate its history (affective domain).
Transfer
Transfer of learning is the application of skill, knowledge or understanding to resolve a novel problem or situation that happens when certain conditions are fulfilled. Research indicates that learning transfer is infrequent; most common when "... cued, primed, and guided..." and has sought to clarify what it is, and how it might be promoted through instruction.
Over the history of its discourse, various hypotheses and definitions have been advanced. First, it is speculated that different types of transfer exist, including: near transfer, the application of skill to solve a novel problem in a similar context; and far transfer, the application of skill to solve a novel problem presented in a different context. Furthermore, Perkins and Salomon (1992) suggest that positive transfer in cases when learning supports novel problem solving, and negative transfer occurs when prior learning inhibits performance on highly correlated tasks, such as second or third-language learning. Concepts of positive and negative transfer have a long history; researchers in the early 20th century described the possibility that "...habits or mental acts developed by a particular kind of training may inhibit rather than facilitate other mental activities". Finally, Schwarz, Bransford and Sears (2005) have proposed that transferring knowledge into a situation may differ from transferring knowledge out to a situation as a means to reconcile findings that transfer may both be frequent and challenging to promote.
A significant and long research history has also attempted to explicate the conditions under which transfer of learning might occur. Early research by Ruger, for example, found that the "level of attention", "attitudes", "method of attack" (or method for tackling a problem), a "search for new points of view", a "careful testing of hypothesis" and "generalization" were all valuable approaches for promoting transfer. To encourage transfer through teaching, Perkins and Salomon recommend aligning ("hugging") instruction with practice and assessment, and "bridging", or encouraging learners to reflect on past experiences or make connections between prior knowledge and current content.
Factors affecting learning
Genetics
Some aspects of intelligence are inherited genetically, so different learners to some degree have different abilities with regard to learning and speed of learning.
Socioeconomic and physical conditions
Problems like malnutrition, fatigue, and poor physical health can slow learning, as can bad ventilation or poor lighting at home, and unhygienic living conditions.
The design, quality, and setting of a learning space, such as a school or classroom, can each be critical to the success of a learning environment. Size, configuration, comfort—fresh air, temperature, light, acoustics, furniture—can all affect a student's learning. The tools used by both instructors and students directly affect how information is conveyed, from the display and writing surfaces (blackboards, markerboards, tack surfaces) to digital technologies. For example, if a room is too crowded, stress levels rise, student attention is reduced, and furniture arrangement is restricted. If furniture is incorrectly arranged, sightlines to the instructor or instructional material are limited and the ability to suit the learning or lesson style is restricted. Aesthetics can also play a role, for if student morale suffers, so does motivation to attend school.
Psychological factors and teaching style
Intrinsic motivation, such as a student's own intellectual curiosity or desire to experiment or explore, has been found to sustain learning more effectively than extrinsic motivations such as grades or parental requirements. Rote learning involves repetition in order to reinforce facts in memory, but has been criticized as ineffective and "drill and kill" since it kills intrinsic motivation. Alternatives to rote learning include active learning and meaningful learning.
The speed, accuracy, and retention, depend upon aptitude, attitude, interest, attention, energy level, and motivation of the students. Students who answer a question properly or give good results should be praised. This encouragement increases their ability and helps them produce better results. Certain attitudes, such as always finding fault in a student's answer or provoking or embarrassing the student in front of a class are counterproductive.
Certain techniques can increase long-term retention:
The spacing effect means that lessons or studying spaced out over time (spaced repetition) are better than cramming
Teaching material to other people
"Self-explaining" (paraphrasing material to oneself) rather than passive reading
Low-stakes quizzing
Epigenetic factors
The underlying molecular basis of learning appears to be dynamic changes in gene expression occurring in brain neurons that are introduced by epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic regulation of gene expression involves, most notably, chemical modification of DNA or DNA-associated histone proteins. These chemical modifications can cause long-lasting changes in gene expression. Epigenetic mechanisms involved in learning include the methylation and demethylation of neuronal DNA as well as methylation, acetylation and deacetylation of neuronal histone proteins.
During learning, information processing in the brain involves induction of oxidative modification in neuronal DNA followed by the employment of DNA repair processes that introduce epigenetic alterations. In particular, the DNA repair processes of non-homologous end joining and base excision repair are employed in learning and memory formation.
General cognition-related factors
Adult learning vs children's learning
Learning is often more efficient in children and takes longer or is more difficult with age. A study using neuroimaging identified rapid neurotransmitter GABA boosting as a major potential explanation-component for why that is.
Children's brains contain more "silent synapses" that are inactive until recruited as part of neuroplasticity and flexible learning or memories. Neuroplasticity is heightened during critical or sensitive periods of brain development, mainly referring to brain development during child development.
What humans learn at the early stages, and what they learn to apply, sets humans on course for life or has a disproportional impact. Adults usually have a higher capacity to select what they learn, to what extent and how. For example, children may learn the given subjects and topics of school curricula via classroom blackboard-transcription handwriting, instead of being able to choose specific topics/skills or jobs to learn and the styles of learning. For instance, children may not have developed consolidated interests, ethics, interest in purpose and meaningful activities, knowledge about real-world requirements and demands, and priorities.
In animal evolution
Animals gain knowledge in two ways. First is learning—in which an animal gathers information about its environment and uses this information. For example, if an animal eats something that hurts its stomach, it learns not to eat that again. The second is innate knowledge that is genetically inherited. An example of this is when a horse is born and can immediately walk. The horse has not learned this behavior; it simply knows how to do it. In some scenarios, innate knowledge is more beneficial than learned knowledge. However, in other scenarios the opposite is true—animals must learn certain behaviors when it is disadvantageous to have a specific innate behavior. In these situations, learning evolves in the species.
Costs and benefits of learned and innate knowledge
In a changing environment, an animal must constantly gain new information to survive. However, in a stable environment, this same individual needs to gather the information it needs once, and then rely on it for the rest of its life. Therefore, different scenarios better suit either learning or innate knowledge.
Essentially, the cost of obtaining certain knowledge versus the benefit of already having it determines whether an animal evolved to learn in a given situation, or whether it innately knew the information. If the cost of gaining the knowledge outweighs the benefit of having it, then the animal does not evolve to learn in this scenario—but instead, non-learning evolves. However, if the benefit of having certain information outweighs the cost of obtaining it, then the animal is far more likely to evolve to have to learn this information.
Non-learning is more likely to evolve in two scenarios. If an environment is static and change does not or rarely occurs, then learning is simply unnecessary. Because there is no need for learning in this scenario—and because learning could prove disadvantageous due to the time it took to learn the information—non-learning evolves. Similarly, if an environment is in a constant state of change, learning is also disadvantageous, as anything learned is immediately irrelevant because of the changing environment. The learned information no longer applies. Essentially, the animal would be just as successful if it took a guess as if it learned. In this situation, non-learning evolves. In fact, a study of Drosophila melanogaster showed that learning can actually lead to a decrease in productivity, possibly because egg-laying behaviors and decisions were impaired by interference from the memories gained from the newly learned materials or because of the cost of energy in learning.
However, in environments where change occurs within an animal's lifetime but is not constant, learning is more likely to evolve. Learning is beneficial in these scenarios because an animal can adapt to the new situation, but can still apply the knowledge that it learns for a somewhat extended period of time. Therefore, learning increases the chances of success as opposed to guessing. An example of this is seen in aquatic environments with landscapes subject to change. In these environments, learning is favored because the fish are predisposed to learn the specific spatial cues where they live.
In plants
In recent years, plant physiologists have examined the physiology of plant behavior and cognition. The concepts of learning and memory are relevant in identifying how plants respond to external cues, a behavior necessary for survival. Monica Gagliano, an Australian professor of evolutionary ecology, makes an argument for associative learning in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. The garden pea is not specific to a region, but rather grows in cooler, higher altitude climates. Gagliano and colleagues' 2016 paper aims to differentiate between innate phototropism behavior and learned behaviors. Plants use light cues in various ways, such as to sustain their metabolic needs and to maintain their internal circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms in plants are modulated by endogenous bioactive substances that encourage leaf-opening and leaf-closing and are the basis of nyctinastic behaviors.
Gagliano and colleagues constructed a classical conditioning test in which pea seedlings were divided into two experimental categories and placed in Y-shaped tubes. In a series of training sessions, the plants were exposed to light coming down different arms of the tube. In each case, there was a fan blowing lightly down the tube in either the same or opposite arm as the light. The unconditioned stimulus (US) was the predicted occurrence of light and the conditioned stimulus (CS) was the wind blowing by the fan. Previous experimentation shows that plants respond to light by bending and growing towards it through differential cell growth and division on one side of the plant stem mediated by auxin signaling pathways.
During the testing phase of Gagliano's experiment, the pea seedlings were placed in different Y-pipes and exposed to the fan alone. Their direction of growth was subsequently recorded. The 'correct' response by the seedlings was deemed to be growing into the arm where the light was "predicted" from the previous day. The majority of plants in both experimental conditions grew in a direction consistent with the predicted location of light based on the position of the fan the previous day. For example, if the seedling was trained with the fan and light coming down the same arm of the Y-pipe, the following day the seedling grew towards the fan in the absence of light cues despite the fan being placed in the opposite side of the Y-arm. Plants in the control group showed no preference to a particular arm of the Y-pipe. The percentage difference in population behavior observed between the control and experimental groups is meant to distinguish innate phototropism behavior from active associative learning.
While the physiological mechanism of associative learning in plants is not known, Telewski et al. describes a hypothesis that describes photoreception as the basis of mechano-perception in plants. One mechanism for mechano-perception in plants relies on MS ion channels and calcium channels. Mechanosensory proteins in cell lipid bilayers, known as MS ion channels, are activated once they are physically deformed in response to pressure or tension. Ca2+ permeable ion channels are "stretch-gated" and allow for the influx of osmolytes and calcium, a well-known second messenger, into the cell. This ion influx triggers a passive flow of water into the cell down its osmotic gradient, effectively increasing turgor pressure and causing the cell to depolarize. Gagliano hypothesizes that the basis of associative learning in Pisum sativum is the coupling of mechanosensory and photosensory pathways and is mediated by auxin signaling pathways. The result is directional growth to maximize a plant's capture of sunlight.
Gagliano et al. published another paper on habituation behaviors in the mimosa pudica plant whereby the innate behavior of the plant was diminished by repeated exposure to a stimulus. There has been controversy around this paper and more generally around the topic of plant cognition. Charles Abrahmson, a psychologist and behavioral biologist, says that part of the issue of why scientists disagree about whether plants have the ability to learn is that researchers do not use a consistent definition of "learning" and "cognition". Similarly, Michael Pollan, an author, and journalist, says in his piece The Intelligent Plant that researchers do not doubt Gagliano's data but rather her language, specifically her use of the term "learning" and "cognition" with respect to plants. A direction for future research is testing whether circadian rhythms in plants modulate learning and behavior and surveying researchers' definitions of "cognition" and "learning".
Machine learning
Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, concerns the construction and study of systems that can learn from data. For example, a machine learning system could be trained on email messages to learn to distinguish between spam and non-spam messages. Most of the Machine Learning models are based on probabilistic theories where each input (e.g. an image ) is associated with a probability to become the desired output.
Types
Phases
See also
Information theory
Types of education
References
Notes
Further reading
External links
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (expanded edition) published by the National Academies Press
Applying Science of Learning in Education: Infusing Psychological Science into the Curriculum published by the American Psychological Association
Memorization
Cognitive science
Developmental psychology
Intelligence
Neuropsychological assessment
Systems science
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Transformative learning | Transformative learning, as a theory, says that the process of "perspective transformation" has three dimensions: psychological (changes in understanding of the self), convictional (revision of belief systems), and behavioral (changes in lifestyle).
Perspective transformation, leading to transformative learning, occurs infrequently. Jack Mezirow believes that it usually results from a "disorienting dilemma" which is triggered by a life crisis or major life transition—although it may also result from an accumulation of transformations in meaning schemes over a period of time. Less dramatic predicaments, such as those created by a teacher for pedagogical effect, also promote transformation.
An important part of transformative learning is for individuals to change their frames of reference by critically reflecting on their assumptions and beliefs and consciously making and implementing plans that bring about new ways of defining their worlds. This process is fundamentally rational and analytical.
Jack Mezirow
Jack Mezirow developed transformative learning theory starting in 1978. Since then, the theory has evolved "into a comprehensive and complex description of how learners construe, validate, and reformulate the meaning of their experience." For learners to change their meaning schemes (specific beliefs, attitudes, and emotional reactions), "they must engage in critical reflection on their experiences, which in turn leads to a perspective transformation." The meaning schemes that make up meaning structures may change as an individual adds to or integrates ideas within an existing scheme and, in fact, this transformation of meaning schemes occurs routinely through learning.
A perspective transformation leading to transformative learning, however, occurs much less frequently. Mezirow believes that this less frequent transformation usually results from a "disorienting dilemma", which is triggered by a life crisis or major life transition, although it may also result from an accumulation of transformations in meaning schemes over a period of time.
The perspective transformation is explained by Mezirow as follows:
Disorienting dilemma
Self-examination
Sense of alienation
Relating discontent to others
Explaining options of new behavior
Building confidence in new ways
Planning a course of action
Knowledge to implement plans
Experimenting with new roles
Reintegration.
Other perspectives
A number of critical responses to Mezirow's theory of transformative learning have emerged over the years. One criticism of Mezirow's theory is its emphasis upon rationality. Some studies support Mezirow. Others conclude that Mezirow grants rational critical reflection too much importance.
Edward W. Taylor has since suggested neurobiological research as a promising area that may offer some explanation about the role emotions play, closing the gap between rationality and emotion in the transformative learning process. Taylor implies that, with available modern technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), these once obscure factors can now be examined through determining which neurological brain systems are at work during disorienting dilemmas and the journey of recovery that follows. This neurobiological research also stresses the importance of the role of implicit memory, from which emerge habits, attitudes and preferences that are related to unconscious thoughts and actions.
While the learning process is certainly rational on some levels, it is also a profound experience that can be described as a spiritual or emotional transformation as well. The experience of undoing racist, sexist, and other oppressive attitudes can be painful and emotional, as these attitudes have often been developed as ways to cope with and make sense of the world. This type of learning requires taking risks, and a willingness to be vulnerable and have one's attitudes and assumptions challenged.
Other theorists have proposed a view of transformative learning as an intuitive and emotional process. John M. Dirkx, Robert D. Boyd, J. Gordon Myers, and Rosemary R. Ruether link Mezirow's rational, cognitive and analytical approach to a more intuitive, creative and holistic view of transformative learning. This view of transformative learning is based primarily on the work of Robert Boyd, who has developed a theory of transformative education based on analytical (or depth) psychology.
For Boyd, transformation is a "fundamental change in one's personality involving [together] the resolution of a personal dilemma and the expansion of consciousness resulting in greater personality integration". This calls upon extra-rational sources such as symbols, images, and archetypes to assist in creating a personal vision or meaning of what it means to be human.
First, an individual must be receptive or open to receiving "alternative expressions of meaning", and then recognize that the message is authentic. Grieving, considered by Boyd to be the most critical phase of the discernment process, takes place when an individual realizes that old patterns or ways of perceiving are no longer relevant, moves to adopt or establish new ways, and finally integrates old and new patterns. More recent research has specifically explored the process of transformative learning as it occurs in bereaved elders, maintaining that the "disorienting dilemma" deemed necessary by Mezirow is present in the loss of a loved one, with an additional devastating factor being the isolation that the elderly in particular are likely to face. Another study considers transformative learning in the context of suicide bereavement. In these cases the dilemma is compounded by the questioning of conceptions or misconceptions that were held about the relationship with the deceased, and the resolving of the meaning of that relationship during the grieving process.
Unlike Mezirow, who sees the ego as playing a central role in the process of perspective transformation, Boyd and Myers use a framework that moves beyond the ego and the emphasis on reason and logic to a definition of transformative learning that is more psychosocial in nature.
Another definition of transformative learning was put forward by Edmund O'Sullivan:
Positing that understanding transformative learning may have been hindered by perspectives of rational thought and Western traditions, Kathleen P. King provides an alternate model grounded in a meta-analysis of research, the "Transformative Learning Opportunities Model".
Recent considerations of these varying perspectives seem to indicate that one perspective does not need to exclude the other. For example, Mezirow and Dirkx discussed their views on transformative learning at a 2005 International Transformative Learning Conference. This dialogue, facilitated by Patricia Cranton, continued via email after the conference and the overview was published in the Journal of Transformative Education. Dirkx focuses on subjectivity, in the power of the inner world in one's shift in view of the outer world. Mezirow emphasizes critical assessment of assumptions. Although their approaches are different, they agree that their perspectives are similar in several aspects. This includes transforming frames of reference that have lost meaning or have become dysfunctional, and fostering enhanced awareness and consciousness of one's being in the world. Both perspectives are required to deepen understanding and to incorporate these ways of learning into transformative education.
One of the difficulties in defining transformative learning is that it bleeds into the boundaries of concepts such as "meaning making" or "critical thinking".
The term "meaning making" (i.e., constructing meaning) is found most frequently in constructivist approaches to education, based on the work of educators such as John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, and Lev Vygotsky. In the constructivist view, meaning is constructed from knowledge.
John Dirkx views transformational learning as a meaning-making process within adult education, aimed at promoting a democratic vision of society and self-actualization of individuals. Learning is life—not a preparation for it. Therefore, transformational learning requires authenticity, a commitment to focus on the here and now, and awareness of feelings and emotions within the learning setting. The relationship between the individual and the broader world is discussed in terms of the critical role it plays in learning. Dirkx describes our emotions and feelings as a kind of language for helping us learn about ourselves, our relationships with others and how we makes sense of all aspects of our experiences, both objective and subjective. Our sense of who we are and what our relationship is to the world must naturally be drawn into the learning process, leading to deeper engagements with ourselves and the world.
Mezirow posits that all learning is change but not all change is transformation. There is a difference between transmissional, transactional and transformational education. In the first, knowledge is transmitted from teacher to student. In transactional education, it is recognized that the student has valuable experiences, and learns best through experience, inquiry, critical thinking and interaction with other learners. It could be argued that some of the research regarding transformative learning has been in the realm of transactional education, and that what is seen as transformative by some authors is in fact still within the realm of transactional learning.
According to Stephen D. Brookfield, learning can only be considered transformative if it involves a fundamental questioning or reordering of how one thinks or acts; a challenge to hegemonic implications. In other words, reflection alone does not result in transformative learning unless the process involves a critical reflection, a recognition and analysis of taken-for-granted assumptions.
In practice
On the surface, the two views of transformative learning presented here are contradictory. One advocates a rational approach that depends primarily on critical reflection whereas the other relies more on intuition and emotion. However, the differences in the two views may best be seen as a matter of emphasis. Both utilize rational processes and incorporate imagination as a part of a creative process. The two different views of transformative learning described here as well as examples of how it occurs in practice suggest that no single model of transformative learning exists.
When transformative learning is the goal of adult education, fostering a learning environment in which it can occur should consider the following:
The role of the educator
Transformative learning cannot be guaranteed. Teachers can only provide an opportunity to transformatively learn. In order to foster transformative learning, the educator's role is to assist learners in becoming aware and critical of assumptions. This includes their own assumptions that lead to their interpretations, beliefs, habits of mind, or points of view, as well as the assumptions of others. Educators must provide learners practice in recognizing frames of reference. By doing so, educators encourage practice in redefining problems from different perspectives. The goal is to create a community of learners who are "united in a shared experience of trying to make meaning of their life experience".
Educators need to provide learners with opportunities to effectively participate in discourse. Discourse involves assessing beliefs, feelings, and values. This dialogue has the goal of assessing reasons behind competing interpretations through critical examination of evidence, arguments, and alternate points of view. Learners are able to validate how and what they understand, as well as develop well-informed judgments regarding a belief. Educators can encourage critical reflection and experience with discourse through the implementation of methods including metaphor analysis, concept mapping, consciousness raising, life histories, repertory grids, and participation in social action.
The educator must encourage equal participation among students in discourse. One strategy is to encourage procedures that require group members to take on the roles of monitoring the direction of dialogue and ensuring equal participation. Educators can also encourage dialogue from different perspectives through controversial statements or readings from opposing points of view. It is necessary that the educator avoids shaping the discussion.
The role of educators is also to set objectives that include autonomous thinking. By fostering learners' critical reflection and experience in discourse, autonomous thinking is possible. The foundations to thinking autonomously begin in childhood and continue in adulthood. The educator assists adult learners in becoming more critical in assessing assumptions, better at recognizing frames of references and alternate perspectives, as well as effective at collaborating with others to assess and arrive at judgments in regards to beliefs.
It is the role of the educator to promote discovery learning through the implementation of classroom methods such as learning contracts, group projects, role play, case studies, and simulations. These methods facilitate transformative learning by helping learners examine concepts in the context of their lives and analyze the justification of new knowledge.
The educator's role in establishing an environment that builds trust and care and facilitates the development of sensitive relationships among learners is a fundamental principle of fostering transformative learning. The educator also serves as a role model by demonstrating a willingness to learn and change. Teachers should provide the environment to allow students to reflect on their transformative learning experiences, but to also allow them to reflect on their own. As a result, professional development is important to assist educators in becoming authentic and critically reflective.
Mezirow outlines three ways in which experience is interpreted through reflection:
Content reflection is the investigation of the content. A question that we might ask ourselves is “what did I do that led to the outcome?
Process reflection includes checking on the problem-solving strategies that are used in the classroom. For example, “do I understand the needs of my students?”
Premise reflection is the question of the problem itself. A question might be "“why do I feel responsible for this situation”.
The role of professional development for the educator
Transformative learning about teaching occurs when educators critically examine their practice and develop alternative perspectives of understanding their practice. It is essential that fostering this critical examination become the role of professional development. The role of professional development is to assist educators in gaining awareness of their habits of mind regarding teaching. As this professional development occurs, educators critically examine the assumptions that underlie their practice, the consequences to their assumptions, and develop alternative perspectives on their practice.
Teachers need education and professional development that will help them to question, challenge and experience critical discussions on school improvement. Transforming teachers so they see themselves as agents of social change can be a challenge within education.
Strategies for transformative professional development
Strategies for transformative professional development include action plans, reflective activities, case studies, curriculum development, and critical-theory discussions. Action plans and reflective activities provide the practice and modelling of critical reflection on the profession of education, and provide guidance for the teaching and learning experience. Through the use of real-life examples, case studies provide the opportunity to analyze assumptions, as well as the consequences of choices and actions. The use of case studies focuses on practice, and on the philosophical and practical aspects of educators' practice. Curriculum development creates the opportunity to connect theory and practice. In addition to introducing new teaching techniques, educators can test and compare new concepts and practices with previous techniques. This testing and comparison moves away from uncritically accepting new teaching methods. Critical-theory discussions can be implemented to guide educators in questioning the meaning and purpose of information, encouraging educators to question the selection of the information they provide to their students.
Examples in educator professional development
Mentoring is another strategy for transformative professional, personal and organizational development. By creating a supportive culture, mentoring can provide the environment for transformative learning to occur. Through this experience mentoring becomes a transformative relationship in which individuals reconstruct possible selves. As a two-way process, mentoring is a learning tool for both the mentor as well as the person being mentored.
In a recent study, Karen Weller Swanson, applying theories of critical reflection, incorporating a critical incident model, and positing a learning partnership, designed a program for practicing teachers, for the purpose of transformative teacher development. Experiences were created to get teachers to reflect on their assumptions, asking them to consider alternative perspectives and to develop a language for making connections between theory and practice. Over the studies' two-year period, teachers were able to develop ownership of theory and transfer this knowledge into their practice. To be effective, transformative teacher development must value what teachers bring from their personal and professional experience, and acknowledge that learning is both an individual and a social experience. The process involved: achieving transparency through negotiation of curriculum, finding a common language through discussion of individual assumptions, getting continuous feedback through critical-incident questions, and testing by teacher application of the program within their classrooms. Autobiography and journaling were additional techniques used within this learning partnership. Both teachers and faculty participating in the program were transformed as beliefs were challenged and knowledge was co-constructed throughout the experience.
New teachers often find expectations ambiguous, and they lack the self-awareness and understanding to navigate the educational environment. A transformative learning framework was used in a Foundations course, for participants to build on individual and collective analysis of teaching experiences, and to help them re-frame their practice. Giedre Kligyte investigated "transformation narratives" that emerged from written reflection of participants' teaching practice, based on individual reflection and group discussion. By using Mezirow's work, along with Robert Kegan's constructive developmental theory, Kligyte found the following themes: a move from non-reflective habitual action to a more conscious practice; a change in perspective to a more sophisticated view of teaching; an increased sense of agency, including the concept that academic practice is an object which can be controlled and shaped, rather than something externally imposed; increased confidence to take risks and experiment; and a more multifaceted idea of what it means to be an academic. The conducive environment allowed for transformative experiences to occur. Through creation of a safe social context where "disorienting dilemmas" can be examined, questioned, and explored, participants were able to develop a new "frame of reference" and reintegrate learning into practice. Kligyte cautions that there are limitations to the framework, such as the possibility that participants will conform to expectations in their reflections. She notes that the "transformation narratives" examined are not a single, final narrative of the self, but a snapshot for further exploration. Kligyte's findings are similar to S. Fletcher's: that transformative learning helps to make sense of a complex and often ambiguous work environment, which requires multiple selves.
The role of the learner
The educator becomes a facilitator when the goal of learning is for learners to construct knowledge about themselves, others, and social norms. As a result, learners play an important role in the learning environment and process. Learners must create norms within the classroom that include civility, respect, and responsibility for helping one another learn. Learners must welcome diversity within the learning environment and aim for peer collaboration.
Learners must become critical of their own assumptions in order to transform their unquestioned frame of reference. Through communicative learning, learners must work towards critically reflecting on assumptions that underlie intentions, values, beliefs, and feelings. Learners are involved in objective re-framing of their frames of reference when they critically reflect on the assumptions of others. In contrast, subjective re-framing occurs when learners critically assess their own assumptions.
The role of the learner involves actively participating in discourse. Through discourse, learners are able to validate what is being communicated to them. This dialogue provides the opportunity to critically examine evidence, arguments, and alternate points of view, which fosters collaborative learning.
The role of the rational and the affective
Transformative learning has two components that at times seem to be in conflict: the cognitive, rational, and objective and the intuitive, imaginative, and subjective. Both the rational and the affective play a role in transformative learning. Although the emphasis has been on transformative learning as a rational process, teachers need to consider how they can help students use feelings and emotions both in critical reflection and as a means of reflection.
There are a number of educational and research institutions that are based on the principles of transformative learning. Some examples include the Transformative Studies Institute and The Transformative Learning Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto.
Evidence is emerging on the applicability of transformative theory in new educational programmes, in business and industry education, health professional education, community education such as courses offered by YMCA, and informal settings such as self-help groups. Phil Bamber and Les Hankin describe how students in a service-learning section experienced perspective transformation and shifts of their world-view when their training was influenced by transformative learning theory.
Susan Imel states that transformative learning may not always be a goal of education, but its importance should not be overlooked. Educators should strive to understand it, even if they choose not to foster it.
See also
Critical pedagogy
Citations
References
Boyd, Robert D., and Myers, J. Gordon. "Transformative Education." International Journal of Lifelong Education 7, no. 4 (October–December 1988): 261–284.
Brookfield, S.D. (2000). "Transformative learning as ideology critique". In J. Mezirow & Associates (Eds.), Learning as transformation. Critical perspectives on a theory in progress (pp. 125–150). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Burbules, N.C. and Berk, R. (1999) "Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: Relations, Differences, and Limits." In Thomas S. Popkewitz and Lynn Fendler, eds.: Critical Theories in Education. New York: Routledge.
Cranton, Patricia. Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1994.
Cranton, P. (1996) Professional Development as Transformative Learning: New Perspectives for Teachers of Adults. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc.
Cranton, Patricia, ed. Transformative Learning in Action: Insights from Practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. no. 74. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Summer 1997.
Cranton, P. (2006) Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Elias, Dean (1997). "It's time to change our minds: An introduction to transformative learning". ReVision, 20(1).
Fletcher, S. (2007). "Mentoring adult learners: Realizing possible selves". In M. Rossiter (Ed.), Possible selves and adult learning: Perspectives and potential. New directions for adult and continuing education (no. 114, pp. 75–86). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Gagnon, Jr., G.W. & Collay, M. (1999) "Constructivist Learning Design".
Grabove, Valerie. "The Many Facets of Transformative Learning Theory and Practice." In: Transformative Learning in Action: Insights from Practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. no. 74, edited by P. Cranton, pp. 89–96. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Summer 1997.
King, Kathleen P. (2005). Bringing transformative learning to life. Malabar, FL: Krieger.
Lee, M. (1999) "The Role of Cultural Values in the Interpretation of Significant Life Experiences". Conference Proceedings, Adult Education Research Conference (AERC)
Loughlin, Kathleen A. Women's Perceptions of Transformative Learning Experiences Within Consciousness-Raising. San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1993.
Mezirow, Jack (1975). Education for Perspective Transformation: Women's Reentry Programs in Community Colleges. New York: Center for Adult Education Teachers College, Columbia University.
Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Mezirow, J. (1995). "Transformation Theory of Adult Learning." In: In Defense of the Lifeworld, edited by M.R. Welton, pp. 39–70. New York: SUNY Press.
Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Miller, J.P. & Seller, W. (1990) Curriculum: perspectives and practice. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman
O'Sullivan, E. (1999) Transformative Learning: Educational vision for the 21st century. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press Inc.
Scott, Sue M. "The Grieving Soul in the Transformation Process." In: Transformative Learning in Action: Insights from Practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. no. 74, edited by P. Cranton, pp. 41–50. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Summer 1997.
Taylor, Edward W. The Theory and Practice of Transformative Learning: A Critical Review. Information Series no. 374. Columbus: ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Education, Center on Education and Training for Employment, College of Education, the Ohio State University, 1998.
Torosyan, Roben. (2007). Teaching for Transformation: Integrative Learning, Consciousness Development and Critical Reflection. Unpublished manuscript.
Change
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Philosophy of education
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Relational frame theory | Relational frame theory (RFT) is a psychological theory of human language, cognition, and behaviour. It was developed originally by Steven C. Hayes of University of Nevada, Reno and has been extended in research, notably by Dermot Barnes-Holmes and colleagues of Ghent University.
Relational frame theory argues that the building block of human language and higher cognition is relating, i.e. the human ability to create bidirectional links between things. It can be contrasted with associative learning, which discusses how animals form links between stimuli in the form of the strength of associations in memory. However, relational frame theory argues that natural human language typically specifies not just the strength of a link between stimuli but also the type of relation as well as the dimension along which they are to be related. For example, a tennis ball could be associated with an orange, by virtue of having the same shape, but it is different because it is not edible, and is perhaps a different color. In the preceding sentence, 'same', 'different' and 'not' are cues in the environment that specify the type of relation between the stimuli, and 'shape', 'colour' and 'edible' specify the dimension along which each relation is to be made. Relational frame theory argues that while there is an arbitrary number of types of relations and number of dimensions along which stimuli can be related, the core unit of relating is an essential building block for much of what is commonly referred to as human language or higher cognition.
Several hundred studies have explored many testable aspects and implications of the theory such as the emergence of specific frames in childhood, how individual frames can be combined to create verbally complex phenomena such as metaphors and analogies, and how the rigidity or automaticity of relating within certain domains is related to psychopathology. In attempting to describe a fundamental building block of human language and higher cognition, RFT explicitly states that its goal is to provide a general theory of psychology that can provide a bedrock for multiple domains and levels of analysis.
Relational frame theory focuses on how humans learn language (i.e., communication) through interactions with the environment and is based on a philosophical approach referred to as functional contextualism.
Overview
Introduction
Relational frame theory (RFT) is a behavioral theory of human language. It is rooted in functional contextualism and focused on predicting and influencing verbal behavior with precision, scope and depth.
Relational framing is relational responding based on arbitrarily applicable relations and arbitrary stimulus functions. The relational responding is subject to mutual entailment, combinatorial mutual entailment and transformation of stimulus functions. The relations and stimulus functions are controlled by contextual cues.
Contextual cues and stimulus functions
In human language a word, sentence or a symbol (e.g. stimulus) can have a different meaning (e.g. functions), depending on context.
In terms of RFT, it is said that in human language a stimulus can have different stimulus functions depending on contextual cues.
Take these two sentences for example:
This task is a piece of cake.
Yes, I would like a piece of that delicious cake you've made.
In the sentences above the stimulus "cake" has two different functions. The stimulus "cake" has a figurative function in the presence of the contextual cues "this task; is; piece of". Whereas in the presence of the contextual cues "I; would like; delicious; you've made" the stimulus "cake" has a more literal function. The functions of stimuli are called stimulus functions, Cfunc for short.
When stimulus function refer to physical properties of the stimulus, such as quantity, colour, shape, etc., they are called nonarbitrary stimulus functions. When a stimulus function refers to non-physical properties of the stimulus, such as value, they are called arbitrary stimulus functions. For example, a one dollar bill. The value of the one dollar bill is an arbitrary stimulus function, but the colour green is a nonarbitrary stimulus function of the one dollar bill.
Arbitrarily applicable relational responding
Arbitrarily applicable relational responding is a form of relational responding.
Relational responding
Relational responding is a response to one stimulus in relation to other available stimuli. For example, a lion who picks the largest piece of meat. The deer who picks the strongest male of the pack. In contrast if an animal would always pick the same drinking spot, it is not relational responding (it is not related to other stimuli in the sense of best/worst/larger/smaller, etc.). These examples of relational responding are based on the physical properties of the stimuli. When relational responding is based on the physical properties of the stimuli, such as shape, size, quantity, etc., it is called nonarbitrarily relational responding (NARR).
Arbitrarily applicable relational responding
Arbitrarily applicable relational responding refers to responding based on relations that are arbitrarily applied between the stimuli. That is to say the relations applied between the stimuli are not supported by the physical properties of said stimuli, but for example based on social convention or social whim. For example, the sound "cow" refers to the animal in the English language. But in another language the same animal is referred by a totally different sound. For example, in Dutch is called "koe" (pronounced as coo). The word "cow" or "koe" has nothing to do with the physical properties of the animal itself. It is by social convention that the animal is named this way. In terms of RFT it is said that the relation between the word cow and the actual animal is arbitrarily applied. We can even change these arbitrarily applied relations: Just look at the history of any language, where meanings of words, symbols and complete sentence can change over time and place.
Arbitrarily applicable relational responding is responding based on arbitrarily applied relations.
Mutual entailment
Mutual entailment refers to deriving a relation between two stimuli based on a given relation between those same two stimuli: Given the relation A to B, the relation B to A can be derived.
For example, Joyce is standing in front of Peter. The relation trained is stimulus A in front of stimulus B. One can derive that Peter is behind Joyce. The derived relation is stimulus B is behind stimulus A.
Another example: Jared is older than Jacob. One could derive that Jacob is younger than Jared. Relation trained: stimulus A is older than stimulus B. Relation derived: stimulus B is younger than stimulus A.
Combinatorial mutual entailment
Combinatorial mutual entailment refers to deriving relations between two stimuli, given the relations of those two stimuli with a third stimulus: Given the relation, A to B and B to C, the relations A to C and C to A can be derived.
To go on with the examples above:
Joyce is standing in front of Peter and Peter is standing in front of Lucy. The relations trained in this example are: stimulus A in front of B and stimulus B in front of C. With this it can be derived that Joyce is standing in front of Lucy and Lucy is standing behind Joyce. The derived relations are A is in front of C and C is behind A.
John is older than Jared and Jared is older than Jacob. Stimulus A is older than stimulus B and stimulus B is older than stimulus C. It can be derived that Jacob is younger than Jared and Jared is younger than John. The derived relation becomes stimulus A is older than stimulus C and stimulus C is younger than stimulus A.
Notice that the relations between A and C were never given. They can be derived from the other relations.
Transfer and transformation of stimulus function
A stimulus can have different functions depending on contextual cues. However a stimulus function can change based on the arbitrary relations with that stimulus.
For example, this relational frame: A is more than B and B is more than C.
For now the stimulus functions of these letters are rather neutral. But as soon as C would be labeled 'as very valuable' and 'nice to have', then A would become more attractive than C, based on the relations. Before there was stated anything about C being valuable, A had a rather neutral stimulus function. After giving C an attractive stimulus function, A has become attractive. The attractive stimulus function has been transferred from C to A through the relations between A, B and C. And A has had a transformation of stimulus function from neutral to attractive.
The same can be done with aversive stimulus function as danger instead of valuable, in saying that C is dangerous, A becomes more dangerous than C based on the relations.
Development
RFT is a behavioral account of language and higher cognition. In his 1957 book Verbal Behavior, B.F. Skinner presented an interpretation of language. However, this account was intended to be an interpretation as opposed to an experimental research program, and researchers commonly acknowledge that the research products are somewhat limited in scope. For example, Skinner's behavioral interpretation of language has been useful in some aspects of language training in developmentally disabled children, but it has not led to a robust research program in the range of areas relevant to language and cognition, such as problem-solving, reasoning, metaphor, logic, and so on. RFT advocates are fairly bold in stating that their goal is an experimental behavioral research program in all such areas, and RFT research has indeed emerged in a large number of these areas, including grammar.
In a review of Skinner's book, linguist Noam Chomsky argued that the generativity of language shows that it cannot simply be learned, that there must be some innate "language acquisition device". Many have seen this review as a turning point, when cognitivism took the place of behaviorism as the mainstream in psychology. Behavior analysts generally viewed the criticism as somewhat off point, but it is undeniable that psychology turned its attention elsewhere and the review was very influential in helping to produce the rise of cognitive psychology.
Despite the lack of attention from the mainstream, behavior analysis is alive and growing. Its application has been extended to areas such as language and cognitive training. Behavior analysis has long been extended as well to animal training, business and school settings, as well as hospitals and areas of research.
RFT distinguishes itself from Skinner's work by identifying and defining a particular type of operant conditioning known as arbitrarily applicable derived relational responding (AADRR). In essence, the theory argues that language is not associative but is learned and relational. For example, young children learn relations of coordination between names and objects; followed by relations of difference, opposition, before and after, and so on. These are "frames" in the sense that once relating of that kind is learned, any event can be related in that way mutually and in combination with other relations, given a cue to do so. This is a learning process that to date appears to occur only in humans possessing a capacity for language: to date relational framing has not yet been shown unambiguously in non-human animals despite many attempts to do so. AADRR is theorized to be a pervasive influence on almost all aspects of human behavior. The theory represents an attempt to provide a more empirically progressive account of complex human behavior while preserving the naturalistic approach of behavior analysis.
Evidence
Approximately 300 studies have tested RFT ideas. Supportive data exists in the areas needed to show that an action is "operant" such as the importance of multiple examples in training derived relational responding, the role of context, and the importance of consequences. Derived relational responding has also been shown to alter other behavioral processes such as classical conditioning, an empirical result that RFT theorists point to in explaining why relational operants modify existing behavioristic interpretations of complex human behavior. Empirical advances have also been made by RFT researchers in the analysis and understanding of such topics as metaphor, perspective taking, and reasoning.
Proponents of RFT often indicate the failure to establish a vigorous experimental program in language and cognition as the key reason why behavior analysis fell out of the mainstream of psychology despite its many contributions, and argue that RFT might provide a way forward. The theory is still somewhat controversial within behavioral psychology, however. At the current time the controversy is not primarily empirical since RFT studies publish regularly in mainstream behavioral journals and few empirical studies have yet claimed to contradict RFT findings. Rather the controversy seems to revolve around whether RFT is a positive step forward, especially given that its implications seem to go beyond many existing interpretations and extensions from within this intellectual tradition.
Applications
Acceptance and commitment therapy
RFT has been argued to be central to the development of the psychotherapeutic tradition known as acceptance and commitment therapy and clinical behavior analysis more generally. Indeed, the psychologist Steven C Hayes was involved with the creation of both acceptance and commitment therapy and RFT, and has credited them as inspirations for one another. However, the extent and exact nature of the interaction between RFT as basic behavioral science and applications such as ACT has been an ongoing point of discussion within the field.
Gender constructs
Queer theorist and ACT therapist Alex Stitt observed how relational frames within a person's language development inform their cognitive associations pertaining to gender identity, gender role, and gender expression. How rigid or flexible a person is with their relational frames, Stitt proposed, will determine how adaptable their concept of gender is within themselves, and how open they are to gender diversity. Children, for example, may adhere to the rigid hierarchical frame "males are boys, and boys have short hair" leading to the false inference that anyone who has short hair is male. Likewise, children may adhere to oppositional frames, leading to false notions like the opposite of a lemon is a lime, the opposite of a cat is a dog, or the opposite of a man is a woman. Stitt observes that adults struggling with gender related issues within themselves, often hyperfocus on causal frames in an attempt to explain gender variance, or frames of comparison and distinction, potentially resulting in feelings of isolation and alienation.
Autism spectrum disorder
RFT provides conceptual and procedural guidance for enhancing the cognitive and language development capability (through its detailed treatment and analysis of derived relational responding and the transformation of function) of early intensive behavior intervention (EIBI) programs for young children with autism and related disorders. The Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge (PEAK) Relational Training System is heavily influenced by RFT.
Evolution science
More recently, RFT has also been proposed as a way to guide discussion of language processes within evolution science, whether within evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology, toward a more informed understanding of the role of language in shaping human social behavior. The effort at integrating RFT into evolution science has been led by, among others, Steven C. Hayes, a co-developer of RFT, and David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University. For example, in 2011, Hayes presented at a seminar at Binghamton, on the topic of "Symbolic Behavior, Behavioral Psychology, and the Clinical Importance of Evolution Science", while Wilson likewise presented at a symposium at the annual conference in Parma, Italy, of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, the parent organization sponsoring RFT research, on the topic of "Evolution for Everyone, Including Contextual Psychology". Hayes, Wilson, and colleagues have recently linked RFT to the concept of a symbotype and an evolutionarily sensible way that relational framing could have developed has been described.
See also
Cognitive grammar
Cognitive linguistics
Construction grammar
Constructivism (psychological school)
Embodied cognitive science
Enactivism
Image schema
Operant conditioning
Personal construct theory
Schema (psychology)
Situated cognition
References
Further reading
External links
Official website of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, which is one of the organizations that most commonly presents new work in RFT
An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory (free, multimedia, open-access, online tutorial)]
Behavioral concepts
Psychological theories | 0.784907 | 0.987162 | 0.774831 |
Critical theory | A critical theory is any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge or dismantle power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. Some hold it to be an ideology, others argue that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, cultural studies, history, communication theory, philosophy, and feminist theory.
Critical Theory (capitalized) is a school of thought practiced by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". Although a product of modernism, and although many of the progenitors of Critical Theory were skeptical of postmodernism, Critical Theory is one of the major components of both modern and postmodern thought, and is widely applied in the humanities and social sciences today.
In addition to its roots in the first-generation Frankfurt School, critical theory has also been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. Some second-generation Frankfurt School scholars have been influential, notably Jürgen Habermas. In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism and progressed closer to American pragmatism. Concern for social "base and superstructure" is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much contemporary critical theory. The legacy of Critical Theory as a major offshoot of Marxism is controversial. The common thread
linking Marxism and Critical theory is an interest in struggles to dismantle structures of oppression,
exclusion, and domination. Philosophical approaches within this broader definition include feminism, critical race theory, post-structuralism, queer theory and forms of postcolonialism.
History
Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy, Horkheimer critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism, and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. He described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either by criticizing society in terms of some general theory of values or norms (oughts), or by criticizing society in terms of its own espoused values (i.e. immanent critique). Significantly, critical theory not only conceptualizes and critiques societal power structures, but also establishes an empirically grounded model to link society to the human subject. It defends the universalist ambitions of the tradition, but does so within a specific context of social-scientific and historical research.
The core concepts of critical theory are that it should:
be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e., how it came to be configured at a specific point in time)
improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology
Postmodern critical theory is another major product of critical theory. It analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in order to challenge modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives, rationality, and universal truths, while politicizing social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings".
Marx
Marx explicitly developed the notion of critique into the critique of ideology, linking it with the practice of social revolution, as stated in the 11th section of his Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." In early works, including The German Ideology, Marx developed his concepts of false consciousness and of ideology as the interests of one section of society masquerading as the interests of society as a whole.
Adorno and Horkheimer
One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is an ambivalence about the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence that gave rise to the "pessimism" of the new critical theory about the possibility of human emancipation and freedom. This ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, particularly the rise of Nazism, state capitalism, and culture industry as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained in the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the traditional tension between Marxism's "relations of production" and "material productive forces" of society. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by centralized planning.
Contrary to Marx's prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution" but to fascism and totalitarianism. As a result, critical theory was left, in Habermas's words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal, and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope". For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.
Habermas
In the 1960s, Habermas, a proponent of critical social theory, raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Although unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkheimer's thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement. In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism, and progressed closer to American pragmatism.
Habermas's ideas about the relationship between modernity and rationalization are in this sense strongly influenced by Max Weber. He further dissolved the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German idealism, though his epistemology remains broadly Marxist. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action, the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called "postmodern" challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty, and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his thought, which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.
Modern critical theorists
Contemporary philosophers and researchers who have focused on understanding and critiquing critical theory include Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Judith Butler, and Rahel Jaeggi. Honneth is known for his works Pathology of Reason and The Legacy of Critical Theory, in which he attempts to explain critical theory's purpose in a modern context. Jaeggi focuses on both critical theory's original intent and a more modern understanding that some argue has created a new foundation for modern usage of critical theory. Butler contextualizes critical theory as a way to rhetorically challenge oppression and inequality, specifically concepts of gender.
Honneth established a theory that many use to understand critical theory, the theory of recognition. In this theory, he asserts that in order for someone to be responsible for themselves and their own identity they must be also recognized by those around them: without recognition in this sense from peers and society, individuals can never become wholly responsible for themselves and others, nor experience true freedom and emancipation—i.e., without recognition, the individual cannot achieve self-actualization.
Like many others who put stock in critical theory, Jaeggi is vocal about capitalism's cost to society. Throughout her writings, she has remained doubtful about the necessity and use of capitalism in regard to critical theory. Most of Jaeggi's interpretations of critical theory seem to work against the foundations of Habermas and follow more along the lines of Honneth in terms of how to look at the economy through the theory's lens. She shares many of Honneth's beliefs, and many of her works try to defend them against criticism Honneth has received.
To provide a dialectical opposite to Jaeggi's conception of alienation as 'a relation of relationlessness', Hartmut Rosa has proposed the concept of resonance. Rosa uses this term to refer to moments when late modern subjects experience momentary feelings of self-efficacy in society, bringing them into a temporary moment of relatedness with some aspect of the world. Rosa describes himself as working within the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, providing an extensive critique of late modernity through his concept of social acceleration. However his resonance theory has been questioned for moving too far beyond the Adornoian tradition of "looking coldly at society".
Schools and Derivates
Postmodern critical social theory
Focusing on language, symbolism, communication, and social construction, critical theory has been applied in the social sciences as a critique of social construction and postmodern society.
While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with "forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system", postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings". Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to social structures' rapid transformation. As a result, research focuses on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.
Postmodern critical research is also characterized by the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher's work is an "objective depiction of a stable other". Instead, many postmodern scholars have adopted "alternatives that encourage reflection about the 'politics and poetics' of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified."
The term critical theory is often appropriated when an author works in sociological terms, yet attacks the social or human sciences, thus attempting to remain "outside" those frames of inquiry. Michel Foucault has been described as one such author. Jean Baudrillard has also been described as a critical theorist to the extent that he was an unconventional and critical sociologist; this appropriation is similarly casual, holding little or no relation to the Frankfurt School. In contrast, Habermas is one of the key critics of postmodernism.
Communication studies
When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas redefined critical social theory as a study of communication, with communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, and distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap to a much greater degree than before.
Critical legal studies
Immigration studies
Critical theory can be used to interpret the right of asylum and immigration law.
Critical finance studies
Critical finance studies apply critical theory to financial markets and central banks.
Critical management studies
Critical international relations theory
Critical race theory
Critical pedagogy
Critical theorists have widely credited Paulo Freire for the first applications of critical theory to education/pedagogy, considering his best-known work to be Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a seminal text in what is now known as the philosophy and social movement of critical pedagogy. Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults learn to read and write, Freire includes a detailed class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. In the book, he calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model of education", because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.
In contrast to the banking model, the teacher in the critical-theory model is not the dispenser of all knowledge, but a participant who learns with and from the students—in conversation with them, even as they learn from the teacher. The goal is to liberate the learner from an oppressive construct of teacher versus student, a dichotomy analogous to colonizer and colonized. It is not enough for the student to analyze societal power structures and hierarchies, to merely recognize imbalance and inequity; critical theory pedagogy must also empower the learner to reflect and act on that reflection to challenge an oppressive status quo.
Critical consciousness
Critical university studies
Critical psychology
Critical criminology
Critical animal studies
Critical social work
Critical ethnography
Critical data studies
Critical environmental justice
Critical environmental justice applies critical theory to environmental justice.
Criticism
While critical theorists have often been called Marxist intellectuals, their tendency to denounce some Marxist concepts and to combine Marxian analysis with other sociological and philosophical traditions has resulted in accusations of revisionism by Orthodox Marxist and by Marxist–Leninist philosophers. Martin Jay has said that the first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting a specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems".
Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action (praxis), often explicitly repudiating any solutions. Those objections mostly apply to first-generation Frankfurt School, while the issue of politics is addressed in a much more assertive way in contemporary theory.
Another criticism of critical theory "is that it fails to provide rational standards by which it can show that it is superior to other theories of knowledge, science, or practice." Rex Gibson argues that critical theory suffers from being cliquish, conformist, elitist, immodest, anti-individualist, naive, too critical, and contradictory. Hughes and Hughes argue that Habermas' theory of ideal public discourse "says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting: Felt, perceptive, imaginative, bodily experience does not fit these theories".
Some feminists argue that critical theory "can be as narrow and oppressive as the rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they seek to unmask and change.
Critical theory's language has been criticized as being too dense to understand, although "Counter arguments to these issues of language include claims that a call for clearer and more accessible language is anti-intellectual, a new 'language of possibility' is needed, and oppressed peoples can understand and contribute to new languages."
Bruce Pardy, writing for the National Post, argued that any challenges to the "legitimacy [of critical theory] can be interpreted as a demonstration of their [critical theory's proponents'] thesis: the assertion of reason, logic and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power. Thus, any challenger risks the stigma of a bigoted oppressor."
Robert Danisch, writing for The Conversation, argued that critical theory, and the modern humanities more broadly, focus too much on criticizing the current world rather than trying to make a better world.
See also
Modernism
Antipositivism
Critical military studies
Cultural studies
Information criticism
Marxist cultural analysis
Outline of critical theory
Popular culture studies
Outline of organizational theory
Postcritique
Lists
List of critical theorists
List of works in critical theory
Journals
Constellations
Representations
Critical Inquiry
Telos
Law and Critique
References
Footnotes
Works cited
Bibliography
"Problematizing Global Knowledge." Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3). 2006. .
Calhoun, Craig. 1995. Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference. Blackwell. – A survey of and introduction to the current state of critical social theory.
Charmaz, K. 1995. "Between positivism and postmodernism: Implications for methods." Studies in Symbolic Interaction 17:43–72.
Conquergood, D. 1991. "Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics." Communication Monographs 58(2):179–94. .
Corchia, Luca. 2010. La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia. Genova: Edizioni ECIG. .
Dahms, Harry, ed. 2008. No Social Science Without Critical Theory, (Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25). Emerald/JAI.
Gandler, Stefan. 2009. Fragmentos de Frankfurt. Ensayos sobre la Teoría crítica. México: 21st Century Publishers/Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. .
Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge University Press. .
Honneth, Axel. 2006. La société du mépris. Vers une nouvelle Théorie critique, La Découverte. .
Horkheimer, Max. 1982. Critical Theory Selected Essays. New York: Continuum Publishing.
Morgan, Marcia. 2012. Kierkegaard and Critical Theory. New York: Lexington Books.
Rolling, James H. 2008. "Secular blasphemy: Utter(ed) transgressions against names and fathers in the postmodern era." Qualitative Inquiry 14(6):926–48. – An example of critical postmodern work.
Sim, Stuart, and Borin Van Loon. 2001. Introducing Critical Theory. . – A short introductory volume with illustrations.
Thomas, Jim. 1993. Doing Critical Ethnography. London: Sage. pp. 1–5 & 17–25.
Tracy, S. J. 2000. "Becoming a character for commerce: Emotion labor, self subordination and discursive construction of identity in a total institution." Management Communication Quarterly 14(1):90–128. – An example of critical qualitative research.
Willard, Charles Arthur. 1982. Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge. University of Alabama Press.
— 1989. A Theory of Argumentation. University of Alabama Press.
— 1996. Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chapter 9. Critical Theory
External links
Gerhardt, Christina. "Frankfurt School". The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Ness, Immanuel (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Blackwell Reference Online.
"Theory: Death Is Not the End" N+1 magazine's short history of academic Critical Theory.
Critical Legal Thinking A Critical Legal Studies website which uses Critical Theory in an analysis of law and politics.
L. Corchia, Jürgen Habermas. A Bibliography: works and studies (1952–2013), Pisa, Edizioni Il Campano – Arnus University Books, 2013, 606 pages.
Sim, S.; Van Loon, B. (2009). Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide. Icon Books Ltd.
Archival collections
Guide to the Critical Theory Offprint Collection. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, Cali Guide to the Critical Theory Institute Audio and Video Recordings, University of California, Irvine. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
University of California, Irvine, Critical Theory Institute Manuscript Materials. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
Conflict theory
Humanities
Philosophical schools and traditions
Social philosophy
Political ideologies | 0.77531 | 0.998965 | 0.774507 |
Technological pedagogical content knowledge | The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework is an educational model that describes the intersections between technology, pedagogy, and content for the effective integration of technology into teaching. TPACK became popular in the early 2000s.
TPACK divides a teacher's contextual knowledge (XK) in teaching into three broad categories: content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and technological knowledge (TK). At the intersection of two categories are more specific forms of knowledge: pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), technological content knowledge (TCK), technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK). At the intersection of all three categories is technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). Contextual knowledge also includes information apart from the three categories, such as an awareness of school policies.
Researchers argue that effective technological integration involves an understanding of the relationships between all three forms of knowledge in a teaching context.
History
In the early 2000s, scholars noted a lack of theory and conceptual frameworks to inform and guide research and teacher preparation in technology integration. The classic definition of PCK proposed by Shulman included one dynamic and complex relationship between two different knowledge bodies: content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. Shulman defined PCK as the blend between content and pedagogy, highlighting the teacher's comprehension of how topics should be taught according to students' diverse interests and capabilities.
For five years, Mishra & Koehler conducted an experiment to understand educators’ development of rich technology uses as well as helping them develop their teaching with technology. As a result of this work, they arrived at the Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge (TPCK) model in 2008, later renamed to TPACK. The questions of "what the teachers need to know in order to appropriately incorporate technology into their teaching... and how they might develop it" were key to the framework development. In 2019, the Mishra proposed an additional aspect of teacher knowledge, contextual knowledge (XK), which encompasses knowledge of not only the TPACK forms but also organisational and situational constraints, such as school policies and available technologies.
Educators found they needed new skills as new technologies entered the field. Consequently, technology knowledge became an essential feature of teacher knowledge. Scholars proposed different frames about TPACK to promote a particular view, including ways and diverse perspectives on understanding and working with technology in the classroom. TPACK-based research has led to the emergence of a significant literature body (TPACK Newsletter #44, 2021).
As Herring and colleagues described, the historical development of TPACK provided a conceptualization that both graphically and narratively explained what is studied, and presented the key concepts, factors, or variables and the presumed relationships found between them. Additionally, it scaffolds the application of findings to other contexts that theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners continue to examine.
Definition
TPACK domains and related subdomains address the complex nature of teaching effectively with appropriate technologies. While the different domains and subdomains can be explored as separate skill concepts, domains and subdomains were conceptualized to work in synergistic reciprocity meaning that the knowledge is not entirely separate indicating the intersectionality of each area. Accordingly, the TPACK model consists of three main domains, each containing one subdomain. The purpose of the subdomains is to unpack the broader domain concept by understanding intersections among the three primary knowledge anchors for the overall framework. The main domains are 1. Technological Content Knowledge (TCK); 2. Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), and 3. Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK). The three subdomains are 1. Technological Knowledge (TK); 2. Content Knowledge (CK); and 3. Pedagogical Knowledge (PK). In 2019, Mishra proposed a revised TPACK diagram to emphasize the context in which technology integration occurs by retitling the outer circle as Contextual Knowledge or XK.
Technological Knowledge (TK) addresses how teachers demonstrate professional knowledge of technology. TK considers what is required for teachers to integrate technology tools and resources into their course content and instructional practice. The technology component of TPaCK in Technology is most beneficial for learning when it brings a change in professional teaching practice and in designs for learning. For teachers, TK not only addresses knowledge about technology but also knowledge of the skills needed to use technology to effectively plan instruction, including with science teachers. TK involves understanding cross-platform applications and capabilities as well as how to configure those applications to realize instructional objectives and student learning outcomes. Content Knowledge (CK) is situated within the following definitional parameters of a teacher's knowledge about a particular subject matter and how it is taught and learned. As Shulman noted, CK would include knowledge of concepts, theories, ideas, organizational frameworks, knowledge of evidence and proof, as well as established practices and approaches toward developing such knowledge." For educators, effective content instruction that engages students in higher-order activities using authentic, real-world examples facilitated through technology is the cornerstone of teaching and learning in the 21st century. Thus, educators must not only be thoughtful in the instructional techniques they use to present content but also strategic in the technology selected to teach the subject matter as it may result in positive or negative results in long-term learning and knowledge retention. Pedagogical Knowledge (PK) addresses how teachers demonstrate professional knowledge of pedagogy. PK refers to the specific knowledge about teaching such as approaches or methods of how teachers teach a particular topic or how to scaffold a concept to the diverse interests and abilities of learners. For teachers and educators, an effective teaching method that engages students in higher-order activities using real-world examples facilitated through different learning styles is the cornerstone of teaching and learning in the current era. Accordingly, educators must be thoughtful in the instructional techniques to teach the subject matter as it may have a great impact on long-term learning and knowledge acquisition. Choosing the right technology to enable higher-order thinking within the content, long-term knowledge retention, and facilitate student learning outcomes are paramount within the CK construct. Finally, Context Knowledge (XK) is the umbrella domain that refers to how teachers contextualize implementation based on the overall teaching and learning context.
Strategies for building TPACK
A wide variety of strategies have been used to develop educators’ TPACK abilities, such as (a) collaborative, design-based lesson planning; (b) the use of technology mapping, game-based learning, and deep-play (c) scaffolding the design process; and (d) accounting for how teacher's beliefs influence their TPACK. Researchers have found collaborative strategies to be helpful to develop teachers’ TPACK, such as (a) faculty-wide mentoring programs, (b) professional collaboration and teacher talk, (c) collaborative reflection practices, and (d) professional learning communities. Teacher education leaders have used the Theory of Action to identify the critical areas as they plan for the effective integration of TPACK into their teacher education and faculty support programs.
Measures
Since its introduction, researchers and professional developers have created a variety of processes and instruments to assess an educator's TPACK, such as self-report measures, open-ended questionnaires, performance assessments, interviews, observations, and more. Widely-used measures such as the Survey of Preservice Teachers’ Knowledge of Teaching and Technology, the TPACK-21 questionnaire, and the TPACK leadership diagnostic tool, have been tested for reliability and validity and applied in a variety of educational settings.
Researchers have made considerable efforts to explore the details of educators’ TPACK through both quantitative and qualitative measures. Qualitative approaches for evaluating TPACK have included classroom observations, the analysis of lesson plans, classroom videos, and interviews. Furthermore, as researchers have sought to better address how the components of XK (including online learning environments and global contexts) influence the development of TPACK, measures of TPACK have begun to include educators’ future intentions to use technology. Additionally, researchers have also considered educators’ self-efficacy alongside TPACK.
Criticisms
The TPACK framework has received a number of criticisms, the majority of which are related to the lack of a precise definition. Similar to Shulman's Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), which serves as a foundation for TPACK, scholars have debated whether TPACK is integrative or transformative leading to varied and nuanced perspectives. Furthermore, scholars have debated precise definitions for the seven knowledge domains associated with the TPACK framework, and what differentiates one domain from another varies widely across studies. These challenges have led to what has been called "fuzzy boundaries" distinguishing TPACK domains that have resulted in even more variations or adaptations of TPACK including TPACK-W for web technologies, G-TPACK for geospatial, TPACK-CT for computational thinking, TPACK-P for TPACK practical, etc. These variations have been considered by some researchers to be misappropriations or conceptual dilution.
A second major area of criticism of TPACK is the lack of reliable assessment instruments, as well as difficulties with existing instruments. Some researchers have cited problems related to participant interpretation of survey items, while others have reported problems with convergence when multiple measures are used.
A third major area of criticism is related to the implications of TPACK for practice. Some scholars argue that the complexity of the framework makes it difficult to operationalize among both researchers and practitioners. Further, as a framework for teacher knowledge, it is not accompanied by specific recommendations or strategies for how to help develop this body of knowledge for teachers. Finally, scholars have noted that is unclear whether the TPACK framework promotes the type of reform-oriented teaching encouraged in new standards and curricula.
References
Pedagogy
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Fad | A fad, trend, or craze is any form of collective behavior that develops within a culture, a generation or social group in which a group of people enthusiastically follow an impulse for a short time period.
Fads are objects or behaviors that achieve short-lived popularity but fade away. Fads are often seen as sudden, quick-spreading, and short-lived events. Fads include diets, clothing, hairstyles, toys, and more. Some popular fads throughout history are toys such as yo-yos, hula hoops, and fad dances such as the Macarena, floss and the twist.
Similar to habits or customs but less durable, fads often result from an activity or behavior being perceived as popular or exciting within a peer group, or being deemed "cool" as often promoted by social networks. A fad is said to "catch on" when the number of people adopting it begins to increase to the point of being noteworthy or going viral. Fads often fade quickly when the perception of novelty is gone.
Overview
The specific nature of the behavior associated with a fad can be of any type including unusual language usage, distinctive clothing, fad diets or frauds such as pyramid schemes. Apart from general novelty, mass marketing, emotional blackmail, peer pressure, or the desire to conformity may drive fads. Popular celebrities can also drive fads, for example the highly popularizing effect of Oprah's Book Club.
Though some consider the term trend equivalent to fad, a fad is generally considered a quick and short behavior whereas a trend is one that evolves into a long term or even permanent change.
Economics
In economics, the term is used in a similar way. Fads are mean-reverting deviations from intrinsic value caused by social or psychological forces similar to those that cause fashions in political philosophies or consumerisation.
Formation
Many contemporary fads share similar patterns of social organization. Several different models serve to examine fads and how they spread.
One way of looking at the spread of fads is through the top-down model, which argues that fashion is created for the elite, and from the elite, fashion spreads to lower classes. Early adopters might not necessarily be those of a high status, but they have sufficient resources that allow them to experiment with new innovations. When looking at the top-down model, sociologists like to highlight the role of selection. The elite might be the ones that introduce certain fads, but other people must choose to adopt those fads.
Others may argue that not all fads begin with their adopters. Social life already provides people with ideas that can help create a basis for new and innovative fads. Companies can look at what people are already interested in and create something from that information. The ideas behind fads are not always original; they might stem from what is already popular at the time. Recreation and style faddists may try out variations of a basic pattern or idea already in existence.
Another way of looking at the spread of fads is through a symbolic interaction view. People learn their behaviors from the people around them. When it comes to collective behavior, the emergence of these shared rules, meanings, and emotions are more dependent on the cues of the situation, rather than physiological arousal. This connection to symbolic interactionism, a theory that explains people's actions as being directed by shared meanings and assumptions, explains that fads are spread because people attach meaning and emotion to objects, and not because the object has practical use, for instance. People might adopt a fad because of the meanings and assumptions they share with the other people who have adopted that fad. People may join other adopters of the fad because they enjoy being a part of a group and what that symbolizes. Some people may join because they want to feel like an insider. When multiple people adopt the same fad, they may feel like they have made the right choice because other people have made that same choice.
Termination
Primarily, fads end because all innovative possibilities have been exhausted. Fads begin to fade when people no longer see them as new and unique. As more people follow the fad, some might start to see it as "overcrowded", and it no longer holds the same appeal. Many times, those who first adopt the fad also abandon it first. They begin to recognize that their preoccupation with the fad leads them to neglect some of their routine activities, and they realize the negative aspects of their behavior. Once the faddists are no longer producing new variations of the fad, people begin to realize their neglect of other activities, and the dangers of the fad. Not everyone completely abandons the fad, however, and parts may remain.
A study examined why certain fads die out quicker than others. A marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, Jonah Berger and his colleague, Gael Le Mens, studied baby names in the United States and France to help explore the termination of fads. According to their results, the faster the names became popular, the faster they lost their popularity. They also found that the least successful names overall were those that caught on most quickly. Fads, like baby names, often lose their appeal just as quickly as they gained it.
Collective behavior
Fads can fit under the broad umbrella of collective behavior, which are behaviors engaged in by a large but loosely connected group of people. Other than fads, collective behavior includes the activities of people in crowds, panics, fashions, crazes, and more.
Robert E. Park, the man who created the term collective behavior, defined it as "the behavior of individuals under the influence of an impulse that is common and collective, an impulse, in other words, that is the result of social interaction". Fads are seen as impulsive, driven by emotions; however, they can bring together groups of people who may not have much in common other than their investment in the fad.
Collective obsession
Fads can also fit under the umbrella of "collective obsessions". Collective obsessions have three main features in common. The first, and most obvious sign, is an increase in frequency and intensity of a specific belief or behavior. A fad's popularity increases quickly in frequency and intensity, whereas a trend grows more slowly. The second is that the behavior is seen as ridiculous, irrational, or evil to the people who are not a part of the obsession. Some people might see those who follow certain fads as unreasonable and irrational. To these people, the fad is ridiculous, and people's obsession of it is just as ridiculous. The third is, after it has reached a peak, it drops off abruptly and then it is followed by a counter obsession. A counter obsession means that once the fad is over, if one engages in the fad they will be ridiculed. A fad's popularity often decreases at a rapid rate once its novelty wears off. Some people might start to criticize the fad after pointing out that it is no longer popular, so it must not have been "worth the hype".
See also
Bandwagon effect
:Category:Fads (notable fads through history)
Coolhunting
Crowd psychology
Google Trends
Hype
List of Internet phenomena
Market trend
Memetics
Peer pressure
Retro style
Social contagion
Social mania
Viral phenomenon
15 minutes of fame
Bellwether (1996 novel)
Notes
References
Best, Joel (2006). Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads. University of California Press. .
Burke, Sarah. "5 Marketing Strategies, 1 Question: Fad or Trend?". Spokal.
Conley, Dalton (2015). You may ask yourself: An introduction to thinking like a sociologist. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. .
(review/summary)
Griffith, Benjamin (2013). "College Fads". St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture – via Gale Virtual Reference Library.
Heussner, Ki Mae. "7 Fads You Won't Forget". ABC News.
Killian, Lewis M.; Smelser, Neil J.; Turner, Ralph H. "Collective behavior". Encyclopædia Britannica.
External links
Popular culture
Crowd psychology
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Marxism | Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
In addition to the various schools of thought, which emphasise or modify elements of classical Marxism, several Marxian concepts have been incorporated into an array of social theories. This has led to widely varying conclusions. Alongside Marx's critique of political economy, the defining characteristics of Marxism have often been described using the terms "dialectical materialism" and "historical materialism", though these terms were coined after Marx's death and their tenets have been challenged by some self-described Marxists.
As a school of thought, Marxism has had a profound effect on society and global academia. To date, it has influenced many fields, including anthropology, archaeology, art theory, criminology, cultural studies, economics, education, ethics, film theory, geography, historiography, literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, political science, political economy, psychology, science studies, sociology, urban planning, and theatre.
Overview
Marxism seeks to explain social phenomena within any given society by analysing the material conditions and economic activities required to fulfill human material needs. It assumes that the form of economic organisation, or mode of production, influences all other social phenomena, including broader social relations, political institutions, legal systems, cultural systems, aesthetics and ideologies. These social relations and the economic system form a base and superstructure. As forces of production (i.e. technology) improve, existing forms of organising production become obsolete and hinder further progress. Karl Marx wrote: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution."
These inefficiencies manifest themselves as social contradictions in society which are, in turn, fought out at the level of class struggle. Under the capitalist mode of production, this struggle materialises between the minority who own the means of production (the bourgeoisie) and the vast majority of the population who produce goods and services (the proletariat). Starting with the conjectural premise that social change occurs due to the struggle between different classes within society who contradict one another, a Marxist would conclude that capitalism exploits and oppresses the proletariat; therefore, capitalism will inevitably lead to a proletarian revolution. In a socialist society, private property—as the means of production—would be replaced by cooperative ownership. A socialist economy would not base production on the creation of private profits but on the criteria of satisfying human needs—that is, production for use. Friedrich Engels explained that "the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer, and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production; upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production—on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment."
Marxian economics and its proponents view capitalism as economically unsustainable and incapable of improving the population's living standards due to its need to compensate for the falling rate of profit by cutting employees' wages and social benefits while pursuing military aggression. The socialist mode of production would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through revolution by workers. According to Marxian crisis theory, socialism is not an inevitability but an economic necessity.
Etymology
The term Marxism was popularised by Karl Kautsky, who considered himself an orthodox Marxist during the dispute between Marx's orthodox and revisionist followers. Kautsky's revisionist rival Eduard Bernstein also later adopted the term.
Engels did not support using Marxism to describe either Marx's or his views. He claimed that the term was being abusively used as a rhetorical qualifier by those attempting to cast themselves as genuine followers of Marx while casting others in different terms, such as Lassallians. In 1882, Engels claimed that Marx had criticised self-proclaimed Marxist Paul Lafargue by saying that if Lafargue's views were considered Marxist, then "one thing is certain and that is that I am not a Marxist."
Historical materialism
Marxism uses a materialist methodology, referred to by Marx and Engels as the materialist conception of history and later better known as historical materialism, to analyse the underlying causes of societal development and change from the perspective of the collective ways in which humans make their living. Marx's account of the theory is in The German Ideology (1845) and the preface A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). All constituent features of a society (social classes, political pyramid and ideologies) are assumed to stem from economic activity, forming what is considered the base and superstructure. The base and superstructure metaphor describes the totality of social relations by which humans produce and re-produce their social existence. According to Marx, the "sum total of the forces of production accessible to men determines the condition of society" and forms a society's economic base.
The base includes the material forces of production such as the labour, means of production and relations of production, i.e. the social and political arrangements that regulate production and distribution. From this base rises a superstructure of legal and political "forms of social consciousness" that derive from the economic base that conditions both the superstructure and the dominant ideology of a society. Conflicts between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provoke social revolutions, whereby changes to the economic base lead to the superstructure's social transformation.
This relationship is reflexive in that the base initially gives rise to the superstructure and remains the foundation of a form of social organisation. Those newly formed social organisations can then act again upon both parts of the base and superstructure so that rather than being static, the relationship is dialectic, expressed and driven by conflicts and contradictions. Engels clarified: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
Marx considered recurring class conflicts as the driving force of human history as such conflicts have manifested as distinct transitional stages of development in Western Europe. Accordingly, Marx designated human history as encompassing four stages of development in relations of production:
Primitive communism: cooperative tribal societies.
Slave society: development of tribal to city-state in which aristocracy is born.
Feudalism: aristocrats are the ruling class, while merchants evolve into the bourgeoisie.
Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class who create and employ the proletariat.
While historical materialism has been referred to as a materialist theory of history, Marx did not claim to have produced a master key to history and that the materialist conception of history is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the , imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself." In a letter to the editor of the Russian newspaper paper (1877), he explained that his ideas were based upon a concrete study of the actual conditions in Europe.
Criticism of capitalism
According to the Marxist theoretician and revolutionary socialist Vladimir Lenin, "the principal content of Marxism" was "Marx's economic doctrine." Marx demonstrated how the capitalist bourgeoisie and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that "the interests of the capitalist and of the worker are ... one and the same." He believed that they did this by purporting the concept that "the fastest possible growth of productive capital" was best for wealthy capitalists and workers because it provided them with employment.
Exploitation is a matter of surplus labour—the amount of labour performed beyond what is received in goods. Exploitation has been a socioeconomic feature of every class society and is one of the principal features distinguishing the social classes. The power of one social class to control the means of production enables its exploitation of other classes. Under capitalism, the labour theory of value is the operative concern, whereby the value of a commodity equals the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Under such conditions, surplus value—the difference between the value produced and the value received by a labourer—is synonymous with surplus labour, and capitalist exploitation is thus realised as deriving surplus value from the worker.
In pre-capitalist economies, exploitation of the worker was achieved via physical coercion. Under the capitalist mode of production, workers do not own the means of production and must "voluntarily" enter into an exploitative work relationship with a capitalist to earn the necessities of life. The worker's entry into such employment is voluntary because they choose which capitalist to work for. However, the worker must work or starve. Thus, exploitation is inevitable, and the voluntary nature of a worker participating in a capitalist society is illusory; it is production, not circulation, that causes exploitation. Marx emphasised that capitalism per se does not cheat the worker.
Alienation is the estrangement of people from their humanity and a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and generate alienated labourers. In Marx's view, alienation is an objective characterisation of the worker's situation in capitalism—his or her self-awareness of this condition is not prerequisite.
In addition to criticism, Marx has also praised some of the results of capitalism stating that it "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together" and that it "has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal arrangements."
Marx posited that the remaining feudalist societies in the world and forms of socialism that did not conform with his writings would be replaced by communism in the future in a similar manner as with capitalism.
Social classes
Marx distinguishes social classes based on two criteria, i.e. ownership of means of production and control over the labour power of others. Following this criterion of class based on property relations, Marx identified the social stratification of the capitalist mode of production with the following social groups:
Proletariat: "[T]he class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live." The capitalist mode of production establishes the conditions that enable the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat as the worker's labour generates a surplus value greater than the worker's wage.
Lumpenproletariat: the outcasts of society, such as the criminals, vagabonds, beggars, or prostitutes, without any political or class consciousness. Having no interest in national, let alone international, economic affairs, Marx claimed that this specific sub-division of the proletariat would play no part in the eventual social revolution.
Bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" and buy labour power from the proletariat, thus exploiting the proletariat. They subdivide as bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie.
Petite bourgeoisie: those who work and can afford to buy little labour power (i.e. small business owners, peasants, landlords and trade workers). Marxism predicts that the continual reinvention of the means of production eventually would destroy the petite bourgeoisie, degrading them from the middle class to the proletariat.
Landlords: a historically significant social class that retains some wealth and power.
Peasantry and farmers: a scattered class incapable of organising and effecting socioeconomic change, most of whom would enter the proletariat while some would become landlords.
Class consciousness denotes the awareness—of itself and the social world—that a social class possesses and its capacity to act rationally in its best interests. Class consciousness is required before a social class can effect a successful revolution and, thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Without defining ideology, Marx used the term to describe the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, "ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces."
Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society (i.e. the ruling social ideas) is determined by the best interests of the ruling class. In The German Ideology, Marx says that "[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is, at the same time, its ruling intellectual force." The term political economy initially referred to the study of the material conditions of economic production in the capitalist system. In Marxism, political economy is the study of the means of production, specifically of capital and how that manifests as economic activity.
This new way of thinking was invented because socialists believed that common ownership of the means of production (i.e. the industries, land, wealth of nature, trade apparatus and wealth of the society) would abolish the exploitative working conditions experienced under capitalism. Through working class revolution, the state (which Marxists saw as a weapon for the subjugation of one class by another) is seized and used to suppress the hitherto ruling class of capitalists and (by implementing a commonly owned, democratically controlled workplace) create the society of communism which Marxists see as true democracy. An economy based on cooperation on human need and social betterment, rather than competition for profit of many independently acting profit seekers, would also be the end of class society, which Marx saw as the fundamental division of all hitherto existing history. Marx saw the fundamental nature of capitalist society as little different from that of a slave society in that one small group of society exploits the larger group.
Through common ownership of the means of production, the profit motive is eliminated, and the motive of furthering human flourishing is introduced. Because the surplus produced by the workers is the property of the society as a whole, there are no classes of producers and appropriators. Additionally, as the state originates in the bands of retainers hired by the first ruling classes to protect their economic privilege, it will wither away as its conditions of existence have disappeared.
Communism, revolution and socialism
According to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, "Marx used many terms to refer to a post-capitalist society—positive humanism, socialism, Communism, realm of free individuality, free association of producers, etc. He used these terms completely interchangeably. The notion that 'socialism' and 'Communism' are distinct historical stages is alien to his work and only entered the lexicon of Marxism after his death."
According to orthodox Marxist theory, overthrowing capitalism by a socialist revolution in contemporary society is inevitable. While the inevitability of an eventual socialist revolution is a controversial debate among many different Marxist schools of thought, all Marxists believe socialism is a necessity. Marxists argue that a socialist society is far better for most of the populace than its capitalist counterpart. Prior to the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote: "The socialisation of production is bound to lead to the conversion of the means of production into the property of society. ... This conversion will directly result in an immense increase in productivity of labour, a reduction of working hours, and the replacement of the remnants, the ruins of small-scale, primitive, disunited production by collective and improved labour." The failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution, along with the failure of socialist movements to resist the outbreak of World War I, led to renewed theoretical effort and valuable contributions from Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg towards an appreciation of Marx's crisis theory and efforts to formulate a theory of imperialism.
Democracy
Karl Marx criticised liberal democracy as not democratic enough due to the unequal socio-economic situation of the workers during the Industrial Revolution which undermines the democratic agency of citizens. Marxists differ in their positions towards democracy. Types of democracy in Marxism include Soviet democracy, New Democracy, Whole-process people's democracy and can include voting on how surplus labour is to be organised. According to democratic centralism political decisions reached by voting in the party are binding for all members of the party.
Schools of thought
Classical
Classical Marxism denotes the collection of socio-eco-political theories expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Ernest Mandel remarked, "Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical." Classical Marxism distinguishes Marxism as broadly perceived from "what Marx believed." In 1883, Marx wrote to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue and French labour leader Jules Guesde—both of whom claimed to represent Marxist principles—accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and denying the value of reformist struggle. From Marx's letter derives Marx's famous remark that, if their politics represented Marxism, '' ('what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist')."
Libertarian
Libertarian Marxism emphasises the anti-authoritarian and libertarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, such as left communism, emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism.
Libertarian Marxism is often critical of reformist positions such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' later works, specifically the and The Civil War in France; emphasising the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its destiny without the need for a vanguard party to mediate or aid its liberation. Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism.
Libertarian Marxism includes currents such as autonomism, council communism, De Leonism, Lettrism, parts of the New Left, Situationism, Freudo-Marxism (a form of psychoanalysis), Socialisme ou Barbarie and workerism. Libertarian Marxism has often strongly influenced both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Maurice Brinton, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Daniel Guérin, C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Anton Pannekoek, Fredy Perlman, Ernesto Screpanti, E. P. Thompson, Raoul Vaneigem, and Yanis Varoufakis, the latter claiming that Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist.
Humanist
Marxist humanism was born in 1932 with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and reached a degree of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Marxist humanists contend that there is continuity between the early philosophical writings of Marx, in which he develops his theory of alienation, and the structural description of capitalist society found in his later works, such as Capital. They hold that grasping Marx's philosophical foundations is necessary to understand his later works properly.
Contrary to the official dialectical materialism of the Soviet Union and interpretations of Marx rooted in the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Marxist humanists argue that Marx's work was an extension or transcendence of enlightenment humanism. Whereas other Marxist philosophies see Marxism as natural science, Marxist humanism reaffirms the doctrine that "man is the measure of all things"—that humans are essentially different to the rest of the natural order and should be treated so by Marxist theory.
Academic
According to a 2007 survey of American professors by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, 17.6% of social science professors and 5.0% of humanities professors identify as Marxists, while between 0 and 2% of professors in all other disciplines identify as Marxists.
Archaeology
The theoretical development of Marxist archaeology was first developed in the Soviet Union in 1929, when a young archaeologist named Vladislav I. Ravdonikas published a report entitled "For a Soviet history of material culture"; within this work, the very discipline of archaeology as it then stood was criticised as being inherently bourgeois, therefore anti-socialist and so, as a part of the academic reforms instituted in the Soviet Union under the administration of General Secretary Joseph Stalin, a great emphasis was placed on the adoption of Marxist archaeology throughout the country.
These theoretical developments were subsequently adopted by archaeologists working in capitalist states outside of the Leninist bloc, most notably by the Australian academic V. Gordon Childe, who used Marxist theory in his understandings of the development of human society.
Sociology
Marxist sociology, as the study of sociology from a Marxist perspective, is "a form of conflict theory associated with ... Marxism's objective of developing a positive (empirical) science of capitalist society as part of the mobilisation of a revolutionary working class." The American Sociological Association has a section dedicated to the issues of Marxist sociology that is "interested in examining how insights from Marxist methodology and Marxist analysis can help explain the complex dynamics of modern society."
Influenced by the thought of Karl Marx, Marxist sociology emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim are considered seminal influences in early sociology. The first Marxist school of sociology was known as Austro-Marxism, of which Carl Grünberg and Antonio Labriola were among its most notable members. During the 1940s, the Western Marxist school became accepted within Western academia, subsequently fracturing into several different perspectives, such as the Frankfurt School or critical theory. The legacy of Critical Theory as a major offshoot of Marxism is controversial. The common thread linking Marxism and Critical theory is an interest in struggles to dismantle structures of oppression, exclusion, and domination. Due to its former state-supported position, there has been a backlash against Marxist thought in post-communist states, such as Poland. However, it remains prominent in the sociological research sanctioned and supported by communist states, such as in China.
Economics
Marxian economics is a school of economic thought tracing its foundations to the critique of classical political economy first expounded upon by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxian economics concerns itself with the analysis of crisis in capitalism, the role and distribution of the surplus product and surplus value in various types of economic systems, the nature and origin of economic value, the impact of class and class struggle on economic and political processes, and the process of economic evolution. Although the Marxian school is considered heterodox, ideas that have come out of Marxian economics have contributed to mainstream understanding of the global economy. Certain concepts of Marxian economics, especially those related to capital accumulation and the business cycle, such as creative destruction, have been fitted for use in capitalist systems.
Education
Marxist education develops Marx's works and those of the movements he influenced in various ways. In addition to the educational psychology of Lev Vygotsky and the pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America is a study of educational reform in the U.S. and its relationship to the reproduction of capitalism and the possibilities of utilising its contradictions in the revolutionary movement. The work of Peter McLaren, especially since the turn of the 21st century, has further developed Marxist educational theory by developing revolutionary critical pedagogy, as has the work of Glenn Rikowski, Dave Hill, and Paula Allman. Other Marxists have analysed the forms and pedagogical processes of capitalist and communist education, such as Tyson E. Lewis, Noah De Lissovoy, Gregory Bourassa, and Derek R. Ford. Curry Malott has developed a Marxist history of education in the U.S., and Marvin Gettleman examined the history of communist education. Sandy Grande has synthesised Marxist educational theory with Indigenous pedagogy, while others like John Holt analyse adult education from a Marxist perspective.
Other developments include:
the educational aesthetics of Marxist education
Marxist analyses of the role of fixed capital in capitalist education
the educational psychology of capital
the educational theory of Lenin
the pedagogical function of the Communist Party
The latest field of research examines and develops Marxist pedagogy in the postdigital era.
Historiography
Marxist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism, the chief tenets of which are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Marxist historiography has contributed to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and the methodology of history from below. Friedrich Engels' most important historical contribution was about the German Peasants' War which analysed social warfare in early Protestant Germany regarding emerging capitalist classes. The German Peasants' War indicates the Marxist interest in history from below with class analysis and attempts a dialectical analysis.
Engels' short treatise The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was salient in creating the socialist impetus in British politics. Marx's most important works on social and political history include The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and those chapters of Capital dealing with the historical emergence of capitalists and proletarians from pre-industrial English society. Marxist historiography suffered in the Soviet Union as the government requested overdetermined historical writing. Notable histories include the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), published in the 1930s to justify the nature of Bolshevik party life under Joseph Stalin. A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1946.
While some members of the group, most notably Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson, left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is one of the works commonly associated with this group. Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits is another example of this group's work. C. L. R. James was also a great pioneer of the 'history from below' approach. Living in Britain when he wrote his most notable work, The Black Jacobins (1938), he was an anti-Stalinist Marxist and so outside of the CPGB. In India, B. N. Datta and D. D. Kosambi are the founding fathers of Marxist historiography. Today, the senior-most scholars of Marxist historiography are R. S. Sharma, Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, D. N. Jha, and K. N. Panikkar, most of whom are now over 75 years old.
Literary criticism
Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views literary works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate. According to Marxists, even literature is a social institution with a specific ideological function based on the background and ideology of the author. Marxist literary critics include Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson.
Aesthetics
Marxist aesthetics is a theory of aesthetics based on or derived from the theories of Karl Marx. It involves a dialectical and materialist, or dialectical materialist, approach to the application of Marxism to the cultural sphere, specifically areas related to taste, such as art and beauty, among others. Marxists believe that economic and social conditions, and especially the class relations that derive from them affect every aspect of an individual's life, from religious beliefs to legal systems to cultural frameworks. Some notable Marxist aestheticians include Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Lifshitz, William Morris, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Ernst Fischer, Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Williams.
History
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Marx addressed the alienation and exploitation of the working class, the capitalist mode of production and historical materialism. He is famous for analysing history in terms of class struggle, summarised in the initial line introducing The Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
Together with Marx, Engels co-developed communist theory. Marx and Engels first met in September 1844. Discovering that they had similar views of philosophy and socialism, they collaborated and wrote works such as (The Holy Family). After Marx was deported from France in January 1845, they moved to Belgium, which permitted greater freedom of expression than other European countries. In January 1846, they returned to Brussels to establish the Communist Correspondence Committee.
In 1847, they began writing The Communist Manifesto (1848), based on Engels' The Principles of Communism. Six weeks later, they published the 12,000-word pamphlet in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled them, and they moved to Cologne, where they published the , a politically radical newspaper. By 1849, they had to leave Cologne for London. The Prussian authorities pressured the British government to expel Marx and Engels, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused.
After Marx died in 1883, Engels became the editor and translator of Marx's writings. With his Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)—analysing monogamous marriage as guaranteeing male social domination of women, a concept analogous, in communist theory, to the capitalist class's economic domination of the working class—Engels made intellectually significant contributions to feminist theory and Marxist feminism.
Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union
Onset
With the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks took power from the Russian Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks established the first socialist state based on the ideas of soviet democracy and Leninism. Their newly formed federal state promised to end Russian involvement in World War I and establish a revolutionary worker's state. Lenin's government also instituted a number of progressive measures such as universal education, universal healthcare and equal rights for women. 50,000 workers had passed a resolution in favour of Bolshevik demand for transfer of power to the soviets. Following the October Revolution, the Soviet government struggled with the White Movement and several independence movements in the Russian Civil War. This period is marked by the establishment of many socialist policies and the development of new socialist ideas, with Marxism–Leninism becoming the dominant ideological strain.
In 1919, the nascent Soviet Government established the Communist Academy and the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute for doctrinal Marxist study and to publish official ideological and research documents for the Russian Communist Party. With Lenin's death in 1924, there was an internal struggle in the Soviet Communist movement, mainly between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, in the form of the Right Opposition and Left Opposition, respectively. These struggles were based on both sides' different interpretations of Marxist and Leninist theory based on the situation of the Soviet Union at the time.
Chinese Revolution
At the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and, more widely, World War II, the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred within the context of the Chinese Civil War. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, conflicted with the Kuomintang over the country's future. Throughout the Civil War, Mao Zedong developed a theory of Marxism for the Chinese historical context. Mao found a large base of support in the peasantry as opposed to the Russian Revolution, which found its primary support in the urban centres of the Russian Empire. Some significant ideas contributed by Mao were the ideas of New Democracy, mass line and people's war. The People's Republic of China (PRC) was declared in 1949. The new socialist state was to be founded on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
From Stalin's death until the late 1960s, there was increased conflict between China and the Soviet Union. De-Stalinisation, which first began under Nikita Khrushchev, and the policy of detente, were seen as revisionist and insufficiently Marxist. This ideological confrontation spilt into a broader global crisis centred around which nation was to lead the international socialist movement.
Following Mao's death and the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping, Maoism and official Marxism in China were reworked. Commonly referred to as socialism with Chinese characteristics, this new path was initially centred around Deng Xiaoping Theory, which claims to uphold Marxism–Leninism and Maoism, while adapting them to Chinese conditions. Deng Xiaoping Theory was based on Four Cardinal Principles, which sought to uphold the central role of the Chinese Communist Party and uphold the principle that China was in the primary stage of socialism and that it was still working to build a communist society based on Marxist principles.
Late 20th century
In 1959, the Cuban Revolution led to the victory of Fidel Castro and his July 26 Movement. Although the revolution was not explicitly socialist, upon victory, Castro ascended to the position of prime minister and adopted the Leninist model of socialist development, allying with the Soviet Union. One of the leaders of the revolution, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, subsequently went on to aid revolutionary socialist movements in Congo-Kinshasa and Bolivia, eventually being killed by the Bolivian government, possibly on the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), although the CIA agent sent to search for Guevara, Felix Rodriguez, expressed a desire to keep him alive as a possible bargaining tool with the Cuban government. He posthumously went on to become an internationally recognised icon.
In the People's Republic of China, the Maoist government undertook the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 to purge Chinese society of capitalist elements and achieve socialism. Upon Mao Zedong's death, his rivals seized political power, and under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, many of Mao's Cultural Revolution era policies were revised or abandoned, and a large increase in privatised industry was encouraged.
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the collapse of most of those socialist states that had professed a Marxist–Leninist ideology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of the New Right and neoliberal capitalism as the dominant ideological trends in Western politics championed by United States president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher led the West to take a more aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union and its Leninist allies. Meanwhile, the reformist Mikhael Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985 and sought to abandon Leninist development models toward social democracy. Ultimately, Gorbachev's reforms, coupled with rising levels of popular ethnic nationalism, led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991 into a series of constituent nations, all of which abandoned Marxist–Leninist models for socialism, with most converting to capitalist economies.
21st century
At the turn of the 21st century, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam remained the only officially Marxist–Leninist states remaining, although a Maoist government led by Prachanda was elected into power in Nepal in 2008 following a long guerrilla struggle.
The early 21st century also saw the election of socialist governments in several Latin American nations, in what has come to be known as the "pink tide"; dominated by the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez; this trend also saw the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Forging political and economic alliances through international organisations like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, these socialist governments allied themselves with Marxist–Leninist Cuba. Although none espoused a Stalinist path directly, most admitted to being significantly influenced by Marxist theory. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declared himself a Trotskyist during the swearing-in of his cabinet two days before his inauguration on 10 January 2007. Venezuelan Trotskyist organisations do not regard Chávez as a Trotskyist, with some describing him as a bourgeois nationalist, while others consider him an honest revolutionary leader who made significant mistakes due to him lacking a Marxist analysis.
For Italian Marxist Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala in their 2011 book Hermeneutic Communism, "this new weak communism differs substantially from its previous Soviet (and current Chinese) realisation, because the South American countries follow democratic electoral procedures and also manage to decentralise the state bureaucratic system through the Bolivarian missions. In sum, if weakened communism is felt as a spectre in the West, it is not only because of media distortions but also for the alternative it represents through the same democratic procedures that the West constantly professes to cherish but is hesitant to apply."
Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has announced a deepening commitment of the Chinese Communist Party to the ideas of Marx. At an event celebrating the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth, Xi said, "We must win the advantages, win the initiative, and win the future. We must continuously improve the ability to use Marxism to analyse and solve practical problems", adding that Marxism is a "powerful ideological weapon for us to understand the world, grasp the law, seek the truth, and change the world." Xi has further stressed the importance of examining and continuing the tradition of the CPC and embracing its revolutionary past.
The fidelity of those varied revolutionaries, leaders and parties to the work of Karl Marx is highly contested and has been rejected by many Marxists and other socialists alike. Socialists in general and socialist writers, including Dimitri Volkogonov, acknowledge that the actions of authoritarian socialist leaders have damaged "the enormous appeal of socialism generated by the October Revolution."
Criticism
Criticism of Marxism has come from various political ideologies and academic disciplines. This includes general criticism about lack of internal consistency, criticisms related to historical materialism, that it is a type of historical determinism, the necessity of suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives. In addition, empirical and epistemological problems are frequently identified.
Some Marxists have criticised the academic institutionalisation of Marxism for being too shallow and detached from political action. Zimbabwean Trotskyist Alex Callinicos, himself a professional academic, stated: "Its practitioners remind one of Narcissus, who in the Greek legend fell in love with his own reflection. ... Sometimes it is necessary to devote time to clarifying and developing the concepts that we use, but indeed for Western Marxists this has become an end in itself. The result is a body of writings incomprehensible to all but a tiny minority of highly qualified scholars."
Additionally, some intellectual critiques of Marxism contest certain assumptions prevalent in Marx's thought and Marxism after him without rejecting Marxist politics. Other contemporary supporters of Marxism argue that many aspects of Marxist thought are viable but that the corpus is incomplete or outdated regarding certain aspects of economic, political or social theory. They may combine some Marxist concepts with the ideas of other theorists such as Max Weber—the Frankfurt School is one example.
General
Philosopher and historian of ideas Leszek Kołakowski said that "Marx's theory is incomplete or ambiguous in many places, and could be 'applied' in many contradictory ways without manifestly infringing its principles." Specifically, he considers "the laws of dialectics" as fundamentally erroneous, stating that some are "truisms with no specific Marxist content", others "philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means", and some just "nonsense"; he believes that some Marxist laws can be interpreted differently, but that these interpretations still in general fall into one of the two categories of error.
Okishio's theorem shows that if capitalists use cost-cutting techniques and real wages do not increase, the rate of profit must rise, which casts doubt on Marx's view that the rate of profit would tend to fall.
The allegations of inconsistency have been a large part of Marxian economics and the debates around it since the 1970s. Andrew Kliman argues that this undermines Marx's critiques and the correction of the alleged inconsistencies because internally inconsistent theories cannot be correct by definition.
Epistemological and empirical
Critics of Marxism claim that Marx's predictions have failed, with some pointing towards the GDP per capita generally increasing in capitalist economies compared to less market-oriented economics, the capitalist economies not suffering worsening economic crises leading to the overthrow of the capitalist system and communist revolutions not occurring in the most advanced capitalist nations, but instead in undeveloped regions. It has also been criticised for allegedly resulting in lower living standards in relation to capitalist countries, a claim that has been disputed.
In his books, The Poverty of Historicism and Conjectures and Refutations, philosopher of science Karl Popper criticised the explanatory power and validity of historical materialism. Popper believed that Marxism had been initially scientific in that Marx had postulated a genuinely predictive theory. When these predictions were not borne out, Popper argues that the theory avoided falsification by adding ad hoc hypotheses that made it compatible with the facts. Because of this, Popper asserted, a theory that was initially genuinely scientific degenerated into pseudoscientific dogma.
Anarchist and libertarian
Anarchism has had a strained relationship with Marxism. Anarchists and many non-Marxist libertarian socialists reject the need for a transitory state phase, claiming that socialism can only be established through decentralised, non-coercive organisation. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin criticised Marx for his authoritarian bent. The phrases "barracks socialism" or "barracks communism" became shorthand for this critique, evoking the image of citizens' lives being as regimented as the lives of conscripts in barracks.
Economic
Other critiques come from an economic standpoint. Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev writing in 1898, Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz writing in 1906–1907, and subsequent critics have alleged that Marx's value theory and the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are internally inconsistent. In other words, the critics allege that Marx drew conclusions that do not follow his theoretical premises. Once these alleged errors are corrected, his conclusion that aggregate price and profit are determined by and equal to the aggregate value and surplus value no longer holds. This result calls into question his theory that exploiting workers is the sole source of profit.
Marxism and socialism have received considerable critical analysis from multiple generations of Austrian economists regarding scientific methodology, economic theory and political implications. During the marginal revolution, a theory of subjective value was developed by Carl Menger, with scholars viewing the development of marginalism more broadly as a response to Marxist economics. Second-generation Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk used praxeological and subjectivist methodology to fundamentally attack the law of value. Gottfried Haberler has regarded his criticism as "definitive", arguing that Böhm-Bawerk's critique of Marx's economics was so "thorough and devastating" that he believes that as of the 1960s, no Marxian scholar had conclusively refuted it. Third-generation Austrian Ludwig von Mises rekindled the debate about the economic calculation problem by arguing that without price signals in capital goods, in his opinion, all other aspects of the market economy are irrational. This led him to declare that "rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth."
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that Marx's economic theory was fundamentally flawed because it attempted to simplify the economy into a few general laws that ignored the impact of institutions on the economy. These charges have been disputed by other influential economists, like John Roemer and Nicholas Vrousalis.
See also
Communism
Influences on Karl Marx
Marx's theory of human nature
Marxian class theory
Marxist film theory
Marxists Internet Archive
Outline of Marxism
Post-Marxism
Marxian economics
References
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Communism
Criticism of religion
Democratic socialism
Eponymous economic ideologies
Eponymous political ideologies
Karl Marx
Left-wing ideologies
Sociological theories
Socialism
Social democracy
Social theories
Theories of history
Types of socialism
Historical materialism | 0.774399 | 0.999984 | 0.774386 |
Internet culture | Internet culture is a quasi-underground culture developed and maintained among frequent and active users of the Internet (also known as netizens) who primarily communicate with one another as members of online communities; that is, a culture whose influence is "mediated by computer screens" and information communication technology, specifically the Internet.
Internet culture arises from the frequent interactions between members within various online communities and the use of these communities for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. The earliest online communities of this kind were centered around the interests and hobbies of anonymous and pseudonymous early adopters, typically those with academic, technological, niche, criminal, or even subversive interests.
Studied aspects of Internet culture include anonymity/pseudonymity, social media, gaming and specific communities, such as fandoms, and has also raised questions about online identity and Internet privacy.
The impact of Internet culture on predominately offline societies and cultures has been extensive, and elements of Internet culture increasingly impact everyday life. Likewise, increasingly widespread Internet adoption has influenced Internet culture; frequently provoking enforcing norms via shaming, censuring and censorship while pressuring other cultural expressions underground.
Elements
While Internet subcultures differ, subcultures those emerged in the environment of the early Internet maintain noticeably similar values.
Values
Enlightenment principles are prominent in Internet culture, from which many other elements of the culture derive.. These principles can be attributed to the Internet's origins in Western, and specifically American, cultural contexts and the significant influence of academic culture, the hacker ethic and gamer culture, which to varying degrees embrace and amplify cultural values such as curious playfulness, competitiveness and collaborative self-actualization commonly pursued through community application of empirical rationalism via debate, competition and creative expression.
Concern for privacy is another discernable value. Internet culture reifies the right to privacy in order to protect freedom of expression, personal liberty and social equality, thus making anonymity or pseudonymity a valued feature of online services for netizens. This is especially the case for freethinkers, social deviants, political dissidents, journalists, hacktivists/activists and members of hacker, (cyber)punk or other underground subcultures, where an absence of privacy may put an individual in danger. Originally the result of technical limitations, the prevalence of anonymity or pseudonymity is an integral part of Internet culture.
Playful curiosity is an additional value derived from the Internet's roots in both creative hacker culture and gamer culture, where a desire to understand complex problems and systems for their own sake, or to exploit for trivial, amusing or irrelevant ends, flourishes.
Disregard of authority mostly came by way of hackers who routinely broke/ignored laws and regulations in their Internet pursuits. It may have originated with hackers who discovered how to defeat telecom dialtone-based security in the 1970s to make phone calls without paying.
The value of competence was a fundamental requirement in the Internet's early days when many tasks were less than user-friendly and technical skill was required to accomplish anything. This was reinforced by Otaku and gaming cultures, where obsessive commitment and sometimes technical/mental skills are essential in order to excel in such hobbies.
Freedom of information (i.e. sharing and unlimited information access) was declared early to be a fundamental aspect of the Internet, underlined by the phrase "Information wants to be free".
Coffee
Coffee is more common than tea in Internet culture, especially within hacking subculture and technical communities. Coffee's higher caffeine content is attracted those in technical who spend long hours on high-focus tasks. A coffee pot was the subject of the first webcam stream on the Internet and the stream was used to monitor when it was time to make more coffee for the computer science lab that hosted the stream. Automating office coffee production was the subject of an April Fool's Day Internet standard called the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.
Preoccupations
Provocative humor that is witty, dry, dark, macabre, self-deprecating, misanthropic and/or politically incorrect is arguably the most recognizable manifestation of Internet culture and its subcultures. Copypasta, Dank Memes, and Shitposting showcase this emphasis. This humor often includes heavy satire and/or parody of mainstream culture, and the "playful, irreverent attitude" which it inherits from its parent subcultures.
Trolling is another preoccupation on the Internet. Starting with the presumption that nothing online should be taken seriously, a recipient's response to trolling (and not the act) functions as a shibboleth.
Otaku (sometimes Weeaboo) sensibilities became popular via anonymous imageboards modelled after Japanese imageboards that hosted anime, manga and other Japanese popular culture materials..
Dissemination and spread
Over the years, Internet users have interacted via a host of different online and offline protocols. Earlier ones such as Usenet and bulletin boards were later superseded by others such as social media. These include:
Blog
Bulletin board systems
Chatrooms
Cybersex
E-Commerce
Games
Internet forums
Internet memes
Microblogs
Online videos
Peer-to-peer file sharing
Social networks
Usenet
Virtual worlds
Wikis
Internet subcultures
As with other cultures, the Internet quickly fragmented into numerous subcultures, which continued to spawn descendants thereafter.
Early
Academic culture
Hacker culture
Military and Intelligence culture
Anonymous culture
Hacker culture
Hacktivist/Cyberhacker culture
Meme culture
Gamer and video game culture
Otaku culture
Newer
Content creator/influencer culture
Incel culture
Manosphere
Dirtbag left
Cancel culture
Fediverse
Rationality community
Effective altruism
Battleboarders
Brogrammer
History
The cultural history of the Internet is a story of rapid change. The Internet developed in parallel with rapid and sustained technological advances in computing and data communication. Widespread access to the Internet emerged as the cost of infrastructure dropped by several orders of magnitude with consecutive technological improvements.
Though Internet culture originated during the creation and development of early online communities – such as those found on bulletin board systems before the Internet reached mainstream adoption in developed countries – many cultural elements have roots in other previously existing offline cultures and subcultures which predate the Internet. Specifically, Internet culture includes many elements of telegraphy culture (especially amateur radio culture), gaming culture and hacker culture.
Initially, digital culture tilted toward the Anglosphere. As a consequence of computer technology's early reliance on textual coding systems that were mainly adapted to the English language, Anglophone societies—followed by other societies with languages based on Latin script—enjoyed privileged access to digital culture. However, other languages have gradually increased in prominence. In specific, the proportion of content on the Internet that is in English has dropped from roughly 80% in the 1990s to around 52.9% in 2018.
As technology advances, Internet Culture continues to change. The introduction of smartphones and tablet computers and the growing computer network infrastructure around the world have increased the number of Internet users and have likewise resulted in the proliferation and expansion of online communities. While Internet culture continues to evolve among active and frequent Internet users, it remains distinct from other previously offline cultures and subcultures which now have a presence online, even those cultures and subcultures from which Internet Culture borrows many elements.
One cultural antecedent of Internet culture was amateur radio (commonly known as ham radio). By connecting over great distances, ham operators were able to form a distinct cultural community with a strong technocratic foundation, as the radio gear involved was finicky and prone to failure. The area that later became Silicon Valley, where much of modern Internet technology originates, had been an early locus of radio engineering. Alongside the original mandate for robustness and resiliency, the renegade spirit of the early ham radio community later infused the cultural value of decentralization and near-total rejection of regulation and political control that characterized the Internet's original growth era, with strong undercurrents of the Wild West spirit of the American frontier.
At its inception in the early 1970s as part of ARPANET, digital networks were small, institutional, arcane, and slow, which confined the majority of use to the exchange of textual information, such as interpersonal messages and source code. Access to these networks was largely limited to a technological elite based at a small number of prestigious universities; the original American network connected one computer in Utah with three in California.
Text on these digital networks usually encoded in the ASCII character set, which was minimalistic even for established English typography, barely suited to other European languages sharing a Latin script (but with an additional requirement to support accented characters), and entirely unsuitable to any language not based on a Latin script, such as Mandarin, Arabic, or Hindi.
Interactive use was discouraged except for high value activities. Hence a store and forward architecture was employed for many message systems, functioning more like a post office than modern instant messaging; however, by the standards of postal mail, the system (when it worked) was stunningly fast and cheap. Among the heaviest users were those actively involved in advancing the technology, most of whom implicitly shared much the same base of arcane knowledge, effectively forming a technological priesthood.
The origins of social media predate the Internet proper. The first bulletin board system was created in 1978, GEnie was created by General Electric in 1985, the mailing list Listserv appeared in 1986, and Internet Relay Chat was created in 1988. The first official social media site, SixDegrees launched in 1997.
In the 1980s, the network grew to encompass most universities and many corporations, especially those involved with technology, including heavy but segregated participation within the American military–industrial complex. Use of interactivity grew, and the user base became less dominated by programmers, computer scientists and hawkish industrialists, but it remained largely an academic culture centered around institutions of higher learning. It was observed that each September, with an intake of new students, standards of productive discourse would plummet until the established user base brought the influx up to speed on cultural etiquette.
Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia, opening the door for public participation. Soon the network was no longer dominated by academic culture, and the term eternal September, initially referring to September 1993, was coined as Internet slang for the endless intake of cultural newbies.
Commercial use became established alongside academic and professional use, beginning with a sharp rise in unsolicited commercial e-mail commonly called spam. Around this same time, the network transitioned to support the burgeoning World Wide Web. Multimedia formats such as audio, graphics, and video become commonplace and began to displace plain text, but multimedia remained painfully slow for dial-up users. Also around this time the Internet also began to internationalize, supporting most of the world's major languages, but support for many languages remained patchy and incomplete into the 2010s.
On the arrival of broadband access, file sharing services grew rapidly, especially of digital audio (with a prevalence of bootlegged commercial music) with the arrival of Napster in 1999 and similar projects which effectively catered to music enthusiasts, especially teenagers and young adults, soon becoming established as a prototype for rapid evolution into modern social media. Alongside ongoing challenges to traditional norms of intellectual property, business models of many of the largest Internet corporations evolved into what Shoshana Zuboff terms surveillance capitalism. Not only is social media a novel form of social culture, but also a novel form of economic culture where sharing is frictionless, but personal privacy has become a scarce good.
In 1998, there was Hampster Dance, the first successful Internet meme.
In 1999, Aaron Peckham created Urban Dictionary, an online, crowdsourced dictionary of slang. He had kept the server for Urban Dictionary under his bed.
In 2000, there was great demand for images of a dress that Jennifer Lopez wore. As a result, Google's co-founders created Google Images.
In 2001, Wikipedia was created.
In 2004, Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki archive of Internet culture, was founded.
In 2005, YouTube was created because people wanted to find videos of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl in 2004. YouTube was later acquired by Google in 2006.
In 2009, Bitcoin was created.
Since 2020, Internet culture has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 2021, there has been an unprecedented surge of interest in the concept of the metaverse. In particular, Facebook Inc. renamed itself to Meta Platforms in October 2021, amid the crisis of the Facebook Papers.
Criticism
One dark aspect of Internet culture is that it has allowed promoters of unhealthy behaviors such as cutting, anorexia, pedophilia, and even organized theft to gain prominence and establish online subcultures. As people spend more time on social media, this could lead to acting excessively and neglecting behaviors. This action may result in the perpetration of cyberbullying, social anxiety, depression, and exposure to inappropriate content that is not suitable for one's age. Rude comments on posts can lower an individual's self-esteem, making them feel unworthy and may lead to depression. Social interaction online may also substitute face-to-face interactions for some people instead of acting as a supplement. This can negatively impact people's social skills and cause one to have feelings of loneliness. People may also face the chance of being cyberbullied when using online applications. Cyberbullying may include harassment, video shaming, impersonating, and much more. A concept described as "cyberbullying theory" is now being used to suggest that children who use social networking more frequently are more likely to become victims of cyberbullying. Additionally, some evidence shows that too much Internet use can stunt memory and attention development in children. The ease of access to information which the Internet provides discourages information retention. However, the cognitive consequences are not yet fully known. The staggering amount of available information online can lead to feelings of information overload. Some effects of this phenomenon include reduced comprehension, decision making, and behavior control.
Identity – "architectures of credibility"
One early study, conducted from 1998 to 1999, found that the participants view information obtained online as slightly more credible than information from magazines, radio, and television, information obtained from newspapers was the most credible. Credibility online is established in much the same way that it is established in the offline world. Lawrence Lessig claimed that the architecture of a given online community may be the most important factor in establishing credibility. Factors include:, anonymity, connection to physical identity, comment rating system, feedback type (positve vs positive/negative), moderation.
Anonymity
Many sites allow anonymous commentary, where the user-id attached to the comment is something like "guest". In an architecture that allows anonymous commentary, credibility attaches only to the object of the comment. Sites that require some link to an identity may require only a nickname that is sufficient to allow comment readers to rate the commenter, either explicitly, or by informal reputation.
Connection to physical identity
Architectures can require that physical identity be associated with commentary, as in Lessig's example of Counsel Connect. However, to require linkage to a physical identity, sensitive information about a user must be collected and safeguards for that collected information must be established – users must place sufficient trust in the site. Irrespective of safeguards, as with Counsel Connect, use of physical identities links credibility across the frames of the Internet and real space, influencing the behaviors of those who contribute in those spaces. However, even purely online identities can establish credibility. Even though nothing inherently links a person or group to their Internet-based persona, credibility can be earned, because of the time required.
Comment rating system
In some architectures, commenters can, in turn, be rated by other users, potentially encouraging more responsible commentary, although the profusion of popular sh*tposters belies this.
Feedback type
Architectures can be oriented around positive feedback or allow both positive and negative feedback. While a particular user may be able to equate fewer stars with a "negative" rating, the semantic difference is potentially important. The ability to actively downrate an identify may violate laws or norms.
Moderation
Architectures can give editorial control to a group or individual not employed by the site (e.g., Reddit), termed moderators. Moderation may take be either proactive (previewing contents) or reactive (punishing violators).
The moderator's credibility can be damaged by overly aggressive behavior.
Digital culture
Memes
Internet culture is full of memes and other content that spreads rapidly. Memes (humorous images) .
Communities
Internet culture thrives on online communities. These communities can be found on specialized forums, social media, or proprietary applications (e.g., Slack, Salesforce). They cater to specific hobbies, fandoms, or professions, creating spaces where individuals with similar interests can connect. Examples of such communities include the passionate "K-pop fandom" or tech enthusiasts.
Jargon
Internet culture has a rapidly changing set of slang, acronyms, and jargon. These terms serve as recognizable ways to identify members and foster solidarity. Successful jargon often spreads beyond the initiating community. Examples of internet slang and jargon include "LOL" (laugh out loud) and "FTW" (for the win).
Gaming
Gaming is a distinct facet of internet culture, with dedicated communities and supportive platforms such as Twitch. Competitive gaming and live streaming encompasses various subcultures is the basis of this community.
Social media
Social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have become fundamental support systems for Internet culture. These platforms support influencers, content creators, and celebrities. Influencers play a crucial role in shaping trends, promoting products, and engaging with their audiences. Other content creators cover every subject: eating, war, fitness, politics, etc.
Activism
Internet culture is an important ecosystem for activism and social movements. Hashtags, petitions, and organizing have built and exploited online communities. Movements such as BlackLivesMatter and MeToo built strong online presences that increased their impact.
See also
Anonymous
Cicada 3301
Cyber law
Cyberdelic
Cyberpunk
Digitalism
Information ethics
Infosphere
Internet trolls
Netnography
Postliterate society
Rules of the Internet
r/wallstreetbets
Technology and society
Techno-progressivism
Technocriticism
Technolibertarianism
Technorealism
References
Further reading
David Gunkel (2001) Hacking Cyberspace, Westview Press,
Clemens Apprich (2017) Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures, Rowman & Littlefield International, London
Sandrine Baranski (2010) La musique en réseau, une musique de la complexité ?, Éditions universitaires européennes La musique en réseau
David J. Bell, Brian D Loader, Nicholas Pleace, Douglas Schuler (2004) Cyberculture: The Key Concepts, Routledge: London.
Donna Haraway (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, NY
Donna Haraway (1997) Modest Witness Second Millennium FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse, Routledge, New York, NY
N. Katherine Hayles (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL
Jarzombek, Mark (2016) Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN
Sherry Turkle (1997) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon & Schuster Inc, New York, NY
Cyberspace
Computer folklore
Subcultures | 0.778071 | 0.995226 | 0.774357 |
Autonomy | In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy is the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. Autonomous organizations or institutions are independent or self-governing. Autonomy can also be defined from a human resources perspective, where it denotes a (relatively high) level of discretion granted to an employee in his or her work. In such cases, autonomy is known to generally increase job satisfaction. Self-actualized individuals are thought to operate autonomously of external expectations. In a medical context, respect for a patient's personal autonomy is considered one of many fundamental ethical principles in medicine.
Sociology
In the sociology of knowledge, a controversy over the boundaries of autonomy inhibited analysis of any concept beyond relative autonomy, until a typology of autonomy was created and developed within science and technology studies[citation needed]. According to it, the institution of science's existing autonomy is "reflexive autonomy": actors and structures within the scientific field are able to translate or to reflect diverse themes presented by social and political fields, as well as influence them regarding the thematic choices on research projects.
Institutional autonomy
Institutional autonomy is having the capacity as a legislator to be able to implant and pursue official goals. Autonomous institutions are responsible for finding sufficient resources or modifying their plans, programs, courses, responsibilities, and services accordingly. But in doing so, they must contend with any obstacles that can occur, such as social pressure against cut-backs or socioeconomic difficulties. From a legislator's point of view, to increase institutional autonomy, conditions of self-management and institutional self-governance must be put in place. An increase in leadership and a redistribution of decision-making responsibilities would be beneficial to the research of resources.
Institutional autonomy was often seen as a synonym for self-determination, and many governments feared that it would lead institutions to an irredentist or secessionist region. But autonomy should be seen as a solution to self-determination struggles. Self-determination is a movement toward independence, whereas autonomy is a way to accommodate the distinct regions/groups within a country. Institutional autonomy can diffuse conflicts regarding minorities and ethnic groups in a society. Allowing more autonomy to groups and institutions helps create diplomatic relationships between them and the central government.
Politics
In governmental parlance, autonomy refers to self-governance. An example of an autonomous jurisdiction was the former United States governance of the Philippine Islands. The Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916 provided the framework for the creation of an autonomous government under which the Filipino people had broader domestic autonomy than previously, although it reserved certain privileges to the United States to protect its sovereign rights and interests. Other examples include Kosovo (as the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo) under the former Yugoslav government of Marshal Tito and Puntland Autonomous Region within Federal Republic of Somalia.
Although often being territorially defined as self-governments, autonomous self-governing institutions may take a non-territorial form. Such non-territorial solutions are, for example, cultural autonomy in Estonia and Hungary, national minority councils in Serbia or Sámi parliaments in Nordic countries.
Philosophy
Autonomy is a key concept that has a broad impact on different fields of philosophy. In metaphysical philosophy, the concept of autonomy is referenced in discussions about free will, fatalism, determinism, and agency. In moral philosophy, autonomy refers to subjecting oneself to objective moral law.
According to Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined autonomy by three themes regarding contemporary ethics. Firstly, autonomy as the right for one to make their own decisions excluding any interference from others. Secondly, autonomy as the capacity to make such decisions through one's own independence of mind and after personal reflection. Thirdly, as an ideal way of living life autonomously. In summary, autonomy is the moral right one possesses, or the capacity we have in order to think and make decisions for oneself providing some degree of control or power over the events that unfold within one's everyday life.
The context in which Kant addresses autonomy is in regards to moral theory, asking both foundational and abstract questions. He believed that in order for there to be morality, there must be autonomy. "Autonomous" is derived from the Greek word autonomos where 'auto' means self and 'nomos' means to govern (nomos: as can be seen in its usage in nomárchēs which means chief of the province). Kantian autonomy also provides a sense of rational autonomy, simply meaning one rationally possesses the motivation to govern their own life. Rational autonomy entails making your own decisions but it cannot be done solely in isolation. Cooperative rational interactions are required to both develop and exercise our ability to live in a world with others.
Kant argued that morality presupposes this autonomy in moral agents, since moral requirements are expressed in categorical imperatives. An imperative is categorical if it issues a valid command independent of personal desires or interests that would provide a reason for obeying the command. It is hypothetical if the validity of its command, if the reason why one can be expected to obey it, is the fact that one desires or is interested in something further that obedience to the command would entail. "Don't speed on the freeway if you don't want to be stopped by the police" is a hypothetical imperative. "It is wrong to break the law, so don't speed on the freeway" is a categorical imperative. The hypothetical command not to speed on the freeway is not valid for you if you do not care whether you are stopped by the police. The categorical command is valid for you either way. Autonomous moral agents can be expected to obey the command of a categorical imperative even if they lack a personal desire or interest in doing so. It remains an open question whether they will, however.
The Kantian concept of autonomy is often misconstrued, leaving out the important point about the autonomous agent's self-subjection to the moral law. It is thought that autonomy is fully explained as the ability to obey a categorical command independently of a personal desire or interest in doing so—or worse, that autonomy is "obeying" a categorical command independently of a natural desire or interest; and that heteronomy, its opposite, is acting instead on personal motives of the kind referenced in hypothetical imperatives.
In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant applied the concept of autonomy also to define the concept of personhood and human dignity. Autonomy, along with rationality, are seen by Kant as the two criteria for a meaningful life. Kant would consider a life lived without these not worth living; it would be a life of value equal to that of a plant or insect. According to Kant autonomy is part of the reason that we hold others morally accountable for their actions. Human actions are morally praise- or blame-worthy in virtue of our autonomy. Non- autonomous beings such as plants or animals are not blameworthy due to their actions being non-autonomous. Kant's position on crime and punishment is influenced by his views on autonomy. Brainwashing or drugging criminals into being law-abiding citizens would be immoral as it would not be respecting their autonomy. Rehabilitation must be sought in a way that respects their autonomy and dignity as human beings.
According to Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about autonomy and the moral fight. Autonomy in this sense is referred to as the free self and entails several aspects of the self, including self-respect and even self-love. This can be interpreted as influenced by Kant (self-respect) and Aristotle (self-love). For Nietzsche, valuing ethical autonomy can dissolve the conflict between love (self-love) and law (self-respect) which can then translate into reality through experiences of being self-responsible. Because Nietzsche defines having a sense of freedom with being responsible for one's own life, freedom and self-responsibility can be very much linked to autonomy.
According to Piaget
The Swiss philosopher Jean Piaget (1896–1980) believed that autonomy comes from within and results from a "free decision". It is of intrinsic value and the morality of autonomy is not only accepted but obligatory. When an attempt at social interchange occurs, it is reciprocal, ideal and natural for there to be autonomy regardless of why the collaboration with others has taken place. For Piaget, the term autonomous can be used to explain the idea that rules are self-chosen. By choosing which rules to follow or not, we are in turn determining our own behaviour.
Piaget studied the cognitive development of children by analyzing them during their games and through interviews, establishing (among other principles) that the children's moral maturation process occurred in two phases, the first of heteronomy and the second of autonomy:
Heteronomous reasoning: Rules are objective and unchanging. They must be literal because the authority are ordering it and do not fit exceptions or discussions. The base of the rule is the superior authority (parents, adults, the State), that it should not give reason for the rules imposed or fulfilled them in any case. Duties provided are conceived as given from oneself. Any moral motivation and sentiments are possible through what one believes to be right.
Autonomous reasoning: Rules are the product of an agreement and, therefore, are modifiable. They can be subject to interpretation and fit exceptions and objections. The base of the rule is its own acceptance, and its meaning has to be explained. Sanctions must be proportionate to the absence, assuming that sometimes offenses can go unpunished, so that collective punishment is unacceptable if it is not the guilty. The circumstances may not punish a guilty. Duties provided are conceived as given from the outside. One follows rules mechanically as it is simply a rule, or as a way to avoid a form of punishment.
According to Kohlberg
The American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) continues the studies of Piaget. His studies collected information from different latitudes to eliminate the cultural variability, and focused on the moral reasoning, and not so much in the behavior or its consequences. Through interviews with adolescent and teenage boys, who were to try and solve "moral dilemmas", Kohlberg went on to further develop the stages of moral development. The answers they provided could be one of two things. Either they choose to obey a given law, authority figure or rule of some sort or they chose to take actions that would serve a human need but in turn break this given rule or command.
The most popular moral dilemma asked involved the wife of a man approaching death due to a special type of cancer. Because the drug was too expensive to obtain on his own, and because the pharmacist who discovered and sold the drug had no compassion for him and only wanted profits, he stole it. Kohlberg asks these adolescent and teenage boys (10-, 13- and 16-year-olds) if they think that is what the husband should have done or not. Therefore, depending on their decisions, they provided answers to Kohlberg about deeper rationales and thoughts and determined what they value as important. This value then determined the "structure" of their moral reasoning.
Kohlberg established three stages of morality, each of which is subdivided into two levels. They are read in progressive sense, that is, higher levels indicate greater autonomy.
Level 1: Premoral/Preconventional Morality: Standards are met (or not met) depending on the hedonistic or physical consequences.
[Stage 0: Egocentric Judgment: There is no moral concept independent of individual wishes, including a lack of concept of rules or obligations.]
Stage 1: Punishment-Obedience Orientation: The rule is obeyed only to avoid punishment. Physical consequences determine goodness or badness and power is deferred to unquestioningly with no respect for the human or moral value, or the meaning of these consequences. Concern is for the self.
Stage 2: Instrumental-Relativist Orientation: Morals are individualistic and egocentric. There is an exchange of interests but always under the point of view of satisfying personal needs. Elements of fairness and reciprocity are present but these are interpreted in a pragmatic way, instead of an experience of gratitude or justice. Egocentric in nature but beginning to incorporate the ability to see things from the perspective of others.
Level 2: Conventional Morality/Role Conformity: Rules are obeyed according to the established conventions of a society.
Stage 3: Good Boy–Nice Girl Orientation: Morals are conceived in accordance with the stereotypical social role. Rules are obeyed to obtain the approval of the immediate group and the right actions are judged based on what would please others or give the impression that one is a good person. Actions are evaluated according to intentions.
Stage 4: Law and Order Orientation: Morals are judged in accordance with the authority of the system, or the needs of the social order. Laws and order are prioritized.
Level 3: Postconventional Morality/Self-Accepted Moral Principles: Standards of moral behavior are internalized. Morals are governed by rational judgment, derived from a conscious reflection on the recognition of the value of the individual inside a conventionally established society.
Stage 5: Social Contract Orientation: There are individual rights and standards that have been lawfully established as basic universal values. Rules are agreed upon by through procedure and society comes to consensus through critical examination in order to benefit the greater good.
Stage 6: Universal Principle Orientation: Abstract ethical principles are obeyed on a personal level in addition to societal rules and conventions. Universal principles of justice, reciprocity, equality and human dignity are internalized and if one fails to live up to these ideals, guilt or self-condemnation results.
According to Audi
Robert Audi characterizes autonomy as the self-governing power to bring reasons to bear in directing one's conduct and influencing one's propositional attitudes. Traditionally, autonomy is only concerned with practical matters. But, as Audi's definition suggests, autonomy may be applied to responding to reasons at large, not just to practical reasons. Autonomy is closely related to freedom but the two can come apart. An example would be a political prisoner who is forced to make a statement in favor of his opponents in order to ensure that his loved ones are not harmed. As Audi points out, the prisoner lacks freedom but still has autonomy since his statement, though not reflecting his political ideals, is still an expression of his commitment to his loved ones.
Autonomy is often equated with self-legislation in the Kantian tradition. Self-legislation may be interpreted as laying down laws or principles that are to be followed. Audi agrees with this school in the sense that we should bring reasons to bear in a principled way. Responding to reasons by mere whim may still be considered free but not autonomous. A commitment to principles and projects, on the other hand, provides autonomous agents with an identity over time and gives them a sense of the kind of persons they want to be. But autonomy is neutral as to which principles or projects the agent endorses. So different autonomous agents may follow very different principles. But, as Audi points out, self-legislation is not sufficient for autonomy since laws that do not have any practical impact do not constitute autonomy. Some form of motivational force or executive power is necessary in order to get from mere self-legislation to self-government. This motivation may be inherent in the corresponding practical judgment itself, a position known as motivational internalism, or may come to the practical judgment externally in the form of some desire independent of the judgment, as motivational externalism holds.
In the Humean tradition, intrinsic desires are the reasons the autonomous agent should respond to. This theory is called instrumentalism. Audi rejects instrumentalism and suggests that we should adopt a position known as axiological objectivism. The central idea of this outlook is that objective values, and not subjective desires, are the sources of normativity and therefore determine what autonomous agents should do.
Child development
Autonomy in childhood and adolescence is when one strives to gain a sense of oneself as a separate, self-governing individual. Between ages 1–3, during the second stage of Erikson's and Freud's stages of development, the psychosocial crisis that occurs is autonomy versus shame and doubt. The significant event that occurs during this stage is that children must learn to be autonomous, and failure to do so may lead to the child doubting their own abilities and feel ashamed. When a child becomes autonomous it allows them to explore and acquire new skills. Autonomy has two vital aspects wherein there is an emotional component where one relies more on themselves rather than their parents and a behavioural component where one makes decisions independently by using their judgement. The styles of child rearing affect the development of a child's autonomy. Autonomy in adolescence is closely related to their quest for identity. In adolescence parents and peers act as agents of influence. Peer influence in early adolescence may help the process of an adolescent to gradually become more autonomous by being less susceptible to parental or peer influence as they get older. In adolescence the most important developmental task is to develop a healthy sense of autonomy.
Religion
In Christianity, autonomy is manifested as a partial self-governance on various levels of church administration. During the history of Christianity, there were two basic types of autonomy. Some important parishes and monasteries have been given special autonomous rights and privileges, and the best known example of monastic autonomy is the famous Eastern Orthodox monastic community on Mount Athos in Greece. On the other hand, administrative autonomy of entire ecclesiastical provinces has throughout history included various degrees of internal self-governance.
In ecclesiology of Eastern Orthodox Churches, there is a clear distinction between autonomy and autocephaly, since autocephalous churches have full self-governance and independence, while every autonomous church is subject to some autocephalous church, having a certain degree of internal self-governance. Since every autonomous church had its own historical path to ecclesiastical autonomy, there are significant differences between various autonomous churches in respect of their particular degrees of self-governance. For example, churches that are autonomous can have their highest-ranking bishops, such as an archbishop or metropolitan, appointed or confirmed by the patriarch of the mother church from which it was granted its autonomy, but generally they remain self-governing in many other respects.
In the history of Western Christianity the question of ecclesiastical autonomy was also one of the most important questions, especially during the first centuries of Christianity, since various archbishops and metropolitans in Western Europe have often opposed centralizing tendencies of the Church of Rome. , the Catholic Church comprises 24 autonomous (sui iuris) Churches in communion with the Holy See. Various denominations of Protestant churches usually have more decentralized power, and churches may be autonomous, thus having their own rules or laws of government, at the national, local, or even individual level.
Sartre brings the concept of the Cartesian god being totally free and autonomous. He states that existence precedes essence with god being the creator of the essences, eternal truths and divine will. This pure freedom of god relates to human freedom and autonomy; where a human is not subjected to pre-existing ideas and values.
According to the first amendment, In the United States of America, the federal government is restricted in building a national church. This is due to the first amendment's recognizing people's freedom's to worship their faith according to their own belief's. For example, the American government has removed the church from their "sphere of authority" due to the churches' historical impact on politics and their authority on the public. This was the beginning of the disestablishment process. The Protestant churches in the United States had a significant impact on American culture in the nineteenth century, when they organized the establishment of schools, hospitals, orphanages, colleges, magazines, and so forth. This has brought up the famous, however, misinterpreted term of the separation of church and state. These churches lost the legislative and financial support from the state.
The disestablishment process
The first disestablishment began with the introduction of the bill of rights. In the twentieth century, due to the great depression of the 1930s and the completion of the second world war, the American churches were revived. Specifically the Protestant churches. This was the beginning of the second disestablishment when churches had become popular again but held no legislative power. One of the reasons why the churches gained attendance and popularity was due to the baby boom, when soldiers came back from the second world war and started their families. The large influx of newborns gave the churches a new wave of followers. However, these followers did not hold the same beliefs as their parents and brought about the political, and religious revolutions of the 1960s.
During the 1960s, the collapse of religious and cultural middle brought upon the third disestablishment. Religion became more important to the individual and less so to the community. The changes brought from these revolutions significantly increased the personal autonomy of individuals due to the lack of structural restraints giving them added freedom of choice. This concept is known as "new voluntarism" where individuals have free choice on how to be religious and the free choice whether to be religious or not.
Medicine
In a medical context, respect for a patient's personal autonomy is considered one of many fundamental ethical principles in medicine. Autonomy can be defined as the ability of the person to make his or her own decisions. This faith in autonomy is the central premise of the concept of informed consent and shared decision making. This idea, while considered essential to today's practice of medicine, was developed in the last 50 years. According to Tom Beauchamp and James Childress (in Principles of Biomedical Ethics), the Nuremberg trials detailed accounts of horrifyingly exploitative medical "experiments" which violated the subjects' physical integrity and personal autonomy. These incidences prompted calls for safeguards in medical research, such as the Nuremberg Code which stressed the importance of voluntary participation in medical research. It is believed that the Nuremberg Code served as the premise for many current documents regarding research ethics.
Respect for autonomy became incorporated in health care and patients could be allowed to make personal decisions about the health care services that they receive. Notably, autonomy has several aspects as well as challenges that affect health care operations. The manner in which a patient is handled may undermine or support the autonomy of a patient and for this reason, the way a patient is communicated to becomes very crucial. A good relationship between a patient and a health care practitioner needs to be well defined to ensure that autonomy of a patient is respected. Just like in any other life situation, a patient would not like to be under the control of another person. The move to emphasize respect for patient's autonomy rose from the vulnerabilities that were pointed out in regards to autonomy.
However, autonomy does not only apply in a research context. Users of the health care system have the right to be treated with respect for their autonomy, instead of being dominated by the physician. This is referred to as paternalism. While paternalism is meant to be overall good for the patient, this can very easily interfere with autonomy. Through the therapeutic relationship, a thoughtful dialogue between the client and the physician may lead to better outcomes for the client, as he or she is more of a participant in decision-making.
There are many different definitions of autonomy, many of which place the individual in a social context. Relational autonomy, which suggests that a person is defined through their relationships with others, is increasingly considered in medicine and particularly in critical and end-of-life care. Supported autonomy suggests instead that in specific circumstances it may be necessary to temporarily compromise the autonomy of the person in the short term in order to preserve their autonomy in the long-term. Other definitions of the autonomy imagine the person as a contained and self-sufficient being whose rights should not be compromised under any circumstance.
There are also differing views with regard to whether modern health care systems should be shifting to greater patient autonomy or a more paternalistic approach. For example, there are such arguments that suggest the current patient autonomy practiced is plagued by flaws such as misconceptions of treatment and cultural differences, and that health care systems should be shifting to greater paternalism on the part of the physician given their expertise. On the other hand, other approaches suggest that there simply needs to be an increase in relational understanding between patients and health practitioners to improve patient autonomy.
One argument in favor of greater patient autonomy and its benefits is by Dave deBronkart, who believes that in the technological advancement age, patients are capable of doing a lot of their research on medical issues from their home. According to deBronkart, this helps to promote better discussions between patients and physicians during hospital visits, ultimately easing up the workload of physicians. deBronkart argues that this leads to greater patient empowerment and a more educative health care system. In opposition to this view, technological advancements can sometimes be viewed as an unfavorable way of promoting patient autonomy. For example, self-testing medical procedures which have become increasingly common are argued by Greaney et al. to increase patient autonomy, however, may not be promoting what is best for the patient. In this argument, contrary to deBronkart, the current perceptions of patient autonomy are excessively over-selling the benefits of individual autonomy, and is not the most suitable way to go about treating patients. Instead, a more inclusive form of autonomy should be implemented, relational autonomy, which factors into consideration those close to the patient as well as the physician. These different concepts of autonomy can be troublesome as the acting physician is faced with deciding which concept he/she will implement into their clinical practice. It is often references as one of the four pillars of medicine, alongside beneficence, justice and nonmaleficence
Autonomy varies and some patients find it overwhelming especially the minors when faced with emergency situations. Issues arise in emergency room situations where there may not be time to consider the principle of patient autonomy. Various ethical challenges are faced in these situations when time is critical, and patient consciousness may be limited. However, in such settings where informed consent may be compromised, the working physician evaluates each individual case to make the most professional and ethically sound decision. For example, it is believed that neurosurgeons in such situations, should generally do everything they can to respect patient autonomy. In the situation in which a patient is unable to make an autonomous decision, the neurosurgeon should discuss with the surrogate decision maker in order to aid in the decision-making process. Performing surgery on a patient without informed consent is in general thought to only be ethically justified when the neurosurgeon and his/her team render the patient to not have the capacity to make autonomous decisions. If the patient is capable of making an autonomous decision, these situations are generally less ethically strenuous as the decision is typically respected.
Not every patient is capable of making an autonomous decision. For example, a commonly proposed question is at what age children should be partaking in treatment decisions. This question arises as children develop differently, therefore making it difficult to establish a standard age at which children should become more autonomous. Those who are unable to make the decisions prompt a challenge to medical practitioners since it becomes difficult to determine the ability of a patient to make a decision. To some extent, it has been said that emphasis of autonomy in health care has undermined the practice of health care practitioners to improve the health of their patient as necessary. The scenario has led to tension in the relationship between a patient and a health care practitioner. This is because as much as a physician wants to prevent a patient from suffering, they still have to respect autonomy. Beneficence is a principle allowing physicians to act responsibly in their practice and in the best interests of their patients, which may involve overlooking autonomy. However, the gap between a patient and a physician has led to problems because in other cases, the patients have complained of not being adequately informed.
The seven elements of informed consent (as defined by Beauchamp and Childress) include threshold elements (competence and voluntariness), information elements (disclosure, recommendation, and understanding) and consent elements (decision and authorization). Some philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt consider Beauchamp and Childress criteria insufficient. They claim that an action can only be considered autonomous if it involves the exercise of the capacity to form higher-order values about desires when acting intentionally. What this means is that patients may understand their situation and choices but would not be autonomous unless the patient is able to form value judgements about their reasons for choosing treatment options they would not be acting autonomously.
In certain unique circumstances, government may have the right to temporarily override the right to bodily integrity in order to preserve the life and well-being of the person. Such action can be described using the principle of "supported autonomy", a concept that was developed to describe unique situations in mental health (examples include the forced feeding of a person dying from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, or the temporary treatment of a person living with a psychotic disorder with antipsychotic medication). While controversial, the principle of supported autonomy aligns with the role of government to protect the life and liberty of its citizens. Terrence F. Ackerman has highlighted problems with these situations, he claims that by undertaking this course of action physician or governments run the risk of misinterpreting a conflict of values as a constraining effect of illness on a patient's autonomy.
Since the 1960s, there have been attempts to increase patient autonomy including the requirement that physician's take bioethics courses during their time in medical school. Despite large-scale commitment to promoting patient autonomy, public mistrust of medicine in developed countries has remained. Onora O'Neill has ascribed this lack of trust to medical institutions and professionals introducing measures that benefit themselves, not the patient. O'Neill claims that this focus on autonomy promotion has been at the expense of issues like distribution of healthcare resources and public health.
One proposal to increase patient autonomy is through the use of support staff. The use of support staff including medical assistants, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, and other staff that can promote patient interests and better patient care. Nurses especially can learn about patient beliefs and values in order to increase informed consent and possibly persuade the patient through logic and reason to entertain a certain treatment plan. This would promote both autonomy and beneficence, while keeping the physician's integrity intact. Furthermore, Humphreys asserts that nurses should have professional autonomy within their scope of practice (35–37). Humphreys argues that if nurses exercise their professional autonomy more, then there will be an increase in patient autonomy (35–37).
International human rights law
After the Second World War, there was a push for international human rights that came in many waves. Autonomy as a basic human right started the building block in the beginning of these layers alongside liberty. The Universal declarations of Human rights of 1948 has made mention of autonomy or the legal protected right to individual self-determination in article 22.
Documents such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples reconfirm international law in the aspect of human rights because those laws were already there, but it is also responsible for making sure that the laws highlighted when it comes to autonomy, cultural and integrity; and land rights are made within an indigenous context by taking special attention to their historical and contemporary events
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples article 3 also through international law provides Human rights for Indigenous individuals by giving them a right to self-determination, meaning they have all the liberties to choose their political status, and are capable to go and improve their economic, social, and cultural statuses in society, by developing it. Another example of this, is article 4 of the same document which gives them autonomous rights when it comes to their internal or local affairs and how they can fund themselves in order to be able to self govern themselves.
Minorities in countries are also protected as well by international law; the 27th article of the United Nations International covenant on Civil and Political rights or the ICCPR does so by allowing these individuals to be able to enjoy their own culture or use their language. Minorities in that manner are people from ethnic religious or linguistic groups according to the document.
The European Court of Human rights, is an international court that has been created on behalf of the European Conventions of Human rights. However, when it comes to autonomy they did not explicitly state it when it comes to the rights that individuals have. The current article 8 has remedied to that when the case of Pretty v the United Kingdom, a case in 2002 involving assisted suicide, where autonomy was used as a legal right in law. It was where Autonomy was distinguished and its reach into law was marked as well making it the foundations for legal precedent in making case law originating from the European Court of Human rights.
The Yogyakarta Principles, a document with no binding effect in international human rights law, contend that "self-determination" used as meaning of autonomy on one's own matters including informed consent or sexual and reproductive rights, is integral for one's self-defined or gender identity and refused any medical procedures as a requirement for legal recognition of the gender identity of transgender. If eventually accepted by the international community in a treaty, this would make these ideas human rights in the law. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also defines autonomy as principles of rights of a person with disability including "the freedom to make one's own choices, and independence of persons".
Celebrity culture on teenage autonomy
A study conducted by David C. Giles and John Maltby conveyed that after age-affecting factors were removed, a high emotional autonomy was a significant predictor of celebrity interest, as well as high attachment to peers with a low attachment to parents. Patterns of intense personal interest in celebrities was found to be conjunction with low levels of closeness and security. Furthermore, the results suggested that adults with a secondary group of pseudo-friends during development from parental attachment, usually focus solely on one particular celebrity, which could be due to difficulties in making this transition.
Various uses
In computing, an autonomous peripheral is one that can be used with the computer turned off.
Within self-determination theory in psychology, autonomy refers to 'autonomy support versus control', "hypothesizing that autonomy-supportive social contexts tend to facilitate self-determined motivation, healthy development, and optimal functioning."
In mathematical analysis, an ordinary differential equation is said to be autonomous if it is time-independent.
In linguistics, an autonomous language is one which is independent of other languages, for example, has a standard variety, grammar books, dictionaries or literature, etc.
In robotics, "autonomy means independence of control. This characterization implies that autonomy is a property of the relation between two agents, in the case of robotics, of the relations between the designer and the autonomous robot. Self-sufficiency, situatedness, learning or development, and evolution increase an agent's degree of autonomy.", according to Rolf Pfeifer.
In spaceflight, autonomy can also refer to crewed missions that are operating without control by ground controllers.
In economics, autonomous consumption is consumption expenditure when income levels are zero, making spending autonomous to income.
In politics, autonomous territories are States wishing to retain territorial integrity in opposition to ethnic or indigenous demands for self-determination or independence (sovereignty).
In anti-establishment activism, an autonomous space is another name for a non-governmental social center or free space (for community interaction).
In social psychology, autonomy is a personality trait characterized by a focus on personal achievement, independence, and a preference for solitude, often labeled as an opposite of sociotropy.
Limits to autonomy
Autonomy can be limited. For instance, by disabilities, civil society organizations may achieve a degree of autonomy albeit nested within—and relative to—formal bureaucratic and administrative regimes. Community partners can therefore assume a hybridity of capture and autonomy—or a mutuality—that is rather nuanced.
Semi-autonomy
The term semi-autonomy (coined with prefix semi- / "half") designates partial or limited autonomy. As a relative term, it is usually applied to various semi-autonomous entities or processes that are substantially or functionally limited, in comparison to other fully autonomous entities or processes.
Quasi-autonomy
The term quasi-autonomy (coined with prefix quasi- / "resembling" or "appearing") designates formally acquired or proclaimed, but functionally limited or constrained autonomy. As a descriptive term, it is usually applied to various quasi-autonomous entities or processes that are formally designated or labeled as autonomous, but in reality remain functionally dependent or influenced by some other entity or process. An example for such use of the term can be seen in common designation for quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations.
See also
Autonomism
List of autonomous areas by country
Autonomy Day
Cornelius Castoriadis
Counterdependency
Direct democracy
Equality of autonomy
Essential facilities doctrine
Flat organization
Takis Fotopoulos
Home rule
Job autonomy
Personal boundaries
Self-governing colony
Self-sufficiency
Teaching for social justice
Viable system model
Workplace democracy
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
External links
Kastner, Jens. "Autonomy" (2015). University Bielefeld – Center for InterAmerican Studies.
"Self-sustainability strategies for Development Initiatives: What is self-sustainability and why is it so important?"
Ethical principles
Individualism
Organizational cybernetics | 0.776205 | 0.997599 | 0.774341 |
Educational game | Educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment, however educational games are games that are designed to help people learn about certain subjects, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand a historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play. Game types include board, card, and video games.
As educators, governments, and parents realize the psychological need and benefits that gaming has on learning, this educational tool has become mainstream. Games are interactive play that teach goals, rules, adaptation, problem solving, interaction, all represented as a story. They satisfy a fundamental need to learn by providing enjoyment, passionate involvement, structure, motivation, ego gratification, adrenaline, creativity, social interaction and emotion in the game itself while the learning takes place.
Video games
With the increase and availability of technological devices, there has been a shift in what types of games people play. Video or electronic gaming has become more widely used than traditional board games. Barab (2009) defines conceptual play as "a state of engagement that involves (a) projection into the role of character who, (b) engaged in a partly fictional problem context, (c) must apply conceptual understandings to make sense of, and ultimately, transform the context". The goal of such play spaces is to have the "gamer" engage in the narrative while learning cognitive and social skills. The ability to immerse oneself in the gaming process facilitates "empathetic embodiment" which occurs when a player learns to identify with the character they have chosen for the game and the virtual environment of the game (Barab, 2009).
Educational video games have been divided into two major categories. "Edutainment" games are those that are typically based on drilling fundamental lessons in a linear progression, with added entertainment value. "Educational video games" are ones that encourage creative thinking and problem solving.
Game-based learning
Game-based learning (GBL) is a type of game play that has defined learning outcomes. Generally, game-based learning is designed to balance subject matter with gameplay and the ability of the player to retain, and apply said subject matter to the real world. Children tend to spend hours playing hide and seek, learning the steps of digital games, such as chess, and engaging in creative games. Therefore, it can be said that play and learning are synonymous, leading to cognitive and emotional development inside a social and cultural context. For instance, the game of hide and seek: Good hiders need visual and spatial perspective to define the best hiding places, while seekers must be skilled at searching for cues from the surroundings and choosing the most probable location for the hider among various possible places. A systematic review investigated the effects of educational games for mental health students:
Origins
In his classical essay, "Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man", Friedrich Schiller discusses play as a force of civilization, which helps humans rise above their instincts and become members of enlightened communities. He states that "humans are only fully human when they play". While the text is limited by the author's beliefs in concepts such as freedom and beauty, it nevertheless sets the stage for Johan Huizinga's classical study, Homo Ludens.
Games have long been employed as a means of education. Using the ancient game of chess, noblemen of the Middle Ages learned strategies of war. During the Civil War, volunteers from Rhode Island played American Kriegsspiel, which had originally been created in 1812 for training Prussian officers-of-war. Then, in the early 19th century, came the creation of Kindergarten by Friedrich Fröbel, which was based on learning through play. Children delighted in his Fröbel Gifts, simple educational toys such as blocks, sewing kits, clay, and weaving materials.
Theory
According to Richard N. Van Eck, there are three main approaches to creating software that stimulates cognitive growth in the gamer. These three approaches are: building games from scratch created by educators and programmers; integrate commercial off-the-shelf (COTS); and creating games from scratch by the students. The most time- and cost-effective approach to designing these educational games is to incorporate COTS games into the classroom with the understanding of the learning outcomes the instructor has for the course. This requires the teacher to buy into the positive results of using digital games for education. It also requires teachers to have adequate self-efficacy concerning the use of these games and their technology. The students usually have high amounts of self-efficacy in usage of digital games, while the lack of confidence teachers have in incorporating the digital games usually results in less effective educational use of the games. However, Gerber and Price (2013) have found that teachers' inexperience with digital games does not preclude them from the desire to incorporate them in class instruction, but districts must have in place support through regular professional development, supportive learning communities with their colleagues, and adequate financial support to implement game-based learning in their class instruction.
Games often have a fantasy element that engages players in a learning activity through narrative or storylines. Educational video games can motivate children and allow them to develop an awareness of consequentiality. Children are allowed to express themselves as individuals while learning and engaging in social issues. Today's games are more social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life. In classrooms, social game-based learning platforms are increasing in popularity, as they purport to enable students to reinforce knowledge and develop social and leadership skills.
The success of game-based learning strategies owes to active participation and interaction being at the center of the experience, and signals that current educational methods are not engaging students enough. Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce. Game-based learning is an expansive category, ranging from simple paper-and-pencil games like word searches all the way up to complex, massively multiplayer online (MMO) and role-playing games. The use of collaborative game-based role-play for learning provides an opportunity
for learners to apply acquired knowledge and to experiment and get feedback in the form of consequences or rewards, thus getting the experiences in the "safe virtual world".
The built-in learning process of games is what makes a game enjoyable. The progress a player makes in a game is through learning. It is the process of the human mind grasping and coming to understand a new system. The progress of understanding a new concept through gaming makes an individual feel a sense of reward whether the game is considered entertainment (Call of Duty) or serious (FAA-approved flight simulator). Well-designed games that motivate players are what make them ideal learning environments. Real-world challenges are easier faced within a game containing effective, interactive experiences that actively engage people in the learning process. In a successful game-based learning environment, choosing actions, experiencing consequences, and working toward goals allows players to make mistakes through experimentation in a risk-free environment. Games have rules and structure and goals that inspire motivation. Games are interactive and provide outcomes and feedback. Most games also have problem solving situations that spark creativity.
Identification with the character within the video game is an important factor in the learning potential of the gamer. Some of the electronic games allow the gamer to create an avatar that is designed and “owned” by the gamer. This character is an expression of the human creating the virtual character. This has opened a new set of scientific possibilities. The virtual world can be used as a laboratory. The relationships and space within the games can simulate complex societies and relationships without having to truly participate. This application of an avatar in not limited to simulation exercises. According to Bainbridge, interviews and ethnographic research could be conducted within the reality of the game space. This could include experiments in social psychology and cognitive science. The fact that game creators and gamers are wanting new experiences within the games, the introduction of “experiments” could increase the level of play and engagement.
Application
Traditionally, technology used in school operates usually to solve problems in a fun way, particularly in mathematics. They usually make up case studies designed to introduce students to certain technologies in an effort to prepare them for a future major assignment that requires the aforementioned technology. They have also been developed to work in the virtual world. More recently educational egames have been developed for Higher Education students, combining real-world case studies in a virtual environment for students to have a consistent, 24/7 educational 'virtual' experience. In some public schools implementing Common Core Standards, game-based learning programs are utilized by educators to supplement their teaching programs. According to a recent case study by an ed tech-based nonprofit organization, teachers find some digital learning games help address issues with alignment in Common Core.
In the future, technology and games are expected to be used in simulation environments to simulate real world issues. In the professional sector, such as flight training, simulations are already used in an effort to prepare pilots for training before actually going out into planes. These training sessions are used to replicate real life stresses without the risk factor associated with flying. Simulation-games are used in other professional areas as well; a spy-themed learning game has been used to improve sales skills at Avaya and a 3D simulation game has been used to train New York City emergency responders.
Before deciding how to use game-based learning, the trainer must first determine what they would like the trainees to learn. A trainer that fails to focus training around a central idea runs the risk of using a game that fails to connect with the learners. To prevent this, tailor the material to the demographic (age group, familiarity, educational pre-text) so that the material is neither too difficult for, nor too familiar to the learner. Gathering ideas from children early in the design process has yielded useful insights into what children want in technology in general or in a specific type of application. Children's early involvement in requirements gathering has revealed clues about gender differences in preferences related to technology, children's navigation skills, ways of presenting textual information, application-specific content-related preferences, the variety of elements to be included in user interfaces and their structures, and children's desire to personalize their applications. Multiplayer role playing games (MMO's) provide opportunities for players to improve such skills as, “complex learning, thinking, and social practices”. MMO's also provide a social network which can favor collaborative gaming and learning and contribute to the formation of teams, communication within a group and help strengthen individual and communal identities.
See also
Footnotes
References
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Education reform | Education reform is the name given to the goal of changing public education. The meaning and education methods have changed through debates over what content or experiences result in an educated individual or an educated society. Historically, the motivations for reform have not reflected the current needs of society. A consistent theme of reform includes the idea that large systematic changes to educational standards will produce social returns in citizens' health, wealth, and well-being.
As part of the broader social and political processes, the term education reform refers to the chronology of significant, systematic revisions made to amend the educational legislation, standards, methodology, and policy affecting a nation's public school system to reflect the needs and values of contemporary society. 18th century, classical education instruction from an in-home personal tutor, hired at the family's expense, was primarily a privilege for children from wealthy families. Innovations such as encyclopedias, public libraries, and grammar schools all aimed to relieve some of the financial burden associated with the expenses of the classical education model. Motivations during the Victorian era emphasized the importance of self-improvement. Victorian education focused on teaching commercially valuable topics, such as modern languages and mathematics, rather than classical liberal arts subjects, such as Latin, art, and history.
Motivations for education reformists like Horace Mann and his proponents focused on making schooling more accessible and developing a robust state-supported common school system. John Dewey, an early 20th-century reformer, focused on improving society by advocating for a scientific, pragmatic, or democratic principle-based curriculum. Whereas Maria Montessori incorporated humanistic motivations to "meet the needs of the child". In historic Prussia, a motivation to foster national unity led to formal education concentrated on teaching national language literacy to young children, resulting in Kindergarten.
The history of educational pedagogy in the United States has ranged from teaching literacy and proficiency of religious doctrine to establishing cultural literacy, assimilating immigrants into a democratic society, producing a skilled labor force for the industrialized workplace, preparing students for careers, and competing in a global marketplace. Education inequality is also a motivation for education reform, seeking to address problems of a community.
Motivations for education reform
Education reform, in general, implies a continual effort to modify and improve the institution of education. Over time, as the needs and values of society change, attitudes towards public education change. As a social institution, education plays an integral role in the process of socialization. "Socialization is broadly composed of distinct inter- and intra-generational processes. Both involve the harmonization of an individual's attitudes and behaviors with that of their socio-cultural milieu." Educational matrices mean to reinforce those socially acceptable informal and formal norms, values, and beliefs that individuals need to learn in order to be accepted as good, functioning, and productive members of their society. Education reform is the process of constantly renegotiating and restructuring the educational standards to reflect the ever-evolving contemporary ideals of social, economic, and political culture. Reforms can be based on bringing education into alignment with a society's core values. Reforms that attempt to change a society's core values can connect alternative education initiatives with a network of other alternative institutions.
Education reform has been pursued for a variety of specific reasons, but generally most reforms aim at redressing some societal ills, such as poverty-, gender-, or class-based inequities, or perceived ineffectiveness. Current education trends in the United States represent multiple achievement gaps across ethnicities, income levels, and geographies. As McKinsey and Company reported in a 2009 analysis, "These educational gaps impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession." Reforms are usually proposed by thinkers who aim to redress societal ills or institute societal changes, most often through a change in the education of the members of a class of people—the preparation of a ruling class to rule or a working class to work, the social hygiene of a lower or immigrant class, the preparation of citizens in a democracy or republic, etc. The idea that all children should be provided with a high level of education is a relatively recent idea, and has arisen largely in the context of Western democracy in the 20th century.
The "beliefs" of school districts are optimistic that quite literally "all students will succeed", which in the context of high school graduation examination in the United States, all students in all groups, regardless of heritage or income will pass tests that in the introduction typically fall beyond the ability of all but the top 20 to 30 percent of students. The claims clearly renounce historical research that shows that all ethnic and income groups score differently on all standardized tests and standards based assessments and that students will achieve on a bell curve. Instead, education officials across the world believe that by setting clear, achievable, higher standards, aligning the curriculum, and assessing outcomes, learning can be increased for all students, and more students can succeed than the 50 percent who are defined to be above or below grade level by norm referenced standards.
States have tried to use state schools to increase state power, especially to make better soldiers and workers. This strategy was first adopted to unify related linguistic groups in Europe, including France, Germany and Italy. Exact mechanisms are unclear, but it often fails in areas where populations are culturally segregated, as when the U.S. Indian school service failed to suppress Lakota and Navaho, or when a culture has widely respected autonomous cultural institutions, as when the Spanish failed to suppress Catalan.
Many students of democracy have desired to improve education in order to improve the quality of governance in democratic societies; the necessity of good public education follows logically if one believes that the quality of democratic governance depends on the ability of citizens to make informed, intelligent choices, and that education can improve these abilities.
Politically motivated educational reforms of the democratic type are recorded as far back as Plato in The Republic. In the United States, this lineage of democratic education reform was continued by Thomas Jefferson, who advocated ambitious reforms partly along Platonic lines for public schooling in Virginia.
Another motivation for reform is the desire to address socio-economic problems, which many people see as having significant roots in lack of education. Starting in the 20th century, people have attempted to argue that small improvements in education can have large returns in such areas as health, wealth and well-being. For example, in Kerala, India in the 1950s, increases in women's health were correlated with increases in female literacy rates. In Iran, increased primary education was correlated with increased farming efficiencies and income. In both cases some researchers have concluded these correlations as representing an underlying causal relationship: education causes socio-economic benefits. In the case of Iran, researchers concluded that the improvements were due to farmers gaining reliable access to national crop prices and scientific farming information.
History
Classical education
As taught from the 18th to the 19th century, Western classical education curriculums focused on concrete details like "Who?", "What?", "When?", "Where?". Unless carefully taught, large group instruction naturally neglects asking the theoretical "Why?" and "Which?" questions that can be discussed in smaller groups.
Classical education in this period also did not teach local (vernacular) languages and culture. Instead, it taught high-status ancient languages (Greek and Latin) and their cultures. This produced odd social effects in which an intellectual class might be more loyal to ancient cultures and institutions than to their native vernacular languages and their actual governing authorities.
18th century
Child-study
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, father of the Child Study Movement, centered the child as an object of study.
In Emile: Or, On Education, Rousseau's principal work on education lays out an educational program for a hypothetical newborn's education through adulthood.
Rousseau provided a dual critique of the educational vision outlined in Plato's Republic and that of his society in contemporary Europe. He regarded the educational methods contributing to the child's development; he held that a person could either be a man or a citizen. While Plato's plan could have brought the latter at the expense of the former, contemporary education failed at both tasks. He advocated a radical withdrawal of the child from society and an educational process that utilized the child's natural potential and curiosity, teaching the child by confronting them with simulated real-life obstacles and conditioning the child through experience rather intellectual instruction.
Rousseau ideas were rarely implemented directly, but influenced later thinkers, particularly Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel, the inventor of the kindergarten.
National identity
European and Asian nations regard education as essential to maintaining national, cultural, and linguistic unity. In the late 18th century (~1779), Prussia instituted primary school reforms expressly to teach a unified version of the national language, "Hochdeutsch".
One significant reform was kindergarten whose purpose was to have the children participate in supervised activities taught by instructors who spoke the national language. The concept embraced the idea that children absorb new language skills more easily and quickly when they are young
The current model of kindergarten is reflective of the Prussian model.
In other countries, such as the Soviet Union, France, Spain, and Germany, the Prussian model has dramatically improved reading and math test scores for linguistic minorities.
19th century England
In the 19th century, before the advent of government-funded public schools, Protestant organizations established Charity Schools to educate the lower social classes. The Roman Catholic Church and governments later adopted the model.
Designed to be inexpensive, Charity schools operated on minimal budgets and strived to serve as many needy children as possible. This led to the development of grammar schools, which primarily focused on teaching literacy, grammar, and bookkeeping skills so that the students could use books as an inexpensive resource to continue their education. Grammar was the first third of the then-prevalent system of classical education.
Educators Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell developed the monitorial system, also known as "mutual instruction" or the "Bell–Lancaster method". Their contemporary, educationalist and writer Elizabeth Hamilton, suggested that in some important aspects the method had been "anticipated" by the Belfast schoolmaster David Manson. In the 1760s Manson had developed a peer-teaching and monitoring system within the context of what he called a "play school" that dispensed with "the discipline of the rod". (More radically, Manson proposed the "liberty of each [child] to take the quantity [of lessons] agreeable to his inclination").
Lancaster, an impoverished Quaker during the early 19th century in London and Bell at the Madras School of India developed this model independent of one another. However, by design, their model utilizes more advanced students as a resource to teach the less advanced students; achieving student-teacher ratios as small as 1:2 and educating more than 1000 students per adult. The lack of adult supervision at the Lancaster school resulted in the older children acting as disciplinary monitors and taskmasters.
To provide order and promote discipline the school implemented a unique internal economic system, inventing a currency called a Scrip. Although the currency was worthless in the outside world, it was created at a fixed exchange rate from a student's tuition and student's could use scrip to buy food, school supplies, books, and other items from the school store. Students could earn scrip through tutoring. To promote discipline, the school adopted a work-study model. Every job of the school was bid-for by students, with the largest bid winning. However, any student tutor could auction positions in his or her classes to earn scrip. The bids for student jobs paid for the adult supervision.
Lancaster promoted his system in a piece called Improvements in Education that spread widely throughout the English-speaking world. Lancaster schools provided a grammar-school education with fully developed internal economies for a cost per student near $40 per year in 1999 U.S. dollars. To reduce cost and motivated to save up scrip, Lancaster students rented individual pages of textbooks from the school library instead of purchasing the textbook. Student's would read aloud their pages to groups. Students commonly exchanged tutoring and paid for items and services with receipts from down tutoring.
The schools did not teach submission to orthodox Christian beliefs or government authorities. As a result, most English-speaking countries developed mandatory publicly paid education explicitly to keep public education in "responsible" hands. These elites said that Lancaster schools might become dishonest, provide poor education, and were not accountable to established authorities. Lancaster's supporters responded that any child could cheat given the opportunity, and that the government was not paying for the education and thus deserved no say in their composition.
Though motivated by charity, Lancaster claimed in his pamphlets to be surprised to find that he lived well on the income of his school, even while the low costs made it available to the most impoverished street children. Ironically, Lancaster lived on the charity of friends in his later life.
Modern reformist
Although educational reform occurred on a local level at various points throughout history, the modern notion of education reform is tied with the spread of compulsory education. Economic growth and the spread of democracy raised the value of education and increased the importance of ensuring that all children and adults have access to free, high-quality, effective education. Modern education reforms are increasingly driven by a growing understanding of what works in education and how to go about successfully improving teaching and learning in schools. However, in some cases, the reformers' goals of "high-quality education" has meant "high-intensity education", with a narrow emphasis on teaching individual, test-friendly subskills quickly, regardless of long-term outcomes, developmental appropriateness, or broader educational goals.
Horace Mann
In the United States, Horace Mann (1796 – 1859) of Massachusetts used his political base and role as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education to promote public education in his home state and nationwide. Advocating a substantial public investment be made in education, Mann and his proponents developed a strong system of state supported common schools..
His crusading style attracted wide middle class support. Historian Ellwood P. Cubberley asserts:
No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.
In 1852, Massachusetts passed a law making education mandatory. This model of free, accessible education spread throughout the country and in 1917 Mississippi was the final state to adopt the law.
John Dewey
John Dewey, a philosopher and educator based in Chicago and New York, helped conceptualize the role of American and international education during the first four decades of the 20th century. An important member of the American Pragmatist movement, he carried the subordination of knowledge to action into the educational world by arguing for experiential education that would enable children to learn theory and practice simultaneously; a well-known example is the practice of teaching elementary physics and biology to students while preparing a meal. He was a harsh critic of "dead" knowledge disconnected from practical human life.
Dewey criticized the rigidity and volume of humanistic education, and the emotional idealizations of education based on the child-study movement that had been inspired by Rousseau and those who followed him. Dewey understood that children are naturally active and curious and learn by doing. Dewey's understanding of logic is presented in his work "Logic, the Theory of Inquiry" (1938). His educational philosophies were presented in "My Pedagogic Creed", The School and Society, The Child and Curriculum, and Democracy and Education (1916). Bertrand Russell criticized Dewey's conception of logic, saying "What he calls "logic" does not seem to me to be part of logic at all; I should call it part of psychology."
Dewey left the University of Chicago in 1904 over issues relating to the Dewey School.
Dewey's influence began to decline in the time after the Second World War and particularly in the Cold War era, as more conservative educational policies came to the fore.
Administrative progressives
The form of educational progressivism which was most successful in having its policies implemented has been dubbed "administrative progressivism" by historians. This began to be implemented in the early 20th century. While influenced particularly in its rhetoric by Dewey and even more by his popularizers, administrative progressivism was in its practice much more influenced by the Industrial Revolution and the concept economies of scale.
The administrative progressives are responsible for many features of modern American education, especially American high schools: counseling programs, the move from many small local high schools to large centralized high schools, curricular differentiation in the form of electives and tracking, curricular, professional, and other forms of standardization, and an increase in state and federal regulation and bureaucracy, with a corresponding reduction of local control at the school board level. (Cf. "State, federal, and local control of education in the United States", below) (Tyack and Cuban, pp. 17–26)
These reforms have since become heavily entrenched, and many today who identify themselves as progressives are opposed to many of them, while conservative education reform during the Cold War embraced them as a framework for strengthening traditional curriculum and standards.
More recent methods, instituted by groups such as the think tank Reform's education division, and S.E.R. have attempted to pressure the government of the U.K. into more modernist educational reform, though this has met with limited success.
Public school reform in the United States
In the United States, public education is characterized as "any federally funded primary or secondary school, administered to some extent by the government, and charged with educating all citizens. Although there is typically a cost to attend some public higher education institutions, they are still considered part of public education."
Colonial America
In what would become the United States, the first public school was established in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 23, 1635. Puritan schoolmaster Philemon Pormont led instruction at the Boston Latin School. During this time, post-secondary education was a commonly utilized tool to distinguish one's social class and social status. Access to education was the "privilege of white, upper-class, Christian male children" in preparation for university education in ministry.
In colonial America, to maintain Puritan religious traditions, formal and informal education instruction focused on teaching literacy. All colonists needed to understand the written language on some fundamental level in order to read the Bible and the colony's written secular laws. Religious leaders recognized that each person should be "educated enough to meet the individual needs of their station in life and social harmony." The first compulsory education laws were passed in Massachusetts between 1642 and 1648 when religious leaders noticed not all parents were providing their children with proper education. These laws stated that all towns with 50 or more families were obligated to hire a schoolmaster to teach children reading, writing, and basic arithmetic."In 1642 the General Court passed a law that required heads of households to teach all their dependents — apprentices and servants as well as their own children — to read English or face a fine. Parents could provide the instruction themselves or hire someone else to do it. Selectmen were to keep 'a vigilant eye over their brethren and neighbors,' young people whose education was neglected could be removed from their parents or masters."The 1647 law eventually led to establishing publicly funded district schools in all Massachusetts towns, although, despite the threat of fines, compliance and quality of public schools were less than satisfactory."Many towns were 'shamefully neglectful' of children's education. In 1718 '...by sad experience, it is found that many towns that not only are obliged by law, but are very able to support a grammar school, yet choose rather to incur and pay the fine or penalty than maintain a grammar school."When John Adams drafted the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780, he included provisions for a comprehensive education law that guaranteed public education to "all" citizens. However, access to formal education in secondary schools and colleges was reserved for free, white males. During the 17th and 18th centuries, females received little or no formal education except for home learning or attending Dame Schools. Likewise, many educational institutions maintained a policy of refusing to admit Black applicants. The Virginia Code of 1819 outlawed teaching enslaved people to read or write.
Post-revolution
Soon after the American Revolution, early leaders, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, proposed the creation of a more "formal and unified system of publicly funded schools" to satiate the need to "build and maintain commerce, agriculture and shipping interests". Their concept of free public education was not well received and did not begin to take hold on until the 1830s. However, in 1790, evolving socio-cultural ideals in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania led to the first significant and systematic reform in education legislation that mandated economic conditions would not inhibit a child's access to education:"Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – 1790 ARTICLE VII Section I. The legislature shall, as soon as conveniently may be, provide, by law, for the establishment of schools throughout the state, in such manner that the poor may be taught gratis."
Reconstruction and the American Industrial Revolution
During Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, African Americans worked to encourage public education in the South. With the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that "segregated public facilities were constitutional so long as the black and white facilities were equal to each other", this meant that African American children were legally allowed to attend public schools, although these schools were still segregated based on race. However, by the mid-twentieth century, civil rights groups would challenge racial segregation.
During the second half of the nineteenth century (1870 and 1914), America's Industrial Revolution refocused the nation's attention on the need for a universally accessible public school system. Inventions, innovations, and improved production methods were critical to the continued growth of American manufacturing. To compete in the global economy, an overwhelming demand for literate workers that possessed practical training emerged. Citizens argued, "educating children of the poor and middle classes would prepare them to obtain good jobs, thereby strengthen the nation's economic position." Institutions became an essential tool in yielding ideal factory workers with sought-after attitudes and desired traits such as dependability, obedience, and punctuality. Vocationally oriented schools offered practical subjects like shop classes for students who were not planning to attend college for financial or other reasons. Not until the latter part of the 19th century did public elementary schools become available throughout the country. Although, it would be longer for children of color, girls, and children with special needs to attain access free public education.
Mid 20th and early 21st century (United states)
Civil rights reform
Systemic bias remained a formidable barrier. From the 1950s to the 1970s, many of the proposed and implemented reforms in U.S. education stemmed from the civil rights movement and related trends; examples include ending racial segregation, and busing for the purpose of desegregation, affirmative action, and banning of school prayer.
In the early 1950s, most U.S. public schools operated under a legally sanctioned racial segregation system. Civil Rights reform movements sought to address the biases that ensure unequal distribution of academic resources such as school funding, qualified and experienced teachers, and learning materials to those socially excluded communities. In the early 1950s, the NAACP lawyers brought class-action lawsuits on behalf of black schoolchildren and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, petitioning court orders to compel school districts to let black students attend white public schools. Finally, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that framework with Brown v. Board of Education and declared state-sponsored segregation of public schools unconstitutional.
In 1964, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act "prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance." Educational institutions could now utilize public funds to implement in-service training programs to assist teachers and administrators in establishing desegregation plans.
In 1965, the Higher Education Act (HEA) authorizes federal aid for postsecondary students.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) represents the federal government's commitment to providing equal access to quality education; including those children from low-income families, limited English proficiency, and other minority groups. This legislation had positive retroactive implications for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, more commonly known as HBCUs."The Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, defines an HBCU as: "…any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and that is accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association determined by the Secretary [of Education] to be a reliable authority as to the quality of training offered or is, according to such an agency or association, making reasonable progress toward accreditation."Known as the Bilingual Education Act, Title VII of ESEA, offered federal aid to school districts to provide bilingual instruction for students with limited English speaking ability.
The Education Amendments of 1972 (Public Law 92-318, 86 Stat. 327) establishes the Education Division in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the National Institute of Education. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 states, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 - Civil Rights Amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965:"Title I: Bilingual Education Act - Authorizes appropriations for carrying out the provisions of this Act. Establishes, in the Office of Education, an Office of Bilingual Education through which the Commissioner of Education shall carry out his functions relating to bilingual education. Authorizes appropriations for school nutrition and health services, correction education services, and ethnic heritage studies centers.
Title II: Equal Educational Opportunities and the Transportation of Students: Equal Educational Opportunities Act - Provides that no state shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin by means of specified practices...
Title IV: Consolidation of Certain Education Programs: Authorizes appropriations for use in various education programs including libraries and learning resources, education for use of the metric system of measurement, gifted and talented children programs, community schools, career education, consumers' education, women's equity in education programs, and arts in education programs.
Community Schools Act - Authorizes the Commissioner to make grants to local educational agencies to assist in planning, establishing, expanding, and operating community education programs
Women's Educational Equity Act - Establishes the Advisory Council on Women's Educational Programs and sets forth the composition of such Council. Authorizes the Commissioner of Education to make grants to, and enter into contracts with, public agencies, private nonprofit organizations, and individuals for activities designed to provide educational equity for women in the United States.
Title V: Education Administration: Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)- Provides that no funds shall be made available under the General Education Provisions Act to any State or local educational agency or educational institution which denies or prevents the parents of students to inspect and review all records and files regarding their children.
Title VII: National Reading Improvement Program: Authorizes the Commissioner to contract with State or local educational agencies for the carrying out by such agencies, in schools having large numbers of children with reading deficiencies, of demonstration projects involving the use of innovative methods, systems, materials, or programs which show promise of overcoming such reading deficiencies."In 1975, The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) ensured that all handicapped children (age 3-21) receive a "free, appropriate public education" designed to meet their special needs.
1980–1989: A Nation at Risk
During the 1980s, some of the momentum of education reform moved from the left to the right, with the release of A Nation at Risk, Ronald Reagan's efforts to reduce or eliminate the United States Department of Education. "[T]he federal government and virtually all state governments, teacher training institutions, teachers' unions, major foundations, and the mass media have all pushed strenuously for higher standards, greater accountability, more "time on task," and more impressive academic results".
Per the shift in educational motivation, families sought institutional alternatives, including "charter schools, progressive schools, Montessori schools, Waldorf schools, Afrocentric schools, religious schools - or home school instruction in their communities."
In 1984 President Reagan enacted the Education for Economic Security Act
In 1989, the Child Development and Education Act of 1989 authorized funds for Head Start Programs to include child care services.
In the latter half of the decade, E. D. Hirsch put forth an influential attack on one or more versions of progressive education. Advocating an emphasis on "cultural literacy"—the facts, phrases, and texts.
See also Uncommon Schools.
1990-1999: standards-based education model
In 1994, the land grant system was expanded via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to include tribal colleges.
Most states and districts in the 1990s adopted outcome-based education (OBE) in some form or another. A state would create a committee to adopt standards, and choose a quantitative instrument to assess whether the students knew the required content or could perform the required tasks.
In 1992 The National Commission on Time and Learning, Extension revise funding for civic education programs and those educationally disadvantaged children."
In 1994 the Improving America's Schools Act (IASA) reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965; amended as The Eisenhower Professional Development Program; IASA designated Title I funds for low income and otherwise marginalized groups; i.e., females, minorities, individuals with disabilities, individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP). By tethering federal funding distributions to student achievement, IASA meant use high stakes testing and curriculum standards to hold schools accountable for their results at the same level as other students. The Act significantly increased impact aid for the establishment of the Charter School Program, drug awareness campaigns, bilingual education, and technology.
In 1998 The Charter School Expansion Act amended the Charter School Program, enacted in 1994.
2000–2015: No Child Left Behind
Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2001 appropriated funding to repair educational institution's buildings as well as repair and renovate charter school facilities, reauthorized the Even Start program, and enacted the Children's Internet Protection Act.
The standards-based National Education Goals 2000, set by the U.S. Congress in the 1990s, were based on the principles of outcomes-based education. In 2002, the standards-based reform movement culminated as the No Child left Behind Act of 2001 where achievement standard were set by each individual state. This federal policy was active until 2015 in the United States .
An article released by CBNC.com said a principal Senate Committee will take into account legislation that reauthorizes and modernizes the Carl D. Perkins Act. President George Bush approved this statute in 2006 on August 12, 2006. This new bill will emphasize the importance of federal funding for various Career and Technical (CTE) programs that will better provide learners with in-demand skills. Pell Grants are specific amount of money is given by the government every school year for disadvantaged students who need to pay tuition fees in college.
At present, there are many initiatives aimed at dealing with these concerns like innovative cooperation between federal and state governments, educators, and the business sector. One of these efforts is the Pathways to Technology Early College High School (P-TECH). This six-year program was launched in cooperation with IBM, educators from three cities in New York, Chicago, and Connecticut, and over 400 businesses. The program offers students in high school and associate programs focusing on the STEM curriculum. The High School Involvement Partnership, private and public venture, was established through the help of Northrop Grumman, a global security firm. It has given assistance to some 7,000 high school students (juniors and seniors) since 1971 by means of one-on-one coaching as well as exposure to STEM areas and careers.
2016–2021: Every Student Succeeds Act
The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, enacted in 2009, reserved more than $85 billion in public funds to be used for education.
The 2009 Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association launch the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
In 2012 the Obama administration launched the Race to the Top competition aimed at spurring K–12 education reform through higher standards."The Race to the Top – District competition will encourage transformative change within schools, targeted toward leveraging, enhancing, and improving classroom practices and resources.
The four key areas of reform include:
Development of rigorous standards and better assessments
Adoption of better data systems to provide schools, teachers, and parents with information about student progress
Support for teachers and school leaders to become more effective
Increased emphasis and resources for the rigorous interventions needed to turn around the lowest-performing schools"In 2015, under the Obama administration, many of the more restrictive elements that were enacted under No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2001), were removed in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) which limits the role of the federal government in school liability. Every Student Succeeds Act reformed educational standards by "moving away from such high stakes and assessment based accountability models" and focused on assessing student achievement from a holistic approach by utilizing qualitative measures. Some argue that giving states more authority can help prevent considerable discrepancies in educational performance across different states. ESSA was approved by former President Obama in 2015 which amended and empowered the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The Department of Education has the choice to carry out measures in drawing attention to said differences by pinpointing lowest-performing state governments and supplying information on the condition and progress of each state on different educational parameters. It can also provide reasonable funding along with technical aid to help states with similar demographics collaborate in improving their public education programs.
Social and emotional learning: strengths-based education model
This uses a methodology that values purposeful engagement in activities that turn students into self-reliant and efficient learners. Holding on to the view that everyone possesses natural gifts that are unique to one's personality (e.g. computational aptitude, musical talent, visual arts abilities), it likewise upholds the idea that children, despite their inexperience and tender age, are capable of coping with anguish, able to survive hardships, and can rise above difficult times.
Trump administration
In 2017, Betsy DeVos was instated as the 11th Secretary of Education. A strong proponent of school choice, school voucher programs, and charter schools, DeVos was a much-contested choice as her own education and career had little to do with formal experience in the US education system. In a Republican-dominated senate, she received a 50–50 vote - a tie that was broken by Vice President Mike Pence. Prior to her appointment, DeVos received a BA degree in business economics from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and she served as chairman of an investment management firm, The Windquest Group. She supported the idea of leaving education to state governments under the new K-12 legislation. DeVos cited the interventionist approach of the federal government to education policy following the signing of the ESSA. The primary approach to that rule has not changed significantly. Her opinion was that the education movement populist politics or populism encouraged reformers to commit promises which were not very realistic and therefore difficult to deliver.
On July 31, 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (HR 2353) The Act reauthorized the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, a $1.2 billion program modified by the United States Congress in 2006. A move to change the Higher Education Act was also deferred.
The legislation enacted on July 1, 2019, replaced the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education (Perkins IV) Act of 2006. Stipulations in Perkins V enables school districts to make use of federal subsidies for all students' career search and development activities in the middle grades as well as comprehensive guidance and academic mentoring in the upper grades. At the same time, this law revised the meaning of "special populations" to include homeless persons, foster youth, those who left the foster care system, and children with parents on active duty in the United States armed forces.
Barriers to reform
Education inequalities facing students of color
Another factor to consider in education reform is that of equity and access. Contemporary issues in the United States regarding education faces a history of inequalities that come with consequences for education attainment across different social groups.
Racial and socioeconomic class segregation
A history of racial, and subsequently class, segregation in the U.S. resulted from practices of law. Residential segregation is a direct result of twentieth century policies that separated by race using zoning and redlining practices, in addition to other housing policies, whose effects continue to endure in the United States. These neighborhoods that have been segregated de jure—by force of purposeful public policy at the federal, state, and local levels—disadvantage people of color as students must attend school near their homes.
With the inception of the New Deal between 1933 and 1939, and during and following World War II, federally funded public housing was explicitly racially segregated by the local government in conjunction with federal policies through projects that were designated for Whites or Black Americans in the South, Northeast, Midwest, and West. Following an ease on the housing shortage post-World War II, the federal government subsidized the relocation of Whites to suburbs. The Federal Housing and Veterans Administration constructed such developments on the East Coast in towns like Levittown on Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. On the West Coast, there was Panorama City, Lakewood, Westlake, and Seattle suburbs developed by Bertha and William Boeing. As White families left for the suburbs, Black families remained in public housing and were explicitly placed in Black neighborhoods. Policies such as public housing director, Harold Ickes', "neighborhood composition rule" maintained this segregation by establishing that public housing must not interfere with pre-existing racial compositions of neighborhoods. Federal loan guarantees were given to builders who adhered to the condition that no sales were made to Black families and each deed prohibited re-sales to Black families, what the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) described as an "incompatible racial element". In addition, banks and savings intuitions refused loans to Black families in White suburbs and Black families in Black neighborhoods. In the mid-twentieth century, urban renewal programs forced low-income black residents to reside in places farther from universities, hospitals, or business districts and relocation options consisted of public housing high-rises and ghettos.
This history of de jure segregation has impacted resource allocation for public education in the United States, with schools continuing to be segregated by race and class. Low-income White students are more likely than Black students to be integrated into middle-class neighborhoods and less likely to attend schools with other predominantly disadvantaged students. Students of color disproportionately attend underfunded schools and Title I schools in environments entrenched in environmental pollution and stagnant economic mobility with limited access to college readiness resources. According to research, schools attended by primarily Hispanic or African American students often have high turnover of teaching staff and are labeled high-poverty schools, in addition to having limited educational specialists, less available extracurricular opportunities, greater numbers of provisionally licensed teachers, little access to technology, and buildings that are not well maintained. With this segregation, more local property tax is allocated to wealthier communities and public schools' dependence on local property taxes has led to large disparities in funding between neighboring districts. The top 10% of wealthiest school districts spend approximately ten times more per student than the poorest 10% of school districts.
Racial wealth gap
This history of racial and socioeconomic class segregation in the U.S. has manifested into a racial wealth divide. With this history of geographic and economic segregation, trends illustrate a racial wealth gap that has impacted educational outcomes and its concomitant economic gains for minorities. Wealth or net worth—the difference between gross assets and debt—is a stock of financial resources and a significant indicator of financial security that offers a more complete measure of household capability and functioning than income. Within the same income bracket, the chance of completing college differs for White and Black students. Nationally, White students are at least 11% more likely to complete college across all four income groups. Intergenerational wealth is another result of this history, with White college-educated families three times as likely as Black families to get an inheritance of $10,000 or more. 10.6% of White children from low-income backgrounds and 2.5% of Black children from low-income backgrounds reach the top 20% of income distribution as adults. Less than 10% of Black children from low-income backgrounds reach the top 40%.
Access to early childhood education
These disadvantages facing students of color are apparent early on in early childhood education. By the age of five, children of color are impacted by opportunity gaps indicated by poverty, school readiness gap, segregated low-income neighborhoods, implicit bias, and inequalities within the justice system as Hispanic and African American boys account for as much as 60% of total prisoners within the incarceration population. These populations are also more likely to experience adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
High-quality early care and education are less accessible to children of color, particularly African American preschoolers as findings from the National Center for Education Statistics show that in 2013, 40% of Hispanic and 36% White children were enrolled in learning center-based classrooms rated as high, while 25% of African American children were enrolled in these programs. 15% of African American children attended low ranking center-based classrooms. In home-based settings, 30% of White children and over 50% of Hispanic and African American children attended low rated programs.
Contemporary issues (United States)
Overview
In the first decade of the 21st century, several issues are salient in debates over further education reform:
Longer school day or school year
After-school tutoring
Charter schools, school choice, or school vouchers
Smaller class sizes
Improved teacher quality
Improved training
Higher credential standards
Generally higher pay to attract more qualified applicants
Performance bonuses ("merit pay")
Firing low-performing teachers
Internet and computer access in schools
Track and reduce drop-out rate
Track and reduce absenteeism
English-only vs. bilingual education
Mainstreaming or fully including students with special educational needs, rather than placing them in separate special schools
Content of curriculum standards and textbooks
What to teach, at what age, and to which students. Discussion points include the age at which children should learn to read, and the primary mathematical subject that is taught to adolescents – algebra, or statistics or personal finances.
Funding, neglected infrastructure, and adequacy of educational supplies
Student rights
Education inequalities facing students of color
Private interest in American charter schools
Charter schools public independent institutions in which both the cost and risk are fully funded by the taxpayers. Some charter schools are nonprofit in name only and are structured in ways that individuals and private enterprises connected to them can make money. Other charter schools are for-profit. In many cases, the public is largely unaware of this rapidly changing educational landscape, the debate between public and private/market approaches, and the decisions that are being made that affect their children and communities. Critics have accused for-profit entities, (education management organizations, EMOs) and private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation of funding Charter school initiatives to undermine public education and turn education into a "Business Model" which can make a profit. In some cases a school's charter is held by a non-profit that chooses to contract all of the school's operations to a third party, often a for-profit, CMO. This arrangement is defined as a vendor-operated school, (VOS).
School choice
Economists, such as the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, advocate for school choice to promote excellence in education through competition and choice. Proponents claim that a competitive market for schooling provides a workable method of accountability for results. Public education vouchers permit guardians to select and pay any school, public or private, with public funds that were formerly allocated directly to local public schools. The theory is that children's guardians will naturally shop for the best schools for their children, much as is already done at college level.
Many reforms based on school choice have led to slight to moderate improvements. Some teachers' union members see those improvements as insufficient to offset the decreased teacher pay and job security. For instance, New Zealand's landmark reform in 1989, during which schools were granted substantial autonomy, funding was devolved to schools, and parents were given a free choice of which school their children would attend, led to moderate improvements in most schools. It was argued that the associated increases in inequity and greater racial stratification in schools nullified the educational gains. Others, however, argued that the original system created more inequity, due to lower income students being required to attend poorer performing inner city schools and not being allowed school choice or better educations that are available to higher income inhabitants of suburbs. Thus, it was argued that school choice promoted social mobility and increased test scores, especially in the cases of low income students. Similar results have been found in other jurisdictions. The small improvements produced by some school choice policies seem to reflect weaknesses in the ways that choice is implemented, rather than a failure of the basic principle itself.
Teacher tenure
Critics of teacher tenure claim that the laws protect ineffective teachers from being fired, which can be detrimental to student success. Tenure laws vary from state to state, but generally they set a probationary period during which the teacher proves themselves worthy of the lifelong position. Probationary periods range from one to three years. Advocates for tenure reform often consider these periods too short to make such an important decision; especially when that decision is exceptionally hard to revoke. Due process restriction protect tenured teachers from being wrongfully fired; however these restrictions can also prevent administrators from removing ineffective or inappropriate teachers. A 2008 survey conducted by the US Department of Education found that, on average, only 2.1% of teachers are dismissed each year for poor performance.
In October 2010 Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs had a consequential meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss U.S. competitiveness and the nation's education system. During the meeting Jobs recommended pursuing policies that would make it easier for school principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit.
In 2012 tenure for school teachers was challenged in a California lawsuit called Vergara v. California. The primary issue in the case was the impact of tenure on student outcomes and on equity in education. On June 10, 2014, the trial judge ruled that California's teacher tenure statute produced disparities that "shock the conscience" and violate the equal protection clause of the California Constitution.
Funding levels
According to a 2005 report from the OECD, the United States is tied for first place with Switzerland when it comes to annual spending per student on its public schools, with each of those two countries spending more than $11,000 (in U.S. currency).
Despite this high level of funding, U.S. public schools lag behind the schools of other rich countries in the areas of reading, math, and science. A further analysis of developed countries shows no correlation between per student spending and student performance, suggesting that there are other factors influencing education. Top performers include Singapore, Finland and Korea, all with relatively low spending on education, while high spenders including Norway and Luxembourg have relatively low performance. One possible factor is the distribution of the funding.
In the US, schools in wealthy areas tend to be over-funded while schools in poorer areas tend to be underfunded. These differences in spending between schools or districts may accentuate inequalities, if they result in the best teachers moving to teach in the most wealthy areas. The inequality between districts and schools led to 23 states instituting school finance reform based on adequacy standards that aim to increase funding to low-income districts. A 2018 study found that between 1990 and 2012, these finance reforms led to an increase in funding and test scores in the low income districts; which suggests finance reform is effective at bridging inter-district performance inequalities. It has also been shown that the socioeconomic situation of the students family has the most influence in determining success; suggesting that even if increased funds in a low income area increase performance, they may still perform worse than their peers from wealthier districts.
Starting in the early 1980s, a series of analyses by Eric Hanushek indicated that the amount spent on schools bore little relationship to student learning. This controversial argument, which focused attention on how money was spent instead of how much was spent, led to lengthy scholarly exchanges. In part the arguments fed into the class size debates and other discussions of "input policies." It also moved reform efforts towards issues of school accountability (including No Child Left Behind) and the use of merit pay and other incentives.
There have been studies that show smaller class sizes and newer buildings (both of which require higher funding to implement) lead to academic improvements. It should also be noted that many of the reform ideas that stray from the traditional format require greater funding.
According to a 1999 article, William J. Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, argued that increased levels of spending on public education have not made the schools better, citing the following statistics:
Internationally
Education for All
EDUCATION FOR ALL THROUGHOUT LIFE
The EFA Assessment 2000 was launched in July 1998 with an aim to help countries to identify both problems and prospects for further progress of EFA, and to strengthen their capacity to improve and monitor the provision and outcomes of basic education. Some 179 countries set up National Assessment Groups which collected quantitative data focusing on eighteen core indicators and carried out case-studies to collect qualitative information.
Education 2030 Agenda refers to the global commitment of the Education for All movement to ensure access to basic education for all. It is an essential part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The roadmap to achieve the Agenda is the Education 2030 Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action, which outlines how countries, working with UNESCO and global partners, can translate commitments into action.
The United Nations, over 70 ministers, representatives of member-countries, bilateral and multilateral agencies, regional organizations, academic institutions, teachers, civil society, and the youth supported the Framework for Action of the Education 2030 platform. The Framework was described as the outcome of continuing consultation to provide guidance for countries in implementing this Agenda. At the same time, it mobilizes various stakeholders in the new education objectives, coordination, implementation process, funding, and review of Education 2030.
Thailand
In 1995, the minister of education, Sukavich Rangsitpol, launched a series of education reforms in 1995 with the intention of the education reform is to realize the potential of Thai people to develop themselves for a better quality of life and to develop the nation for a peaceful co-existence in the global community.
Since December 1995, activities have been conducted in four main areas:
· School reform. Efforts have been stepped up to standardize the quality of education in all levels and types of schools and educational institutions. Educational coverage has been expanded.
· Teacher reform. Training and recruitment of teachers have been reformed urgently and comprehensively both in public and private schools. Educational administrators and personnel have been developed continuously.
Curriculum reform. Curriculum and teaching-learning processes have been reformed on an urgent basis in order to raise educational quality of all types and levels.
· Administrative reform. Through devolution, educational institutions have been empowered to make administrative decisions and to offer appropriate educational services which are as consistent as possible with the local lifestyle and conditions. Provincial organizations have been strengthened to facilitate devolution while private participation of the family and community have been promoted and supported.
School-based management (SBM) in Thailand implemented in 1997 in the course of a reform aimed at overcoming a profound crisis in the educación system.
Establish effective Provincial Education Councils with strong community membership. The purpose of decentralization is to ensure that local education needs are met, there should be a close relationship between community representatives and officials . Thus, decentralization will require a careful balance between the guidance of community selected representatives and government officials. To representing local needs and priorities.
The 1995 Education Reform results in 40,000 schools under the Education Reform in 1997. Project were required to improve their school environment and encourage the local community to be involved in school administration and management.
Those schools could later accepted 4.35 students aged between 3-17years old from poor families in remote areas .Thereafter Thailand was successfully established Education For All (EFA). Thus, Thailand received 1997 ACEID awards for excellence in education from UNESCO in 1997
According to UNESCO, Thailand education reform has led to the following results:
The educational budget increased from 133 billion baht in 1996 to 163 billion baht in 1997 (22.5% increase)
Since 1996, first grade students have been taught English as a second or foreign language and computer literacy.
Professional advancement from teacher level 6 to teacher level 7 without having to submit academic work for consideration was approved by the Thai government.
Free 12 years education for all children provided by the government. The Eighth Thailand's National Social and Economic Development Plan was also written to support the implemented of education reform program. This program was later added to the 1997 Constitution of Thailand and gave access to all citizens.
World Bank report that after the 1997 Asian financial crisis Income in the northeast, the poorest part of Thailand, has risen by 46 percent from 1998 to 2006. Nationwide poverty fell from 21.3 to 11.3 percent.
Learning crisis
The learning crisis is the reality that while the majority of children around the world attend school, a large proportion of them are not learning. A World Bank study found that "53 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school." While schooling has increased rapidly over the last few decades, learning has not followed suit. Many practitioners and academics call for education system reform in order to address the learning needs of all children.
Digital education
The movement to use computers more in education naturally includes many unrelated ideas, methods, and pedagogies since there are many uses for digital computers. For example, the fact that computers are naturally good at math leads to the question of the use of calculators in math education. The Internet's communication capabilities make it potentially useful for collaboration, and foreign language learning. The computer's ability to simulate physical systems makes it potentially useful in teaching science. More often, however, debate of digital education reform centers around more general applications of computers to education, such as electronic test-taking and online classes.
Another viable addition to digital education has been blended learning. In 2009, over 3 million K-12 students took an online course, compared to 2000 when 45,000 took an online course. Blended learning examples include pure online, blended, and traditional education. Research results show that the most effective learning takes place in a blended format. This allows children to view the lecture ahead of time and then spend class time practicing, refining, and applying what they have previously learned.
The idea of creating artificial intelligence led some computer scientists to believe that teachers could be replaced by computers, through something like an expert system; however, attempts to accomplish this have predictably proved inflexible. The computer is now more understood to be a tool or assistant for the teacher and students.
Harnessing the richness of the Internet is another goal. In some cases classrooms have been moved entirely online, while in other instances the goal is more to learn how the Internet can be more than a classroom.
Web-based international educational software is under development by students at New York University, based on the belief that current educational institutions are too rigid: effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not predictable or standardized. The software allows for courses tailored to an individual's abilities through frequent and automatic multiple intelligences assessments. Ultimate goals include assisting students to be intrinsically motivated to educate themselves, and aiding the student in self-actualization. Courses typically taught only in college are being reformatted so that they can be taught to any level of student, whereby elementary school students may learn the foundations of any topic they desire. Such a program has the potential to remove the bureaucratic inefficiencies of education in modern countries, and with the decreasing digital divide, help developing nations rapidly achieve a similar quality of education. With an open format similar to Wikipedia, any teacher may upload their courses online and a feedback system will help students choose relevant courses of the highest quality. Teachers can provide links in their digital courses to webcast videos of their lectures. Students will have personal academic profiles and a forum will allow students to pose complex questions, while simpler questions will be automatically answered by the software, which will bring you to a solution by searching through the knowledge database, which includes all available courses and topics.
The 21st century ushered in the acceptance and encouragement of internet research conducted on college and university campuses, in homes, and even in gathering areas of shopping centers. Addition of cyber cafes on campuses and coffee shops, loaning of communication devices from libraries, and availability of more portable technology devices, opened up a world of educational resources. Availability of knowledge to the elite had always been obvious, yet provision of networking devices, even wireless gadget sign-outs from libraries, made availability of information an expectation of most persons. Cassandra B. Whyte researched the future of computer use on higher education campuses focusing on student affairs. Though at first seen as a data collection and outcome reporting tool, the use of computer technology in the classrooms, meeting areas, and homes continued to unfold. The sole dependence on paper resources for subject information diminished and e-books and articles, as well as online courses, were anticipated to become increasingly staple and affordable choices provided by higher education institutions according to Whyte in a 2002 presentation.
Digitally "flipping" classrooms is a trend in digital education that has gained significant momentum. Will Richardson, author and visionary for the digital education realm, points to the not-so-distant future and the seemingly infinite possibilities for digital communication linked to improved education. Education on the whole, as a stand-alone entity, has been slow to embrace these changes. The use of web tools such as wikis, blogs, and social networking sites is tied to increasing overall effectiveness of digital education in schools. Examples exist of teacher and student success stories where learning has transcended the classroom and has reached far out into society.
The media has been instrumental in pushing formal educational institutions to become savvier in their methods. Additionally, advertising has been (and continues to be) a vital force in shaping students and parents thought patterns.
Technology is a dynamic entity that is constantly in flux. As time presses on, new technologies will continue to break paradigms that will reshape human thinking regarding technological innovation. This concept stresses a certain disconnect between teachers and learners and the growing chasm that started some time ago. Richardson asserts that traditional classroom's will essentially enter entropy unless teachers increase their comfort and proficiency with technology.
Administrators are not exempt from the technological disconnect. They must recognize the existence of a younger generation of teachers who were born during the Digital Age and are very comfortable with technology. However, when old meets new, especially in a mentoring situation, conflict seems inevitable. Ironically, the answer to the outdated mentor may be digital collaboration with worldwide mentor webs; composed of individuals with creative ideas for the classroom.
See also
Anti-schooling activism
Blab school
Block scheduling
Certificate of Initial Mastery
Criterion-referenced test
Educational philosophies
Female education
High school graduation examination
Higher-order thinking
Inquiry-based Science
Learning crisis
Learning environment
Learning space
Merit pay
Multiculturalism
Political correctness
Project-based learning
Special Assistance Program
Student-centered learning
Sudbury model democratic schools
Sudbury Valley School
Teaching for social justice
University reform
Web literacy
References
Sources
Further reading
Comer, J.P. (1997). Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can't Solve Our Problems- and How We Can. New York: Penguin Books.
Cuban, L. (2003). Why Is It So Hard to Get Good Schools? New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.
Darling-Hammond, Linda. (1997) The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work. Jossey-Bass.
Dewey, J. and Dewey, E. (1915). Schools of To-morrow. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company.
Gatto, John Taylor (1992). Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Canada: New Society Publishers.
Glazek, S.D. and Sarason, S.B. (2007). Productive Learning: Science, Art, and Einstein's Relativity in Education Reform. New York: Sage Publications, Inc.
Goodland, J.I. and Anderson, R.H. (1959 and 1987). The Nongraded Elementary School. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
James, Laurie. (1994) Outrageous Questions: Legacy of Bronson Alcott and America's One-Room Schools New York.
Katz, M.B. (1971). Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Kliebard, Herbert. (1987) The Struggle for the American Curriculum. New York : Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kohn, A. (1999). The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and 'Tougher Standards. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Murphy, J.H. and Beck, L.G. (1995). School-Based Management as
Ravitch, D. (1988). The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Sarason, S.B. (1996). Revisiting 'The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change. New York: Teachers College Press.
Sarason, S.B. (1990). The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform: Can We Change Course Before Its Too Late? San Francisco: Josey-Bass, Inc.
Sizer, T.R. (1984). Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Tough, Paul. (2008). Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Tough, Paul. (2012). How Children Succeed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Tyack, David and Cuban, Larry. (1995) Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zwaagstra, Michael; Clifton, Rodney; and Long, John. (2010) What's Wrong with Our Schools: and How We Can Fix Them''. Rowman & Littlefield.
External links
Education issues
History of education | 0.780444 | 0.992081 | 0.774264 |
Social anthropology | Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
Comparison with cultural anthropology
The term cultural anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, are oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of people. Social anthropology is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion, give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.
Topics of interest for social anthropologists have included customs, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption and exchange, kinship and family structure, gender relations, childbearing and socialization, religion, while present-day social anthropologists are also concerned with issues of globalism, ethnic violence, gender studies, transnationalism and local experience, and the emerging cultures of cyberspace, and can also help with bringing opponents together when environmental concerns come into conflict with economic developments.
British and American anthropologists including Gillian Tett and Karen Ho who studied Wall Street provided an alternative explanation for the financial crisis of 2007–2010 to the technical explanations rooted in economic and political theory.
Differences among British, French, and American sociocultural anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and borrowing of both theory and methods. Social and cultural anthropologists, and some who integrate the two, are found in most institutes of anthropology. Thus the formal names of institutional units no longer necessarily reflect fully the content of the disciplines these cover. Some, such as the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford), changed their name to reflect the change in composition; others, such as Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, became simply Anthropology. Most retain the name under which they were founded.
Long-term qualitative research, including intensive field studies (emphasizing participant observation methods), has been traditionally encouraged in social anthropology rather than quantitative analysis of surveys, questionnaires and brief field visits typically used by economists, political scientists, and (most) sociologists.
Comparison and intersection with cognitive anthropology
Cognitive anthropology studies how people represent and think about events and objects in the world. It links human thought processes and the physical and ideational aspects of culture. The scopes of these two disciplines intersect in the field of cognitive development. The following part of the section shows the significance of their co-research for understanding the processes that constitute society.
According to Sir Edward Tylor: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” The cultural consensus principle is incorporated in the reasoning behind the cultural consonance model and other similar models (see cognitive anthropology) that seek to evaluate the effects of shared cognitive structures on social life and the human condition beginning from the onset of cognitive development. The major part of social and cognitive anthropology concepts (e.g., Cultural consonance, Cultural models, Knowledge structures, Shared knowledge etc.) seem to rely upon broad pervasive, unaware interactions between society members. Research shows that unconscious remembering increases recall efficiency over time and yields greater confidence in that thought. According to the received view in cognitive sciences, cognition begins from birth (and even from prenatal) due to motive forces of shared intentionality: unaware knowledge assimilation. Therefore, mechanisms of unaware interactions at the onset of life, one of the focuses of research in cognitive sciences, have become the central research issue in social and cognitive anthropology.
Another intersection of these two disciplines appears in neuroscience research. Behavioral propensities (an exteriorization of Cultural models, Schemata, etc.; see key concepts of cognitive anthropology) are the product of biological and cultural factors that manifest in individual brain development, neural wiring, and neurochemical homeostasis. According to received view in neuroscience, an observed human behavior, in any context, is the last event in a long chain of biological and cultural interactions. The brain´s anatomy is subject to neuroplasticity and depends on both, contextual (cultural) and historically dependent (previous experience) mechanisms to shape the neural system. By bridging sociology with anthropology and cognitive science perspectives, we can assess shared cultural knowledge – understand processes underlying unspoken social norms and beliefs, as well as study processes of shaping individual values that together constitute societies.
Focus and practice
Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such as economics or political science by its holistic range and the attention it gives to the comparative diversity of societies and cultures across the world, and the capacity this gives the discipline to re-examine Euro-American assumptions. It is differentiated from sociology, both in its main methods (based on long-term participant observation and linguistic competence), and in its commitment to the relevance and illumination provided by micro studies. It extends beyond strictly social phenomena to culture, art, individuality, and cognition. Many social anthropologists use quantitative methods, too, particularly those whose research touches on topics such as local economies, demography, human ecology, cognition, or health and illness.
Specializations
Specializations within social anthropology shift as its objects of study are transformed and as new intellectual paradigms appear; musicology and medical anthropology are examples of current, well-defined specialities. More recent and currently specializations are:
cognitive development – neuroscience research for the neuroplasticity and the shared intentionality approach to the extended mind thesis: the anthropological analysis of ecological learning in cognitive development;
social and ethical understandings of novel technologies – the way anthropologists analyze everyday life, cultural reproduction, and human evolution;
kinship – emergent forms of "the family" and other new socialities modelled on kinship;
postsocialism crisis – the ongoing social fall-out of the demise of state socialism;
the politics of resurgent religiosity; and
audit cultures – analysis of audit cultures and accountability.
The subject has been enlivened by, and has contributed to, approaches from other disciplines, such as philosophy (ethics, phenomenology, logic), the history of science, psychoanalysis, and linguistics.
Ethical considerations
The subject has both ethical and reflexive dimensions. Practitioners have developed an awareness of the sense in which scholars create their objects of study and the ways in which anthropologists themselves may contribute to processes of change in the societies they study. An example of this is the "hawthorne effect", whereby those being studied may alter their behaviour in response to the knowledge that they are being watched and studied.
History
Social anthropology has historical roots in a number of 19th-century disciplines, including the study of Classics, ethnography, ethnology, folklore, linguistics, and sociology, among others. Its immediate precursor took shape in the work of Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer in the late 19th century and underwent major changes in both method and theory during the period 1890–1920 with a new emphasis on original fieldwork, long-term holistic study of social behavior in natural settings, and the introduction of French and German social theory.
Polish anthropologist and ethnographer Bronisław Malinowski, one of the most important influences on British social anthropology, emphasized long-term fieldwork in which anthropologists work in the vernacular and immerse themselves in the daily practices of local people. This development was bolstered by Franz Boas' introduction of the concept of cultural relativism, arguing that cultures are based on different ideas about the world and can therefore only be properly understood in terms of their own standards and values.
Museums such as the British Museum weren't the only site of anthropological studies; with the New Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories", especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions" or "Negro villages". Thus, "savages" from the Americas, Africa and Asia were displayed, often nude, in cages, in what has been termed "human zoos". In 1906, Congolese pygmy Ota Benga was put by American anthropologist Madison Grant in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, labelled "the missing link" between an orangutan and the "White race"—Grant, a renowned eugenicist, was also the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the validity of scientific racism, whose first formulation may be found in Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia in the "indigenous village"; it received 24 million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such "human zoos".
Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history and by the end of the 19th century the discipline began to crystallize into its modern form—by 1935, for example, it was possible for T. K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled A Hundred Years of Anthropology. At the time, the field was dominated by "the comparative method". It was assumed that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process from the most primitive to most advanced. Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary "living fossils" that could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations which were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. It was during this time that Europeans first accurately traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean for instance—although some of them believed it originated in Egypt. Finally, the concept of race was actively discussed as a way to classify—and rank—human beings based on difference.
Tylor and Frazer
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) and James George Frazer (1854–1941) are generally considered the antecedents to modern social anthropologists in Great Britain. Although the British anthropologist Tylor undertook a field trip to Mexico, both he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative studies through extensive reading, not fieldwork, mainly the Classics (literature and history of Ancient Greece and Rome), the work of the early European folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and contemporaneous ethnologists.
Tylor advocated strongly for unilinealism and a form of "uniformity of mankind". Tylor in particular laid the groundwork for theories of cultural diffusionism, stating that there are three ways that different groups can have similar cultural forms or technologies: "independent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, transmission from one race to another."
Tylor formulated one of the early and influential anthropological conceptions of culture as "that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [humans] as [members] of society." However, as Stocking notes, Tylor mainly concerned himself with describing and mapping the distribution of particular elements of culture, rather than with the larger function, and he generally seemed to assume a Victorian idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional, multilineal cultural change proposed by later anthropologists. Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious beliefs in human beings, proposing a theory of animism as the earliest stage, and noting that "religion" has many components, of which he believed the most important to be belief in supernatural beings (as opposed to moral systems, cosmology, etc.).
Frazer, a Scottish scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned himself with the study of religion, mythology, and magic. His comparative studies, most influentially in the numerous editions of The Golden Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism globally. Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were particularly interested in fieldwork, nor were they interested in examining how the cultural elements and institutions fit together. The Golden Bough was abridged drastically in subsequent editions after his first.
Malinowski and the British School
Toward the turn of the 20th century, a number of anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem increasingly speculative to them. Under the influence of several younger scholars, a new approach came to predominate among British anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how societies held together in the present (synchronic analysis, rather than diachronic or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several years) immersion fieldwork. Cambridge University financed a multidisciplinary expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898, organized by Alfred Cort Haddon and including a physician-anthropologist, William Rivers, as well as a linguist, a botanist, and other specialists. The findings of the expedition set new standards for ethnographic description.
A decade and a half later, the Polish anthropology student Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) was beginning what he expected to be a brief period of fieldwork in the old model, collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First World War stranded him in New Guinea. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British colonial possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for several years.
He made use of the time by undertaking far more intensive fieldwork than had been done by anthropologists, and his classic ethnographical work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach to fieldwork that became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view" through participant observation. Theoretically, he advocated a functionalist interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned to satisfy individual needs.
1920s–1940
Modern social anthropology was founded in Britain at the London School of Economics and Political Science following World War I. Influences include both the methodological revolution pioneered by Bronisław Malinowski's process-oriented fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918 and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's theoretical program for systematic comparison that was based on a conception of rigorous fieldwork and the structure-functionalist conception of Durkheim’s sociology. Other intellectual founders include W. H. R. Rivers and A. C. Haddon, whose orientation reflected the contemporary Parapsychologies of Wilhelm Wundt and Adolf Bastian, and Sir E. B. Tylor, who defined anthropology as a positivist science following Auguste Comte. Edmund Leach (1962) defined social anthropology as a kind of comparative micro-sociology based on intensive fieldwork studies. Scholars have not settled a theoretical orthodoxy on the nature of science and society, and their tensions reflect views which are seriously opposed.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had carried out his initial fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However, after reading the work of French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research (entitled simply The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he developed an approach known as structural functionalism, which focused on how institutions in societies worked to balance out or create an equilibrium in the social system to keep it functioning harmoniously. His structuralist approach contrasted with Malinowski's functionalism, and was quite different from the later French structuralism, which examined the conceptual structures in language and symbolism.
Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence stemmed from the fact that they, like Boas, actively trained students and aggressively built up institutions that furthered their programmatic ambitions. This was particularly the case with Radcliffe-Brown, who spread his agenda for "Social Anthropology" by teaching at universities across the British Empire and Commonwealth. From the late 1930s until the postwar period appeared a string of monographs and edited volumes that cemented the paradigm of British Social Anthropology (BSA). Famous ethnographies include The Nuer, by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi, by Meyer Fortes; well-known edited volumes include African Systems of Kinship and Marriage and African Political Systems.
Post-World War II trends
Following World War II, sociocultural anthropology as comprised by the fields of ethnography and ethnology diverged into an American school of cultural anthropology while social anthropology diversified in Europe by challenging the principles of structure-functionalism, absorbing ideas from Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism and from the followers of Max Gluckman, and embracing the study of conflict, change, urban anthropology, and networks. Together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and students at Manchester University, collectively known as the Manchester School, took BSA in new directions through their introduction of explicitly Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis on conflicts and conflict resolution, and their attention to the ways in which individuals negotiate and make use of the social structural possibilities. During this period Gluckman was also involved in a dispute with American anthropologist Paul Bohannan on ethnographic methodology within the anthropological study of law. He believed that indigenous terms used in ethnographic data should be translated into Anglo-American legal terms for the benefit of the reader. The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth was founded in 1946.
In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual impact, it "contributed to the erosion of Christianity, the growth of cultural relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in modern life, and the replacement of diachronic modes of analysis with synchronic, all of which are central to modern culture." Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund Leach and his students Mary Douglas and Nur Yalman, among others, introduced French structuralism in the style of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In countries of the British Commonwealth, social anthropology has often been institutionally separate from physical anthropology and primatology, which may be connected with departments of biology and zoology; and from archaeology, which may be connected with departments of Classics, Egyptology, Oriental studies, and the like. In other countries (and in some, particularly smaller, British and North American universities), anthropologists have also found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of cultural studies, ethnic studies, folklore, human geography, museum studies, sociology, social relations, and social work. British anthropology has continued to emphasize social organization and economics over purely symbolic or literary topics.
1980s to present
The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was founded in 1989 as a society of scholarship at a meeting of founder members from fourteen European countries, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The Association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennial conferences and by editing its academic journal, Social Anthropology/Anthropologies Social. Departments of Social Anthropology at different universities have tended to focus on disparate aspects of the field, and can be found in several universities around the world. The field of social anthropology has expanded in ways not anticipated by the founders of the field, as for example in the subfield of structure and dynamics.
Anthropologists associated with social anthropology
Andre Beteille
Aleksandar Boskovic
Edmund Snow Carpenter
Philippe Descola
Mary Douglas
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Raymond Firth
Rosemary Firth
Meyer Fortes
Ernest Gellner
Stephen D. Glazier
Jack Goody
David Graeber
Don Kalb
Adam Kuper
Edmund Leach
Murray Leaf
Claude Lévi-Strauss
David MacDougall
Judith MacDougall
Alan Macfarlane
Bronisław Malinowski
Siegfried Frederick Nadel
A.H.J. Prins
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Juan Mauricio Renold
Audrey Richards
Victor Turner
Marshall Sahlins
Marilyn Strathern
Hebe Vessuri
Susan Visvanathan
Douglas R. White
Eric Wolf
Robert Layton
See also
Cultural anthropology
Ethnology
Ethnosemiotics
List of important publications in anthropology
Rajamandala
Notes
References
Benchmark Statement Anthropology (UK)
Further reading
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1915): The Trobriand Islands
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922): Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1929): The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1935): Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands
Leach, Edmund (1954): Political systems of Highland Burma. London: G. Bell.
Leach, Edmund (1982): Social Anthropology
Eriksen, Thomas H. (1985):, pp. 926–929 in The Social Science Encyclopedia
Kuper, Adam (1996):
External links
The Moving Anthropology Student Network (MASN) - website offers tutorials, information on the subject, discussion-forums and a large link-collection for all interested scholars of social anthropology | 0.777653 | 0.995633 | 0.774257 |
Peer pressure | Peer pressure is a direct or indirect influence on peers, i.e., members of social groups with similar interests, experiences, or social statuses. Members of a peer group are more likely to influence a person's beliefs, values, religion and behavior. A group or individual may be encouraged and want to follow their peers by changing their attitudes, values or behaviors to conform to those of the influencing group or individual. For the individual affected by peer pressure, this can have both a positive or negative effect on them.
Social groups include both membership groups in which individuals hold "formal" membership (e.g. political parties, trade unions, schools) and cliques in which membership is less clearly defined. However, a person does not need to be a member or be seeking membership of a group to be affected by peer pressure. An individual may be in a crowd, a group of many cliques, and still be affected by peer pressure. Research suggests that organizations as well as individuals are susceptible to peer pressure. For example, an organization may base a decision off of the current trends to receive more affection or grow a following group.
Peer pressure can affect individuals of all ethnic groups, genders and ages. Researchers have frequently studied the effects of peer pressure on children and on adolescents, and in popular discourse the term "peer pressure" is used most often with reference to those age-groups. It's important to understand that for children of adolescent age, they are faced with finding their identity. Erikson, a sociopsychologist, explains that identity is faced with role confusion, in other words, these children are trying to find a sense of belonging and are the most susceptible to peer pressure as a form of acceptance. For children, the themes most commonly studied are their abilities for independent decision-making. For adolescents, peer pressure's relationships to sexual intercourse and substance abuse have been significantly researched. Peer pressure can be experienced through both face-to-face interaction and through digital interaction. Social media offers opportunities for adolescents and adults alike to instill and/or experience pressure every day.
Studies of social networks examine connections between members of social groups, including their use of social media, to better understand mechanisms such as information sharing and peer sanctioning. Sanctions can range from subtle glances that suggest disapproval, to threats and physical violence. Peer sanctioning may enhance either positive or negative behaviors. Whether peer sanctioning will have an effect depends strongly on members' expectations and the possible sanctions actually being applied. It can also depend on a person's position in a social network. Those who are more central in a social network seem more likely to be cooperative, perhaps as a result of how networks form. However, this goes both ways and so they are also more likely to participate in negative behaviors. This may be caused by the repeated social pressures they experience in their networks.
Children and adolescents
Children
Imitation plays a large role in children's lives; in order to pick up skills and techniques that they use in their own life, children are always searching for behaviors and attitudes around them that they can co-opt. In other words, children are influenced by people that are important in their lives, such as friends, parents, celebrities (including YouTubers), singers, dancers, etc. This may explain why children with parents who eat unhealthy or don't live active lifestyles can conform to creating habits just like their parents as young adults, and why children try to walk when very young. Children are aware of their position in the social hierarchy from a young age: their instinct is to defer to adults' judgements and majority opinions. Similar to the Asch conformity experiments, a study done on groups of preschool children showed that they were influenced by groups of their peers to change their opinion to a demonstrably wrong one. Each child was handed a book with two sets of images on each page, with a groups of differently sized animals on the left hand page and one animal on the right hand, and each child was asked to indicate the size of the lone animal. All the books appeared the same, but the last child would sometimes get a book that was different. The children reported their size judgements in turn, and the child being tested was asked last. Before the child was to be tested, however, there was a group of children working in conjunction with the researchers. Sometimes, the children who answered before the test subject all gave an incorrect answer. When asked in the presence of the other children, the last child's response was often the same as his or her peers. However, when allowed to privately share their responses with a researcher, the children proved much more resistant to their peers' pressure, illustrating the importance of the physical presence of their peers in shaping their opinions.
An observation is that children can monitor and intervene in their peers' behavior through pressure. A study conducted in a remedial kindergarten class, in the Edna A. Hill Child Development Laboratory at the University of Kansas, was designed to measure how children could ease disruptive behavior in their peers through a two-part system. After describing a series of tasks to their classroom that included going to the bathroom, cleaning up, and general classroom behavior, teachers and researchers would observe children's performance on the tasks. The study focused on three children who were clearly identified as being more disruptive than their peers. They looked at their responses to potential techniques. They utilized the two-part system: first, each student would be given points by their teachers for correctly completing tasks with little disruption (e.g. sitting down on a mat for reading time), and if a student reached three points by the end of the day they would receive a prize. The second part brought in peer interaction, where students who reached three points were appointed "peer monitors" whose role was to lead their small groups and assign points at the end of the day. The results were clear-cut, showing that the monitored students' disruption level dropped when teachers started the points system and monitored them, but when peer monitors were introduced the target students' disruption dropped to average rates of 1% for student C1, 8% for student C2, and 11% for student C3 (down from 36%, 62%, and 59%, respectively). Even small children, then, are susceptible to pressure from their peers, and that pressure can be used to effect positive change in academic and social environments.
Adolescence
Adolescence is the time when a person is most susceptible to peer pressure because peers become an important influence on behavior during adolescence, and peer pressure has been called a hallmark of adolescent experience. Children entering this period in life become aware for the first time of the other people around them and realize the importance of perception in their interactions. Peer conformity in young people is most pronounced with respect to style, taste, appearance, ideology, and values. Peer pressure is commonly associated with episodes of adolescent risk-taking because these activities commonly occur in the company of peers. Affiliation with friends who engage in risky behaviors has been shown to be a strong predictor of an adolescent's own behavior. Peer pressure can also have positive effects when youth are pressured by their peers toward positive behavior, such as volunteering for charity, excelling in academics, or participating in a service project. The importance of peer approval declines upon entering adulthood.
Even though socially accepted children are more prone to experience higher, more frequent, positive fulfillments and participate in more opportunities, research shows that social acceptance (being in the popular crowd) may increase the likelihood of engaging in risky behavior, depending on the norms in the group. Groups of popular children showed an increased propensity to engage in risky, drug-related and delinquent behavior when this behavior was likely to receive approval in their groups. Peer pressure was greatest among more popular children because they were the children most attuned to the judgments of their peers, making them more susceptible to group pressures. Gender also has a clear effect on the amount of peer pressure an adolescent experiences: girls report significantly higher pressures to conform to their groups in the form of clothing choices or speech patterns. Additionally, girls and boys reported facing differing amounts of pressures in different areas of their lives, perhaps reflecting a different set of values and priorities for each gender. Both boys and girls are susceptible to peer pressure, but what it revolves around is defining the values, beliefs, or attitudes that their peer groups have or deeply desire. For girls, it typically revolves around their physical appearance, including their fashion choices, such as wearing thong underwear. For boys, it's more likely to revolve around typical masculine ideals, such as athleticism or intellect. Either way, peer pressure tends to follow the trends with the current world.
Peer pressure is widely recognized as a major contributor to the initiation of drug use, particularly in adolescents. This has been shown for a variety of substances, including nicotine and alcohol. While this link is well established, moderating factors do exist. For example, parental monitoring is negatively associated with substance use; yet when there is little monitoring, adolescents are more likely to succumb to peer coercion during initiation to substance use, but not during the transition from experimental to regular use. Caldwell and colleagues extended this work by finding that peer pressure was a factor leading to heightened risk in the context of social gatherings with little parental monitoring, and if the individual reported themselves as vulnerable to peer pressure. Conversely, some research has observed that peer pressure can be a protective factor against substance use.
Peer pressure produces a wide array of negative outcomes. Allen and colleagues showed that susceptibility to peer pressure in 13- and 14-year-olds was predictive of not only future response to peer pressure, but also a wider array of functioning. For example, greater depression symptomatology, decreasing popularity, more sexual behavior, and externalizing behavior were greater for more susceptible teens. Of note, substance use was also predicted by peer pressure susceptibility such that greater susceptibility was predictive of greater alcohol and drug use.
Smoking
Substance use is likely not attributed to peer pressure alone. Evidence of genetic predispositions for substance use exists and some have begun to examine gene x environment interactions for peer influence. In a nationally representative sample, adolescents who had a genetic predisposition were more likely to have close friends who were heavy substance users and were furthermore, more likely to be vulnerable to the adverse influence of these friends. Results from specific candidate gene studies have been mixed. For instance, in a study of nicotine use Johnson and colleagues found that peer smoking had a lower effect on nicotine dependence for those with the high risk allele (CHRNA5). This suggests that social contexts do not play a significant role in substance use initiation and maintenance and that interventions for these individuals should be developed with genetics in mind as well
Drinking
Though the impact of peer influence in adolescence has been well established, it was unclear at what age this effect begins to diminish. It is accepted that such peer pressure to use alcohol or illicit substances is less likely to exist in elementary school and very young adolescents given the limited access and exposure. Using the Resistance to Peer Influence Scale, Sumter and colleagues found that resistance to peer pressure grew as age increased in a large study of 10- to 18-year-olds. This study also found that girls were generally more resistant to peer influence than boys, particularly at mid-adolescence (i.e. ages 13–15). The higher vulnerability to peer pressure for teenage boys makes sense given the higher rates of substance use in male teens. For girls, increased and positive parental behaviors (e.g. parental social support, consistent discipline) have been shown to be an important contributor to the ability to resist peer pressure to use substances.
It is believed that peer pressure relating to alcohol use in college is caused by a variety of factors including: Modeling, social norms, and being offered alcohol. Offering alcohol can be seen as a kind gesture, but in some cases a forceful one. Students may feel like their social position could become compromised if they don't follow the actions of their fellow peers. This correlates to modeling, a term used to describe the action of copying/imitating the actions of your peers to fit in. This usually occurs when students give into peer pressure to seem more attractive to the perceived majority. Lastly, you have common, socially acceptable norms that frequently occur in college settings such as substance abuse and drinking. One of the most commonly used excuses among students to which why they drink is because "everyone does it". Upon entering college, it's common to see students begin to increase their alcohol intake, especially for those who do not live at home. Because they have shifted from being influenced by their parents to being influenced by their college peers, it's common to see students reflect their peers, most likely due to an increase of modeling to fit in to social settings.
Prevention
Substance use prevention and intervention programs have utilized multiple techniques in order to combat the impact of peer pressure. One major technique is peer influence resistance skills. The known correlational relationship between substance use and relationships with others that use makes resistance skills a natural treatment target. This type of training is meant to help individuals refuse participation with substance use while maintaining their membership in the peer group. Other interventions include normative education approaches (interventions designed to teach students about the true prevalence rates and acceptability of substance use), education interventions that raise awareness of potential dangers of substance use, alcohol awareness training and classroom behavior management. The literature regarding the efficacy of these approaches, however, is mixed. A study in Los Angeles and Orange Counties that established conservative norms and attempted to correct children's beliefs about substance abuse among their peers showed a statistically significant decrease in alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use, but other studies that systematically reviewed school-based attempts to prevent alcohol misuse in children found "no easily discernible pattern" in both successful and failed programs. A systematic review of intervention programs in schools conducted by Onrust et al. found that programs in elementary school were successful in slightly reducing a student's likelihood to abuse drugs or alcohol. However, this effect started to wear off with programs that targeted older students. Programs that targeted students in grades 8–9 reduced smoking, but not alcohol and other drug abuse, and programs that targeted older children reported no effect at all.
In a non-substance use context, however, research has shown that decision-making training can produce concrete gains in risk perception and decision-making ability among autistic children. When administered the training in several short sessions that taught the children how to recognize risk from peers and react accordingly, the children demonstrated, through post-training assessments, that they were able to identify potential threats and sources of pressure from peers and deflect them far better than non-autistic adolescents in a control group.
Peer pressure and sexual intercourse
There is evidence supporting the conclusion that parental attitudes disapproving sex tends to lead toward lower levels of adolescent unplanned pregnancy. These disparities are not due solely to parental disposition but also to communication.
A study completed in Cape Town, South Africa, looked at students at four secondary schools in the region. They found a number of unhealthy practices derived from peer pressure: condoms are derided, threats of ridicule for abstinence, and engaging in sexual activity with multiple partners as part of a status symbol (especially for males). The students colloquially call others who choose abstinence as "umqwayito", which means dried fruit/meat. An important solution for these problems is communication with adults, which the study found to be extremely lacking within adolescent social groups.
Another investigation, completed in 2011, looked at the effect of peer pressure surrounding sexual activities in the youth surrounding US born Mexicans and Mexico born Mexicans. It summarized that US born Mexican youths are more susceptive of peer pressure, specifically towards sexual relations, than Mexico born youths. It has been found that Mexican born youths grow up with stronger familial households than US born Mexico born youths, which leads to why Mexico born youths are more apt to talk with family than with peers. Less interaction with peers means less influence with peers and more trust in family.
Literature reviews in this field have attempted to analyse the norms present in the interactions and decision making behind these behaviors. A review conducted by Bongardt et al. defined three types of peer norms that led to a person's participation in sexual intercourse: descriptive norms, injunctive norms, and outright peer pressure. Descriptive norms and injunctive norms are both observed behaviors and are thus more indirect forms of pressure, but differ in one key aspect: descriptive norms describe peers' sexual behaviors, but injunctive norms describe peers' attitudes toward those behaviors (e.g. approval or disapproval). The last norm defined by the study is called "peer pressure" by the authors, and is used to describe direct encouragement or pressure by a person's peers to engage in sexual behavior.
The review found that indirect norms (descriptive and injunctive) had a stronger effect on a person's decision to engage in sexual behavior than direct peer pressure. Between the two indirect norms, descriptive norms had a stronger effect: people were likely to try what they thought their peers were engaging in rather than what they thought had approval in their peer group.
Additionally, studies have found a link between self-regulation and likeliness to engage in sexual behavior. The more trouble an individual had with self-regulation and self-control growing up, the more they were likely to fall prey to peer pressure that would lead them to engage in risky sexual acts. Based on these findings, it may be a good idea to prevent these through either a decision-making program or by targeting adolescents' ability to self-regulate against possible risks.
Neural mechanisms
From a neurological perspective, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the striatum play an important role in figuring out the value of specific actions. The mPFC is active when determining "socially tagged" objects, which are objects that peers have expressed an opinion about; the striatum is significant for determining the value of these "socially tagged" objects and rewards in general. An experiment performed by Mason et al. utilizing fMRI scans analyzed individuals who were assigned to indicate if a chosen symbol appeared consecutively. The researchers did not tell the subjects the real purpose of the experiment, which was to collect data regarding mPFC and striatum stimulation. Before the actual experiment began, the subjects were subject to a phase of "social" influence, where they learned which symbols were preferred by other subjects who had completed the experiment (while in actuality these other subjects did not exist). Mason et al. found that determining an object's social value/significance is dependent on combined information from the mPFC and the striatum [along the lines denoted in the beginning of the paragraph]. Without both present and functional, it would be difficult to determine the value of action based upon social circumstances.
A similar experiment was conducted by Stallen, Smidts, and Sanfrey. Twenty-four subjects were manipulated using a minimal group paradigm approach. Unbeknownst to them, they were all selected as part of the "in-group", although there was an established "out-group". Following this socialization, the subjects estimated the number of dots seen on the screen while given information about what an in-group or out-group member chose. Participants were more likely to conform to in-group decisions as compared to out-group ones. The experiment confirmed the importance of the striatum in social influence, suggesting that conformity with the in-group is mediated with a fundamental value signal—rewards. In other words, the brain associates social inclusion with positive reward. The posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), which is associated with perspective taking, appeared to be active as well, which correlated with patients' self-reports of in-group trustworthiness.
In adolescence, risk-taking appears to increase dramatically. Researchers conducted an experiment with adolescent males who were of driving age and measured their risk-taking depending on whether a passenger (a peer of the same age) was in the car. A driving simulation was created, and certain risky scenarios, such as a decaying yellow light as the car was approaching, were modeled and presented to the subjects. Those who were most likely to take risks in the presence of peers (but took fewer risks when there were no passengers) had greater brain activity in the social-cognitive and social-affective brain systems during solo activity (no passengers.) The social-cognitive aspect refers to the ability to gauge what others are thinking and is primarily controlled by the mPFC, right temporal parietal junction, and the posterior cingulate cortex. The social-affective aspect relates to the reward system for committing actions that are accepted or rejected by other people. One side of the reward system is "social pain", which refers to the emotional pain felt by individual due to group repudiation and is associated with heightened activity in the anterior insula and the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.
Social psychological explanation
A explanation of how the peer pressure process works, called "the identity shift effect," was introduced by social psychologist Wendy Treynor, who weaves together Festinger's two seminal social-psychological theories (on dissonance, which addresses internal conflict, and social comparison, which addresses external conflict) into a unified whole. According to Treynor's original "identity shift effect" hypothesis, the peer pressure process works in the following way: One's state of harmony is disrupted when faced with the threat of external conflict (social rejection) for failing to conform to a group standard. Thus, one conforms to the group standard, but as soon as one does, eliminating this external conflict, internal conflict is introduced (because one has violated one's own standards). To rid oneself of this internal conflict (self-rejection), an "identity shift" is undertaken, where one adopts the group's standards as one's own, thereby eliminating internal conflict (in addition to the formerly eliminated external conflict), returning one to a state of harmony. Although the peer pressure process begins and ends with one in a (conflict-less) state of harmony, as a result of conflict and the conflict resolution process, one leaves with a new identity—a new set of internalized standards.
Social media
Social media provides a massive new digital arena for peer pressure and influence. Research suggests there are a variety of benefits from social media use, such as increased socialization, exposure to ideas, and greater self-confidence. However, there is also evidence of negative influences such as advertising pressure, exposure to inappropriate behavior and/or dialogue, and fake news. These versions of digital peer pressure exist between youth, adults and businesses. In some cases, people can feel pressure to make themselves available 24/7 or to be perfect. Within this digital conversation there can be pressure to conform, especially as people are impacted by the frequency of times others hit the like button. In 2014, 39% of the 789 respondents, in ages 13-17, felt pressured to post content for likes and comments. The way others portray themselves on social media might lead to young people trying to mimic those qualities or actions in an attempt to conform. In 2014, 40% of 789 respondents, in ages 13-17, felt the need to only post content to look good to others on social media. It may also lead to a fear of missing out, which can pressure youth into irresponsible actions or decisions. Actions and influence on social media may lead to changes in identity, confidence, or habits in real life for children, adolescents, and adults. Another area in which social media and social network groups influence people is in the purchasing of products. When a person is a part of an online social networking group, they are more likely to purchase a product if it was recommended by another member of that group than if it were recommended by a random person online. Knowledge about brands, opinions of brands, and purchasing behavior are directly influenced by peers and the media; people's purchase decisions largely stem from what their friends are purchasing. The effects of social networking groups on purchasing products even translates to subscriptions. If a subscription-based product was given to a member of an online social networking group as a gift by another member of the same group, the person receiving the gift is more likely to adopt the cost of the subscription and keep paying for the service.
Peer pressure on social media across cultures
Over 3 billion social media users across the world are using a variety of platforms, in turn, the type, frequency, and scope of the resulting peer pressure fluctuates. Some research suggests social media has a greater influence on purchasing decisions for consumers in China than in other countries in the world. In addition, Chinese consumers say that they are more likely to consider buying a product if they see it discussed positively by friends on a social media site. Some countries have a very low usage rate of social media platforms, or have cultures that do not value it as highly. As a result, the power and impact of digital peer pressure may vary throughout the world. Overall, there is limited research on this topic and its global scope.
In history
Holocaust
The Holocaust is one of the most well-known of genocides. In the 1940s, Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, began a systematic purge against the Jewish people living in Europe, killing around six million Jews by the end of World War II. It is clear that some Germans are culpable for the Holocaust; SS officers and soldiers clearly bought into the Jewish genocide and participated as executioners, jailers, and hunters (for hiding Jews). However, a broader statement is harder to make—as seen below, not all Germans wanted to kill the Jews. When bringing the concept of peer pressure into the Holocaust, German culpability is even harder to decide.
The primary issue revolves around collective responsibility and beliefs. As such, there are two positions, most notably held by Christopher Browning and David Goldhagen.
Browning's Ordinary Men
Christopher Browning, most known for his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101, relies on an analysis of the men in Reserve Police Battalion 101. The men of the 101st were not ardent Nazis but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg. They were drafted but found ineligible for regular military duty. Their test as an Order Police battalion first came in the form of Jozefow, a Jewish ghetto in Poland. The Battalion was ordered to round up the men in the ghetto and kill all women, children, and elderly on sight. During the executions, a few dozen men were granted release of their execution tasks and were reassigned to guard or truck duty. Others tried to stall as long as possible, trying not to be assigned to a firing squad. After the executions were completed, the men drank heavily, shaken by their ordeal.
At the end of his book, Browning supplies his theory on 101's actions: a combination of authoritative and peer pressure was a powerful coercive tool. First, the Nazi leadership wanted to keep the country's soldiers psychologically healthy, so soldiers were not forced to commit these murders. Throughout the German ranks, nothing negative happened to the soldiers and policemen who refused to join in on a firing squad or Jewish search party. They would simply be assigned other or additional duties, and perhaps subject to a little verbal abuse deriding their "cowardice". For the officers, no official sanction was given, but it was well known that being unable to carry out executions was the sign of a "weak" leader, and the officer would be passed for promotions. Second, Major Trapp, the head of Battalion 101, consistently offered protection from committing these actions, even so far as supporting one man who was blatantly and vocally against these practices. He established "ground" rules in which only volunteers were taking on 'Jewish Hunts" and raids.
Browning relies on Milgram's experiments on authority to expand his point. Admitting that Trapp was not a particularly strong authority figure, Browning instead points to the Nazi leadership and the orders of the "highest order" that were handed down. Furthermore, according to Browning's analysis, one reason so few men separated themselves from their task was peer pressure—individual policemen did not want to "lose face" in front of their comrades. Some argued that it was better to shoot one and quit than to be a coward immediately. Some superior officers treated those who did not want to execute Jews with disdain; on the other hand, those selected for the executions or Jewish hunts were regarded as real "men" and were verbally praised accordingly. For some, refusing their tasks meant that their compatriots would need to carry the burden and the guilt of abandoning their comrades (as well as fear of ostracization) compelled them to kill.
Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners
Daniel Goldhagen, disagreeing with Browning's conclusion, decided to write his own book, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Its release was highly controversial. He argues that the Germans were always anti-Semitic, engaging in a form of "eliminationism". Taking photos of the deceased, going on "Jew-Hunts", death marches near the end of the war, and a general focus on hate (rather than ignorance) are points Goldhagen utilizes in his book.
He does not believe that peer pressure or authoritative pressure can explain why ordinary Germans engaged in these actions. He believes that in order for the policemen in Battalion 101 (and those in similar situations) to kill, they must all be fully committed to the action—no half-heartedness. As he notes,"For that matter, for someone to be pressured into doing something, by peer pressure, everyone else has to want to do it. Peer pressure can, of course, operate on isolated individuals, or small groups, but it depends upon the majority wanting to do it. So the peer pressure argument contradicts itself. If the majority of the people hadn't wanted to kill Jews, then there would have been peer pressure not to do it" (37).Instead, he places a significant emphasis on the German people's anti-Semitism, to the extent of drawing ire from other historians. Browning notes Goldhagen's "uniform portrayal" of Germans, dehumanizing all of the perpetrators without looking at the whole picture. For example, in the town of Niezdow, the Police Battalion executed over a dozen elderly Poles in retaliation for the murder of a German policeman. It is less clear, then, if the Germans in the Police Battalion are antagonistic only towards Jews. The German-Canadian historian Ruth Bettina Birn has—in collaboration with Volker Rieß— checked Goldhagen's archival sources from Ludwigsburg. Their findings confirm the arbitrary nature of his selection and evaluation of existing records as opposed to a more holistic combination of primary sources. Furthermore, Konrad Kwiet, a Holocaust historian, argues that Goldhagen's narrow focus on German anti-Semitism has blinded him to other considerations. He points to the massacres of non-Jews as an example:"[Goldhagen does not shine light] on the motives of “Hitler’s willing executioners” in murdering disabled people within the so-called “Euthanasia Program”, in liquidating 2.7 million Soviet prisoners of war, in exterminating Romas or in killing hundreds of thousands of other people classified as enemies of the “German People and Nation”. The emphasis on German responsibility allows Goldhagen to push aside the willingness of genocidal killers of other nationalities [such as Latvians] who, recruited from the vast army of indigenous collaborators, were often commissioned with the task of carrying out the ‘dirty work’, such as the murder of women and children, and who, in many cases, surpassed their German masters in their cruelty and spontaneous brutality".
Rwandan genocide
The Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994, with ethnic violence between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities. The primary belligerents were the Hutu; however, as with most ethnic conflicts, not all Hutu wanted to kill Tutsi. A survivor, Mectilde, described the Hutu breakdown as follows: 10% helped, 30% forced, 20% reluctant, and 40% willing. For the willing, a rewards structure was put in place. For the unwilling, a punishment system was in effect. The combination, Professor Bhavnani argues, is a behavioral norm enforced by in-group policing. Instead of the typical peer pressure associated with western high school students, the peer pressure within the Rwandan genocide, where Tutsi and Hutu have inter-married, worked under coercion. Property destruction, rape, incarceration, and death faced the Hutu who were unwilling to commit to the genocide or protected the Tutsi from violence.
When observing a sample community of 3426 in the village of Tare during the genocide, McDoom found that neighborhoods and familial structures are important micro-spaces that helped determine if an individual would participate in violence. Physical proximity increases the likelihood of social interaction and influence. For example, starting at a set point such as the home of a "mobilizing" agent for the Hutu (any individual who planned or led an attack in the village), the proportion of convicts living in a 100m radius of a resident is almost twice as many for convicts (individuals convicted of genocide by the gacaca, a local institution of transitional justice that allows villagers to adjudicate on many of the perpetrators’ crimes by themselves) as for non-convicts. As the radius increases, so does the proportion decrease. This data implies that "social influence" was a major factor. Looking at neighborhoods, an individual is 4% more likely to join the genocide for every single percentage point increase in the proportion of convicted perpetrators living within a 100m radius of them. Looking at familial structures, for any individual, each percentage point increase in the proportion of genocide participants in the individual's household increased their chances of joining the violence by 21 to 25%.
However, the complete situation is a little more nuanced. The extreme control of citizens' daily lives by the government in social affairs facilitated the rapidity of the genocide's spread and broke down the resolve of some who initially wanted to have no part in the genocide. First, prior to the genocide, Rwandans' sense of discipline was introduced and reinforced through weekly umuganda (collective work) sessions, involving praise for the regime and its leaders and a host of collective activities for the community. Respect for authority and the fear of stepping out of line were strong cultural values of pre-genocide Rwanda and so were included in these activities. Second, their value of social conformity only increased in the decades leading up to the genocide in both social and political manners. Peasants were told exactly when and what to farm and could be fined given any lack of compliance. These factors helped to drive the killing's fast pace.
Most importantly, there were already ethnic tensions among the groups for a variety of reasons: conflicts over land allocation (farming versus pasture) and declining prices of Rwanda's main export: coffee. These problems combined with a history of previously existing conflict. With the introduction of the Second Republic under Habyarimana, former Tutsis in power were immediately purged, and racism served as an explanation as keeping the majority Hutu in legitimate government power. As a result, when the war came, the Hutu were already introduced to the concept of racism against their very own peers.
The division in Rwanda was reinforced for hundreds of years. King Kigeli IV, a Tutsi, centralized Rwandan power in the 1800s, just as Belgian colonization was taking place. The Belgian furthered the message of distinct races, allowing Tutsi men to remain the leaders in the society.
Applications
Leadership tool
Education
Principals who served as strong "instructional" leaders and introduced new curricula and academic programs were able to create a system of peer pressure at the teaching level, where the teachers placed accountability pressure on themselves.
Voting
Peer pressure can be especially effective (more so than door-to-door visits and telephone calls) in getting people to vote. Gerber, Green, and Larimer conducted a large-scale field experiment involving over 180,000 Michigan households in 2006 and four treatments: one was a reminder to vote, one was a reminder to vote and a note informing them that they were being studied, one that listed the voting records for all potential household individuals, and finally one that listed the voting records for the household individuals and their neighbors. The final treatment emphasized peer pressure within a neighborhood; neighbors could view each other's voting habits with the lists, and so the social norm of "voting is best for the community" is combined with the fear that individuals' peers would judge their lack of voting. Compared to a baseline rate of 29.7% (only the voting reminder), the treatment that utilized peer pressure increased the percentage of household voters by 8.1 percentage points (to 37.8%), which exceeds the value of in-person canvassing and personalized phone calls.
A similar large-scale field experiment conducted by Todd Rogers, Donald P. Green, Carolina Ferrerosa Young, and John Ternovski (2017) studied the impact of a social pressure mailing in the context of a high-salience election, the 2012 Wisconsin gubernatorial election. Social pressure mailers included the line, “We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote.” This study found a treatment effect of 1.0 percentage point, a statistically significant but far weaker effect than the 8.1 percentage point effect reported by Gerber, Green, and Larimer. The 2017 study's effects were particularly sizable for low-propensity voters.
Charitable donations
An experiment conducted by Diane Reyniers and Richa Bhalla measured the amount donated by a group of London School of Economics students. The group was split into individual donators and pair donators. The donation amounts were revealed within each pair; then, the pair was given time to discuss their amounts and then revise them as necessary. In general, pair subjects donated an average of 3.64 pounds (Sterling) while individuals donated an average of 2.55 pounds. Furthermore, in pairs where one subject donated significantly more than the other, the latter would on average increase the donation amount by 0.55 pounds. This suggests that peer pressure "shames" individuals for making smaller donations. But when controlling for donation amount, paired subjects were significantly less happy with their donation amount than individual subjects—suggesting that paired subjects felt coerced to donate more than they would have otherwise. This leads to a dilemma: charities will do better by approaching groups of people (such as friends); however, this could result in increased donor discomfort, which would impact their future donations.
Organizational researchers have found a generally similar phenomenon among large corporations: executives and managers of large companies look to similar organizations in their industry or headquarters city to figure out the appropriate level of corporate charitable donations, and those that make smaller donations might be seen as stingy and suffer damage to their reputations.
See also
References
Further reading
Lowe, M. L., & Haws, K. L. (2014). (Im)moral Support: The Social Outcomes of Parallel Self-Control Decisions. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(2), 489–505. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676688
Group processes
Youth
Conformity
Popular psychology
Social influence
Majority–minority relations | 0.777437 | 0.995802 | 0.774173 |
Physical education | Physical education, often abbreviated to Phys. Ed. or PE, and sometimes informally referred to as gym class or simply just gym, is a subject taught in schools around the world. PE is taught during primary and secondary education and encourages psychomotor, cognitive, and effective learning through physical activity and movement exploration to promote health and physical fitness. When taught correctly and in a positive manner, children and teens can receive a storm of health benefits. These include reduced metabolic disease risk, improved cardiorespiratory fitness, and better mental health. In addition, PE classes can produce positive effects on students' behavior and academic performance. Research has shown that there is a positive correlation between brain development and exercising. Researchers in 2007 found a profound gain in English Arts standardized test scores among students who had 56 hours of physical education in a year, compared to those who had 28 hours of physical education a year.
Many physical education programs also include health education as part of the curriculum. Health education is the teaching of information on the prevention, control, and treatment of diseases.
Curriculum in physical education
A highly effective physical education
program aims to develop physical literacy through the acquisition of skills, knowledge, physical fitness, and confidence. Physical education curricula promote healthy development of children, encourage interest in physical activity and sport, improve learning of health and physical education concepts, and accommodate for differences in student populations to ensure that every child receives health benefits. These core principles are implemented through sport participation, sports skill development, knowledge of physical fitness and health, as well as mental health and social adaptation.
Physical education curriculum at the secondary level includes a variety of team and individual sports, as well as leisure activities. Some examples of physical activities include basketball, soccer, volleyball, track and field, badminton, tennis, walking, cycling, and swimming. Chess is another activity that is included in the PE curriculum in some parts of the world. Chess helps students to develop their cognitive thinking skills and improves focus, while also teaching about sportsmanship and fair play. Gymnastics and wrestling activities offer additional opportunities for students to improve the different areas of physical fitness including flexibility, strength, aerobic endurance, balance, and coordination. Additional activities in PE include football, netball, hockey, rounders, cricket, four square, racing, and numerous other children's games. Physical education also teaches nutrition, healthy habits, and individuality of needs.
Pedagogy
The main goals in teaching modern physical education are:
To expose children and teens to a wide variety of exercise and healthy activities. Because P.E. can be accessible to nearly all children, it is one of the only opportunities that can guarantee beneficial and healthy activity in children.
To teach skills to maintain a lifetime of fitness as well as health.
To encourage self-reporting and monitoring of exercise.
To individualize duration, intensity, and type of activity.
To focus feedback on the work, rather than the result.
To provide active role models.
It is critical for physical educators to foster and strengthen developing motor skills and to provide children and teens with a basic skill set that builds their movement repertoire, which allows students to engage in various forms of games, sports, and other physical activities throughout their lifetime.
These goals can be achieved in a variety of ways. National, state, and local guidelines often dictate which standards must be taught in regards to physical education. These standards determine what content is covered, the qualifications educators must meet, and the textbooks and materials which must be used. These various standards include teaching sports education, or the use of sports as exercise; fitness education, relating to overall health and fitness; and movement education, which deals with movement in a non-sport context.
These approaches and curricula are based on pioneers in PE, namely, Francois Delsarte, Liselott Diem, and Rudolf von Laban, who, in the 1800s focused on using a child's ability to use their body for self-expression. This, in combination with approaches in the 1960s, (which featured the use of the body, spatial awareness, effort, and relationships) gave birth to the modern teaching of physical education.
Recent research has also explored the role of physical education for moral development in support of social inclusion and social justice agendas, where it is under-researched, especially in the context of disability, and the social inclusion of disabled people.
Technology use in physical education
Many physical education classes utilize technology to assist their pupils in effective exercise. One of the most affordable and popular tools is a simple video recorder. With this, students record themselves, and, upon playback, can see mistakes they are making in activities like throwing or swinging. Studies show that students find this more effective than having someone try to explain what they are doing wrong, and then trying to correct it.
Educators may also use technology such as pedometers and heart rate monitors to make step and heart rate goals for students. Implementing pedometers in physical education can improve physical activity participation, motivation and enjoyment.
Other technologies that can be used in a physical education setting include video projectors and GPS systems. Gaming systems and their associated games, such as the Kinect, Wii, and Wii Fit can also be used. Projectors are used to show students proper form or how to play certain games. GPS systems can be used to get students active in an outdoor setting, and active exergames can be used by teachers to show students a good way to stay fit in and out of a classroom setting. Exergames, or digital games that require the use of physical movement to participate, can be used as a tool to encourage physical activity and health in young children.
Technology integration can increase student motivation and engagement in the Physical Education setting. However, the ability of educators to effectively use technology in the classroom is reliant on a teacher's perceived competence in their ability to integrate technology into the curriculum.
Beyond traditional tools, recent AI advancements are introducing new methods for personalizing physical education, especially for adolescents. AI applications like adaptive coaching are starting to show promise in enhancing student motivation and program effectiveness in physical education settings.
By location
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is suggested that young children should be participating in 60-minutes of exercise per day at least 3 times per week in order to maintain a healthy body. This 60-minute recommendation can be achieved by completing different forms of physical activity, including participation in physical education programs at school. A majority of children around the world participate in Physical Education programs in general education settings. According to data collected from a worldwide survey, 79% of countries require legal implementation of PE in school programming. Physical education programming can vary all over the world.
Asia
Philippines
In the Philippines, P.E. is mandatory for all years in school, unless the school gives the option for a student to do the Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme instead for their fifth and sixth year. Some schools have integrated martial arts training into their physical education curriculum.
Singapore
A Biennial compulsory fitness exam, NAPFA, is conducted in every school to assess pupils' physical fitness in Singapore. This includes a series of fitness tests. Students are graded by a system of gold, silver, bronze, or as a fail. NAPFA for pre-enlistees serves as an indicator for an additional two months in the country's compulsory national service training if they attain bronze or fail.
Europe
Ireland
In Ireland, one is expected to do two semesters worth of 80-minute PE classes. This also includes showering and changing times. So, on average, classes are composed of 60–65 minutes of activity.
Poland
In Poland, pupils are expected to do at least three hours of PE a week during primary and secondary education. Universities must also organise at least 60 hours of physical education classes in undergraduate courses.
Sweden
In Sweden, the time school students spend in P.E. lessons per week varies between municipalities, but generally, years 0 to 2 have 55 minutes of PE a week; years 3 to 6 have 110 minutes a week, and years 7 to 9 have 220 minutes. In upper secondary school, all national programs have an obligatory course, containing 100 points of PE, which corresponds to 90–100 hours of PE during the course (one point per hour). Schools can regulate these hours as they like during the three years of school students attend. Most schools have students take part in this course during the first year and offer a follow-up course, which also contains 100 points/hours.
United Kingdom
In England, pupils in years 7, 8, and 9 are expected to do two hours of exercise per week. Pupils in years 10 and 11 are expected to do one hour of exercise per week.
In Wales, pupils are expected to do two hours of PE a week.
In Scotland, Scottish pupils are expected to have at least two hours of PE per week during primary and lower secondary education.
In Northern Ireland, pupils are expected to participate in at least two hours of physical education (PE) per week during years 8 to 10. PE remains part of the curriculum for years 11 and 12, though the time allocated may vary.
North America
Canada
In British Columbia, the government has mandated in the grade one curriculum that students must participate in physical activity daily five times a week. The educator is also responsible for planning Daily Physical Activity (DPA), which is thirty minutes of mild to moderate physical activity a day (not including curriculum physical education classes). The curriculum also requires students in grade one to be knowledgeable about healthy living. For example, they must be able to describe the benefits of regular exercise, identify healthy choices in activities, and describe the importance of choosing healthy food.
Ontario, Canada has a similar procedure in place. On October 6, 2005, the Ontario Ministry of Education (OME) implemented a DPA policy in elementary schools, for those in grades 1 through 8. The government also requires that all students in grades 1 through 8, including those with special needs, be provided with opportunities to participate in a minimum of twenty minutes of sustained, moderate to vigorous physical activity each school day during instructional time.
United States
The 2012 "Shape Of The Nation Report" by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (part of SHAPE America) and the American Heart Association found that while nearly 75% of states require physical education in elementary through high school, over half of the states permit students to substitute other activities for their required physical education credit, or otherwise fail to mandate a specific amount of instructional time. According to the report, only six states (Illinois, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, and Vermont) require physical education at every grade level. A majority of states in 2016 did not require a specific amount of instructional time, and more than half allow exemptions or substitution. These loopholes can lead to reduced effectiveness of the physical education programs.
Zero Hour is a before-school physical education class first implemented by Naperville Central High School. In the state of Illinois, this program is known as Learning Readiness P.E. (LRPE). The program was based on research indicating that students who are physically fit are more academically alert, experience growth in brain cells, and enhancement in brain development. NCHS pairs a P.E. class that incorporates cardiovascular exercise, core strength training, cross-lateral movements, as well as literacy and math strategies which enhance learning and improve achievement.
See also
Recreation
Exercise
Lack of physical education
Sports day
Worldwide Day of Play
References
External links
Education
Sports science
Education by subject | 0.775451 | 0.998174 | 0.774036 |
Informal education | Informal education is a general term for education that can occur outside of a traditional lecture or school based learning systems. The term even include customized-learning based on individual student interests within a curriculum inside a regular classroom, but is not limited to that setting. It could work through conversation, and the exploration and enlargement of experience. Sometimes there is a clear objective link to some broader plan, but not always. The goal is to provide learners with the tools they need to eventually reach more complex material. It can refer to various forms of alternative education, such as unschooling or homeschooling, autodidacticism (self-teaching), and youth work.
Informal education can include accidental and purposeful ways of collaborating on new information. It can be discussion-based and focuses on bridging the gaps between traditional classroom settings and life outside of the classroom.
Role
People interpret information differently, and therefore a structured curriculum may not allow all learners to understand the information. Informal education is less controlled than the average classroom setting, which is why informal education can be so powerful. Informal education can help individuals learn to react to and control different situations and settings. In addition, it combines social entities that are important for learning. Informal education may be viewed as the learning that comes as a part of being involved in youth and community organizations. This type of education is a spontaneous process, which helps people to learn information in a new way. It helps to cultivate communities, associations and relationships that make for a positive learning environment.
Characteristics
Some characteristics of informal education are:
Informal education looks to create or deepen situations where people can learn, explore and enlarge experiences, and make changes.
Provides an environment where everyone can learn together and can scaffold off of one another.
Understanding that the activity can be based on any form of learning, the teaching does not have to be deliberate, more so implied. We give students the tools to do complex materials over time, rather than teaching the complex material and then giving the tools.
Focuses on the social aspects of learning, and how important collaborative learning is.
The tools students are given are tangible for the processes in which they will be applied.
Bridges the gap between school and life.
Allows students a choice in learning, and how to approach the material.
Make learning accessible in everyday life and in the future.
Informal education is driven by conversation and interacting with others.
Benefits
Responsiveness when interacting with the environment.
Possibiations or restrictions.
Allows for free choice and changes in interests.
Ability to create ones own
Bridges gap between theory and practical
Values
Work for the well being of all.
Respect the unique value and dignity of each human being.
Dialogue.
Equality and justice.
Democracy and the active involvement of people in the issues that affect their life. (Jeff and Smith 2005:95-6)
Informal education focuses on values. There is no curriculum or guiding plan for a lot of work.
In indigenous African communities
Informal education has been the practice of indigenous communities in Africa as long as people have lived there. The tradition of African education has long been closely intertwined with the daily life of the African people with the idea that children "learnt what they lived". The philosophy of traditional African education suggests that one’s education cannot be separated from the everyday life and the "curriculum" is thus considered "a way of life" with the ultimate goal being to create a "complete individual, [and] a lifelong learner". The knowledge and practices that are important to the community are generally passed down through the sharing of memories and participation in cultural activities. Their education system serves as "the information base for the community, which facilitates communication and decision-making". Similar to other indigenous communities such as the Chillihuani in Peru, African education is created with goals in mind but is not limited to typical classroom settings; students continually participate in various learning activities as they grow in the community.
The culture within traditional African communities contain methods of learning. Through song and dance children learn more about their language as well as how to read and write. Oral traditions are used to teach children about history and morals as well as other forms of culture and practical skills for survival. In northern Tanzania and southern Kenya, the children of the Maasai pastoralists learn skills such as "where to find water and green shrubs that can be fed to young calves" in case of drought. Children are encouraged to show respect to their elders and through this, children learn how to show respect through their actions and words. A child can even learn the circumstances of their birth through their names. Onipede, a Yoruba name in Nigeria, suggests that the child was born soon after the death of a family member. Through their traditional science, children learn how to contribute to health and food production. everything that is a part of their life is used as a means to learn about themselves, their communities, and their culture.
Advantages
If a person masters a skill by becoming deeply engaged in solving a problem, then giving students real world issues or opportunities to solve problems in their own lives and communities would significantly motivate and help them to master new concepts. Teaching students new scientific concepts by using cultural tools could eliminate the time spent trying to figure out whether concepts are useful or not. This may motivate learners and help them to master what we teach from the start. If we applied English and grammar lessons to effectively communicate with others in the community, students would be more inclined to effectively master these concepts since they would be using them for individual or group purposes. Finally, formal schooling, unlike an informal school setting, discourages students from learning and problem solving on their own.
Informal learning can open up a plethora of intellectual growth in those that seek to learn outside a standard academic setting. Pursuits can be influenced by a smaller class size to be the best that they can be, with instructors better able to see to the individual care of each of their students.
See also
Nonformal learning
Formal learning
Informal learning
References
Bibliography
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. 18(1), 32.
Blyth, C. (2008). The Art of Conversation. London: John Murray.
Callanan, M., Cervantes, C., & Loomis, M. (2011). Informal learning.2, 646. doi:10.1002
Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think. New York: D. C. Heath.
Kahane, R. (1997). The Origins of Postmodern Youth: Informal Youth Movements in a Comparative Perspective. Berlin: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110817188.
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. NY: Oxford University Press.
Sennett, R. (2012) Together. The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. London: Allen Lane.
Zeldin (1999). Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life. London: Harvill Press.
External links
Formal vs. , WGBH.
Informal Education, The National Academy of Sciences.
Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings, National Science Foundation.
Moving Beyond Broadcast and Traditional Pedagogy: Making a Children’s Documentary for the New Media Landscape Master of Fine Arts Thesis, Science and Natural History Filmmaking, Montana State University.
infed.org: What is informal education?
Alternative education
Learning | 0.779729 | 0.992647 | 0.773996 |
Teacher education | Teacher education or teacher training refers to programs, policies, procedures, and provision designed to equip (prospective) teachers with the knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, approaches, methodologies and skills they require to perform their tasks effectively in the classroom, school, and wider community. The professionals who engage in training the prospective teachers are called teacher educators (or, in some contexts, teacher trainers).
There is a longstanding and ongoing debate about the most appropriate term to describe these activities. The term 'teacher training' (which may give the impression that the activity involves training staff to undertake relatively routine tasks) seems to be losing ground, at least in the U.S., to 'teacher education' (with its connotation of preparing staff for a professional role as a reflective practitioner). The two major components of teacher education are in-service teacher education and pre-service teacher education.
History
Policy and related issues
The process by which teachers are educated is the subject of political discussion in many countries, reflecting both the value attached by societies and cultures to the preparation of young people for life, and the fact that education systems consume significant financial resources.
However, the degree of political control over Teacher Education varies. Where teacher education is entirely in the hands of universities, the state may have no direct control whatever over what or how new teachers are taught; this can lead to anomalies, such as teachers being taught using teaching methods that would be deemed inappropriate if they used the same methods in schools, or teachers being taught by persons with little or no hands-on experience of teaching in real classrooms. In other systems, teacher education may be the subject of detailed prescription (e.g. the state may specify the skills that all teachers must possess, or it may specify the content of teacher education courses).
Policy cooperation in the European Union has led to a broad description of the kinds of attributes that teachers in European Union member states should possess: the Common European Principle for Teacher Competences and Qualifications.
Continuum
Although ideally it should be conceived of, and organised as, a seamless continuum, teacher education is often divided into these stages:
initial teacher training / education (a pre-service course before entering the classroom as a fully responsible teacher);
induction (the process of providing training and support during the first few years of teaching or the first year in a particular school);
teacher development or continuing professional development (an in-service process for practicing teachers).
Initial
Organization
In many countries, Initial Teacher Education (also known as preservice teacher training) takes place largely or exclusively in institutions of higher education. In countries like Sri Lanka there are separate institutes called National colleges of Education to provide pre-service teacher training while Teacher Training Colleges provide in-service teacher education. Further institutes called Teacher Centers provide continuing professional development for teachers. It may be organized according to two basic models.
In the 'consecutive' model, a teacher first obtains a qualification in one or more subjects (often a diploma in teaching or an undergraduate bachelor's degree), and then studies for a further period to gain an additional qualification in teaching (this may take the form of a post-baccalaureate credential or master's degree).
In the alternative 'concurrent' model, a student simultaneously studies both one or more academic subjects, and the ways of teaching that subject, leading to a combined bachelor's degree and teaching credential to qualify as a teacher of that subject.
Other pathways are also available. In some countries, it is possible for a person to receive training as a teacher by working in a school under the responsibility of an accredited experienced practitioner.
In the United Kingdom there is a long tradition of partnerships between universities and schools in providing state supported teacher education. This tradition is not without tensions and controversies.
In the United States, approximately one-third of new teachers come through alternative routes to teacher certification, according to testimony given by Emily Feistritzer, the President of National Center for Alternative Certification and the National Center for Education Information, to a congressional subcommittee on May 17, 2007. However, many alternative pathways are affiliated with schools of education, where candidates still enroll in university-based coursework. A supplemental component of university-based coursework is community-based teacher education, where teacher candidates immerse themselves in communities that will allow them to apply teaching theory to practice. Community-based teacher education also challenges teacher candidates' assumptions about the issues of gender, race, and multicultural diversity. This assists to make an attitudinal change in the teacher trainees in order to eliminate segregation within the school community.
Curriculum
The question of what knowledge, attitudes, behaviours, approaches, methodologies and skills teachers should possess is the subject of much debate in many cultures. This is understandable, as teachers are entrusted with the transmission to learners of society's beliefs, attitudes and deontology, as well as of information, advice and wisdom, and with facilitating learners' acquisition of the key knowledge, attitudes and behaviours that they will need to be active in society and the economy.
Generally, Teacher Education curricula can be broken down into four major areas:
foundational knowledge in education-related aspects of philosophy of education, history of education, educational psychology, and sociology of education.
skills in assessing student learning, supporting English Language learners, using technology to improve teaching and learning, and supporting students with special needs.
content-area and methods knowledge and skills—often also including ways of teaching and assessing a specific subject, in which case this area may overlap with the first ("foundational") area. There is increasing debate about this aspect; because it is no longer possible to know in advance what kinds of knowledge and skill pupils will need when they enter adult life, it becomes harder to know what kinds of knowledge and skill teachers should have. Increasingly, emphasis is placed upon 'transversal' or 'horizontal' skills (such as 'learning to learn' or 'social competences'), which cut across traditional subject boundaries, and therefore call into question traditional ways of designing the Teacher Education curriculum (and traditional school curricula and ways of working in the classroom).
practice at classroom teaching or at some other form of educational practice—usually supervised and supported in some way, though not always. Practice can take the form of field observations, student teaching, or (U.S.) internship (See Supervised Field Experiences below). This area also includes extracurricular competences such as dealing with conflicts and bullying among pupils.
Rural
Those training to teach in rural and remote areas face different challenges from those who teach in urban centres. Therefore, a different approach to teacher education is needed for those who aspire to each in rural and remote areas. It has been proposed that rural and remote communities may have more success recruiting teachers who already live in these communities, rather than trying to recruit urbanites to move to rural communities once they have completed their teacher training. Online and blended teacher education programs are becoming more prevalent to help meet the needs of teacher shortages in rural and remote areas. In addition, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers by 2030 through international cooperation.
Supervised field experiences
field observations—include observation and limited participation within a classroom under the supervision of the classroom teacher
student teaching—includes a number of weeks teaching in an assigned classroom under the supervision of the classroom teacher and a supervisor (e.g. from the university)
internship—teaching candidate is supervised within his or her own classroom
These three areas reflect the organization of most teacher education programs in North America as well as Asian countries like Sri Lanka. Courses, modules, and other activities are often organized to belong to one of the three major areas of teacher education. The organization makes the programs more rational or logical in structure. The conventional organization has sometimes also been criticized, however, as artificial and unrepresentative of how teachers actually experience their work. Problems of practice frequently (perhaps usually) concern foundational issues, curriculum, and practical knowledge simultaneously, and separating them during teacher education may therefore not be helpful.
However, the question of necessary training components is highly debated as continuing increases in attrition rates by new teachers and struggling learners is evident. Additionally, with the increasing demands of the "teacher" research is beginning to suggest that teachers must not only be trained to increase learning experiences for their students, but how to also be a leader in an increasingly challenging field. The debate of how best to prepare teachers for teaching in today's demanding environments will continue to be an important focus of the United States, where the education of all children successfully is priority.
Induction of beginning teachers
Teaching involves the use of a wide body of knowledge about the subject being taught, and another set of knowledge about the most effective ways to teach that subject to different kinds of learner; it, therefore, requires teachers to undertake a complex set of tasks every minute. Many teachers experience their first years in the profession as stressful. The proportion of teachers who either do not enter the profession after completing initial training, or who leave the profession after their first teaching post, is high.
A distinction is sometimes made between inducting a teacher into a new school (explaining the school's vision, procedures etc.), and inducting a new teacher into the teaching profession (providing the support necessary to help the beginning teacher develop a professional identity, and to further develop the basic competences that were acquired in college).
A number of countries and states have put in place comprehensive systems of support to help beginning teachers during their first years in the profession. Elements of such a programme can include:
mentoring: the allocation to each beginning teacher of an experienced teacher, specifically trained as a mentor; the mentor may provide emotional and professional support and guidance; in teacher training, induction is limited to the provision of a mentor, but research suggests that, in itself, it is not enough.
a peer network: for mutual support but also for peer learning.
input from educational experts (e.g. to help the beginning teacher relate what she learned in college with classroom reality).
support for the process of self-reflection that all teachers engage in (e.g. through the keeping of a journal).
Some research suggests that such programmes can: increase the retention of beginning teachers in the profession; improve teaching performance; promote the teachers' personal and professional well-being.
However, numerous authors suggest that current teacher education is highly flawed and primarily geared towards a western dominated curriculum. Hence, they suggest that teacher education should be inclusive and take into account multiple backgrounds and variables to allow teachers to be responsive to the requirements of their students. This falls into the area of culturally responsive teaching and requires teaching education and teachers to address issues of diversity education and disadvantage as a part of a teacher education curriculum. Jabbar & Hardaker (2013) argue that this is an essential process in helping students of ethnicity, colour and diversity achieve and attain.
Continuous professional development
Because the world that teachers are preparing young people to enter is changing so rapidly, and because the teaching skills required are evolving likewise, no initial course of teacher education can be sufficient to prepare a teacher for a career of 30 or 40 years. In addition, as the student body continues to change due to demographic issues there is a continuous pressure on academics to have mastery of their subjects but also to understand their students. Continuous professional development is the process by which teachers (like other professionals) reflect upon their competencies, keep them up to date, and develop them further.
The extent to which education authorities support this process varies, as does the effectiveness of the different approaches. A growing research base suggests that to be most effective, continuing professional development activities should:
be spread over time,
be collaborative,
use active learning,
be delivered to groups of teachers,
include periods of practice, coaching, and follow-up,
promote reflective practice,
encourage experimentation, and
respond to teachers' needs.
However, a systematic review published in 2019 by the Campbell Collaboration, summarizing evidence from 51 studies, finds no clear evidence that continuing professional development in education improves student academic outcomes.
Teacher training
In recent times, a major role in the teacher training world has been covered by The Erasmus Programme and his platform, the SchoolEducationGateway; providing a unique opportunity to European teachers in international training courses in different European countries, fully funded the KA1 (KeyAction1).
Quality assurance in teacher education
The concept of 'quality' in education is contested and understood in numerous different ways.
Assuring the quality of teacher education includes selecting competent recruits for teacher education programs, accrediting teacher education programs who consistently show positive results, and offering registration, licensing, or certification to those who demonstrate competency to enter the teaching profession.
It is sometimes taken to relate to the quality of the work undertaken by a teacher, which has significant effects upon his or her pupils or students. Further, those who pay teachers' salaries, whether through taxes or through school fees, wish to be assured that they are receiving value for money. Ways to measure the quality of work of individual teachers, of schools, or of education systems as a whole, are therefore often sought.
In most countries, teacher salary is not related to the perceived quality of his or her work. Some, however, have systems to identify the 'best-performing' teachers, and increase their remuneration accordingly. Elsewhere, assessments of teacher performance may be undertaken with a view to identifying teachers' needs for additional training or development, or, in extreme cases, to identify those teachers that should be required to leave the profession. In some countries, teachers are required to re-apply periodically for their license to teach, and in so doing, to prove that they still have the requisite skills. But still there are countries (e.g. Sri Lanka) where teaching cannot be considered as a profession as the teachers are not provided with a license to teach.
Feedback on the performance of teachers is integral to many state and private education procedures, but takes many different forms. The 'no fault' approach is believed by some to be satisfactory, as weaknesses are carefully identified, assessed and then addressed through the provision of in house or school based training. These can, however, be seen as benefiting the institution and not necessarily fully meeting the continuing professional development needs of the individual as they lack educational gravitas.
Teacher educators
A teacher educator (also called a teacher trainer) is a person who helps in-service and pre-service teacher trainees to acquire the knowledge, competencies and attitudes they require to be effective teachers.
Several individual teacher educators are usually involved in the initial or ongoing education of each teacher; often each specialises in teaching about a different aspect of teaching (e.g. educational ethics, philosophy of education, sociology of education, curriculum, pedagogy, subject-specific teaching methods etc.).
Not every culture has a concept that precisely matches the English term 'teacher educator'... Even where the concept exists, the range of roles that is covered by the term varies significantly from country to country. In some traditions, the term 'teacher trainer' may be used instead of 'teacher educator'.
A teacher educator may be narrowly defined as a higher education professional whose principal activity is the preparation of new teachers in universities and other institutions of teacher education, such as National Colleges of Education, Teacher Training Colleges and Teacher Centers. A broader definition might include any professional whose work contributes in some way to the initial education or the continuing professional development of school and other teachers.
Even within a single educational system, teacher educators may be employed in different roles by different kinds of organisation. In the European context, for example, people who could be considered to be teacher educators include:
Higher education academics with a responsibility
for teacher education as such,
for teaching a subject (such as chemistry or mathematics) to students who will later become teachers;
for research into teaching,
for subject studies or
for didactics;
teachers in schools who supervise student teachers during periods of teaching practice;
school teachers or school managers responsible for inducting new teachers during their first year of teaching; or
those in charge of school teaching staff's continuous professional development.
Teacher educators may therefore work in many different contexts including National Colleges of Education, teacher training colleges, teacher centers (universities, schools, private sector training organisations or trade unions), and their working time may be fully, or only partly, dedicated to the preparation of teachers.
Professional knowledge and competences of teacher educators
Being able to educate teachers requires different knowledge and skills than those required to teach pupils or students.
Teacher educators' fields of knowledge
Some recent research has highlighted the many fields of knowledge that are required by teacher educators; these include knowledge about: the pedagogy of teacher education; learning and learners; teaching and coaching; and the profession of teacher educator itself. In addition, teacher educators need to know about the specific contexts their students will work and working in (e.g. for primary, or secondary education) and the subjects they will teach. More experienced teacher educators need expertise in: curriculum development and assessment; the wider context of teacher education, the way it is organised, and in research.
Multiple identities
The complexity of the tasks of the teacher educator arises in part because, as research has shown, they have multiple professional identities. (This is linked to the issues of definition of the term, highlighted above). While some of those who carry responsibility for the education of teachers do self-identify as 'teacher educator', others may self-identify rather as 'researcher' or 'academic'; others may relate primarily to their academic discipline, such as 'chemist' or 'geographer.'
But the key duality of identity that lies at the core of the teacher educator profession is that of first-order and second order teaching. A teacher educator must be a highly competent ‘first-order educator’ (i.e. a good teacher) but also a skilled ‘second-order educator’ (i.e. capable of teaching effectively about the skill of teaching and facilitating others to acquire teaching skills). As first-order educators, they need to be proficient teachers (of 'adult' students). As second-order educators, they require, in addition, specific competences and dispositions, such as modelling and meta-reflection, that enable them to teach about teaching.
The acquisition or improvement of teacher competences requires training, through which it will be improved educational planning and assessment. This results in a better learning of students, as evidences show. It is the objective of FAMT & L Comenius project, conducted at the University of Bologna, designed with the aim of promoting the correct use of formative assessment in mathematics education for students aged from 11 to 16. Reaching this goal supposes to design training programs for teachers of mathematics, starting from identifying their needs, believes, expectations and the use of formative assessment.
Modelling
The way in which teacher educators teach has a greater impact on student teachers’ thinking about practice than what teacher educators teach. So, teacher educators need to be able to model the competences and attributes they wish their students to adopt. Swennen et al. (2008). concluded that, in order to ‘model’ what they teach, teacher educators need to develop the ability to link their own (tacit) theories and practice of teaching to public theory, i.e., in Korthagen's words, to translate Theory with a capital ‘T’ to theory with a small ‘t’.
Meta-reflection
Just as teaching is no longer seen as simply transferring factual information, so educating teachers also requires a more sophisticated approach, based upon professional awareness that comes from reflective practice. For Loughran, being a professional teacher educator requires “genuinely reflecting on, and responding to, the needs, demands, and expectations of teaching about teaching within the academy”.
Professional standards for teacher educators
In some parts of the world (notably the United States, Flanders and the Netherlands) specific standards of professional practice have been developed for, or by, teacher educators. These set out the range of competences that a member of the teacher educator profession is expected to be able to deploy, as well as the attitudes, values and behaviours that are deemed to be acceptable for membership of the profession).
Policy and legislation on the teacher educator profession
While schools and school teachers are often in the news and in political debate, research shows that the teacher educator profession is largely absent from such public discussions and from policy discourse in education which often focuses exclusively on teachers and school leaders.
Some research suggests that, while most countries have policies, and legislation, in place concerning the teaching profession, few countries have a clear policy or strategy on the teacher educator profession. Caena (2012) found that some of the consequences of this situation can include a teacher educator profession that is poorly organised, has low status or low formal recognition, has few regulations, professional standards – or even minimum qualifications, and no coherent approach to the selection, induction, or continuing professional development of Teacher Educators.
In India, the National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE) released the 'National Curricular Framework for Teacher Education, 2010 (NCFTE), which aims to remedy many of the ills of teacher training in India. It calls for preparing a 'humane and reflective practitioner' and for fostering the agency and autonomy of the teacher, who can interpret the curriculum meaningfully to the contextual needs of the learners, than merely focus on 'teaching the text book'.
Research into the teacher educator profession
The teacher educator profession has also been seen as under-researched; empirical research on professional practice is also scarce.
However, the importance of the quality of this profession for the quality of teaching and learning has been underlined by international bodies including the OECD and the European Commission.
Some writers have therefore identified a need for more research into "what teachers of teachers themselves need to know", and what institutional supports are needed to "meet the complex demands of preparing teachers for the 21st century".
In response to this perceived need, more research projects are now focussing on the teacher educator profession. Several academic journals cover this field.
See also
European Teacher Education Network
Gender mainstreaming in teacher education policy
Normal school
Pedagogical pattern
Pedagogy
Pedeutology
ResearchED
School of education
Teaching method
History of education
History of education in the United States
Normal schools, for teacher education worldwide
Normal schools in the United States, historical coverage of teacher training in major states
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Human relations movement | Human relations movement refers to the researchers of organizational development who study the behaviour of people in groups, particularly in workplace groups and other related concepts in fields such as industrial and organizational psychology. It originated in the 1930s' Hawthorne studies, which examined the effects of social relations, motivation and employee satisfaction on factory productivity. The movement viewed workers in terms of their psychology and fit with companies, rather than as interchangeable parts, and it resulted in the creation of the discipline of human relations management.
Mayo's work
Elton Mayo stressed the following:
The power of natural groups, in which social aspects take precedence over functional organizational structures.
The need for reciprocal communication, in which communication is two way, from worker to chief executive, as well as vice versa.
The development of high quality leadership to communicate goals and to ensure effective and coherent decision making.
It has become a concern of all many companies to improve the job-oriented interpersonal skills of employees. The teaching of these skills to employees is referred to as "soft skills" training. Companies need their employees to be able to successfully communicate and convey information, to be able to interpret others' emotions, to be open to others' feelings, and to be able to solve conflicts and arrive at resolutions. By acquiring these skills, the employees, those in management positions, and the customer can maintain more compatible relationships.
Arguments against Mayo's involvement in human relations
Mayo's work is considered by various academics to be the basic counterpoint of Taylorism and scientific management. Taylorism, founded by Frederick W. Taylor, sought to apply science to the management of employees in the workplace in order to gain economic efficiency through labour productivity. Elton Mayo's work has been widely attributed to the discovery of the 'social person', allowing for workers to be seen as individuals rather than merely robots designed to work for unethical and unrealistic productivity expectations. However, this theory has been contested, as Mayo's purported role in the human relations movement has been questioned. Nonetheless, although Taylorism attempted to justify scientific management as a holistic philosophy, rather than a set of principles, the human relations movement worked parallel to the notion of scientific management. Its aim was to address the social welfare needs of workers and therefore elicit their co-operation as a workforce.
The widely perceived view of human relations is said to be one that completely contradicts the traditional views of Taylorism. Whilst scientific management tries to apply science to the workforce, the accepted definition of human relations suggests that management should treat workers as individuals, with individual needs. In doing so, employees are supposed to gain an identity, stability within their job and job satisfaction, which in turn make them more willing to co-operate and contribute their efforts towards accomplishing organisational goals. The human relations movement supported the primacy of organizations to be attributed to natural human groupings, communication and leadership. However, the conventional depiction of the human relations 'school' of management, rising out of the ashes of scientific management is argued to be a rhetorical distortion of events.
Firstly, it has been argued that Elton Mayo's actual role in the human relations movement is controversial and although he is attributed to be the founder of this movement, some academics believe that the concept of human relations was used well before the Hawthorne investigations, which sparked the human relations movement. Bruce and Nyland (2011) suggest that many academics preceded Mayo in identifying a concept similar to that of the human relations movement even going as far to suggest that the output and information collected by the Hawthorne investigations was identified well before Mayo by Taylor. In addition, Wren and Greenwood (1998) argue that Taylor made important contributions to what inspires human motivation, even though his ultimate findings were somewhat different from the human relations movement.
Another name which has been attributed to pre-existing human relations ideas is that of Henry S. Dennison. The one time president of the Taylor Society has been linked to both Taylorist principles as well human relation ideals thus creating a nexus between Taylorism and human relation thought. Dennison demonstrated an activist concern both with the rationale and character of workers, and with the control and management undertaken by managers of the business enterprise.
In order to assess the validity of human relations as a benchmark for rights within the workplace, the contribution of Taylorism in comparison to human relations must be established. Taylorism and scientific management entailed to be a "complete mental revolution" and as Taylor explained, Taylorism sought to encourage managers and labourers to "take their eyes off of the division of the surplus as the important matter, and together turn their attention toward increasing the size of the surplus." This notion of management appealed to the employer as it addressed organisational problems, inefficiencies and adverse employer-employee relations. Scientific management aimed to use science and qualitative data in the selection of employees and facilitate the use of employee databases and performance reviews. Firstly, scientific management aimed to reduce inefficiency through studying the time and motions in work tasks. The object of time studies was to determine how fast a job should and could be done. Secondly, Taylor purported to introduce specific quantitative goals to individual employees in order to provide challenging time restraints and thus increasing productivity. Most importantly, Taylor sought to increase productivity through organization of behaviour.
See also
Group dynamics
People skills
Social psychology
References
Organizational theory
Systems psychology
Human resource management
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Situationism (psychology) | Under the controversy of person–situation debate, situationism is the theory that changes in human behavior are factors of the situation rather than the traits a person possesses. Behavior is believed to be influenced by external, situational factors rather than internal traits or motivations. Situationism therefore challenges the positions of trait theorists, such as Hans Eysenck or Raymond B. Cattell. This is an ongoing debate that has truth to both sides; psychologists are able to prove each of the view points through human experimentation.
History and conceptions
Situationists believe that thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and past experiences and behaviors do not determine what someone will do in a given situation, rather, the situation itself does.
Situationists tend to assume that character traits are distinctive, meaning that they do not completely disregard the idea of traits, but suggest that situations have a greater impact on behavior than those traits. Situationism is also influenced by culture, in that the extent to which people believe that situations impact behaviors varies between cultures. Situationism has been perceived as arising in response to trait theories, and correcting the notion that everything we do is because of our traits. However, situationism has also been criticized for ignoring individuals' inherent influences on behavior. There are many experiments and evidence supporting this topic, and shown in the sources below but also in the article itself. But these experiments do not test what people would do in situations that are forced or rushed, most mistakes are made from rushing and or forgetting something due to lack of concentration. Situationism can be looked at in many different ways, this means that situationism needs to be tested and experimented in many different ways.
Experimental evidence
Evidence for
Many studies have found series of evidence supporting situationism. One notable situationist study is [Philip Zimbardo|Zimbardo]'s [Stanford prison experiment]. This study was considered one of the most unethical because the participants were deceived and were physically and psychologically abused. The goal of the study was that Zimbardo wanted to discover two things. If prison guards abused prisoners because of their nature, or because of the power and authority they were given in the situation. They also wanted to figure out if prisoners acted violent and savage because of their nature or because of being in a secluded and violent environment. To carry out this experiment, Zimbardo gathered 24 college men and paid them 15 dollars each an hour to live two weeks in a mock prison. The participants were told that they were chosen to be guard or prisoner because of their personality traits, but they were randomly selected. The prisoners were booked and given prison clothes and no possessions. They were also assigned a number to be referred to with the intent of farther dehumanizing them. Within the first night, the prisoner and guard dynamics began to take place. The guards started waking up the prisoners in the middle of the night for count, and they would yell and ridicule them. The prisoners also started developing hostile traits against the guards and having prison related conversations. By the second day, the guards started abusing the prisoners by forcing them to do push ups, and the prisoners started rebelling by removing their caps and numbers, and hiding in their cells with their mattresses blocking the door. As the days passed the relationship between the guards and prisoners became extremely hostile- the prisoners fought for their independence, and the guards fought to strip them of it.
There were many cases where the prisoners began breaking down psychologically, and it all started with prisoner 8612. After one day after the experiment started, prisoner number 8612 has anxiety attacks and asked to leave. He was then told "You can't leave. You can't quit.” He then went back to the prison and “began to act ‘crazy,’ to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control.” After this, he was sent home. The other prisoner that broke down was 819. 819 had broken down and was told to rest in a room. When Dr.Zimbardo went to check on him he said " what I found was a boy crying hysterically while in the background his fellow prisoners were yelling and chanting that he was a bad prisoner, that they were being punished because of him." Zimbardo then allowed him to leave but he said he couldn't because he was labeled as a bad prisoner, to which Zimbardo responded "Listen, you are not 819. My name is Dr. Zimbardo, I am a psychologist, and this is not a prison. This is just an experiment and those are students, just like you. Let's go." He stopped crying suddenly and looked up at me just like a small child awakened from a nightmare and said, "OK, let's go."
The guards also began to have extremely abusive relations with the prisoners. Zimbardo claimed there were three types of guards. The first were the guards that followed all the rules but got the job done, the second felt bad for the prisoners, and the third were extremely hostile and treated them like animals. This last type showed behaviors of actual guards and seemed to have forgotten they were college students, they got into their roles faster, and seemed to enjoy tormenting the prisoners. On Thursday night, 6 days into the experiment, Zimbardo described the guards as having "sadistic" behavior, and then decided to close down the study early.
This study showed how regular people can completely disassociate with who they are when their environment changes. Regular college boys turned into broken down prisoners and sadistic guards.
Studies investigating bystander effects also support situationism. For example, in 1973, Darley and Batson conducted a study where they asked students at a seminary school to give a presentation in a separate building. They gave each individual participant a topic, and would then tell a participant that they were supposed to be there immediately, or in a few minutes, and sent them on their way to the building. On the way, each participant encountered a confederate who was on the ground, clearly in need of medical attention. Darley and Batson observed that more participants who had extra time stopped to help the confederate than those who were in a hurry. Helping was not predicted by religious personality measures, and the results therefore indicate that the situation influenced their behavior.
A third well-known study supporting situationism is an obedience study, the Milgram experiment. Stanley Milgram made his obedience study to explain the obedience phenomenon, specifically the holocaust. He wanted to explain how people follow orders, and how people are likely to do unmoral things when ordered to by people of authority. The way the experiment was devised was that Milgram picked 40 men from a newspaper add to take part in a study at Yale University. The men were between 20 and 50 years old, and were paid $4.50 for showing up. In this study, a participant was assigned to be a "teacher" and a confederate was assigned to be a "learner". The teachers were told the learners had to memorize word pairs, and every time they got it wrong they were shocked with increasing voltages. The voltages ranged from 15 to 450, and in order for the participants to believe the shock was real, the experimenters administered to them a real 45v shock, The participant was unaware that the learner was a confederate. The participant would test the learner, and for each incorrect answer the learner gave, the participant would have to shock the learner with increasing voltages. The shocks were not actually administered, but the participant believed they were. When the shocks reached 300v, the learner began to protest and show discomfort. Milgram expected participants to stop the procedure, but 65% of them continued to completion, administering shocks that could have been fatal, even if they were uncomfortable or upset. Even though most of the participants continued administering the shocks, they had distressed reactions when administering the shocks, such as laughing hysterically. Participants felt compelled to listen to the experimenter, who was the authority figure present in the room and continued to encourage the participant throughout the study. Out of 40 participants, 26 went all the way to the end.
Evidence against
Personality traits have a very weak relationship to behavior. In contrast, situational factors usually have a stronger impact on behavior; this is the core evidence for situationism. In addition, people are also able to describe character traits of close to such as friends and family, which goes to show that there are opposing reasons showing why people can recall these traits.
In addition, there are other studies that show these same trends. For example, twin studies have shown that identical twins share more traits than fraternal twins. This also implies that there is a genetic basis for behavior, which directly contradicts situationist views that behavior is determined by the situation. When observing one instance of extroverted or honest behavior, it shows how in different situations a person would behave in a similarly honest or extroverted way. It shows that when many people are observed in a range of situations the trait-related reactions to behavior is about .20 or less. People think the correlation is around .80. This shows that the situation itself is more dependent on characteristics and circumstances in contrast to what is taking place at that point in time.
These recent challenges to the Traditional View have not gone unnoticed. Some have attempted to modify the Traditional View to insulate it from these challenges, while others have tried to show how these challenges fail to undermine the Traditional View at all. For example, Dana Nelkin (2005), Christian Miller (2003), Gopal Sreenivasan (2002), and John Sabini and Maury Silver (2005), among others, have argued that the empirical evidence cited by the Situationists does not show that individuals lack robust character traits.
Current views: interactionism
In addition to the debate between trait influences and situational influences on behavior, a psychological model of "interactionism" exists, which is a view that both internal dispositions and external situational factors affect a person's behavior in a given situation. This model emphasizes both sides of the person-situation debate, and says that internal and external factors interact with each other to produce a behavior. Interactionism is currently an accepted personality theory, and there has been sufficient empirical evidence to support interactionism. However, it is also important to note that both situationists and trait theorists contributed to explaining facets of human behavior.
See also
Trait activation theory
Philip Zimbardo
Notes
Further reading
Krahe, B. (1993) Personality and Social Psychology: Towards a Synthesis. London: Sage.
Personality theories | 0.79111 | 0.978128 | 0.773806 |
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