PROJECT
THE MASTERLY VOICE was the direction in a dog training pamphlet my high school
English teacher father read out loud to me well over sixty years ago when he
brought home a new puppy.. And it wasn't only the amateur dog trainer to which this advice obtained, Indeed, it was and remains as well applied to
the School Master and Mistress in the form of, “On the first day, you, the
teacher, must set the tone.”
From
the first I entered the teaching profession to the last course I taught, I
heard colleagues claim that the Masterly Voice is needed to successfully
accomplish the job. But, also from the
first, not only did the Masterly Voice sit poorly in me, and perhaps because of
this, whatever the age of students in my charge, it appears they did their best
to ignore my commands choosing to do their own thing, with too many showing
annoyance when I intentionally asserted my authority. To the good order of my classes, students’
own things tended more often than not to coincide with many a lesson.
Reflection
on the dynamics over time finally dented the thickness of received wisdom to
awaken in me the realization of a naturally arrived at Constructivism, the view
“…that individuals create their own
new understandings on the basis of an interaction between what they already
know and believe and ideas and knowledge with which they come into contact.
“ (Richardson, pp 1623-1624) Thus, the results of my instruction
would always be unique to each individual whether I wished it or not.
Yet,
the convention, especially in the higher education settings in which I sought
and was given employment, was and remains to fix common course standards and
then measure each student’s achievement of them on assignments, exams and even
in class participation culminating in a single score for the course. But, if each takes from instruction that
which is unique to the individual, then the common standards and their measures
of achievement become mightily invalid.
So,
the first change I made in deliberately employing Constructivism was to alter
my grading policy. On the first day of
classes I facilitated conversations among the assembled undergraduates on the
purposes of grading. As they had never
thought about it before, they could not find voice to my probes and the
exercises morphed quickly into brief lectures on my grading philosophy and
design of practice. On the second class
day I implemented the huge leap in asking each student to write the grade for
the course they wanted and a reason for me to accept that grade on a large
index card. If the statement was well
argued, I said, I would accept the grade and then they could take from our
considerations of the material in question that which they found compelling
without worry the effect on course grade..
In reality, unless the space was blank I accepted any reason. All complied
and off we went. Except…I got called on
the carpet by administrations consequent of student complaints over my grading
system and had to return to convention.
Further contemplation told me that I
needed to reframe the situation of students in my courses so they might
understand and find congenial my employ of Constructivism. “To reframe”, Watzlawck states, “…means to change
the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a
situation is experienced and to place it in another frame which fits the
‘facts’ of the same concrete situation equally well or better, and thereby
changes its entire meaning.” (Watzlawick,
p. 95)
To
arrive at the new frame for my Constructivism I needed to make the old fame
plain to myself. I discovered the old frame could be characterized as The
Authoritarian.
The
Authoritarian is the overwhelmingly dominant form of schooling at every level
and in which I have done all my teaching.
It is hierarchically structured with individual adult and youth success
within it contingent on personal integration with caste roles and satisfaction
of authority expectations. The
Authoritarian’s Universe of Discourse is to be found in control, dominance-subservience,
compliance, order, punishment. Its Voice
can be portrayed as The Domineering Parent.
Its Forms of Address are as in You must/must not, You should/shouldn’t,
You need to, etc.
The new frame I found could be characterized as The
Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid. The
Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid structures an interdependent culture and
governance for a school as a whole and an independent subject knowledge
seeking, acquisition and use for each student.
Personal success in living and working well within the organization is
contingent on adult-youth egalitarian, cooperative management of institutional
administration, policy, and social control, and of individual self and
interpersonal regulation while each student’s subject knowledge success is
contingent on a high degree of self-determination. Examples of The Libertarian-Communitarian
Hybrid center mostly on the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA, (https://sudburyvalley.org/), and its modeled schools, on Summerhill School
in Leiston, England (http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/), and Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (https://antiochcollege.edu/ ).
The Libertarian-Communitarian Universe
of Discourse tends to be situational with community, group, interpersonal and
self-regulation concerns found in negotiation, mutual agreement and consensus
while individual student subject concerns are to be found in personal autonomy
and individuality. The Hybrid’s Voice
for community can be portrayed as The Arbitrator with Forms of Address as in
Are you willing to, Would you agree to, as in The condition, situation, goal
warrants, indicates, suggests, recommends, as in I hear you, I think I
understand, I can only imagine, I can’t imagine. The Hybrid’s Voice for personal subject
decisions can be styled as The Solo Sailor with Forms of Address from youth as
in I’m going to/not going to, I want/don’t
want, I have/don’t have, and forms of
adult address to youth as in Here are
options, It’s up to you, The choice is yours, If you wish/want.
I
could now see that my Constructivism veered heavily to The Libertarian when it
came to course content: As I remarked to
more than one undergraduate without a drop of sarcasm, “I place ideas, concepts
and propositions before you for your pleasure to take or leave as you like.“ I
could also see that I adopted The Libertarian Universe of Discourse, Voice and
Forms of Address when it came to subject content but projected The
Communitarian when it came to student self-regulation, interpersonal and group
dynamics. In essence, I was trying to
create within my courses an Interconnected Community of Solo Sailors.
Then
like the anvil dropping in a cartoon, it hit me that this definition of the
classroom situation was grossly inconsistent with The Authoritarian
expectations of the institutions within which I had been employed and the
students enrolled. Still, I thought to give reframing the good old college try.
I
employed Experiential Cooperative Learning activities focused on concepts found
in the course syllabi and the assigned texts to reframe self-regulation, interpersonal
and group dynamics to the Communitarian. I strongly encouraged the use of The
Arbitrator Forms of Address when students were negotiating on group agreements.
I promoted
youth Solo Sailor Forms of Address for students to use during topic class
discussions while I used the adult forms owning my own specific topic
information to reframe perception of common course content to the Libertarian. I
reinforced The Libertarian perception by not assessing the degree of retention
of either student or instructor derived content information Further, I did not directly instruct on or assess
retention of material from the assigned readings, but left the decision to
engage and the content to take from readings to each student; I provided the
beginning of each class session for discussion of readings if a student or a
group of students wished to do so always using the adult Solo Sailor Forms of Address
when eliciting student interest for discussion. However, I surrendered to The Authoritarian
accountability expectation of institutions and students by using The
Domineering Parent Forms of Address to steer methods by which students arrived
at their own content knowledge from class activities, guided pivotal
questioning, lectures and readings and, then, by assessing the degree to which
each student achieved an instructed technique.
These
reframing efforts kept on failing.
Consistently having to justify myself to administrations which
constantly declined to agree with my reasoning certainly demonstrated the
failure. My reframing methods may have
been insufficient to the task and my implementation of them may have been less
the stellar, but the global Authoritarian environment of the institutions in
the end had the most substantial effect.
An explanation can be found in Ludwik
Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a
Scientific Fact. First comes the
adoption of a single all-encompassing paradigm, which Fleck defines as “… a
structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many details
and relations…[offering] enduring resistance to anything that contradicts it.”
(Fleck, p. 27) Because
the paradigm belongs to a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas
or maintaining intellectual interaction,
he maintains, perception wholly directed by that paradigm undergoes social
reinforcement constraining the individual by determining what can be thought in
no other way: “Whole eras”, Fleck
states, “will then be ruled by this thought constraint. Heretics who do not share this collective
mood…are rated as criminals by the collective [and] will be burned at the stake
until a different mood creates a different [perception] and different
valuation.” (Fleck, p. 99)
“What we are faced with here”, he suggests, “is
not so much simple passivity or mistrust of new ideas as an active approach
which can be divided into several stages.
(1) A contradiction to the system appears unthinkable. (2) What does not fit into the system remains
unseen; (3) alternatively, if it is noticed, either it is kept secret, or (4)
laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not
contradict the system. (5) Despite the
legitimate claims of contradictory views, one tends to see, describe, or even
illustrate those circumstances which corroborate current views and thereby give
them substance. (Fleck, p 27) And I will add: or the individual holding contrary views is
ignored by and eventually expelled from the thought collective.
Put
simply: the institutions of higher education in which I taught and students acculturated
exclusively held the thought constraint, the paradigm, of The Authoritarian; I
held an opposing thought system, The Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian
Hybrid. The different thought system I
employed presented a contradiction to The Authoritarian, especially, in student
expectations of instructional attitudes and professorial behaviors and in
individual student learning and class group-dynamic behaviors creating a
cognitive dissonance within each student in each course I structured through my
form of Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid. They partially resolved the conundrum
through responding well to Authoritarian expectations inherent in the need to
comply with my directions in class session activities and in successfully
acquiring instructed methods, but confusion reigned.
A
switch in situational expectation, Watzlawck contends, causes confusion and the
need to resolve confusion causes a readiness and eagerness “…to hold on firmly
to the next piece of concrete information that is given…[thus] setting the
stage for reframing.” (Watzlawck, p. 101)
Unfortunately, I experienced a complete absence of readiness and
eagerness in students to anticipate any next unfolding of my form of
Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid pedagogy, so the next piece and
the next after that and the next after that of the form continued an unresolved
confusion. Most students lived with the
bewilderment while continuing to act according to their Authoritarian
expectations. But, those few more
severely disturbed by being in the middle of the reframing process complained
to institutional administrations and I continued to be called to account and
compelled to abandon the Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid for
The Authoritarian. While I was not
burned at the stake, my heresy was rewarded by constantly being discontinued in
employment.
Being
true to the strong innate inclination toward independent thought within an
egalitarian community, insisting on instruction through a paradigm reflective
of this inclination but alien to the one structuring the organization in which
I was employed and students integrated, and working to change the conceptual
setting of the classroom for students so they experienced it through that
different paradigm, I, in the end, led my students into a logical paradox: as Watzlawick
would say, I ordered them to Be Spontaneous.
(See Watzlawick, p. 64)
In
Change: Principles of Problem Formation
and Problem Resolution Watslawick, et al, use reframing as a tool for
change at the level of a single person. But, the manner of its use here
centered on change of collected groups of individuals bound tightly within a
given paradigmatic system. While I may
have wished reframing precipitated a second order change, “…whose occurrence
changes the system itself” (Watzlawck, pp 10-11), the social reinforcing
thought constraints of the system in which we labored could only allow first
order change, “one that occurs within a given system which itself remains
unchanged”. (Watzlawck, pp 10-11) The
confusion I engendered in classes of students suggested first order change was
possible and underway. However, as
repeatedly displayed, the integrative power of the system, in this case The
Authoritarian, and its fourteen to fifteen year hold on these groups of
students eventually precluded even first order change. Moreover, only in my courses were students
being asked to substantively change in this manner, the overwhelming majority
architecture of their studies deepening integration into the system. Further, the fifteen week semester turned out
to be an unrealistic period within which to successfully reframe even to a
first order change.
Ultimately,
reconceptualization to a Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid college
classroom just could not be had within The Authoritarian system. If a Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian
Hybrid conceptualization is to be had within groups of students, then, they will
have to have grown to higher education and be attending a college wholly
constructed by that paradigm.
Indeed, to assure the constructivist,
libertarian-communitarian habits of mind, behavior and expectation, students
ought to growth through schooling intentionally constructed to engender and
express them/
References:
Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Eds. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K.
Merton. Trans. Fed Bradely and Thaddeus
J. Trenn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1979.
Richardson,
Virginia. “Constructivist Pedagogy”.
Teachers College Record 105:9,
1623-1640, 2005.
Watzlawck, Paul, Weakland, John H., and
Fisch, Richard. Change: Principles of
Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.
New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc. 1974.
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