More resurrection - process

There is a lot of talk about process these days. It seems that every moving target is a process. Maybe it is. But do we understand process? Do we really know how it works? I would think no. One person has done a lot of thinking about process, however. Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter and thinker par excellence. Though appearing at first rather complicated and technical, his process model provides us with an excellent analytic tool for looking at process in general, and anything we consider to be a process in particular. A few notions need to be in hand when approaching his model. His seven-stage arc covers three descending stages, if you will, a turnaround, and three ascending stages. As such it encompasses four levels, which parallel, if not explain, Aristotle's four causes (a topic, which if you haven't already dealt with, is highly recommended). These causes/levels are explained in terms of two related notions: freedom and constraint. Level I starts with 3 degrees of freedom and 0 degrees of constraint, and each successive level becomes less free and more constrained. Movement through the ascending part of the arc, of course, indicates increasing freedom and less constraint. Think about it: process is liberating. Put those two ideas into your consciousness and let them simply share some awareness space for a while. You'll be surprised where it might lead you. Today I'm not here to explain all of this to you, rather I just want to whet your appetite for something that can be a real eye-opener, if you let it. If you have to deal with processes, no matter what kind in which contexts, this can be a very helpful tool. Check it out.

Resurrecting ideas whose time never came

Just because some ideas assert themselves and garner lots of attention doesn't mean their the best ideas around. It's not just my innate scepticism of markets that leads me to this conclusion. Ideas, concepts, and notions need to be understood, and some are simply a bit more difficult to grasp. This increased difficulty is, I'm sure, a contributor to their losing out in the race to the marketplace ... if that is in fact where everything is determined.

One such idea/concept/notion is erotetics.

No, please look again: there's an additional "et" shoved in there; we're not dealing with anything risque at all, but that doesn't mean it isn't an exciting concept. OK, exciting may be too strong a word, but interesting and meaningful still apply.

Stated most simply, erotetics is the science of questions. Some see it as branch of logic, namely the logic of questions and questioning, and as such was of interest in general to philosophers and in practice to lawyers. For others, it was a short-lived, and, in my estimation, too long overlooked branch of educational theory.

It's not that I think there is only one way to think about education, a term I use to encompass both teaching and learning. There is still a lot of debate about what teaching is, and the emphasis these days is certainly on the learner, though I'm not sure the teaching-learning dichotomy isn't a false one any way, but that's a topic for another time. I do believe, however, that the very notion of questions and questioning can be an excellent starting point for a number of things that matter. To me, questions and questioning - erotetics - is the hub of the wheel of consciousness, with language, perception, philosophy, education, science, politics, and a host of other "disciplines" acting as spokes. But, if it's as important as I think it is, then why has it been and is it so neglected?

One of the issues involved is certainly that we don't have as strong a grip on the notion of questioning as we think we do. Having taken a closer look at the subject (see "A Question of Questions"), I'm much more aware of what a complex, yet extremely powerful, factor questions are. Even risking being over-simplistic, questioning is a unique - if not defining - human capability. The problem is, we don't understand just how they work and how they can be best employed, especially in education. Sure, we've all heard of the Socratic method, and we're all aware that questions play a significant role in teaching, but too many classroom questions deal with procedural, not learning, issues, and too many classroom questions that are related to learning activities are simply poor questions that don't live up to their potential.

As a result, I'm making a call for the resurrection of an idea whose time never really came, namely erotetics. It's time to start questioning questions again.

Anti-teaching ... really?

In my day job, I have to deal a lot with trying to get adult-education teachers and vocational trainers into the 21st century. In other words, I have been tasked with helping get our collective head around the latest information and communication technology (ICT). It's not an easy job, and it's not a pretty picture. This is not because this class of educator is particularly put off by new technology, it's more of case of them not seeing why it may be useful. After all, we've been talking at students and seminar participants for years now, and nobody's really complained, and they seem to be getting it, and their employers are generally satisfied ... so why all this new stuff?

I find the question particularly legitimate. Have we really shown that there is any advantage to ICT in any classroom. On the one hand, we have the fact that an increasing number of our learners are simply at home in the new technologies. In one of the EU projects in which I am involved (TeNeGEN: Connect the TEachers to reach and teach the NEt GENeration www.tenegen.eu), this was the starting point for developing materials and courses to help get our target group more up-to-speed with their students. Sure, we're making some progress, but there is a deeper issue involved, namely change.

It's not so much that our target group educators are anti-technology, for I'm convinced that most of them are not, rather, we need to think about new ways of structuring, organizing and facilitating instruction. As was mentioned in the last posting, involvement and interaction and doing and experience are especially important factors in the learning process. We've known this for a long time now, but only recently has enough momentum built that we can actually start acting upon this knowledge.

One of those whose blazing the trail into the areas of new learning is Mike Wesch at Kansas State University. If you haven't already, I can only recommend and encourage you to stop over and take a look at his "Brief Philosophy of Anti-Teaching" which was originally published on the Savage Minds blog. This is a great introduction to thinking differently about what we're doing in the classroom. And, for those of you who are more visual, there's a YouTube video from him that is worth a watch, too.

The heart of the matter

Everywhere I've been lately there's been a lot of talk about learning: elearning, formal learning, informal learning, vocational learning, professional learning. You name it, someone's found a way to tack "learning" on the end of it, as if this would clarify anything. It doesn't.

Most of my discussion partners really weren't talking about learning, they were talking about other things, like education, training, or schooling. I'm not convinced that any of these 3 last-named notions really have a lot to with learning per se. What is more, in most of those discussions, replacing the word "learning" with "teaching" would have made them at least more comprehensible and, more importantly, accurate. For some reason I get the very strong impression that most people think that others won't learn unless there's someone there to help them. I think that's putting the cart before the horse . We humans are capable of so very much, but there is one thing I found that we can't do in the least: we cannot not learn. We are constantly and continually intaking, assimilating, sorting, sifting, filtering, feeling, processing, remembering, and forgetting ... in other words, learning. Learning is what we do most, and what we do best, even if most of us like to doubt the quality of that learning when we see the results in others. Maybe that's why we so often get that urge to institute some kind of control system, like schools, colleges and universities, religious institutions, and other training providers.

Certainly we can learn on our own, and I would be the last to maintain that others can't or couldn't make a substantial contribution to our learning. What I'm skeptical of, though, is what I like to call the "teacher value-added". What most teachers do - at least in my experience - falls under lecturing, maybe audio-visual (at least since the advent of PowerPoint and the web), and in some cases some demonstration with the occasional discussion group thrown in for good measure. I know I'm being too hard on a lot of my colleagues, but just suggesting changes never brings them about. While it may not be a perfect model, the learning pyramid at least give us a frame of reference for thinking about teaching and learning. It would seem to make sense to place more emphasis where the expectations of the outcomes are the highest, at the bottom of the pyramid. More bang for the buck, as we used to say in defense.

To me, the best teacher of all is the one who gets out of the way and lets others learn. This is not to say that teachers should not be involved in learning. They should be. This is not to say that teachers are superfluous. They aren't. But teachers need a better understanding of their role in the process, as the catalyst of learning process, not primarily the assessor of learning outcomes.

A note of cynical optimism

Everyone has to start somewhere somehow. I'm no different. I've noticed that there's a lot of negativity about, and a lot of it has to do with money. Let's face it, money makes mean. This comes from losing sight of how it - like anything else - fits into our everyday lives.

Now, I'm purposely not going to say that we need to have the proper perspective on things, for that's one of the issues that is bedeviling us these days: perspective. When reflected upon, we realize that a perspective is simply one way of looking at something, and my experience has shown me that there is never just one way of seeing anything. To me, smart people - whatever "smart" may mean - have the ability to see things differently at different times without thinking they are looking at different things. In other words, they seem to have a more integrated view of what's around them, and how they relate to them.

What has struck me lately is that I don't see a lot of that. I don't know all that many smart people, but I'm always on the lookout for them. And before you think that I'm just another arrogant jerk who lives in a down-the-nose perspective, I'll hasten to add that I don't consider myself all that smart most of the time. It's easy to get caught up in thinking we've got anything figured out. No, I believe that whatever I think, believe, or know is best considered as a working hypothesis, nothing more.

I wish there were more smart people around, but there aren't. I keep hoping there are more than I think there are. That's what I mean by cynical optimism.