Michael Wesch’s short video, A Vision of Students Today, associates the gap in relevance between student’s interests today and educational practices at a traditional university to the widespread availability of new, and more captivating, modes of learning and interaction, now available in the digital age. My own educational experience, which began over 60 years ago, suggests that this disconnect is not necessarily a new phenomena, nor solely a product of digital technologies. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid might agree. As they argue in a paper entitled, ” The University in the Digital Age, the weaknesses in today’s educational system are due primarily to a fundamental pedagogical failure. According to the authors, the problem is that we treat education as a matter of delivering scientifically vetted content to students, rather than engaging them in an on-going shared practice of discovery.
the problem is that we treat education as a matter of delivering scientifically vetted content to students, rather than engaging them in a situated, on-going shared practice. of discovery.
The authors’ paper certainly resonates with me personally, especially their characterization of the typical approach used to teach math. In my case, two seminal experiences come to mind. The first occurred when I was in seventh grade. My teacher, Mrs. Milford, posed the following question in our class: If an airplane is traveling at 500 miles and hour, and the wind is blowing at 40 miles an hour, how fast is the plane moving? When she revealed the right answer–540 miles per hour–I was perplexed. I asked: “If the wind is traveling at 40 miles per hour, how can it catch up with a plane flying at 500 miles per hour? No doubt, a reasonable question for a seventh grader? Not according to Mrs Milford. In response to my perceived impertinence I was sent to the principal’s office where I was assigned the task of putting the top 500 U.S. cities in alphabetical order. Talk about a disconnect! Needless to say, it was some time before I raised another math question. In fact, the next occasion occurred years later, in my college algebra class, when I asked why one could not divide by zero. The answer, I was told, was because, if I did so, I would fail. Enough said!
In their paper, Brown and Duguid describe how math might be taught in the context of a community of practice.
They suggest that if knowledge is to be meaningful to students, the teacher must make explicit the thought process that he or she goes through in generating a question, and seeking an answer for it. By participating in the learning process–that is to say, the practice and, yes, the culture of doing math –students will develop an intuitive sense of how to generate solutions to such problems on their own.
By participating in the learning process–that is to say, the practice and, yes, the culture of doing math– students will develop an intuitive sense of how to generate solutions to such problems on their own.
Duguid and Brown do not discount the role of technology in the educational process. To the contrary, they consider a number of ways in which technology based tools can support their vision. Having recently experimented with “blogging,” and found it very satisfying, I too would like to build it into my classes, in the form of e-portfolios. I agree with Duguid and Brown that education should prepare students for the real world by engaging them in a form of disciplinary practice. And it would seem to me that blogging within the classroom can help students and faculty achieve such a goal. However, in an interdisciplinary educational program such as CCT, a somewhat different approach might be required. Interdisciplinarity is its own unique practice. It has no-bottom line text: rather it emerges and evolves in the process of engaging with complex problems. The kind of blogging exercise that would most be most relevant in this regard would be one that links students not solely to each other, and to their faculty, but also to the non-academic groups–outside the ivory tower–wrestling with real life problems. University roles and boundaries have traditionally been relatively fixed, so these three groups have typically been remote from one another. Were they to interact around problem solving, just imagine the practice they might engender!
