Presented at the 14th Annual Learning Conference, Johannesburg, S.A., June 2007

Preparing our students for…?

I recently read a book by Nassim Taleb called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which resonated with my experience of 21st century life. Essentially he says, “Expect the unexpected.” He argues that we are wired to expect that the future will look like the past, and to discount the possibility of the unknown—sometimes with catastrophic effects. He says that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown and the very improbable. It’s time we started treating the unexpected as “a starting point,” not as “an exception to be pushed under the rug.”

It’s no surprise, then, that creativity and innovation are powerful forces in today’s economy.  In my field, entrepreneurship education, it is particularly obvious. Market economies are dynamic entities always in the process of “becoming.” Entrepreneurial ventures are about prospects for the future, not about the inheritance of the past. Successful entrepreneurs are able to recognize opportunity where others see chaos, contradiction and confusion. (Kuratko and Hodgetts, 2004)

Of course it is not just students in our small business classes who face an uncertain future or will be called upon to be creative more often than knowledgeable.

So, why do we teach as though tomorrow will be like yesterday?

Pedagogic Reform (vs. Revolution)

"Very few schools teach students how to create knowledge; instead, students are taught that knowledge is static and complete, and they become experts at consuming knowledge rather than producing knowledge. In fact, in the U.S. there are some educational reform movements afoot that run in the opposite direction-- toward rigid teaching that emphasizes a rote learning of material, instead of creative appropriation and deeper understanding." (Sawyer 2006)

Unlike many college teachers I do have an education background including two masters’ degrees from Columbia University’s Teachers College. My first visit to this continent was as a Peace Corps volunteer and my job was to help teachers with a discovery approach to science lessons. Over the last thirty years I have watched the rise and fall of many innovative teaching approaches. Most of them—cooperative learning, collaborative learning, inquiry, project-based, and so on—are improvements upon the standard lecture approach to college teaching in that they involve the student in team building and knowledge construction.   But, these reforms simply won’t meet the needs of our students.

It’s time for a radical change in education. “Radical,” of course, refers to “the root.”  At the root of most teaching, be it in the form of a traditional lecture or small collaborative learning groups, are two concepts—the individual learner and the acquisition of knowledge.  But what if learning (transformative, developmental learning) is social and doesn’t require something (knowledge) to learn?

It will help, I think, to consider why it is we do teach the way we do and why it’s so hard to make a radical break with this model (in all its variations). In this section and throughout I follow closely Lois Holzman in Schools for Growth (1997).

The cognitive bias of Western thought (which has become a global bias) is that understanding requires accumulation of objective knowledge which in turn requires a dualistic split between the knower and the known. Thisfocus on knowing “about something” holds back developmental learning activity.

But, you might ask, how can we possibly understand if we don’t depend on knowing?  Is there such a thing as non-knowing understanding?  I think so. It is a kind of understanding (and learning) that is indistinguishable from participating in the life process. Very young children “do understanding” in this way; they actually become knowers fairly late in the process of adaptation.  Functioning as a knower requires a distance between oneself as the knower and what is to be known, and infants simply lack this distance; their understanding (and learning) is inseparable from their ongoing activity.  The distance between knower and known emerges gradually with societal-cultural adaptation (Bakhurst, 1991). We owe it to our students to reinitiate the developmental activity they experienced as small children and this requires rejecting knowing as the sole way of understanding.

Closely linked to our commitment to knowing is an equally strong commitment to the concept of the individual.  The individual, in turn, is related to the notion of the particular. Our notion of the particular--the idea that what exists, and what is knowable, are particular things—stems from the ancient Greeks.  Aristotle described the world as divided in two--ontology (what exists or is to be known) and epistemology (the how of knowing).  Aristotle said that particulars (earthly objects) contain both form and substance.  We human beings understand, or know, earthly objects because the form that shapes their substance (such as the wood of a chair) also shapes the substance of our minds (the consciousness of chair).  In other words, both the chair and our consciousness of it are shaped by the same reality.  Understanding or knowing thus derives from harmony of the individual and the thing.  In the thirteenth century, Aristotle’s ideas were rediscovered and used to reinvent Christianity as a worldview and their influence spread. 

Modern science brought a new view of the world--naturally in motion rather than naturally at rest --  a new view of “Man”--uniquely other than Nature -- and a new view of their relationship--the universe is governed by rules which Man alone can make and know and by which he can establish control.  Human beings thus came to be characterized as knowers (viewers, perceivers, technological interveners) of the world.             

“Proper thinking” came to be deducing or logically inferring one thing (a particular about a particular) from another (another particular).  In this way reasoning about things remained essentially static, classificatory and deductive--even if the things themselves were constantly in motion.    

This epistemological paradigm has been the basis for remarkable advances in the biological and physical sciences and technology over the roughly 400 years of modern science.  However, the human-social world cannot be known in the same way as we can know the physical world.  Our relationship to it (as both its subject and object) is fundamentally different (see, for example, Newman and Holzman, 1996, 1997; Shotter, 1993).  Ironically, as psychology/education reaches for the objectivity (and prestige) of the hard sciences, the hard sciences have not only learned to tolerate uncertainty and undecidability at their very foundations but have embraced this state of affairs and creatively continued to advance both theoretically and technically.

Lev Vygotsky Revolutionary Scientist

‘Thus, the notion of a zone of proximal development enables us to propound a new formula, namely that the only “good learning” is that which is in advance of development.’ (1978, p.89).

Where should a radical educator turn but to a revolutionary?  Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist who wrote hundreds of papers in his short life ranging from literature review to experimental psychology. He worked in the brief period of Soviet history when possibility was in the air and young scientists were eager to help build a new society. (Friedman, 1990; Joravsky, 1989; Newman and Holzman, 1993; van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991)

Among Vygotsky’s many contributions was a demonstration, through ingenious experimental work with children, that learning is social and learning “worthy of the name” is inseparable from development. His work reveals learning as a continuously emergent social activity -- quite different from the standard dualistic model of an individual learner acquiring objective knowledge.

Although he was working in the ’20s and ‘30s, Vygotsky was first published in the U.S. in 1962 and has become an established part of education research just over the past two decades. A victim of Stalinist repression, his work came under severe attack during the last years of his life and was suppressed after his death.  His publications were withdrawn from libraries and universities and only the efforts of a small group of his followers kept his writings intact and his work alive. We are interested here in his work on the relationship between learning and development.

In Mind and Society (1978), Vygotsky rejects three older views of education: (1) the purely maturational view which suggests that a child's individual level of mental development constitutes a prerequisite or precondition for learning to take place; (2) the view that learning and mental development are synonymous; and (3) the mind as a network of generalized rather than specific capabilities where the mind was assumed to be like a muscle that when exercised in a given area of knowledge would produce learning elsewhere.

Vygotsky brought to the question a new conceptual tool--Marx’s dialectical historical materialism-- introducing a new conception of change--change as qualitative transformation of totalities.  Learning was, to him, both the source and the product of development, just as development was both the source and the product of learning. Learning and development are an inseparably intertwined and emergent activity, best understood together as a whole. Their relationship is dialectic, not linear or temporal (one doesn’t come before the other) or causal (one isn’t the cause of the other). Learning leads development, Vygotsky says, but ‘development in children never follows school learning the way a shadow follows the object that casts it’ (1978, p.91).

OK, very interesting. But what does this have to do with our college students?  One way to look at what Vygotsky is saying is that we are all in a continuous state of “being and becoming.” Those of you familiar with Vygotsky probably associate his name with his concept of the ZPD or “Zone of Proximal Development.” From the perspective of “being and becoming,” the ZPD is the ever-emergent and continuously changing “distance” between being and becoming. It is the “space” that allows us to become. An important feature of the ZPD is that in constructing it, we do things we don’t yet know how to do; we go beyond ourselves. This capacity of people to do things in advance of themselves, Vygotsky discovered, is the essence of human growth. Children learn and develop, he said, by “performing a head taller than they are” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 102).

Western culture’s obsession with knowledge (cognition, epistemology) is perpetuated in educational theory and practice that identifies learning with knowing.  As long as schools continue to try to produce only “knowers,” they will thwart the kind of creative, continuously emergent developmental activity that characterizes infancy and early childhood.  Our job is to help our students “practice becoming,” to produce environments where learning and development are jointly created.

Wittgenstein’s Language Games

What’s going on in these ZPDs? What is ZPD creating/ sustaining activity? How do we “activate the human capacity to perform?” One way of describing this activity is  playing new “language games.” For this concept we can thank another seminal thinker of the 20 century, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Following the epistemological bias discussed above, we tend to think of language as representing things, as about things. But language is not only representational or about something—it’s an activity—one of the things we do together.

Wittgenstein is perhaps unique as a scholar in that he wrote two equally influential books which present opposing views.  In his first book, the only one published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he attempts to solve the problems of philosophy by showing the logical form of language. Thirty-two years later, in Philosophical Investigations, he disavowed most of what he stated in the first book. He devoted the rest of his intellectual life to the exploration/investigation of a non-essentialist philosophy, that is, philosophy without theses or premises, philosophy as method. It is his later work that we explicate here.

"The term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life." (PI, 23)

"Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning." (Z 173)

Seeing language as a family of games that we play with each other is a direct challenge to the epistemological “form of life.”  In Wittgenstein’s second take on language, the vagueness of ordinary usage is not a problem to be eliminated but rather the source of linguistic riches. It is misleading even to attempt to fix the meaning of particular expressions by linking them referentially to things in the world. The meaning of a word or phrase or proposition is nothing other than the set of (informal) rules governing the use of the expression in actual life.

Like the rules of a game, Wittgenstein argued, these rules for the use of ordinary language are neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false: they are merely useful for particular applications. We develop ways of speaking that serve our needs in the various overlapping groups in which we live our lives. 

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. (PI 115)

Interestingly, although we are clearly the creators of language games (and, therefore, language) our experience is that language represents reality (pace Aristotle!) and we are “captured” by the picture-- of reality, understanding, thinking-- it shows us.

Our students, like us, are captured by an understanding of how language works, what learning is, what they are capable of, and so on. What I am calling improvisational teaching helps them play new language games creating ZPDs where they can grow, gives them a glimmer of revolutionary activity, gives them the experience of learning where they are not alienated from what there is to learn, and helps them realize that learning is something we do together, experience being and becoming at one and the same time.

In my field there is some understanding of the importance of this type of learning. As entrepreneurship education becomes more popular, there is recognition that the traditional education system stultifies rather than develops the attributes and skills needed by entrepreneurs. It is clear to champions of such programs that if entrepreneurs are to be developed, considerable changes are required in both the content and process of learning. In particular Kirby (2004) suggests that there needs to be a shift in emphasis from educating “about” entrepreneurship to educating “for” it. Interestingly, he stresses that entrepreneurship should not be equated with new venture creation or small business management, but with creativity and change. According to Ronstadt (1990), students must be prepared to thrive in the “unstructured and uncertain nature of entrepreneurial environments.”   In this context he proposes that educational institutions need to change the process of learning to enable their students to develop their right brain entrepreneurial capabilities as well as their left-brain analytical skills.

Again, I would argue this is true for all students. Perhaps we all now have to “recognize opportunity where others see chaos, contradiction and confusion.”

Impact on Teaching

On his method (in Philosophical Investigations) Wittgenstein says, "What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking...You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities...thus your mental cramp is relieved..."(quoted in Monk, 1990, p. 502). Wittgenstein shows us again and again the extent to which our thinking is strongly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions.

Playing language games (philosophizing) helps us free ourselves from the picture that holds us captive. We have the human experience of making meaning together. We create ZPDs. How do we catalyze this activity in the classroom?

Teaching is about having the answers. Typically those of us who have abandoned lecturing for a more participatory teaching approach simply elicit the answers from the students instead of presenting them ourselves.

Improv games— most familiar from comedy shows like “What’s My Line”—can help retrain us and our students. As Carrie Lobman and Matt Lundquist explain in Unscripted Learning (2007): “Improv is about learning to take risks and, even more important, it’s about learning how to support other people to take risks… Improv is also about learning how to work as an ensemble—as a group… learning to improvise can help people become strong leaders who are able to make use of the creative potential of groups…A large part of what makes improv so interesting is watching the ensemble create something by working together rather than competing with one another.”

Changing your class from an assortment of individuals into an ensemble with experience creating together is invaluable. A key component of this process, especially for you, is learning to listen and respond in a creative way. Our activity as teachers is usually to listen for what we have on our agenda. We quickly evaluate and commend or correct.

What if instead we ask questions we don’t have an answer for? What if we listen for the assumptions our students are making, ways they are limited in their thinking by the picture that holds them captive?

One of the key ideas behind successful improv is “the offer.” The improv troupe (or the classroom organized to learn/develop) has the responsibility to make offers that are of use to the ensemble and has the responsibility to pick up and nurture offers coming their way.

We all have the experience of great discussions with quick give and take. The subtext in these discussions is usually – listen to me, I have a better idea. Here we are willing to nurture a thought or idea and see what we make of it together.  This is not a competitive but a generative discussion.

My “offers” intend to make the philosophical assumptions I hear prominent. My favorite injunction I take from Wittgenstein, “…don't think, but look!”

Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? -- Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. -- For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! (PI 66)

I’m suggesting that we stop teaching and start directing our class ensemble as they shape and reshape ZPDs that support some kind of development or transformation in students;  encourages them to take risks to discover and create; and generates responsibility, ownership and pride.

As teachers do we have to deliver and explain content? Of course. Can we learn how to go about this more effectively? Sure. But let’s not confuse this activity with learning.  The acquisition of skills and information has its place but it does not lead to qualitative transformation; it is simply the assimilation of what already exists. 

What will prepare our students to creatively meet the future coming at them? Our students need “learning that leads development.” This is the kind of learning we see in young children—they are constantly in their play creating environments where they are “a head taller” than themselves. We need our students to develop and grow and creatively face the future as it comes at them.

References

Baker-Sennett, J., & Matusov, E. (1997). School “performance”: Improvisational processes in

development and education.  In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Creativity in performance.  New York:

Ablex.

Bakhurst, D. (1991). Consciousness and revolution in Soviet philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Donnelly, P. (2004) Response to Towards a Framework for Early Learning. St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin

Holzman, L. (1997) Schools for growth: Radical alternatives to current educational models. Mahway, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Holzman, L. (2000). Performative psychology: An untapped resource for educators. Educational and Child Psychology, 17(3), 86-103.

Kirby, D.A. Entrepreneurship education: Can business schools meet the challenge? Education + Training. 2004. v 46, no. 8/9, p. 510-519.

Kuratko, D.F. (2005). The emergence of entrepreneurship education: development, trends, and challenges. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, September 2005. v29/i5/p577.

Kuratko, D.F. and Goldsby, M.G. (2004). Entrepreneurship: Theory, process, practice. Mason, OH: South-Western College publishers.

Lobman, C. and M. Ludquist. (2007). Unscripted learning: using improv activities across the K-8 curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.

Monk, R. (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape.

Newman, F. and L. Holzman. (1996) Unscientific psychology: A cultural-performatory approach to understanding human life. Westport, CT: Praeger

Ronstadt, R. (1990). The educated entrepreneurs: A new era of entrepreneurial education is beginning. In C.A. Kent (Ed.), Entrepreneurship education. (pp. 69-88) New York: Quorum Books.

Sawyer, R. K. (2006). Educating for Innovation. Thinking Skills and Creativity. April 2006. v1/i1/p41-48

Shotter, J. (1993). Conversational realities. London: Sage Publications.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society. (Trans. M. Cole). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.), G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.