The Hidden History of Bildung in Anglo-American Educational

DiscourseNorm Friesen

Oulu, May 25, 2009nfriesen@tru.ca

Overview

• What is Bildung (today)? • Rousseau’s 3 types of education as a framework• What are the learning sciences?• How are they related?• Two “hidden traditions:”– Anthropology and learning– Hannah Arendt’s Crisis of Education

• Other : feature films, critical tradition

Contemporary Definition

• Bildung: “one of the central notions of the modern Western educational tradition. Central to this tradition is the question of what constitutes an educated or cultivated human being. Generally, the answer to this question was not given in terms of discipline or socialization, that is, in terms of the adaptation to an existing external order. Bildung rather referred to the cultivation of the inner life, the cultivation of the human mind or human soul.” (Biesta, 2006)

Other, Recent Definitions

• Wolfgang Klafki: „Erschlossensein einer dinglichen und geistigen Wirklichkeit für einen Menschen – das ist der objektive oder materiale Aspekt; aber das heißt zugleich: Erschlossensein dieses Menschen für diese seine Wirklichkeit – das ist der subjektive und der formale Aspekt...

• Erschlossensein: to be developed, opened up.

Bildung for Klafki

• „The developmental opening up of a physical and mental reality for a person; that is the objective or material aspect [of Bildung]

• But at the same time, it also means: the developmental opening up of this person for this, her reality –and this is the subjective and formal aspect...

• A dialectical process: can be either unstructured or highly formal

Klafki on Bildung, Con’t• Bildung as the interconnection of three basic abilities:• Ability to determine one’s interrelationships and

meanings for onesself as associated with work, religion, relationships, etc.• Selbstbestimmungsfähigkeit• Mitbestimmungsfähigkeit• Solidaritätsfähigkeit (p. 52)

• Bildung as an intergenerational social and political process (Klafki)

Kant on Aufklaerung/Bildung

• “emergence from one’s self-incurred… intellectual dependency” (Kant, 1784) Bildung as a development in which becoming ones’ self and gaining one’s voice and identity is also and simultaneously the way in which one becomes a full member of society

• Was kann ich wissen (relation to knowledge)? Was soll ich tun (activity)? Was darf ich hoffen (future)? Was ist der Mensch (self as subject; anthropology)?

Presuppositions: Rousseau on Education

• Education comes to us from 1) nature, 2) from men, or 3) from things. Harmony as paramount.1. “The inner growth of our organs and

faculties is the education of nature, 2. “the use we learn to make of this

growth is the education of men, 3. “and what we gain by our experience

of our surroundings is the education of things.”

man

things

nature

Learning & its “Facilitation”

• Learning theories as descriptive accounts of how people (and [other] animals) learn. Can inform prescriptive instructional and design practices

• The need for a bridge between basic learning research and practice has long been discussed. To ensure a strong connection between these two areas, Dewey called for the creation and development of a “linking science", Tyler (1978) a “middle position"; and Lynch for employing an “engineer analogy" as an aid for translating theory into practice. (Ertmer & Newby)

“Learning across ages and settings”• “successful efforts to understand and propel human

learning require a simultaneous emphasis on formal and on the implicit ways in which humans learn” (Bransford et al)

• “the how and why of learning are exposed if we discover its neural underpinnings and identify the internal mechanisms that govern learning across ages and settings.” (Bransford et al)

• Relatively independent of: content, culture, even environment

Biesta on “The new language of Learning”

• “The idea that education should be about… the learner…suggests a framework in which the only questions that can meaningfully be asked about education are technical questions, that is, questions abut the efficiency and the effectiveness of the educational process. The more important questions about the content and purpose of education become virtually impossible to ask.” (Beyond Learning, 2006)

Bildung vs Learning• Process that is biological,

developmental• Occurs naturally, and

formally in school; leads to pressure to “de-structure” school

• Sees the “education of man” as a derivative form of “education of nature” and “things”

• Process that is social• Does not occur through

nature• Is structured socially, and

school emerges from this• Is a process of

“Überlieferung”• Includes education of

“things” and “men”• Ed. of “nature” seen

insufficient

Bildung:• Human development as

insufficient on its own• “Mängelwesen”

(Gudjons/Gehlen)• E.g. of the “wild child”

man

things

Learning:

“development”

“formal learning”

“informal learning”nature

Schooling & Education: Learning environments

• “Learning environments include schools and classrooms but also the many informal learning situations that have existed through history and continue to exist alongside formal schooling. “ (Sawyer)

• “The objective of education is learning, not teaching”• "We don't have to make human beings smart. They

are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.“

New Learning Environments

• “A true science of learning has to bring together understandings of both informal and formal learning environments, drawing on the best features to build the schools of the future”

• “…learning sciences research might also lead to more radical alternatives that would make schools as we know them obsolete, leaving today's big high schools as empty as the shuttered steel factories of the faded industrial economy. “

• “the entire instructionist system will have to be replaced with new learning environments that are based on the learning sciences.”

Hidden Tradition

In its broad sense, education refers to any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual...In its technical sense education is the process by which society, through schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions, deliberately transmits its cultural heritage--its accumulated knowledge, values, and skills--from one generation to another. (Kneller, 1971)

Lave and Wenger: Situated Learning What is important from Bildung?• As humanizing, social & intentional• Bildung as the dialectical interrelationship between

self and worldTheir milieu:• XEROX PARC: Researchers published books,

anthropological accounts of education, learning• Etienne Wenger cowrote Situated Learning there• Other names: John Seely-Brown, Allan Kay

From W.F. Hanks, Introduction

• “Even in cases where a fixed doctrine is transmitted, the ability of a community to reproduce itself through the training process derives not from the doctrine, but from the maintenance of certain modes of co-participation in which it is embedded.”

• “learning is a way of being in the social world, not a way of coming to know about it.”

Lave & Wenger

• “A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.”

• “learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world.”

Lave & Wenger: Legitimate Perhiperal participation

• “Learning is not merely a condition for membership, but is itself an evolving form of membership.”

• “In any given concrete community of practice the process of community reproduction… must be deciphered in order to understand specific forms of legitimate peripheral participation. This requires a broader conception of individual than the single segment encompassed in studies of "learners."

Similarities to Bildung

• “Education” about social/cultural processes of Überlieferung across generations

• Important aspects of “education” are what happens between newcomers and old-timers

• School is not so much about “facilitating” or “propelling” human learning as a about social/cultural processes

Formal education & curricula

• distinguish between a learning curriculum and a teaching curriculum. A learning curriculum consists of situated opportunities

• a teaching curriculum supplies - and thereby limits - structuring resources for learning, the meaning of what is learned is mediated through an instructor's participation, by an external view of what knowing is about.

Hannah Arendt

• 1906 – 1975• Studied with Martin Heidegger

& Karl Jaspers in Germany• Met Walter Benjamin in Paris• Moved to America in 1941• Developed existential theory, in which natality

is a central concept

Arendt

• Not in terms of resonance with, but in terms of “direct” representation of the tradition of Bildung.

• “Reflections on Little Rock” “The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education.” –child as thrust into the political

Home – School – Society (or “the World”)Home: private, protectingSociety: political, heterogeneous, ideological

Hannah Arendt on Education

• “For education belongs among the most elementary and necessary activities of human society, which never remains as it is but continuously renews itself through birth, through the arrival of new human beings. These newcomers, moreover, are not finished but in a state of becoming. “

• “the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world. “

Arendt: on School & Teachers

• School: “the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all. Attendance there is required not by the family but by the state.”

• “educators here stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it.”

Natality

• Natality: the promise borne by every child to bring something new into the world.

• Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings; but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative

Arendt, continued…

• What concerns us all and cannot therefore be turned over to the special science of pedagogy is the relation between grown-ups and children in general or, putting it in even more general and exact terms, our attitude toward the fact of natality: the fact that we have all come into the world by being born and that this world is constantly renewed through birth.

Education & Authority

• In education this responsibility for the world takes the form of authority. The authority of the educator and the qualifications of the teacher are not the same thing.

• Vis-a-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.

Some Cause for Hope

Learning Sciences affirm: • Ethnography, learning as a cultural/social

process• Ethnomethodology, learning as something

that happens socially, relationally

Conclusion

• Not entirely absent from North American discourse; but still very much hidden

• Both see education as an essentially “humanizing” or “social-making” activity

• Resistance to facilitating learning as a natural process

• Either area of “hidden” influence can be interpreted in different ways– E.g. Lave & Wenger as a theory of learning for Biesta

Handbook of Learning Sciences (06) Sawyer, “Introduction: The new Science of Learning”

• No programmatic definition of the term• “Beginning in the 1970s, a new science of learning

was born - based in research emerging from psychology, computer science, philosophy, sociology, and other scientific [sic] disciplines.” (p. 10)

• “The learning sciences are centrally concerned with exactly what is going on in a learning environment, and exactly how it is contributing to improved student performance.” (p. 10)

• “This is a new kind of science, with the goal of providing a sound scientific foundation for education” (p. 15)

Sawyer, Conclusion: The Schools of the Future

"Because it requires such a massive human effort, learning sciences work has tended to occur at a small number of universities where there is a critical mass of faculty and graduate students, and has tended to cluster around collaborative projects supported by large NSF grants at those universities. [...] This trend will continue, and the learning sciences, to a certain extent, will become more like 'big science.'"

• "ethnomethodologists may look for predictive regularities in technology-mediated meaning making that can inform design."

CCL: Canadian Council on Learning

• “what works and what doesn’t work?”• Meta-analysis (Glass, 1975; see also Glass 2000)• "studies should…strive for [more] rigorous control

of...methodological factors, such as instructor equivalence, instructional materials equivalence, and time on task differences" (Lou, Abrami & Bernard, 2006, p. 168).

• Redefining How Success is Measured in First Nations, Inuit and Métis Learning

2002: LEGISLATION

• No Child Left Behind:– Passed into law 2002 (670 pp.)– Is in force until 2014 (statistics on ½-way point

coming in)– Specific terms & phrases recur:

• “scientifically based research” (occurs 100 + times)• 21st Century Schools (title of one of ten main sections)

– Others are associated:• “Gold Standard” of research (experimental research)• “What works;” “evidence-based”

NCLB: PART D—ENHANCING EDUCATION THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

‘‘SEC. 2421. NATIONAL ACTIVITIES.

‘‘(a) STUDY.—Using funds made available under section 2404(b)(2), [i.e. not more than $20,000,000 in 2002]* the Secretary—

‘‘(1) shall conduct an independent, long-term study, utilizing scientifically based research methods and control groups or control conditions—

‘‘(A) on the conditions and practices under which educational technology is effective in increasing student academic achievement; and

*“The NSF spent $100,000,000 between 2003 and 2006 to accelerate the development of the learning sciences;” Sawyer, 2006a xii.

‘‘(B) on the conditions and practices ... That increase student academic achievement, including technology literacy;

‘‘(2) shall establish an independent review panel to advise the Secretary on methodological and other issues that arise in conducting the long-term study;

‘‘(3) shall consult with other interested Federal departments or agencies, State and local educational practitioners and policymakers (including teachers, principals, and superintendents), and experts in technology, regarding the study; and

‘‘(4) shall submit to Congress interim reports, when appropriate, and a final report, to be submitted