Jerome Bruner, Other rainy day thoughts...
Instead of a full blown "article" that I usually write in here, this glorious rainy day here in St. Paul has inspired me to just post some random thoughts and musings for your whatever.
The first is this famous quote from Jerome Bruner...
"What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise (1996: ix-x)."
I can't help but feel there is an ever growing and dangerous rift between how faculty and the educational institutions themselves at the postsecondary level view culture and its aims and how those young adults populating its classes view culture and its aims. What seems to be more realistic is that how faculty tend to conceive of education is a function of how they wish culture and its aims were, and this wish is more often than not modeled via a nostalgic interpretation of the past and the system that produced the current faculty. This is problematic in that this view is more often than not only effective when it is pushed upon students through authoritarian classroom power structures. The question that arises is just what value does education have to students when the faculty's conception of culture and its aims do not mirror the conception within the students?
Not what, but how...
Maybe this is due to my position within the underbelly of the faculty apparatus, but it seems to me that the most pressing question pedagogical theorists in academia in regards to composition have pursued is a question of what to teach. If students don't like reading scientific texts, we teach them popular science texts. If they don't like to read Shakespeare, we assign Tupac.
The problem with this perspective is that it is inherently limited to the perspective of the instructor. Or, to put it another way, an instructor is only as good as their connection to their student's personal lives. This, sadly, leads to over-generalizations over what "students might be interested in." It is too prone to bias and cross-generational miscues.
Instead, viewing teaching as not a question of what but rather of how allows for a greater range of creativity and freedom towards achieving stated and unstated goals of education. As in the above example, instead of just changing Shakespeare to Tupac and patting yourself on the back, an instructor who is more interested in how to teach might address in a completely different way. They may not need to have to change the content but rather change the relationship of the content to the student. They also may change the content but do so in a manner in which students are also not told to like Tupac either.
Further, this might help to allow teaching within some disciplines (I'm mostly looking at you, English studies) to break free of their own self-reflecting theories and vocabulary. A lot of theory in composition is great...except for the fact that it is many times at odds with what psychology and biology are telling us. We know a great deal more about how learning happens, about how societies interact, and how what teaching methods can better serve the field. If only we could see outside our own frosty windows to other areas of campus.
Teaching as the last great meta-narrative standing...
In creative writing classes, there is a firm stamp of modernism in nearly every activity. This seems odd until you realize that while many professors of creative writing may write in a more post-modern sense, they have never applied the same critique of modernism exhibited in their own writing to their own teaching. In this sense, teaching continues to exist as an uncritiqued, unchallenged meta-narrative among many in the profession. The basic ideas of the purpose and method of education is so deeply rooted in our culture that people many times don't even think to question it. This, interestingly, still leaves the door open to a post-modern view of education...the likes of which I am too tired to think about right now...but could be very interesting, especially when coupled with emerging technologies such as the internet.