Education is a vital part of creating and interpreting social practice. When we share knowledge there are a number of paths it can take. We can see our goal as trying to add to the cumulative knowledge of each individual and/or the distributed knowledge within a given community. That is to say that the cumulated knowledge of the individual, when shared as the distributed knowledge (what all the individuals of a community know) becomes something a lot more powerful. Distributed knowledge is more diffuse and generative. In the education system, we tend to assess knowledge only in its individual cumulative form (testing an individual) when a more accurate evaluation might be how a community solves and anticipates problems through distributed (accumulated social practices) knowledge. Distributed knowledge is a lot more powerful and radical because it implies that when we share knowledge we help each other solve problems, both personal and societal.
A sophisticated society uses all its media to distribute knowledge. Music, literature, this is what a culture does, it attempts to distribute knowledge. Some cultures/societies might try to block the distribution of knowledge, especially when technology has created so many ways for people to distribute (pool) their understanding and problem solving capabilities. Knowledge is not cumulative in the individual but distributed to the community. This is how it should be judged and evaluated.
When we talk about a particular culture/society we might say we are talking about the dominant culture mostly, but there are also so many subsets that also work within this framework. The subsets (ethnic communities, subcultures, others with under narrated stories) operate within the greater community but also have their own distribution systems, some more effective than others. These subcultures often struggle mightily to develop and distribute information that is important against the barriers/colonialism of the dominant culture. When unique wisdom is distributed from a subgroup or an individual into the wider culture that is reason to celebrate. It is the Black Fantastic of Richard Iton, who posits that the solution for a culture that is denied love from the greater community is to distribute/generate it and then share it outwards. Music is a prime mover in this effort. We must use our own indigenous culture and thought to fight against the cultural colonialism of the dominant power (s).
The politics of difference and how cultures interact in a dominant society describes both the modernistic progression and also a postcolonial phase where there is a disruption between what is defined and how that is changed. These interventions by the subset can be seen as not only being black, but feeling black. That the change agent is the idea, not the person behind the idea. The feeling not the feeler. The artist does not only describe or show what is "real" but responds to it and agitates for or against it--when they do this within capitalism they might be described as capitalistic orphans. The instrumentalized roles that the system wants us to portray or complete without an understanding versus the autonomous roles that we can do more creatively.
For Iton and others, this struggle for distributed knowledge is an attempt to redefine personal and collective histories and bodily descriptions. The ego is not that important collectively but individually it might be important as a generative agent-- so we can experience and embody ourselves and our communities differently. It is all about agency and grooving until the end of time.
By turning the colloquial into the academic, we can work towards getting social practice more tightly woven into the curriculum. We can also use this understanding to improve our teacher intelligence, that is our ability to turn authentic and applicable objectives into engaging activities and assessments and then letting our students build on that, free of unnecessary power relationships.
In terms of what this force of integrating social practice might look like in the classroom, we can use some of the description of Bell Hooks from the Wikipedia article about her "In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Hooks investigated the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argued that teachers' use of control and power over students dulls the students' enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, "confin[ing] each pupil to a role, assembly-line approach to learning.”[16] She advocated that universities encourage students and teachers to transgress, and sought ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She described teaching as “a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged”.[17]"
One way to liberate learning from some of the inherent contradictions and limitations of the classroom (and expose learning to different contradictions and limitations to further its growth) is to blend together the academic and vernacular. That is to try and build learning experiences into content rich experiences from day-to-day experience. We can use activities that create content that the students have a role in describing. In that way we can build social practice into the education process in a more dynamic way then simply reinforcing cultural tropes. For example, we can have students use an online source like the Wall Street Journal to identify a current event article and then have the student use that article title to find full text of the article in a library's Wall Street Journal index. In this way we are introducing the concept of using both public and private databases to create value. Students (and faculty) see the benefits of using both types of resources, and librarians create learning objects to reinforce this relationship and teach students how to do it, as shown through this tutorial. We use the social practice of scanning the Wall Street Journal homepage for news into an academic exercise of using library databases to build on the value.
When I thought of Jorge Luis Borges' quote about heaven being a library, I imagined it was an expression emblematic of the instructivist notion that wisdom is inside a source outside oneself and you acquire this wisdom (a little bit of heaven) through absorption and application. The author is the teacher and the reader is the student. It made me a bit melancholy but also helped me understand that many librarians saw themselves as traditional teachers, presenting information/library collections and reference service in an objective way as our main educational goal. Helping students and others know about and find books and presenting programs about subjects and strategies for acquiring learning.
As I read a little bit more about Borges and his poetic representations of learning and knowledge I thought perhaps he did embrace the constructivist notion that I am more comfortable with, as this quote makes clear: "the fact is that poetry is not the books in the library … Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book." This suggests Borges had a more constructivist model of engagement/learning that it is not the book that is heaven (or knowledge) but rather our interaction with the book that creates the paradise. This suggests that librarians can take their spot along with other activists and educators as creating programs, content, and other teaching/learning opportunities that encourages engagement with knowledge and formulation of content and relationships that not just reflect the world (past, present, and future) but can actively encourage people to change themselves and the world (past, present, and future). Librarians are not objective teachers only presenting content and programs through books and other materials and programs but can be engaged in presenting scenarios to be solved through interaction with knowledge and tradition but also, perhaps, to transcend it.
This is, for me, the essence of constructivism, as the instructor identifies key objectives, develops activities that develop those objectives, and then create the mechanism so that participants can construct their understanding of the objectives based on the activities and feedback from themselves and others, with oversight of the instructor.
Education and the Social Practice
Research skills initially mirrored the information skills necessary to participate in the economy/politics of the time (Prussian). These skills included: to evaluate information, to compare it with other information, to synthesize information from different sources, to identify the most crucial pieces of information available (critical thinking). These were the skills needed by citizens (white male landowners and perhaps a few others) to give them the skills to fully participate as citizens.
Today, those participatory citizens skills are no less important, but they have gotten more expansive, as society has become more advanced technologically and culturally.
These skills are necessary not only for those involved with traditional higher education, but also for self-directed/self motivated learners that might not be looking for a graduate degree.
Here are some questions around the contention that education mimics the culture that creates it:
What are the privileges of learning and how are they distributed? Do the right people have access? do others have access? Amount of free time. Economic creativity. Why should capitalism have all the options of solving the problems? Who has access to the tools of learning -- production of learning opportunities. Always the power, the instructor. Should students create an assignment for the next class. Do we need to have technology skills as well, not just to learn, but to create knowledge, which is becoming increasingly important?
Subject specialist changes meaning when there is so much knowledge available on the Internet. We will need our instructors to guide much more in the shared economy and often this will include guiding us to other experts. There can be no fear of job replacement in this scenario as it is wealth creation. No one way to have fun and learn.
The educational possibilities of the shared economy are very deep and varied. For example, Air BNB opens up travel feedback to a whole slew of the population that before did not share their views with other parts of the population.
One of the challenges of online/blended learning is to appeal to the sense of place that f2f has. People want to come together. In Boston, for example, there are so many people that want to see and experience the Harvard campus (such as rubbing the foot on the statue of John Harvard). Blended and online will become less foreign as they develop their own emotional centers with their traditions and their own sense of place.
Social practice and learning can also interact around the concept and process of the question. The question is a time-honored part of any traditional learning structure. An expert/speaker presents information/analysis and then the audience has a time for questions. This questioning is an important part of the process as it gives the audience a chance to connect thoughts and ideas, interact with the speaker and each other, and add content to the gathering.
Generally in the question and answer period, there is a question or series of questions and then a response. How powerful it was when there was a presentation and there was a whole series of questions that did not necessarily get responded to by the speaker, as there would not have been time for all of the questions if matched with a response. The questions stood as content on their own, as the audience and speaker treated them as content on their own. Some audience members responded to other people's questions and in this way it became more like a discussion board in an online environment. In this regard, questions are not a source of confrontation or clarification, but of audience members contributing to the creation of knowledge.
Social Practice is also deeply involved with unsuccessful learning. Administrators and others may be quick to focus on outside interventions, such as tutoring, bridge programs, and the like. And, these are all good as long as these practices are sustainable and do not detract too much from the teaching and learning in the classroom. After all, learning and teaching were the original interventions to the challenge of progress. We can not water that reality down too much.
We tend to view research as being good for academic grades and life-long learning, but it turns out that there are cognitive reasons to do research. The brain loves to adapt and learn new things. It turns out that research is the type of active learning that increases brain functioning over time, with skills like memory, critical thinking, and word skills. So, when you think you are doing something for the present, it turns out that we are doing something for our cognitive futures as well.
The educational possibilities of the shared economy are very deep and varied. For example, Air BNB opens up travel feedback to a whole slew of the population that before did not share their views with other parts of the population.
One of the challenges of online/blended learning is to appeal to the sense of place that f2f has. People want to come together. In Boston, for example, there are so many people that want to see and experience the Harvard campus (such as rubbing the foot on the statue of John Harvard). Blended and online will become less foreign as they develop their own emotional centers with their traditions and their own sense of place.
Social practice and learning can also interact around the concept and process of the question. The question is a time-honored part of any traditional learning structure. An expert/speaker presents information/analysis and then the audience has a time for questions. This questioning is an important part of the process as it gives the audience a chance to connect thoughts and ideas, interact with the speaker and each other, and add content to the gathering.
Generally in the question and answer period, there is a question or series of questions and then a response. How powerful it was when there was a presentation and there was a whole series of questions that did not necessarily get responded to by the speaker, as there would not have been time for all of the questions if matched with a response. The questions stood as content on their own, as the audience and speaker treated them as content on their own. Some audience members responded to other people's questions and in this way it became more like a discussion board in an online environment. In this regard, questions are not a source of confrontation or clarification, but of audience members contributing to the creation of knowledge.
Social Practice is also deeply involved with unsuccessful learning. Administrators and others may be quick to focus on outside interventions, such as tutoring, bridge programs, and the like. And, these are all good as long as these practices are sustainable and do not detract too much from the teaching and learning in the classroom. After all, learning and teaching were the original interventions to the challenge of progress. We can not water that reality down too much.
We tend to view research as being good for academic grades and life-long learning, but it turns out that there are cognitive reasons to do research. The brain loves to adapt and learn new things. It turns out that research is the type of active learning that increases brain functioning over time, with skills like memory, critical thinking, and word skills. So, when you think you are doing something for the present, it turns out that we are doing something for our cognitive futures as well.
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