Education Guide

I have been lost for a while, reading
and re-reading Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Lanier’s book explores the unintended
consequences of digital design on human culture, identity and what it is to be
human This is a mind altering book, a provocative and powerful book, a book to interrogate, a book that ought
to be on every teacher’s professional reading list, especially those of us who
pretend to understand and interpret educational technology.  

I am not ready to blog about Lanier’s
thinking yet but and as a consequence of reading Lanier I am adopting his list
of suggestions for what an individual can do. 

• Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realise that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about you that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

Reading Lanier made me better able to
value the thinking in thought piece provided by cj. 

Edwards, R. (2009) Translating the Prescribed into the
Enacted Curriculum in College and School Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Edwards’ 2009 paper Translating the
Prescribed into the Enacted Curriculum in College and School asks me to think
about the curriculum in quite different ways. 
His paper contains two case studies to support his thesis that the
prescribed curriculum (“in the form of unit descriptors —texts which inscribe
the standards that students are meant to achieve”) – become (in)visible in the
translations of the practices of curriculum-making and the people, spaces and
artefacts that are translated in the process.

 

I am exploring
a different tack, which assumes that difference and multiplicity is inherent in
curriculum-making practices and therefore there is nothing to be explained as
such. It is simply the case. This raises questions about the helpfulness of
examining curriculum-making drawing upon the typology of the prescribed,
described and enacted as it has largely been taken up (Bloomer, 1997). Edwards
2009

 

Edwards looks at curriculum through ANT
description. 

Here order and stability are temporary network effects and not
inherent in materials or objects. Unlike most framings therefore, ANT does not
privilege human consciousness or intention. Both the animate and inanimate are
treated as materially equal. The symmetry between inanimate and animate objects
in ANT arises because  ‘human powers
increasingly derive from the complex interconnections
of humans with material objects … . This means that the human and
physical worlds are elaborately intertwined and cannot be analysed separate
from each other’ (Urry, 2000, p. 14).

Edwards describes Callon’s
classification of the translation process within ANT like interconnections or
networks through four moments;

 

1. Problematisation – the inclusions and inclusions allowed in the network
2. Interessement
   – the practices through which
   barriers are built between network and not network
3. Enrolment – the practices of alliance within the network
4. Mobilisation

And uses these to understand the ANT network
of a standardised curriculum

 

Curriculum-making
is multiple precisely because the prescribed curriculum mobilises different
networks of actors. Thus, as Mulcahy (1999, p. 97) suggests, lecturers and
teachers engage in a ‘strategic juggling of representational ambiguity’ among
the varied standards inscribed in the prescribed curriculum of unit descriptors
and the like.  Difference and
multiplicity in the curriculum is therefore to be expected and described rather
than be identified as problematic and explained (away). This raises important
educational questions about the status and equivalence of learning outcomes
within a standardised curriculum and the type and amount of work that is
necessary to exclude multiplicity in the name of standardisation. Edwards 2009

I am enjoying thinking about
curriculum in a non-linear way; identifying how problematisation, interessement,
enrolment and mobilisation allow me to understand its complexity in new ways.  But I am anxious that I misinterpret ANT and
reduce it by my imaginings to yet another theory – all that “is understood as a diverse domain of
conceptual and empirical work that explores how the people, objects, practices
and ideas come to be organized and ordered in particular ways, while resisting
its own authority as yet another reductionist theory” Edwards 2009

Most of all I am excited by the
potential of ANT to help better represent e-learning curricula and pedagogy in
school and by how arguments Jaron Lanier makes in You are not a Gadget will fit
here.

Edwards paper launches with a quote from Latour that I am holding
close

To translate is to betray: ambiguity is part of translation.
(Latour, 1996, p. 48)

His paper forced me to look carefully
at my day job as a curriculum describer and to go back to the beginning to re-examine
my assumptions about curriculum.  The italicised
content that follows comes from Edwards.

He makes me wonder if our struggle
with the enaction of curriculum is doomed to be forever Sisyphean because we
misunderstand “difference and multiplicity and the continuously generated effect of the webs of relation within which curriculum
networks are located and instead search for reasons, problems and explanation. “
 

I read the paper in the context of the New Zealand Curriculum and as I read it
led me to ask the following questions. 

Question: Does our New
Zealand curriculum prescription “specify
certain learning outcomes to be achieved at a specified level within a
hierarchical system of assessment”?

Answer: Yes – check out
p44 onwards

Question: Does our New
Zealand curriculum prescription “also
make broad statements about expectations in relation to teaching, learning and
assessment practices to achieve those goals, thereby seeming to limit the
possibilities for diversity”?

Answer: Yes – p34 to 36
provide examples of this

Question: Do I believe
that a “very standardised and rational”
curriculum will “in principle enable and
support student mobility and the portability of credit within the education
system”?

Answer: Yes I don’t
think this unreasonable

 

Question: When it comes to
curriculum am I a prescriber, a describer or an enacter?

Answer: I am probably
mostly “describer” sometimes “enacter”.

 

Question: How is what I understand
about curriculum as a describer similar to what the prescriber or the enacter understands?

Answer: I keep a focus
on describing learning outcomes which is something both prescribers and
enacters purport to value.

 

Question: How is what I
understand about curriculum as a describer different from what the prescriber
or the enacter understands?

Answer: The understanding
of curriculum can stray into blame based interpretations of outcomes based on “who
students are” and “what teachers do” – I try to keep my description focused on “what
students do”  

 

Question: Do I read blogs
and websites devoted to curriculum describers – the “often idealised narratives
of practice provided by teachers, lecturers and students”?

Answer: All the time

Question: Do I accept that
the following factors influence my attempts and the attempts of others to enact
the curriculum? 

For example

• contextual e.g. national policy, funding arrangements;

• organisational e.g. nature and size of institution and subject department, styles of management, level and type of resources, locus of decision-making, internal or external assessments;

• curriculum e.g. the ways in which the curriculum is prescribed, nature of the curriculum i.e. academic or vocational;

• micro-political e.g. collegial, hierarchical or individualistic, expectations of students and parents; and

• individual e.g. professional formation and dispositions of lecturers and teachers, student backgrounds and prior experiences
  

Answer: Yes I think I do

 

Question: How much time do
I spend in professional learning communities talking, thinking, meeting, completing
action research, blogging, and tweeting about these factors?

Answer: More than I wish
to share here

 

Question: Is my expectation
that this discourse will sort these factors in a way that will improve the enaction
of the curriculum?

Answer: As Bauman notes In
Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture) quoting Havel
“hope is not prognostication.” It is, alongside corage and will, a mundane,
common weapon that is too seldom used.” So yes it is my expectation.

 

Question: Are my efforts
to improve the enacted curriculum in New Zealand  based on a belief that learning outcomes are/
should be the same despite different contexts for and means of developing and demonstrating
them.

Answer: I guess so

 

Question: Do I see the
curriculum as a “black box” – “as a taken
for granted object, bounded by a context which (mis)shapes it in unexpected
ways”?

Answer: Given what I
have claimed already I must

 

Question: When we research
the unexpected ways in New Zealand – why differences in the enacted curriculum
occur – do we assume that explanation will help us learn how to control them.

Answer: Yes

 

Question: Is this a
warranted assumption?

Answer: Ahhhhh … I don’t
know .. I have never really challenged it before

 

Question: Is enacted curriculum
research in New Zealand that is framed on explanation, an unwarranted and
ultimately unhelpful simplification of a more complex process?

Answer: Arghhhh…

 

Question: Is educational research
around the enacted curriculum in New Zealand asking the wrong question/s?

Answer: This is a frightening
question to contemplate

 

Instead of
looking at the factors that can
be positioned to explain differences between the prescribed, described and
enacted curriculum to bring about their closer alignment, we need to examine
more closely the actors in the
multiplicity of curriculum making practices (Fountain, 1999). The emphasis then
is on describing closely how things
come to be the case without privileging human intention and agency. I am arguing
therefore that much of the current shape of debate around these issues is
unhelpful, as it suggests a possibility precisely for control and prescription
based upon a priori distinctions,
which is unavailable due to the heterogeneity and multiplicity of practices.Edwards
(2009)

 

Question: Is implementation
of the prescribed curriculum (in its enactments (described and enacted
curriculum)) in a linear sense an educational fantasy?

Answer: It is possible

 

Question: Is what I do in
school to help clarify and thus standardise the learning outcomes in the
prescribed curriculum (describing the prescribed curriculum so that it may be “better”
enacted) no more than fantasy?

Answer: That the expectations
in the day job are no more than fantasy – to accept this is to betray my
purpose – but I cannot reject it  

 

Question: Is
standardisation of curriculum “an (un)stable and precarious achievement”?

Answer: It is disquieting that after reading Edwards this seems
increasingly likely

Source: Artichoke