Certification Exam Archives - Page 2 of 2

#CertStudy, Day 3: Why/how I learn from New Literacy Studies

December 28, 2017December 29, 2017 Kyle

This post is part of a series wherein I blog my way through studying for the doctoral certification exam in the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Read the first post here.

Full disclosure: Amazon links in this post have my affiliate code built into them. If you follow one and purchase something, I’ll get a small commission. Thanks for supporting Learning, Faith & Media and my other work.

As I’ve written here before, the broadest conviction of my research and practice is that digital literacy is an increasingly important part of religious leadership. This doesn’t mean every lay leader or clergy person needs to be able to design a website, or produce a effective online course, or coordinate a sophisticated online marketing campaign. It does mean knowing enough about our new media ecology to understand why these processes and products might be important to the life of a 21st-century congregation.

Digital literacy is a contested term with lots of possible meanings and stakes. But I’m very grateful to my advisor for sending me, in my first semester, on a journey to better understand the recent-ish history of how literacy scholars have thought about reading and writing, both narrowly and broadly conceived.

One of the first distinctions I had to get my head around was what differentiated the field known as “New Literacy Studies” from what had come before. I’m still no expert, but I would not have wrapped my head around the problem so quickly or so well without the article I’ll spend some time with today, James Gee’s “The New Literacy Studies and the ‘Social Turn.'” Much to my delight, it’s that rare (but less rare than it used to be) academic article not behind a paywall.

Part of my task in revisiting and writing about the articles on my reading list is pulling out some big ideas and “money quotes” for my notes, so let me try to deliver on the promise of this post’s heading by doing so.

Gee begins by surveying thirteen academic disciplines that took—or came to be because of?—what he calls “the social turn.” Social turn disciplines/movements were “reactions against the behaviorism of the early part of this century and the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 60’s and 70’s that replaced behaviorism, both of which privileged the individual mind” (p. 3). If that sounds familiar, it could be because I mentioned the move outward from there in yesterday’s overview of cognitive perspectives on learning.

Behaviorism, in the name of being “scientific,” reduced the human mind to stimulus responses. It confused symbols (language and more) with mere signals (think of Pavlov’s dogs). I first encountered these ideas in the philosophical non-fiction of Walker Percy (Message in a Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos), for whose head start I was very grateful.

The “cognitive revolution” reduced the mind to a computer’s CPU. Programming languages are truly languages, truly symbols, so that was an improvement.

But it does assume a universal and unambiguous mapping between words and their meanings, and that’s where the “social turn” movements take issue with it. These movements assert that words/language/meaning/interactions/[etc.] can’t exist outside a social context (and, Gee points out, vice versa).

Probably the most recognizable implication of this idea (and the related policy torch carried by the New Literacy Studies) is that there’s no “universal” or “value neutral” English. There are many Englishes used in many different contexts.

We’re not talking just about big-picture dialects (different English-speaking countries, say) but about the “local literacies” that are part of why, for example, white suburban kids in Milwaukee (like me) spoke a bit differently from white suburban kids from Minneapolis/St. Paul (where many of my college buddies were from). The need to acknowledge local literacies is about way more than my confusion about duck, duck, gray duck, though. It’s about avoiding telling entire groups of students that their rich sociocultural knowledge doesn’t count.

(If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s hilarious and high-minded Consider the Lobster, you’ve been in this territory before in his essay “Authority and American Usage.” I mention it mostly because it contains my favorite teacher confession of all time, in which DFW fesses up to “a mammoth rhetorical boner.”)

OK, so the social turn disciplines say, to put it briefly, context matters to what language means and how we (learn to) use it.

With me so far? I’m gonna skip the middle section, which is a fascinating and important discussion of how the values of the social turn disciplines were coopted/embraced by fast capitalism and, ultimately, what progressive educators might do about that.

For me, the really wonderful and useful passage from Gee’s article involves the work that language does when we deploy it in our messy social situations:

What do I mean by enactive work and recognition work? Think about the matter this way: Out in the world exist materials out of which we continually make and remake our social worlds. The social arises when we humans relate (organize, coordinate) these materials together in a way that is recognizable to others. We attempt to get other people to recognize people and things as having certain meanings and values within certain configurations or relationships. Our attempts are what I mean by “enactive work” and others’ active efforts to accept or reject our attempts—to see or fail to see things “our way “—are what I mean by “recognition work”.

We attempt, through our words and deeds, to get others to recognize people, things, artifacts, symbols, tools, technologies, actions, interactions, times, places, and ways of speaking, listening, writing, reading, feeling, believing, thinking, and valuing as meaningful and valuable in certain ways. We attempt to make each of these meaningful and valuable each in themselves (“this is scientist”, “this is a scientific instrument”, “this is objective information”, etc..) and as a configuration of elements all related to each other in a specific and meaningful way (“this is a scientist at work with her lab assistants engaged in an experiment that will yield objective truth”). (8-9)

In the article, Gee is interested in “enactive” and “recognition” work for its ability to “take back our social theories from the new capitalism, while requiring us to own up to our own projects and engage with other people’s—especially ‘non-academic’ people’s—projects at a variety of levels” (13). I think that idea is pretty compelling and important.

But for the purposes of this little studying exercise and I hope for my research, the point is this: religious education in the midst of viable alternatives to belief (see A Secular Age) is about (at least) three important axes of enactive and recognition work:

Educator does enactive work showing that a religious worldview makes sense. Students recognize such work as sensible or not. We who hope to pass on the faith think this piece is the most important, and we are wrong.
Educator does (partly enactive, partly recognition) work of modeling moderate, critical religious belief in a world where religious diversity is a fact of life and in which religious fundamentalists of all stripes are a significant contributor to global conflict and play an outsized role in tacitly defining faith amid widespread religious illiteracy. This piece, I believe, is actually more important to the future of denominations like mine.
Educator, together with students in either an affirmative, negative, or ambiguous mode, make sense of what these God beliefs mean for the business of everyday living. This piece, I believe, is where activities like Digital Storytelling, play a crucial role.

Clear as mud? Not to me either. But I remember the article a lot better and have the sketch of an argument I can refine. Thanks for staying with me!

#CertStudy, Day 2: Cognition Overview

December 27, 2017December 29, 2017 Kyle 2 Comments

Cognitive perspectives on learning have, historically, begun purely in the mind and moved outward, so to speak. Cognitive science grew up with computer science, and ways of thinking/theorizing about cognition and computing have been surprisingly (and surprisingly satisfyingly) intertwined.

So in many of the early papers in cognitive science, the brain is regarded purely as a symbol (not signal) processing system, and there’s lots of careful, sophisticated work on schemas, scripts, etc. that you could mistake for an intro to programming textbook if you didn’t look to closely. It’s pretty fun reading pseudocode for how to handle, like, going to cocktail parties and whatnot.

As the science of complex systems came into its own, it began to have an impact on thinking about thinking. Cognitive scientists increasingly began to view the mind as a complex system. Now, rather than a really powerful CPU and detailed source code, the mind becomes a collection of autonomous agents competing for control (think “hungry” vs. “focusing.”) If you want a highly accessible if occasionally infuriating account, try Minsky’s Society of Mind. Just be warned that he’s as dogmatically materialist at Richard Dawkins.

From here it gets more complicated to tell even a greatly oversimplified version of the (already simplified) version I’ve learned. One strand of thinking pushes back on the idea that knowledge is primarily “out there” and learning is a question of figuring out effective ways of shoving it “in here” in ways that stick. We could do worse than to call this the cognitivist tradition (confusing I know). If you’ve read Freire just go ahead and think of it as pairing well with what he calls the “banking model” of education.

We can contrast this view with the constructivist model, which says knowledge is built by the learner rather than deposited by the teacher. This is Piaget‘s big idea. “Built on what?” you ask. On what the learner already knows. So when you encounter something you want to understand, you either assimilate it—fit it into your existing knowledge—or accommodate your existing knowledge to the new information.

Constructionism (Seymour Papert, for a time a Sherry Turkle collaborator) builds on constructivism (zing) by externalizing this vision somewhat. Papert suggests that we build new knowledge in our minds as we build/tinker with our own creations (“object” to think with, though the object can also be a computer program or media or whatever). This gives rise to all kinds of exciting ideas about using computers for learning. Papert thought that computers could be a “mathland” where students learn math the same way French kids learn French by living in France. I happen to think he’s right on the money, about math as well as other disciplines.

Other ways of moving thinking about thinking (at least partially) outside of our heads:

Situated cognition is all about how the context contributes to thinking/learning. Recall yesterday’s discussion of Jean Lave’s work on communities of practice, etc. There’s also a very famous and fun article about doing math in the grocery store.

Distributed cognition is the notion that the environment doesn’t just shape/interpret our thinking/learning, it can in some ways instantiate it. The paradigm-shifting paper here is about how the flight crew of an ’80s(?) -era airplane—and indeed the plane itself—comprise a sort of cognitive system. It’s a fun read (or at least skim). If you’ve read one of those tiresome thinkpieces about how no one remember phone numbers or state capitals or characters in Dickens novels or whatever because of evil smartphones, the author was pointing out that now our brains form a cognitive system with the entirety of the Internet.

Embodied or grounded cognition is the view that our bodies (i.e., more than just our brains) are involved in cognition in important ways. The theory goes that our minds store these multimodal representations/simulations of physical sensations associated with particular experiences. When we re-engaged with such a process, we access, are guided by, and refine the previous representation. In other words, embodied cognition is, among other things, the cognitive theory behind that expression “just like riding a bike.”

How do these ideas inform the work of somebody interested in religious education? Well, there’s lots of potential examples. Like the fact that those of us who believe worship experiences are an important part of forming faith are more likely to want to those experiences to be richly multimodal—involve moving our bodies, engaging many senses, interacting with other people, and expressing our own powerful ideas in addition to receiving them from others.

As I said yesterday, I think I’m heading toward a dissertation about Digital Storytelling in religious education settings. This is an inherently constructivist/constructionist position: I believe people will learn/practice/claim their faith more significantly if they have agency in deciding what ideas to reflect on deeply, if they have a community of fellow learners to bounce notions off of, if they have a chance to make something of their own and share it with the world, and if they’re invited to think about how the abstract religious concept has concrete, real-world implications for their everyday lives.

There will be time to flesh that ideas out a bit more thoroughly and with a bit more literature. But I think that’s plenty for today.

#CertStudy, Day 1: Introducing the Certification Exam

December 26, 2017May 19, 2022 Kyle 13 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts wherein I blog my way through studying for the doctoral certification exam in the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The process will culminate February 9 in a three-hour, open-note (but “closed Internet”) test where I’ll be expected to bring social, cultural, and cognitives perspectives and research to bear on an open-ended question about the intersection between media and technology, learning and education, and my own research interests. I’ll be posting article summaries, “mini-sprints,” sketches of arguments—basically anything to get me reading and writing a little bit each day.

One of the things that’s unique (or at least unusual) about our program is its breadth. Thus, the “three-pronged” question structure asking for social, cultural, and cognitive perspectives is pretty much a constant across the sample questions we’ve received. So it seemed like a quick explication of each prong was in order.

Social perspectives on learning and technology are interested in interpersonal kinds of questions. That might happen on the micro-level, with researchers putting some sort of learning-oriented activity system under the microscope. There’s also a strong current of macro-level social analysis running through educational policy research generally and the matter of educational technology in particular (e.g., the history of research on the “digital divide”). Sociologists of education are important resources here, of course, but so too are technologists who work on formal and informal learning tools that have person-to-person (or person-to-“agent“) interactivity at their core.

The “social bin” work that I’m most tuned into is concerned with studying learning generally and literacy more specifically (though still broadly conceived) as an inherently social enterprise. For example, Lave and Wenger have studied learning as it happens in particular situated and social contexts. The idea here is that communities engaged in some shared practice bring people “into the fold” through a process called “legitimate peripheral participation.”

So, for example, if you’re a religious educator or church communicator interested in how technology is changing religious life and leadership, you might get connected with a community of practice collectively engaged in the work of reflective practice in this area. You’d likely start out at the periphery of such a group, “lurking” on relevant Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, email newsletter lists, etc. or even attending a conference or other gathering. You might try out a couple ideas in your own practice, based on resources or inspiration you encountered in those social spaces.

But eventually you encounter some sort of challenge. So you put a question out to the group. Those who are thoroughly engaged in this work already might point you in some promising directions or connect you with individuals working on similar problems in similar contexts. If that happens enough times, and you do the hard work of trying out the ideas and integrating them into your practice, you might slowly become one of those go-to leaders, becoming a resource for others. You’ve moved from peripheral or novice participation to something closer to expert. Preece and Schneiderman take this sort of perspective in developing their “reader to leader” framework for studying technology mediated social participation.

I think my research is heading in the direction of studying how people make (religious) meaning making media together. So, for example, if I’m part of a Digital Storytelling circle and I have a draft of a video about my experience going “on pilgrimage” to Comic Con, I might get a question about what a pilgrimage is, why this trip was so drenched in personal meaning for me, or whether it’s entirely appropriate to compare my experience to visiting a sacred religious site. The question might shape where I take my draft, might force me to articulate more clearly that the connection for me is about having an embodied experience of sharing and gratitude. Perhaps a fellow participant or the group’s mentor shows me how a certain editing technique or script revision can get me closer to the message they hear me trying to communicate. This is the kind of learning that researchers and designers working in the social perspective and tradition are especially keen to observe, understand, and cultivate.

If the social perspective is concerned with those learning interactions as such, the cultural perspective cares about the sort of aggregate properties of larger groups with something in common. Indeed, Raymond Williams writes that culture is common in two senses of that word. Cultural phenomena are ordinary; they are the stuff of the everyday and (often) unexamined. They’re also shared—the practices, rituals, beliefs and artifacts that “feel like home” to a group of people.

Educational anthropologists (like my advisor, Lalitha Vasudevan) are among those who contribute in this area. But I’m also especially excited by the work of practitioners who respond to the cultural spaces where they work in order to design new kinds of learning opportunities. This move is generally known as “culturally relevant pedagogy” and my favorite example is this video by Leah Buechley thinking about how to diversify maker culture.

For the purposes of my program’s self-understanding, I see religion as a largely cultural phenomenon. In future posts I’ll be fleshing out some theory about storytelling as an anthropological phenomenon, a universal human meaning-making experience made especially engaging and accessible by cheap and ubiquitous media making tools. And I think my work has always been interested in the intersections between cultures: currently it’s digital culture and church culture, and probably also youth culture.

For example, what happens what you turn a church’s parish hall into a maker space for young people? Well for one thing, the adult mentor(s) need to act less like teachers and more like colleagues. Soep and Chávez have done a lot of both academic and more popular writing on their pedagogy of collegiality, in the context of their work as adult participants in Youth Radio. They’re realistic about the limits of shared power, but they do their best to jointly frame projects with their young collaborators and to let those young people take the lead in investigating and reporting stories once the editorial team has decided on a direction.

For another thing, everyone involved needs to be open to just how elusive truly “shared” values can be. Anytime we advance a monolithic idea of what’s important, there’s a good chance we’re discounting and disadvantaging the wisdom and experience of marginalized groups. Thus, educational researchers with a cultural lens on their work have been among the most critical voices in pushing back on “what counts?” in various learning settings.

OK, I’m approaching my time limit today. And I’m still sorting through my notes from Cognition and Computers this semester, so I’ll save the cognitive perspective for tomorrow. Until then!