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stance taken in this paper, then, is constructivist – that conversation is learning
in the making.
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Teachers' Invisible Presence in Net-based Distance Education | Hult | The International... - 0 views
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Any conversation, that is, draws on heteroglossia (Bakhtin’s neologism) – pools of different ideas whose elements, when exchanged, foster learning. According to Bakhtin, every utterance has a double significance. It is an expression of a 'unitary [common] language' used to conduct the conversation and, at the same time, it builds on the 'social and historical' differences embedded in the heteroglossia (1981, p. 272).
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described conversations as multi-authored texts rather than as multi-voiced heteroglossia (see Bakhtin, 1994,
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fulfilled best when the codes of the speaker and the listener most completely coincide and, consequently, when the text has the maximum degree of univocality” (1988, p. 34). The generation of new meanings occurs when there are differences between the speaker and the listener. Texts used in educational exchanges cease:
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online adult education is not the delivery of texts but, rather, the creation and insertion of ‘thinking devices’ into conversation.
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For this article we have concentrated on teacher and student views of teachers’ role orientations in online courses.
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our intention has been to identify and clarify teaching ‘saliences’ that have emerged in online adult education in Sweden. In a wider sense, however, our analysis is also a response to the question: ‘Whatever happened to teaching in the learning society?’
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When asked about their views, all students felt that teachers played a central role in supporting Net-based learning. Indeed, some of them suggested that moderation in online settings of adult education is more important than in face-to-face settings.
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In this perspective, teachers gave students tasks that activated them and, thereby, fostered their understanding of subject matter.
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Some students spoke about being activated by stimulating tasks that led them to engage with the Web and libraries, with one of them adding ‘seeking by your self is a pre-condition for learning.’ Active searching also meant that students came into contact with information which extended their learning beyond the task itself.
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None of the teachers, however, was entirely satisfied with their dialogic or conference practice. Levels of engagement, dialogue, and initiative-taking were not as high as they had hoped. In response, they tried to promote conversation by encouraging students to react to each other’s postings, by organising tasks where cooperation and interaction was needed, or by introducing new aspects and questions when discussion faltered.
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Further, teachers reported that they also tried to act as models of good behaviour by giving swift replies to student postings and by making their own postings appropriate yet concise.
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felt that sharing different aspects of the subject matter with the teacher and fellow students raised fresh questions. It made them reach beyond the book, evoking learning and thinking along new pathways. Even if they thought that well-chosen tasks were the most effective way of fostering dialogue, they also expected the course leader to participate fully, developing new themes if student postings declined, and remaining alert to student proposals that might enhance the interchange of ideas and knowledge.
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None of the teachers, however, spontaneously offered this view as their primary role or orientation. Nevertheless, when asked whether they had any correspondence with students through private mailboxes rather than ‘conferences’ and ‘cafes,’ some of them said that they occasionally responded privately to correct misinterpretations.
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This task raises many questions about teaching, highlighting the difference, for example, between instructionist and constructionist paradigms for learning (Wilensky, 1991). Would a too well-planned course be instructionist, thus constraining student influence and the pursuit of democracy? In their postings, teachers in this study felt that there was no necessary contradiction – that well-planned courses could, indeed, strengthen student influence. Nevertheless, busy distance education students, according to the teachers, often appreciate instructionist courses with clearly stated activities and tasks, even if the students are left with limited opportunities to ‘construct their own relationships with the objects of knowledge’ (Wilensky, 1991, p. 202).
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Teacher’s invisible presence is exemplified in taking a stand-by role and/ or being reluctant to intervene. ‘The [teachers’] silence should be deafening,’ one teacher recommended. Although most of the teachers agreed that well-planned courses do not inhibit course dialogue, the fact that in their own online course deliberations they set aside time to discuss this issue may reflect ambivalence in their stance. The question of when and how teachers should intervene remains impossible to resolve, except in practice.
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a second conclusion – that the promotion of learning in an open environment requires an animating or steering presence. Such teaching, however, is not a process of instruction. And for this reason the word teacher may no longer be appropriate. In English, the word tutor is commonly used in adult education, because it has connotations of ‘supervision’ and ‘guardianship’ as well as ‘instruction’ (see Oxford English Dictionary). More recently, Salmon has suggested ‘e-moderating,’ but even moderation carries instructionist connotations – to exercise a controlling influence over; to regulate, restrain, control, rule (OED) – that may not be appropriate to all forms of liberal education. In the context of mainland Europe, the word pedagogue may be appropriate since, etymologically, pedagogue denotes someone engaged in 'drawing out.'
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Intellectual development, however, can be an intra- as well as an inter-personal phenomenon. That is, learning may not come directly from teachers but rather from their absent or invisible presence. Online pedagogues, therefore, can be present in different ways. They may be present in person, participating in learning conversations. They may constitute an absent presence that, nonetheless, is embodied in the learning resources directed towards students (e.g., the selected readings or activities). Or pedagogues may exist merely as inner voices, inherited from the language of others, that (invisibly) steer the desires, self-regulation, and self-direction of learners. Indeed, this last pedagogic position ‘auto-didacticism,’ has always been central to the post-Enlightenment ideals of liberal adult education.
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CriticalThinking.org - The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Learning - 1 views
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every field stays alive only to the extent that fresh questions are generated and taken seriously as the driving force in a process of thinking
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thinking begins with respect to some content only when questions are generated by both teachers and students.
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No questions equals no understanding. Superficial questions equals superficial understanding. Most students typically have no questions. They not only sit in silence, their minds are silent as well. Hence, the questions they do have tend to be superficial and ill-informed. This demonstrates that most of the time they are not thinking through the content they are presumed to be learning. This demonstrates that most of the time they are not learning the content they are presumed to be learning.
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Questions define tasks, express problems and delineate issues. Answers on the other hand, often signal a full stop in thought. Only when an answer generates a further question does thought continue its life as such.
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Feeding students endless content to remember (that is, declarative sentences to remember) is akin to repeatedly stepping on the brakes in a vehicle that is, unfortunately, already at rest. Instead, students need questions to turn on their intellectual engines and they need to generate questions from our questions to get their thinking to go somewhere. Thinking is of no use unless it goes somewhere, and again, the questions we ask determine where our thinking goes.
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It is possible to give students an examination on any subject by just asking them to list all of the questions that they have about a subject, including all questions generated by their first list of questions.
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CriticalThinking.org - The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Learning
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One of the reasons that instructors tend to overemphasize "coverage" over "engaged thinking" is that they assume that answers can be taught separate from questions. Indeed, so buried are questions in established instruction that the fact that all assertions - all statements that this or that is so - are implicit answers to questions is virtually never recognized. For example, the statement that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade is an answer to the question "At what temperature centigrade does water boil?"
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Describing the Habits of Mind - 0 views
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h, cultivate, observe, and assess. The intent is to help students get into the habit of behaving intelligently. A Habit of Mind is a pattern of intellectual behaviors that leads to productive actions.
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Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they never quit. —Conrad Hilton
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Senge, Roberts, Ross, Smith, and Kleiner (1994) suggest that to listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words—listening not only to the "music" but also to the essence of the person speaking; not only for what someone knows but also for what that person is trying to represent
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They tolerate confusion and ambiguity up to a point, and they are willing to let go of a problem, trusting their subconscious to continue creative and productive work on it. Flexibility is the cradle of humor, creativity, and repertoire. Although many perceptual positions are possible—past, present, future, egocentric, allocentric, macrocentric, microcentric, visual, auditory, kinesthetic—the flexible mind knows when to shift between and among these positions
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Whether we are looking at the stamina, grace, and elegance of a ballerina or a carpenter, we see a desire for craftsmanship, mastery, flawlessness, and economy of energy to produce exceptional results
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Creative people are open to criticism. They hold up their products for others to judge, and they seek feedback in an ever-increasing effort to refine their technique. They are uneasy with the status quo. They constantly strive for greater fluency, elaboration, novelty, parsimony, simplicity, craftsmanship, perfection, beauty, harmony, and balance.
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Finding Humor You can increase your brain power three to fivefold simply by laughing and having fun before working on a problem. —Doug Hall
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Collaborative humans realize that all of us together are more powerful, intellectually or physically, than any one individual
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Working in groups requires the ability to justify ideas and to test the feasibility of solution strategies on others
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t also requires developing a willingness and an openness to accept feedback from a critical friend. Through this interaction, the group and the individual continue to grow. Listening, consensus seeking, giving up an idea to work with someone else's, empathy, compassion, group leadership, knowing how to support group efforts, altruism—all are behaviors indicative of cooperative human being
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Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in oneself, slowing the mind's hearing to the ears' natural speed and hearing beneath the words to their meaning
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They are invigorated by the quest of lifelong learning. Their confidence, in combination with their inquisitiveness, allows them to constantly search for new and better ways. People with this Habit of Mind are always striving for improvement, growing, learning, and modifying and improving themselves. They seize problems, situations, tensions, conflicts, and circumstances as valuable opportunities to learn (Bateson, 2004).
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Have you every heard of habitus? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitus_(sociology)
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IIER 20(2): Khine and Hayes - Investigating women's ways of knowing: An exploratory stu... - 0 views
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Personal epistemological beliefs, one's beliefs about the nature and acquisition of knowledge, and their role in the learning process have become a focus of a growing body research in recent years. Studies show that a person's epistemological beliefs play an important role in their intellectual development as well as in learning specific subjects (Hofer, 2008)
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Baxter Magolda (1992) describes ways of knowing as being "related to, but not dictated by gender" (p.8)
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Their subjects described five ways of knowing - received knowledge, subjective knowledge, constructed knowledge, procedural knowledge, all similar to those of Perry, and silence. From their data Belenky et al. distilled these five epistemological positions down to focus on two: preprocedural and procedural knowing, which corresponded to 'relativism' in Perry's scheme. In 1986 this work culminated in the publication of "Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice and mind".
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Importantly, they saw that CK and SK scores were not related to performance and thus concluded that 'ways of knowing' were more reflective of a learning style or approach rather than a reflection of ability or intellectual capacity (Gallotti et al., 1999)
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Research in personal epistemology looks into ways of knowing, focusing on the nature of knowledge (certainty, structure and source of knowledge) and beliefs about learning (speed and ability to learn). The exploration of different learning or cognitive styles and in particular the relationship between gender and epistemological beliefs in tertiary education contexts is an area of much current research focus.
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Students' separate knowing and connected knowing scores, however, did predict preferences for different kinds of teaching.
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Separate knowing scores were always higher in males whereas females had always higher connected knowing scores. The connected and separate knowing scores of males were not significantly different, whereas females typically showed significantly higher connected scores.
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, learning occurs in different ways for different people in different situations, and may be affected by the learning styles of others who are present. According to Gallotti et al. (1999), students tend to prefer teachers whose style reflects their own. Schommer-Aikens and Easter (2006) find it likely that teachers' personal epistemological paradigms would impact on their decisions about forms of instruction, curriculum and evaluation. Should this be the case, an awareness on the part of the teacher and the learners of the predominant or favoured ways of knowing within a learning context might be seen as a useful tool in designing classroom activities which take into account student diversity.