An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …
The last posting left the reader with a general view of what essentialist
instruction is and how it has advanced through constructionist thinking in the
late twentieth century. Pioneering that
development was Robert Gagne. He
identified a set of conditions and levels of learning in which students, still within
the tradition of essentialism, were directed to add to their knowledge of
essential knowledge – that is information needed in becoming functioning adults.
That instructional approach – the most conducive
to the natural rights perspective – would utilize techniques that have students
reflect on the information presented to them by the implementation of various
classroom techniques summarily called constructivism. They, the techniques or strategic
instructional practices, have added sophistication to essentialist instruction
that previously relied on straightforward presentation – mostly lecturing – of information.
Through constructivist techniques, students are
called upon to manipulate information in various ways that demand them to
reflect on that information. But is
there proof that constructive methods work?
With some added theorizing, one can make the claim that there is
evidence that they in fact do work. That
is, for example, if one ascribes the term, prototypes, to what constructive
instruction strives students to form – and the judgment here is that it does –
then there is ample evidence that it is effective.
Starting in the 1980s, E. D. Hirsch cited
studies that show the advantages of using these mental prototypes - as part of
an essentialist approach:
We are
able to make our present experiences take on meaning by assimilating them to
protypes formed from our past experiences.
Psychologists have … given them various names such as frames, theories,
concepts, models, and scripts.
Researchers … have chosen the word schema for them, and it is the
term I use to refer to the phenomena. Schema
and its plural schemata correctly suggest somewhat abstract mental
entities rather than concrete images.[2]
This indicates that the goal of these essentialists is to have students
make more holistic or integrated cognitive formulations of what otherwise would
be too unassociated or asymmetrical bits of information. So, readers might further ask: is attempting to do this too complex for
secondary students? Has subsequent
research supported the use of schemata formation or construction?
Here is but one example
of more contemporary research that further supports this essentialist approach;
that is a study by Hogfeng Zhang, et al.
It
… found that significant
improvement—in terms of students’ learning experience scores and academic
grades—was seen in the experimental group [in which constructive instruction
was implemented] compared with the control group. This study has further
verified that implementing a constructive alignment template can
significantly improve students’ learning effectiveness in scientific courses,
hence providing theoretical and practical references for teaching and learning
in scientific courses.[3]
Or indicated in the following finding by Audrey Gray,
… I visited Pat Gray's
classroom. His secondary language arts programme exemplified the attributes of
constructivist teaching: learner-centered instruction in a democratic
environment; active learners who build and create meaning and knowledge;
learners who hypothesize, question, investigate, imagine and invent; learners
who reflect and make associations with prior knowledge to reach new
understandings.[4]
While this sort of constructive learning enhances the role of students,
it is still teacher-centered in that those professional educators orchestrate
the presentation of information to fulfill the conditions and levels that Gagne
identifies.[5]
Again, in terms of civics, the political
systems model provides the needed guiding schema. The model, if taught to students, not only
organizes the information in appropriate fashion for the goals expressed in
this and previous postings but also serves as the conceptual organizer for
political and governmental information that individual students will confront
in the classroom and in their adult lives.
And with this account
demonstrating the tie to a constructivist approach, it will now begin to address
the various commonplaces of curricular development – those being students
or learners, subject matter, teachers, and milieu – that this natural rights/behavioral
associated perspective has. The blog will
further turn to how they relate to the application of this approach to civics.
But
as a word of context, readers should keep in mind that these positive qualities
of constructive or essentialist teaching are only possibilities or potentials
since what was described in this, and the last two postings do not pertain to
what actually happens in most American civics education classrooms.
In the upcoming postings, readers will not find
an extensive inquiry into each of these issues (each can be the topic of
extensive study), but a general view which sufficiently helps justify the
adoption of the natural rights construct as a theoretical foundation for a
civics curriculum in America’s secondary schools.
[1] This presentation continues
with this posting. The reader is informed that the claims made in
this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this
blogger. Instead, the posting is a representation of what an
advocate of the natural rights view might present. This
is done to present a dialectic position of that construct. This series of postings begins with “Judging
Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.
[2] E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New
York, NY: Vintage, 1987), 51.
[3] Hongfeng Zhang, Shanodan Su, Yumeng Zeng, and Johnny
F. I. Lam, “An Experimental Study on the Effectiveness of Students’ Learning in
Scientific Courses through Constructive Alignment – A Case Study from an MIS
Course,” Education Sciences, May 11, 2022, accessed September 14, 2022, file:///C:/Users/gravi/Downloads/education-12-00338-v2.pdf. Emphasis
added.
[4] Audrey Gray, “Constructive Teaching and Learning,”
SSTA Research Centre Report #97-07 (n.p.), accessed September 15, 2022, https://saskschoolboards.ca/wp-content/uploads/97-07.htm. This is taken
from Ms. Gray’s master thesis and is offered as a demonstration.
[5] Robert Gagne’s conditions are verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and attitudes. His levels are reception, setting expectations, relevant retrieval, targeted perceptions, verbal encoding, responding, evaluative reinforcement, evaluative assessment, and retaining information. For elaboration see the last posting OR B. Janse, “Gagne’s Conditions of Learning,” Toolshero (2019), accessed September 15, 2022, https://www.toolshero.com/personal-development/gagnes-conditions-of-learning/.
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