JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XIV

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

The last posting ended with a general overview of the methodological process associated with political systems model – that being the scientific method.  With that, there was a hint as to what that could mean for classroom instruction – that being instruction that implements the inquiry approach.  An inquiry method, to various levels of fidelity, applies scientific modes of study by which students solve open ended problems. 

But the adoption of inquiry has not been the case in most civics classrooms.  Instead, didactic methods have prevailed.  Comprising the educational school of thought or philosophy known as essentialism, civics educators – in line with most of public-school educators – have advocated that the goal of education should be to pass on essential information to the younger generation. 

That would be to impart information regarding the culture, basic work skills, and other general knowledge that prepare students for the life beyond school.  Or more encompassing, this view sees classroom instruction adjusting individual students to society.  The question is:  how does one do that?  The common reply has been didactic instruction, i.e., instruction that dispenses and explains the information that functioning adults need.

          Essentialists have found behaviorist principles to be particularly harmonious – as a psychological perspective – to these educational aims.  As stated earlier in this blog, direct instruction, a technique that basically follows the format of assign-recite-test pattern with appropriate rewards and punishments being what these educators see as the most obvious and straightforward way to meet this aim.  But there have been those within essentialism who have taken on a more sophisticated approach.

An essentialist who devised a fairly responsible model of learning, Robert Gagne, identified what he called conditions of learning – five of them – and nine progressive levels or “steps” in which students can advance and engage with school subject content.  The conditions are:

 

·      Verbal information which consists of knowledge claims one finds among various sources of subject information and can be interrelated with other information in meaningful ways.

·      Intellectual skills are those abilities students can develop by which they process knowledge such as forming hierarchies, contextualizing relevant, new information, or acquiring information that adds distinctive attributes to what is being studied among other skills.

·      Cognitive strategies consist of analytic abilities in which students can break down sets of information that assist in exposing problems, the problems themselves, or the information needed to solve those problems.

·      Motor skills are those behavioral steps that students develop and, through practice, improve upon in which they tackle challenging academic issues.

·      Attitudes are those sentiments students need to motivate themselves to address the material that classroom instruction presents them.

 

And as for the levels or steps, they are:

 

Level 1:  Reception (or capturing the attention of students)

Level 2:  Setting expectations (or students being informed what they are to learn and why they are to learn it)

Level 3:  Relevant retrieval (or calling on students to recall what they know and is helpful in meeting a lesson’s objectives)

Level 4:  Targeted or selective perception (or presenting new information that students are to learn with an array of aids such as visuals, examples, discussions)

Level 5:  Verbal encoding (or presentation of the new information in a variety of language presentations such as graphics or case studies)

Level 6:  Responding (or student presentation of new information in various communicative approaches such as tests, demonstrations, interpretations – perhaps artistic productions)

Level 7:  Evaluative reinforcement (or teaching agents providing students with feedback as to the proficiency students demonstrate with the goal to improve on student performance)

Level 8:  Evaluative assessment (or determination how well students have learned the content)

Level 9:  Enriching the retained information (or have students transfer learned content to novel or real-life situations that do not totally match information learned but need to be adjusted or nuanced so as to be applicable) [2]

         

To break down this overall influence, educational psychologist, Geoffrey Scheurman writes,

 

With the help of computers, cognitive scientists have fueled a “revolution” in the psychology of learning by modeling how learners’ prior knowledge (stored in clusters called Schemata) not only filter, but actually modifies, sensory activity as it is experienced.[3]

 

The hope of “constructive” thought, which Gagne helped develop, is a newer perspective, included in the behaviorist-essentialist model, and has led to the incorporation of more engaging and reflective methods in the classroom as the above conditions and levels indicate.  These might include dialogue, problem-solving, heuristic material analysis, etc.  That was the hope in the years leading up to the twenty-first century.

          But of particular importance would be if teachers would – in the mode ascribed by the behaviorist-essentialist school of instruction – fragment or breakdown their content into logical, sequential pieces of information and have students work with and reassemble the pieces that learners could accomplish in their studies.[4]  In short, it has students actively reflect on the information they are to learn.

Yet, as this blog has argued, these newer approaches have not been widely incorporated.  Instead, this blog, citing expert reportage, has doggedly maintained that the more didactive strategies with minimal to no application of more “constructive” instructional techniques – or as indicated above, insist on the assign-recite-recall protocol.

This is despite the fact that the political systems model lends itself comfortably to this more interactive, essentialist curricular plans.  The political systems model is highly logical and sequential as described and explained in this blog.  It lends itself to mental manipulations about how the system works given varying presentations about how it functions. 

The next posting will continue this presentation of essentialist thinking by addressing the question:  how well does this more sophisticated approach work?  Beyond that, it will begin to report on the commonplaces of curricular development as they apply to essentialist instruction.

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[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] B. Janse, “Gagne’s Conditions of Learning,” Toolshero (2019), accessed September 15, 2022, https://www.toolshero.com/personal-development/gagnes-conditions-of-learning/.

[3] Geoffrey Scheurman,  “From Behaviorist to Constructive Teaching,” Social Education, 62, 1 (January 1998), 6-9, page not noted.

[4] Peter F. Oliva, Developing the Curriculum (Boston, MA:  Little, Brown, and Company, 1982).

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XIII

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

This posting serves as the last one to apply Eugene Meehan’s concerns regarding the viability of the political systems model.[2]  Those last concerns, predictability and control, and their treatment here serves as a sort of introduction to the methodology that model mostly employs.

          In terms of predictability, this systems approach does provide viable predictive insights into the political phenomena it studies.  While it was gaining prominence in the 1950s, one can still find among political science researchers its centrality in how they conduct their research.  This following description from Tufts University gives one a sense of this role which mostly relies on the model’s predictive power:

 

The study of political systems and theories represents an essential basis for explaining, understanding, and comparing the units and actors that comprise the world of the early 21st century. As a field, Political Systems and Theories encompasses courses whose focus is alternative theoretical approaches for the conduct of research and analysis about political systems, major forces shaping the emerging world, the nature of international change and continuity, and the basis for theoretical development. The Political Systems and Theories field offers students the opportunity to explore, evaluate, and compare [mid-range] theories about such crucially important phenomena as power, legitimacy, institutions, cooperation, conflict, peace, and war. Conceptually, the field is (or should be) integral to, and an essential prerequisite for, courses that comprise the practical parts of the curriculum. Students taking this field are expected to acquire basic knowledge about the major theories that shape international and comparative politics.[3] 

 

This sort of overview implies a central role being attributed to systems theory by crediting it the central position in the discipline even today.

          Why?  The results of ensuing studies provide legitimate insights into political behavior.  Of course, political science is not a hard science and predictability is highly qualified as is the case in not just political science but in all of the social sciences.  For example, Drew Bowlsby, et al. report on such challenges political science research faces when it comes to predictability, so the ability to predict is significantly constrained and can only be considered in relative terms within the social sciences.[4] 

The derived findings from this literature of political science, which are deemed of importance to the knowledge of secondary students in preparation to becoming viable citizens, should be included in their curricular studies.  It offers the best opportunities in understanding students’ social environments.  What people find when looking at corporate practices, for example, is increased reliance on political studies based on this model to make sense of their political realities.[5]

Finally, the question of whether the use of the construct fulfills its purposes as outlined above needs to be addressed.  That is, does this construct imply ways of controlling the phenomena in question?  This dialectic argument is claiming that, as illustrated over the postings dedicated to this model, the construct penetrates the workings of government and political actors in general, so as to give consumer-citizens enormous insight into governance and politics.

Courses of study which apply this construct have the model serve as foundations or “springboards” by which to identify those aspects of the American political system which citizens need to know in order to have any chance of being effective in pursuing their goals.  By emphasizing the realities of the American political conditions, not much time or concerns are diverted into historical aspects that add little to the effectiveness of political actors in the present.

Historical elements are appropriately subsumed under cultural factors that affect current political decision-making behaviors.  The construct does not make a priori judgments about any particular political arrangements, and can, therefore, be easily applied in such ways as to render the political arrangements of an individual country – like the US – in neutral fashion, something historical approaches have found difficult to sustain.

If students accept that this nation’s cultural expectations of government are for the respective state to protect its citizens’ rights and to meet the demands of their competing consumer-citizens,[6] the political systems approach serves most completely the purposes of that perspective.

Methodology

          The methodology most associated with the political systems approach is the scientific method.[7]  Because of the nature of social aspects of political science, strategies of inquiry have been developed which include survey research methods, observations, ethno-methodologies, document study, simulation and games, as well as experiments.

          The purpose here, though, is not to review the scientific methodology of the discipline, but rather to describe how this methodology incorporates the political systems approach through classroom use.  In that pursuit, a scientific approach is again the most conducive to those teachers so disposed. 

That is, by applying the scientific method to the problems associated with teaching practical political information, educators can avail themselves of the most congruent method to deliver the subject matter if that presentation adheres to the political systems approach.  Many in the field of social studies – e.g., the main professional organization, the NCSS[8] – has encouraged such instructional options.

          The judgment of this dialectic argument is that the method associated with the behavioral learning theories is the truest to the scientific mode since it relies on studying observable human behavior.  As related to the systems approach, as described in this account, behavior is the focus of concern:

 

… behavioral learning theories, [are] explanations for learning that emphasize observable behavior.  Behavioral theories emphasize the ways in which pleasurable or painful consequences of behavior change individuals’ behavior over time and ways in which individuals model their behavior on that of others … Behavioral learning theorists try to discover principles of behavior that apply to all living beings …[9]

 

          This concern over classroom instruction will be the initial topic of the next posting.  Apart from the dialectic presentation, this blogger believes that nothing has affected civics education since the 1970s more than this shift to the political systems model in arranging its subject matter.

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[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] Eugene Meehan in the mid-twentieth century provides the following list of criteria by which one can evaluate or ask questions of any theory, but given its thrust, they seem most applicable to scientifically derived theories. The list is:  Comprehension, Power, Precision, Consistency or Reliability, Isomorphism, Compatibility, Predictability, Control.  See Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought:  A Critical Study (Homewood, IL:  Dorsey Press, 1967).

[3] “Political Systems & Theories/About the Field,” Fletcher/Tufts University (n.d.), assessed September 11, 2022, https://fletcher.tufts.edu/academics/courses-general-requirements/fields-study/political-systems-theories.

[4] See Drew Bowlsby, Erica Chenoweth, Cullen Hendrix, and Jonathan D. Moyer, “The Future Is a Moving Target:  Predicting Political Instability,” Cambridge University Press (February 20, 2019), accessed September 11, 2022, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/abs/future-is-a-moving-target-predicting-political-instability/0028744BE1AFF83F879E7759D798D88A.

[5] For example, Daniel Nyberg, “Corporations, Politics, and Democracy:  Corporate Political Activities as Political Corruption,” Organization Theory (January 18, 2021), accessed September 11, 2022, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2631787720982618.

[6] Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in The Liberalism-Communitarianism Debate, ed. C. F. Delaney (Lanhan, MD:  Rowman and Litttlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994), 19-37.

[7] John G. Gunnell, “Political Theory and Political Science,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, edited by David Miller, Janet Coleman, William Connolly, and Alan Ryan (Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell, 1987), 386-930 AND Janet Buttolph Johnson, H. T. Reynolds, and Jason D. Mycoff, Political Science Research Methods, 8^th Edition (Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage Publications, 2015).

[8] National Council for the Social Studies, Preparing Students for College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) (Washington, D. C.:  NCSS, 2013), accessed April 16, 2018, https://www.socialstudies.org/c3.

[9] Robert Slavin, Educational Psychology:  Theory and Practice (Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, 1994), 265.