Educators who wish to address
an area of study, say civics, rely – sometimes without awareness – on some
overall explanatory/descriptive view of the subject. The claim of this blog has been that
currently that view for social studies subjects has been the natural rights
view. Academics call it classical
liberalism. The blog has further argued
for a change, that instead of the current view, it should be replaced by the
construct, liberated federalism. A good
deal of space in this blog has gone into describing and explaining that
proposed view.
At this point, the blog has attempted to present a viability
statement that applies Eugene Meehan’s criteria[1] to
highlight the construct’s strengths.
After addressing each individual criterion – comprehensiveness, power, precision, consistency/reliability,
isomorphism, compatibility, predictability, and control – the blog with the
last posting added two more criteria: abstract level and motivation. These distinct but related criteria relate
more to educators’ daily concerns.
Abstract
level refers to how much of reality is included with some presentation of that
reality, and motivation refers to how much the material elicits the interest of
the students presented with that reality.
If readers are interested but have not read that posting, readers can
look it up at the URL, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/, September 1, 2023.
That posting also introduced the work
of Jerome
S. Bruner[2]
and Edgar Dale.[3] This posting will delve more deeply into
their contributions. To begin, Bruner
provides a model for the different modes by which information can be
communicated and at what minimal ages a person can understand the information
presented by the different media modes.
Generally, as observed by
analyzing people’s learning abilities at different age levels, Bruner
discovered that the following trend exists:
the youngest (least sophisticated) children understood information in
the enactive mode of representation.
That would be children from birth to 1 year of age depending on this mode
and refers to an activity of direct experiences.
For example, teaching a
baby to shake a rattle is done by an action activity in which the rattle is
placed in the baby's hand and the teacher grasps that hand and shakes it. This can be described as action
learning. Of course, action learning can
be employed with older learners, as with dance lessons.
With some aging, for students
who are more sophisticated but still lacking in the higher levels of
sophistication, a more abstract mode can be employed. Bruner calls this intermediate level of
abstraction iconic modes of representation (applicable to teaching young
children from 1 to 6 years of age). This
teaching uses media that present images of what is to be learned. “How to” demonstrations or pictures are
examples of this mode. Cooking shows on
TV use this mode to teach viewers how to cook specific dishes.
Last, for the most
sophisticated students, the most abstract mode of representation can be used
and is what Bruner calls symbolic (potentially applicable to teaching students
7 years of age and above). These
instructional media rely on language.
By depending on language, these informational materials can have the
highest degree of applicability to varying aspects of reality – it's the most
generalizable information (while lesser abstract media modes need to convey
more specific content).
Language media opens the
student to concepts which categorize elements of reality. For example, the concept, transportation,
refers to a wide variety of phenomena which can be grouped to convey meaningful
information, as in the sentence, “costs affect the mode of transportation
people use.”
On the other hand, the
work of Dale addresses the same concern between abstraction and modes of
representation, but instead of devising more general modes of representation, he
identifies specific media types and activities that instructors can
choose. Dale arranges them
hierarchically by listing them within a triangle or pyramid. That is, he arranges, from bottom to top, an
ascending order of abstraction within the prism – the visual depiction of his
model is called Dale's Cone of Experience.
If one superimposes
Bruner's modes on Dale's listing of media types, it can take the following form:
MOST
ABSTRACT – SYMBOLIC
Written
text (as in a book)
Spoken
word (as in a lecture)
INTERMEDIATE
ABSTRACTION – ICONIC
Still
pictures (as in a picture portfolio)
Moving
pictures (as in a film)
Exhibition
(as in a collection of artifacts)
Demonstration
(as in a person showing a student how to cook a given dish)
LEAST
ABSTRACTION – ENACTIVE
Role-playing
(as in a learner pretends to be a person in some social situation, e.g., as a
family member when father or mother comes home to announce he/she has lost
his/her job)
Simulation
(as in playing a game based on a model of some reality, e.g., playing the game Monopoly)
Direct
purposeful experience (as in an internship in which student takes on real life
responsibilities for a particular job)
Applying all these ideas
regarding sophistication, abstraction, and motivation to evaluating federation
theory, the question becomes: how well
does the construct allow instructors, curriculum developers, and media
developers to match the sophistication of secondary students to civics or
government material being taught?
Here, this blogger will
simply state that federation theory does not primarily rely, as most classroom
instruction does, on higher levels of abstraction. That would be the case in either structural
descriptions of complex bureaucratic institutions – branches of government,
political parties, interest groups, and the like – or behavioral analysis of
political variables – such as the correlation between demographic dimensions
and particular individuals securing leadership positions in government.
Most of those classroom
sessions utilize lectures or demonstration presentations. Instead, a curriculum guided by federation
theory relies on instruction that focuses on more dynamic aspects of civics and
government. It would guide instruction
to, for example, describe contextualized political and governing accounts,
elicit students to empathize with political actors dealing with interpersonal
human challenges, and/or has students recreate the inter-dynamics of groups in
varying degrees of federated associational arrangements.
By doing so, this approach
lends itself to a more humane and less abstract treatment of governance and
politics. While this form of federation
theory, liberated federalism, relies on more historical analysis, it is more
apt to present less abstract content by conveying stories or narratives. And it lends itself to relying on cognitive
psychology by highlighting how people think, both currently and in the past.
But that does not preclude
the use of more abstract media. For
example, it does not, out of hand, dismiss behavioral studies, but can rely on
them when they are applicable and prudent.
In short, the judgment is that this perspective allows for very high
degrees of flexibility on the part of instructors, curriculum developers, and
media developers to gauge the material and experiences in which students are
asked to take part.
In that federation theory
comes closest to following Bruner's advice:
when presenting new content, the overall strategy should be to follow
the progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic. All other things being equal, in order to be
effective, less sophisticated students need less abstract content and,
therefore, less abstract media modes of instruction should be used. Conversely, for more sophisticated students,
given the content being taught, more abstract media of instruction can and
often should be employed.
As for the other elements
of motivation, one can ask: what sounds
more motivating? Are dry abstract
descriptions of unfamiliar material more motivating than materials that depict
the interactive activities of human encounters?
These latter depictions would be contained in stories of collective
entities such as families, workplaces, back room negotiating sessions, war
fronts (ones that don't glorify wars but get at the real-life sacrifices war
demands), political campaigns, and so on.
These are the types of
content settings that federation theory encourages instructors to use and their
students to study. To say the least,
federation theory holds its own in terms of motivation and is best when it
comes to matching the sophistication of students and the abstraction levels of
the media and content it suggests.
For a full illustration
of this strategy within the confines of a single course – but illustrates the principles
contained in this posting – readers are referred to this blogger’s book, Toward
a Federated Nation: Implementing
National Civics Standards.[4] This blog will next turn to the methodology
issues in implementing a curriculum based on a liberated federalism model.
[1] Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political
Thought: A Critical Study (Homewood,
IL: Dorsey Press, 1967).
[2]See Saul McIeod, “Jerome Bruner’s Theory of Learning and Cognitive Development” (June 14, 2023), accessed August 31, 2023, Jerome Bruner's Theory of Learning And Cognitive Development - Simply Psychology. The issue was how the material was presented. And one of the factors determining success was the nature of the media used to present the information. To this blogger’s understanding, Bruner was not arguing that young students had to mature to learn complicated material. He was of the mind that any content could be taught to any student regardless of his/her sophistication. The issue is how the material is presented.
[3] “Edgar Dale,” Wikipedia (n.d.), accessed September 1,
2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Dale.
[4] Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation: Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee,
FL: Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020). Available through Amazon and other booksellers.
No comments:
Post a Comment