Tuesday, October 24 at 11am Central Daylight Time
Carol Lee, currently president of the National Academy of Education, will join our Coffee Hour to discuss her current thinking about the way that research in the learning sciences can and should inform educational research and policy.
Carol has made available a draft paper for background reading. In this paper Carol wrestles with what it means to actually see the complexities of human learning and development in real world terms and then discusses the implications for wrestling with such complexities in research that seeks to understand and optimize opportunities to learn, within and across settings. As is our policy for Coffee Hour gatherings, attendees are expected to read this material ahead of time and to send comments or questions in order to ensure that our discussion is maximally inclusive to Mike Cole at mcole@ucsd.edu. He will send out a reminder a week before the seminar. The main reading for this session is “How the Science(s) of Human Learning and Diversity (SoLD) Can Inform Foundational Truths About the Centrality and Complexity of Diversity: Wrestling with Interrogations of Race and Resiliency/ From a Grandma’s Lens” by Carol Lee.
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I deeply enjoyed thinking about this topic with Dr. Lee and the rest of the community. One question I had is this: the social construction of “teacher” as an identity is so deeply entwined with the experiences we have as students — aka everyone thinks they know how to teach because they went to school — but so few formally prepared teachers (in my experience as faculty in an MA in C&I for practicing teachers) have any understanding of what we know about learning as opposed to the logistics or strategies of teaching. What do you think is key for teachers to understand about the Science(s) of Learning and Diversity?
Excellent question.
Being rejected to join the meeting despite having the link –
“Sign in to join this meetingThe host requires authentication on the commercial Zoom platform to join this meeting. Please sign in with a commercial Zoom account to join.”
Signing up for your own zoom account is free. Once you have one, signing in is easy. I guess I should always set a password so that even those without a zoom account have no difficulty.
I found the talk to be very interesting and thought-provoking and I’m looking forward to the discussion tomorrow.
I had two questions in reading the talk.
(1) When I was teaching a graduate proseminar in developmental psychology, my students were overwhelmed with the complexity of human development, which was similar to the lines of work presented by Carol Lee. Carol seems to hint at similar reactions from her students. I think the students were correct in being overwhelmed and they often voiced the idea that one person cannot do all this work.
While Carol presents a few examples of this type of research endeavor, I’m wondering whether she thinks that higher education institutions and research practices need to change to support this type of research. If so, what might be some such changes that can better foster this type of research?
(2) Assuming that the research endeavor proposed here became more prominent in developmental and educational research, would this be enough to persuade and maybe silence some slices of the public, which right now are rather loud and also successful in avoiding and banning educational discourse to engage students with “contested [societal] issues” we face? To put it differently, will the change in the developmental/educational research promoted here be able to change or persuade this slice of the population? If so, how? And if not, how can we more fruitfully engage with them?
It seems like, with respect to number 2 the answer is a clear yes if she uses the 5thD as an example. I worked over many years to be certain that this activity would be build into the curriculum at UCSD. It did not last in parts of the overall system, but the basic model was adopted by the new, 8th college, and Angela Booker, who was hired to replace me is the Provost. But that is a rare set of developments, and there is no evidence yet of how well the increased scale can withstand the drive for large numbers and efficiency from the changing University structures. my two zloty
Looking forward to reading these reflections through a grandparental lens, and to attending the lunch meeting on 24 October (United Nations Day and Zambia’s national independence day). Robert
The scope of Carol Lee’s paper is immense. Here is a question on which I would love to hear her views:
Youthful participation in planning progressive social change.
What is our role as a grandparental generation of educators ?
Reminiscing about my brief episode as a student activist in the 1960s, I treasure its influence on my subsequent life-journey, but also recognise that many of my more conspicuous mistakes arose from over-confidence grounded in what Piaget termed formal operational thinking.
What lessons can we learn from Greta Thunberg’s courageous and confrontational approach to the older generation regarding how to promote greater international cooperation in addressing the very real challenges of climate change ?
How might a Greta Thurnberg approach to youth activism be carried out with respect to elementary school education, Robert? Say, the child-child, dialogic approach?
Greta Thunberg’s focus on global climate change is helpful in cutting through relativism. Her much publicised campaign illustrates in a vivid way that children and adolescents sometimes have an edge over older generations in the validity of their claim to universal relevance.
Carol Lee gave us some compelling examples of children taking an initiative in social situations that appears to reflect a priority for compassion and generosity over selfish and aggressive competition. When we are faced with evidence of the opposite priority in international affairs, it is tempting to invoke the prevalence of prosociality among children as a moral argument in favour of cessation of hostilities.
At least, surely most of us preoccupied with education would favour attempting to lay the foundations in childhood for adult dispositions conducive to peaceful coexistence. A number of programs in the contested region of Palestine and Israel seem to have devoted concerted efforts in that direction (eg Givat Haviva Institute https://www.ghefpeace.org/
The Greenhouse at Kibbutz ein Shemer )
Within the USA, Vivian Paley’s “You Can’t Say You Can’t Play” lays out a relevant pedagogical strategy, mandating inclusion by building consensus in a preschool class.
The Child-to-Child approach we documented in Paul Mumba’s teaching at Kabale Primary School in Zambia in the 1990s operationalised opportunities for pre-adolescent children to practice compassionate nurturant care through out-of-school assignments to share responsibility with their parents for monitoring and promoting the health of younger siblings and neighborhood playmates (DOI: 10.1002/cd.312)
I think the use of dialogue as a methodological entry-point mentioned by Carol during the meeting yesterday is likely to prove seminal in plotting productive ways forward in this complex domain. Navigating a way to ensure adequate attention is given to suggestions emanating from low-power participants may sometimes require confrontation and challenges to existing regulations that tend to marginalise children relative to adults.