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Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION We begin this article with the claim that current theoretical frameworks in education artificially splinter the holistic experience of teaching and learning. While perhaps oversimplified, the main challenge for us as researchers, theorists, and practitioners is that the three main driving perspectives create artificial and unproductive distinctions separate from how teachers and learners encounter educational experiences. This is especially true in the development of instruction, curriculum, and design of research questions, which are viewed by many as valid only if they are internally and externally consistent within a single epistemic and ontological frame. The disparate views of what makes up reality, truth, and knowledge and how we may know these concepts bring stakeholders in educational settings into conflict about the practices of teaching and learning. For the purposes of this article, we frame these views in the educational system language of Prawat and Floden (1994) and the larger field of social science as depicted by Bernstein (Bernstein, 1976, 1983). For example, many who take their perspective from the empiricist, Positivist, or objectivist epistemic stance claim truth and knowledge exist separately from the minds that perceive them and they may be fully understood through the senses (Hollis, 1994). Therefore, learners may read, observe, hear, or use other acquisitive means to know what is true and real as given them by a teacher, school system, and larger state and federal political systems. According to this view, researchers may only know whether learning
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occurred and teaching was successful through objective assessments that ask students to repeat this knowledge from memory. This view is in conflict with the contextualist or social constructivist that believes that while an objective reality exists (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), our limited senses and cognitive capacity restrict our understanding of truth, knowledge, or reality. It has therefore been proposed that it is only through discourse with others that we may assent to some approximation of truth and knowledge that has emerged through social negotiation and agreement among a group of participants in the process of learning (Savery & Duffy, 1994). Further, the role of the instructor is that of facilitator and coach rather than provider of objective truths and knowledge to be memorized. For researchers, this makes the use of objective learning assessments invalid because the blunt instruments available to them for perceiving what is true privilege only one view of truth. While this has been described by Bernstein (1976) as one of the main goals of the Western philosophical enterprise, many constructivists reject this as a valid goal for educational research and theory. Further, this contextualist view challenges the idea that research can generalize beyond the sample from which it was drawn, because each new community in which confirmatory research is conducted is likely to be constructed of different socially ideas about what constitutes truth or knowledge. Finally, the relativist views all truth and knowledge as individually constructed by the individual lack of transfer from one person to the next. As Hollis (1994) describes, it is the problem of “other minds (p. 241),” which states that we can never know what truth or reality is for each individual; therefore, there is no universal truth. This makes learning and teaching challenging because it requires the instructor to develop
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personalized instruction for each individual student. Such an approach is a timeconsuming affair, reducing the ability of schools to warehouse children. It further demands of the school or district low student-instructor ratios in order to meet the demands of the individual learner. Research from this perspective is thus completely relative to the individual and lacks any attempt to transfer. Instead, outcomes of such research often involve telling the stories of the learners in hopes of capturing their narrow truth, as it exists during the short window of time during which it remains true for that student. Thus, their personal experience can only be understood relative to the experiences of all other learners. Figure 1 presents an approximation of the current view:
Figure 1. Current conception of truth, knowledge, and reality from three major perspectives Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: I would want this graph a little bit further explained below the image perhaps here.
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The problem We claim that this current view of knowledge fails to comprehend the holistic nature of reality and knowledge. We claim that instructors and learners do not experience the objective world separate from the subjective or internal/relative cognitive states. From a review of case studies and qualitative research, it is clear that they instead experience all things at once and understand them in all their complexity and relationships concurrently as depicted in Figure 2.
Figure 2. How we propose that learners and instructors experience the world.
single perspective; instead, it should recognize the complexity of teacher and learner
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experience by creating learning and instructional tasks that encourage understanding from
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Therefore, educational experiences and curriculum should not be designed from only a
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and with each perspective on truth, knowledge, and learning. The question remains how can we understand the world in a way that does not artificially limit what can and should be done in relation to learning and teaching activities, assessments, and systems, but recognize our limits and affordances as human beings that are brought to bear on understanding.
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Actions The primary perspective guiding the development of the theory proposed here was informed by the pragmatic theoretical work of Jürgen Habermas’ (1981a; 1981b). His Theory of Communicative Action (CA) has the goal of developing methods for understanding and improving the effectiveness of human communication towards goals and has been a work of more than 40 years. While the area of conducting research employing Critical Ethnography as part of understanding communicative actions in educational research centered on practice has already been well-covered by Carspecken (1999; 1996), Chouliaraki & Fairclough (1999), Denzin & Lincoln (2003), and early work in the area by Paul Willis (1977) ,there has been substantially less discourse related to understanding what it means for educators to understand the roles of learners and instructors when viewed from the perspective of communicative action. What has begun to emerge from our findings, examined through this lens, is a different conception of learning, teaching, assessment, and instructional design in which human communication is both the vehicle for understanding as well as the sometimes warped window that distorts it. From a philosophical perspective, it is problematic that many researchers place
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themselves in one epistemic category or another with the contextualist battling the objectivist by claiming one form of knowledge to be superior to another. It is especially troubling for many practitioners who tend to understand all forms of knowledge to be occurring concurrently rather than through only a single acquisition or construction model as described by Sfard (1998) as mentioned earlier.
Addressing epistemic and ontological fragmentation in the social sciences In order to address the fragmenting of worldviews into objectivist, subjectivist, and relativist positions (Bernstein, 1983) as noted in the introduction, we begin by providing an overciew of the views of Jürgen Habermas, a German sociologist, pragmatist, and
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critical theorist to better understand the complexities of learner interactions and the social-construction of knowledge without falling prey to privileging one form of knowledge over others. Critical theory is a methodology that includes a critique of ideology to enable individuals to become aware of distortions in knowledge stemming from the nature of human communication of it (Habermas, 1981). Both empirical and interpretive social scientists use their senses to describe the world around them; critical theorists seek to understand why the social world is the way it is. More importantly, through critique, they seek to understand how it should be (Habermas, 1981). A self-awareness of knowledge distortion is enlightenment necessary as precondition for individual freedom and self-determination. Underlying the process of critique is the idea that existing social structures and beliefs are constructed in a participatory fashion by stakeholders and are therefore also changeable through further social action. The individual takes freeing, or emancipatory, action that changes the
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Should this be 1981? Also, missing in references. Scott Warren 6/13/11 3:07 PM Deleted: 1971 Scott Warren 6/13/11 3:06 PM Deleted: E Scott Warren 6/13/11 3:06 PM Deleted: both Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: And Carpecken has the added that the criticalist thinks society is unfair, unequal, oppressive, and they want “change” . P. 7 Is this different from Habermas? Perhaps this is in the next sentence “should be” Scott Warren 6/13/11 3:07 PM Deleted: 7 Scott Warren 6/13/11 3:07 PM Formatted: Font:Italic
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social system to permit the realization of an individual’s unique potential and therefore is emancipated (Habermas, 1984, Ewert, 1991). Habermas proposed the Theory of Communicative Action in which human speakers
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by the act of communication create of shared meaning. Communicative actions are “acts
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oriented to achieving, sustaining, and reviewing consensus ” (p.17). Speech acts raise
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grounds an agreement (p. 296). If one does not agree, then one may reject the bid of the
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initial speaker and propose claims that counter or modify the validity of the truth claims
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“validity claims” as they speakers assert acceptable representations of some facet of the world that they claim to be true or real. Habermas (1984) argues that, with the participants’ response of “yes” or “no,” the speaker accepts a speech-act offer and
inherent in the original speech act. Therefore, communicative action is set towards one or more particular goals such as 1.) getting what one wants, 2.) being understood by another, 3.) being seen to tell the truth, 4.) to make a personal subjective claim to truth, and even to 5.) make completely relative claims to personal truth and identity. Figure 3 shows Habermas’ (2002) Four Types of Communicative actions as laid out in his book On the Pragmatics of Communication.
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The exchange of validity claims requires agreement among participants, as well as the rejection or modifications based upon the strength of the stronger argument or reason (Habermas, 1993). Within an utterance, speakers are in contact with the objective world,
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the social world, and their own subjective world concurrently. This creates a crux of intersubjectivity where knowledge is viewed concomitantly as objective, subjective, and relative by speaker and hearer. It is this understanding that forms the basis for our theory of learning and teaching.
Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions In order to understand the role of Habermas’ work in the context of educational settings, we propose the theory of Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions. While originally outlined briefly in Warren and Stein (2008) and in a presentation by
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Warren, Bohannon, and Alajmi (2010) ,we expand our concept of learning and teaching
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as activities that have inherent claims to truth and knowledge acts and that emerge from
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the designed instructional activities as well as the social discourse that accompaniaes
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them. In instructional settings, communicative goals from the teacher may include the
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conveying structural content information (i.e. Denton is the county seat of Denton County) and may also include drawing out students’ responses that confirm understanding. In other goals, the instructor may seek to negotiate or enforce normative rules within the class (i.e. you should not copy someone else’s paper). The learning goals that teachers have for their students can come from state curriculum or from personal goals established for individual students in response to diagnostic testing or evaluation; however, each is communicated either directly through such actions as writing them on a poster board or through the implicit goals of the specific activities and linkages to assessment. Within LTCA, the core truths of learning and teaching emerge from developing learning activities that allow for four main types of communicative actions that were identified originally by Habermas. These include strategic or teleological actions geared towards learners determining the validity of objective knowledge, constative actions geared towards allowing students to interactively make and challenge claims to the validity of objective knowledge, normative actions related to the validity of claims of truth about group, institution, and societal rules, and finally, dramaturgical actions that allow for individual expressions of truth through artistic forms of communication such as painting and poetry. Habermas states that dramaturgical actions come from two different worlds: “the subjective and the objective” (p. 93), making them different in many ways
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that the other three types. In order to understand what this theory means in terms of what it is to learn, teach, assess, and design instructional activities from the perspective of LTCA, we offer examples from each of these perspectives. The Four Types of Communicative Actions The goals of learning and instructional communicative actions (i.e. discursive speech acts, textual discourse) generally have one of four purposes. The first goal in educational settings has traditionally been to transmit objective, empirical knowledge or fact commonly accepted in the present as valid by society such as information found in standardized tests. Such transmission includes several different types of communication. •
Teleological or strategic actions. These relate to technical acts that are intended to direct students to act or speech acts phrased in the imperative in which students have no option but to do or not do (transgress). During such acts, there are generally only two options that result from evaluating specific empirical knowledge; to determine whether it useful or not and therefore, whether or not they should accede to the direction.
Table 1 provides a definition, the teaching and learning function, and a simple example of how strategic communicative action may be used in an educational setting.
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Table 1: Strategic Communicative Actions in Educational Settings. Communication Type Strategic (Teleological) actions are geared towards effectively getting what the student or teacher wants from the objective world and what one wants to communicate as true or valid knowledge.
Function Communication is geared towards effectively getting what the student or teacher wants from the objective world and wants to communicate as true or valid knowledge.
Example Students are told by a teacher to read a section of a textbook containing objective knowledge regarding Roosevelt’s New Deal. The knowledge contained has previously been socially agreed upon as valid by a state school board or local district. Students may then evaluate what information is truthful and either accept or reject what has been communicated by the text and, by extension, the instructor. However, in this form of communication, no negotiation regarding this truth claim emerges and ends with acceptance or rejection.
In current instructional settings, including strategic communication is one of the most often used. This is often accomplished by giving explicit directions that learners may either follow or not. This may be to read a text, listen to a lecture and take notes, or some similar activity, and then requiring that they be prepared to take a test. From a validity standpoint, strategic actions can only be accepted or rejected in terms of the validity of the speaker/teacher’s claim. In this case, either the imperative speech act was successfully accepted and the learner engaged in the action, or it was not successful and therefore may be accepted as having been perceived by the learner as an invalid directive. If the
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information gained through the strategic action is successfully transmitted through the action, the learner perceives it as useful, factual, or objectively true. Such information may then be then leveraged through
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Constative actions. Also viewed as conversations, these communicative interactions allow further development and critique the theoretical understandings of speaker and hearer. Either participant may be the teacher or student who may make claims which can be challenged or accepted through communicative negotiation in a manner beyond that allowed by strategic actions, which are limited because they do not allow for challenge or negotiation of the validity of a statement, only acceptance or rejection. It is through these constative acts that speakers make claims to the validity of knowledge and hearers may challenge that validity through rejection and negotiation.
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In an instructional setting, such constative actions may be achieved by designing learning
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activities that allow students to make claims about the validity of a piece of contested or
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somewhat ambiguous understanding that is generated through the reading of a piece of text such as an short story or an ill-structured problem. For example, the teacher could provide students with a book like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which depicts a future filled with digital constructs and an Internet-like space in which people interact and face massive social and economic challenges. The instructor could develop an activity in which students first compare this dystopian future with their own, identifying those pieces of knowledge that individual students view as useful or they view the truth or reality of Gibson’s vision within their “lifeworld” experiences.
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Table 2: Constative Communicative Actions in Educational Settings. Communication Type
Function
Example
Constative are geared towards allowing students to interactively and intersubjectively make and challenge claims to the validity of objective and even subjective knowledge. In this case, a truth claim is challenged or accepted through communicative negotiation such as argumentation regarding the entirety of a claim or particular supporting evidence or critique of sub-claims
Communication focuses on allowing students to interactively and intersubjectively make and challenge claims to the validity of objective and even subjective knowledge. A truth claim is challenged or accepted through communicative negotiation such as argumentation regarding the entirety of a claim or particular supporting evidence or critique of subclaims (Habermas, 1984; Warren et al., 2008).
An instructor may make a claim to spur discourse amongst students in their class. As they challenge the truth of the claim and develop counter-claims. Such as imposing severe punishments on students for failing to return home before curfew. This may spur discourse between and among students as to the fairness of curfew laws during historic wartimes that learners can use to draw parallels with the world today.
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Students then engage with peersin conversations about the validity of each of these truths that they see emerging from the text, challenging one another’s claims to knowledge, and
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building some form of consensus about what they believe is true and useful for their small groups. Taking this consensus, the instructor may then require that students take this knowledge and make predictions about how the future will look and express this through a creative writing or visual design (i.e. painting, drawing) activity which would be presented to the class for critique of the claims to knowledge shown in their work. Further, different forms of assessments can be given by the instructor that measure the
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Taking….take (too close to one another - reword Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: And ask them to… Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Start a new sentence after activity.
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level of objective knowledge that students achieved in terms of understanding important facts about the plot of the narrative, character traits, and other relevant details. In addition, the instructor, student peers, and/or experts grade student products against a rubric to provide multiple perspectives.
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Normative actions. A third possible goal of communicative action is to provide socially valid normative understandings that have been generated through past consensus. This may occur within socially or culturally bound groups through shared experience, which generate claims to truth such as social rules leading to legal or moral conceptions through normatively regulated action.
In the classroom, we may see the teacher initially communicate the norms of appropriate behavior through strategic communication in manners that do not allow them to be challenged. This often comes in the form of establishing rules for grading, appropriate learning behaviors, required assignments, attendance, and other important expectations as communicated through written or digital syllabi combined with verbal Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Incomplete sentece
review of each. Table 3 provides Table 3: Normative Communicative Actions in Educational Settings. Communication Type
Function
Example
Normative relate to the validity of claims about group, institution, and societal rules. Such actions are constructed through consensus with other faculty, administrators and the students of a class.
Communicative actions relate to the validity of claims about group, institution, and societal rules and norms. Such actions are constructed through consensus with other faculty, administrators and the students of a class.
The teacher communicates the norms of appropriate behavior including rules for grading, required assignments, attendance and class expectations. Students may choose to follow or not follow those they feel are valid. Rule transgression is an implicit rejection of that truth claim. These may also be further negotiated within the classroom group.
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These rules also come from school, district, university or college policies related to
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cheating and plagiarism or expectations of the faculty member. Often, consequences for failure to follow these classroom norms are also communicated here, which can range from loss of points towards the final grade to expulsion from the university. Many normative expectations stem from societal expectations of fairness and result from larger rules established by legal avenues such as courts. •
Dramaturgical action. Lastly, the speaker may attempt to express some internal state or “lifeworld” understanding towards the goal of taking some future action such as a direction to do something, known as dramaturgical action (Habermas, 1981a; Habermas & Cooke, 2002).
This future action or goal may be related to personal identity and expressed through artistic expressions such as painting or writing a poem that conveys what spoken communication may only hint at for the learner.
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Table 4: Dramaturgical Communicative Actions in Educational Settings. Communication Type
Function
Example
Dramaturgical actions allow for individual expressions of truth and personal identity such as when a teacher teaches with an inner passion for the subject matter with the goal of inspiring similar passion in students. It is taking action to achieve a purpose related to one’s identity or personal truth; however, it is open to interpretation by participants in the learning process.
Such communications are those that allow for individual expressions of truth and personal identity such as when a teacher teaches with an inner passion for the subject matter with the goal of inspiring similar passion in students. These are about taking action to achieve a purpose related to one’s identity or personal truth; however, it is open to interpretation by participants in learning processes.
Dramaturgical action would be to ask students to develop some artistic work (i.e. dance, poem, painting, drawing, story, etc.) that is an expression of their personal identity. These expressions would be open to critique for improvement by peers in order to improve the level to which the artwork communicates the meanings intended by the artist.
LTCA instructional principles
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four main types of communicative actions. Followed by each is a suggestion for designing instruction that includes LTCA principles. The principles are included in Table 5. Table 5. Learning and Teaching as Communicative Action (LTCA) ID principles. Communicative Action
Normative
Principle
Design Direction
Allow students an opportunity to negotiate norms and classroom rules that support their learning experiences. Students and instructor should construct norms that will guide effective communication in which all members of the classroom may fairly and respectfully critique claims to truth and knowledge.
When preparing learning experiences, include and model initial rules for behavior and discourse, but allow for whole class negotiation and modification of these norms early and regularly in response to expressed need. The instructor may start with the rule that no one may speak without raising their hand and being recognized by the teacher. However, through negotiation, learners may instead establish conditions under which they may speak without the instructor’s permission.
Provide knowledge of or access to shared, socially validated facts that can be communicated by an instructor or technological tool including textbooks, web sites, and other repositories of reified knowledge.
When designing instruction, include activities that communicate basic, socially validated knowledge to give learners a framework for understanding, discourse, social and relative knowledge construction, and other future learning experiences. That knowledge which comes to schools from the state has been subjected to numerous challenges to claims to truth prior to being instituted in state standards. While some may be faulty, they provide a starting point for shared understanding and a place to begin critique of validity.
Give opportunities for learners to engage in critical discourse centered on understanding claims to truth and knowledge put forth by peers, instructor, textbooks, and others capable of doing so and to have their own claims to truth and knowledge critiqued and challenged towards a larger goal of constructing or acquiring validated knowledge to be used towards making future change.
Include specific opportunities for learners to critique challenge existing claims to knowledge and truth from texts, instructor, peers, and other sources of reified knowledge. Allow students to construct their own claims to truth and knowledge and allow them to be tested for validity by peers, instructor, and, if applicable, experts. As put forth in social constructivist views, communication among and between learners is an effective means of constructing knowledge. However, any knowledge emerging from this discursive process must be open to the crucible of critique in order to test its validity.
Strategic
Constative
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Dramaturgical
17 Â Make available chances to safely express their personal identities, passions, and other internal, relative or subjective truths and knowledge, which are open to respectful critique through discourse with peers, instructor, and others.
Design instruction that allows learners opportunities for safe personal expressions of identity, while still allowing for minor critique. While a poem a student writes may be an expression of their personal identity and truth, it is still subject to critique as to its validity through discourse social settings similar to when a Broadway musical is subjected to newspaper critics.
When designing a learning environment according to these principles, we suggest that instructors and designers include supporting scaffolds for modeling and providing tools
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for making communication efficient and respectful as critique is at the heart of learning in this theoretical model. Students lacking adequate models for critique may be quite negative and fail to discuss positive elements or points of agreement related to a claim to truth made by another learner. Further, learning activities should include instructor cognitive challenges to learner truth claims based on established research in cognitive, social, behavioral, and communication theory research. This allows a balance between the instructor and student power in the learning relationship rather than centering all power with the student, which may devalue any truth claims brought by the instructor in the eyes of learners, leading to misconceptions and miscommunications. LTCA relations to existing instructional design paradigms. There are several aspects that are different about designing instruction that employs LTCA. It is not merely a difference in the instructional design process such as leveraging the ASSURE, social constructivist, or ADDIE models; instead, it is about what must be present in the module or instructional unit for it to constitute valid instruction and to allow for proper assessment that allows the researcher or teacher to better understand the whole learning experience. Instead of ensuring instruction or assessment is designed to privilege one form of knowledge that fits within the theoretical model, it is concerned with the
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: First time mention of ASSURE and ADDIE should probably be explained as they are abbreviations.
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effectiveness of the communication and the validity of claims to truth as the core units of learning and teaching. However, it does not reject any of theoretical perspectives as being invalid; instead, the central claim is that all three major perspectives must be addressed when developing valid instruction and assessment. LTCA theory states that all opportunities for all four forms of communicative action must be present in order for an instructional sequence or unit to be valid. While this may be more complicated for the teacher and learners, it generates more valid communicative actions than other theoretical models, because all aspects of human communication are elicited and addressed. This helps ensure that learners more comfortable with one form of communicative action than another still engage in learning activities rather than being excluded because only one perspective or theory of learning has been addressed. What it does not do is give primacy to any one of Prawat and Floden’s (1994) epistemic views. Instead, it not only respects that each has much to contribute, but insists that each must be present in an instructional design for effective learning to occur. LTCA and epistemic perspectives on knowledge From the perspective of communicative action, the core problem with designing instruction only from a contextualist, relativist, or objectivist theoretical view (Prawat & Floden, 1994), is that these viewpoints often tend to accept only certain kinds of communicative action or knowledge as being valid. When instructional design then is conducted from one of these coherent theories, only certain forms of learning activity are then acceptable because of what each says about what knowledge is and how it can be known (epistemology). Each theory presents its own difficulty, because it rejects the
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theory of knowledge held by the other worldviews/perspectives in terms of what constitutes knowledge. The following illustrate adaptations from Bernstein (1976, 1983), Hollis (1994), and Prawat and Floden (1994) provide depictions of the common theoretical lenses and why taking only on perspective while discounting what the others offer is problematic from the LTCA standpoint. Little “o” objectivist perspectives. When viewed through this lens, facts, truth, and knowledge exist and are available to us through our senses. For some theorists, teachers, and designers, this means that a.) truth exists and b.) that we can know truth or knowledge by seeking it around us by using our senses to internalize it. However, within this perspective, the validity of the truths we seek in this manner may not be sufficiently supported. Therefore, we must employing experiments to validate the truths that we seek
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through our senses to avoid falling prey to our own misperceptions that stem from systemic failures of the interaction between sense organs and brain. In this perspective, there are a lot of opportunities for strategic actions in which students are ordered to memorize facts and knowledge, but there are fewer opportunities to challenge the validity of the truths contained therein. This perspective becomes problematic in terms of determining truth, because it fails to take into account situational or social factors that may influence how we understand what truth is. The framing of the questions themselves may influence the outcomes of the experiments and the inborn biases of the seeker of truth may color how they interpret the statistical results of an empirical study. Further, the lack of context for the data may lead the researcher(s) to the incorrect conclusion because of an overreliance on experimental method, which may discount unpredictable human factors.
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Further, designing instruction from this perspective may provide learners with only one view of a particular set of objective facts that may lead to future misunderstandings and values memorization of such facts so that they can be assessed using multiple choice and other forms of “objective” assessment in order to determine whether or not learning has occurred. This discounts knowledge that comes from informal learning that may come from differing cultural or social perspectives (e.g. The American Revolution was “good” depends on whether you are from the U.S. or Britain.) and how your experience changes your view of what is factual. Contextualist views. From this perspective, truth and knowledge exist objectively, but cannot be known directly. Instead, facts, knowledge, and truth are constructed through social processes of human communication and must be understood within the context of the group and social processes from which they emerge. This perspective prizes human communication as a tool for understanding and often leverages at least two of the major forms of communicative action; namely, constative and normative communication. However, the main problem with this perspective is that it often discounts factual knowledge (Airasian, 1993) that allows learners and instructors to have a common basis for communication to validly occur. For example, if an instructor were to develop an instructional unit for 8th grade in which the learners were to construct knowledge about George Washington’s winter at Valley Forge, but were not given facts such as the timeline for when it occurred, the positive and negative outcomes of the event, information about what led to it and what happened afterwards, numerical data about the number of soldiers that died from starvation or cold, and the numbers of desertions, they
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might come to a number of false conclusions about the event. Even with the opportunity to challenge poorly constructed knowledge, severe misconceptions may remain that plague the students in future activities or when asked to complete “objective” assessments at the state level. Regardless of whether a teacher or researcher likes the No Child Left Behind Act, it is part of the reality of schooling and therefore should be considered in the design of instruction. Relativist views. In the perspective of the relativist, there is no such thing as objective reality or truth and therefore, knowledge is constructed only by the individual, for the individual’s own use. Therefore, knowledge is non-transferrable to others and must be developed for each new context without a common set of facts and referents that can easily be communicated. To a large, extent, this perspective holds that all views are equally valid and therefore truth depends on the eye of the beholder and holds the individual in primacy above group perspective or objective, factual truth. This view clearly has problems in terms of designing instruction, because the programme of instruction for each learner must be individually developed on an almost daily basis depending on what is valuable to the learner in terms of constructing knowledge. Because the individual holds this prime position, the design of instruction must be ongoing and dynamic for each learner and can be time consuming for both the instructor and the student who must be the central participant in the design. While this view allows for a tremendous amount of self-expression, its subjectivity discounts the validity of experimental or social processes that may lead to truth. In the American Revolution example earlier, the learner may not be interested in the Valley Forge campaign and therefore it may never be addressed in their education because it does not
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Add reference for readers from abroad
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meet their personal perception of necessary knowledge in their quest towards being a professional hockey player. Example of instruction using LTCA principles Related to the American Revolution example, the learning objectives for an 8th grade class may be that the learner should be able to: 1.) express understanding of the commonly accepted facts about General Washington’s campaign in Valley Forge as strategically expressed through the text, video, and/or instructor presentation as assessed by a standardized test (strategic communicative action); 2.) challenge and/or incorporate the perspective presented in those facts leveraging counter perspectives, evidence, and small group social negotiation and communications to develop a valid theoretical argument regarding the differences between the strategically communicated knowledge and their own socially constructed knowledge about the event as assessed by peers and instructor (constative communicative action); 3.) develop normative communications about acceptable social negotiation, presentation of information, and development of arguments while appealing to and or challenging classroom, school, cultural, or other social rules as a means of reaching understandings that contribute to their understanding of objective and socially constructed knowledge (normative communicative action); and, 4.) set personal objectives for learning about this or a related topic in which each student leverages their own art work (i.e. painting, drawing, poetry) to communicate an expressive understanding of the subject at hand or develops an aesthetic critique of a related artwork (i.e. Washington crosses the Delaware painting) in the context of truths proffered by professional critics and within the student’s own newly constructed knowledge set.
Using LTCA Theory to Redesign K-12 Instruction When leveraging LTCA, a lesson now looks different from one that may have only included a set of readings (i.e. pg. 81-92 in the textbook), followed by five assessment questions to determine whether or not the learner internalized and memorized the most important facts about Washington’s time in Valley Forge. Instead, this may be
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Shouldn’t this also include delivering it to the peer audience for gentle critique?
23
the starting point for the lesson in which students are exposed to strategic communicative action in which the book and/or teacher communicate that it is imperative that the students learn these objective facts, this is not where the lesson ends. Instead, it may look like the following: 1. Activity 1 (Strategic Action): The learner will (TLW) read pages 81-92 in the textbook. They will then complete the five assessment questions and turn them in to the teacher/instructor for assessment of learning. (Strategic Action) 2. Activity 2 (Normative action): TLW be randomly assigned to a group. Each group will develop a set of rules for behavior in the group based on classroom rules, school, rules and other forms of law. They should develop a set of at least 5-10 rules by which they will each be bound for the duration of the activity. This should include specific roles that each member of the group will perform (i.e. leader, researcher, scribe). 3. Activity 3 (Constative action): Each group will be given a laptop computer with a wireless card and Internet access. Each group is expected to conduct some research related to the event (Washington’s time in Valley Forge) and seek at least two other perspectives on the event. One can be from the U.S., but at least one other should be from another country, tribe, or minority viewpoint (i.e. Native American, enslaved African American, primary source such as a soldier’s letter). Examine the differences among the perspectives and, as a group, formulate your own perspective on the event using the evidence you gather during your search. Create a small presentation, speech, or other dramatic work that presents your perspective on the event as shaped by your research and communication with your group. 4. Activity 4 (Dramaturgical action): Each group has been provided with a different image painted or drawn of Washington in Valley Forge or crossing the Delaware River. Based on your research, as individuals either write a critique of your image OR draw one of your own that reflects your personal view of the event that you will share with your group and the class. Be prepared to explain and defend your work.
Assessment using LTCA Also different from the existing theoretical views is the idea that learners should be assessed from all four perspectives of communicative action and in terms of the effectiveness of the communicative goals of each action. For example, each of the
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Who holds them accountable? The teacher or the group or the individual student?
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following are examples that frame each form of assessment within the context of the activity and the communicative action that grounds it. 1. Activity 1: The learner will (TLW) read pages 81-92 in the textbook. They will then complete the five assessment questions and turn them in to the teacher/instructor for assessment of learning. (Strategic Action) Assessment in this perspective will come in the form of formative and summative assessments. More specifically, the learner is already being assessed at a close level in Hickey, et al’s (2006) assessment terms through the textbook questions. This would
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follow with content knowledge questions framed within a test on the unit (proximal) and
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: Hickey, et al.’s (2006)
then later at state level using a standardized assessment. This may leverage different
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: This
forms of questions ranging from multiple-choice to true/false and fill-in-the-blank. This
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: This
provides the instructor with an understanding of how long their memorization of the facts
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: You have three consecutive sentences here that start with This – maybe this is intentional.
lasted as this usually takes place over a period of several months and provides feedback as to the effectiveness of their methods. 2. Activity 2: TLW be randomly assigned to a group. Each group will develop a set of rules for behavior in the group based on classroom rules, school, rules and other forms of law. They should develop a set of at least 5-10 rules by which they will each be bound for the duration of the activity. This should include specific roles that each member of the group will perform (i.e. leader, researcher, scribe). In this perspective, the effectiveness of the rules is most often reflected in the degree to which learners are successful at completing their other learning activities, how few transgressions and behavioral difficulties arise, and the degree to which each learner effectively communicates within and external to the group, as well as how well each performs their agreed-upon roles. 3. Activity 3: Each group will be given a laptop computer with a wireless card and Internet access. Each group is expected to conduct some research related
25 to the event (Washington’s time in Valley Forge) and seek at least two other perspectives on the event. One can be from the U.S., but at least one other should be from another country, tribe, or minority viewpoint (i.e. Native American, enslaved African American, primary source such as a soldier’s letter). Examine the differences among the perspectives and, as a group, formulate your own perspective on the event using the evidence you gather during your search. Create a small presentation, speech, or other dramatic work that presents your perspective on the event as shaped by your research and communication with your group.
Each group will be assessed leveraging a rubric-based system in which peer groups, teacher, and possibly experts examine each group’s communicated perspective and provides direct feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the constructed knowledge. The instructor also acts as a challenged to poorly constructed knowledge during the formation process and acts as an arbiter of the appropriateness of the scope of the group response. For example, at the end of the film Rushmore, a student put on a play that took place during Vietnam and expressed a particular perspective on the war but was on the scale of a Hollywood movie. This may not be appropriate. 4. Activity 4: Each group has been provided with a different image painted or drawn of Washington in Valley Forge or crossing the Delaware River. Based on your research, as individuals either write a critique of your image OR draw one of your own that reflects your personal view of the event that you will share with your group and the class. Be prepared to explain and defend your work. In this instance, the relativist perspective forces the individual to express themselves or critique the work of others, but focuses on dramaturgical communications of selfexpressive truth (their own or others). The effectiveness as assessed by rubric communication will be similar to that in Activity 4, but will focus on individual expressions of knowledge as defended by each.
The role of technology in LTCA Theory
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: ?
26 Virtual worlds and modern, digital communication using the Internet (i.e. email,
chat, discussion forums, blogs, podcasts, social networks, etc.) offer learners a medium through which “social presence” can be created, and where such communication and learning can be achieved as has been indicated by Jones, et al (2010). In these spaces,
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autonomy centers on the learners themselves to select, combine, and coordinate
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: et al. (if there are more than five authors) otherwise all need to be listed.
motivational and cognitive strategies, in elective ways to control their own learning. However, it has also been warned by the German philosopher Heidegger (1966) that that this selfsame technology may distort the human communication that we claim is
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: 2 that
at the heart of learning and teaching. He states that “(w)e can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature (p. 54).” Today, with learning management systems, email, instant messaging, mobile phones, and numerous other technologies, Heidegger suggests that it is possible that they are changing our identities and how we interact with the world. Further, how we present ourselves to others in online instructional settings is often limited by our personal abilities to manipulate and use the tools to communicate, which often presents a fully distorted view of the individual. Given the propensity for text placed in a Moodle forum to distort a poster’s meaning, resulting in hours of clarification by instructor and student versus minutes in a face-to-face classroom to reach the same point of clarity. Dreyfus and Spinosa (2003) go on to frame Heidegger’s statement this way, which makes clear their sense of danger of technology: “Here, the dangerous seduction of technological devices becomes obvious. Because the word processor makes writing easy for desiring subjects and this ease in writing solicits us to enter conversations rather than produce finished works, the word processor attached to the (Inter)net solicits us to substitute it
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: learning management system such as for instance Moodle,
27 for pens and type- writers, thereby eliminating the equipment and the skills that were appropriate for modern subject-object practices (p. 347).”
Heidegger also indicates the means by which we may leverage technology without allowing it to distort ourselves as teachers and students: “We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside…as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent on something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses “yes” and at the same time “no,” by an old word, releasement (sic) towards things (p. 54).” It is in his conception of “releasement” that a person engages in a form of meditative thinking akin that we view as part of metacognition in educational settings. In this case, it is thinking deeply about the technology, our interaction with it, how it influences us, and how it may best be used to serve the interests of teaching and learning. This is in contrast to how, in the history of instructional technology, it has been the technology that has guided or limited instruction to what it allows rather than what is needed to allow effective educational communication.
CONCLUSION Our main goal in this paper was to illustrate Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions as a new model for understanding teaching and learning. This representation provides a holistic context for designing, implementing, and assessing educational practices. A main feature of this theory is that learning and teaching, at their core, are communicative practices and that these must be present for instruction to be successful and meaningful. In this context, no current epistemic framework is superior to another and we hypothesize that, instead, the objectivist, contextualist, and relativist perspectives are all valid, necessary, and concurrent in educational settings. Teaching and instructional design involve constructing learning activities that include forms of
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strategic, constative, normative, and dramaturgical communicative actions, which both guide learners towards understanding and allow for authentic assessment. Instead of attempting to identify a single truth, this perspective examines the construct of valid human communication and understanding as the main unit of success. Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions proposes the idea that the teacher may sometimes be at the center of the educational process and at other times the learner takes center stage. At times, knowledge is acquired and at others, it is constructed as deemed necessary by the expert instructor, often, though not always, in conjunction with the learners. The power relationships in the classroom are constantly shifting and changing in response to learner and instructor needs.
References Bernstein, R. J. (1976). The restructuring of social and political theory (6th Paperback ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bernstein, R. J. (1983). Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carspecken, P. (1999). Four scenes for posing the question of meaning and other essays in Critical Philosophy and Critical Methodology. New York: Peter Lang. Carspecken, P. F. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research. New York: Routledge. Chouliaraki, L., & Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.). (2003). The discipline and practice of qualitative research (2 ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Dreyfus, H., & Spinosa, C. (2003). Further reflections on Heidegger, technology, and the everyday. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 23(339), 339-349.
Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: all Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: all Jenny Wakefield 6/13/11 3:12 PM Comment: the LTCA
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Duffy, T. M., & Cunningham, D. J. (1996). Constructivism: Implications for the Design and Delivery of Instruction. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology. NY: Macmillan. Habermas, J. (2002). On the pragmatics of communication. Oxford: Polity. Heidegger, M. (1966). Discourse on Thinking (J. Anderson & E. Freund, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Hollis, M. (1994). The philosophy of social science: an introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Prawat, R. S., & Floden, R. (1994). Philosophical perspectives on constructivist views of learning. Educational Psychologist, 29(Winter), 37-48. Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4-13. Warren, S., Najmi, A., & Alajmi, M. (2010). Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions: An Experimental Course Design. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. Warren, S. J., & Stein, R. (2008). Simulating teaching experience with role-play. In D. Gibson & Y. Baek (Eds.), Digital Simulations for Improving Education: Learning Through Artificial Teaching Environments (Vol. 1). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to Labor: How working class kids get working class jobs (Morningside Edition ed. Vol. 1). New York: Columbia University Press Morningside Edition.