“Introduction” in “How Education Works”
Introduction
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.
—(Feyerabend, 1987, p. 316)
The Educational Machine
This is a book about the technological nature of education. What follows is thus broadly concerned with processes, methods, tools, procedures, techniques, theories, principles, and models of teaching. However, the view that it presents of education is anything but mechanical. A paintbrush is as much a technology as a manufacturing plant, and teaching is far more akin to painting than it is to manufacturing, though it shares many common features with both. Teaching can be thought of as the application of tools, methods, principles, techniques, and structures to help people learn, and we all do it, whether to ourselves or others. It never happens the same way twice, and the ways in which we might respond to it are more numerous and various than the ways in which we might respond to a painting. The mantra repeated throughout this book in many different ways and in many different contexts is that what we do (the tools, methods, principles, etc. for doing it) is far less significant than the way that we do it (the technique). And, in an invented system of the complexity of an education system, there are many different ways of doing it, almost all of which we will never think of, the vast majority of which will be awful, but many of which will be wonderful.
Moreover, the number of possible ways of doing it can expand endlessly with each novel way of doing it that we discover. Learning often makes more learning possible, softening our boundaries. Sometimes, though, we can learn things that shrink our horizons as much as expand them. Invention always makes more invention possible at a global scale, though at an individual scale it can sometimes erect hard boundaries that were formerly soft and indistinct, thereby blocking paths that we might have taken. This book explores the many ways that such softening and hardening can occur and why neither freedom from boundaries nor the creation of them is a good thing in itself: it all depends on how, why, when, where, with what, by whom, and for what purpose it is done.
This is a book about understanding the technology of learning as it is lived, as a participant, not just as a user, from a deeply and inextricably human perspective. It is about how technology, from symbols to gadgets, from pencils to timetables, from poetry to textbooks, can support or inhibit creativity, capability, flexibility, passion, delight, and of course learning.
Whether you are a learner guiding your own learning journey, a student, a teacher (you are), an author, a designer of learning, a designer of software, a manager of learning systems, a philosopher, or a researcher in education, there is probably something of value in this book for you.
Education
An education is something that we can own—to be educated is to possess an education. Education is also a field of study, an occupation, and an industry. It is a process. It is something that one can be “in” and something that one can acquire. In this book, all of these shades of meaning will emerge, but to begin with we will use something a little closer to the common dictionary definition, such as this (provided by Google Search), that education is “the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university.” The “systematic” part of that definition matters a lot in a book that seeks to explain education in technological terms. However, I am not going to only be talking about the formal, intentional processes and structures embodied in educational institutions such as schools, universities, and colleges. Although these are significant technologies through which a lot of education occurs, and which will figure largely in what follows, they are just one kind of educational technology among many and part of many more. An institution is an educational technology that itself is assembled from many others, most of which are anything but educational technologies, and it affords great diversity and flexibility. Of course, it might not necessarily be the best technology for the purpose of learning what ostensibly is being taught. The technologies of education, like almost all technologies, are Faustian bargains (Postman, 2011) that almost always have harmful side-effects. I intend to show that many of the dominant technologies of institutional and formal education—courses, classrooms, assessments, timetables, and more—can be inimical, in at least some respects, to their primary function of learning. To be more precise, the technologies of which they are composed have a consistent tendency to pull in mutually exclusive directions, like gears set in opposition. It can take a lot of effort and skill to overcome such problems, and a central claim of this book is that how we have developed ways of doing so has significantly shaped and defined what we have traditionally thought of as good teaching. Many of our most cherished pedagogies and structures are simply solutions to problems caused by how we have chosen to teach. At least some of those problems can be and sometimes are solved differently, and a great many solutions create new problems to be solved.
I am not being so fuzzy in my definition as to consider everything we do as education, though it is certainly true that almost everything that we see, hear, feel, and do can be educative under the right circumstances, just as the stick that introduced this book can play an educative role, if and only if it is assembled with appropriate methods, objects, structures, processes, and phenomena that make it so.
Education above all is a process of and for learning. But, of course, though learning is the most central part of education, not all learning is a result of education, education does not always lead to the learning that we might hope for, and a large portion of what goes on in and as a product of our education systems has nothing to do with learning.
It is common to be instructed in something and to come away learning nothing particularly useful apart from how we feel about being instructed. Dogs and even cockroaches learn, but we don’t normally try to educate cockroaches, and we train dogs rather than educate them, as a rule. Equally, humans can learn to fear, to love, to enjoy, to hate without necessarily being educated to do so. Mountains, crowds, and dogs rarely seek to educate us, but there are many things that we can and do learn from them. Meanwhile, education always teaches things that it does not set out to teach, and it can fail to teach what it intends to teach. This book will explain how, when, and why this is true. It will explain, in the process, how education works.
To summarize, the meaning that I will ascribe to “education” in this book is that of the systematic transformation of people’s skills, knowledge, and values, whether or not it occurs in a formal setting, whether or not it involves intentional instruction, whether or not it involves someone whom we would conventionally label a teacher, and whether or not the tools, methods, and approaches used are intentionally designed to work that way. The systematization can and nearly always does involve others. As well as the learner, this process also involves countless individuals, the structures and systems that they create, the technologies, tools, stories, and methods that they construct. It is a massively complex, deeply entangled system, only parts of which are deliberately designed to teach. Timetables, classrooms, doors, doorknobs, and textbooks can and do teach, and this book explains how that happens. It is about why education is fundamentally concerned with learning technologies and the parts that we can and do play in creating, using, and in most cases being a part of them. And we are seldom if ever the only parts: almost always we are co-participants with other people, all of whom play their parts.
There Are Always Many Teachers
There is probably no such thing as a pure autodidact. Even if you were raised by wolves, wolves teach. Have you ever learned anything truly by yourself, unaided? Without reading something, without watching someone, without using methods that you have learned from others, without making use of a technology made for people to use that thus teaches something in and of itself? In the language that we normally use to describe such experiences, I teach myself many things. For instance, I try to teach myself at least one new musical instrument every year. However, I have seen and heard people play most of these instruments, or ones like them, which has taught me something of value before I even start. I actively seek YouTube videos, tutorials, manuals, images, diagrams, all written by people who are nothing if not my teachers. The instruments that I play have been designed, in most cases, to be played, with fretboards, keys, mouthpieces, and so on that invite particular kinds of use. The instruments themselves teach. I listen to the sounds that I make, that provide clear feedback on whether or not I have been successful, by criteria that I have learned from my technology-mediated culture. As I get better at playing, I start to play for and with others. I talk with other players; I observe how people react to what I play. All of these things teach. In fact, there’s a wealth of teachers involved in the self-teaching process, of which I am only one. It is true that I perform a lot of the orchestration; I guide the process, choose the elements, structure the activities, choose when and for how long I learn, and so on. However, much of this remains true even when I am deliberately and explicitly taught by a professional teacher. If, say, I attend a class, then the notion that all of my learning occurs during the act of being taught is patently absurd. All of us make sense of things ourselves, integrate our knowledge, make connections, choose where to give most of our attention, perform actions, whether or not someone is deliberately teaching us. It is simply a matter of degree and, to an extent, a matter of scale (the level of detail that we choose to observe), whether we choose to call this self-directed learning or not. When we teach ourselves, we are more in control of how, when, where, and whether we learn, but there are always others teaching us too. In formal learning contexts, we just delegate (or are forced to give) more of that control to someone else. We are always co-participants in the learning process, never its sole orchestrators.
We Are All Learning Technologists
Technologies lift us beyond what nature has endowed us with. The use of technology is central to what it means to be human: it might even be our defining characteristic (Taylor, 2010). Technologies do not have to be embodied in devices or physical objects. There are just as many intellectual, psychological, legal, design, and pedagogical technologies as there are blackboards, computer programs, and desks. As I will argue throughout the book, words are technologies, and so are sentences, arguments, stories, poems, theories, models, and prayers. Our technologies play a central role in making us who and what we are. We participate in them, and they participate in us. We co-participate in them with others. They help to define how we think, and they play a considerable role in determining which new technologies we can build, in a never-ending dynamic cycle of construction, both of meaning and of the social, psychological, and physical worlds that we inhabit: language, art, writing, organizational processes, procedures, metaphors, and gestures as much as wheels, cellphones, transit systems, and houses. The complex arrangements and interdependencies of technologies and how we use them combine to form further technologies, which Arthur (2009) defines as assemblies that orchestrate phenomena to achieve some purpose: we organize stuff to do stuff, and the stuff that we organize to do stuff can be anything, including other stuff that we organize to do stuff.
Given that our technologies are so much a part of every aspect of our being, it is no surprise that we use them when learning. All educative activity and most if not all learning that we accomplish could not begin to occur without technologies. To educate, including to educate oneself, is to be a user of, and a participant in, technologies.
This book weaves a common theme across a wide range of phenomena that traditionally have been treated as separate, but that reveal new subtleties and insights when viewed as interacting, mutually constitutive technologies. Pedagogies, language, imagery, art, and group processes share a surprising amount in common with computers, screwdrivers, and buildings in their basic behaviours and dynamics, in the ways that we participate in their instantiation, and in the ways that they work with and against one another to achieve our ends. If we can get a better understanding of the nature of technologies, their dynamics, their structures, their designs, their limitations, their propensities, and their patterns of change, then we can apply these insights to build and use better technologies or at least to better recognize their boundaries and potential. Whether we are learners or teachers or both (spoiler: we are both), we are designers, users of, and participants in learning technologies, so we should probably learn to design and use them as well as we can. Moreover, we should understand how they use us, how they evolve, and how they lead to emergent and unforeseen complex behaviours that we do not control but that profoundly affect us.
All educators are learning technologists. They might differ a little in the technologies that they choose to use and how they choose to assemble them, but they all create and use technologies in order to educate. And we are all, every one of us, educators, whether explaining, showing, or describing something to someone else, teaching it to ourselves, or simply modelling behaviours that others might imitate, critique, reflect on, or deride. This book can help you to become slightly more mindful of the process, but, from a newborn baby to a grand old professor, we cannot help but be educators, in all our actions and interactions, virtually all the time. Not only do we all teach, but also we are all taught: not just by individuals but also by the combinations of individuals that make up groups, networks, crowds, and collectives that surround us and often contain us, as well as by the tools, methods, structures, and processes that they create.
Although technologies are essential to almost all learning, they are never the sole cause. For instance, our motivations, or the passion and enthusiasm of others, can play a massive role in making it happen. Technologies can do no more than help to kindle and communicate such passion. More subtly, there are aspects of technologies that themselves are not technologies—that are either a consequence of their use or a non-technological component—but that play a significant role in enabling learning: things that make them appealing or unappealing, effective or ineffective, and so on, from the narrative flow to the colours or media that they use. “Tain’t what you do (it’s the way that you do it),” as the song by Oliver and Young (1939) goes, “that’s what gets results.” Using good tools and methods is important, but it is usually more important to use them well. The idiosyncratic, ever-changing, highly personal technique that we develop, and all the passion and creativity that it embodies, to a large extent, are what give technologies meaning, value, and form. Learning is both a social and a psychological phenomenon for which the technology can be a conduit or facilitator but never the only cause.
Where I’m Coming From
It is hard to avoid one’s own cultural context when writing a book of this nature, so it might be useful for you to know a bit about me before we go much further. By profession, I am currently a distance educator. I am also the associate dean, learning and assessment, for the faculty of science and technology and a full professor in computing and information systems at Athabasca University, a distance-based open university situated in Alberta, where I have worked for over 15 years. I don’t just teach but also work at a distance: I live in Vancouver, over 1,000 kilometers from the workplace that I rarely visit. Prior to that, for about 10 years, I taught, partly online, at the University of Brighton, a more conventional in-person university in the United Kingdom. I spent several years before that working with, managing, and building information and communication technologies (ICTs) in an educational context. Before that, and throughout my 20s, I sang and played guitar for a living, which will be reflected in some of the examples and metaphors used in this book and which has been surprisingly helpful in making connections between ideas and theories over the years. From an academic perspective, I have postsecondary qualifications in philosophy, information systems, learning technologies, and education, and I have followed a great many academic sidetracks along the way, many of which make their way into the text, from evolution and complex adaptive systems to architectural theory.
For me, education is more about a body of learners needing or wanting to learn than it is about a body of knowledge to be learned. Education is not just about learning skills and factual knowledge. It is more concerned with developing ways of thinking and being; of passing on, challenging, and sometimes changing attitudes, values, and beliefs, including my own. In its formal incarnations, it tends to be an instrument of cultural stability, but if it works then it is at least as much an instrument of change. Knowledge is created, recreated, and transformed, not transmitted. My job as a professional educator is not to fill vessels but, as Plutarch (1927) told us long ago, to light fires. In so doing I am not just assembling combustible materials and applying a spark but also passing on the flame that has already been kindled in me. The flame will not burn the same way in others as it burns in me, because we are all made of different stuff. Teaching others is about enabling them to know things and to cultivate ways of thinking that, as often as not, I do not and sometimes cannot know myself. And it is about others lighting flames in me: as an educator, I learn for a living. But I am just one tiny part of a massively complex and only partially designed mechanism, a piece of a rich, entangled ecosystem filled with ways to support and engender learning. Classrooms and learning management systems, pencils and iPads, and countless nameless and named people, past and present, contribute to the whole, as do the countless events, structures, technologies, interactions, and things that constitute the intertwined histories of the learners whom I support. I never teach alone.
I believe that education is a deeply situated, human, social, and cultural phenomenon, and it does a great disservice to its complexity to try to extract the researcher from the research, as much as it does to extract the teacher from the teaching. This book, by design and given its central theses, is not an objective account. You will read many passionately held opinions, personal anecdotes, and biased accounts of practice in this book, for which I make no apologies. I hope that at least some of the story that it tells resonates with you and helps you to make a bit more sense of your own practices, attitudes, and beliefs regarding learning and teaching.
About the Sections and Chapters
The book is divided into three main sections and a preamble. The preamble sets the scene, Part 1 delves into the nature of technology, Part 2 focuses on educational practices and theories themselves, and Part 3 applies the model to explain, in some depth, the scene-setting stories and observations of the preamble.
Preamble: Elephant Spotting. This brief section contains two short chapters that provide some stories and observations to illustrate some of the problems that this book will address and, hopefully, solve.
Chapter 1: A Handful of Anecdotes about Elephants. This chapter begins to set the scene with a few short anecdotes that reveal various elephants in the classroom that are seldom given more than cursory glosses in educational research: that bad teaching methods—or even no apparent teaching at all—can lead to good results; that good teaching methods can lead to bad results; that what is taught is not necessarily what is learned; and that teaching is embedded in our constructed environment.
Chapter 2: A Handful of Observations about Elephants. This chapter continues setting the scene by making a number of observations about some peculiarities of education systems: that rewards and punishments are deemed necessary to drive learning, something that we naturally love to do; that learning online is often treated as undesirable while being the most popular form of learning on the planet; that media and tools appear to make little or no difference to learning outcomes; that the ways that teachers believe to be the most effective are not, on average, at all; that personal tutoring beats conventional classroom teaching by a 2 sigma advantage; that teaching to learning styles has no benefit; and that reductive research methods in education are seldom very useful.
Part I: All about Technology. This section provides the theoretical basis for the rest of the book. Although it does have a number of important and useful things to say about educational systems, tools, methods, and techniques, it is primarily about the nature of technologies themselves, which, given the fact that the key premise of this book is that education is primarily a technological phenomenon, should be useful. Some of this might not seem to be immediately relevant to the needs of educators, but I ask you to take it on trust that it is. This is a necessary foundation for understanding the next, more education-focused, section.
Chapter 3: Organizing Stuff to Do Stuff. This chapter explores a range of different meanings of the word technology, which turns out to be a complex and difficult word to pin down. I settle on Arthur’s (2009) definition of technologies as orchestrations of phenomena to some use and his insight into the nature of technologies and their evolution as a process of assembly. Among other things, this analysis allows us to see pedagogies, along with other methods and processes used in education, as technologies in their own right.
Chapter 4: How Technologies Work. The purpose of this chapter is to delve more deeply into how technologies work, how they evolve over time, and how they exist in relation to one another. It draws extensively from a variety of complexity theorists—including Brian Arthur, Stuart Kauffman, Scott Page, and John Holland—to help frame not just the complexity of technological systems but also some of the deeper patterns that they embody.
Chapter 5: Participation and Technique. This chapter unravels the different ways that we participate in technologies, using the concepts of soft and hard technologies to distinguish between participation as an active creator and participation as part of a mechanism. I discuss some existing uses of the hard/soft technology distinction and reframe them, extending Arthur’s work to include the roles that people play in technologies, not just as users but also as participants.
Part II: Education as a Technological Phenomenon. This section is where everything that comes before aims. It applies the model of technological systems developed in Part 1 directly to the process, theory, and practice of education.
Chapter 6: A Co-Participation Model of Teaching. This chapter explores the kinds of technologies that we normally label as pedagogies and the roles that pedagogies tend to play in technological assemblies. In particular, it helps to explain how and why the pedagogical process is inherently distributed, how learning is a feature not just of brains but also of the complex systems of which we are parts, and how there are always many co-participants in any deliberate act of learning.
Chapter 7: Theories of Teaching. This chapter shows how the co-participation model sheds light on existing families of pedagogical theories and models, providing a frame for understanding how, in assembly, theories of teaching, learning, and knowledge can successfully complement one another and be used to do what each does best.
Chapter 8: Technique, Expertise, and Literacy. This chapter provides insights into the technological nature of and the complex interplay between ourselves and our creations and how the co-participation model sheds light not just on the process of education but also on the nature of learning itself. It applies the co-participation model in order to understand the nature of technique (our roles in enacting technologies), expertise, and the value and nature of different kinds of literacy, revealing the notion to be highly situated and intrinsically linked to the many overlapping cultures to which we belong.
Part III: Applying the Co-Participation Model. This section uses the theory developed over the first two sections in order to explain the elephants in the room that initially made an appearance in the first two chapters. I thus hope to show how and why the co-participation model matters as a means of understanding learning and teaching.
Chapter 9: Revealing Elephants. This chapter explains the anecdotes presented in the first chapter in terms of co-participation theory, thus helping to demonstrate some of the ways that it can be used to guide and interpret learning and teaching practice.
Chapter 10: How Education Works. Through the lens of the observations initially made in Chapter 2, this chapter uses the co-participation model to explain why many of our most cherished attitudes toward and practices in education, assessment, and especially research on education are inherently flawed. It shows that much of our research—including attempts to compare the effects of different media, to examine the effects of teaching on learning styles, or more broadly to identify generally effective teaching methods—is often misdirected. It explains how attempts to solve teaching problems inevitably generate new teaching problems to solve and that often-ignored but ubiquitous technological elements of the process—from classrooms to timetables to assessment practices—work directly against our intent to educate. The chapter shows how distance and online educators have needlessly inherited pedagogical solutions to in-person teaching problems, along with most of the problems that those solutions created, even though the essential challenges of online learning in many ways are almost the opposite of their in-person counterparts, and many of the checks and balances that allow in-person education to work might not be available to online learners. Along the way, I present some tentative solutions to some of these issues.
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