A study by Brescia and Miller (via Stephen's Web) on the benefits of instructional blogging suggests that the main benefits are "the reinforcing of course engagement and the repetition of exposure to coursework are the most valuable aspects of blogging."

Anne, my 2-day-old daughter, will apparently be a persuasive rhetorician. She already understands the value of backing up her claims with evidence and reasoning. Just a few hours after birth, she cried somewhat rather loudly and quite persistently, "Waaaaah!!" (Translation: Change my diaper). "Is it necessary?" I asked. She cried again, "Waaah, waaaah, waaaaaah!" (Translation: If you want evidence, check it out.) I checked it, and yes it was wet. But I still requested reasoning to attend the evidence. She simply looked me in the eye and gave one loud and short burst, "Waah!!!" (Translation: You figure it out!!!) So, her matter-of-factness, and intensity, convinced me to immediately give her a new diaper.

Ben Feller ("Study says teacher training is chaotic", Boston Globe) writes about a study conducted by Arthur Levine, former President of Teachers College at Columbia University, asserting that teacher education is "deeply flawed." (For the report, go to The Education Schools Project.) The main points are:

• a lack of common required skills in teacher education programs
• low admissions standards
• disengaged college faculty
• inadequate practice in the classroom, and
• inadequate supervision

I can identify with inadequate supervision and the lack of practice in the classroom. When I went to Turkey to teach English armed with my masters degree, I knew the theory but had had zero practice. In Turkey, I was scrambling every night to figure out what I would do the next day. And there was almost no communication among teachers to resolve what I should teach, and so subsitute in a way for a mentor.

What I appreciate most about teaching today is that I have a few engaged colleagues with whom I discuss on an almost daily basis what's going on in our classrooms and how to improve our pedagogy. In addition to the problems that Levine found, I would suggest that aspiring teachers should be organized into support groups to learn from one another and perhaps even continue to support one another after graduation.

Clay Spinuzzi at Blogging Pedagoy writes about new innovations in getting one's homework done:

Slashdot has some links to a discussion about how students are cheating in college, including leveraging Wikipedia, Turnitin, and so forth. One of the more intriguing links was to Student of Fortune, which appears to be a brokering service for, er, tutoring.

My traditional, glib response to worries about cheating has been that as long as the instructor comes up with unique, situated assignments and reviews drafts during the writing process, it's not an issue. But that solution works for instructors teaching small numbers of classes in small sections. And the measures described here, especially Student of Fortune, can counteract the countermeasures.

As Spinuzzi notes, students can "outsource" their homework, thus circumscribing attempts to design assignments to avoid cheating and plagiarism. Actually, although the technological methods are new, the concept is not. I remember in 1969 when a friend of mine was paid to impersonate another student for the entire semester for a Spanish class. A problem occurred when he fairly quickly realized that as a Spanish major he might be recognized by another professor who would wonder why he was sitting in an introductory Spanish course. Student of Fortune, however, makes it considerably easier to find someone to do their work and easier to line up people to do that work. And there's considerably less risk of being detected. The Internet has enabled cheating to reach new entrepreneurial levels.

Web 2.0 adherents often talk about the need for conversation, sometimes as if simply participating in the conversation is sufficient to promote learning. What is less often seen is the notion of intention. Philosopher Alicia Juarrero's book Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System tackles the problem of intention in action.

In her book, Juarrero asks, “What is the difference between a wink and a blink?” The wink, of course, is intentional, and the blink is not. And this is what her book is about, a contribution to action theory, which is a branch of philosophy that investigates the difference between action and non-action, intentional and unintentional behavior. Such distinctions are crucial in courts of law and have import in interpreting everyday encounters. Juarrero asserts that modern action theories are grounded in an inadequate understanding of cause and explanation. To remedy this defect, she proposes that action theories take a dynamical approach and consider intentional behavior as a complex system.

Juarrero's focus is on action. As conversations are a form of action, I wonder what role intention might play in education? What relationships exist between intention and focused attention as studied in second language acquisition? Juarrero herself wonders “whether and to what extent we can teach children to focus and channel their internal dynamics” (p. 251).

In addition to intention, Juarrero's take on stories attracted my attention. Juarrero looks at stories, or narrative, primarily as a hermeneutic tool, which can be applied to education. Stories aren't a new notion in education, but putting their usefulness in complexity terms explains how they might work in learning. Stories have the potential “to promote flexibility and resilience” (p. 253), to push one’s conceptual landscapes far from equilibrium, in children and in adults. Not all stories. Most simply reproduce social expectations and indoctrination. For stories to develop flexibility and resilience in children, they need to provide some element of surprise via juxtaposing concepts in unexpected ways. For an example, consider The Farmer’s Wife (Shah, 1998).

In this children’s story, a farmer’s wife drops her apple, which rolls into a hole. Unable to get it out, she asks a series of animals and objects (bird, cat, dog, bee, beekeeper, rope, fire, water, and cow) to help her. However, each one in turn refuses and is called “naughty.” Finally, she asks the bird to peck the cow, which sets off a cascade of actions in reverse order of animals and objects, returning to the bird again, building up to the point at which it is expected that the last (and first) animal, the bird, will retrieve the apple. However, instead, at the last second, a wind blows the apple out of the hole, “And everyone lived happily ever after.” This short story juxtaposes (1) asking according to one’s own interest with asking according to the recipient’s interest (or nature), (2) allegedly naughty beings (and the good farmer’s wife) with living happily ever after, and (3) an expected outcome from a linear cascade of causes with unexpected chance.

There are other concepts with educational and research implications presented in Juarrero’s text: interlevel causality, interdependencies, enabling constraints, and so on. Juarrero’s book is pregnant with concepts and questions for re-examining old lines of educational research and opening up new ones.

Dynamics in Action is dense. To understand its philosophical underpinnings requires careful re-readings. It is also speculative. Juarrero is using, as she says, complex adaptive systems as a theory-constitutive metaphor. However, it is insightful speculation, and it is a story worth re-reading.

Reference:

Shah, I. 1998. The Farmer’s Wife. Cambridge, MA: Hoopoe Books.

Note: Most of this post is excerpted from my review of Juarrero's book in the journal Complicity.

The Second Language Writing Section Interest Section (TESOL) has their own website (via Paul Matsuda).

When you think of tolerance and multiculturalism, does Medieval Europe come to mind? Probably not. Yet, Maria Rosa Menocal's (professor of Spanish and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University) book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain makes precisely that claim. Weaving together tales from medieval Spain, Menocal illustrates how three different religions built a "first-rate" culture of tolerance that influenced Europe for centuries to come.

Menocal intertwines "culture of tolerance" with F. Scott Fitzgerald's notion of a "first-rate" mind, writing,

the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time ...

[that] contradictions--within oneself, as well as within one's culture--could be positive and productive. (pp. 10-11)

Contradictions, Menocal asserts, were responsible for the flowering of art, intellect, and tolerance towards others in Medieval Spain: Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted openly and freely, keeping a strong sense of identity, yet assimilating features of other cultures that they admired. In Medieval Spain, tolerating contraries led to great philosphers like ibn Rusd and Maimonides, who wrestled with the contraries of faith and reason. Maimonides, with his Second Law, or Mishneh Torah, would be called a "second Moses." Moses of Leon struggled with the traditional Halakah and came up with his Sefer ha-zohar, The Book of Splendor, a systematic compilation of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. The study of the living language of Arabic generated once again a Hebrew that was "the language of a vibrant, living poetry" (p. 109).

Such "first-rate" contraries resulted in "authentic multiculturalism." Jews, such as Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Samuel the Nagid, were viziers in an Islamic government. Alongside Arabic--a language of state, love, and religion--existed other religious and vernacular languages. This multicultural environment preferred freedom of religious expression to political correctness; "incongruity in the shaping of individuals" (p. 11) to a "strict harmony of ... cultural identities" (p. 277); "to pose difficult questions rather than to propose easy answers or facile morals" (p. 274); and so on. All of these contraries and others touch upon so many issues in education and modern life, such as assimilation vs. heritage maintenance, multiculturalism vs. traditional canons, political correctness vs. freedom of expression and of religion, bilingual education vs. immersion, and so on.

The authentic multiculturalism of Medieval Spain arose from tolerance of and dialogue with others. Yet, tolerance and dialogue are not givens, as this culture of tolerance eventually fell.

WHAT HAPPENED? HOW AND WHY DOES A CULTURE OF tolerance fall apart? How did a people come to abandon a culture rooted in an ethic of yes and no, so readily able to love and embrace the architecture or the poetry of political enemies or religious rivals, so willing to read good books regardless of the library they came from? All the answers are themselves bundles of contradictions.... Perhaps all that can be said with any conviction is that in the combination of spectacular successes and failures presented by this history lie tales of both warning and encouragement. (p. 266)

The notion of contradictions being essential for tolerance and creativity, and also for learning (see Learning: A State of Dissatisfaction) underscores the need to inject uncertainty and novelty into the classroom, not so much as to be overwhelming but enough to promote the flow of learning.

At the end of the book, Menocal writes, "Every reader will take away different lessons from the tales in this book." Indeed.

Below are some reviews that offer other readings of and lessons from The Ornament of the World

• "Before the Moor's last sigh," Fouad Ajami, Washington Post
• "Religious tolerance before it was hip," Jane Lampman, Christian Science Monitor
• "Progress and Islam", Scott Galupo, National Review
• Adina Levin, BookBlog
• "When everybody got along," Dolores and Roger Flaherty, Chicago Sun-Times