Literature round-up

Awaiting the reports on the pilot study, I’m catching up on reading. I’m also preparing my paper for the European Conference on E-Learning.

The subject node in an activity system is particularly problematic because contradiction can be inscribed within it. If there is a gap between the subject’s use value, the functional value of what they produce, and the subject’s exchange value, the wealth their labour creates for their employer (which exceeds the subject’s rewards for their labour), then some contradiction is created for the subject. Daniels and Warmington (2007) argue the subject node in the activity system is under-theorised, as the system takes insufficient account of the relations within and between subjects.

Part of education’s function is shaped by the economic and political context within which education occurs. Hence, for example, the Education Act of 1870 existed primarily to make UK subjects functioning units within a fully-fledged industrial economy (regulated hours of attendance, regulated conduct within the institution, punishment for transgression). Rikowski (2002) argues, ‘General education… nurtures those attitudes and personality traits pertinent to working in capitalist enterprises in general’ (p. 20).

Activity Theory presupposes that activity is purposeful. There is no activity system without an object. Engestrom and Kerosuo (2007) argue that Activity Theory ‘is strongly committed to pedagogical and interventionist actions to facilitate and change learning’ (p.337). Hence, as a practical approach to learning it is not about waiting for change to happen via the internal pressures of contradictions, but, instead, provoking change through an analysis of activity systems and the contradictions between their various nodes.

Activity Theory argues that human activity is mediated through tools, a term broadly defined to include signs and codes as well as physical artefacts. However, and as with subjects, the tools node is complex, as Engestrom and Blackler (2005) argue (using objects to signify tools, not objects to signify outcomes): ‘First, it would be a mistake to assume that objects are “just given”; objects are constructed by actors…. Second, at the same time it would also be a mistake to assume that objects are constructed arbitrarily on the spot; objects have histories and built-in affordances, they resist and “bite back”’ (p. 310). On the one hand, meanings for objects (tools) are constructed by users through usage, but on the other hand objects have a back-story created by their previous uses, which are likely to exert an influence on how they are used subsequently. Using an object in an unfamiliar way can provoke resistance.

A significant value and potential of Activity Theory is that it can expose contradictions in existing human activity, and posit alternatives. In this sense it is empowering, and can, potentially, resolve contradictions experienced within subjects. Rikowski (2002), placing his analysis within an explicitly political context, defines Marxism as a ‘promethean scream: we are everything, there are no gods, no superhuman forces. People are the sole creators, it is labour alone which constitutes social reality’ (p. 1).

References
Daniels, H. and Warmington, P. (2007) ‘Analysing third generation activity systems: labour-power, subject position and personal transformation,’ Journal of Workplace Learning, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 377-391.

Engestrom, Y. and Blackler, F. (2005) ‘On the life of the object,’ Organization, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 307-330.

Engestrom, Y. and Kerosuo, H. (2007) ‘From workplace learning to inter-organizational learning and back: the contribution of activity theory,’ Journal of Workplace Learning, vol. 19, no. 6, pp.336-352.

Rikowski, G. (2002) ‘Methods for researching the social production of labour power in capitalism,’ University College Northampton School of Education research seminar, 7 March 2002.

Sharples (2002), ‘Disruptive devices…’

Sharples’s (2002) main focus is on school learning, but his discussion of technologies in education has wider relevance. Having surveyed popular mobile technologies and their prevalence, he argues, ‘the response of educational institutions to such powerful technologies has, almost universally, been to treat them as a threat to be countered’ (p. 2). Part of the reason for this is structural: ‘Institutional learning depends on the classroom being a sealed environment, with all outside interventions being carefully regulated by the teacher’ (p. 3). Sharples’s analysis echoes Foucault’s (1977) in this respect, as education becomes more about control than the creative exploration of learning.

Sharples recognises that the increasing prevalence of technology in society will exert pressure on our existing pedagogical models: ‘the tensions between personal technology and institutional education will increase as students breach the sealed world of the classroom by bringing in computers that are capable of communicating with the internet’ (p. 6). Although Sharples was only writing in 2002, there is something archaic about the last part of the sentence as, in practice, the majority of students now possess phones/handheld devices with net access. In addition, Sharples’s analysis overlaps with Engestrom’s (1987, 2001) in the sense that new tools disrupt the existing activity system. The division of labour in the classroom becomes less pyramidical, with implications for the teacher and their position of authority.

Sharples realises the implications of allowing the net into the classroom: ‘we can welcome students who bring their own personal communicators and computers, but in the full knowledge that they will disrupt traditional learning and that this disruption needs to be managed’ (p. 7). Sharples’s research focuses on a prototype device used to support schoolchildren’s learning, and in this sense his approach is, oddly, more akin to the sustaining technology approach (Christensen 1997): ‘another possibility is for future mobile devices to be designed so that they provide just the tools that are required or allowed in different contexts’ (p. 14). There is still a desire to contort technology to serve the existing pedagogical model, rather than using the technology to construct a distinct pedagogy. Sharples correctly identifies the tension to existing learning and teaching caused by technology, but does not follow through fully with the implications of the tension which, in Engestrom’s (2001) analysis, creates the conditions for new knowledge to be constructed: ‘When an activity system adopts a new element from the outside …, it often leads to an aggravated secondary contradiction where some old element (for example, the rules or the division of labor [sic]) collides with the new one. Such contradictions generate disturbances and conflicts, but also innovative attempts to change the activity’ (p. 137).

References
Christensen, C. M. (1997) The innovator’s dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press.

Engeström, Y. (1987) Learning by expanding: an activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki, Orienta-Konsultit Oy. http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Engestrom/expanding/toc.htm (accessed 28 April 2011).

Engestrom, Y. (2001) ‘Expansive Learning at Work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization’, Journal of Education and Work, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 133-156.

Sharples, M. (2002) ‘Disruptive Devices: Mobile Technology for Conversational learning,’ Kodak/Royal Academy of Engineering Educational Technology Research Group, University of Birmingham, Birmingham.

A note on Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ (1977)

Foucault argues that the origins of education cast a long shadow: ‘the schools and poorhouses extended the life and the regularity of the monastic communities to which they were often attached’ (p. 149). The organisation of school classrooms continues to militate against group work, and to insist on obedience and (frequently) silence. Furthermore, Foucault relates the organisation of time in educational institutions to wider economic and historical developments: ‘The gradual extension of the wage-earning class brought with it a more detailed partitioning of time’. Learning becomes compartmentalised; ‘it is a question of constituting a totally useful time’ (p.150).

Foucault also relates school learning to the guild apprenticeship: ‘the relation of dependence on the master that is both individual and total; the statutory duration of the training, which is concluded by a qualifying examination…; an overall exchange between the master who must give his knowledge and the apprentice who must offer his services, his assistance and often some payment’ (p. 156). Thinking of Higher Education, and in the aftermath of the Browne review, we can get rid of the adjective ‘often’ from the previous sentence. However, in an era of escalating fees for H.E. we are encouraged to think of the student as customer rather than apprentice, thus changing the power dynamic. The act of buying provides the buyer with consumer rights, but the historical residue of power and control remains, and thus there is tension between the higher education customer, and the institutions they attend. Furthermore, the fact that entry to H.E.I.s is dependent on grades attained, and that there are currently many more buyers than there are educational commodities to buy in H.E., restores some authority to the institutions. It will be an interesting dialectic if a new brand of student activism is catalysed not by political theory, but by customer dissatisfaction.

In a later chapter ‘The means of correct training,’ Foucault compares the school to a military camp, characterised by surveillance. Furthermore, Foucault’s description of the Ecole Militaire is similar to modern workplaces: ‘the very building of the Ecole was to be an apparatus for observation; the rooms were distributed along a corridor like a series of small cells; at regular intervals, an officer’s quarters were situated’ (pp. 172-73). Meanwhile, in modern offices, workers sit at terminals, in a room with one or more supervisors. Foucault goes on to assert the principle of surveillance in education: ‘A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it, and which increases its efficiency’ (p. 176).

Foucault was writing before the digital age. However, we can bring his descriptions to bear on the present: ‘thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the “physics” of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams and without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force or violence’ (p. 177). Put ‘fibre’ in front of ‘optics’ and it works just fine. Furthermore, ‘the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at in any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so’ (p. 201). User agreements signed by students and employees empower managers to track net usage, and so the user needs to be ever-mindful of the fact that they may be being watched.

Foucault argues that surveillance and control are focused in assessment: ‘the examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement… That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized’ (p. 184). Again, the over-arching historical frame for the assertion is historical: ‘It became less and less a question of jousts in which pupils pitched their forces against one another and increasingly a perpetual comparison of each and all that made it possible both to measure and to judge’ (p. 186). Furthermore, ‘the examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them’ (p. 189).

Workplaces and educational institutions tend to fetter; ‘one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique’ (p. 218). Furthermore, the controlling tendencies of organisations ensure the fermenting of rebellions; Foucault’s description of prison calls to mind the school experiences of many people: ‘the prison makes possible, even encourages, the organization of a milieu of delinquents, loyal to one another, hierarchized, ready to aid and abet any future criminal act’ (p. 267).

Reading Discipline and Punish gives a constant sense of conspiracy without a clear identification of the conspirators, other than a general sense that it’s the people in power. Perhaps there is something Anarchistic in Foucault’s analysis, in the sense that those who have power form and contort organisations to ensure they retain power. However, some arguments do come across clearly; that institutions (with their controlling tendencies) are an inefficient means of enabling learning, which should be fluid and lifelong. Furthermore, surveillance now has the potential to be more pervasive, yet less visible, than ever before. In addition, the emerging dialectic between the H.E.I. and the student/customer seems likely to generate conflict. Maybe Maoism will find its generational equivalent in Mallism.

Reference
Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan, London, Allen Lane.

‘Becoming individual in education and cyberspace’ (2004)

Krejsler advocates project work for assessment: ‘the purpose of the project is to build up knowledge about the phenomenon investigated and to mediate that knowledge to others to whom it might be useful. A further purpose may be to take action on a knowledge-based background’ (p. 490). In the digital age, an online space (a blog, for example) comprises a canvas on which a range of project activities can be undertaken.

Building on the work of Foucault, Krejsler sees institutional learning as confined by a distinct hierarchy and values: ‘populations are made into useful individuals in various institutions that operate according to similar principles no matter whether we talk about prisons, schools, factories or nucleus families. Each institution represents an enclosure that subjects individuals to specific criteria for entry into and exit out of the enclosure’ (p. 492). The Community of Practice theory is interested in the subject’s movement from entry to exit, but less interested in entry and exit criteria. Krejsler imbues the community with sinister undertones, as its boundaries become associated with containment and constraint.

Krejsler argues we are in a post-Industrial age in which the structure of our institutions has changed: ‘Culture, marketing and service that respond sensitively to the whims of fashion and markets in a globalized economy with a high-speed turnover increasingly replace the production of basic goods, which moves to the Third World. The job market is no longer stable. One cannot anymore expect long-term steady employment on the basis of a diploma from an authorized educational institution’ (p. 492). Krejsler’s analysis challenges the Community of Practice theory because the community itself becomes unstable and febrile; individuals cannot rely on continued membership of the community, as the community’s terms of membership may shift. This was not a problem in the original communities of practice (eg, Yucatan midwives, West African tailors) studied by Lave and Wenger (1991). As Krejsler argues, ‘Enclosure within the disciplinary institution is replaced by individualized anxiety. It is expected that one can constantly market one’s competencies so that they match at any given time the volatile needs of the job market. One is constantly und pressure to convince one’s employers that one is indispensable’ (p. 493).

Krejsler cites Deleuze (1990), who ‘distinguishes between the individual, who has an indivisible identity within a certain enclosure, and the dividual, who is under constant pressure to simultaneously divide his/her attention between several different projects, environments, and relations’ (p. 494). Individuals have multiple personae for different institutional contexts and, in the twenty-first century, these personae are digitised.

Krejsler suggests learning in the digital age can threaten institutions: ‘Learning that is organized in accordance with military principles of hierarchy, obedience and discipline increasingly dissipates into more volatile forms. Computers and the internet threaten to distribute knowledge and learning from the authorized enclosures of school to a virtual ubiquitous space’ (p. 495). Furthermore, the digital age learner has a new set of resources: ‘When access to the Internet, chat rooms and e-mail is part of project work, the student is constantly subject to the temptation to surf out into spaces that genuinely interest and excite him/her’ (p. 497). Therefore, Krejsler argues, the institution cannot be assured of full control over learning.

Kejsler’s analysis is frequently dystopian, yet he accurately describes classroom encounters, and the power relations that underpin them. Describing the teacher responding to off-message behaviour by the student, ‘he/she applies the tactics of the lifted eyebrows at first, seasoned, if necessary, with joking or slightly ironic comments. This should make the students aware that they are leaving the path of the virtuous.’ Next, ‘The teacher, being trained as an expert in communication, here asks the students to explain how their work proceeds, whether something blocks their learning or whether they are inadvertently being led astray from the formulated goals of their project. The students decode the situation and the futility of taking recourse to any other outlet than confessing that they are astray. They therefore express that they have already realized their wrongdoing and are rapidly returning to what they are expected to do. The teacher wraps up his/her absolution in informal and joking language. Employing an inescapable logic of reason, however, he/she leaves no doubt about what is expected of the students’ (p. 498).

Most people could recognise teacher behaviour along these lines. However, Krejsler argues that what he calls a ‘logbook’ (‘blog’ is better suited to the digital age) ‘makes us enter a foggy area where it becomes difficult to distinguish private from public matters, where the role of the student gets thoroughly intertwined with the role of the private person… [enabling] the student to enter spaces of reflection and wondering resembling the diary as a point of departure for challenging dialogues’ (pp. 498-99). A log, digital or otherwise, allows personal factors, including emotions, to be brought into institutional learning contexts in which emotions have not always been welcomed.

Having conducted a gloomy analysis, Krejsler concludes with a more uplifting quote from Morss (2000, p. 196): ‘learning can be an eventfulness whereby the teacher is not “empowering” students (as though power were something in the students’ future), but where their learning is already an expression of their own power, energy and joy.’

Krejsler’s focus is on how knowledge is managed and controlled in institutional settings. He does not mention Communites of Practice but it applies, because he is interested in entry and exit criteria for institutions/communities, and what people have to accomplish to meet the criteria. He does not examine, however, the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not stable, and its effects are not predictable. The subversive potential of knowledge is intrinsic to knowledge; the educator may have a clear sense of what values they wish to convey, but students may form their own interpretation of the information in front of them, even if they have to suppress their own insights in an institutional setting, for their own good. For example, a teacher may tell students that Lear is mad when he says, ‘Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Arm it in rags, a pygymy’s straw doth pierce it,’ but the student may yet interpret the statement as saying the rich and powerful get away with it, and the poor get screwed. That could be a useful insight.

References

Deleuze, G. (1990) Postscript on the societies of control, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Krejsler, J. (2004) ‘Becoming individual in education and cyberspace’ Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, vol. 10. no. 5, pp. 489-503.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Morss, J. R. (2000) ‘The passional pedagogy of Giles Deleuze,’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 185-200.

Miettinen, ‘The Sources of Novelty…’ (2006)

Miettenen (2006) repeats Csikszentmihali’s argument that creativity cannot occur in a vacuum, an argument which challenges the concept of original creation: ‘Edison’s and Einstein’s discoveries would be inconceivable without the prior knowledge, without the intellectual and social network that stimulated their thinking, and without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread their innovations’ (p. 174). Wenger (1998, p. 141) makes the same argument: ‘Our knowing – even of the most unexceptional kind – is always too big, too rich, too ancient, and too connected for us to be the source of it individually.’ T.S. Eliot said essentially the same of artistic creativity in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). Innovation finds a form in its historical context.

Miettenen also repeats the idea that failures prompt learning. Knowledge can be transferred from one generation to another, but when contexts change the old knowledge no longer works, and hence reflection can lead to the production of new knowledge appropriate for a new context (an argument carrying echoes of the saber-tooth curriculum). Hence, knowledge is not static but is in a constant state of renewal.

In common with Engestrom, it’s hard to avoid the presence of Marxist thought in Miettenen’s analysis. He cites the ongoing tension between use value (functionality) and exchange value (price). Is it his contention that this tension is likely to precipitate a failure, resulting in reflection and, thereafter, a new form of economic organisation? This could well be a good idea (given that the capitalist economic model profits from scarce resources rather than protecting them), but the durability of the market economic model doesn’t seem to be considered in the article.

Miettenen acknowledges ‘the impossibility of predicting the various historical developments that may turn out to be significant for the emergence of an innovation’ (p. 179). What seems to emerge here is that new creations come from trial and error, with the parameters for any new creation being shaped by the historical moment. Miettenen, therefore, seems to be steering towards Foucault’s notion of epistemes, that each historical period has knowledge parameters determining the limits of the achievements of the era.

Engestrom’s theory of expansive learning may help us to recognise knowledge limits (if only in localised contexts), and maybe even challenge them. The Marxist thread comes from the recognition of dualistic tension as a structural feature of societies. Learning and teaching can be on either side of the dualism, either reaffirming existing knowledge and understanding, or attempting to catalyse new forms of knowledge.

References
Miettinen, R. (2006) ‘The Sources of Novelty: A Cultural and Systemic View of Distributed Creativity’ Creativity and Innovation Management, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 173-181

Wenger, Etienne (1998, repr. 2005), Communities of Practice, Cambridge , Cambridge University Press.