The following appeared in a LISTSERV in April, 2001 and
has been subsequently edited.
Hi, all,
I just went to a really interesting lecture by a
philosopher on paradigm-shifts in the sciences. One of the things he talked
about was this interesting conundrum: on the eve of a paradigm shift (e.g., just
after Einstein published e=mc squared), a scientist trying to decide whether to
stick with the old (newtonian universe) or go with the new (relativistic
universe) has a tough dilemma. Do I go with this new idea that seems to explain
some tough, hitherto unsolved problems but that flies in the face of everything
I believe? or do I reject it, because I think the old theories will eventually
solve these tough problems without having to turn everything on its head?
Deciding to go with the new is, in a lot of senses, irrational, unless we re-define
what counts as rational.
Now, I'm not just going on about this talk because it was
engaging. It occured [sic] to me that students being confronted with a college-level
workload (and expectations about analyzing, synthesizing, writing, etc.) for the
first time might be having the same kind of dilemma, where taking the advice of
learning assistance folks seems irrational. For instance, say I advise a student
unsure about how to proceed with an assignment that he needs to meet with the
professor. In all of his past experience, "meet with the teacher," was
always about getting something wrong, which he understood as being bad. I don't
know this, but I can see I'm having a tough time convincing him. I try to say
the professor will "help" him. In his experience, the word
"help" has always been a euphemism for "punish," as in
"this will be good for you."
Here's my question (finally!): Has anyone researched or run
across any articles/books/people who take this perspective on students? I hope
I'm not hopelessly outdated in using the word "paradigm" in this
setting.
Thanks,
Steve
Steve (and anyone else reading in),
I have thought about the issue you broach in a similar, but
somewhat different, way. I teach reading and study strategy courses at UC
Berkeley. Obviously these students have been extremely successful academically
or they wouldn't be here. Yet, many of their approaches are NOT adaptive to this
new environment with new expectations and demands. It occurred to me in working
with my students that those who have been successful will often be LEAST
amenable to changing their learning approaches. Those approaches have been
useful for them. As you say, it would be risky, if not irrational, to adopt a
new approach over one that has been proved to work. This only stands to reason.
So, what I realized is that I need to make a case to them for how post-secondary
education, learning, reading etc. is different from secondary education. It's
not merely "more", (more reading, more "in-depth" etc.) but
qualitatively different. In my view it is different in a number of ways, but one
of the most important is how professionals in their respective disciplines think
about, create and share knowledge; that is in terms of conventional
epistemological beliefs in the disciplines. I usually frame this to my students
as disciplinary "Ways of Knowing". What counts as knowledge and
knowing and good evidence, etc. is not the same in college as it was in high
school and it's not the same across the disciplines. At Berkeley students are
being asked (implicitly) to learn to know the world in a certain way, to think
like an anthropologist or an electrical engineer or a historian, not merely know
the content of these fields. This REQUIRES epistemological realignment,
sometimes from hour to hour as they move from a course in Math to one in Ethnic
Studies.
I think I can speak to another of your questions. You ask,
"Has anyone researched or run across any articles/books/people who take
this perspective on students?" The short answer is "Yes".
Educators who do their work under the aegis of "new literacy studies"
often take this perspective toward students transitioning to college/university
studies. What these folks do is view literacy and learning and education as
social processes, as enculturation and socialization as much as cognitive
development or expansion. So for me, making the transition to college is about
being socialized into new communities who have new and different ways (norms and
conventions) for reading, writing, thinking, making arguments, collecting and
evaluating evidence (here's where the epistemological issues come in) and the
like.
A fairly direct link can be drawn from this approach to the
work by philosophers and sociologists of science (Thomas Kuhn being the most
famous and the one who popularized the term "paradigm") in the sense
that these scholars were interested in the ways that science as a social
enterprise changes, develops and as Kuhn so famously put it "shifts".
That is, they recognized that science isn't only about facts and findings (nor
is learning in one's major) it's about fads and conventions and norms and
personalities and social movements and entrenched interests. Scientists are
socialized into communities just like everyone else and are subject to their
pressures like anyone else (think of it as professional peer pressure). The
risks you mention that a scientist (or educator, for that matter) faces when
deciding whether to shift paradigms are largely professional (just another way
of saying "social') in nature, not "scientific" per se. So, ideas
are taken up, built upon, ignored, shunned, even sabotaged based on social
considerations, not just on their merits as "objective" ideas. This
exemplifies the point that it's not always the best ideas that prevail in
science. Scientists must, and do, consider social implications of adopting a
paradigm. The entrenched ideas and communities of scholars who share them will
almost always exert undue influence over the movement of a field because it is
in their interest to not see their paradigm go by the way. In short, science, in
one very important sense of the word, is a social enterprise with all that that
term connotes.
The shared notion between these seemingly rather different
comments is that science like education is a social-institutional enterprise.
Science and education are not, respectively, merely about finding facts and
learning them. So, I think discussions or studies about epistemological beliefs
are important but often incomplete because they rarely address the issue of
where these beliefs came from. Belief systems are learned, generally, through
socialization. So in my view college students must often adopt new belief
systems, seriously tweak their existing epistemological frameworks and, perhaps
most significantly, give up beliefs and ways of thinking that they have
internalized from their experiences and their communities. Sometimes adopting an
approach to studying and reading and learning entails changing one's whole way
of thinking about what knowledge is and what education is for. It's no wonder
then that students are circumspect about shifting paradigms just because we tell
them to.
Lastly, I'm not sure that the challenge/dilemma faced by
students is best termed one of paradigm shift. Kuhn (See "The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions"), as I understand it, uses the term to talk about a
socially held framework of ideas, methods etc. and not residing in any
individual. Moreover, Kuhn's work has been widely lauded, but he received some
trenchant criticism over his loose use of the term "paradigm". So,
expanding the use of the term even further may be counter-productive.
Hope that is a little useful, and more than a little
provocative.
Nic