Dissolving some new dichotomies

I’ve been catching up on several issues of Education Week that piled up as I spent some time decompressing from the stresses of the spring semester and the joys of my younger child’s college graduation.  Several commentaries caught my eye and brought John Dewey’s habit of dissolving apparent dichotomies to mind.  I’ll mention just two here:

1)   In the May 21^st issue, NYU Dean Mary Brabeck highlights the importance of what she calls (following researchers in the medical field) “translational” research.  Brabeck argues that the soon-to-be-post-Whitehurst Institute of Education Sciences ought to be thinking about supporting research that brings neuro-, cognitive-, and medical sciences investigators into direct collaboration with those studying the practice of pedagogy and the education of teachers.  Brabeck acknowledges that this range of researchers may be “epistemologically at odds” with one another, but she offers significant NIH funding for centers that bring basic scientists together with medical practitioners and the development of two new journals with “translational medicine” in their titles as evidence that educational research agendas can be shaped so that conflicting ways of knowing are bridged by carefully designed collaboration.

In the practice of medicine and teaching, one’s knowledge of the “basic science” that informs each profession serves as a kind of reflective platform on which one stands when determining possible interpretations and plausible responses to this particular case.   The findings of the neuroscientist don’t tell me what to do, but those findings do tell me where to look, what questions to ask, what possibilities to consider.   The epistemic divide apparent between basic researchers and researchers of practice is a post hoc analytic distinction, not a distinction present in the moment of decision, in the process of interpretation and response.   If that is so, then there is no bar in principal to the kind of research Brabeck supports. 

2)   In the June 4^th issue, Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson argue that “disruptive innovation” will change the way we learn.   They bemoan, as many commentators have, the standardization in contemporary schooling and they call for customization of instruction.

Unfortunately, they begin their commentary with the claim that “all students learn differently,” insisting “most of us know this intuitively.  We learn best through different methods, with different styles, and at different paces.”    They suggest that differences are in learning styles, multiple intelligences, and/or aptitudes.  Dewey would challenge this claim, I think, or at least require a more precise linguistic formulation of the fact of our learning.    Dewey’s view is that we all learn in the same way no matter what the lesson – through a process of inquiry, employing the “method of intelligence”  -- but that every learning experience is different because every particular set of learning circumstances is unique.  

Despite their reliance on a misleading cliché, Christensen and friends are right about the need to recognize the unique quality of particular learning experiences and to call for school restructuring that supports customization by enabling “disruptive innovation.”  The latter concept fits neatly with the Deweyan reliance on doubt and discomfort as the prompts for learning.

Christensen et al. suggest that standardization and customization are mutually exclusive.  On the surface (and as exemplified by their example of Microsoft’s Windows closed operating system versus Linux open source and modular system), their dichotomy makes some sense.   But Dewey warns us to be wary of such hard and fast distinctions when recognition of a certain kind of “standardization” (the common process of human learning) is what enables us to explain the variance and customization in actual learning experiences.

Soft Cosmopolitanism

In "The Ambivalance of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism," (Sociological Review 55, 4, November 2007) authors Zlato Skribis and Ian Woodward studied the cosmopolitan ideas and practices of first world adults. Asked to reflect on their own cosmopolitan attitudes, respondents expressed positive sentiments by referring to "easily accepted opportunities" for travel, cuisine, and aesthetic pleasures (e.g., world music) associated with globalization. They did not, however, refer to the "more difficult aspects of cosmopolitan openness," such as showing hospitality to strangers or accepting the interests of humanity ahead of their own national and personal interests. Furthermore, the positive aspects of the cosmopolitan situation were counter-balanced by their fears of "culture loss" or "dilution of national culture".

The authors theorize that "cosmopolitanism is a set of structurally grounded discursive resources available to social actors, which is variably employed to deal with issues like cultural diversity, the global, and otherness." To put this in simple English, people in advantageous positions flip flop about cosmopolitan openness when the going gets rough.

Spiritual retreats, wth their glowing menues of trans-national philosophies and gurus, appear to be a prime site for soft cosmopolitanism.

The New York Times, in an article on Kripalu Institute in Massachusetts, "It’s Not Easy Picking a Path to Enlightenment," notes that the latest yoga super-stars invariably draw large (and well-paying) crowds, who tend to flock around them like groupies.

Even their relatives can rake it in. "If you’re not a celebrity, it helps to be related to one. Denise Barack, Kripalu's programming director, noted that the man leading the “Working With Your Angels” seminar was “the son of someone who’s well known for angel work."

Meanwhile, socially conscious programs such as “Conscious Kitchens” featuring the cookbook author and food activist Francis Moore Lappé, have been poorly attended. “Some of our more socially conscious programs tend not to draw as well,” Ila Sarley, Kripalu’s president, said. Other dud categories include aging (“People want to feel like they’ll be eternally youthful,” and organic gardening.

They want to feel youthful without working very hard.

Ayn Rand - a public philosopher?

Yesterday a grad student sent me a link to Ayn Rand's 1974 commencement address to West Point entitled, "What is Philosophy?"  This student, who I had suspected was a lot more conservative in his politics than he was willing to admit in class, wanted to know what I thought about Rand's take on philosophy.  As I read the piece, I was struck by a few observations regarding public philosophy and work of publicly-engaged scholars.

It was interesting to think about Rand delivering this as a commencement address in 1974 to West Point cadets.  When I think of how much fluff passes today for these kind of speeches, I was pretty impressed with the depth and raw ambition of the address.  To take on the question, "What is Philosophy" with a bunch of restless college grads and their families today would require real courage, which I surmise Rand did not lack.  In today's sound-byte age, Rand's delivery of a substantive and challenging talk at a graduation ceremony evoked some nostalgia in me.  

For those of you who are on the edge of your seats regarding the title question, "What is Philosophy?" let me put you at ease:  it's the Queen of the Sciences, the foundation of everything.  As Rand states, "Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence."  She tutors the cadets on the branches of philosophy, starting with epistemology, moving to ethics, politics, and aesthetics.  She makes a great case, I think, for why people should be interested in the abstract ideas of philosophy -- why abstractions are the stuff of thinking itself.  It's a passage I may quote to my philosophy of education classes in the future.

Her argument, in the talk, is that these cadets need not just philosophy but "a philosophic system" so that their principles and actions in life can be integrated, coherent, conscious, rational, and disciplined.  And guess which philosophic system she proceeds to sell?  Rand's Objectivism has been at the center of her novels for many years; I remember twenty-two years ago when I read Atlas Shrugged between my junior and senior years of college, and I still see her titles in the hands of many students.

There is much to disagree with, for me, in Rand's philosophical system, but that is not really the point of this post.  Rather, I'm more interested in the question:  what kind of public philosopher was Rand?  While Rand was not a philosopher but a novelist by profession, her books, speeches and letters seek to promote one philosophical system; the non-profit Ayn Rand Institute carries the mission on from Irvine, California.  Rand did not practice philosophy, but sold a philosophy through her books, speeches, and influence.  She was enormously successful in this endeavor, but it's important to distinguish between practicing philosophy in an engaged, public way,  and selling a philosophy to the public.

Practicing philosophy certainly includes much of the stuff that we find in Rand's talk -- the reading, writing, and argumentation in the traditions of epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, among others.  Yet I believe that philosophy that is engaged with public problems and contexts requires that we remain committed to the questions rather than one fixed set of answers.  It also requires that we stay engaged with the communities and multiple publics of our material contexts, bringing the practices of philosophy to these different arenas in the service of shared interests and common problems.

In 1974, when Rand was delivering this address, the U.S. military was in the midst of pulling out of Vietnam, facing one of its first and worst military defeats in modern history.  To the cadets of West Point, Rand sought to uplift those soldiers that were facing sharp criticism in American political life.  "You are attacked, not for any errors or flaws, but for your virtues.  You are denounced, not for any weaknesses, but for your strength and your competence.  You are penalized for being protectors of the United States."  She continues:

Today's mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty, is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy.  A philosophy out to destroy man's mind is necessarily a philosophy of hatred for man, for man's life, and for every human value.  Hatred of the good for being the good, is the hallmark of the twentieth century.  This is the enemy you are facing.

Rand offers the West Point cadets the same larger-than-life heroism that characterized all of her protagonists.  As a person whose entire existence was defined by the 1917 Russian Revolution, Rand's hatred of communism was palpable and defined her life's philosophy and work.  But to offer West Point graduates, the U.S. military leaders of our present generation, leaders of the most powerful military machine on earth, a greater sense of their own righteousness, virtue, and power seems terribly foolish.  

A military machine like the one that stumbled and fell in Vietnam certainly did not need the smug certainty and heroism of Rand's individualist heroes, but the reflective inquiry practices of the philosophical tradition.  "What is Philosophy?" mistakes a philosophical system for the practice of philosophy, called a practice because of how we must keep engaging its questions, problems, and contexts as new circumstances and problems require.  Rand is a fascinating public intellectual and novelist, and an ambitious commencement speaker, but in the end, her answer to "What is Philosophy" mischaracterizes what philosophy's true gifts can be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Productive Writer

Over at the blog Zen Habits Brett McKay has posted a wonderful short note on Emerson's thoughts on the productive writer-scholar.






Here are Emerson's Three Rules:


1. Write everything down

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Men are born to write… Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.

2. Eliminate Distractions

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends, and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. . . Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes, - all are distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a straight course impossible. You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so, can that amount of vital force accumulate, which can make the step from knowing to doing.

3. Keep moving

“Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

Great guidance from one of the greatest of engaged scholars.

Thoughts from a journal editor

As editor of Education and Culture, the journal of the Dewey Society, I write a brief note with each issue, usually offering a few ideas of my own while briefly discussing the articles. I went back recently and reread the notes from the first two issues I edited, 20(2) and 21(1), from about 3 years ago.

In the first I discuss what I see as my hopes for a journal sponsored by the John Dewey Society:

When I wrote the JDS board about taking over the journal, I gave a rationale that read, in part, that [My] interests are broadly Deweyan. Though I have read and studied Dewey’s work, I see the journal as more Deweyan in spirit, rather than just in letter. I would be interested in seeking out scholars who are examining not only Dewey himself, but his influence upon his contemporaries, and his enduring legacy. I would like to invite contributions on current work on Dewey’s influence. I am also keenly interested in exploring how the new technologies may be used in the journal. I would insist on electronic submission and reviewing procedures to expedite the process of production. I would also like to explore online components of the journal . . . I hope we are on the right path to realizing some of these characteristics, and I welcome any comments from readers on the journal’s direction and how this new editorial team may best serve the Society.

In the second note, I continue this discussion of what this journal is and might be. The impetus for this reflection was an email exchange with a former editor of Educational Theory:

Last year, I engaged in a series of spirited emails with Ralph Page about my new position as editor. Ralph recently retired after many years from the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana/ Champaign, and edited Educational Theory, one of the best-known journals in the areas of social foundations of education and educational policy, from 1983–1991. I had heard about Ralph from many people, especially my former colleague Christine Shea, before I had the pleasure to meet him, and came to realize the effect he has had upon not only the fields of what we at Purdue call “cultural foundations,” but more especially, through his work with countless authors and reviewers, a continuing narrative about what it means to be a journal editor. Ralph enjoined me to think of a journal as more than a place where the “best” articles get published, and the field, in my case, Dewey studies, is defined. Ralph thinks a journal can be, as he so generously put it, “a site of interchange among actual authors and actual audiences.” I thought about that and agreed that many people may not think of journals as sites for exploration, for the education of the authors, but more simply as gate keeping devices for the disciplines involved, and as finished products of scholarship. Ralph reminded me of the primacy of keeping the audience in mind when considering how to put together an issue. He told me that he asked himself the question: Will this audience be better off if they have a chance to read this article? That intrigued me, and I thought along with Ralph about what “better off” means in this context. We decided that “better off” may mean that an article raises neglected topics or a marginalized point of view, and thus enlarges the field of discourse. Or, more directly and personally, the audience may be better off by hearing a crucial statement by an up and coming junior scholar on the cusp of tenure. “Better off” for Ralph did not mean merely some notion of “excellence” or “cutting edge,” determined by a supposedly unbiased and distinguished review panel. These issues are not excluded, but a host of other issues, some idiosyncratic to the editor, his or her board, the journal at that particular time, may be considered.

I try to keep these thoughts in mind as we move forward with the journal and continue to think about its place in the lives of scholars and practitioners. We are moving forward with a special issue commemorating the150th anniversary of the birth of John Dewey in 2009, and looking at where Dewey studies, as well as practice, may take us today.

Open Access Scholarship

This post on open-access philosophy is, I think, worth reading in the context of our stated goals of communicating beyond our small group of colleagues whose libraries have subscriptions to expensive journals:
http://tomkow.typepad.com/tomkowcom/2008/06/open-resource-p.html

One of the important points made by the author and his commenters is that it takes the cooperation of the senior scholars in a discipline to change (and not drastically) the criteria for evaluating the work of younger scholars for hiring and tenure to make this work.

So, senior scholars: what are you going to do about this?

(Bonus question: why is the electronic edition of the collected works of Dewey so expensive, rather than available on a publicly accessible web page? Would Dewey approve?)

Blogging Tips

The Commission on Social Issues and our blog, Social Issues, aim to help scholars and progressive educators contribute to the discussion and resolution of social, cultural and educational issues.

Blogging is an important channel of communication about these issues. The public, engaged scholar-intellectual of today can get ideas circulating by joining the blogosphere.

Social Issues will frequently share ideas about blogging, and encourages its readers to blog, both here at SI and on their own.

We have already mentioned Chris Garrett as a source of great ideas on blogging.

Another source is Lorelle VanFossen, who blogs at Lorelle on Wordpress. Although much of the content is about the wordpress blogging platform, Lorelle is full of great ideas about blogging and writing in general.

In her post today Lorelle writes about the popular author Peter McWilliams and his motivational books Life 101 and Do It, demonstrating how McWilliam's style and approach to his topics offer great lessons for bloggers.

She says:

Blogging is about confidence, confidence in your subject matter and self-confidence that keeps you returning to your blog, persistently publishing . . . Blogging is about overcoming your fears. It’s about making mistakes and learning to live with it. It’s about the courage to say what needs to be said, no matter what anyone else says or thinks.

Life 101 and Do It! address the issues of what gets in our way and stops us from moving forward, especially when the path is a creative one that requires courage and faith in our abilities. It’s so easy to turn back when someone says something nasty . . . or insults your expertise

All of us hoping to advance progressive ideas in our conservative and frequently corrupt society have something to learn about the courage to move forward.

Citizen Journalism

The website Helium is partnering with various public interest groups to sponsor awards for citizen journalism on a number of topics of interest to members of JDS.

As it is the prime mission of the Commission on Social Issues to encourage citizen journalism among JDS members, this project should have special interest.You may remember Dewey's abortive collaboration with Franklin Ford, his complaint that the mainstream media were mostly scandal sheets failing to get behind lurid stories to the social processes responsible for them, and his complementary desire to bring more of the newspaper business into philosophy. So here is one already organized outlet.

Here is the lead from Helium:

Are you a real citizen journalist?
Helium's Citizen Journalism Awards cover a broad spectrum of issues: technology against world poverty, presidential candidates' health records, protecting animals by eating stem-cell-grown meat and the conflicts along Columbia's borders.

Show us your skills and get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers.

Here is more:

The time has come to rethink what it means to be a journalist. If you have what it takes to research topics and issues, lend an objective voice and write compelling articles, then you are a citizen journalist. Helium is bringing together the worlds of traditional news reporting and community-based journalism to create a site that citizen journalists call home.

Are you ready to report and write? Helium encourages you to report everything from local issues happening in your town to pressing global and environmental issues. As a citizen journalist writing at Helium, you’ll get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers. Here’s where to build a diverse portfolio of top-quality articles to help jump-start your career.

ONCE AGAIN AT HULL-HOUSE~Educating Women

Now located on the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and under the direction of Lisa Yun Lee, the original, now historic site of Jane Addams’s Hull-House remains a lively center of activity around social issues, as you will see if you check out the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. On May 22-23, 2008 the old Hull-House dining room and renovated conference facility were filled to capacity with about eighty participants in the inaugural gathering of a new international, intergenerational community of learning and inquiry on women, gender, and education—of which, without doubt, Jane Addams herself would have approved heartily. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the International Society of Educational Biography, the Blackwell History of Education Museum at Northern Illinois University, the University of Oklahoma, and Fairfield University hosted the event and provided scholarship aid for some participants. The brainchild of Lucy Townsend (2008 conference chair), Susan Douglas Franzosa (2009 conference chair), and myself, this new community goes by the name Educating Women. That name’s double entendre refers deliberately to women as both subjects and objects of educating.

True to that name, this inaugural conference brought together professors, students, teachers, activists, researchers, and concerned citizens from North America, Africa, Asia, and Europe around the theme, Educating Women: The Status of Research on the Education of Girls and Women. Consonant with that theme, those in attendance both surveyed and proposed such research, demonstrating the myriad rich possibilities of the scholarship in educational women’s and gender studies that has emerged only within the past two or three decades. Addressing education in infancy and throughout the human lifespan in highly various educational institutions both rural and urban, presenters’ topics included coeducation, single-sex schooling, teacher education, and women’s studies, as well as women’s instructive folklore, women’s educative social movements and friendships. Participants presented studies of girls’ and women’s education in Pakistan, Botswana, Kenya, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the American South. They discussed research on Mexican-American, African-American, Chinese-American, and Italian-American girls’ and women’s education; on education in visual arts, music, athletics, sexuality, gardening, sustainable agriculture, home economics, and the legal profession; on education about pain, for peace and other sorts of activism, and for living wisely and well; on women’s anger and artistry in teaching; on the teaching, learning, and curricular resources of mothers; on the particular educational challenges of pregnant teens and of both women with disabilities and mothers of children with disabilities. Some sessions argued for the value of studying women’s literary representations of teaching and learning; many others argued for the value of recovering knowledge about the past work or thought of significant educating women—such as Frances Wright, Elizabeth Sherwood, Betty Kirby, Flora White, Sarah Raymond, Ellen Swallow Richards, Catharine Macaulay, Christine de Pizan, Emma Goldman, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Roberta Abney, and founders of women’s studies programs—not to mention the sessions on Jane Addams. Selected papers presented at Hull-House will appear in forthcoming special issues of Educational Studies and Vitae Scholasticae. Meanwhile the community is preparing also to publish its own refereed journal, Educating Women, online, with password-protected spaces for discussing its articles.

Four keynote speakers called attention to issues of recurring concern throughout the conference. Ruth Sweetser, president of the American Association of University Women, opened the Hull-House conference with a lecture concerning the history of that organization’s research on girls’ and women’s education—including its most recent report, Where the Girls Are, which debunks the myth of a “boys’ crisis” in U.S. education and concludes that understanding race/ethnicity and family income levels are critical to understanding girls’ and boys’ achievement. Kolawole Babatunde, representing Nigeria ActionAid International, opened the first afternoon’s session with a lecture on “Major Factors Affecting Girls’ Education in Northern Nigeria: A Grassroots-Based Approach,” which illuminated strong points of resonance with issues affecting North American girls’ education, including critical concern about a narrow focus only on academic learning and achievement, and thus signaled possible directions for future collaboration in behalf of Nigerian girls’ education. The first day closed with a lecture by Lisa Yun Lee and a film, on Hull-House itself, along with a tour of the museum. Jane Roland Martin, whose John Dewey Lecture became one of her many books, Cultural Miseducation, opened the second day with a lecture, “Making Research on Women Count,” critiquing the “hidden” curriculum of misogyny witnessed during the recent U.S. Presidential primary campaign season as a signal of much educational work yet to be done and drawing imaginative inspiration from the concept of the land grant university to envision new approaches that Educating Women might take in the twenty-first century. Gaby Weiner, now of Edinburgh University, Stirling University, and Manchester University in the U.K., formerly of the University of Umeå in Sweden, opened the final afternoon’s sessions with a lecture, “Too Much Talk and Too Little Action: Trends in Research on Gender and Education in Europe and the Anglophone World,” comparing so-called “second wave” and “third wave” feminisms there with a content analysis of journals that suggested important possible future directions for Educating Women.

This conference and the publications following from it do not tell the whole story about the community of learning and inquiry that Educating Women aims to become. A project initially conceived in informal conversation over dinner in Charlottesville, VA during the American Educational Studies Association conference in 2005, and developed by its three founders at subsequent conferences and through carefully planned meetings and retreats in 2006 and 2007, Educating Women responds to a perceived generation gap in scholarship on women and education and also to a situation felt to be presently so limiting as to be stifling the field’s growth. In general, the educational women’s and gender studies field’s senior scholars seem to lack opportunities for collaborative work, while interested junior scholars often lack access to mentors and to sufficiently diversified, advanced studies to feel confident pursuing research on women, gender, and education. Moreover teachers, parents, and community educators often have no access to the research that is published in academic venues, even when it might be useful to them. Besides organizing conferences and publishing an online journal, therefore, this project will—as funds raised permit—utilize distance-education technologies, organize special interest groups within other existing organizations, construct an online archive of the field’s development, connect people with mentors, facilitate mutual communications and collaborations among scholars and teachers, and provide online a researchers' and teachers’/parents’ resource center that may work something like a virtual extension service. This trans-institutional, trans-associational project’s aim is to make unprecedented opportunities for novice, mid-career, and senior scholars to undertake advanced learning and inquiry in this new field and, also, just as importantly, to make their work available to a global audience of educators who can and will inform and inspire the work of scholars, use it, and improve upon it to make a difference in the learning and living of women, girls, and all other gender-troubled people. The founders are currently organizing Educating Women’s Board of Advisers, and welcome new participants in this culturally diverse community who care about girls’ and women’s education and about gender and sexuality education, who are also eager to learn and to teach. Contact: societyforeducatingwomen@gmail.com.

Teach your children well?