Education, Social Interaction, and Material Co-Presence: Against - PDF document

1 Education, Social Interaction, and Material Co-Presence: Against Virtual Pedagogical Reality Mireille Coral and Jeff Noonan On the Brink: Oakland-Windsor Teaching and Learning Conference 2013 University of Windsor, May 2 nd , 2013 Myles Horton, one of the founders of the Highlander Folk School, a centre for adult popular education renowned for its work with the union and civil rights movements in the American South, argued that education was a process that was painful for the student. “There’s a lot of p ain in it,” he reflected. The pain caused by education is not debilitating, but indicative of a movement from lesser to greater development. “I realized,” he continued, “ that was part of growth, and growth is painful. A plant comes through the hard ground, and breaks the seed apart.”(Horton, 1990, p. 184). If the sprout fails to emerge from its shell, or if it is too weak to break through the ground, there is no mature plant. The same is true, we will argue, with regard to human beings: education is the process of cognitive growth beyond immature and one-sided forms of understanding. As a process of growth, it too cannot be achieved without pain. A crucial role of the educator, we contend, is to motivate students to want to feel the pain that all cognitive growth requires. To accomplish this task, the educator must be part provocateur, challenging students to break apart the seed of their own intellectual limitations. This challenge, we will suggest, makes a certain form of conflict essential to the pedagogical relationship, a conflict which requires co-presence in shared physical space. If we are correct, then on-line contexts are not conducive to education. Virtual environments permit the exchange of useful (and useless) information, but the absence of genuine, felt human contact limits their educational

2 value, even when they provide highly mediated social interactions (through Skype, in chat- rooms, etc). Our argument is not directed against on-line environments in general. We admit that on- line learning is possible. Our target is thus not the exchange of information through the internet, but the substitution of information exchange in virtual environments for challenge, questioning, dialogue, and argument in live, physical environments. Education is possible only in the latter environment, for the challenge and conflict upon which cognitive growth depends requires co- presence in physical space. There is no avoiding the question when the questioner is in front of you looking you in the eye. That experience is disconcerting; it produces a discomfort essential to education: the unease at feeling an earlier world-view challenged and exposed as partial, contradictory, or rooted in false normative assumptions that serve the prevailing structure of power and value. To become educated is to internalise this dissatisfaction with the given state of your understanding, to practice on yourself the critical questioning through which cognitive growth occurs, and then to engage others in the same spirit of respectful conflict, in formal or informal settings. Our argument will be developed in three steps. In the first, we will explicate our understanding of education and its intrinsic connection to social interaction in physical space cby examining relevant aspects of the pedagogy of Miles Horton, Paulo Freire, and George Herbert Mead. In the second section we will turn our attention to the on-line environment and contend that the consumeristic and ego-centric mentality virtual environments encourage are not conducive to the emergence of the self-and world-critical dispositions that education-- cognitive growth-- requires. In conclusion we will further support our conclusions by sharing insights

3 derived from our own pedagogical practice in university and adult high school education contexts. I: Education, Social Conflict, and Cognitive Growth In order to become functioning members of society, children must undergo a socialization process. While the content of this process differs historically and culturally, its function is the same: to integrate children into the dominant institutions and get them to internalize the dominant value system. Socialization is indispensible to social reproduction, but since the identities it produces are “ forged in history and relations of power, ” unless those histories are exposed to critical consciousness they will be reproduced rather than overcome by the socialization process (hooks, 1994, p. 30). Schools, which both socialise and educate, are therefore contradictory institutions. On the one hand, as Stanley Aronowitz argues, schools are “charged with the task of preparing children for their dual responsibilities to the social order: citizenship and — perhaps its primary task —labor” (Aronowitz, 2008, p.16). In so far as schools are preparatory for citizenship and labour, they are agents of socialization whose aim is the reproduction of the established power relations and value system, with all of their contradictions, hierarchies, and injustices. On the other hand, to the extent that schools must cultivate in the student cognitive capacities that will not develop simply through the biological processes of physical maturation, they must involve a genuinely educational moment. Hence, as an institution of social reproduction and integration which cannot as such avoid education, the school is dangerous — in order to perform its socializing function it must educate, and to the extent that it educates it must enable the student to question the scientific, moral, and political certainties social reproduction requires. If school did not enable students to question these established

4 certainties, then adolescents graduating from secondary school would have the same beliefs and cognitive capacities they had as four year olds entering kindergarten. The socialization function of schooling involves the transmission of information-- facts about history and society, the rules to follow in order to carry out mathematical operations and construct grammatical sentences, practical and interpersonal skills required to compete in the job market, etc. Yet, for this transmission of information to occur, there must always be a prior challenging of the student to open him or herself cognitively to that which he or she has not already thought or experienced. Let us take a simple example. A young student has been taught by his parents that his new baby brother has been brought by the stork. He tells this story in health class. The educator must now confront the student with the biological story. If the educator doe s not, she fails in her duty to open the student’s mind towards the more comprehensive and coherent understanding of human reproduction that biological science provides. But the educational achievement is not identical to the successful transfer of information, but is the moment where the student feels in himself the need to abandon the old story. The educational practice is not the explanation of how eggs are fertilized, it is the respectful but insistent challenge to the stork story. Education is successful when the student sees, for him or herself, not the truth of the biological story, but the inadequacy of the fairy tale. He has now opened his cognitive horizons and can discover the truth for him or herself. From the side of the educator, challenging and opening cognitive horizons is education, explaining the biological mechanics is teaching. From the side of the student, feeling the need to abandon the comforting fairy tale is becoming educated, assimilating the new information about the mechanics of reproduction is learning.