New Learning’s Updates

Towards Reflexive Pedagogy

What do we mean by "Reflexive Pedagogy"? Let's start with an historical journey and a contrast with what we have called "Didactic Pedagogy". This is old pedagogy, but on the scale of human history, not so old. Our reference point for the modern might be Plato’s Academy of Athens, where learning was primarily dialogical (“Socratic dialogue”), rhetorical, and argumentative. (Confucian learning is much the same.) The Western universities that arise in the late middle ages represent a newly didactic mode of learning, originating as they do from a monastic tradition, where in the words of one of the founders of this tradition, “It belongeth to the master to speak and to teach; it becometh the disciple to be silent and to listen.” (St Benedict c.530 [1949]). Then, after the rise of the printing press, teacher lectures are supplemented by a novel textual artifact, the textbook. This lays out, in a synoptic, systematically ordered, definite and seemingly inarguable way, knowledge that students are to acquire, with the aim of optimizing efficient acquisition and retention by learners (Ong 1958). These modern discursive and pedagogical forms become universal by the end of the nineteenth century.

As early as the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau railed against didactic pedagogy.

Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason, he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts (Rousseau 1762 [1914]).

By the beginning twentieth century, educational thinkers and practitioners from John Dewey to Maria Montessori and Rabindranath Tagore, were to offer systematic critiques and practical alternatives to didactic pedagogy. We call these “reflexive” in the sense that they represent in certain senses a revival of the dialogical, where the agency of the learner is at play in a dialectic between teacher and learner, the to-be-learned and the learning.

In a twenty-first century version of this debate, Kirschner, Sweller and Clark argue in favor of something they term “guided instruction”. The object of their critique is a series of ostensible evils that they label “constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching”. They put the case for “direct instructional guidance, ... defined as providing information that fully explains the concepts and procedures that students are required to learn.” These “procedures of the discipline” are “based on the facts, laws, principles and theories that make up a discipline’s content”. To what pedagogical end? “Long-term memory is now viewed as the central, dominant structure of human cognition. ... We are skillful in an area because our long-term memory contains huge amounts of information concerning the area. ... The architecture of long-term memory provides us with the ultimate justification for instruction. The aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory.” This is where, according to these authors, fundamental problems arise with the various approaches that they seek to criticize. “Minimal guidance places a huge burden on working memory. ... Cognitive load theory suggests that the free exploration of a highly complex environment may generate a heavy working memory load that is detrimental to learning” (Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark 2006: 76-80).

Here are key features of what we call didactic pedagogy:

  1. For there to be “direct instructional guidance”, the balance of control of a learning environment must be with the instructor,—hence the synoptic, monological artifacts of the lecture and the textbook.
  2. There is a focus on cognition, and mostly at times, one particular aspect of cognition, long term memory—measurable per the artifact and ritual of closed-book, summative examination.
  3. The focus is on the individual learner because long term memory is singularly individual.
  4. There is an emphasis on a narrow range epistemic processes by means of which a learner can demonstrate that they can replicate disciplinary knowledge—which in this pedagogical mode is limited to remembering facts, appropriately applying definitions, and correctly deducing answers by the application received theorems, and faithful application of the “procedures of the discipline”. This is pedagogy of mimesis or knowledge replication.
Roles and Relationships in Didactic Pedagogy

Soon after the publication Kirschner et al. article, there came a rebuttal by Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn. They argue that pedagogical processes such as problem-based learning and inquiry learning “provide students with opportunities to engage in the scientific practices of questioning, investigation, and argumentation as well as learning content in a relevant and motivating context.” This entails “not only learning content but also learning ‘softer skills’ such as epistemic practices, self-directed learning, and collaboration that are not measured on achievement tests but are important for being lifelong learners and citizens in a knowledge society.” This is not to say that learning is without structure. This structure takes the form of “scaffolding [that] makes the learning more tractable for students by changing complex and difficult tasks in ways that make these tasks accessible, manageable, and within student’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1962 [1978]).” Such pedagogy constitutes a kind of “cognitive apprenticeship, whereby students become increasingly accomplished problem-solvers given structure and guidance from mentors who scaffold students through coaching, task structuring, and hints, without explicitly giving students the final answers” (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, and Chinn 2007: 100, 105).

Here now, is our gloss on what we call reflexive pedagogy:

  1. There is a shift in the balance of agency between an instructor and a learner, where the learner has considerable scope and responsibility for epistemic action, albeit within the frame of reference of an activity sequence that has been scaffolded by the instructor. Knowledge activity is dialogical, with backwards and forwards movement between instructor and students, and students and students. The sources of knowledge are not monological (the artificially singular, synoptic voice of the lecturer or textbook writer). Rather, they are multiple—the great variety of authentic and problematically varied knowledge sources now immediately accessible in the universal library that is the internet, and beyond that, the lived experience of learners.
  2. The focus is on the artifacts and knowledge representations constructed by the learner and the processes of their construction. In an age where knowledge is always accessible via personal digital devices, long term memory is not so important. Long term memory will develop, but that will be an incidental and inessential consequence of deep engagement in a discipline. There is no longer a need to emphasize long term memory in pedagogy. For, if a fact cannot for the moment be remembered, it always possible to look it up in an instant. If a procedure cannot be remembered, there is an app that will execute that procedure—a calculation, series of directions, a data mashup. The objectives of learning are different in an age where we have these ubiquitous devices, these cognitive prostheses. The measurable object of learning now shifts from long term memory to knowledge processes and their documentation in the form of epistemic artifacts or knowledge representations—the report, the worked solution, the recorded activity, the model, the design. This, in other words, involves a shift in emphasis from cognition to epistemic artifacts, a phenomenon that we have elsewhere called “ergative pedagogy” or work-oriented pedagogy (Cope and Kalantzis 2015).
  3. The focus is on the social sources of knowledge. Knowledge is not a matter of what I know as an individual. It is my capacity to navigate the wide epistemic world at my fingertips; it is my ability to discern critically what is salient and what is not; it is commitment to acknowledge the social provenance of my knowledge by means such as citations and links; it is my ability to work with others to create collaborative knowledge where the sum of the knowable is greater than the individual contributions of colleagues in-the-knowing; it is my capacity for synthesis; and it is my ability to extend creatively socially acquired knowledge.
  4. By now, we will have brought to education a wider range of epistemic processes. In a reflexive pedagogy, we don’t need to abandon evidence in the form of facts, conceptual clarity with finely calibrated definitions, or deductions grounded in theorems—all things Kirschner et al. rightly value. However, these always sit within a wider epistemic frame of reference, where evidence is contextualized by argument to justify the supportability of a claim, where non-trivial claims are always provisional and open to rebuttal, and where in our disciplinary practice knowledge is dynamic and evolving.
Roles and Relationships in Reflexive Pedagogy

The debate between Kirschner et al. and Hmelo Silver et al. has been rehearsed time and time again over the course of the history of modern education, and doubtless it will be rehearsed many times again.

(From the introduction to our book, Cope and Kalantzis (eds), e-Learning Ecologies, New York: Routledge, 2016)

References

Cope, Bill, Mary Kalantzis. 2015. "Assessment and Pedagogy in the Era of Machine-Mediated Learning." Pp. 350-374 in Education as Social Construction: Contributions to Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by T. Dragonas, K. J. Gergen, S. McNamee, and E. Tseliou. Chagrin Falls OH: Worldshare Books.

Hmelo-Silver, Cindy E., Ravit Golan Duncan, and Clark A. Chinn. 2007. "Scaffolding and Achievement in Problem-Based and Inquiry Learning: A Response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark." Eductional Psychologist 42:99-107.

Kirschner, Paul A., John Sweller, and Richard E. Clark. 2006. "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching." Educational Psychologist 41:75-86.

Ong, Walter J. 1958. Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762 [1914]. Emile, or Education. Translated by B. Foxley. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

St Benedict. c.530 [1949]. "The Holy Rule of St. Benedict."

Vygotsky, L. S. 1962 [1978]. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Anthony Rud
  • William Cope