The Languages of Education
Context. Our English Department, together with the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, has just created a minor, Writing for the Public Sphere, and I will be teaching in the fall semester one of its courses, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education. The Minor has been long overdue, finally responding to student requests and to the need to reunite reading and writing; the latter, as you know, the subject of my recent newsletters. I look forward to it with anticipation but also some anxiety, because my book, Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning [Teachers College Press, 2003] seems not to have moved the needle in the direction it delineates. Although the book has received some acclaim, especially from academics in the field, it has not found its way into the hands of many teachers, parents, and administrators. I know this because the sales figures don’t lie. While I don’t feel the writing itself was at fault, I do feel in retrospect that much of the historical and philosophical material in the first part of the book turned away many potential readers, so I fear that unless I change my ways, I may not have that much to offer my prospective students, at least in a positive way. I’m going to begin, though, with this entry about the directions I feel we need to go with the language we use both in writing about education and in the classroom itself, and hope that in my interactions with students in the class I’ll learn more than I teach.
We can begin with how we educate our educators. Reading some of the textbooks prepared for courses like the History and/or Philosophy of Education or Social Foundations, I found that the complex thinkers we present in these courses were reduced to the print equivalent of sound bites, except without teeth. The very turns of language, the protean play of thought that characterize and even constitute the active mind become homogenized into a single bland pudding. Take the following example from a typical text, America’s Teachers by Joseph W. Newman:
Wedded as they are to change and adaptation, pragmatists do not believe in absolute and unchanging truth. For pragmatists, truth is what works. Truth is relative because what works for one person may not for another, just as what works at one time or in one place or in one society may not work in another. Pragmatists admit the concept of relative truth, applied to morality, could lead to chaos.
And so on. While it is hard to disagree with any of the above, it is also hard to extract from it any sense of the nature and quality of pragmatist thinking. Although intended for university students, the prose rates a grade level of 7.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. But despite this syntactic simplicity, it is not particularly clear how we move from one sentence to the next. Nuanced ideas are reduced to self-contained bumper sticker mottoes like “truth is what works,” or banalities like “what works for one person may not for another,” and there are no concrete examples to anchor these vapidities. Ironically for a paragraph about pragmatism, there are no specifics about the classroom or anything else, in violation of William James’s comment that nobody can see further into a generalization than her or his knowledge of specifics allows. As Saul Bellow has his character Herzog say: “We mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals.”
The language of textbooks, unfortunately, is only a special case of a problem that pervades the academic discipline of education, which has difficulty finding a language to talk about the classroom that is neither trivial and anecdotal nor pretentiously abstract. Most often the general bias of schools and departments of education is towards active, humane, student-centered methods, but this impulse is thwarted by a soporific style constantly at odds with the dynamics of reform. Here is an example from what otherwise could have been a valuable book edited by Nadine Lambert and Barbara McCombs, How Students Learn: Reforming Schools Through Learner-Centered Education, published by the American Psychological Association to inform laypersons about empirical studies of learning. While I was pleased to learn that these studies support the same views of learning as I have, my mind is numbed at the language, as in this example by Barbara McCombs:
Empowerment in this model is reciprocal and is embodied in training for parents, teachers, administrators, and students. As parents, teachers, and administrators develop positive belief systems in themselves and their students, and as they acquire a higher level understanding of student’s inherent mental health and how to uncover it through enhanced communication and interactions (will component), they are empowered to create a positive emotional climate and to develop enhanced interpersonal relationships with their students that embody qualities of mutual trust, respect, caring, and concern (social support component). As students display enhanced will and skill, teachers, parents, and administrators are empowered by seeing and realizing how they can nurture children’s inner potential to learn and develop in positive ways.
The diction is Latinate, polysyllabic and repetitive, clogged by near-meaningless three-word noun phrases such as “positive emotional climate” and “enhanced personal relationships.” If there are realities to which these composite abstractions relate, they have long since evaporated from the text. The problem underlying these difficulties is the lack of steady thinking in the process of writing. Does the writer stop to consider whether “mutual trust, respect, caring, and concern” are different elements or repetitive ways of talking about the same thing? Is “inner potential”—used twice—different from some kind of outer potential? And do administrators need to both “see” and “realize” this “inner potential”?
Another more recent style of thoughtless educational writing has been influenced by the jargon of postmodernism, especially as it appears in much current literary criticism. Here is a sentence written by Peter Trifonas, the editor of Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory:
Although this characterization of the chapters presented in this volume is self-consciously forefronted by the title of the anthology (and any title worthy of the appellation “title” should surely thematize the heterogeneity of a body of work so as to do just that!), the text does not speak only to those who have embraced the ethical value of opening the empirico-conceptual and epistemic limits of one’s work and oneself to the risk of less than canonical modes of thinking.
Verbose, abstract, polysyllabic, this writer is also deaf to the sound of his own words. All three passages keep the reader at bay, the first two through a patronizing scorn of his or her intelligence, the third through an involuted and exclusionary language that makes sense, if at all, only to other initiates—a discourse that undercuts in its very utterance its political pretenses to help build a democratic community. If the language in which we write about education is to improve, we need to create a continuity between it and the ways in which we speak to our colleagues and students at our best. With s self-awareness that arises through the act of writing itself.
The chapter on the language of education in Jerome Bruner’s Actual Minds, Possible Worlds seeks such continuities. For Bruner, “a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and negotiated by its members.” There are certain institutions such as storytelling, science, and law that particularly serve the role of what Bruner calls a “forum” for these kinds of negotiations and explorings, and education should be one of the most central forums, giving “its participants a role in constantly making and remaking the culture—an active role as participants rather than as performing spectators who play out their canonical roles according to rule when the appropriate cues occur.”
Bruner then gives an example from his own experience as a student of how the language of education can help this process:
I recall a teacher, her name was Miss Orcutt, who made a statement in class, “It is a very puzzling thing not that water turns to ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but that it should change from a liquid into a solid.” She then went on to give us an intuitive account of Brownian movement and of molecules, expressing a sense of wonder that matched, indeed bettered, the sense of wonder I felt at that age (around 10) about everything I turned my mind to. . . . In effect, she was inviting me to extend my world of wonder to encompass hers. She was not just informing me. She was, rather, negotiating the world of wonder and possibility. Molecules, solids, liquids, movement were not facts; they were to be used in pondering and imagining. Miss Orcutt was the rarity. She was a human event, not a transmission device.
Unlike his fellow psychologist Barbara McCombs, Bruner speaks not as a detached clinician but in an immediately personal, concrete way. His language suggests the world we live in is extraordinary to the point of the miraculous, and that not the least miracle is the ability of the human mind to make some sense of it.
Miss Orcutt’s language “invites”—to use Bruner’s apt verb—her students to participate in the act of discovery in ways similar to how literary writers invite the reader to engage in the process of discovery. While as teachers we may not be able to speak in literary prose, we can use a language that is more affective (hence effective) and engaging, more responsive to alternative possibilities. But we too use a classroom language that is less personal, less inquisitive, and less qualified than the ways we speak in other situations. Bruner cites a study by his wife, Carol Feldman, who was
interested in the extent to which teacher’s stances toward their subject indicate some sense of the hypothetical nature of knowledge, its uncertainty, its invitation to further thought. She chose as an index the use of modal auxiliary markers in teachers’ talk to students and in their talk to each other in the staff room, distinguishing between expressions that contained modals of uncertainty and probability (like might, could, and so on) and expressions not so marked. Modals expressing a stance of uncertainty or doubt in teacher talk to teachers far outnumbered their occurrence in teacher talk to students. The world that the teachers were presenting to their students was a far more settled, far less hypothetical, far less negotiatory world than the one they were offering to their colleagues.
Neither Bruner nor Feldman speculate in depth on the reasons for this situation, but it has a great deal to do with a teacher’s sense of role and authority in the classroom. The impulse behind many teaching behaviors, especially those of beginners, is to convince the students and themselves that they really deserve to be where they are, that they know what they are talking about. On their side, students often display the speech characteristics that are the opposite of their seemingly self-assured teachers for a complementary reason—the fear of being “wrong.” They will often hedge their bets by prefacing their remarks with “This may be beside the point but. . .” or “I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but. . .”
An essential aspect of active learning for both teachers and students, then, is the ability to monitor, reflect upon, and analyze one’s own language. Every utterance we make has not only content, but also a stance towards that content and towards reality in general; each word if heard or read rightly is a witness to the absence or presence of mind behind it.