By by
Eugene Matusov, University of Delaware, USA
Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Chestnut Hill College, USA
August 19, 2011
History: As far as we know, the notion of “Education 2.0” has emerged sometime between the time that Tim O’Reilly introduced the notion of Web 2.0 in 2005 and March 27, 2008 when the Google conference on Education 2.0 (in Russian) was organized in Moscow (Goldin, 2010). In his article “Education 2.0: A fashionable term or new content”, the Russian innovative educator Alexander Goldin defined the common definition of the term of Education 2.0 as a formula: Education 2.0=Education +Web 2.0. One can find many examples of such definition by Googling on “Education 2.0” (for example, here, here, here, here, and here). At the same time a few innovative educators called for radical rethinking of Education itself along the same line as the concept of web was rethought by Tim O’Reilly. Besides Goldin’s effort to develop a radical new vision of Education 2.0, we only know work by John Moravec, who moved beyond even Education 2.0 and introduced Education 3.0. We are a part of similar efforts of radically redefining the concept of education in the notion of Education 2.0 and we also feel affinity to these efforts by John Moravec and Alexander Goldin (but we feel that we are different from them as well).
Since Alexander Goldin wrote about the notion of Education 2.0 in Russian, we decided to translate his major concepts defining Education 2.0:
a) Principle of subjectivity. Goldin defined the curriculum of Education 2.0 not as acquisition of ready-made culture, as it is in Education 1.0, but rather as refinement of the personal worldview within an academic subject area. This means that the curriculum does not exist before the student or independent of the student. Knowledge is always subjective, ontological i.e., a person is a being-in-the-world), and not objective and ready-made. Learning occurs through unique and individualized trajectories through “the world of the Big Culture”. The work of a teacher is in the organization of diverse learning activities and not in developing preset curricular programs.
b) Principle of abundance. “Personal knowledge of students is formed not according to some preset curricular program but it develops within a specially designed” rich learning environment, which is always abundant, redundant, and even wasteful. This principle also involves diversity: multiage, diverse level of expertise, diverse experiences and knowledge, network of diverse sources, diverse ideas, diverse cultures, diverse themes, and so on.
c) Principle of collaboration. The participants (i.e., students and the teacher) should have equal rights. The teacher is number#1 learner in the classroom and not the number#1 expert in the classroom. There is a community of learners. Students are also in a position of teacher. As education process progresses, the boundary between the teacher and the students increasingly erases. Each participant has a “personal status” in the process that is defined by his/her multiple roles in diverse learning processes. Goldin defines four such roles of participation: guest, client, active member, and expert. For example, a teacher can be an expert in trigonometry and a guest in modern hip-hop music at the same time. Similarly, a student can be a client for trigonometry and an expert in modern hip-hop music. Education 1.0 is a bipolar hierarchy (teacher-student), while Education 2.0 is a multipolar democracy. Finally, collaboration means to move away from Education 1.0 assessment system of grades to Education 2.0 assessment system of portfolio of achievements as “open resume”.
d) Principle of openness. Education 2.0 is based on students’ free, independent, and responsible choice to select what they want to learn, when, with whom, and how.
e) Postindustrial society. Education 1.0 fits to industrial society, while Education 2.0 fits postindustrial society.
We see the concept of DEFA (Dialogic Education For Agency) as merge of the two major approaches: 1) Dialogic Pedagogy (mostly its ontological version) and Agency approach to education focusing on respecting and promoting agency of the students (see Summerhill School, Sudbury Valley School, and The Circle School). Currently, we could not find any good example of realization of the DEFA approach.
Table 1. Comparison of Education 1.0 (aka Education for Standards) and Education 2.0 (aka Education for Agency)
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Categories
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Education 1.0
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Education 2.0
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|---|---|---|
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Purpose
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Education for achieving the preset curricular endpoints/standards
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Dialogic Education For Agency (DEFA) and voice in socially desired activities or practices
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Economy
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Industrial, knowledge-based postindustrial, standard-based
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Post-knowledge, post-skill, post-standard, agency-based, artisan
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Values
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Accuracy, achievement of the given, standard, standardization, exclusive seriousness, instrumentality, objectivity, interchangeability, transferability across contexts, universality, detachment, agreement, mono-focus, detachment, homogeneity, answer, correctness, smoothness, certainty, finalization, following the well-defined goal, following known maps, achieving well-defined quality, treating students as objects of the teacher’s pedagogical actions
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Bottomless depth of understanding, transcendence of the given, creativity, diversity, originality, final causes, imagination, playfulness, subjectivity, embodiment, embeddedness, situatedness, synchronous and diachronous poly-focus, uniqueness, disagreement, surprise, question, inquiry, uncertainty, unfinalizing, tension, defining and transforming goals, charting new territories, creating new quality, thinking out-of-box
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Type of learning
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Learning 1.0: thermostat-like learning (achieving preset and well-defined benchmarks)
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Learning 2.0: subjective redefining goals and values
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Tools (skills, knowledge, attitudes, habits)
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Detached from people’s goals, uses, social relations, and values; a universal “toolkit” of essential skills and knowledge approach
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Charged with and defined by people’s goals, uses, social relations, and values
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Assessment
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Credentials through standardized tests on correctness and accuracy for the preset and detached values
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Contested responsibility to self and the relevant community
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Curriculum
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Student’s deficit: a gap between the preset curricular endpoint and the student’s performance; solving preset well-defined problems
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Interest, inquiry, tension, question and concern-raising, problem-posing, goal-defining
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Nature of learning
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A special activity designed and assigned by the teacher to the student; (self)teaching causes learning
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Aspect of any activity, in which a person is engaged involving certain but often contested transformation of participation in the activity
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Guidance
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a) Instructionism: well-defined, stable, and universal pathway (i.e., instructional strategies) by the teacher to the preset curricular endpoint for all students, teacher-proved
b) Constructivism: ill-defined, emergent, and individualized pathway by the teacher to the preset curricular endpoint for each student
c) Discovery: Creating conditions by the teacher in which a student will unavoidably discover the preset curricular endpoints
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· Providing rich opportunities for people’s access to socially valuable activities;
· Legitimate peripheral participation;
· Legitimate redefining the practice and its goals;
· Legitimate access to and participation in a reflective and critical discourse about the practice;
· Freedom to join or leave the activity;
· Legitimate multiple and dynamic nature of people roles in the network of practices they participate;
· Equal rights of consciousnesses;
· Dialogic provocations;
· Validation of participants’ contributions by revealing their strengths;
· Collaborative testing of ideas;
· Legitimate unilateral “divorce” among all the participants
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Pedagogical discourse
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Monologic, authoritative
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Dialogic, internally persuasive
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Relationship and decision making
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Hierarchical by power and knowledge, authoritarian, impersonal, detached, manipulative, student’s unconditional cooperation with the teacher
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Democratic, personal, attached, respectful, conditional cooperation through constant negotiation, recognition of all participants’ strength and diverse experiences and ways of knowing
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Pedagogical desire
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Making students want what the teacher wants them to do through rewards, punishments, exploitation, bargaining, and manipulation
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Exploration and negotiation of all participants’ desires and tensions among them
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Educational ideal
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Universally capable and knowledgeable and mutually replaceable workers with transferable, universal, de-contextualized skills
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Uniquely socially appreciated individuals with strong personal voices in some socially desired practices
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Pedagogical concerns
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Students being off-task, off-script, non-cooperative, out of control, academically too behind or too ahead
Teacher not being knowledgeable enough how to answer to a student’s question, finishing a lesson too early or too late, finding what to teach and how, preparing lessons in time, being blamed for his/her students’ academic failures, having non-cooperative or too intrusive parents
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· Overlook and neglect of other participants’ potentials and transcendences; · Missed teaching-learning opportunities; · Providing a rich learning ecology; · Being trapped in embodied oppressive relations and discourses that participants do not transcend; · Seeking alibi in being (i.e., avoiding responsibility); · Blocking other people’s opportunities for participation and growth; · Forced participation; · Silencing other people’s dissented voices; · Creating a safe learning environment where participants are not punished for their mistakes or hurt by mistakes of others; · Lack of playfulness or seriousness |
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Activity system
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Closed system: self-contained, detached, predictable, separated, technologized, sterilized, standardized, and unilaterally controlled space, time, curriculum, instruction, motivation, classroom management, assessment
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Open-ended system: contextualized, dialogized, ontologized, generative, emergent self-organizing, chaotic, unpredictable, adderessive, responsive, responsible, negotiable, eventful, creative, democratic
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Education and culture
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Reproduction and consumption of ready-made culture
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Active and creative production of culture-in-making
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Educational research
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Normative, objective, objectivizing and finalizing, replicable, universalizing, controlled, instrumental, above the participants from a bird-eye perspective, based on a deficit model, “everything that matters is measurable”
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Transformative for the participants and researchers, meaning making, addressive to the participants, subjectivizing and unfinalizing, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted” (Einstein), responsible
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Mutual critique (critique of the perspective from the other perspective)
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Alienation; apathy; suppression of agency, creativity, and dissent voices; shallow learning; pedagogical violence; oppression; lack of critical thinking; disrespect of human dignity; conventionalism of knowledge; dogmatism; demanding of unconditional obedience; waste of human creative potential; creating mental and relational dys- and malfunctions and disabilities (including learning disabilities); social hierarchy and divides; promoting social oppressions and hegemonies; arresting human development; creating pseudo-knowing; promoting elitism; creating hierarchies of human practices, ways of knowing, and experiences; not useful for future agency-based economy; using summative assessments (e.g., grading) and thus making learning unsafe and students distrustful of their teachers; creating human robots and motivational zombies; treating people as replaceable is dehumanizing and humiliating; creating social and political tensions in the society pregnant to violent eruptions; lack of responsibility for a systematic oppression of agency; arrogance of knowing what is the best for other people; not supporting people’s interests, strengths, concerns, and inquiries; debilitating effect of treating people as deficient on a systematic basis; creating competitions for educational success among students; purifying and essentializing world issues into universal academic curriculum; exclusion of students’ ontology from their learning; suppressing societal problems, hot issues, contested truths, controversies, and debates in school curricula; |
Unclear pedagogical objectives, unpredictability of learning outcomes; educational outcome inequality (i.e., different alumni know different things), no standards, immeasurability of the learning outcomes, unaccountability, waste of resources; chaos; lack of control; disrespect of authority; deficit of cultural capital (e.g., some alumni may not know the essential cultural things like algebra or Shakespeare); fragmentation and balkanization of the society; “blind guides blind” (how can students define their own curriculum), localism (no universality or transferability); truth is universal; ineffectiveness; prohibitively expensive for the society (only good for small elite); unrealistic (modern institutions and economy do not and will not support education for agency); the value of human agency is very limited in our society and economy (e.g., there very limited places of creative jobs or creativity in jobs); economy and state requires standard-based participation, students from disadvantaged communities need the basics and essential toolkit of knowledge and skills – the cultural capital of the dominant culture – first and most of all for their social mobility (“use master tools to destroy master house”); basic skills and knowledge have to be learned before creativity and deep understanding; only highly talented people (elite) are creative and have agency; it can’t be replicated on a mass scale; if students have a choice not to learn they will abuse it; connection students to the real life will lead to unsafe, unprotected, and exploitative world for children (and other people); lack of patriotism; atheism
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…
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… |
…
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What is agency?
We define the concept of human agency in the following way:
- Person’s transcendence of any preset, existing limits, expectations, and norms of a sociocultural practice (Bakhtin, 1990, 1993; Buchanan, 1979);
- Recognition of the value (either positive and/or negative – i.e., validation) of this transcendence by relevant others and the self (Buchanan, 1979);
- Recognition of the cause of itself (causa sui) (Buchanan, 1979; Spinoza, White, & Stirling, 1910);
- Personal and social responsibility for this transcendence and its recognition (i.e., requiring justification-response by others and the self) (Bakhtin, 1993; Buchanan, 1979)[1];
- Creation of a new definition of quality (i.e., what is good and bad) of the practice through this transcendence and its recognition – the criteria for quality do not fully preexist the deed of the agency (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Bateson, 1987; Matusov & Hampel, 2008);
- This transcendence and its recognition occur on a big, highly visible, scale that often requires special actions (i.e., the actions that are often referred as "self-actualization", see Maslow, 1943) as well as on a small, rather unnoticeable scale which penetrates even people’s everyday routines and basic needs (Matusov, 2011, in press);
- The existing, ready-made culture provides material for the person’s transcendence of the practice and recognition of this transcendence by self and others (Buchanan, 1979);
- Agency exists and reveals itself through a person’s acts of culture transformation[2] and culture production (Berlyand, 2009; Bibler, 2009; Lobok, 2001);
- Disagreement, mis- and non- understanding, non-participation, non-cooperation, and collision of participants’ desires are birthmarks of agency (Matusov, 1996, 2001, 2011);
- Agency is unpredictable, ontological, and eventful (Bakhtin, 1990, 1993; Buchanan, 1979; Lobok, 2001; Matusov, 2009; Sidorkin, 1999).
Why dialogic?
Meaning-making process is:
- Dialogic (i.e., question-based) (Bakhtin, 1999)
- Ontological and experiential (i.e., here-and-now) (Sidorkin, 1999)
- Eventful (i.e., unpredictable dramatic meeting of two consciousnesses, beings-in-the-world) (Bakhtin, 1993)
- Embedded in the perpetual internally persuasive discourse in which truth is tested and forever testable (Bakhtin, 1991, 1999; Matusov & von Duyke, 2010; Morson, 2004)
Student authorship
a) Authorship is a form of agency manifestation;
b) Student responsive authorship: the student’s creative, interested, and substantive responses to the teacher’s dialogic provocations (assignments and questions) that transcend the teacher’s expectations and surprise the participants;
c) Student self-generated authorship: student’s (individual or collective) initiations of new projects, new inquiries that they want to and do pursue, self-assignments, self-initiated readings and discussions (i.e., self-initiated academic assignments and learning journeys);
d) These types authorial authorship have blurry boundaries but also new qualities (Matusov, 2011)
References
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1990). Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays (V. Liapunov, Trans. 1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1991). Dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act (1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1999). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (Vol. 8). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bateson, G. (1987). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
Berlyand, I. E. (2009). A few words about Bibler's dialogics: The School of the Dialogue of Cultures conception and curriculum. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 47(1), 20–33.
Bibler, V. S. (2009). The foundations of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures Program. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 47(1), 34–60.
Buchanan, J. M. (1979). Natural and artifactual man. In J. M. Buchanan (Ed.), What should economists do? (pp. 93-112). Indianapolis: Liberty Press.
Lobok, A. (2001). The probabilistic world: The chronicles of the philosophical-pedagogical reflections of an educational experiment. Yekaterinoburg, Russia: Association of Small Businesses.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370-396.
Matusov, E. (1996). Intersubjectivity without agreement. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3(1), 25-45.
Matusov, E. (2001). Intersubjectivity as a way of informing teaching design for a community of learners classroom. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17(4), 383-402.
Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into dialogic pedagogy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers.
Matusov, E. (2011). Irreconcilable differences in Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: An educational perspective. Culture & Psychology, 17(1), 99-119.
Matusov, E. (2011, in press). Authorial teaching and learning. In E. J. White & M. Peters (Eds.), Bakhtinian pedagogy: Opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. New York: Peter Lang Publishers.
Matusov, E., & von Duyke, K. (2010). Bakhtin’s notion of the Internally Persuasive Discourse in education: Internal to what? (A case of discussion of issues of foul language in teacher education). In K. Junefelt & P. Nordin (Eds.), Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin Stockholm University, Sweden June 3-5, 2009 (pp. 174-199). Stockholm: Stockholm University.
Matusov, E., & Hampel, R. (2008). Two perspectives on promotion. Academe, 94(1), 37-39.
Morson, G. S. (2004). The process of ideological becoming. In A. F. Ball & S. W. Freedman (Eds.), Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning (pp. 317-331). Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sidorkin, A. M. (1999). Beyond discourse: Education, the self, and dialogue. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Spinoza, B. d., White, W. H., & Stirling, A. H. (1910). Ethic (4th ed.). London, New York [etc.]: H. Frowde.
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[1] Buchanan (1979) wrote, “If individual man is to be free, he is to be held accountable, he is to be deemed responsible for his actions. But at the same time he is allowed to take credit for his achievement. Who can claim credit for results that could have been predicted from nature? From а knowledge of his genetic endowment or his social environment, or both? But once man is conceived in the image of an artifact, who constructs himself through his own choices, he sheds the animalistically determined path of existence laid out for him by the orthodox economists’ model. А determined and programmed existence is replaced by the uncertain and exciting quest that life must be” (p. 110).
[2] As Hegel argued an individual “cannot define the goal of his action until he has acted…” (cited in Leontiev, 1981, p. 62).
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