This paper was submitted as part of my Doctoral Comprehensive exams December 1995. All text is copywrite D. Jason Nolan. If you want to use it or quote from it, please contact me.
[Transformative and Holistic Learning | CMC: Over Schooled and Under Educated | MUDs: Research into Educational Computer Mediated Communication | Index]
There are cultures where walking is not seen as traversing space but as pushing space under one's feet. (De Kerckhove, 1995, p. 34)
In relating my 'sub-specialization' to curriculum studies, I will make an argument for replacing curriculum studies with my 'sub-specialization' which I see as a continuum between Transformative and Holistic Learning (THL)(Miller, 1990; 1992; 1993; Sullivan, 1994). This move is based on the notion that the needs of our society has moved beyond the point where the Newtonian world view inherent in curriculum studies is sufficient. Taking a queue from Schwab (1969), I propose a synthetic eclectic of the individual and the cosmological based on the notion of chaos (dynamic systems and complexity) (Caine, 1994; Gleick, 1987; Prigogine, 1984) that forces the envelope of our postmodern society as the mechanism to instill curriculum with a sense of purpose.
Schwab's (1969) notion of an eclectic as "the arts by which unsystematic, uneasy, but usable focus on a body of problems is effected among diverse theories, each relevant in to the problems in a particular way" (p. 1) is, in a way, an appeal for an eclectic education; a recognition that "flight from the field" (pp. 3-4) would never return to the coop of the mechanistic world view that had been the influence on curriculum studies. Schwab implicitly outlines a chaotic curriculum when he looks for a sense of theory able to encounter this "complex whole which is other than a collection of unusable generalities" (p. 9).
Curriculum studies can never successfully implement change without addressing the fundamental problem within curriculum studies. This problem is that it has never extracted itself from the mire of scientism-the mechanistic Newtonian world view-which finds its place in curriculum through the ideas of Dewey and Bobbit (Jackson, 1992). The sciences themselves were lifted out by theories that allowed for new world views to develop (Kuhn's paradigm shifts), the most recent of which is dynamic systems or chaos theory. Education should follow the lead of science, or at least start to develop some of its own world views by incorporating itself within a broader world view. Necessary for this 'great leap forward' is a movement away from the administrative/mechanistic model of education (what Drake (1994) describes as a 'factory model'), inherited from Dewey and Bobbit (as well as Marx and Henry Ford no doubt), that will allow the reorientation of curriculum into a dance between individuals, communities, bioregions, extending to the cosmos. Such a reorientation can only come from a THL continuum because of its capacity to speak to the totality of human experience and learning in a manner that recognizes the infinitude of ways in which experience and learning can be made manifest in human lives. The idea of a continuum suggests an inclusion or melding (rather than melting) of psychological, individual, interpersonal, group, community, global, environmental, and cosmological perspectives on learning without privileging a specific segment.
THL works toward a new model of human able to determine its own place in a model of the cosmos; as part of this dynamic whole. This is done through work towards a new model of curriculum. In the present, curriculum is about the control of learning. Dewey wanted to know and control learning experiences; Tyler (1949) wanted to systematize them, Giroux (1992) wants to give the power to the individual at least insofar as knowing that you are controlled and trying to get some of that power. None of them are completely rethinking the entire social and conceptual foundations on which curriculum has built itself. But what does it take to at least envision something beyond the present context quickly described by these representative thinkers. THL has theoretical models for situating education within a cosmological perspective (Swimme, 1992), as well as practical models for curriculum development, implementation and evaluation in our existing milieu in Drake's Story Model for Curriculum Development (Caine, 1994; Drake, 1992).
Yes, I am temporarily putting aside the diversity of approaches to curriculum described by Dewey (1938; 1991 (originally 1910)) and later Eisner (1985) and Kliebard (Jackson, 1992), who describe curriculum directions and alternatives that still widen our understanding of what curriculum is and can do in our society. Almost all contemporary curriculum thinkers that I have encountered still think within the world that Dewey built. Dewey delineates choices between Traditional and Progressive education; Tyler gives us five principles, Connelly (1990) directs us towards the teacher and her self-reflective story, and Giroux wants to instill a critical awareness at all stages of the political discourse of education. But they all, in spite of this 'quick' description of their work, live in a world whose scientific method was described by Newton, and political framework mapped out by Marx. This is a world view which accepts the precepts of the market place, labour/capital conflicts, a primary administrative function for education and curriculum, and a mechanistic attitude towards the functioning of the educational machine within or along side the machines of society and industry (Saul, 1995). The ideas of contemporary curriculum thinkers are of value with respects to the micro-aspects of education, but they are built on a foundation that absorbs positive vibrations at their source. The foundation must change if their value is to be realized.
Science has provided the paradigm for curriculum since the beginning of contemporary conceptualizations of curriculum. A Newtonian world view of curriculum is far behind the sciences, of which the educational world spends so much time in emulation. From Newtonian, to relativistic, to quantum to dynamic (Chaotic), science and scientific understanding of the way in which the world works has grown. We in Curriculum Studies, however are still in the Nineteenth century, and this holds for postmodern discourses as it holds for the measurement and evaluation folks. Dewey, Tyler, Schwab, Giroux all rely on the continued existence of the mechanistic world in at least some part of their discourse. They all react against or work within, and take some varriation of the the present world/condition as a given. They do not teach to the next millennium.
Curriculum studies requires a school, administration or bureaucracy to function, or at the very least a form of authority to operate against. Even Patty Lather's "The Validity of Angels" (1995), defining the curriculum of in the empowerment of women living with HIV/AIDS, requires a monolithic imposing political structure against which her 'other' can grind itself into existence. It is what the critical aspect of curriculum studies (feminist, postmodern, post-structuralist, Critical Pedagogy) ignores, not what it does well that brings it into question as a nexus for curriculum issues.
One half of curriculum studies, probably best described by Dewey's term 'Progressive' seeks to humanistically accommodate the individual within the fold of our modern society. The other half speaks to sub-division and particularity, of a uniqueness that cannot be integrated. Though the latter's value is in giving voice and empowering individuals and 'minority' groups, both these positions are also unfortunately important the sustainance of a corporate (Saul, 1995), or what I have described as administrative/mechanistic, world view. By clearly defining everyone as either an adjusted participant in society, or as being the 'other' (by which the postmodern describes isolation from the communal; a communal that would protect us from manipulation by the corporate entities that pervade our world) we are all socialized or marginalized into contexts that precluded effective and meaningful negation of government and large corporate structures. And, while Critical Pedagogy speaks to empowering-giving voice to-those who live as 'other,' funding for government social and educational programs are cut. Critical Pedagogy does not speak to self-reliance and emancipation from government and corporations, but to demands for power from a government that can continue to marginalize the non-united social groups.
In States of Grace, Spretnak (1991) suggests that "in all the varieties of deconstructive postmodernism, groundlessness is a constant" (p. 241). She sees how the compartmentalization of power or voice decontextualizes experience beyond one's immediate situation. To Derrida, as the first contemporary thinker I ever encountered who presented the idea that language was alientating, "there is nothing outside the text" (Derrida, 1976, p. 158; Spretnak, 1991, p. 243). Despite the logic of this statement within his theoretical structures, his words depict a world in which we speak less to commonalties than to the particular. Such a world view stems from the Enlightenment and its appropriation, by the human mind, of all creation. Derrida echoes Bishop Berkeley's earlier anthropocentric world view: "The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived: the trees therefore are in the garden... no longer than while there is some body by to perceive them" (Berkeley, 1710, p.75). The discourse of Critical Pedagogy alienates the non-initiated by its exclusive and academic language, and it substitutes itself for metatheory (in an act of obscurantism) divorcing the eternal present from context; aborting any hope for praxis (Carr, 1986, p.34) through the dispersal of communal energy in particularities.
THL replaces the present Newtonian conceptual framework of curriculum studies with one that is chaotic (dynamic). This framework builds on the dynamic nature of cosmological, biological and sociological events, and makes a fundamental recognition of the interrelation of all things (Berry, 1988; Sahtouris, 1995 (Originally 1989); Spretnak, 1991). Curricularists (Caine, 1994; Drake, 1994) attempt to implement these notions within the existing system, but they fail due to its foundation in the Newtonian world view that purports a notion that all things are knowable through compartmentalization and observation, as codified by Dewey and Tyler.
THL represents a new eclectic substrate for curriculum studies upon which various existing and future discourses can be laid. THL does make reference to the meta-discourse of the unfolding of the cosmos because the universe is here and, unlike Bishop Berkeley or Derrida, it will continue to be here regardless of theories. The story of the universe (Swimme, 1992) from beginning to ourselves, and our self-reflective awareness of it, is a curriculum just waiting for implementation. It provides curricular frameworks for inclusivity without imposing a species derived meta-narrative (such as Derrida explodes) on individual or group experience, and it recognizes non-human elements in human experience .
Bookchin (1989), reminds us that "all ecological problems are social problems" and that our privileging of our present condition is as much a danger for education as it is for species facing extinction:
...is society itself a curse, a blight on life generally? Are we better for the new phenomenon called 'civilization' that seems to be on the point of destroying the natural world produced over millions of years of organic evolution? (p. 24)
Since our concept of education is based on a mechanistic rather than biocentric world view, we need to redirect our efforts to build a curriculum continuum from the consciousness to the cosmos exploring the myriad of ways that "we can make the world into a universal classroom" (Cayley, 1992, p. 73). A curriculum that recognizes the cyclical manifestation of patterning in life and learning; how small influences large; the impossibility of 'knowing' the actual, rather than apparent, impact of an action; that removes the school, and the teacher, from the nexus of learning is both unrealizable under present conditions and all the more necessary because of them.
My learning and teaching functions amid the paradigms of intentionality, task dedication and reflection; basic concepts by which the individual makes meaning of the world. These insights I have been learned from Critical Pedagogy as well as Dewey. They are the tools by which I can instill my curriculum with a sense of purpose. By purpose, I mean the renewal of a sense of context and meaning within a world view. This is not advocating a return to the anthropocentric, Newtonian sense of the primacy of human (primarily male) logic, reason, and rationality. Rather, purpose, under a THL world view, would place our species on an equal relation with all manifestations of the cosmos, and value our role as a self-reflective participant. THL provides curriculum with a sense of purpose, a story, as technological advances explode our definition of what constitutes an educational context, and government cutback constrict traditional learning settings. I want to use THL to authenticate non-school learning equal to that of the classroom and the hegemony of the school board. To do this, the experience of education needs to adopt, as a working mantra, Illich's (Cayley, 1992; Illich, 1970) dictum that we are over schooled and under educated.
This deschooling attitude is not a curriculum of compromise when it comes to existing systems, but rather a subversion of curriculum, a feint that marginalizes existing curriculum, not by demanding an alternative but through making the alternative thrive while the existing system rots. THL does not exclude or privilege one type of learning over another; it would not actively oppose schools. THL recontextualizes school learning within the individual/community needs from its previous administrative/factory context. It works against the primacy of the educational system as it stands; towards the "disestablishment of schools" (Illich, 1970, p. 41) as the only place where learning is validated.
THL is constructionist (incorporating ideas of intentionality and task dedication) in its attitudes toward learning (Bruckman, 1994; Papert, 1991). Constructionism,
asserts that learning is an active process, in which people actively construct knowledge from their experiences in the world. ...people construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally-meaningful projects. (Bruckman, 1995)
THL combines constructionism with the notions derived from complex systems theory which recognizes that "a moderately simple set of procedures can lead to the spontaneous emergence of a significantly higher degree of order," and that these procedures can occur at any part of educational experience: "the relationships at different layers of the school seem to be self-similar as well as being interconnected" (Caine, 1994, p. 2).
To me, learning is about knowing yourself and your context, not about what we have called throughout my life curriculum. In my mind, Dewey's curriculum hoops (Dewey, 1938), at best linear or circular, become Drake's Story Model (1992) of cyclical journeys that are both mythic and postmodern in the THL curriculum continuum. Her notion of the Story Model is presented as a series of repeating journeys or coils of evolving growth or manifestation, not just for the student, but also the reflective teacher, and the educational context. In fact, Drake's model (below) fits equally well as a paradigm for individual growth as it does for the paths of the unfolding of the cosmos itself.
To develop curriculum and the necessary learning spaces in which a truly THL community may manifest itself, the student/teacher/researcher must work from within his or her community of learning and experience. For me, this is the Internet. My community has grown since I first started teaching on the 'net in 1989 to the point where this is as much my learning space as others find in the forest, city street, family dwelling, or even classroom. I am drawn to its anarchy, the access to unmediated learning environments (unmediated by teachers) in Multi User Simulated Environments, known as MUDs (Curtis, 1992), and communication forums, and multiple forms of communication and interactions-synchronous, asynchronous, polysynchronous-that call for the participants to make meaning, ask questions, share experiences in any form they choose in order to gain any value from the experience. Novak's (1991) conceptualization of CyberSpace as "liquid architecture in embodied fiction" (p. 227) reveals the constructionist and narrative possibilities in the medium. As a recent OISE graduate told me on the eve of her graduation, I should work towards a community of praxis in which the participants 'grind' off one another in a learning process as mutuality subjective members of a community, instead of grinding against the educational machinery (Dorey, 1995); like the slow grind of the glacier down the mountain. And both the Internet, and the Virtual Reality (VR) to follow, have the same fundamental feature; according to Jaron Lanier, the 'creator' of VR, "the essence of virtual reality is that it shares" (De Kerckhove, 1995, p. 46).
Cyberspace, regardless of how it is manifest, is not a cure for scientism. It is, however, a medium sufficiently new, and inherently chaotic, which has all the tools necessary for relocalizing education beyond the ken of our present system. Using VR, in presently available forms, I can develop curriculum that is not just 'student-centred' but replaces the school itself with a learning community of student that is self-defined and sustaining. Such a curriculum as is presently developing through project like MIT's Moose-Crossing (Bruckman, 1994) supplants the teacher's role as the task master, the time keeper, the score keeper, judge, jury, and apologist for the faceless administration behind her, and relocalizes her to the periphery as an experienced, professional, trusted resource to whom a student may turn. My dissertation project called Holon which will be the focus of another answer in these exams, will be based on Moose-Crossing's software design concept, but will compromise, providing the curriculum tools to the classroom teacher so that she may help students develop the skills necessary for successful participation in Holon and any other text-based VR project. To quote a paper written to explore the research possibilities of VR:
Multi User Simulated Environments... allow for not only synchronous and non-synchronous communications, but the creation of and interaction with virtual objects in a shared communication space.... They provide students with the opportunity for an integrated curriculum experience, combining computer programming/literacy with narrative and informal text-based language skills acquisition, and peer to peer learning. Within the fold of transformative/holistic learning.... MUSE create an educational context where students can explore stories/narratives of self, society, bioregion with peers from around the globe.
There is an incompatibility with respect to the ideas of global access and the barriers to this curriculum orientation. Barriers in the form of inability to participate due to tradition, laws, cultural restrictions, in this case due to the ascension of the corporate/mechanistic mind set that opposes learning in favour of accreditation. Also, there are problems with the bypassing of existing education, accreditation, employability, basic needs of students, community commitment to curriculum, manipulation of this approach by groups with restrictivist agendas.
However, the point is that we should not be working towards an ameliorated curriculum of compromise, nor should we be working towards meeting self-described needs of existing social groups. Some have already suggested that the socialization process renders individuals incapable of conceiving of true alternatives to existing conditions. This is not a problem, since the THL alternative that has been presented here will only be offered, not in place of existing learning, but along side it; not to supplement but to supplant.
THL is not intended as just another 'flavour of the month' that will, after its moment in the sun, melt back into line with other curricular flavours. It represents a necessary and fundamental paradigm shift of the foundations of curriculum which provides an opportunity for use to escape our current educational bondage. If THL is not successful, some other manifestation of it must.
References
Berkeley, G. (1710). A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. In B. Hepworth (Ed.), The Rise of Romanticism (pp. 63-79). Manchester: Carcanet New Press.
Berry, T. (1988). The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club.
Bookchin, M. (1989). Remaking Society. Montréal: Black Rose.
Bruckman, A. (1994). MOOSE Crossing: Creating a Learning Culture. [ftp://media.mit.edu/pub/asb/papers/moose-crossing-proposal.ps].
Bruckman, A., and Mitchel Resnick (1995). The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism and Professional Community. Convergence, 1(1), [http://asb.www.media.mit.edu/people/asb/convergence.html].
Caine, G., and Renate N. Caine (1994). Patterns of Wholeness: Can Complexity and Systems Theory Help Us Understand Restructuring of Schools. AERA paper, New Orleans.
Carr, W. &. S. K. (1986). Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research. London: The Falmer Press.
Cayley, D. (1992). Ivan Illich: In Conversation. Toronto: Anansi.
Connelly, F. M. &. D. J. C. (1990). Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry. Educational Researcher(June-July), 2-14.
Curtis, P. (1992), Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities. [http://www.oise.on.ca/~jnolan/muds/about_muds/pavel.html].
De Kerckhove, D. (1995). The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Toronto: Summerville House.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dewey, J. (1938). Education and Experience. New York: Macmillan.
Dewey, J. (1991 (originally 1910)). How We Think. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
Dorey, T. (1995). Personal Correspondence.
Drake, S. M. (1992). Developing an Integrated Curriculum Using the Story Model. Toronto: O.I.S.E. Press.
Drake, S. M. (1994). Confronting the Ultimate Learning Outcome: We Teach Who We Are. AREA paper, New Orleans.
Durkheim, E. (1956). Education and Sociology. (Fox, Sherwood, D., Trans.). New York: Free Press.
Eisner, E. W. (1985). The Educational Imagination. New York: MacMillan.
Giroux, H. A. (1992). Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge.
Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making A New Science. Markham: Penguin.
Illich, I. (1970). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.
Jackson, P. (1992). Handbook of Research on Curriculum. New York: MacMillan.
Lather, P. (1995). The Validity of Angels: Interpretive and Textual Strategies in Researching the Lives of Women with HIV/AIDS. Qualitative Inquiry, (In Press), 1-39.
Miller, J. P., J.R. Bruce Cassie, & Susan M. Drake (1990). Holistic Learning: A Teacher's Guide to Integrated Studies. Toronto: O.I.S.E. Press.
Miller, J. P. (1992). Toward a Spiritual Curriculum. Holistic Education Review(Spring), 43-50.
Miller, J. P. (1993). The Holistic Curriculum. Toronto: O.I.S.E. Press.
Novak, M. (1991). Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace. In M. Benedikt (Ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps (pp. 225-254). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Papert, S. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In I. Harel & S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.
Prigogine, I. &. I. S. (1984). Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam.
Sahtouris, E. (1995 (Originally 1989)). Gaia: The Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos. Toronto: University of Toronto Bookstores.
Saul, J. R. (1995). The Unconscious Civilization. Toronto: Anansi.
Schwab, J. J. (1969). The Practical: A Language for Curriculum. School Review, 1-23.
Schwab, J. J. (1971). The Practical: Arts of Eclectic. School Review, 493-542.
Spretnak, C. (1991). States of Grace. San Francisco: Harper San Franciso.
Sullivan, E. (1994). The Dream Drives the Action: Bringing Education into Ecozoic Time. Draft.
Swimme, B. &. T. B. (1992). The Universe Story. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Tyler, R. W. (1949). Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.