Class notes, S D15

Daniel Kahneman, at TEDtalks: experiencing v. remembering self

The question of the self as a teacher - 'what is my pedagogical nature?' (van Manen).  What are my biases and cognitive errors?  How do I filter out parts of my experience and allow others in? What contexts do I occupy?  What are my intentions (my goals and pursuits)? What are my intensions (the things I attend to and of which I am aware)?

The experiencing self lives 'in' the moment.  The remembering self tells stories about the moments it has lived. The experiencing self is lost, voiceless, ignored by the self constructed through memory.  And, as our earlier study of the fallibility of memory explains, how reliable is that self?

We remember experiences through the changes that take place, significant moments of the experience and the way experiences end. We have difficulty accepting the complexity of life - how willing are we to inquire into our manifold 'meaning questions'?  We have difficulty not focusing on those significant moments (the focusing illusion), taking them as representative of the larger whole. As Bracey reminds us to ask, do they?

Data, information, experienced comes through a continuum between completely raw to completely processed.  If consciousness is itself a filter, then our perceptions are always already processed; critical thought - problematizing experience - demonstrates that ongoing processing never ends.

The teaching cycle and the reflection cycle are, thus, the same.  We teach ('unwittingly' per Schon); we reflect (multiple sources; multiple perspectives; position-taking, empathy, examining validity claims); we plan (the best of what we know now); we teach; we reflect; we plan ...

2011 TIMSS and PISA scores

A great post on the latest standardized test scores, by Yong Zhao of UO.

He does go the full bracey (are the differences in scores statistically significant), though he breaks down their meaning (and practical significance) in user-friendly language.

Class notes, M D3

Teachers,

"A reflection"

Teacher Research as

• phenomenology - What am I experiencing?
• epistemology - How do I know I know what I know?
• ethnography - What is it like to be them?

Mr. Palomar

As an introduction to the book and its contribution to your experience in educational research, let me outline much of what you did great work articulating yesterday (with much thanks to Dr. Phil Carspecken).

Observing a wave (1.1.1)
In this first chapter, Calvino explores sense perception of the physical world, with social and cultural factors backgrounded as much as possible.  All we basically have in this chapter is Mr. Palomar and "waves."  You neatly noticed that we cannot escape culture, we can only background it.  It still operates by supplying categories, words, and analogies for sense perception.
Although Calvino could have chosen any physical object or phenomenon to investigate for the purposes of analyzing sense perception, he picked a rather difficult one: waves forming near an ocean shore and moving to break on a beach.  Why start his book on experience here?

One possible reason is a belief, on the part of Calvino, that an examination of wave perception will illuminate common structures of all sense perception, including and more significantly the taken-for-granted features of the more common.  By focusing on the most purely visual entry in the entire book, Calvino helps call attention to horizon of factors that constitute the objective, visual world.  Or as we might understand it, “making the invisible visible."  The difficulties involved in examining perception of waves are simply easier to see than these same difficulties present when examining a bowl, pencil, rock and other physical objects that display consistent shape.  Here, then, he allows
the reader to explore the phenomenological narrative of experience, that of Mr. Palomar.
From this perspective, the ocean symbolizes how reality outside of human knowledge and experience is pressed into various shapes and patterns by the act of perception. When we look, meaning comes through the schema that orders experience in our minds.  The ocean, for Mr. Palomar, is like Kant’s notion of the “thing in-itself”; something we do not have direct access to because it is already interpreted by the time we are conscious of it.  Structures of perception filter experience through language, culture, socio-economic and educational background -  structures located within the apparatus of perceiving rather than in the objects themselves.  Here again, we hear echoes of van Manen, reminding of the responsibility to "make thoughtful sense of the meaning the child's experience has for the child as well as for the adult."

Waves may be taken to represent any perceptual object that arises from the interaction of our perceptual apparatus with the world around us.  The ways in which we perceive waves reveal processes and structures involved in all object perception.  Like Tiffany thinking like her daughter, how we see functions from what we know.

What are some of the things that emerge from Mr. Palomar's efforts that might throw light upon all sense perception?

Notice that Mr. Palomar, like all of us, is capable of perceiving waves unproblematically.  It is only when he tries consciously to perceive a wave, as some sort of well defined object, that questions and problems arise.   It is only when he restricts his holistic modes of experience in order to really focus on just his visual perceptions that difficulties come up.  The whole thrust of phenomenological philosophy made use of this sort of thing: common and unproblematical perceptions do become problematical and interesting when one subjects the experience of perception to careful scrutiny.  This happens whether one investigates how we perceive grass, stones, trees, ideas, emotions, memories, music, waves ...., anything and everything!

Waves, like all sense objects, are "seen" as foregrounds within a horizon of contrasts: other waves, the shore, the sky.  All objects of perception appear against a background of apperception.  Apperception means, ap-perception or "perceived-with".  The apperceptual background is necessarily perceived with the perceptual foreground because the contrast between foreground and background is necessary to give form.  Waves are more difficult to see as discrete objects partly because their backgrounds often shift to disrupt the foreground over time.

The holistic dimension to sense perceptions is not directly perceived but must be arrived at through a reflection.  Or, as van Manen writes, “And yet it only through the quest of fundamental reflection that we can become more fully who we are ...”  Analysis disrupts the taken-for-granted; per William James, "with critical philosophy, havoc is made of everything."

This line bears more general philosophical lesson to be learned from Mr. Palomar's study of waves on page 6: "If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation, looking at waves would be a very restful exercise for him and could save him from neurasthenia, heart attack, and gastric ulcer.  And it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world's complexity by reducing it to its simplest mechanism."

Science has basically been an effort to reduce the universe to its simplest mechanisms.  It has been an effort to do so that begins with sense experiences.  It must take certain types of sense experience to be unproblematical.  Waves would not be chosen as a beginning place for the assumptions made by most scientists regarding unproblematical sense experience.  But the exercise of examining waves could be used by a phenomenologist or by a postmodern philosopher to cast doubt on all sense experience and thus put the project of science into question.  The point is not to negate science, but rather to recast the significance of scientific theory and relativize it somewhat.

By staring at waves, the structures taken for granted in common sense experience all of a sudden appear to be problems.  Sense experience is revealed to be based on structures that may have as much to do with the nature of consciousness or culture as the nature of a reality existing independently of our knowledge and experience.  This insight has informed several schools of philosophy.  Calvino articulates the insight on page 7: "Is this perhaps the real result that Mr. Palomar is about to achieve?  To make the waves run in the opposite direction, to overturn time, to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits?"

But Mr. Palomar is unable to take this insight any further.  Perhaps it is because he hoped to perceive the truth he sought, rather than find it in some non-perceptual way.  But what other way could there be?  At this point in the novel, sense perception remains the paradigm of unproblematical, certain knowledge for Mr. Palomar: thoughts can only direct more efforts at "directly perceiving".  And these efforts come to no avail.  Perception is found to be un-graspably complex to Mr. Palomar and yet no other type of experience is revealed to promise a more certain type of knowledge.

For our purposes, then, is Mr. Palomar limited in the kinds of data he can collect and limited in the forms of analysis in which to understand the data?  Does too much of the subjective and normative lies in the background?  Is he, perhaps like you, yet not ready to deal with the data fully?

Comments are discussion are welcome

Value-Added; a start

Teachers,

I have rounded up a few articles that inform you about 'value-added' systems of evaluation.  One point to clarify, though.  I was slightly off in my general description of the process (last night in class), to save time.  Students' scores compared to averaged students' scores is not the metric; changes in students' test scores are compared to average changes in students' test scores.  So, the rate and direction of change is compared to a mean rate of change.

Sorry to muddy an already murky concept.  As you read, feel free to email questions (or submit them to Ask Us Anything).  Thanks.

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Study backs value-added measures (LA Times, with analysis by NEPR, a 'think tank')

Study analyzes efficacy of value-added (Brookings, another 'think tank')

Study looks at effect of 'successful' teachers on students (NYTimes, with analysis by independent researcher)

Class notes, Monday, N19

Teachers,

First, a few research items:

• An example of "post-hoc storytelling" (i.e. confirmation bias?) from Neuroskeptic
• Here is a particularly insightful look at how statistics can be gamed.
• Here is a more subtle approach.

On to Mr. Palomar.  Some background?

Author Italo Calvino presents Mr. Palomar's experiences as a combination of three dimensions

• 1 - the visual or the objective world that multiple people have access to at the same time
• 2 - the cultural or the normative/evaluative world that structures conscious awareness
• 3 - the philosophical or subjective world in which only each person has access

Here is an example.  Kelsie walks into room 101 before class begins.  She is freezing cold.  Andrew, who is already in the room, wears a jacket.  Kelsie asks if she can "turn the air down."  Before Andrew replies, what does he know about,

• 1 - is Kelsie speaking to him?  what happens if the air is turned "down"?  is it physically possible for Kelsie to "turn the air down"? and other issues that relate to the objective world of which both Kelsie and Andrew participate; are they talking about the same thing?
• 2 - is it allowed by the GSE for a candidate to "turn the air down"?  does one candidate need consult with another before taking actions on the room conditions?  what norms guide Andrew's actions toward another candidate or a woman? and other issues related to the normative world that underlies the way Andrew and Kelsie experiences the world of others
• 3 - what does it mean to Andrew and to Kelsie "to turn the air down"?  Is this a question of temperature? one of the white noise of the air conditioner?  is Kelsie sincere and/or serious in her request?  is Kelsie asking Andrew for permission? does Andrew respond to Kelsie in ways shaped by prior experience between them? and other issues that relate to their subjective worlds, or what Kelsie experiences but Andrew does not (and vice versa)

A simple question between two people has a cascade of possible meaning.  The question is simple only if all participants agree on the conditions which make the question simple. These are the validity claims in an argument, statement or question.  Critical ethnography, of the kind you will partake in your research and of which Mr. Palomar undergoes, examines these claims.  It starts with the recognition that communication is a process of negotiated meaning.  To reach understanding, participants - Andrew and Kelsie in the above example - must agree to all the claims made by a statement by constructing a world of shared meaning, before action is possible.  Otherwise, cognitive errors, faulty assumptions, misread intentions and other forms of miscommunication increase the risk of misunderstanding.

Think now of the possible meanings pregnant in at that moment.  One perspective could be that Andrew, having spent the day in a room sweltering at 80 degrees, is delighted about to be in such a cool place.  His students were exceptionally loud this day, and the speaker system broke its volume control so every loudspeaker message came in at 11.  Andrew is delighted to have the consistent low drone of the air conditioner drown out peaks of sound around him.  His subjective experience varies widely from Kelsie's. The simple question sits on the nexus of a horizon of possible meanings.  Understanding the explicit meanings, by examining the three dimensions of validity claims present in the question, takes effort.

Think now of a teacher and student.  Every statement given or question asked by the teacher and student  has conditions that make it true.  These relate to the objective or visual conditions of the statement (what exactly is being stated or asked?), the subjective or philosophical conditions of each participant (what does each think and feel about the statement or question? what might the other think or feel about the statement or question?  how sincere is each party?) and the normative or cultural conditions of each conditions (what background information or culturally relevant meanings determine how each participant makes sense of the statement or question).  In order to restore shared meanings, teacher and student must position-take with the other - try to understand how the other comes at the statement or question.

Here we can recall van Manen's claim about the "asymmetry" in a pedagogic relationship, and a heavy dose of your learnings from Equity:

• Should a teacher assume that all students share all the conditions inherent in the validity claims of her experiences?
• Should a teacher demand that all students learn to accept the conditions underlying her validity claims?
• Regarding the meaning of a situation, what does it mean for the teacher to have a larger responsibility in the relationship?

Mr. Palomar gives us an example of a perhaps more foundational question: what does it require for a teacher research to examine the meaning questions of her practice?

Thanks

November 10, Class Notes

Signal v. noise: "Our ability to tease the signal from the noise has not grown nearly as fast. As a result, we have plenty of data but lack the ability to extract truth from it and to build models that accurately predict the future that data portends ... we are fooled into thinking that random patterns are meaningful; we build models that are far more sensitive to our initial assumptions than we realize; we make approximations that are cruder than we realize; we focus on what is easiest to measure rather than on what is important; we are overconfident; we build models that rely too heavily on statistics, without enough theoretical understanding; and we unconsciously let biases based on expectation or self-interest affect our analysis."

Peer review:
why do it?
what can it do?
what can I get from it?
responsibility of the reviewer?

advantages include:
practice questioning
gaining new perspectives, advice on our writing
potential for self-reflection and analysis
learn about new styles for communicating
adopting the teacher perspective (how to give helpful criticism)
form of assessments
find out what others in the field are thinking

concerns include:
worrying about how comments will be received
uncomfortable
need tact and thoughtfulness

Bracey reminders:

• show me the data
• do the math
• are groups/situations comparable? (the value of context/ecology of schools)
• beware simple explanation for complex phenomena
• correlations are not causations (what else might account for the outcomes?)
• ask 'so what?'

Statistical v. practical significance - p <.05
Even if a study is proven effective, is it worth implementing?

Identity claims

Validity claims

• objective (visual)
• subjective (philosophical)
• normative (cultural)

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For our next class, please read the first three episodes of Mr. Palomar ("Mr. Palomar at the beach").   Some suggestions to answer the question,"how should I read Mr. Palomar?" follow.  Please contact me for further in depth discussion.

Focus on how validity claims and truth conditions structure the experience of Mr. Palomar.  Think of his escapade as data gathering and reflection on the data he gathers.  Why does he find what he does?  Consider what conditions - subjective and normative - lead him to see an objective condition.  There will be a constant interplay between which validity claims are backgrounded (tacit, taken-for-granted, implicit) and the conditions that lead Mr. Palomar to meaning.  Help the class poke around with that process to get inside his understanding of the scene.

Focus on the similarity between what Mr. Palomar experiences and your experience in the classroom.  Granted, the comparison will not be exact.  Yet the struggles he has to make sense of his experience do mirror in some way the struggles you may have in coming to understand your teaching.  Italo gifts him with a talent for problematizing his experience.  That skill plays out in every entry.  He turns what might otherwise seem ordinary into a cascading set of questions that fuel his thoughts on the data before him and of which he participates.  He is the ultimate example of a participant observer, making sense of his setting as he participates in it.  Echoes perk up here to

• van Manen: "... tactful acting I demonstrate unwittingly what I can do ... thoughtful reflection I discover what I can do ... my pedagogical nature ..." and to
• Schon: "... they must plunge into the doing, and try to educate themselves before they know what it is they're trying to learn ..."

Remember, the reading is structured to enable you all to make sense of research analysis.  The book is a vehicle for bringing out complexity, of making the invisible visible. What do you learn about perception from each entry?  What rings true in the questions Mr. Palomar asks and the situation his perceptions put him in?  How does examining Mr. Palomar in each entry alter how you process the experience in schools?  What now will you look for or how will you look?

Third Critique Editorial Teams

Teachers,

For your final article critique, you will be part of an editorial team.  Before your writing can be submitted to me (sent 'to print'), it must meet approval from the other members of your group.  When a finished critique comes to me it will have the meet the standards of excellence (why limit yourselves to 'proficiency') of the entire team.  In other words, each separate paper is, in a sense, a group production.

This process replicates how peer review works, more or less, in refereed journals.  As the editors of an issue, you will play the role of determining what writing you feel is worthy of submission.  I look forward to both your work and the discussion of the process.

Here are the teams:
Jessica - Corrie - Jeremy - Zach

Andrew - Kelsie - Rachel - Aimee

Jay - Jacob - Kelly


Please direct all questions and comments to me as they arise.  Thanks.

Class notes, M O29

Teachers,

Some thoughts and questions on our class tonight:

Bracey:
When is using the mean appropriate?  The median?  The range?
How do you know if groups, and the conditions of their learning, are comparable?

What do the statistics from assessments really tell us?  What else must a teacher include in order to get better interpretation of the data?

To answer Corrie question: School leaders are not 'stupid' for using standardized measures as evaluators of teachers.  They are efficient and frugal.  Tests have what is called 'face validity;' on their face, most people accept them as valid.  And, in a crude sort of way, they are.  Our discussion in class concerned the validity and reliability of their inferential statistics.  Most people do not (and can not) pay attention to inferential statistics.

Observations:
Eric Fischel, "Year of the drowned dog" - explanation

Fredric Remington, "Fight for the water hole" - explanation

When observing, do we impose a narrative upon a scene?
Is it possible to observe without judgment, or interpretation?
How does a new teacher both trust her growing instinct, yet remain skeptical and inquisitive into why she does what she does?

Class notes S O20

Teachers,

Notes and questions from today's class:

How do you move from should to do?
What moves knowledge into action?

What data/information about our teaching can we collect and analyze?
What are the contextual factors of our teaching for which that data has meaning?

What are our goals, objectives, aims, ends, philosophies (what do I want to achieve, to happen, to be learned)?
What effort am I willing to apply to reach my objectives?
If I am not reaching them, do I change my action or have  I changed my beliefs?

How do I change from a judgment stance to one of inquiry and reflection?

What keeps me from asking "what in the world is going on?"
How do I turn from seeking solutions to problems, to seeking better understand about what happened to know what problem to address (what are meaning problems)?

How much of the contextual factors do I need to understanding before I have 'enough' understanding to act/decision?

How often do I take the effort to reflect on what did happen?
What a claim valid (what leads to mutual understanding in communication)?
Do we share the same objective world (are we talking about the same thing)?
Do we share the same subjective world (do we mean the same thing)?
Do we share the same normative world (do base our actions on the same principles and norms)?

When does an experience and anecdote represent the general reality?

Class notes, S O6

Teachers,

Some questions that arose during our class this past Saturday.  Look for a set of posts related to the articles in the next few days.  Please share your thoughts, if they add to the learning.

Thanks.

article critiques

• What is the conversation in this area?  What are the current norms, expectation and accepted methodologies and evidentiary criteria?
• To whom is the research directed?  What are the expectations of readers of this journal?  How difficult is it to get published in this journal?  How does that level of ease or difficult affect the standards of evidence?
• What can I learn about this area?  How can the research change my assumptions, schema and understandings?
• I am reviewing the idea or the research on the idea?
• Is the research deductive (does it start with a belief and find evidence for that belief)?  Is the research inductive (does it start with the evidence and ground up to a more general theory about the collected data)?  Is the author an analyst of the data or an advocate for an idea?
• Do authors attempt to generalize their findings (universally true, true for all regardless of any context)?
• Do the authors attempt to prove/validate a theory or do they intend an exploration of a phenomenon?
• Do the authors attempt to make a policy recommendation or do they advise more research?  Does the population of participants support their intent?

data gathering

• Attention matters; how narrowly should I focus?  What do I miss?
• How much control do I have over my focus and attention?  How can I become more aware of what I am aware? How do I know I know what I know?
• Humans are pattern detectors; is what we perceive really there?  What do we ignore, miss, make invisible in order to detect that pattern?
• Do we detect a pattern because our identity demands it?  Are we willing to allow our worlds to be rocked?
• How do find the balance between focusing on the context and investigating the margins?
• How do we make the invisible visible?
• What assumptions do we make about another's experience?  To what extent do I attempt to position-take with that other person in order to understand their experience?
• What is working for me?  Why do I think so?  In other words, it 'works' to do what?

Bracey, chapters 1 and 2 for S O20

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"Position-taking" - the empathic and active self-distancing of our own feelings to see through the experience of another.  If, as van Manen claims, we are "fated to never be transparent to ourselves" and we need to "make thoughtful sense of the meaning the child's experience has for the child as well as for our adult view," how can we tell when our efforts at position-taking result in a confabulation of the other's point of view or a confirmation of what we expect and want the other's point of view to be?

John  Lloyd, tedtalk on the Invisible

Jonathan Haidt, on intuition and reasoning (from the NYTimes, S O7): "We effortlessly and intuitively “see that” something is true, and then we work to find justifications, or “reasons why,” which we can give to others.  Both processes are crucial for understanding belief and persuasion. ... And intuitions are rarely stronger than when they are part of our partisan identities ... But I never said that reasons were irrelevant. I said that they were no match for intuition, and that they were usually a servant of one’s own intuitions. Therefore, if you want to persuade someone, talk to the elephant first. Trigger the right intuitions first. "

Reading question: van Manen and Schon

Teachers,

As hoped for and promised, though a bit tardy.  As you read each article, please keep these questions as a guide:

Max van Manen, "Beyond assumptions"

• Why does van Manen begin his paper with the claim that there are no agreed upon techniques and procedures for action research?
• van Manen seeks "a more self-reflective human science-oriented form of action research while restoring the pedagogical quality of our relation to children." What does this imply about the forms of research typically undertaken by teachers?  Why would he want it to change?
• What impact does his claim that "theory enlightens practice after the action has occurred" have on self-reflection?
• What are "meaning questions," in contrast to improving pedagogy or problem-solving in classrooms?
• How might you investigate a teacher's "pedagogical thoughtfulness and pedagogical tact"?
• What might van Manen mean by "the way we make thoughtful sense of the meaning the child's experience has for the child as well as for our adult view"?
• What are the implications for data collection if "the most captivating stories exactly those that help us to understand better what is most common, most taken-for-granted, and what concerns us most ordinarily and directly in our tactful pedagogical interactions with children "?
• How are we to understand our decision-making and teaching practice if we are "not completely transparent to ourselves"?
• How can the research process enable you to find your "pedagogical nature"?

Donald Schön, "Educating the reflective practitioner"

• How does Schön argue for indeterminacy in professional practice?  Why does he do so?
• How does "technical rationality" contrast with "reflection-in-action"?
• What steps would you take to answer the question “what it is it that we do when we do what we do"?
• What kind of method and rigor is required for "reflection on reflection-in-action"?

Facts do not enlighten

Teachers,

An op-ed from the NYTimes confirms the view that reason is not a tool of truth-seeking, but rather one of argumentation.  Even 'facts' get disregarded: "You might expect that people’s views would soften and that divisions between groups would get smaller. That is not what usually happens. On the contrary, people’s original beliefs tend to harden and the original divisions typically get bigger. Balanced presentations can fuel unbalanced views ... What explains this? The answer is called “biased assimilation,” which means that people assimilate new information in a selective fashion. When people get information that supports what they initially thought, they give it considerable weight. When they get information that undermines their initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it."

Biased assimilation acts to filter out what we neither expect nor want to hear.  Unfortunately, the 'wanting' occurs well below the level of cognitive awareness; we may not realize how selective our perceptive and cognitive processes are.

Fallibility of memory

Now, from the NYTimes, this article supports some of our previous reading and work on reflection.  Some choices quotes:

• Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story.
• Why is a witness’s account so often unreliable? Partly because the brain does not have a knack for retaining many specifics and is highly susceptible to suggestion. “Memory is weak in eyewitness situations because it’s overloaded,” said Barbara Tversky, a psychology professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York ... Hundreds of studies have cataloged a long list of circumstances that can affect how memories are recorded and replayed, including the emotion at the time of the event, the social pressures that taint its reconstruction, even flourishes unknowingly added after the fact ...While most of us tend to think memory works like a video recorder, it is actually more like a grainy slide show. Lost details, including imaginary ones, often are added later. 
• Sometimes we miss details because we weren’t paying attention, but sometimes we are concentrating too hard on something else. Nothing is as obvious as it seems.
• Whether in a story told in a courtroom or at a dinner table, the mind is sometimes prone to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy. Brain scans taken as people “recall” something they did not actually see have many similarities to the brain dwelling on an actual memory ... “That’s one of the striking findings of the studies,” said Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard. Whether an event is real or imagined, “many structures involved in the coding and retrieving are the same" ... All this makes sense, he said, when you consider the purpose of memory. He and his colleagues believe that memory is designed not just to keep track of what has happened, but to offer a script for something that might.
• Because the brain uses memories for mental dress rehearsal, we are not wired to retain every facet of an event, scientists say. We don’t have to. A general framework is all that’s necessary to keep from getting lost, or find food, or know what to do when a storm is coming.

Class notes, M S17

Teachers,

Below you will find a distilled reflection on the ideas we discussed in class.  Please contribute more if I have filtered out some crucial point.

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Making the invisible visible - paying attention to those elements we might normally filter out of attention; to do so, we might need to make the visible invisible - consciously ignoring the habitual and obvious

The critical eye of observation - noticing changes, differences, newness; do we need to consciously focus in order for our critical eye to operate?

Expectations, conditionings, use - all play a part in how we filter attention; they lead us to make connections, to prime us to things certain ways and to activate certain schema

Our perspective is shaped by physical properties, everything from what space we inhabit in a location to our own feelings, emotions and perspectives (this is the heart of phenomenology - for we experience in full, though our perspective is but one dimension of the innumerable ways of seeing).  Our backgrounds, our desires and intentions, who we are at any given time (and who we expect to be and who we expect others to expect us to be) and what we think the situation demands all prime us to attend to various things in diverse ways.

The key is to be aware of how we are responding to an environment, to a phenomenon, of our biases and expectations.  Only be paying attention to how and to what we do pay attend are we able to exercise more authenticity in our observations and experiencing of a situation.

You raised a flurry of terrific points about your observation process.  These include:

• analyzing while data collecting (Jay)
• how expectations, conditioning shape attention (Kelly)
• direct attention in an abnormal way - noticing the implicit and taken-for-granted (Rachel)
• pre-set patterns 'prime' us to notice things, even if they do not exist (Kelsie)
• emotions may over-determine perceptions (Jessica)
• noticing how the atmosphere/vibe affects you (Jacob)
• seeking out information/patterns rather than noticing them as they arise (Aimee)
• focusing on things that disturb or challenged expectations (Corrie)
• paying attention to others can make us reflect on ourselves (Andrew)

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Notes from the readings worth considering:

memory reconsolidation 

• the act of remembering changes the memory
• 'misremembering until it made sense' - making our memories cohere
• "Based on his research, Bartlett concluded that the standard view of human memory – it’s a vast repository of stable facts – was completely wrong. “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces,” he wrote. “It is an imaginative reconstruction.”"
• "Reconsolidation constantly alters our recollections, as we rehearse nostalgias and suppress pain. We repeat stories until they’re stale, rewrite history in favor of the winners, and tamp down our sorrows with whiskey. “Once people realize how memory actually works, a lot of these beliefs that memory shouldn’t be changed will seem a little ridiculous,” Nader says. “Anything can change memory. This technology isn’t new. It’s just a better version of an existing biological process.”"
• from Sean Carroll: "We tend to assume that the brain must be like a computer — when we want to access a memory, we simply pull up a “file” stored somewhere on the brain’s hard drive, and take a look at its contents. But that’s not it at all. Schacter believes that pieces of data relevant to any particular memory — times, images, sounds — are stored piecemeal in different parts of the brain. When we want to “remember” something, another part of the brain assembles these pieces into a (hopefully) coherent picture. It’s like running a new simulation every time you need a memory, and it’s the same thing we do when we try to imagine some event in the future.  Everyone has heard that memories can be unreliable, but many of us don’t appreciate the extent to which that is true. It’s not the case that “real” memories are stored once and for all deep in the darkest recesses of the brain, and it’s just a matter of digging them up. False memories — conjured from any number of sources, from gradual embellishment to direct suggestion by others — seem precisely as vivid and real to us as accurate memories do. For a good reason: the brain uses the same tools to construct the memory from the available raw materials. A novel and a history book look the same on the printed page."
• from The Guardian: "Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it's time to recall the past. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person's head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else's viewing. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like ...  In storyboarding an autobiographical memory, the brain combines fragments of sensory memory with a more abstract knowledge about events, and reassembles them according to the demands of the present. The memory researcher Martin Conway has described how two forces go head to head in remembering. The force of correspondence tries to keep memory true to what actually happened, while the force of coherence ensures that the emerging story fits in with the needs of the self, which often involves portraying the ego in the best possible light ... How many more of our memories are a story to suit the self? There can be no doubt that our current emotions and beliefs shape the memories that we create. "

adaptation; or, 'why we tune out' - For all of our senses, when a certain input is constant we gradually get used to it

believing is seeing

attention may be different than awareness

motivated reasoning - thinking is like a lawyer (winning arguments), not a scientist (exploring, rationally, the 'truth')

• from Cordelia Fine: "... we humans quickly develop an irrational loyalty to our beliefs, and work hard to find evidence that supports those opinions and to discredit, discount or avoid information that does not."
• from Joe Keohane: "In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information."

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For class S, O6:

• Write down fifty things about one trip/experience/chore.
• Keep a daily consumption or purchase log (for a week or between class sessions)
• Create a simple survey of at least five questions.  Give it to a sampling of people.  Document their answers in a way that is interesting and readable (like a graph or chart, spreadsheet, pictogram).
• Read Max van Manen "Beyond assumptions" and speech by Donald Schon (pdf's to be emailed, with guiding questions)
• We will return to the implications of 'motivated reasoning' as well

Class notes, S S15

Teachers,

Thanks for the moments of brilliance (truly), insight and thoughtfulness.  You helped me make sense of the ideas.  Below is a brief synpopted version of our discussion.  Please comment, if you need to share, or add if I have not done justify to the depth of meaning you experienced.

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Plato, "Allegory of the Cave"

Why does the prisoner, now able to see reality, willingly go back into the cave?

• "pity" - compassion, empathy, mercy, 'provoked' to go back
• relationships/others - they are his people; no one else to share knowledge with?
• progress to stay out; retreat to return?

How does the prisoner get freed in the first place?

• liberated by another; 'compelled' to leave (dragging and screaming)
• can we free ourselves?
• difficulty of seeing/experiencing another's perspective
• difficulty of sharing your your perspective to those not interested in experiencing it

By 'freed,' what could we mean?

• to see/experience something new, or in a new way
• to experience the broader, fuller, more 'real'
• to change; to become someone new
• the ability to choose to experience differently - can we?  Do we always need be liberated against our will?

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Teacher Inquiry is driven on certain factors:

• the social and cultural contexts in which teaching unfolds
• giving voice/form to the rich diversity of experience (of both the learner and, especially, the teacher)
• "... detailed, meaning-inflected and locally specific understandings that a certain kind of ethnographic understanding brings forward" (from UnderstandingSociety, on Clifford Geetz)
• psychological dimension of experience (What does it mean to have had the experience?)
• as a narrative process, it means telling your story

Teacher Inquiry will call upon several foundational understandings:

• Ethnography- learning to understand a different culture, becoming part of a new community; learning to negotiate objective, subjective and normative worlds with students;
  Who are these people?  How do they think?  What does it mean for me to become one of them?
  emic/otic perspectives (insider/outsider); what meaning the experience has for the (other) in addition to your meaning; Value Claims; metic: voice on an outsider to a culture; otic: perspective of an outsider trying to represent natives; emic: perspective of natives to a culture
• Phenomenology - the reflective process, bringing language to your experiences, becoming aware of the biases and filters that shape understanding, paying attention to your experiences
  What is this phenomenon?  How does my perspective determine what I experience of it?
• Epistemology - a theory of language and the systems by which we make meaning; questions of participants; How do I know I know what I know?

'theory of mind'  - how we struggle to make sense of another person's decisions or actions; what we intuit about what they are thinking and experiencing that would cause them to act in a certain way; we have a tendency to impose our thinking onto their experience and evaluate them accordingly; "we literally theorize about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior"

How to avoid 'epistemic closure' - Inquiry stance on your practice, your ideas and beliefs, the meanings you bring to an encounter with others; no assumptions; questioning our premises

making the invisible visible (Spindler, 1963)

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for Monday, S17, please bring in an object of importance to you. Others will handle it, so be circumspect about its value and another's reaction to it.

Guidelines for article critique

Teachers,

A reminder that your first Article Critique is due NOT this coming Monday; it is due Monday, September 24 instead. We have shifted a week in our readings, as well. Please keep an eye on this blog for other updates.

To give you some guidance on your writing, we will spend some time this Saturday (S15) working in the WU journal database. Below, you will find some guidelines to help you along the process.

As always, comments and questions are welcome.

Thanks.

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Article Critique Guidelines

This writing provides you with the opportunity to critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a topic related to equity of education.  This process will allow you to think about a variety of issues that you might be interested in learning more about for possible teaching application.  It will also provide you with the opportunity to do some guided work on reading and analyzing existing literature, a skill that teachers need to have to determine what already is known about a particular issue in order to improve practice.

Selecting your articles:

You will choose among several types of articles:

1.     educational research piece from journals such as Theory and Research in Social Education, The Elementary School Journal, The Reading Teacher, …

2.     practitioner piece from journals and magazines such as Social Studies, Educational Leadership, Language Arts, …

3.     an example of teacher research from websites or journals such as:

http://oldweb.madison.k12.wi.us/sod/car/carhomepage.html

Writing your critiques:

A written critique is a detailed analysis and means that you engage in the process of evaluating the article in a thorough and an analytical way.  This is not simply a summary or “book report” of what you read in the article.  (Just because it is a critique does not mean that it is critical in a negative sense – you can have a positive, negative or mixed reaction to the piece.)  After reading the article and making notes about the strengths and weaknesses of the argument the author makes, you will write a critique of the text.  The following questions can be used to guide you in thinking about the points you want to make.

*Please include a bibliographic reference for the article as well as a short abstract of the main content of the piece (either one provided or one that you draft yourself).  The total length of the paper will be in the 3page range.

Guiding questions:

1. Consider the argument that the author makes in the text.  What do you consider to be the strengths of this piece?  What do you consider to be the weaknesses?  Be sure to use specific evidence from the piece to support your claim.
2. What does the piece offer you as a teacher to improve or challenge your practice?
3. What additional questions can this raise for you about this issue or about related issues about which you are now curious?

**If you need additional support in understanding how to write a critique, check out the steps provided on the following website:

http://www.rpi.edu/web/writingcenter/critique.html

Consider this stage process as a template:

Step 1. Analyze the text

The following questions may help you analyze the text:

* What is the author's main point?

* What is the author's purpose?

* Who is the author's intended audience?

* What arguments does the author use to support the main point?

* What evidence does the author present to support the arguments?

* What are the author's underlying assumptions or biases?

Step 2. Evaluate the text

After you have read the text, you can begin to evaluate the author's ideas. The following questions provide some ideas to help you evaluate the text:

* Is the argument logical?

* Is the text well-organized, clear, and easy to read?

* Are the author's facts accurate?

* Have important terms been clearly defined?

* Is there sufficient evidence for the arguments?

* Do the arguments support the main point?

* Is the text appropriate for the intended audience?

* Does the text present and refute opposing points of view?

* Does the text help you understand the subject?

* Are there any words or sentences that evoke a strong response from you? What are those words or sentences? What is your reaction?

* What is the origin of your reaction to this topic? When or where did you first learn about it? Can you think of people, articles, or discussions that have influenced your views? How might these be compared or contrasted to this text?

* What questions or observations does this article suggest? That is, what does the article make you think about?

Step 3. Plan and write your critique

Write your critique in standard essay form. It is generally best not to follow the author's organization when organizing your analysis, since this approach lends itself to summary rather than analysis. Begin with an introduction that defines the subject of your critique and your point of view. Defend your point of view by raising specific issues or aspects of the argument. Conclude your critique by summarizing your argument and re-emphasizing your opinion.

* You will first need to identify and explain the author's ideas. Include specific passages that support your description of the author's point of view.

* Offer your own opinion. Explain what you think about the argument. Describe several points with which you agree or disagree.

* For each of the points you mention, include specific passages from the text (you may summarize, quote, or paraphrase) that provide evidence for your point of view.

* Explain how the passages support your opinion.

Source of information: Rosen, Leonard J. and Laurence Behrens, eds. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. 1994.

http://www.rpi.edu/web/writingcenter/critique.html

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Article Critique model text

Some have requested a mentor text to guide your article reviews.  So here is an idea: I will post one that I have written and allow you to critique my critique.  The goal for this form of peer review is to enhance the writing.  Please offer questions and comments in that vein.  I like this open-source process for rooting out bad arguments, inconsistent thoughts, incomprehensible language, mistaken assumptions, poor analysis and other forms of writing habits.

Positives might be nice, as well.

(For those of you uninterested in reading my work in progress, here is a just-too-brief example of an article critique).

Thanks for your help.

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Kahan, D, Braman, D. and Jenkins-Smith, H. (2010) “Cultural cognition of scientific consensus” in Journal of risk research (in press)

*

Abstract: (from authors)Why do members of the public disagree—sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.

*

“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth”

Archimedes

Why do segments of the population so easily disagree on public policy despite the presence of “steady and massive accumulation of scientific evidence” and consensus among experts?  The authors of “Cultural cognition of scientific evidence,” from a yet to be released issue of Journal of risk research, present a “novel explanation” for the tendency of individuals to assimilate new information to their preexisting beliefs.  They provide correlational and experimental evidence that “cultural cognition,” one’s background worldview and normative values, represents how new information is understood by individuals in a way more determinate than logic and reason.  They conclude,

“Individuals systematically overestimate the degree of scientific support for positions they are culturally predisposed to accept as a result of a cultural availability effect that influences how readily they can recall instances of expert endorsement of those positions.”

In other words, perception is always and already biased.  Let us unpack the background, methodology and results of this study to get a stronger sense of why this is so.

Background

The authors start by framing a problem of public dialogue regarding science,

“The problem, it seems, is not that members of the public are unexposed or indifferent to what scientists say, but rather that they disagree about what scientists are telling them.”

They go on to explain why they take up the lens of “cultural cognition” as a hypothesis for this reflexive position-taking.  This theory, “a collection of psychological mechanisms that dispose individuals selectively to credit or dismiss evidence … that fit values they share with others,” emerges from a nexus of three existing ideas.  The availability heuristic refers to the tendency of individuals to “more readily recall instances of experts taking the position that is consistent with their cultural predisposition.”  Working memory has a limited size.  When thinking about an issue, people juggle only so much information at once.  The availability of certain kinds of information thus weights their decision-making more heavily.

Add to this factor a disposition for biased assimilation of information.  Thinking about an issue may result in a kind of evidence seeking, for data to fit into existing schema.  One reason for this narrowing of acceptable data concerns identity-protective motivations “to conform one’s belief to those of like-mind others in order to avoid dissonance and protect social standing.”  Think of identity as a kind of normal state of being, without conscientious attempt to perform for others.  This more or less unreflective thinking implicitly pulls into view information that does not shock the mind.  Dissonance-creating information is ignored, allowing a kind of cognitive restfulness.  Put another way, it hurts too much to think.

Together, these three dimensions of perception lead to over-representing information sources in individual’s mental inventories that align with a preexisting belief.  The predisposition accounts for a disproportionate share of confirming information.

Methodology and Results

The authors pose this thesis of cultural cognition as the reason for public dissensus.  To test this, they set up a study with two components.  Using a sample of 1500 individuals who roughly represent American socio-economic demographics, the authors use a correlational survey on preexisting beliefs among their subjects and then an experimental survey to assay responses to scenarios aligned with and diametrical to these beliefs.  The results are analyzed in two ways. First, a preliminary quick scan of the surveys provides a macro-view on their thesis.  Then a multivariate analysis (basically, a computer-based algorithm that transforms the survey results into numbers and crunches them into statistics) detects micro-level significance.

In all instances of analysis, the results confirm the original thesis.  While the range and degree of confirmation varies widely, all outcomes provide statistically significant evidence (the outcomes could not have happened by chance) of  “a strong correlation between individuals’ cultural values and their perceptions of scientific consensus.”

Commentary

“Cultural cognition of scientific consensus” underscores the view that dialogue is riven from the start with obstacles of perception.  This article has several serious threats to its validity.  One could argue that the evidence from this study is itself subject to the same forces this study attempts to grapple, demonstrating the obstacles of perception by failing as a piece of research (a fact that is philosophically intriguing, though of limited practical use).  Or, one could demonstrate how surveys used might over-determine the authors’ beliefs (by allowing for only two diametrical points of view; the middle vanishes, along with nuance).  And the failure of the researchers to address, much less explain, how prior understanding of their subjects majorly skew the survey responses.  Further, one could point out how the use of statistics to articulate the process of human thinking inherently misses the actual scope of human experience.  This means that responses are a third order of thinking - original thought, explanation of original thought, response to survey in a way to present original thought in line with researchers aims (the so-called Hawthorne effect).  All these criticisms (and more: consider also he unquestioned representativeness of the sample) do put a drag on the reach of the conclusions presented in the study.  However, the underlying workings of cultural cognition, confirmed with at least a face valid confidence as they appear in this study, do provide a graspable structure for ways to approach the dynamics of understanding. 

This aspect is vital for educators and others working in the public sphere. The challenge for the teacher is immense.  As the authors write of a typical student,

“… because of culturally biased information search and culturally biased assimilation, she is likely to attend to the information in a way that reinforces her prior beliefs and affective orientation … the same predisposition that informs her prior (beliefs) will also be unconsciously shaping her ability to recognize an assign weight to all manner of evidence, including the opinions of scientists.”

Cognitive tendencies filter perceptions. To reach each other, individuals must take overt steps to negotiate the bearings of their common world; shared experience has to be explicitly named and agreed upon at a fundamental level.  For teachers, this means structuring learning environments that invite students to investigate the ways they (both student and teacher) bias information.  Statements of fact need to be broken down into components of normative and subjective experience (Carspecken, 1990).  From simple reflexive opinions to layered rational replies, student dialogue represents the topsoil of understanding.  It is the effortful digging into the cultural valence of thinking – “communicators must attend to the cultural meaning as well as the scientific content of information” – that provides a platform for the kinds of critical thinking ostensibly sought in classrooms today.  Put another way, the very values of judgment that produce meaning must be kept open lest individuals close down onto piece-meal, fragmentary beliefs (Readings, 1996).

The authors do not intend so, but their work further erodes the conception of schooling based on the ideal of accumulation.  In practice, this conception treats students as self-activating vacuum cleaners; when they are ready to get to the business of knowledge consumption, an internal switch starts the sucking.  The effects of cultural cognition brings awareness to the shakiness of the ground underneath.  Communities – including districts, schools, even classrooms – must first recognize how divergently the world spins for its members.  Attempts to harmonize the common space each member occupies must precede knowledge acquisition.  Put differently, educators must seek to understand the experiences of their students from within the students’ point of view (van Manen, 1990), and help each do the same with all others.  They must start with the proposition that unpacked (and perhaps un-unpackable) belief structures carry students, not the other way around.  Without giving reason to students and taking for granted the inviolable presence of an active subjective rationality (Schön), teachers will compound the dissensus at the heart of the study under review.

   Archimedes never found a place to stand.  Schools have the potential to give up his futile search, and instead lead students to examine the taken-for-granted ground of their individual experience.  

References

Carspecken, P. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research. New York: Routledge

Readings, B. (1996). The university in ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Schön, D. (1987). “Educating the reflective practitioner.” 1987 AERA presentation.  (http://resources.educ.queensu.ca/ar/schon87.htm)

van Manen, M. (1990). “Beyond assumptions: shifting the limits of action research.” Theory into Practice, vol. xxix, no. 3