#schemata

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

Moving on with the commonplace of curriculum development – the learner – the next concern of this blog is pedagogic student interests.[2]  Gerald Gutek[3] puts forward the argument of essentialists, i.e., that the pedagogic interests of students are served if they are mastering the basic skills and acquiring basic subject matter content.  E. D. Hirsch writes how skills and content are related.

 All cognitive skills depend on procedural and substantive schemata that are highly specific to the task at hand.

         Once the relevant knowledge has been acquired, the skill follows.  General programs contrived to teach general skills are ineffective.  [Artificial intelligence] research shows that experts perform better than novices not because they have more powerful and better oiled intellectual machinery but because they have more relevant and quickly available information.  What distinguishes good readers from poor ones is simply the possession of a lot of diverse, task-specific information.[4]

 Or more directly,

 Teacher-centered philosophies [such as essentialism] are those that transfer knowledge from one generation of teachers to the next. In teacher-centered philosophies, the teacher’s role is to impart a respect for authority, determination, a strong work ethic, compassion for others, and sensibility. Teachers and schools succeed when students prove, typically through taking tests, that they have mastered the objectives they learned.[5]

           Hirsch continues in this vein by further pointing out that his cited research has found that such skills as critical thinking or inquiry skills are only taught successfully for specific tasks and content and are not transferable as is claimed by the Rousseau-Dewey tradition.[6]  Even among researchers who generally support inquiry, a level of concern can be detected.

         For example, and looking at this instructional approach from a more global perspective, the following can be found:

 It should be cautioned that inquiry-based learning takes a lot of planning before implementation. It is not something that can be put into place in the classroom quickly. Measurements must be put in place for how students [sic] knowledge and performance will be measured and how standards will be incorporated. The teacher’s responsibility during inquiry exercises is to support and facilitate student learning … A common mistake teachers make is lacking the vision to see where students’ weaknesses lie. According to Bain, teachers cannot assume that students will hold the same assumptions and thinking processes as a professional within that discipline …

While some see inquiry-based teaching as increasingly mainstream, it can be perceived as in conflict with standardized testing common in standards-based assessment systems which emphasise the measurement of student knowledge, and meeting of pre-defined criteria, for example the shift towards “fact” in changes to the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a result of the American No Child Left Behind program.

Programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Program can be criticized for their claims to be an inquiry based learning program … While there are different types of inquiry … the rigid structure of this style of inquiry based learning program almost completely rules out any real inquiry based learning in the lower grades. Each “unit of inquiry” is given to the students, structured to guide them and does not allow students to choose the path or topic of their inquiry. Each unit is carefully planned to connect to the topics the students are required to be learning in school and does not leave room for open inquiry in topics that the students pick. Some may feel that until the inquiry learning process is open inquiry then it is not true inquiry based learning at all. Instead of opportunities to learn through open and student-led inquiry, the IB program is viewed by some to simply be an extra set of learning requirements for the students to complete.[7]

 This extended quote is included to point out that even in an inquiry-based approach, educators need to give essentialist ideas and ideals due respect – again, students need information before they can go off and inquire or do whatever else education calls on them to do.

         That tradition – the Rousseau-Dewey tradition – emphasizes intensive study by classroom students in which critical thinking skills, inquiry skills, or discovery skills (terms that are often used interchangeably) are practiced and “taught” over limited material (teaching in depth, not breadth).  This antithesis argument claims that students need many referents in order to make sense of the realities of the world.

         Expert thinking, as studied by current cognitive psychologists, is evidenced by being able to recall many facts which are contained within the contexts of schemata.[8]  Schemata mentally arrange facts in meaningful groupings or chunks of information.  “As we have seen, the most effective system of the mind, whether in chess or in reading, is to keep most of its indexed schemata at a medium level of generality.” [9]

         What works in reading and chess works for governmental studies. The political systems approach, under the construct of the natural rights perspective, provides such a medium level of generality.  It is a viable vehicle by which to arrange meaningful and relevant political facts. Relevancy is determined by the goals of the natural rights perspective to prepare students to be viable citizens in the competitive realities of the American political system.

         The next posting will pick up on this theme as it continues this review of pedagogic student interests.

[Reminder:  Readers are reminded that they can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, they can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit  

OR

click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings to other published works by this blogger by clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then looking up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]

[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022. [Note:  This blog, in the postings entitled “Judging the Natural Rights View, I-XVI, started with “An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation …” It should have read “An advocate of natural rights …”  Please excuse the mistake.  The archived record has been corrected.]

[2] The learner or student is one of Joseph Schwab’s commonplaces.  See William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[3] Gerald L. Gutek, Basic Education:  A Historical Perspective (Bloomington, IN:  Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1981).

[4] E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs to Know (New York, NY:  Vintage, 1987), 61.

[5] Matthew Lynch, “Philosophies of Education:  2 Types of Teacher-Centered Philosophies,” The Edvocate/Entelechy, August 5, 2016, accessed October 5, 2022, https://www.theedadvocate.org/philosophies-education-2-types-teacher-centered-philosophies/.

[6] Hirsch, Cultural Literacy.

[7] “Inquiry-based Learning,” Lumen/Foundation of Education (n.d.), accessed October 5, 2022, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/olemiss-education/chapter/inquiry-based-learning/.  British spelling.

[8] Schemata, plural form of schema, are representations of developed plans, theories, or models presented in the form of graphic models, other graphic presentations, or outlines.

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