Theories of intercultural education - Joseba Arregi, Asier Barandiaran, Dmitrii Enygin, Venera Midova (free ebook reader for ipad txt) 📗

model, or discursive model, based on a continuing dialogue between teacher and students, with explanations, clarifications, descriptions, mappings provided by the teacher to stimulate understanding, feedback, problem solving, reflection and knowledge building; this model addresses the behaviourist approach to learning (for example, Huitt, 2003).

−  the transformative model, based on humanist, social and clinical psychology, includes providing the means for learners to actively develop awareness of the socio-cultural reality in which they live. Through critical reflection students become aware of how they have come to perceive, understand and feel about the world as they do, and can then

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begin to transform these assumptions in a more inclusive, discriminating, permeable and integrative perspective” (Mezirow, 1990). Students are trained to reflect in action and on action (Schön, 1987). See also documents of the I-Curriculum EU project (2004) and those of UNESCO on ICT in Teacher Education (2002).

Each model leads to different expectations in terms of learning results. For example, using a transactional model, based on constructivist theory, does not allow for outcomes measurable through quiz and tests. If such assessment measures are nevertheless set up, then the teacher’s practice is in fact probably more transmissive and more prescriptive that it appears or wants to be. Integrating ICT in classrooms in itself does not change basic pedagogical reality. Often stakeholders believe that the use of the technology will bring about change. They expect teachers to spontaneously reflect on their activity with ICT and that this will bring about the desired changes, as if innovation and evolution were inherent to ICT technology. This overwhelming belief in the transformative power of technology is nowhere as important as it is in the curriculum content of training for ICT or digital competency and/or literacy.

3.2. Emerging cultural transformation with digital knowledge

Pedagogical practices have been revisited in terms of their cultural embeddedness. Two new issues still remain implicit: the evolving status of information and knowledge as schools and universities move from paper to digital technology; and the change in the pedagogical model, changes in how we relate to knowledge and information, and how this modifies how we produce individually or within collaborative activities knowledge. Pedagogical practices, with the growing disinterest of learners for academic offers of knowledge, can address the crucial issues that the use of digital technology has brought to the forefront only by becoming more reflexive and more critically oriented.

As the economy is more and more information and knowledge-based, the role of academic institutions in generating this information and knowledge is diminishing relatively to the total mass of information and knowledge produced today. This results not only in an important shift in the role and importance of universities in the knowledge economy, but it has also brought about a significant change in the way students relate to academic information and knowledge. What Jacques Tardif had diagnosed in 1998 is turning out to be hopelessly true: “Information and communication technology invite their users – whatever their age, their experiences and the environment in which the technology is used – to spontaneously establish a utilitarian and functional relation to knowledge and information.” This is not without raising specific challenges.

A new relationship to knowledge and information

Constructivism is the recurrent reference in several frameworks. However, there is usually insufficient information to grasp what is meant by this allusion to what is a very rich and complex set of theories. Constructivism and student-centred learning are often associated with ICT. In an important literature review on the impact of ICT on learning and teaching, Newhouse (2002) presents constructivism as “the pedagogical philosophy to which most ‘Western” educational leaders and researchers subscribe”. Markauskaite (2006) attests of this causal relationship between ICT and the shift from teaching to learning: “Access to new ICT tools and resources, such as CD-ROMs and on-line databases, modelling environments and other tools of computer-mediated learning, could change and even totally reshape present instruction from behaviourist teacher-centred teaching to constructivist student-centred learning. ».

What is the rationale for linking a constructivist approach to learning and student centred or learner centred pedagogy? It is true that ICT introduces an important change, in accordance with what young people are experiencing today: the interactive experience of information. Learners want to be active, to react, to manage the situation and not be passive receivers. They want to work with tools that allow them to process multimedia information easily and rapidly. Therefore teachers, having understood that knowledge is constructed by each one through interaction with other people and external reality, want to organise learning situations where

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young people will actively construct their knowledge. Digital technology is fundamentally interactive and lends itself easily to such projects.

However, there is here a confusion that would need to be clarified. It appears that two dimensions of the educational situation are woven together when constructivism is referred to in the frameworks. These two dimensions are:

−  the epistemological dimension: what conception of knowledge does the teacher have or is working with: there are several possibilities here, ranging from objectivist knowledge to constructivist knowledge

−  the pedagogical dimension: who is the main actor, who triggers the events: from teaching activity to learning activity.

It seems that the understanding of constructivism that is referred to when researchers and teachers speak of a constructivist student-centred pedagogy, is a more behaviourist reference to active learning. Teachers are challenged by learners to organise activities that allow students to construct their knowledge. Problem-based learning is thus associated in some frameworks with constructivist pedagogy, even though this structuring of learning activities is not necessarily focused on the learner’s capacities and level of competence, but on a discovery and investigating approach, and on imitation and transposition of solutions. The behaviourist dimension, getting the learner to actively participate in learning, is present, but not the constructivist dimension understood as the learning based on linking what one does with questions to the learner about his activity, his way of accomplishing the work and his awareness of what is happening for him in this learning episode. Critical reflection thus results on becoming aware of oneself as a knower, within a socio-cultural knowledge production context.

The last dimension is the new relationship to information and knowledge, which refers to a constructivist understanding of knowledge. Schools have developed in a society where knowledge was scarce and available to chosen elites. Through formal education was achieved a sharing of knowledge and information. Digital technology is rapidly transforming not only the access conditions but the very nature of knowledge. Writing has become as accessible as reading, and the challenge today is not the have the knowledge but to know how to deal with great amounts of information, data and facts. Knowledge has thus become not the acquisition of information, data, facts and concepts, but the construction of a meaningful understanding of what make sense in this world. The digital knowledge revolution is happening within an important epistemological change in the meaning of what is knowledge.

Constructivism is basically an epistemological theory, which was explicitly formulated only in the 20th century. It asserts that knowledge is not the reflection of the outside world, nor the projection on reality of the innate structures of our mind. The physical world has to be modelled, re-invented (Watzlawick), constructed (Bachelard) through interactions during which the knowing subject develops his knowing structures while producing his knowledge about the world (Piaget). Constructivism introduces a crucial change in the nature of knowledge. It represents a major shift from the logical positivism, the scientific objectivity and the empiricism that dominated Western thought from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century, in other words for all that is usually known as modernism. This modern way of thinking is still very much present in current discourse and especially in school curriculum. The role the curriculum plays in each system, in selecting prospective teachers and in evaluating students, reveals its epistemological basis.

Constructivism opposes to the objectivist view of knowledge and science, the human participation in the elaboration of knowledge and the awareness that all knowledge results from a situated processing of perceptual information. Building on Piaget’s work revealing the ongoing development of intelligence through interaction with the outside world, this approach proposes that human experience involves continuous active agency, that the knowing experience is more important that the results, that knowing is inherently a socially-embedded and situated meaningful experience.

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Constructivism is therefore a conception of knowledge that de-legitimizes the “objectivist” view of human knowledge. It proposes a dynamic view of knowledge and learning, and weakens the curriculum approach of a fixed body of facts, data and knowledge that each one must acquire. It is not a question of denying the importance of a shared culture, but the accent is more on the learning processes and on the development of active knowers and the curriculum becomes a means for the development of students. A constructivist approach to learning does not imply that learners have to be active so much as it sets a completely different landscape for learning. An active approach to learning is not sufficient, if there is not, in the pedagogical environment that is set up, the elements that will trigger awareness of one’s actions, of the personal maturing that is happening, and of the resulting ‘distanciation’ with the knowledge building activity that constructivism involves. That is why learning, even within a constructivist understanding of learning, needs to be organized by teaching. It is the teacher that will be able to select the kind of tasks that will allow the development of awareness; it is the teacher that will bring the adequate question, because he/she will know where the students are at, what are their interests, there previous knowledge, etc. All these aspects can be said to refer to Vygosky socio-cultural theory of learning. Only then can there be a true transformational learning.

The challenge for teachers today is to enter into a constructivist approach to learning and deploy a socio-cultural understanding of their activity. But if the information/knowledge society requires that they master these approaches, they also need to succeed in working with students who have entered into a fundamentally functional and utilitarian relation to knowledge and information. This is also one of the characteristics of an information/knowledge society. The relationship to information is changing, not only epistemologically, but also pragmatically. Students are less and less looking for a transformational experience in schools or academic settings. Scholarly knowledge does not attract or interest young people because of its great humanistic or scientific value, but more and more only if they need it for some specific pragmatic purpose. As teachers are beginning to shift towards a more meaningful and encompassing experience of learning – the constructivist epistemological approach - and are discovering that ICT greatly facilitates this approach, they are discovering that more and more young people are looking elsewhere for deep structuring and fulfilling experiences. Schools and higher education are less and less the unique places for in-depth knowledge experiences. Teachers and education stakeholders are therefore more and more challenged to provide unique self-fulfilling and enriching experiences, competing with the other media based knowledge experiences.

A change of pedagogical model

As already noted, references to a constructivist, student centred pedagogy are often based on a behaviourist conception of learning activities, where the learner has to have ongoing active involvement. When looking at what is expected of teachers with the evolving place of knowledge and schools in giving access to knowledge in today’s society, it becomes obvious that they have to gradually bring about a change in the relationship to knowledge, without accepting as the only tenable one the very utilitarian approach of many students.

The new cultural awareness makes it necessary to define a direction for innovation, for improvement, for raising standards in education, in curriculum, or in teacher training. One such direction could be a change of pedagogical model. Teachers cannot improvise a new pedagogical model.