Intensive seminar: "Bildung and North
American Learning Sciences"
[Includes links to workshop PowerPoint files.]
25-27 May,
2009
University of
Oulu, Department of Educational Sciences and Teacher Education
Dr Norm Friesen
Introduction
Bildung,
recently defined as the “reciprocal interrelationship of world and individual” (Klafki,
1997), is a term with both current relevance and a rich intellectual heritage.
Over the centuries, its humanistic emphases have been reformulated and
reaffirmed in a variety of ways. It has received some of its most recent
reconsiderations in the English language, some by the likes of Gundem, Hopmann,
Løvlie and Biesta. The “Learning Sciences,” on the other hand, refers to a
relatively recent, interdisciplinary development in specifically North American
educational theory and research. It focuses on the development of innovations in
technology and design, and particularly on scientific understandings of human
learning that are simultaneously positivistic and eclectic –including
experimental methods, but also extending to ethnography and ethnomethodology
(e.g. Sawyer, 2006). At the same time, influences evident in the Learning
Sciences can be traced back to developments in North American educational
research occuring during and after the First World War.
The time from the turn of the century to the inter-war period is significant for
both Northern European Bildung and
North American sciences of education. It represents, of course, a crisis for
traditional theories of Bildung, and
it has been interpreted as a moment when Germanic and American intellectual
traditions of education parted ways irremediably (Lagemann, 1989). In this
series of lectures, however, Dr. Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair at Thompson
Rivers University presents a different interpretation of these developments and
their consequences: Dr. Friesen will explore lively points of contact that have
connected North American educational theory and Northern European
Bildung at significant moments during
the 20th century. Dr. Friesen will present these as a part of a kind
of “subterranean” history of the influence of aspects of
Bildung in North American research
and theory leading up to the Learning Sciences.
Dr. Friesen will trace this largely “buried” influence and history in the
context of three seminar sessions with members of the Theoretical Foundations of
Education at Oulu University. The first of these sessions will focus on the
relevance of Bildung in contemporary
English and North American conceptions of learning and education, specifically
those emphasizing embodied, situated, anthropological aspects of education. In
the second session, Dr. Friesen will consider ways in which discussions of media
and generational dynamics –from Karl Mannheim through Marshall McLuhan—have
echoed descriptions of educational and communicative processes and priorities
described, for example, in Klafki’s Neue
Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik and in Klaus Mollenhauer’s
Vergessene Zusammenhänge. Finally, in
the third session, Dr. Friesen will conclude with a presentation focusing on one
example of the closer convergence of these two traditions in the present day:
the growing relevance of phenomenology and related methods of ethnomethodology
to educational research and theory in North America and in the Learning Sciences
in particular. Here the influence is no longer entirely tacit, but becomes
noticeably explicit, signaling a more general rapprochement between continental
and Anglo-American ways of thinking.
Session 1. Bildung and its Hidden
History
It goes without saying that the intellectual tradition of
Bildung and the characteristics of
North American educational theory and research are complex and diffuse. Tracing
their recent convergence and divergence initially requires that salient and
potentially interrelated elements of each tradition first be delineated and
highlighted. In this first presentation, Dr. Friesen will undertake this through
reference to the work of both Wolfgang Klafki, who provides one of the most
recent re-interpretations of the contemporary relevance of German
Bildung, and Ellen Lagemann, a
pre-eminent historian of American educational research. The characteristics of
both American and Northern European research will serve as the basis for the
identification of a number of conspicuous counter-examples, which bridge the
divergent traditions. These are provided by European émigrés, who (during the
Second World War and after) addressed American and other educational issues.
These are also provided by other researchers outside of the American educational
mainstream, such as those at the XEROX PARC research center in Palo Alto,
California. Dr. Friesen will discuss the contributions of a number of
researchers of this kind, and will explore how their work highlights concerns
and issues which are important to Bildung,
but are not often explicitly understood in these terms.
Session 2. Media and Intergenerational Processes
The second session focuses on understandings of educational and communicative
processes as they relate to the technologies and processes of media. Discussions
of the relevance of media (writing, print, television, Internet) to education
represent another example of the interconnection of North American and European
contexts. Unlike the points of influence described above, which only bridge
divergent traditions, the question of media can be said to represent an area of
mutual convergence in traditions: In both intellectual contexts, the connection
of the school to the technology of print and the centrality of literacy has been
emphasized by prominent spokespersons. For example, Klaus Mollenhauer (1987)
associates with the written word and the rise of literacy the emergence of a
“pedagogical sphere” (distinct from the spheres of private and public life) and
he sees printing and literacy as giving rise to a specifically
“representational” educational dynamic. Similarly, Neil Postman has written in
the American context about the influence of mediatic change on education and on
conceptions of childhood, and has used terms remarkably similar to Mollenhauer’s
to argue that newer media threaten conventional or traditional schooling.
Session 3. Phenomenology and ethnomethodology
Phenomenology and ethnomethodology are methodological innovations that are being
introduced to mainstream educational research through the Learning Sciences. In
this presentation, Dr. Friesen will make the case that these methodologies are
associated with understandings of education and socialization that are
intrinsically germane to the tradition of
Bildung. Both methodological orientations blur the boundary between formal,
functional processes and cultural, aesthetic understandings: Phenomenology
examines education experientially and relationally, rather than in terms of
means-ends rationality; similarly, ethnomethodology sees general and formal
social constructions (educational and otherwise) as arising through the
improvisational and existential engagements of those involved. Education,
teaching and learning end up being configured in both methodological contexts as
processes that are reducible neither to unreflective socialization nor to pure
psychological instrumentality. Dr. Friesen will explore the various
interpretations of education articulated from these methodological perspectives
by both European and Anglo-American contributors, including Wilfried Lippitz,
Max van Manen and Wolff-Michael Roth.
Despite the dominance of instrumental, psychological approaches to educational theory and practise in North America, a different understanding of the value and dynamics of education is often articulated informally in cultural representations (e.g. fiction and feature films) and in personal recollections. This alternative understanding is one in which the personal characteristics of a teacher or professor, and the relation between student and teacher are often paramount. For example, a particularly memorable teacher or professor ---rather than a particularly effective course or curriculum design--- will often play a critical role in the narrative of one's own educational and professional trajectory. Through reference to existing research and to examples drawn from real-life practise, this article presents a broadly existential and explicitly relational way of understanding education, or rather, pedagogy. It will give special emphasis to the way that such an understanding has been articulated in the text Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Education by Klaus Mollenhauer ---one of the most influential German pedagogical theorists of the 20th century, but little known in English-speaking contexts. This paper will describe how the insights of Mollenhauer and other writers regarding an existential and relational pedagogy were translated and adapted for a North American course in teacher education, and how such a course can serve as an important ingredient in nurturing undergraduate students who are becoming teachers.
References
Klafki, W. (1996). Neue Studien zur
Bildungstheorie und Didaktik. Zeitgemäße und kritisch-konstruktive Didaktik.
Basel.
Mollenhauer, K. (1983). Vergessene
Zusammenhänge: über Kultur und Erziehung.
Munich: Juventa.
Sawyer, R.K. (2006a). Introduction: The new science of learning. In R.K. Sawyer
(Ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of the
Learning Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 1–16.