Curricular Complexity: Recognizing the sociocultural contexts of learning

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Curricular ComplexityRecognizing the
sociocultural contexts of learning
Lisa R. Lattuca Center for the Study of Higher
Education Penn State University July 8, 2004
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The CHEPS theme of innovation and governance

• Higher education institutions play a crucial role
  in the knowledge society and economy.
• What changes are needed to strengthen this role?

• Themes from Day 1
• Productive destruction
• What shall we keep? What shall we replace?
• Innovation is cultural and social, as well as
  technical
• Teaching as technical core and cultural
  practice
• From innovators to conditions for innovation
• Need for conversation between macro and micro
  levels

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• Themes from Day 2
• Sedimented structures and patterns in
  institutional practices
• Challenge is to cognitively and institutionally
  recombine

• Themes from Day 3
• Shifts in discourses on higher education
  (learning)
• Recent transformations represent change in
  social contract
• between society and higher education
• Curriculum is a story about who we are and is
  this
• even more necessary in a shifting global
  context?

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Situating myself
The Academic Plan, Stark Lattuca, 1997
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In the spirit of productive destruction
What should be salvaged and what should not?
The Academic Plan, Stark Lattuca, 1997
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Advantages

1. Promotes clarity identifies potential
   influences, constraints, affordances
2. Applicable at course, program, institution-level
3. Provides a heuristic for curricular planning and
   research elements of a plan and variables for
   investigation
4. Encourages attention to student learning
5. Suggests a dynamic curriculum development process
   evaluation and adjustment process

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Some tensions to resolve

• Real versus ideal conceptualizations
• A plan for any endeavor incorporates a total
  blueprint for action, including purposes,
  activities, and ways of measuring success. A
  plan implies both intentions and rational choices
  among alternatives to achieve the intentions.
• (Stark Lattuca, 1997, p. 9)

• Critique a rationalist perspective

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A possible revision

• any academic plan consists of choices made
  about seven elements purposes, content,
  sequence, learners, instructional processes,
  resources, and assessment/evaluation.
• In developing or revising a course or program, we
  make choices about these seven elements
  sometimes intentionally, sometimes rationally,
  and sometimes unintentionally and irrationally.
• (for the revision of Lattuca Stark, 2006?)

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Advantage 4 revisited

• Encourages explicit attention to student
  learning.
• Inclusion of students as element in academic plan
  promotes thinking about how new curricular
  approaches and attention to student goals build
  on recent psychological understandings of how
  learners reconstruct their knowledge by meshing
  new information with old.
• (Stark Lattuca, 1997, p. 14)

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• Psychological perspectives on learning are useful
  but incomplete
• Interdisciplinary perspectives (including those
  of anthropology, cultural psychology,
  neuroscience, etc.) needed to further refine
  models of learning

WHY? Because social contexts shape learners and
learning. What are the implications of this
statement for the academic plan concept and for
curricular practices in higher education?
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Advantage 5 revisited

• Encourages a dynamic view of curriculum
  development. The assumption of a built-in
  adjustment mechanism encourages iterative change
  by making it an expected part of regular
  practiceUnlike the static definition of a
  curriculum as a set of courses, a plan implied
  vigorous strategic adjustment as conditions
  change because the process of creating a plan can
  also be examined and influenced.
• (Stark Lattuca, 1997, p. 14)

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• we have considered curriculumonly in its noun
  form (a racecourse to be traversed), and not in
  its infinitive verb form (currereto run,
  especially the course). In the latter, the
  emphasis is on the activity of running or,
  metaphorically, on the activity of our making
  meaning from the course This currere view makes
  mind a verb (to use Deweys phrase an active,
  meaning-seeking and meaning-making verb).
• (Doll, 1993, p. 278)

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• How would a revised model of curriculum portray
• Fully contextualized understanding of learning
• The idea that adjustments can be made as the
  course is being run as well as after it is
  completed
• The curricular goal of meaning-making
• Mind as verb

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So whats wrong with this picture?
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Sociocultural contexts

• Organizational Influences
• Program relationships
• Resources
• Leadership
• Governance

• Internal
• Influences
• Faculty
• Discipline
• Students
• Peers
• Program mission
• Leadership

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Further reconceptualization
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Learner in context?
Educational Context
Academic Plan
Purpose
If students uniquely experience a curriculum,
where do outcomes go?
Content
Sequence
Resources
Materials
Instructional Processes
Evaluation
Learners
Outcomes
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A new question arises
Educational Context
Academic Plan
Purpose
If learner and learning are inseparable what
are the implications for quality assurance and
accountability?
Content
Sequence
Resources
Materials
Instructional Processes
Evaluation
Learners
Outcomes
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Where were going now

• An overview of learning theories
• Contribution of social learning theories
• Should learning theory inform curriculum theory?
• What does it mean for policy and practice?

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Whats learning?

• Until 1950s, psychologists commonly defined
  learning as a change in behavior
• Mind is subjective, not observable
• But behavior can be measured

• Notion of change (or potential for change) still
  underlies many definitions of learning
• Piaget assimilation and accommodation
• Dewey solving problems
• Vygotsky zone of proximal development

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Behaviorist perspectives

• Learning is a process of forming connections
  between stimuli and responses
• Environment shapes/controls behavior
• contingencies of reinforcement
• operant conditioning (rewards)
• Drives -- hunger, rewards, fear -- motivate
  learning
• Behavior that is not reinforced becomes less
  frequent and may disappear

But what about understanding?
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• Woods (1987) found that in a four-year
  engineering program, students observed professors
  working more than 1,000 problems. The students
  themselves solved more than 3,000 homework
  problems and worked problems on the board. Yet
  despite all this activity, they showed negligible
  improvements in problem-solving skillswhat they
  did acquire was a set of memorized procedures for
  about 3,000 problem situations that they could,
  with varying degrees of success, recall.
• (Bransford, 2000, p. 59)

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Instruction in the behaviorist model

• Increase frequency of correct answers and
  minimize errors
• Drills and rewards prominent
• Self-paced instruction
• clear, specifiable outcomes (objectives)
• easy to achieve steps
• that in sequence complete a behavior
• Criterion referencing a clear standard for
  performance rather than norm referencing
• Immediate feedback as to the correctness of a
  response

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Cognitive perspectives

• Reaction to behaviorist perspectives on learning
• The human mind is not passive exchange system
  where stimuli arrive and appropriate responses
  leave (Grippin Peters, 1984)
• Humans actively interpret sensations, manipulate
  things and ideas, make intellectual connections
  and thereby give meaning to phenomena

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Contributions Piaget

• Locus of control is individual learner
• Internal cognitive structures change as
  individuals mature and interact with environments
• Stages of development shape learning and what can
  be learned
• Child actively explores the environment,
  assembles, organizes material that is,
  constructs understanding, in solitary play

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ContributionsInformation processing theories

• Focus on mental associations inferred from
  behavior
• Environment important, but learner also
  considered
• Prior knowledge, schemata
• Early theories focus on restructuring of memory
• Good instruction presents and organizes
  information in way that maximizes memory
• Response from learner - is info correctly stored?
• Use of key points, meaningful associations to
  connect new and old information
• Encouraged active learning check individual
  understanding, correct errors before they are
  stored

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Contributions Metacognition

• Learning process becomes the responsibility of
  the learner
• Instructors no longer direct learning process
• Instructor supports metacognition (and uses some
  direct teaching strategies)
• Learner-centered models of instruction
• Constructivist theories, self-regulation,
  motivation important

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Critiques

• Cognitive theories portray the learner as the
  lone investigator
• Theories dont reflect on learners as members of
  social groups
• Nor on how learners interact using the medium of
  language
• Take prior knowledge and individual differences
  into account, but learner may still be passive
• Metacognitive theories are an improvement, but
  focus largely on individual processing

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In contrastin context

• Lev Vygotsky
• Less interested in what children can do alone
  than what they can do with aid from others
• Proper challenges or stimulation might enable
  further learningability to profit from
  assistance
• Learning process is similar in child adult
• John Dewey
• Individuals grow up in social environments that
  have accepted meanings and values they learn
  these values and these values, in turn affect
  learning what and how they learn

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Prospective assessment of development
Zone of Proximal Development
Actual Development Individual problem-solving
Potential Development (problem-solving with
guidance)
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Constructivist perspectives
Social constructivists

• Capacity to think and learn is an adaptive
  feature
• Enabling the individual to deal fruitfully with
  the environment
• Learners actively explore and construct
  understandings of the world through their
  activities
• Learning is a practical activity that occurs when
  people interact with their environments

Individual constructivists
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Social learning perspectives (situative
perspectives)

• Focus on social settings in which learning occurs
• Learning occurs through observation of others in
  immediate environment and
• Learning is a function of interaction of
  person-and or person-in environment
• Not individual cognition (alone)

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Varieties of constructivism

• Individual Perspective
• Learning is an individual (internal) activity
• Individuals make meaning based on previous and
  current knowledge structures
• Emphasizes individuals acquisition of knowledge
  and cognitive skills

• Social Perspective
• Learning is social (cultural) activity
• Meaning-making is a dialogic process of social
  interaction
• Learning is collective, participatory process
• Emphasizes context, interaction, and situatedness

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Foregrounding aspects of learning

• Behaviorist perspective emphasizes activity
• Growth skill development
• Cognitive perspective stresses information
• Symbols, meaning, problem solving and reasoning
• Growth greater conceptual understanding
• Situative perspectives emphasize
• Participation in practices of inquiry, discourse,
  and sense-making of a community
• Development of identities as thinkers and
  learners
• Growth more effective participation in
  practices
• (Greeno et al, 1997, 1998)

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A rapprochement?

• Each perspectives contributes something to our
  understanding of educational practices
• The situative perspective can subsume cognitive
  and behaviorist perspective by including skill
  acquisition and conceptual understanding as
  aspects of students participation and their
  identities as learners and as knowers.
• (Greeno et al., 1998)

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Situative perspectives

• What looks like individual learning is rarely
  truly individual
• Much of what we learn we learn from others
• through observation and imitation afforded by
  participation in social settings
• through dialogue about shared problems or tasks
• through use of cultural tools invented by human
  societies
• Language, signs, numbers, logic, etc.
• (Salomon and Perkins)

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Social aspects of learning

• If learning cannot be understood solely in terms
  of cognitive processes occurring in individual
  heads, then
• We must attend to
• interactions among individuals
• interactions among individuals situations
• and their impact of learning

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Social mediation of learning

• Zone of proximal development (Vygotsky)
• Social processes, such as instruction, may raise
  cognitive performance to levels that could not be
  reached by the individual alone
• Scaffolding (Scardamalia, Brown, Palincsar)
• Active guidance, modeling, encouragement,
  mirroring, and feedback aid learning
• Theories of intellectual development (Perry,
  Magolda, etc.)
• Instructional activities can move students from
  lower to higher levels of intellectual/epistemolog
  ical development

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Participatory knowledge construction

• Knowledge is jointly constructed in communities
  of practice
• Interaction is vehicle for thought learning
  products distributed over social (learning)
  system
• Goal of instruction social knowledge
  construction and distribution of knowledge,
  skills and understanding around a particular
  activity (apprenticeship)

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Cultural artifacts

• Social mediation by cultural artifacts
• Books, languages, statistics, computers, etc. are
  culturally and historically situated tools
• These shape learning in powerful ways
• Cant separate the individual from the context in
  which he learns sociohistorical time and place
  shape learners and learning

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Agency

• Learning is culturally and socially situated.
• What we learn is influenced by time (history) and
  place (context)
• Instructional practices influence what and how we
  learn (or dont)
• but we can learn to learn better
• Cultural tools influence how and what we learn
• but we can adapt tools for our own purposes

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Some questions

• Do current educational practices acknowledge the
  social contexts of learning?
• Individual cultural social background
• Prior knowledge (misconceptions) what students
  bring to the table
• Social nature of learning
• Impact of context on what is learned by whom

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Do our curricula look like this?
External influences
Internal influences
Organizational influences
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• What are the implications of a situated (or
  sociocultural) understanding of learning on
  curriculum?
• Revisit Barnetts question what is the right
  analytical level for a model of curriculum and
  curriculum change?

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National or system level

• What higher education policies encourage
  achievement of desired educational outcomes?
• What social needs do we wish to serve since
  those will determine the outcomes that must drive
  curricular choices?
• How will we know if weve achieved our goals?
  What can we assess and how shall we assess it?

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Institution and program level

• How do we create learning environments that
  produce the desired outcomes?
• Access policies
• Faculty rewards
• Instructional development
• Flexible programs (entry points and standards)
• Formative assessment of students and programs

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Course level

• Can we ensure that all students learn?
• What would facilitate learning? R
• remediation, academic skills training, advising?
• What kinds of feedback should students receive as
  they are learning? What do we do to improve
  learning in progress?
• What pedagogical strategies do we use to promote
  learning? Do our pedagogies promote learning?

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Final thoughts

• Curricula are complex animals
• more than a set of courses or a program
• a living and somewhat unpredictable thing
  enlivened students and faculty
• embedded in social, cultural, political, and
  economic contexts that can shape what is learned

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Finally, the normative view

• Every curriculum reflects a set of values
• sometimes curricula dont communicate what we
  truly value
• rather they reflect choices and decisions made
  out of habit, lack of attention, convenience, or
  compromise

What we truly value learning, ideas, ways of
inquiry should drive, and should be reflected
in, our curricula.