Theoretical Background

The Playground Theoretical Background

Student-teacher relationships are fluid and dynamic. Teachers become learners and learners become teachers (Dewey, 1938). Working against the grain of the traditional conception of the teacher/students relationship, where students are the passive recipients of the teacher’s knowledge (what Freire calls a banking concept of education), we move from the assumption that: "the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach" (Freire, p.61). From this view, the classroom is envisioned as a site where new knowledge, grounded in the experiences of students and teachers alike, is produced through meaningful dialogue (Freire’s dialogical method).

Expertise is distributed and porous. Traditional teacher-student hierarchical relationships are replaced by ones where “teacher and learner roles are not fixed positions but change continuously” (Lund & Rasmussen, 2010). Through dialogue, the “teacher-student” and “students-teachers” (Freire, p. 80) teach each other. They co-mingle their experiences, co- configure their knowledge and skills, and co-construct the curriculum (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

Learning is situated in a specific context and embedded within a particular social and physical environment (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Learning should not be viewed as a process of transmission of abstract and decontextualised knowledge from one individual to another. Rather, learning is a social process whereby knowledge is co-constructed, and meaningful learning occurs when individuals are engaged in social activities.

Knowledge is constructed. Knowledge is a result of active manipulation of the environment; it requires reflective action; and, it entails participation in social practices. For instance, a person learns science by participating in the social practices of scientists. And participating in the social practices of scientists, as described by James Gee, requires knowing how to be a particular who and knowing how to pull of a particular what. Being a particular who and pulling off a particular what requires that we act, value, interact, and use language in sync with, in coordination with, others, as well as with various objects in the appropriate situations at the appropriate times (Gee, 1996, p. 129). Knowledge is not a matter of having a set of facts; it is not a domain that stands apart from the world. Knowledge is the offspring of doing (Dewey, p. 321-322).

New media literacy practices offer a powerful resource for learning. Interrupting hierarchies that draw distinctions between “high culture” and “low culture,” we move from the assumption that popular culture --as mediated by the Internet-- offers new kinds of tools, places, and modalities for learning. Gee notes, “These new ways are the ways with words (and their concomitant ways of thinking) connected to contemporary digital technologies and the myriad of popular culture and specialist practices to which they have given rise (James Gee, 2004, p. 2). Further describing the importance of new media practices, Jenkins’ notes how they represent shifts in the ways we understand ourselves, media, and the world around us (Jenkins, 2006); this shift is first enacted in our relations with popular culture, but then the skills we acquire through play are re-adapted and re- applied, and come to have implications for how we learn, work, participate in civic life and connect with other people around the world (Jenkins, 2006, p. 23).

Education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. “It is through education that society can formulate its own purpose, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.” (Dewey, p. 437-438) Richard Shaull writes, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world “(p. 34). An example of this second type of education is Paulo Freire’s notion of a problem-posing education. The point of departure for a problem-posing education is in the “here and now.” And, the method of a problem-posing education is dialogic action, whereby “subjects meet in cooperation in order to transform the world” (Freire, p. 167). Having a deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation” (Freire, p. 85).

Cognition is distributed. Thinker’s think through action and interaction with the environment, combining brain with body and world (Clark, 1997). Explaining this idea Andy Clark (2003) writes, “What makes us distinctively human is our capacity to continually restructure and rebuild our own mental circuitry, courtesy of an empowering web of culture, education, technology, and artifacts” (p. 10). To think is to participate “in potent and iterated loops through” the social and cognitive technological environment (p. 75). We use tools and technologies as a source of complementary capacities to those provided by the biological brain. Given the way cognition is an act of “looping” through the world, as the social and technological world changes, so too changes the possibilities of what humans can do. As digital media, tools and resources are brought into the new socio-cultural and technological “loop” humans are supported to do new kinds of things, and new capacities arise. An implication of this model for how human intelligence is an “open” system, is an understanding for how schools need to stop sorting students by way of a yardstick that measures for particular forms of intelligence, instead work from an understanding of the inherent open-ness and diversity of human capacity.

References Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, the MIT Press. Clark, A. (2003). Natural-Born Cyborgs: minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence, Oxford University Press, New York. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S.L. (2009). Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation. New York, NY. Teachers College Press. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books. Freire,P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder Gee, J.P. (1996) Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourse. 2nd Ed. Philadelphia: Falmer Press. Gee, J.P. (2004c). Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. N.Y. Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press. New York and London.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Lund, A., & Rasmussen, I. (in print 2010). Tasks 2.0: Education Meets Social Computing and Mass Collaboration. Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The Penguin Press, Penguin Group (USA). Inc.