Language. Yo. What is THAT? (A social perspective)

Okay, and we're back...

Now, the only problem with the ideas of the cognitivist domain is that, according to more socially oriented theory, they have placed cognition in the wrong place. Cognition, mind, is not a process of the brain--the way the a computer (brain) supports a program (mind)--rather, mind and cognition are social processes, socially situated, socially distributed.

Those claims may sound strange or wrong, but if you look at what they're saying, they make a lot of sense. The cognitive school is based on the idea that the computer is the proper model for mind and consciousness--but there's a major difference between the human mind and the computer program in respect to context: computers are purely individual, decontextualized, ahistorical, unsituated, lacking enrivonment and ecology; the human mind is never in existence outside of all of these. Much of modern linguistics, anthropology, social psychology--among other sciences--believe these are the very foundations of mind, not just its habitat.

In this way, language, even when playing a role in cognitive development, is social because cognition itself is seen as socially distributed. One could say that language is the means through wich all of these constructs exist--history, society, ecology--and therefore that mind itself is a linguistic/social construct, even though it appears as an individual entity--at least in our setting.

This discussion started when I made a claim so familiar to me that I hardly think about it anymore: that communication is but one--and a minor one at that--function of language. And therefore that language educational that focuses only on this element is not real education. Here is more support for that claim on the social level:

John Searle points out that language can be shaped by the world, but that it can shape the world socially; for example, the declaration "I now pronounce you man and wife," when spoken by the right person in the right setting, changes the social structure of the world: where once there were two singe people, now there is a married couple. That is language used to create social reality, not to communicate an already-existing reality.

Searle uses a classic example of three old school baseball umpires arguing. One says, "I calls 'em and I sees 'em"; the second says, "I calls 'em as they is!"; the third says, "They ain't nothin' till I calls em." The third guy is probably the closest to the truth. No matter how far, on a level of physics, the ball is from the plate, the right person with the right social position can MAKE it a strike, not by physically moving in, but through language.

This is a great metaphor is many ways! First, it raises the debate, Does an umpire use language to communicate the fact that the ball was a ball, OR does he use language to create the social reality that that mass of electrons was a ball or strike? This is the debate over the purpose of language. Sure it may have both elements, but what is the crucial element of human language? Someone like Searle will argue that the real power is the ability to create social institution, power, privilege, etc., through linguistic declarations. [Another thing I love here is the dialect of English used. Clearly it's nonstandard; but it shows the very important point that Standard English isn't privileged because it's in any way more intelligible--we can say things in many ways and communicate them just as effectively or ineffectively. The words/language may not be where the communication exists. Think of someone who's never seen baseball; none of the lines communicates a thing to this person because they don't have the context through which to understand the utterances...]

Actually, I shouldn't have bracketed that last point, because in it we also see the power the gets supported and reproduced through language. None of these guys speaks "correctly," and in another context, they would be viewed as all kinds of less intelligent, poorly educated, poor in general, etc. Again, the notion that issues of "standard dialects" do more to reproduce power than they do to help communication is another idea to known to me and people in my field that we forget that most people outside of language studies may not have considered it this way. But that's my point here in this blog.

I'll try to stop writing so this is readable. These claims are big and unsupported--ready for a battle! What do you think? Is this all just bullshit?

Language. Yo. What is THAT? (A cognitive perspective)

I want to pick up on a conversation started elsewhere with DW because one of the things that I see as having vast, vast differences between the field and the laity is the concept of language, what it is, what it's for. I realize this blog is dedicated to education, and that's even more reason for discussions of these language questions, because, as I hope to persuade any skeptics, all thinking (at least conceptual thinking) is done in a language; and since education on every level must have sometime to do with the development of conceptual thinking, all education is in a very real way language education. (Notice that the achievement gaps between native English speakers and nonnative English speakers is just has high in math is in English...) These may be big claims, but they are entirely supportable. (I'm still trying to keep these posts shorter!)

So what is language? Surely we use language to communicate ideas with one another, but most linguists would probably put communication pretty low down on the list of what human language does. I'm with them. Let's consider two domains: cognitive and social. First, in line with the claim above that (conceptual) thinking and language are one, one of the points of language is individual cognitive development. Language is not just interpersonal, but intrapersonal as well. We think in language, make our decisions, wrestle with ideas, with identities--all of this is done in internalized language (Vygotsky's work comes to mind here). Psycholinguists have a really hard time proving this claim in an experimental way because the fact is that no human is raised outside of a language system--except for very rare cases of abuse and abandonment, which indeed have been studied. But the very fact that we are conceptually thinking beings and that we simply don't exist as humans outside of a language system (which all people, barring physiological disorders, acquire as a matter of nature), that is, the fact that we can't think of a refutation for this while attempting to silence our "inner monologue" serves as some weighty proof in itself. But there is of course more.

Pidgins and Creoles

Some other evidence comes from the transition from pidgin to creole languages--at least from what some theorists argue. A pidgin is a language used purely for transactions, among people who come from different languages to a place where they need to do business with one another. Hawaii is a example; early in the 20th Century it was a place where people from many different languages settled and need a communication system in order to do business with one another. This happens all over the place though. Pidgins can grow to be fairly complex, but one thing that keeps them from being defined as languages is that they have no native speakers. Once the generations of children born to the pidgin speakers begin to internalize the language, they need more than just the communicative functions; they need a language to do all the cognitive work that a full linguistic system does (see John S. Mayher), and so what was once a pidgin, over time, gets developed into a creole, which is a language formed from combining two or more other languages. The major lesson here is that children need a fully developed linguistic system, not just a pidgin, and they will even create one if needed. (Another reason why people who resist the ways in which the younger generations shift aspects of our language are misguided in their anxiety; this is just how languages work.)

I think there is a lot to be learned from the pidgin/creole distinction, especially in education/language education, because my concern is that if we realize--on a cognitive level--what students need language for, but if we treat language purely for is communicative functions--as I think so much of schooling does--then I think we are robbing them of a rich education. This is a point I am sure I'll come back to because it relates a lot to some of my points about writing assessment.

Okay, that was a brief glimpse of the cognitive domain. But at this point, for at least the past 30 or so years, the social functions of language have really come to the fore in terms of the role it plays in human affairs and development. I'll save that for a new post though. Anyone want to fight about any of the claims made so far??

Science! Yo. What is it?

Here's my attempt at a definition:

The development and revision of theory based upon [systematic] observation of worldly phenomena (psychical, mental, and social), then the application of the theory back to the worldly phenomena in an effort to explain, *or* predict, or otherwise understand them. And repeat.

I would add one more clause as well: ... with the overall intention of improving life quality.

Within this definition there is *room for* experimentation, falsifiability, etc., but I argue that these only mark certain paradigms of science, not science itself. So the goal here is to create a definition that will cover all, or the most possible, forms of science within one definition. Similarly, some science seeks to explain but not necessarily predict, hence the "or".

Who's game? Let's define this thing.

[My reason: In education right now, there are constantly calls for more scientific research, which is great. However, since this terms is so undefined, what I see is more like an excuse to ignore any research (particularly more humane research) one wants on the basis of it being "unscientific". Very easy to do if we have no real definition of science, and if it's research we'd rather not deal with anyway.]

Please post your best definition of science!

The Inauthenticity of School Writing: or, Teaching Writing is Weird

Inauthenticity in School Writing
Something very weird happens when you try to find models of good writing that your college composition students can use to emulate: you can’t find them. There are no “research papers” out there; there are no five-paragraph essays; very few real pieces of writing do those things we want our college students to do. So most often, we are left with using examples of good student writing as models. But this is weird. If student writing reflects nothing that naturally occurs in the world, what is it doing? What after all is student writing supposed to be emulating? This is not a small question, but I think one that really strikes at the heart of literacy education. When we teach writing, at any level, what are we doing and why are we doing it? My experience is mostly in college writing, and I have never found acceptable answers to these questions. I find that we in composition have pretty similar ideas about what we’re doing and why, but that when it comes time to show the greater academy, the accreditors, the public at large—there are just no decent answers.

Is writing used in school to assess what students have learned about a topic? If so, then composition courses might want to help students practice ways to use writing as a demonstration of content mastery. That puts composition in the role of “service course,” which most comp people hate.

Is writing used not just for after-the-fact assessment (“summative assessment”) but used rather for students to learn about a topic AS they write? Is it therefore a means of learning, not just a demonstration that learning has taken place? If this is the case, then composition courses would be failures if all they did was help student practice discrete writing skills that serve to demonstrate content mastery. In this scenario, comp courses set into motion much deeper learning strategies (though I’m not liking that word).

What if we go even further: Is writing—school writing—used in part for students to craft and develop stances that serve to concretize certain student/scholarly identities, without which “learning” is just the internalization of random facts, but with and through which learning is about the transformation of the world and identities within it? If writing, argumentative writing in our society, is a social practice through which people take stances upon the world, create and develop identities in relation to situations of import, and through which they both enter into and simultaneously transform the social roles and institutions they inherit—then literacy education, college composition, any teaching of writing would seem to be indispensible to a real education.

These three options, fairly loosely, might be said to represent the three major schools of thought in English composition: the first school, the “current-traditional” school, was prominent from the 50s till about 1970; the second school, “process” pedagogy took over then; and in the mid-to-late 80s, the “post-process” school started to gain prominence. It’s a lot messier than this, and all schools still operate here and there. But for anyone outside the field of composition, it might be good to know that these waves of different ideas of writing education are noted by most compositionists.

So teaching writing in college is weird, for several reasons. First, not many of us believe that the current-traditional school has much validity; yet it seems that most people outside our field think this is the role we do and should be playing. So there is a fight between paradigms here. We want to help our students learn to utilize their writing practices so that they can learn more deeply in their education and so that they can create identities that take stances on issues and seek to transform them, rather than calling internalization of agreed-upon content an education. Most of our colleagues yell at us because their students “can’t write,” which always means different things, but nearly always within the range of “can’t use commas” (which most teachers can’t either) to “have bad subject verb agreement” (which most linguists might agree is undergoing a shift in Standard English anyway). The point is that “can’t write” generally means “have poor mechanics,” which just isn’t what we tend to focus on, and for several reasons: first, no two people even agree on what good mechanics are after a certain level, so what one teacher sees as good writing, another might see as a misplaced modifier; also, our decades of research tell us that if we approach the more global issues of writing/literacy as social practices, the surface level errors will decrease with time; further, said research shows us that trying to rush the path toward error-free prose by overt instruction doesn’t work anyway…. So error-free prose itself is a myth, and trying to teach it directly robs time from the curriculum where students’ literacy practices could be developed and places this time in instruction that might help them pass a test this semester, but will have no long term effect on their writing. (This is nearly indisputable, and I will gladly refer any reader to tons of supporting research upon request.)

Writing instruction is weird. I started this post with the more specific issue of not being able to find “real writing” that students can use as models for their “school writing.” It’s true. I love using MLK’s beautiful “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but when you really try to use it as a model, you see that this—one of the most powerful pieces of 20th Century exposition—uses very few of the conventions our colleagues wish we would teach, and breaks even more. Academic journal essays are generally more clear in their argumentation, but they are so specialized that they’re entirely boring to most people, college freshmen included; op-ed pieces are good, but there too we see only analogies to the “rules of writing” that people think matter in school. So professional writing is very difficult to use as models for college writing, and that in itself speaks to issues of inauthenticity in what we do and in what is expected of us outside the composition classroom.

People learn most effectively through apprenticeships, through watching masterful craftspeople perform tasks, sprinkled with bits of explanation/instruction, then by a “scaffolding” process by which the learner gradually takes over and eventually masters the given practice. This goes for many types of learning (though perhaps not all [though, I personally think all]), and for the learning of social practices it most certainly applies. With no masters out there who find value in the rules of school writing, how are we supposed to—-with a straight face-—tell our students that these rules matter? We can call them training wheels, but after 12 years of training wheels, wouldn’t you get bored and just want to be free to ride and fall or soar?

In assessment theory we call something 'authentic' to the extent that the test itself matches the real life thing it seeks to measure. In this case, when we assess student writing, where is our authenticity? Is it any wonder that so many students just see writing as whatever this or that teacher wants, as just another test to pass?

But on the flip side, if we take this argument and say, Okay, let’s target our writing to model office memos, notes to parents, professional emails, etc., does this seem like a worthy use of an education? I think the major lesson compositionists have learn in the transitions away from the current-traditional model is that writing must be seen as a practice with value in and of itself, not just as a means to another end, whether that end is demonstrating content knowledge or writing error free office memos. Whether we see writing as a cognitive process or an interlocking system of social practices (always situated, never having any purpose outside of a given context), most in composition would argue that we are only educating our students when we value the actual writing and the writers. But again, this seems to be a fight between us inside the composition classroom and nearly everyone else outside. I blame us for not communicating our reasons more persuasively.

As long as we view composition (as long as we let the outside world view it) as training for something else, not for writing and the means it serves, then we are bound to be inauthentic in our assignments and assessments. What should we do?

Harvey Milk and Phenomenology

I was listening to an interview with Chris “Mad Dog” Russo on the radio this morning, and I was struck by his citing the film Milk when asked about his view on same sex marriage. Mad Dog is a New York based sports talk show host, for those who don’t know. I’m not saying that all sports talk show hosts are conservative, but from my years of listening to WEEI in Boston, at least on that station, liberal points of view are rarely spoken, and often mocked—by most hosts and listeners alike. Not all, of course. But anyway… The host this morning asked Russo if he was for or against gay marriage and there was a long pause. He balked a bit. But in answering the question, he brought up Milk implying that after seeing this movie, he realized that this was an issue about real people, etc., and that he is for same sex marriage now. (This may not be the entirely nuanced version, but it hits the main points.)

Now, what does this have to do with this blog? Everything. What I take from this is a very clear example of how popular media change public opinion. Popular media change public opinion. Russo was not persuaded by logic here; he was not reading the academic journals on queer theory and persuaded intellectually… He saw a movie, a story, became familiar with the life of one person, and his opinion (and I’m assuming many others’) was changed, or at least began to crack. The initial mission of this blog was born out of a frustration, a helplessness, that all of the good done within the walls of the academy—specifically educational research—go unnoticed or even actively disregarded by the public. But public opinion is what drives policy, which drives assessment, which drives curricula, etc. The mission of this blog was to take issues that tend to have meaning and support only within the academy walls and to get them out. And hearing Russo talk on the radio this morning, I thought it was worth sharing that story.

This, to me, is the point where we need to examine the role of scientific inquiry and the uses of scientific paradigms. That’s why I slipped the word phenomenology into the post title. What I heard in Russo was a man convinced not by logic and reason, but by a glimpse of the lived experience of a gay individual. So what does this say about scientific methodology? What is the proper role of experimental science in a field that means very little unless it can affect public opinion? Here’s the quandary: we like to think that we are ultimately rational, that we are persuaded by reasoning—by logos, not ethos or pathos. But that’s just not the way we operate. Why should it be? I am not saying that experimental methodologies have no role in transforming public opinion—of course they do. But I think we need to shed the naiveté that says they are all that shapes public opinion.

Validity theory—the study of what makes scientific inquiry valid—now considers validation to be an argument, not just a factual number. I mention this in another post. What’s important about this notion that validity is an argument is that arguments only have strength in relation to a given audience. This is huge because the old views of validity treated validation as if it could be done in a vacuum, as if social values had not effect, but they do. What I’m getting at is the validity—the necessity—of scientific methods that expand beyond experiments and that reach their intended audiences. An argument that is valid for one community may be invalid for another. In order to really get this idea, we have to really suspend our disbelief about some social values we take to be universal. For example, the prototype of experimental science, the double blind controlled drug test. This is a form of argument, and it only works on communities that value that type of evidence. We tend to believe that after a series of experiments that show that a drug has intended effects and minimal unintended side effects—enough to convince the FDA—that the drug is worth using. The experiments were valid. But experiments, if you recall from the other post, cannot be valid or invalid; all they can do is provide evidence for a decision, and that decision is where validity lies. So if you were to take a community of people whose religion forbade any kind of drug and show them all the statistical evidence in the world, all the results of the controlled randomized experiments, etc., you would not convince them that taking the drug was their best decision. The experiments have no validity for this audience.

One assumption we have to unpack is something that we tend to believe so strongly, we consider it universal. We tend to believe that life should be extended as long as possible, almost regardless of quality. It’s kind of hard to debate that, as a society, we hold this value. So, holding this value, a drug that will maintain life is a valid piece of evidence for the decision to take it. But if we value a life of purity over longevity… then maybe this scientific methodology is invalid. Validity theory is a hell of a drug!

The point here is that we throw around the words scientific and unscientific is careless, even harmful ways. If you are trying to convince a population that condoms are good for preventing HIV, but you don’t understand the social values that determine what type of argument is persuasive and what rules are worth obeying or breaking, what lines of evidence are convincing—if you assume that all societies are convinced by what we tend to call scientific method, then you are in trouble. Narrative evidence—like a film that chips away at a person’s long standing belief that homosexuals are somehow deviant—this is in some cases much more persuasive than other types of evidence, such as experimental or statistical. So, am I calling Milk science? Of course not. But I am arguing that phenomenology—the method of investigating lived experience—is science, and it’s effective, even more effective than experimental methods depending on the audience. (Yes, science has an audience and must adapt its methods accordingly*.) I’m arguing that we privilege on paradigm of scientific methodology with no real reason for doing so, other than it’s just what our cultural values dictate. So much so that I assume some people reading this are thinking that science is just science, that it’s just right and everything else is just guesswork. But I think this is something we really need to fight about. I am arguing that we need to loosen this grip, especially when US reports call for more scientific evidence-based research on education. Because phenomenological research IS evidence based, and it IS highly scientific. It’s just not experimental or statistical. It provides insight rather than proof sometimes. But think about how powerful insight can be, and how in the face of tons and tons of “proof” we are able to hold on to our beliefs anyway.

Just some stuff to think about in terms of research and science, and how we need to get our research outside the limits of the walls of our tiny scientific communities if this research is to mean anything to anyone other than us.

Solidarity and Mainstream Dialects: A Puzzle in Three Acts

Part I

Paulo Freire—-personal hero—-discusses solidarity as one of the major pieces of liberation and humanization. I want to take a brief look at what this means; then I want to look at some widely known linguistic principles about mainstream and nonmainstream dialects in order to make sense of James Gee’s—-another hero—-statement that while mainstream dialects (Discourses, in his terms) are good for obtaining social goods, it is nonmainstream Discourses that lead their speakers to solidarity. I think this creates a major puzzle in modern education, a puzzle for which I have no solution, but which I think is crucial to put out there. Here goes.

[I’m trying to keep these shorter—-per some requests, haha—-so I will need to skimp on some evidence to back up some claims. I’ll try to mark certain points with an * to acknowledge places where I would like to give more support if anyone is curious or skeptical…]

A very quick snapshot of Freire: he rose to fame as an educator in Brazil who believed that part of what kept Brazilian peasants oppressed was their illiteracy. I only mention this because his work is a criticism of education is not directed at US education literally, but when you read him, the connections are shocking. For Freire, real education must lead to the liberty and humanity (humanization) of the students; in other words, a real education will not serve to oppress and dehumanize student. Makes sense. That problem is that if we are not careful, wide scale education can have major oppressive and dehumanizing effects, even if that’s not our intention (my point, not necessarily his). If we are to liberate people (which includes humanization), for Freire, an education must encourage them to perceive the structure of the world in a critical fashion such that, if they are deemed oppressive or dehumanizing, the students will not be moved to simply fit into this structure as it stands; rather, they will be moved to transform that structure so that it, and all those inside of it, are all free to pursue their humanity, not just exist as “beings-for-others” who spend their lives working only for the benefit of those in charge. So for Freire, education must lead to transformation, not simply adaptation to the world as it is. This is perhaps THE major tenet of "critical pedagogy" (Freirean pedagogy).


So for Freire, education is the pursuit of full humanity, but he says "The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity."

So this might be a good fight to have. Is solidarity an important enough part of the human experience such that an education that isolates, that values and rewards isolation, is in essence oppressive, even dehumanizing? (also, what if it encourages isolation/discourages solidarity among some groups more than others? Now it gets a little scary…) Well, I’m of the mind to think yes, that solidarity is so important to all we value in life—-though perhaps might be strikingly missing from the standard view of "the American Dream"—-that an education which devalues and discourages it ought not to be fixed, as it were, but ought to be transformed.

But even if I’m alone in this, I think we can all agree that if our educational system is, say, neutral on the solidarity of members of some groups, but is downright intolerant of solidarity among other groups—-that this system is deeply flawed and even vicious.

Part II

So what am I getting at? Let’s look at some “facts” (or at least some widely accepted and longly held enough views) of linguistics and language dialects.

Language are often represented as existing in pure and “broken” or impure forms. In English, we tend to view one dialect as correct (usually called Standard English, or SE), and all others as just 'bad English'. The truth, however, is that SE is no more correct, in linguistic terms, than other dialect, and that the reason it is viewed as “good English” is purely political—-a matter of power, not of anything inherent in the language and its rules, only a matter of who speaks it and who doesn’t. Again, this is not my opinion, but is pretty much agreed upon by the entire field of linguistics at least since William Labov’s work in the late 1960s.

When I say that all dialects are equal in “linguistic terms” what I mean is that all forms of a language can be called dialects when they are a) rule-governed and b) predictable. Most of us are familiar with the major rules of SE: don’t use double negatives; “saw” is the past tense of “see”; subjects and verbs must agree in number, etc. All SE native speakers learn these rules in the home and in their communities, and then the rules are reinforced in the form of drilling in classrooms—at least they were when I was a kid. None of these rules, however, hold for all English dialect--a very important point!* (Notice for now that they are reinforced but not learned in school*; this is another huge point that would be great to fight about.) Rules govern SE and if you were to listen to SE speakers, you could also predict, for the most part, the grammatical forms they would use as they form sentences. They don’t just use grammar randomly. Despite extremely minor errors here and there (‘brung’ instead of ‘brought’ for example), even very young children have mastered what seem like infinite webs of rules that govern their native languages/dialects*.

But the idea that out of all the dialects of English that only SE is rule governed and predictable is just wrong—-and even worse than wrong, because what it really does is allows us to spot those born and raised in nonSE homes and communities; it allows us to spot outsiders, but it almost never impedes communication. (*Another major point).

One other major point that all sociolinguists generally know is that languages are not just composed of words, but that they are thoroughly value-laden. To speak a language is, to a very large extent, to extol the values that underlie it. Thus, when cultures have been forced to speak languages of people who have overtaken them, they have lost more than just bunches of words and grammatical rules; they have lost entire depictions of the world, based on the values and identity of a culture that has come to see the world in this way. Modern sociolinguists-—and especially the school called New Literacy Studies (NLS)-—hold that language and identity are intimately linked. In fact, this may be a weak version of the view; a stronger version might hold that language and identity are one, that to deny a language is to deny an entire identity*. But I don’t want to digress here too much. Perhaps this needs another post.

NLS co-founder James Paul Gee uses the term Discourse (with a capital “D”) instead of dialect because the latter only refers to the words and grammar rules, but the former refers to the entire “Identity kit” which includes beliefs, values, gestures, etc. For Gee, a Discourse is more like a social identity; and we all have many. We all know that we talk differently in different social settings: we would report the exact same event in very different language if we were talking to friends, to professors, to parents, on a first date, in a job interview, while teaching a class, etc. (Each of these would be an example of a Discourse.) But it’s not only the language that changes. Different Discourses can have fundamentally different values. The Discourse of being a good friend has a different underlying set of values than the Discourse of being a good football player, etc. There is no reason, for Gee, that we need to worry about holding such conflicting values within ourselves, for that’s just what we do; it doesn’t make us hypocritical or schizophrenic or anything. According to Gee, we all master many Discourses as we go through life, and some will lead us towards certain social goods (jobs, money, social standing), where as others will lead us away from these goods. Gee calls the former “dominant Discourses” and the latter “nondominant Discourses.” Mastering the Discourse of school would be a great example of a dominant Discourse. If you can master all that comes with this discourse—-the values, language, attitudes, mannerisms, beliefs, etc.—-you will have more access to succeed in certain domains that someone who fails such mastery will struggle with. And the success in these domains-—college, professional life, etc.-—will lead to certain social good, to the American Dream, as they say.

But there are reasons why we master certain nondominant Discourses as well. Mastering the Discourse of being a die-hard Red Sox fan will not lead me to money, jobs, social status—-but it has its rewards; it welcomes me into a community, and in this community we have solidarity. The same would hold for any nondominant Discourse for Gee: street gangs, class clowns, birdwatchers, for example. What Gee does not emphasize, to my knowledge, is that dominant Discourses are not only good for leading to social goods, they are flat out bad for leading to solidarity. This can be seen in all kinds of scenarios where people lose their community ties in a trade off for “success” in certain domains. For example, stories are rampant about the “choice” that inner-city students have between succeeding in school and maintaining their social standing (solidarity) in their home communities. We hear of kids who have to literally hide their books so that they won’t lose their friend or even face physical harm for taking on that social identity (good student Discourse). I personally don’t think this issue can be underestimated when we talk about how to “fix” all these education problems we have*.

Part III

So if Gee is right that mainstream Discourses lead to social goods, but not to solidarity—-that they, in fact, deny solidarity with other, nonmainstream Discourses—-then we can see some real problems in American schooling. If Freire is right that there is no liberation, not humanity without solidarity; and if our schools—by forcing students to assume a system of Discourses that will threaten their solidarity, especially the less mainstream the communities from which they hail—then we have some real problems that will not be fixed by “higher standards” or “accountability.”

Here is the argument in syllogistic form:

Premise one: Education that seeks to keep people from solidarity cannot be called liberating or humanizing (or, if you prefer the stronger view, is oppressive and dehumanizing).

Premise two: US education demands that students-—especially nonmainstream students—-master mainstream Discourses in order to be good students, but these Discourses will keep them from solidarity.

Therefore… Well, we’re in trouble.

And, as per the mission of this blog, if we simply attempt to fix education (that is, to make it even better at doing this terrible thing it does), then we are not headed toward a future of a liberated humanized citizenry; in fact, until we transform the very principles that underlie these ideas, we are more likely headed for the opposite.

My Dissertation Study

My dissertation study

A lot of people have wondered what kind of dissertation someone does in English composition, or specifically what my dissertation is about. So here goes. I gave mine a nice lofty title, mostly as a way of positioning myself for a job someday—I know, but it's just a title. “Applying Modern Validity Theory to College Writing Assessment” or something like that.

The simple version:
I am trying to find out the experience students go through after they have been placed in Basic Writing (the lower level first year composition class). So I have gathered about 10 participants and I'll be interviewing them, reading some of their work—including the essay that got them placed into BW—and just trying to get inside the overall experience, the more global effects of being placed into BW.

The larger implications:
The larger issues here are educational tracking and assessment (or test) validity. People all over the world are tracked according to their “abilities” or “aptitudes,” ideally all done for their best interest, but the bigger question is whether tracking people this way is actually good or bad for them—and of course, if it's bad for them, who is benefiting..? In other words, if a student “belongs” in BW, we say this because we think they will be better off in the long run for having taken the course; we believe that are not yet ready for College Writing (the mainstream composition class), either because they don't have certain “skills” or perhaps they just need more time writing as they develop and mature. Also, we fear that putting them in CW will be bad because they will get low grades, or maybe fail; they will get discouraged because they will feel behind, all that kind of stuff. In this way, it could be the best decision.

But what if not? There's also the chance that this person needed that little boost saying, You're a better writer than you may realize or than your schools have let you know; you belong in the more advanced class; maybe they are the type of learner who rises to a challenge and responds more to a little added belief in themselves than in a kick-in-the-pants type of placement. We don't know. And the placement method itself won't tell us. What's more, the student themselves might not really know. To make it worse, this course may separate them from their friends, is usually non-credit-bearing (but still costs money) which means they will be a semester behind for graduation credits; often this course will not transfer—and since there may be a high correlation between BW placement and low socioeconomic status (SES), this can put undue burdens on someone who has to transfer because of financial constraints and now had to pay for a class that they can't even use toward graduation... The list goes on. One of the larger points is that this is a high stakes decision. Yes, there are educational matters at hand—being ready, “ready,” for CW, etc., but there are much more global issues of social identity, perception of self as a student, economic burden—things that may greatly outweigh the educational benefits of the placement.

So how to we find out? And why did I call this a matter of validity theory?

Validity, what it is.

Validity is “scientific inquiry into score meaning” (Samuel Messick, 1989). The old way of looking at it (pre mid-1950s) was as follows: a test score is reliable to the extent that the same results would happen over and over again (whether the student took the same test over, or whether several graders graded it); but its only valid if the test actually measures the thing it was supposed to test. We no longer quite see it this way. But just for an example, if you measure water temperature with a thermometer and it reads 80 degrees, it might be right, but lots of things could be wrong. So you could try it a few more times with the same thermometer, and you could try several different thermometers—if they all say 80 degrees, you have a very reliable measure. But, if the water is forming ice crystals, or is about to boil over, then clearly, the thermometer did not give a valid measure of the temperature. So reliability is the extent to which measures are consistent, and validity is (or used to be) the extent to which they are “correct.”

But the educational sciences outgrew this definition of validity for a few reasons. First, when you're talking about a psychological/mental construct—can this kid write well enough to take CW?--the issue of a “correct” answer just may not exist. In these matters, such as BW writing placement, there really is no correct or incorrect answer, but the answers are more or less plausible. But there's a bigger issue at stake. The measurement tool—the assessment procedure—is here to help us obtain evidence for the students' placement; it is not here to place them. This is huge. WE place them. The test is a tool that, if designed will (if it measures what it's supposed to measure) give us good evidence, but we the humans are the ones who make the decision. Validity, therefore, resides not in the measurement tool, but in the decision that we the humans make. So if the thermometer reads 32.5 degrees but we still go swimming and freeze to death? It's wasn't the thermometer's fault.

It has been about fifty years since we took validity out of the hands of the test itself and but the burden upon ourselves. What this means is that, in order to make the best possible decision based on an assessment, we need to accrue all possible evidence for and against the decision; thus, validity is seen now as a type of argument, not just as a matter of given fact. In terms of my study, I am investigating possible reasons for or against the placement of these particular students in order to examine possible issues in the larger matter of educational tracking.

One other major shift in validity theory is that the validity of the decision made and the social consequences of the decision are now seen as one, not two imperatives. (This was a major contribution of Samuel Messick, 1989; the validity as an argument idea is credited to Cronbach, 1988, and Kane, 1992, for those interested.) Again, my study seeks to fulfill this imperative. I have read tons of literature about the need to incorporate social consequences in validation inquiry, but I have never seen a study that actually does it. (Again, for the nerdier, Shepard, 1993, talks about it, but I don't think she goes far enough.)

So what happens now is that we've really opened a debate about science and scientific method in educational and social research. If we are to examine validity as a interpretive argument, with the assessment scores being the evidence and the decisions made being the conclusion—and if we are to take in social consequences as part of the evidence for or against the validity of this argument, we have graduated from the scientific paradigm that looks for the “correct” score as the valid score. There just isn't such thing in these matters. Our scientific inquiry into the score meaning of these placement essays must—if it is to follow the major ideas of validity theorists—examine phenomena that are not representable through quantitative means, and certainly not through a paradigm that even believes that there is objectivity is the measurement of this type of phenomena. Objectivity and correctness just don't come into play here because there just is no objectively correct answer to the big questions in life, such as, Did we place that student in the right class? The traditional view of validity would allow for a glance at transcripts and retention rates perhaps and be satisfied that the assessments were valid. But no longer. We know too much more now, and modern theorists do not but into the notion of excluding any possible evidence from the validity argument. (Pamela Moss is another major theorist to check out.)

Another reason for this study is that I see a lot of wondering in composition literature about what happens to basic writers as a result of their placement, but again, I don't recall ever seeing a study that sought to find out. That's what I'm trying to do. And I'm approaching this from a paradigm of phenomenology, which means that rather than giving surveys to thousands of BW students, and analyzing the data I receive on that level, I am attempting to get inside (and even help co-construct) the “lived experience” of these few students. This type of paradigm seeks insight, rather than objectivity or generalizability. And this this something I would love to fight about! The question is, Is the aggregate of common experiences of thousands of people more telling that the vivid life stories (in relation to our question) of a handful? Clearly the two inquiries are after different things, and each is good for something that the other isn't. But anyone who has read this and who sees no value in a phenomenological approach, as I've outlined here—let's fight it out! Maybe you're right. But maybe I'm right...

So far I have interviewed ten participants, and I've found some really interesting themes emerging—themes I could not have predicted ahead of time. I'll let you know as I gather more data. The interviews have been very open-ended, and I've decided to find times to let them know what I think I'm hearing thematically, to let them reflect and even construct experience right there with me. I'll be glad to talk more about this method and methodology in another post! It's solid...

JL