Author: Scott Robertson, PhD

Scott is a faculty member in the UBC Teacher Education program. His degrees include a PhD (’24) + MA (’03) in Curriculum Studies, a BEd (Secondary) (’00), and a BHK (Physical Education) (’98). His interests include relational curriculum, teacher agency + autonomy, and the roles and effects of mentoring in teacher education, sport coach practice, and coach education. Scott enjoyed 17 years in Secondary ELA classrooms and remains a local TOC. His background in HOPE-related Physical Education includes 31 years as a coach and coach educator in youth soccer. He is also a very proud and devoted Dad!

On Teleology: I. Efficiency

Featured Image Credit (edited) by William of Ockham – from a manuscipt of Ockham’s Summa Logicae, MS Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 464/571, fol. 69r}, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

On Teleology: I. Efficiency

Teleology is the study of final causes or, put another way, the fulfillment of inherent purpose or, even more simply, completion. As a quality or trait, we can call this τέλος, or telos.

An analogy I use in Teacher Ed to illustrate telos is shipbuilding… what kind of ‘ship’ – or maybe better in plural, what kinds of ‘ships’ – have school teachers been aiming to build? One warrant for this shipbuilding comparison, my thinking goes, is our culture’s hankering obsession with efficiency, i.e. what ocean-going vessel ever gets built except to fill some function or purpose?

By analogy, what function or purpose do teachers envisage or intend for K-12 graduates – what kind(s) of people do we want K-12 graduates to become? How closely does this resemble the kind(s) of people the Curriculum has in mind? And then, maybe more importantly, what kind(s) of people do teachers actually end up ‘building’? Alternatively, from the student perspective, what kinds of influence have teachers brought to bear upon their telos? What kinds of people finally cross that stage for their diploma?

No analogy being perfect – sort of the point with analogies – we can then make broader comparisons and contrasts between students and ships and gain a bit of insight about the intentions around which we approach the ‘building’ of each one.

Looks to be Grade 11 or 12ish
Image Credit by Manne1953 on Pixabay

But if ships don’t float your boat, try framing telos in the natural world… by analogy, imagine bacteria, forever on the hunt to feed and survive, yet to what end? Do bacteria literally just feed because they already live and will procreate, or do they need to survive in order to fulfill some further function or purpose?

Image Credits by Ali Shah Lakhani (edited) on Unsplash and
geralt on Pixabay

Likewise, consider the cells in our bodies. Controlled as they are by genes, proteins, and nuclei, each has a specific function that elicits some somatic or physiological consequence. By analogy, we might even stretch the description as far as saying cells seem to operate with some kind of ‘intention’ although that’s not to invoke ‘awareness’ or ‘sentience’… none as far as we know, anyway, not like the awareness a shipbuilder has while building ships or the intent a teacher has while teaching students.

Hmm… could telos be more inherent or instinctive than intentional, some mere effect of causes, which fall like dominos? Possibly, but for now let’s defer that question on the basis, as noted above, that our culture prefers to ply the Road of Efficiency, towards which ‘a purpose for everything’ definitely fills the bill. Of course, it’s no secret who else plies Efficiency Road – plies it like a wide-load truck – and it’s no outlander who believes that Science embraces teleology.

Along that Road, ‘a purpose for everything’ might also convey ‘nothing wasted’… think Occam’s Razor and a cut-to-the-chase sentiment that we might dare to call “relentless” although maybe let’s amend this to something kinder and gentler, like “persistent” – still sharp, just not so cutting.

Image Credit by Classroom Clipart

Hang on, though… let’s also clarify exactly which Occam’s Razor we’re using here because, you know, there’s Occam’s Razor and there’s Ockham’s Razor…

(i) Occam’s Razor

‘All things being equal,
the simplest explanation tends to be the correct explanation.’

and/or

“…permission to wrap up all epistemological loose ends
as ‘finished science’ in one fell swoop of fatal logic”

– posted on by The Ethical Skeptic

Occam’s Razor would keep matters simplistic by having us ignore or dismiss whichever details and data don’t suit some preferred belief or objective. In other words…

‘That which is easier to understand’

equals

‘That which is therefore more likely to be true’

equals

‘I’ll not be wasting my precious time with all that
thinking, testing, wondering crap’

equals

‘I don’t agree with you’
‘I don’t want to agree with you,
and, for that reason, you are wrong,
plus Occam’s Razor is Sciencey;
ipso facto, I am invincible’

(ii) Ockham’s Razor

“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate”

equals

“Plurality should not be posited without necessity”

William of Ockham would have us avoid leaping to conclusions or posing explanations beyond what can be justified by careful reasoning, yet with exceptions for what is self-evident, what is known to experience, and what might be “… proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.” [William of Ockham, you understand, was a devout pre-Protestant friar and scholar who, thereby, viewed God as the sole ontological necessity.] In other words…

Proffer something because reason can warrant or justify its addition

equals

Don’t let your ego write cheques that Science can’t cash

And how come? Because something straightforward is and ought to remain distinct from something simple just as something complex is and ought to remain distinct from something complicated.

The razor imagery, meanwhile, is metaphor for scraping away the ink you spilled from writing (or thinking) unnecessarily.

OK, let’s recap: Telos thus far = Ships, Cells, Bacteria, Science, and two kinds of Razors… up next – you guessed it: Acorns!

The Other A.I.

Featured Image Credit: Pexels on Pixabay

The academic community – a community to which I have belonged for decades – trades in ideas, and thinking is our currency-in-trade.

Throughout my teaching career, as I’ve offered elsewhere, I’ve devoted my practice to helping people make thinking a habit:

Thinking is the value in our ideas, and since we’re accountable by means of personal responsibility to defend these, there’s our incentive for thinking to be informed by knowledge, practised with discipline, and weighed by healthy scepticism. Discussing and testing ideas is the purview of thinking, and as such, thinking’s an invaluable skill.

Along the way, as our thinking skills mature, we yet retain at our core something personalised and uniquely individual: let’s call this integrity, which literally derives from roots that combine to mean something “untouched,” i.e. something “pure.” As puzzle pieces integrate to form a whole picture, so we might imagine all the pieces that form 'ourselves'. Full integrity finds every piece contributing, no piece erroneous or superfluous although, unlike puzzle pieces, ours we are able to enhance and improve. Distinct from “integrity the buzzword,” integrity is the character and experience to cope, or else not cope, with real consequences. Integrity is how we spot adversity, and it fuels our will to leave comfort zones in order to measure how much we’ve grown.

As a coach since 1990 and a teacher since 1999, I’ve long felt my responsibility, on behalf of people, to help players and students find ways to grow and contribute in accordance with their own integrity.

Fuel for this growth includes the earnest effort we expend in the academic setting to develop and explore imaginative, inventive, even original ideas, and then to properly credit the earlier thinkers who provided our source material. Citation is a formal way to indicate where other thinkers’ ideas ended and our ideas began. But such ‘academic integrity’ goes beyond formal citation.

Academic work is an investment – rigour now for pay-off later. Investing in the development and expression of ideas now, out of what came before, not only works the thinker’s valuable skill, it also advances the growth and maturity of broader confidence and social esteem into the future. This is one reason, from my experience, for tying student success directly to engagement with others in a classroom… p.s. that’s hardly some revelation, but it remains important enough to justify reiteration.

When I teach, I need to hear from students too, particularly in person, although whatever the case, in their own words. Of course, I also appreciate the utility of a Zoom call. But in-person contact time between students and teachers is such a precious commodity that face-to-face teaching-and-learning – for me, anyway, not sure for you – is simply irreplaceable and will never be going away… not unless we so utterly lose our broader social integrity that we just stop being human.

That said, we do manage to prove, now and again, that the pieces comprising our integrity seem to contain at least a few impurities. For instance, you may be surprised to learn how, even before the Digital Age, we found ourselves facing opportunities and enticements not only to draw upon others’ ideas, words, images, and videos but also to risk presenting these irresponsibly as our own.

These days, as we have access to scads of text and media literally in the palm of our hands, legitimate schools are left to counter our worser nature by emphasising quaint abstractions like honesty, fairness, and respect. Such schools expect students and teachers to behave as honest and responsible members of an academic community by complying with policies, regulations, and prohibitions that uphold that academic integrity thing.

One common prohibition is plagiarism, which means submitting the oral or written ideas, words, images, or videos of another person as one’s own without giving that other person proper credit or acknowledgement. Plagiarism is intellectual theft though, more simply put, plagiarism is cheating, by which I mean falsifying anything that is subject to formal evaluation or peer review. And again in my experience, I’ve found plagiarism is far more common than most students ever realise. But whether it is or isn’t tantamount to stealing or cheating, plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that we absolutely must not tolerate, much less accept. Why?

Plagiarism is a serious academic obstacle that poses significant, permanent consequences, whether detected or not. Ideas that are not one’s own must be given credit at all times – perhaps this is the fundamental precept of academics – because, without respecting this credit, any pursuit or growth or refinement of existing knowledge is fruitless, and any working of the skill of thinking utterly ceases for having no available fuel… well, apart from ‘How can I steal and get away with it?’ or maybe ‘How can I justify being lazy?’ or how about ‘How can I excel at being an ‘Enter’ button presser?’ Presenting the same or substantially the same work more than once, in the longer-term, gains us nothing beyond the muddled growth of thinking about ‘how to cheat and prosper at the same time’.

How about the uncredited use of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, as in ‘Gen A.I.’ – the other A.I.… is this also plagiarism? Honestly, how can it not be? In order to draw upon what’s available, Gen A.I. scours and indexes all available ideas, words, images, and videos, and these not just from some other person but from most everybody out there who’s accessibly published on-line.

Not a search engine in sight… no people either
Image Credit (edited): hyeok10_12 on Pexels

This being the case, then what of any work completed with Gen A.I. – correctly cited or not… what isn’t plagiarism? Good question, one that evidently poses an inconvenient truth yet to be addressed by the euphoric mania, beyond watery defenses like “pattern matching,” “fair use,” and “non-human agency”… bullshit excuses as evasive and lazy as the humans whose use of Gen A.I. warrants all concern for academic integrity in the first place.

“Always ask when you are unsure…”

Thus far, to students who ask me, I’ve found myself able to suggest that Gen A.I. – like Wikipedia before it – makes for a poor academic resource, which is to say, “An easy place to start is rarely a good place to finish.”

Upon saying this to students, I’ve occasionally faced a reminder that the analogue world of my past experience is something to smirk at. Don’t get me wrong, we did have electricity and computers back then, but I’ll grant it was also a time when TVs received broadcast signals, telephones had a dial tone, the Commodore Amiga was cutting-edge technology, and everyone wore Lacoste. More to the point, though… back then, when the encyclopædia on your shelf was all you had, it was also your motive to visit the library, or a magazine stand, or your friendly neighbourhood teacher, who’d also done those same things.

As for those students who smirk at me today, I gather that somebody they’ve never met must have laid my past to rest on their behalf, and therefore nothing – repeat, nothing – from that past had better even try holding threat upon their attention, especially not when it can’t be accessed via smart phone.

By the same turn, I hold what seems to me a reasonable expectation on behalf of these Students of the Digital Age, namely that they appreciate their responsibility to…

  1. understand how ‘academic integrity’ applies to each activity across a program of study
  2. clarify not merely what constitutes ‘academic misconduct’ but also why its consequences threaten our whole endeavour
    • p.s. while you’re at it, also take note whether your school has any kind of “Student Declaration of Responsibility” to which you may have assented upon registration – and then, whether you find one or not, respect it anyway

I should say, I never smirk when I expect all this because, at its core, academics is about broader growth and human progress. It’s about human lives and our livelihoods underway. It’s about how well we expect to be doing once we pass things on… things like ideas and how to think them through.

And hey, if you don’t feel like this endeavour requires work compelled by sincerity and integrity, then maybe it’s time to re-think your involvement. Or maybe just get out of the business altogether because it’s every scholar’s responsibility on everyone else’s behalf to respect the principles of academic integrity, foremost by applying those principles in your own practice.

Image Credit (edited): Bruno Silva on Pexels

Conceptualising the In-Between: IV. Interest

Click here to read Part III. Relationships

In between the student-teacher relationship (STR) is “a multiplicity of betweens” (p. 207) in which each contributes by taking interest in other. So what is interest?

interest: mid-15c., “legal claim or right; a concern; a benefit, advantage, a being concerned or affected (advantageously),” from Old French interest “damage, loss, harm” (Modern French intérêt), from noun use of Latin interest “it is of importance, it makes a difference,” third person singular present of interresse “to concern, make a difference, be of importance,” literally “to be between,” from inter “between” (see inter-) + esse “to be” (from PIE root *es- “to be”)

For each person whose interest is to be in between – interresse – with another, that person potentially influences and contributes to the other: each/other. With shared trust and mutual intention, such interest describes a healthy STR, which grows with the passing of time.

Irwin’s analogy is apt, by which education, for Aoki, is inherently bilingual, as it were, occupying “spaces between [a mother-tongue] and additional languages” (p. 41) – between what is known and what is new. Between now and the-yet-to-come, what is new becomes what is known, and so it goes,[1] this course to run, this ambiguity in which to dwell with others, presently, to make a difference for the meantime – to grapple and grow in the interest of each/other.

Curricular interest has its own particular culture and way of being, Irwin continues, sometimes uncomfortable, often challenging, not needfully intimidating. It resists the assimilation or dominance of either “language” and prefers to forge some composite: the outcome, as compared to ‘someone trained’, is ‘more than one educated’.

Moreover, what is known can inform what is new. According to Liu Baergen, the central theme in Aoki’s work is how “lived experiences often contributes [sic] to one’s inner attitudes” (p. 173). I agree and add, from Aoki himself, that we ought “to be mindful of how others help us to open ourselves to who we are…” because it is “others [who] help us in our own self-understanding” (p. 382), who help us to learn from what is known about ourselves something new. It is others with whom we share lived experiences, whose voices join in chorus with ours. Aoki’s claim, taken from Deleuze, seems unmistakable: “‘Every multiplicity grows in the middle’” (p. 205). We are nothing new without each/other.

Aoki describes IB in two ways. First, IB is an abstract ‘place’, a locus of activity, characterised by dialogue and tension. Imagine a furnace in which you and I forge my identity while, simultaneously, you and I forge your identity. In this concerted way, this locus of two coming together, we forge both our identities as well as a shared understanding: we help forge each/other, which I take as Aoki’s description of “belonging together” (p. 396). IB is “the many [as] a unity mediated by synthesis,” e.g. the IB dynamic occurring in between, where “what are related assumes priority over the notion of relation” (p. 396), e.g. a trusted teacher discerning a willing student’s needs.

Also to be found in between is a characterisation of the time spent together, where each step taken is that ‘place’ where we are ‘now’. This is Aoki’s second description: IB as a kind of bridge, characterized by mutuality and journeying, that we mount and cross together. This Aoki describes as “belonging together,” that moment-by-moment amalgamation as each step taken is felt and lived. Where we stood earlier we each might call the ground-of-who-I-am-and-what-I-understand-right-now, i.e. that was you and me then, with that ‘present’ understanding.

Where we alight from the bridge now, as it lands us on the other side, having crossed together, we might call the ground-of-who-I-am-and-what-you-have-helped-me-understand-thanks-to-having-crossed-together. But that’s much too long, so maybe let’s just call it our present ground. By the same turn, let’s call that earlier our prior ground – and “ground” because hey, we all have to stand somewhere… metaphors – like bridges – are only meant to go so far.

More to the point is the duration of time spent crossing the span of that bridge, as if to look back upon the experience and say, “Ah yes, how that was! – that time spent crossing the bridge together,” which might have been worst or best or, more likely, something in between. This is that sense of IB not as ‘place’ but as an experience of ‘places’, a remembrance of what it was like during some time spent together: what we thought, how we felt, how we nudged and provoked each other, how we reacted – all memories now, really – as well as anything we might have decided to take from the encounter – good or bad or otherwise. And as there’s surely more to add, let’s be wary of nostalgia… meanwhile, I think the point is clear. Dwelling in the IB space affords a kind of mediation, a negotiation between us that permits truth or knowledge or learning to be found somewhere along through the middle.

I’m reminded here, as elsewhere, of the wisdom of Dr. King: one more great thinker and teacher who called our attention to the locus in between. As we are all, he claimed, paradoxically yet beautifully this makes us one. We ought to pay heed.

[1] I have a reading and writing exercise for students in which we parse one sentence’s subject and object – respectively, what is known and what is new – as a way to comprehend or predict a sentence that follows. In that subsequent sentence, the previous object is the new subject, and what was new is now what is known. So the cycle rolls – a bit formulaic, or else novel, depending on your perspective. As we create cohesive paragraphs and essays, so we interact with each/other.