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!

Tech Trade-Off: I. Time to Think Differently

Featured Photo Credit (edited): constantiawork on Pixabay

“Tech [Anything]” grabs attention these days, so don’t be too miffed once you start reading because this is me literally giving it away inside thirty words.

I. Time to Think Differently

Fill the washing machine, add some detergent, set the dial, and push ‘Start’.

It’s a 25min cycle… now, why not grab a coffee, or something to read…

Technology is a marvel… and if there’s one benefit we enjoy, thanks to Technology, you’d have to think it’s surplus time. Take that laundry off your hands, and all that time’s now on your hands.

So close that door behind you, and grab that coffee, and something to read – after all… you are, technically, still ‘doing the laundry’ – we all respect that… why else even invent a washing machine? Listen closely, behind that closed door: can you hear it? That little machine chugging merrily along, doing the laundry while you slip away, guilt-free!

Like I said: Technology is a marvel.

Photo Credit: Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash

And only a fool would disagree – next time you find yourself faced with doing the laundry, just weigh your surplus time against all that hand-wringing labour … unless, of course, you prefer leaning over a washtub down by the creek, or beating your clothes with a rock.

From delicate hands Technology lifts all the toil we prefer to avoid, and in the process, what we learn while ‘doing the laundry’ is how surplus time is the expectation we once never knew we couldn’t live without. Listen more closely, behind that door, and what you’ll hear is not the intrepid little washing machine but the sterile drone of some finger-raw laundry fool processing their foolish foolishness. But you’re nobody’s fool – you set that dial and went to grab a coffee, and owned that fool in the process.

We seem to shorthand a lot of things this way – or, rather – we seem to invent a lot of Technology that shorthands things for us by compressing something lengthier into a more singular ‘process’… whatever took time over several steps to complete, now just a mere leap ‘from there to there’.

We also seem to talk this way – or, rather – we seem to think this way. For instance, you’ll hear people shorthand their vacation: “We did the Louvre, did the Eiffel Tower, did the whole Paris thing…”

And hey, when you only visit a few days, that means squeezing in as much Paris as you can while you can because, like any process, that ‘vacation’ you start will eventually be coming to an end. Added bonus: back home, when someone asks, “How was your vacation?” you can shorthand the whole trip with that cool touch of insouciance about all the places you “did.”

Photo Credit (edited): Margarida Louro on Unsplash

And sure, maybe this shorthanding is a checklist mentality bereft of politesse, but for anyone who really knows, an embrace of surplus is a sophisticated taste grown accustomed to efficiency. Besides, it wasn’t just anybody who “did Paris,” was it? As they would say in the City of Light: “Comme tu penses, donc tu es.” They’d say it fluently, of course.

As for this post, I’ll grant that a two-sentence leap from laundry to the Louvre is a little abrupt. But if you’re struggling to spot the Technology thread in this Paris bit, that is sort of the point.

Beyond e-devices and microprocessors and the digital stuff typically considered these days to be Technology, think about process and all the simultaneous design and infrastructure we simply take for granted… I mean beyond obvious stuff, like WiFi and satellite communications, or fibre optic networks and transmission towers, or even jet engines and global travel. Think way back. Think like that fish who suddenly notices all the water… but this time, instead of noticing the water, notice how long you’ve been immersed in it.

Take Paris trips and leisure time. Take the whole concept of ‘vacation’, for being a great example of technological surplus. For one thing, ‘vacation’ now means it’s not ironic that hotels, restaurants, and tourism have become an industry unto themselves.

Think past museums and exhibits and architecture… magnificent towers, world cities, global infrastructure… stable governments, world commerce, industrial agriculture, economies of scale… think past all that and, instead, think how all that stuff has developed really gradually over a long, long, long, long time. A long time. Centuries, I mean – not days.

Think how all that stuff had to be rethunk and revised and rebuilt again and again and again through multiple versions and earlier forms in how-many-other-places across Planet Earth – so, think ‘actual history’, the process of life underway. If you can, even think back further than the 21st century – ikr!

Think of the manner by which all our Technology has been developed and refined in dozens of countries by gazillions of people over centuries of accidents and mistakes and trial and error and serendipity. Think about all the discovery and extraction and refinement of raw materials for manufacturing, and all the supply chains that had to be invented from scratch to keep it all circulating, and all the sales and retail and finance that were established, not just to keep all those things viable but supplied and chained in order to be sustained. And think about all the years and decades and centuries of time during which all this came to be. Think about another way to conceive of “technology” – think not “tech” but “-ology” – and think at least once-removed from 21st century glee. As opposed to surplus time, think committed time. Think historical time and geographical time (which would be time- and place-time). If possible, think about all this stuff from any perspective that is beyond your own.

Oh, and think with no defined horizon, no particular pinpoint. As each ‘present moment’ arrives, and moves on, then arrives again, and then again moves on… think process in its most literal ongoing expression: think always now, with due respect for both memory and foresight. Stop thinking about what process means, and start thinking what process is.

All this is probably a lot to think about, but we are nearly done thinking: think how submerged we are in technology, innovation, progress, and euphoria, and commerce and growth and leisure, and the way things are, and the way we want them to be, and the way we’re accustomed to all of them being, all at once even if not all in concert.

… or, failing all that, at least think of our taste for efficiency and our commitment to surplus.

Recap:

(a) Time spent on process? Not on my watch!

… yet for misconstruing ‘steps in a process’ as ‘short-lived times spent on innumerable single events’, each shorthanded process gradually changes our outlook from ‘means as means’ to ‘means becoming ends in themselves’

(b) Eureka! Time saved by technology!

… yet for gradual changes to our outlook, ‘surplus time’ has a real effect upon our thinking and, thereby, upon our decisions and behaviour

What I hear called Technology someone else might call “innovation” or “advancement,” or someone else might critique as “progress.” “Pioneering,” “state of the art,” “cutting edge” – all these, also, to the point: as we stake claims of ownership for words and concepts, that seems pretty telling as to how immersed we are, living inside all this. Or maybe better to say how all this lives inside us. And the more immersed it is, the more feverish our yammering becomes: “next level,” “über-sophisticated,” “transcendent.”

We’re soaking in ourselves, it seems, and maybe it’s time for a rinse. And thus do we find our way, in the space of two sentences, back to doing the laundry.

Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

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Is Something Wrong with Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Feature Image Credit by John Manuel Kennedy Traverso on Wikipedia

Some thoughts prompted by this article by Ron Berger in EdWeek.

Early in my teaching, I decided to write prompts instead of questions. In fact, what I wrote were called imperatives or commands, a type of sentence that drops the second-person singular subject, “You,” and opens with the predicate verb:

“(You) Explain the irony of the outdoor scene from Chapter 3.”
“(You) Organise your ideas into three categories and (you) list 3–5 details beneath each one.”
“(You) Provide at least two explanations that support your conclusion.”

I decided to write prompts for two reasons. Teaching English, I wanted to practice what I preached: the verb is the most important word in a sentence. And, as a new teacher, I wanted to use Bloom’s Taxonomy because I bought into its gradual climb up the higher-order ladder, which at the time seemed to me correct.

As time went on, though, the ‘higher-order’ interpretation seemed mistaken, and was maybe fostering poorer teaching than otherwise. But I knew the importance of verbs and the power a word could have, so I started mixing so-called ‘lower-order’ commands, e.g. list, describe, explain, into ‘higher-order’ tasks and thinking, e.g. analyse, evaluate, justify. For one class, I adapted an old novel study quiz comprising uncomplicated interrogative sentences.

An inherent message to such a quiz, I felt, was essentially a teacher saying to students, “Prove that you actually read the book,” which opened up somewhat dubious questions about trust and earning grades. By rewording the quiz questions into imperatives, I wanted students to write something beyond the one-and-done sentence response.

Revising interrogative questions into imperative prompts eventually contributed to my questioning one of the structural premises behind our revised Government Curriculum, which currently emphasises skill over content. Where this Curriculum does prescribe some limited content knowledge, called “Big Ideas,” its inquiry pedagogy and student-centred approach are inherently individualised and thereby prone to opinion, which for me alters the common curricular debate over what knowledge is of most worth into a debate over whose knowledge is of most worth. Of itself, I’d say this is a worthwhile development although, in context, I think things tend to get a lot more nuanced.

So-called ‘lower-level’ skills seem no less important to me than so-called ‘higher-level’ (or the more snobbish ‘higher-order’) skills; in fact, so-called higher-order critical thinking skills depend not only on what we immediately read or hear but on what we can remember and recall from longer-term memory. And I tend to see content and skill not as discrete but integrated. To emphasise either one over the other is something akin to affixing ‘knowing’ to the bottom and ‘doing’ to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

In teachers and in students, we find both the reflection of thinking and the action of doing – content as well as skill – in simultaneous tandem dynamic. To ignore their inseparability risks a curricular blunder: as skill without content is aimless, so content without skill is inert. We’re wise to conclude the same about teachers and students, who study content and skill: to each, the other is indispensible.

As to those prompts I revised, students’ submissions let me know pretty quickly that they were provoking a lot more careful, imaginative thinking. Responses were detailed, thoughtful, far more personal – I knew they couldn’t be searching Google. Students often told me, “These questions are so hard,” which was honestly what I wanted to hear. I also took note that students still called them questions.

And I soon realised how much longer these responses took to read… 30min per student, 15hrs per class. I came to assigning only two prompts per chapter, and later only one, which later became “five throughout the book that you trace and develop into questions of your own.” By the time I read Ron Berger’s article, critiquing the ‘higher-order’ interpretation, my own experience was enough to confirm his assessment:

“… the root problem with [Bloom’s] framework is that it does not accurately represent the way that we learn things. We don’t start by remembering things, then understand them, then apply them, and move up the pyramid in steps as our capacity grows. Instead, much of the time we build understanding by applying knowledge and by creating things.”

Bloom’s original taxonomy has ‘knowing’ at the bottom and ‘doing’ at the top, as if to suggest that doing is contingent upon knowing. But I agree with Berger: “Every part of the framework matters, [and] teachers should instead strive for balance and integration.” Learning is neither hierarchical nor linear. If anything, as Berger mentions, we tend to create and analyse by applying what we remember in an ongoing simultaneous process. For example, consider the old adage…

I read, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.

This adage is an analogy, and analogies aren’t meant to be perfect, which makes them just as instructive where their comparisons break down, showing us both what something is as well as what something is not. Ambiguity falls to context, which in turn falls at the feet of a teacher’s professional judgment: decisions really are the core of teaching.

This adage is also a simple taxonomy, one that no academic is likely to endorse – what is meant by “reading,” for example, and how is this distinguished from “seeing,” and aren’t both unique kinds of “doing”? Still, it does seem to express a bit of wisdom.

Who believes what you see? Edgar Dale’s Pyramid has been granted some pride of place in Education… looks like he must have sat through some boring lectures or something

What you may have seen from academics is something similar called the Learning Pyramid or the Cone of Experience, attributed to Edgar Dale. But don’t think that simply adding someone’s name underscores its validity or contends with other wrinkles called e-learning and machine learning.

Anyway, as an attempt to describe learning, the adage is an analogy, like Bloom’s taxonomy or any framework: fixed and rigid and literally contrived. Such things hardly represent our lived experiences although, in fairness, every perspective carries a unique set of assumptions inside its luggage.

The Nuisance of Nuance: IV. Will

Feature Photo Credit by Sigmund on Unsplash

Click here to read Part III. Comprehension

With all that wind and the trees falling over and stuff, we may be safer just to leave the park behind and head someplace else – disdainful crowds were never really my thing anyway.

… after the hurricane’s blown through!

Generally, where we might accept a ‘fact’ as one piece in the truth puzzle, we can only claim ‘belief’ for how those facts ought to piece together and contribute to some bigger thing, factual or non-factual: as far as I know, nobody has, or ever will have, a complete front-of-the-box picture of Truth. Besides, fact and truth, knowledge and belief… if these all meant the same thing, we’d be using the same word and not four different ones. How, then, do they differ? Well, for one thing, where belief requires facts, facts can speak for themselves.

The Original 3D Puzzle
Photo Credit by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash

So, if I’m hiking up a hillside, I might believe another hill slopes down in opposite fashion, just out of sight over the peak – but then again, maybe not… maybe there’s an even taller hill to climb, which I’ll only spot once I’ve crested this hill. I hope not because I’m getting pretty tired, but whatever. Meanwhile, what I know for indisputable fact is that behind me right now is a hill that descends back the way I came. So there’s at least one key difference between fact and belief, and if my measure for this is temporal, that works just fine for me.

In addition to ‘what I come to know’ – a pathway up the hillside as I traverse it – there is also ‘what I come to believe’ – a different path down once I crest the peak… that is, unless I’m mistaken, and the only path down is the one I walked up. Where or how has some belief arisen that more paths down exist…?

“I heard…”
“I remember…”
“I wish…”
“I think…”
“I hope…”

…or maybe the most reliable of all…

“I learned…”

Are you spotting that temporality yet?

Even so, ‘knowledge’ per se is somehow not simply ‘knowing’ the things that I’ve learned: as I hike up that hillside, toward the crest and what lies beyond, I’m able to distinguish ‘what I know’ (which is behind me) as fact compared to ‘what I believe’ (which lies beyond) as… knowledge? opinion? wishful thinking? It’s a distinction that makes me wonder whether this thing we so glibly call “knowledge” is both fact from the past as well as belief of what’s to come, all at once. If so, that seems kind of Hegelian, where ‘kind of’ is sort of like if Hegel had taken to wearing his shirts inside-out.

Things that make you go GAH – all this pedantry! Recall, that’s where all this began, with knowledge being situated on two separate stairs or one step to the left, thereby not being exactly the ‘same’ knowledge. But in the great puzzle of truth, even pedantry has its own place in among the rest of the pieces. In fact, I believe one reason we argue so much is that we no longer allow enough for pedantry and detail. Once upon a time, I suspect we did, or else we’d have demolished ourselves long before this. This nuisance of nuance takes patience and time although neither of those seems too popular in the Twitter-world of reverent Instagram… stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

In that world, no amount of philosophizing over reality and the truth matters a jot a pixel. In that world, what seems to matter more is consensus the ‘Share’ button. After all, as we’re I’m discovering of late, disagreement on ‘facts’ is so fundamental as to be irreconcilable. Or, put another way, words only matter when it’s me who’s tweeting them.

Be that as it may… as a matter of fact, words really do matter, for precision – P – E – D – A – N – T – R – Y – and clarity – N – U – A – N – C – E. Words matter for the feelings they invoke and the memories they provoke. Every word we utter, hear, write, or read must have some basis at least in consensus print media television on-line sharing, if not in actual fact; otherwise, what’s the point of language? Hey, if no one communicated, period, then sure, problem solved. But more fundamentally… if every belief we have, prior to our words, has only some basis in consensus on-line sharing, and not in fact, then the sum total of all language is just so much scattered chaos the Internet. The reason why words matter is that people are where words erupt and evolve, which means that words are what people – and not just any sole person, but all of us, people – words are what we’re all about. Luckily, some of us know a few extra words, or even several extra languages.

But without any basis to know anything beyond our selves, all we can do – maybe what each one of us must do – is trust that we share a similar comprehension of facts.

Photo Credit by Guillaume QL on Unsplash

And if knowledge really is situated – whether up that flight of stairs or a split second later or a step to the left from where you now stand – if that is really accurate, is it any wonder we’re all at a loss, or destined to endless dispute? We may all apprehend the same event, but pedantically speaking, we can’t all comprehend literally the exact same facts. We may share the same event, but we cannot share the same experience: each of us has an experience all their own, and when we share that experience – if knowledge really is situated – then we can only believe and trust how closely your experience corresponds to mine, or anyone else’s.

If knowledge really is situated, what we need within ourselves is an ability to reach beyond our selves: beyond anything shared, what we need is the will to believe and trust each other.

[p.s. if you’ve missed the imagery, it’s a reversal: beyond our selves extends outward, like what we believe might be over the cresting hill, whereas beyond anything shared is back the way we came, inward unto ourselves, reliably back the way we came.]

And if that’s feeling a little anti-climactic, here as a closing, you can’t say I didn’t warn you about that next hill to climb.

Photo Credit by Murat Gün on Unsplash