Category: Motives

We Get What You Pay For

Featured Photo Credit: Jan van der Wolf on Pexels

Am I the only one who sees at least a hazy comparison between banning social media and banning vices like alcohol and tobacco?

Just for instance… over the past fifty–odd years, we’ve not only managed to restrict the age for purchasing alcohol and tobacco, we’ve also reached some level of comfort that such restrictions may be growing somewhat more culturally acceptable, and even worth further pursuit.

Today, similar acceptance seems evident in myriad age-restricted bans upon the usage of social media, even as weighed against its benefits… one Google search is all anyone needs to confirm the health concerns. And let’s set aside that any threat to the health of so-called “minors” might also mean a threat to the health of so-called “adults” – we’ve apparently reached a comfort level on that, too, one that leaves the adults free to decide for themselves whether or not to damage their health.

Illicit drugs, pornography, firearms – all restricted, if not illegal. Even movie theatres, video games, and music releases can have age restrictions or purchase & supervision requirements. As for me (though not sure for you), I’ve known plenty of minors in my lifetime who were turned down when they asked adults to forgive such bans and let them purchase [ restricted Product X ]. The point just now is not enforcement, which in real consequence is hit-or-miss, but more plainly actuality, which by point of fact is cultural evidence that we’ve found actual reason and method in our past for imposing restrictions and bans.
 
As for the current hoo-haw… if it suggests anything, could it be simply that plenty of people have raised considerable concern? On its face, the mere call to ban social media seems grave enough to warrant a far more judicious – and far less rapid – pursuit of any usage, widespread or minimal, while we try to understand the longer-term consequences of social media, not to mention A.I. As much as the pace of e-culture has reduced our tolerance for waiting, it has also accelerated our lack of patience, which in turn has amplified our imprudence. Among these various cultural reductions, it’s that last one for me (though not sure for you) that really threatens our future.

Someone will argue that social media, and A.I. too, still have practical utility and that weighing this against any ban would short-change the deprived children and youth who use them. Yes, and a 12 year-old can’t just walk into the Motor Vehicles office and book a Road Test, yet driving too has great practical utility. Driving also presents a severe threat to public safety, even after motorists have earned their privilege by passing various licensing processes. Take issue as one may against protecting the duration or stringency of road safety and driver licensing, but for good reason, we do restrict its access.

So, as we halt a minor’s purchase of alcohol or tobacco, why not also a smart phone? Instead of banning social media or A.I., why not restrict the age for operating the devices and accounts we use to access them. How about restricting Rogers / Telus / Bell accounts to make it illegal for minors to be signed on as family members? As no responsible parent simply turns over their car keys to a 12 year-old, why hand them a restricted smart phone? That’s a cultural thing – a willingness to obey the law on account of respecting the belief that instituted it. Unless, of course, that’s a comfort level thing too, and people just aren’t comfortable with it – either way, wouldn’t that tell us something more about what we value most?

Funny over the past ~10-12 millenia how human civilization managed to grow without electronic anything – even longer than that, if we start redefining “human civilization.” Funnier still – and a little ironic – how all that non-digital time finally landed us here to be facing all this, just the same… did we follow some improper process along the way? Along that timeline, as social media and A.I. suddenly now present socio-economic threat, are we even capable of regulating or curtailing or halting their production and usage quickly enough? Are we even concerned enough to try? If no incentive to try outweighs the incentives to not try, at least not for the people who could try, then I’d say we definitely do and don’t know much about what we value most.

Do we value our health? As social media bears a documented health threat, why aren’t we flatly banning it all, for everyone? Or, if we won’t ban what’s addictive because its addictive, then at least we might regulate it because its addictive, and distorting, and hyper-personalized, and fatiguing, and algorithmic, and profitable. Regulate social media the way we regulate alcohol, or tax it the way we sin-tax alcohol and tobacco. Or at least license its proper usage… how ubiquitous would it be if access to social media were limited, even by dollar-cost? Wait, I forgot – it already is. So how important is any of this, as a health concern, when at least some people are evidently addicted? No problem – remember? Adults make their own decisions, plus bars and nightclubs seem to fare pretty well, and people still smoke too, if just a different shrub than before. Lucky for us, all that stuff is legal.

Bans and restrictions are no more effective in practice than their enforcement – in the world where I live, everyone who really wants to is able to smoke and drink and drive and shoot. But, as any of them might be held to account, well… that’s usually something after the fact, if even then. Lucky for us.

As for me though (not sure for you), rather than hassle everyone with bans and restrictions, rather than nag young people with “A.I. makes you lazy” or “Social media makes you ill,” I prefer to help them learn why “being lazy” or “being ill” is a worthwhile concern. I prefer to persuade people with more inclusive, longer-term responses, apart from whichever bans and restrictions might still get imposed. And I’d rather see us educating people about which choices we face, and which reasons underpin worthwhile debate, and which alternatives are available to those who want to live some better way than enduring threats to health and safety.

Create incentives that change behaviour – or hey, create disincentives that change behaviour, whichever – but create something more nuanced and imaginative than the decree of bans and restrictions, something more capable than getting peoples’ backs up. Unless, of course, we’re clearer now on what we value most.

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 while 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!

Click here to read Part II. Illustration

Conceptualising the In-Between: III. Relationships

Featured Image Credit: Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

Click here to read Part II. Logos

If the engine or dynamic force of the In-Between (IB) is purpose, the fuel is surely motive. Together, purpose and motive suggest more about the IB dynamic than mere cause-and-effect, which is a fitting place to refocus upon students and teachers.

For instance, a student’s ownership of their learning and a teacher’s duty to help students learn are overlapping facets of their joint relationship, e.g. “Finding myself involved with [this other person], what is the situation asking [e.g. of me, of them, of us]?” What a teacher purposes alongside a student[1] Aoki characterises not as “instrumental action” but as “situational praxis” (p. 40).[2] From a “bureaucratic device,” he reconceives curriculum enactment into being “a form of communicative action and reflection set within a community of professionals” (p. 40) and, I would add, students too. And he recasts discrete instruction of mandated Curriculum, e.g. ‘covering Chapter 9’ or ‘going over the Study Questions’, as something holistic and shared, e.g. interpreting the relevance for each student of a History text, a Math equation, a Science lab, or a Shakespearean play.

The work that students do alongside teachers, typically (but not solely) daily and face-to-face, is a dynamic that occurs in the shared IB space. The ensuing dynamic interaction of that student-teacher relationship (STR) I conceptualise as relational curriculum, the dynamics of which are pedagogical: lessons planned, activities tried, questions asked, decisions made, and a buzz that enlivens the classroom. Aoki describes students and teachers as travelling back and forth across a “bridge” (Irwin, p. 41) that spans a gap between two ‘places’: curriculum-as-planned and curriculum-as-lived, or as I alternatively label them, mandated Curriculum-as-designed and relational curricula-as-occurring.

While crossing that bridge, it falls to the teacher to decide how best to guide a student, to know whether, when, and from which angle in the clearing they might cast any shadow and obscure a student’s light. So while they cross that bridge, how much better that a student and teacher have come to know their together selves before deciding upon some purpose or destination, i.e. some assessment outcome? This is the gist of relational curriculum.

The relational notion of ‘curricula-as-occurring’ can apply as well in the world beyond as within the classroom, making the IB space a temporal concept as much as a spatial one, i.e. we can only ever be one place at a time. Teaching, then – inclusive of the past, motivated by the future – (and thus, presumably, learning too) is presently spatio-temporal: both at once. Teaching is Aoki’s multiplicitous curricular landscape (Irwin, p. 41, added emphasis) that helps students to reconsider ‘what has been’ in order to renovate ‘what now is’ into ‘what may be’:

… entering back… in full reciprocity by re-including [what has been] once again as active participant in [what now is].

(Aoki, p. 409)

In this way, the IB dynamic can bear influence upon our very identity – not by reaching for it to grasp hold but by reaching out to grapple and grow.

For one as for all, identity comprises coinciding constituents: the past-present-future of one’s been-being-becoming and, simultaneously, the suffusion upon oneself of others’ influences. Identity is an endless chorus by which we share ever more constituencies: this-or-that ‘other’ plus however many ‘others’ besides. To grapple with such concerted complexity, Irwin denotes concurrent possibilities by way of Aoki’s graphic slash symbol [ / ]: a giving-way of the simplistic false dichotomy, either/or, to more intricate “transformative possibilities” (Aoki, p. 406) that weave and intertwine between us: and/not and.

Being “neither strictly vertical nor strictly horizontal” (p. 420), a place both to the left and to the right, the slash symbolises an angle or perspective that is somehow in between. And/not and is a scope in which we might find connection/opposition, concurrence/challenge, or cooperation/competition. The range of what is possible in between is plausible, negotiable, and available to the imaginative decision-making of those involved, e.g. to teachers and students yet also to people paired up in any number of imaginable ways. In between [ / ] is choice, x/not x.

However, the qualification that relational curriculum poses an ethical choice between desirable alternatives makes curricular enactment an empowering decision. So let’s understand relational curriculum as a scope and scale not in the negative, x/not x, but rather in the positive, x/y. In this way, each or both alternatives make possible something new, something more, something different.

In between, we help each other to make decisions, choose directions, and set courses to uncharted places. In a shared IB space, where students and teachers reciprocate, the prescription-paralysis of either/or dualism can give way to the reconciliatory presence/absence of x/y dialogue:

… not in the sense of a verbal exchange, but to denote a process in which there are interacting parties and where what is ‘at stake’ is for all parties to ‘appear’.

(Biesta, p. 43)

Rather than the instrumentality of Curricular implementation as some coarse techno-logicality, IB is conversational process in a ‘place’ where what it means to dwell “in between” is compellingly inclusive. IB is dialogue with those present and with those tangibly absent; it is listening to voices as well as seeking voices that are heard and not heard.

In the back-and-forth of x/y dialogue, the more-than-one constitutes one: in a word, a ‘unit’ or ‘united’. Dialogue sustains the past, to keep it alive and well and with us each present moment. Fuelled not simply by what just happened but also by what could happen, by what could be, IB is a compelling imperative for people to listen and respond, not just as joint actors but also as contributors.

With respect to others, with respect for others, we can reiterate, disagree, misunderstand, or absorb in muted silence, or we can contribute and propel others from this present moment into the next, and the next, and the next thereafter. Remembering the past in the present dresses the future for its arrival.

Click here for Part IV. Interest

[1] Note the syntax and structure of the sentence describing the dynamic of the STR: “What a teacher purposes alongside the student… .” To have written “What a teacher purposes between themselves and the student…” would betray teacher-centered bias, ill suited to IB. Moreover, although the sentence as-is takes a teacher’s perspective, it remains honest since I am a teacher and cannot assume a student perspective. What I can do is empathise and respect the student perspective; if I have earned any genuine respect from students, then – hopefully! – they will empathise and respect my perspective in return.

[2] Praxis is “the aspect which ‘resides in’ the knowledgeable actor or knowing subject” (Carr & Kemmis, p. 44), an “‘informed, committed action’” (Robertson, p. 14) that feeds the dynamic of joint action, like fuel to an engine.