Professional Theory

Theory as a form of action combines with professional thinking about education to organize and structure educational effort and activity. Here educators generate and manage our characteristic institutions. Hence the question – How should educators, reflecting on the ways by which people create, spread, and use ideas, principles, and skills in life, systematically apply our understanding of these processes to structure the overall work of education?

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Consider the role of theory in professional learning – codified principles of organized performance based on acquired skill and experience. Theory shapes action at a very broad level by providing educators with abstractions that enable us to think about particulars in diverse situations. With these abstractions, we develop courses of action that prove to be reasonable, sustained, and effective. As people constructed the existing systems of education over the past five hundred years, they used two ideas to structure effort, ideas that diverged from earlier practice. The first powerful abstraction was the distinction between research and teaching, as laid out on the one hand in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and on the other in Comenius’ Great Didactic. This distinction led to a significant difference between the institutions of higher education and those of elementary and secondary schooling. The second structuring idea was the principle that the language of culture and education should be the national language, not an ecumenical language such as learned Latin. From this idea, national cultures and national systems of education developed.

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Technologies of print gave power to both ideas – the separation of research and teaching along with the primacy of the national vernacular in education – and the principles shaped the historic uses of the book. Innovators in research and teaching, as well as those engaged in advancing the cultural uses of national languages, were able to exploit the power of the printing press unusually well. Over the course of several centuries, these two principles have pervasively structured the provision of education around the world. Now, as educators start to work with new technologies, different dynamics of enablement take hold in our professional work. In contrast to the effects of print, in a system of knowledge based on digital communication, the distinction between research and teaching and educational reliance on national languages may both become increasingly anachronistic. With respect to the first principle, digital communications have a fluidity and ubiquity that make functional separations, between activities such as research and teaching, difficult to maintain. With respect to the second, digital media require operating systems, and there is a tremendous premium on having a single operating system shared by all. Further, there is perhaps no more fundamental operating system than the language that is the language of thought, and consequently, great advantages may accrue if one language becomes universal as the language of intellect. In these ways, technological innovations alter the pressure of conditions on professional theory, on the distinction between research and teaching and on the dominance of national languages in education. Nevertheless, it may prove to be the case that a shift away from the distinction between research and teaching may have great relevance to an agenda for educators while the question of language has minor importance.

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Technological changes are only one of many matters affecting choices making one or another language primary in the processes of education. Historically, the economics of print publishing promoted the use of vernacular languages and the uses of print flourished as larger and larger segments of the population became literate in the vernacular. [Note 65] Distribution costs were, and still are, a high proportion of the costs of printed resources, which leads to a distribution structure that favors compact markets, e.g., national markets deeply penetrated by reliance on the local language. Global digital networks have a very different structure of distribution costs, which are very low once the infrastructure is in place. Further, they are not sensitive to distance. As a result, digital networks are inherently global and the Web is world-wide both in fact as well as name. Digital technologies have already had a marked effect promoting English as a global language of scholarship and education. These effects, however, are only pat of the matter. Whether education remains primarily national in language and structure, or whether it becomes increasingly global in character, with English becoming the great ecumenical language of learning, probably does not depend on the social construction of a digital educational system, at least until its late stages. [Note 66] The importance of national languages in life and education is a thoroughly over-determined phenomenon in the sense that there are many, many causalities, each of which is sufficient to account for the effects taking place. In the face of this over-determination, the social construction of a digital education system may extend the use of English globally as a language of specialized learning, while national languages remain the primary language of diverse education systems, upheld in this role by other dynamics and causalities.

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In contrast, for educators developing the pedagogical uses of digital technologies, new media are increasingly having very significant effects on the distinction between research and teaching, between the interactions of elementary and secondary schooling with higher education. We can understand the distinction between research and teaching as something that educators developed because they conceived quite different strategies for taking advantage of printed resources, one for research and one for teaching. Starting in the sixteenth century, those who worked primarily as researchers, aiming to advance the state of knowledge, used print media to promote principles of open communication to a community of peers, to amass and to share complex collections of data, and to design and to perfect instruments that were costly and difficult to operate. This research apparatus, culminating in the publication of findings and theories, posed increasing demands on educators, for it required systematic care and substantial expenditures. Relatively quickly the research function became a matter for small, self-selected elites, which required expensive support and which eventually found a primary home in universities that traditionally had provided the locus of education in the major professions. The idea of research and the systematic advance of knowledge took hold in professional education, as well as in the sciences and scholarship. Since the late eighteenth century in Germany, higher education has progressively become a costly pursuit of new knowledge and nurture of elite skills for a small, advantaged segment of the population. [Note 67]

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Starting likewise in the sixteenth century, other educators initiated the basic publishing strategy for the teaching function, developing well-designed textbooks to provide students a sequence of standard lessons leading to fulfillment of any given learning objective. As the apparatus of research became more costly and delicate, that of teaching became cheaper and more durable, making possible the spread of schooling throughout whole societies by implementing ever-more-inclusive systems of text-based instruction. As a result, two cultures of education were developed, that of elementary and secondary schooling on the one hand and that of higher education on the other. This distinction is so fundamental that educators rarely reflect on it. Describing it as a significant theoretical distinction may strike many as strange, for it seems to be a necessity of nature, not a consequence of thought. Yet the great gulf between the preparation of professionals for service in elementary and secondary schooling and for teaching and research in higher education follows much the lines laid out by theorists circa 1580. Likewise the norms of practice are significantly different, as are the criteria of success and the internal allocation of resources. As people perceive these professional domains, they link the culture of elementary and secondary schooling together and treat that of higher education, a.k.a., post-secondary education, as something radically different. [Note 68] This differentiation of education into two realms, elementary and secondary versus higher, exemplifies how the material conditions of work can shape the way people think about complicated relationships. Expensive libraries and laboratories have become necessities of higher education, yet their expense is prohibitive in elementary and secondary schooling. Conditions have perforce differed in the two realms and ideas about education have reflected these different conditions.

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Digital technologies, however, are rapidly enabling us to avoid these traditional constraints. The knowledge resources created to support advanced scholarship and professional practice are becoming ubiquitous. Where a digital infrastructure exists for supporting intellectual work, the marginal costs of using those resources do not increase greatly as more and more people make use of them. Consequently, the infrastructure of higher education is becoming available in schools as both levels develop their digital capacities. Here we have a major historical departure: the material conditions differentiating elementary and secondary education from higher education are disappearing. This change is apparent in schools that now have robust connections to the Internet. It is spreading everywhere. With this change, educators at all levels face a radical pedagogical challenge: to develop ways of making these ubiquitous tools of advanced research and scholarship pedagogically meaningful in the education of children. As children at different ages are distinctive, continuing differences between schools and colleges, between Kindergarten and research centers, are necessary. Yet the conditions are taking hold for there to be one educational culture encompassing all the parts. Within that culture, educators should rethink how to handle differences of interest and development in very fundamental ways. [Note 69]

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Historically, the separation between early schooling and higher education has not always predominated. In medieval practice, the roots of what we now call secondary education assimilated much more to higher education than it did to elementary. Well into the nineteenth century, secondary schools usually linked tightly to colleges and universities, and in Europe to this day admission into the lycée or Gymnasium is the main cutoff, with all graduates of those schools virtually guaranteed general access to the university system. In many educational systems, especially those where the university derives from the medieval guilds of students, faculty members in secondary education substantially have the status and qualifications of their peers elsewhere in the university. Usage of the terms "pupil" and "student" still reflects this linkage between secondary and higher education, as "eleventh-grade pupils" would be condescending and "third-grade students" a bit pretentious. Let us infer from these residual characteristics that present theoretical constructs are not timeless and that renewed, expanded connections between higher education and elementary and secondary levels are well within the realm of historical possibility.

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Several factors make it plausible that an alteration in the controlling theoretical conception about the knowledge professions is reinvigorating these latent connections between schools and the university. Over the past two hundred years or so, the apparatus of science and scholarship has become more and more elaborate and costly, restricting practical mastery to elites and forcing increasing specialization upon their members. Digital information technologies do not necessarily lower the cost of the apparatus, but they change the economics of participation significantly, making the marginal cost of broader participation minimal. To be sure, it is moot whether, given digital access to the tools and data necessary in creating knowledge and in forming professional skill, a larger proportion of people can make good use of it or be interested in doing so, but at least this possibility becomes a question! At least in principle, people at all levels of the educational enterprise increasingly share and participate together in one full and complex working environment through the digital infrastructure. Consider an instance so commonplace that we have difficulty reflecting on its larger implications. The average person regularly watches on the nightly news weather forecasts that use sophisticated data sets, and advanced modes of structuring and presenting them, along with quite complicated climatic theories, to convey a clear understanding of large regional weather probabilities. Ordinary people daily absorb both theory and data, synthesizing it into a useful understanding, that is quite close to the theory and data that the most erudite students of climate and weather simultaneously use. If educators find more and more ways to extend, activate, and deepen the possibility of universal participation in a unified environment for intellectual work, the spectrum of intellectual achievement by coming generations can greatly rise relative to current norms.

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Several other long-term secular developments increase incentives for scientists and scholars to try to engage a wider public in their work. When the priorities driving much scientific research and technological development were weapons related, the selection of problems and the management of resources concentrated effort on the attainment, no matter what the costs, of narrow ends in view – bigger bombs, faster planes, more discriminating radar, and on and on. Public understanding was only tangentially important in the work of national defense. With the end of the Cold War, scientific priorities have been changing in interesting ways. Under conditions in which material well-being is largely a function of success in global economic competitions, the general technological efficiency of a population becomes highly consequential. Know-how and the ability to adapt to innovative practices needs to be distributed among all participants in the working population. Thus, effective education in technology and science is as important as good research in promoting such technological efficiency.

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Even more important than the economic drive to higher and higher levels of technological know-how, people have a substantial interest in a high level of applied scientific understanding. As national defense diminishes in precedence, the enduring priority of public health and a sustainable environment regain their prominence as science-related issues of pre-eminent importance. Although both have critical research dimensions to them, both also have very difficult educational problems embedded in them. In both areas, and others as well, preventative strategies may prove far more cost-effective as the primary means of action than corrective strategies using heroic interventions in the face of crisis. As a result, high-level scientists and scholars concerned with these matters at the level of advanced research take a deeper, more active interest in educational issues, and those allocating research and development funds are more often supporting broader educational incentives than they did in the depths of the Cold War.

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As universities become more sensitive to the fullness of their educational missions, a theoretical construct can take hold in which scientists and scholars understand the generative purpose, which they serve through the creation of knowledge, to be education, the advancement of learning at all its levels. [Note 70] This comprehensive commitment to education does not result in everyone in universities and research institutes scrambling to usurp the work of schools of education, with all suddenly engaging in the preparation of teachers and school administrators. Rather it leads to a wider interest in the design and development of curriculum, reshaping the whole body of knowledge for broader and easier access, and in adapting it to pedagogical strategies, in which the processes of study and learning throughout education draw people into the work of producing knowledge from early in their educational experience onward. [Note 71]

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As Reformation pedagogues advanced the idea of "a learned clergy and a lettered people," they set forth the goals of the print-based educational system. A learned clergy and a lettered people was the original version of the controlling distinction between research and teaching . Functionally, the concept of "a lettered people" meant that basic schooling had prepared the ordinary person to receive effective tutelage from the learned clergy. Through a long process of secularization, this concept has continued to describe the theoretical structure between the general public and knowledge elites cultivated through the educational system up to now. Now new media enable educators to change this basic structure. The present-day version of the lettered people is "information access." It is a goal that falls radically short of our real possibilities. To pursue information access as the end and objective of the new technologies is to leave unchallenged a great limiting condition operative through the era of print. With the apparatus of research becoming ubiquitous, universal participation in the advancement of learning becomes a plausible ideal. The people can be not merely lettered, but learned as well. The community ceases to be one in which the lettered multitude is under the tutelage of the learned few. Instead all become learned citizens, a basic requirement of real cultural democracy. Consider as an initial intimation of the power this ideal can unleash, the tremendous intellectual energies surging into web site development, with many projects evident that go way beyond the facilitation of research in the narrow sense to the promotion of broad participation in intellectual work. [Note 72] In the digital era, advancing knowledge becomes a defining good and necessary goal of the human polity, and full, personal participation by each in the work of education and culture becomes both a feasible endeavor and a basic human right for all its citizens.

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A pedagogy that draws all people into the work of advancing knowledge, of forming values, and of crafting skills would be a highly empowering pedagogy and one that indicates how the roles of teachers may adapt to the new information conditions. Where all are to enter into the advancement of learning, educators must treat the student as an autonomous, responsible agent. A curriculum supporting work by independent students, answerable to themselves, embodies a pedagogy that facilitates three main functions: posing problems, providing data, and furnishing tools. The pedagogy itself involves various mentoring activities, helping to make sure that students really grasp the problems and questions, that they comprehend key characteristics of the data that they seek, and that they can use the tools of analysis, simulation, and synthesis available to them both purposefully and well. This is the pedagogy of research. [Note 73]

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Changes putting all persons into control of the resources of research and inquiry possessed by the culture lead to an educational system that effectively apprentices everyone to the work of culture. [Note 74] One can imagine an emerging new structure to teaching, with general teachers in the school classroom managing a range of inquiries by their students and a network of consultants with special competencies activated by teachers and students via desktop video conference – a network of undergraduates, graduate students and professors who help field questions that neither students nor teacher in a class can answer through their independent inquiries. The whole process of consultation could rise up and down a hierarchy of expertise. Any question, if it touches a real point of expert ignorance and uncertainty, could push the structure of inquiry and response further towards the frontiers of possible knowledge. [Note 75] When we speak of learning communities, we speak of something like such structures of universal intellectual participation.

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> Questions:

• What needs to be done to advanced knowledge resources to make them interesting and productive to children and novices?
• Should commonsense expectations about what children can accomplish change as advanced intellectual tools and resources become available to everyone?
• Can educators develop new ways of identifying and evaluating contributions to knowledge?
• Can all this cause childhood to loose its charm of "innocence," or may in unexpectedly infuse adulthood with new currents of "childish" wonder?