Richardson, thoughts

I found the paper interesting, but I did think it was a bit simplistic. I initially thought it was based largely on common-sense. But having reflected a bit I think that that is perhaps a dangerous assumption and there are theoretical positions taken in the paper that are perhaps presented as fait acompli. Such as the assumed causality and the active=good, passive=bad stance.

I saw definite links with the student approaches to learning ‘hierarchy’ and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. However I do think that there is a distinction between ‘why’ you ‘do’ learning and ‘how’ you do learning. That is, whilst your motivation may be to expand your understanding of the world, this doesn’t mean that you will necessarily adopt an active approach to learning. Certainly in cultures such as China this would be frowned upon as a concept. But I think it’s much more individual than that.

So, whilst I am tempted to place learning conceptions 1-4 alongside Sfard’s Acquisition metaphor and 5 and 6 alongside the participation metaphor, I think it’s much more complicated and messy than that.

I also think that the models are messier than his visualisations. I prefer the depictions of Engstrom’s activity theory, could that be substituted here? Indeed Richardson’s closing paragraph reminds me of Gutierrez’s third space in socio-critical literacy theory (http://www.jstor.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/stable/pdfplus/20068336.pdf, p152 for an overview), a kind of extension of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD), a shared territory where teachers and students meet, negotiate and create shared resources and I see that Gutierrez deployed Engstrom’s activity model to illustrate this concept.

One other thing that struck me - I thought that in the teaching approaches – there is no conception of the teacher as an expert providing an apprenticeship into a community. The conceptions are very much geared to developing individuals as individuals not within a social context. Thought that was strange.

Hope that’s not all too critical, I’m practicing my critical thinking skills for TMA02. Feels terribly rude though.