Research and the Theoretical Field - Pauldowling.me

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3 Introduction Only theoretical objects may be discovered; an empirical object is merely encountered. (Dowling, in press) A participant on a Doctoral School workshop that I was running, recently, said that he was interested in looking into students’ understandings of learning. My response to this was to ask whether it was generally the case that students have understandings of learning. Of course, if you ask students, ‘how do you understand “learning”’, then they will, more than likely, attempt to answer your question. In doing so, it is at least possible that they will begin to formulate, explicitly, something that they have not thought about in this way before; they will begin to theorise learning. This possibility, of course, suggests that it is probably not a good idea to ask the question, if you want to find out something about the lives and thoughts and practices that the students already live, think and engage in, in advance of your intervention. Let’s take ‘learning’ as an example. In order to theorise learning, there are two kinds of resources on which we might draw. The first consists of the ways in which other people have theorised it. In everyday life, a dictionary might be an appropriate source in this respect. These are rather less useful for our purposes, here, because the research literature will often use common (and less common) terms in specialised ways that may not be represented in everyday dictionaries, particularly as we are usually interested in the research of the moment as well as that of longer standing. So we go to the research literature itself to explore the ways in which learning is theorised. I’ve always been impressed by Jean Piaget’s theorising of learning; there’s a helpful and quite brief introduction in Piaget, 1980. Piaget is concerned with ontogenesis—the development of the individual—and, elsewhere (Piaget, 1995), the development of the social. The basic processes of individual learning and social learning are the same; Piaget uses the term equilibration. Essentially, a non-learning state would be a state of equilibrium in which everything is as expected, knowledge is, to this extent, complete. Such stability is not found in practice, of course, because individuals and groups keep bumping into things that disturb the peace. For Piaget, the natural state of development involves the attempt to restore equilibrium and, in Piaget, 1980, he proposes a hierarchy of levels of equilibration in ontogenesis. We must imagine a (notionally) stable schema, or cognitive plan or map of interpretation. A new experience, one that cannot be interpreted without conflict, will result in a development of the schema so that the assimilation of the new experience entails an accommodation, or transformation of the schema that resolves the conflict. At the next level, where assimilation/accommodation is not achieved, the schema divides to produce specialised schemata that are internally consistent. Thus, a child might be introduced to the term ‘plus’ in respect of the addition of money and may develop strategies to deal with money calculations: 75 cents plus 26 cents is RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD
4 three quarters plus a quarter, that’s four quarters = a dollar plus one penny left over, that’s a dollar-one (see Lawler, 1985, from which this illustration is, with a little license, borrowed). Later, in school perhaps, she is taught a formal addition procedure, using columns, so 75 plus 26 is to be expressed in this way: 75 + 26 101 1 1 The child now has two schema for ‘plus’ (Lawler uses the terms ‘microviews’ (1985) and ‘microworlds’ (1981)). However, it may be that she has not yet developed full competence in addition in columns—the ‘carrying’ part is always a bit tricky to remember. So, when she’s asked by her father, ‘what’s 75 plus 26’, she might say, ‘I don’t know.’ But if her father reformulates and ask, ‘well, what’s 75 cents plus 26 cents’, she may well deploy her moneyplus schema and get the right answer. The father may not understand what’s going on here (though Bob Lawler clearly did), because, for him, the two problems are the same. That’s because, in his own equilibrating learning, he has progressed to the third level of equilibration, that of globalisation in which two or more schemata are subsumed under a more general scheme. The works that I have referred to, here—by Piaget and Lawler—are not equivalent theories of learning, but Lawler’s cognitive science is influenced by Piaget’s psychology (or, genetic epistemology, as he called it) and the two approaches can be rendered commensurable in my strategy of globalisation here. The other kind of resources on which we might draw in theorising learning might be referred to as empirical instances. We might, for example, consider how we might recognise learning or how we have recognised it; or we might think about how we might measure it. I’ve been making feeble attempts to learn Japanese for the past six years. Now my problems do not seem to relate particularly to the considerable difference in the grammars of Japanese and English. Rather, they seem to be concerned with recognition and recollection of differences, between words and, in reading, between characters. Thus, if someone is speaking to me and uses the word, kooenkai (), which means ‘lecture’ and is pronounced co (as in coal) en (as in end) ki (as in kite), in the middle of a sentence, then I am not unlikely to recognize the first two syllables, kooen as the Japanese word for park () and then be left wondering about the kai part—shell (), mediation (, also shell), association () and many more, including the ‘ON’ (derived from Chinese) pronunciation of the character for sea (), pronounced umi (u as a short ‘oo’, mi (as in mit). In reading, I used to confuse the character for write, , with that for thing, , though the are easily distinguished in context as the former, unlike the latter, would be unlikely to appear without qualifying hiragana (the purely phonetic characters that are used for verb endings etc). And I have RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD
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Page 10 and 11: 9 • the term ‘problematic’ (c
Page 12 and 13: 11 Your examination essay should me
Page 14 and 15: 13 Chapter 1 Towards Theory Week 1
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Page 20 and 21: 19 Chapter 2 The Theoretical and Em
Page 22 and 23: 21 Introduction: The Theoretical an
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Page 30 and 31: 29 Activity 2.2 This activity may c
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Page 42 and 43: 41 Chapter 4 Generating a Question
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53 production. The organisation of
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55 Babbedge et al report that ‘th
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59 Answer the following questions i
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61 Introduction: The use-value of r
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63 If the culture of the teacher is
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65 32. It is important, too, that t
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69 You should spend 4.5 hours on th
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71 Core texts for this chapter Crot
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75 what is agreed to be ``true'', w
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79 by ‘great men’). He is also
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81 Postings to Board B17, Philosoph
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85 distribution of these modes will
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87 amongst the collaborators. Indee
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89 Institutionalisation I + I - Dis
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91 research in order to identify an
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93 Further Reading Basset, E. H. an
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95 of their skills, glory in compet
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97 ... I and many sociologists spen
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99 literary studies that is concern
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101 3. Investigate the procedures f
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103 Bernstein, B. B. (2000). Pedago
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105 Geertz, C. (1973 (2000 Edn)). T
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107 and academically able students:
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109 Discussion Boards Week B0 Gener
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111 Week 7 Week 6 Week 5 Week 4 Exp
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Research and the Theoretical Field - Pauldowling.me

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