What would Piaget say?
What would Piaget say??
Liddy Nevile
Australian Council for Educational Research
There have been many attempts to explain why 'things can be so different now that we have computers'. Is this true in any way? What advantages might we expect computers to offer?
In this paper I will discuss only one aspect of this, the concrete nature of programming, and in so doing will look at the relationship between Piagetian ideas of staged intellectual development from concrete to abstract thinking and what has been called epistemological pluralism auricle & Papert, 1990), the natural extension of constructivism.
In the various Sunrise projects in Australia in which teachers and students are involved, there are a significant number of children who have a laptop computer each and they start out using LogoWriter as the computational environment in which to do their work. In these circumstances these children, perhaps like no others before them, are able to collaborate with their colleagues, their teachers , parents and friends in the production of their 'school' work. This has been made possible by the ubiquity of their work (it travels about with them) and the wonderful forgiving nature of the electronic medium in which corrections are not only forgotten but leave no evidence of their ever having existed. So what happens is that children seek help from a range of people and receive help of many kinds. They bring their 'school work' into contact with far more thinking styles than children have been able to in the recent past. This has brought us, those responsible for them, to thinking more about the nature of collaborative learning as it might be in the future in the 'classroom without walls'.
What does all this mean?
Children like those in the Sunrise classes are likely to ask either Mum or Dad for help. Suppose Mum is a scientist. Typically she, as a scientist, will try to show how the whole problem fits together and how it fits into the wider structure of scientific knowledge, and that there are established ways of thinking about the particular problem and .... But let us suppose Dad is an artist. He too will want to help his child but it is more likely he, as an artist, will approach the problem at hand by assuming the rest of the world is OK and that the child needs some meaning for the task at hand. He will describe the problem, see how it relates to the things close at hand, take the child 'inside' the problem.
The scene I have described would more usually be cast the other way, with the father as scientist and the mother as artist, or craftswoman, but that issue is not relevant here.
It is important to recognise that not everyone sees a given problem in the same way and many of us attribute success in dealing with problems within a particular domain to a valued perspective which is effective within that domain. There are 'ways of doing things' which seem to outsiders like the secrets of a discipline and to which access is gained only after long qualification periods in which those seeking access are all too often required to learn practices which are not in fact those used by the experts who have 'made it' within the discipline. Those who 'resist' the rules are excluded before they reach a point at which they will be free to choose their practices. While no-one would question the need for rigour within science, for instance, it does seem reasonable to separate the need for rigour in proof from the process of constructive and creative insight, learning and thinking.
The child who seeks help outside the narrow range of the classroom, from other than the teacher, is likely to encounter a variety of ways of dealing with a problem. Soon enough the child learns which person gives the sort of help that is needed in a particular context and this skill, itself, contributes to the child's knowledge. The child is not usually seeking proof of a particular fact but rather a process for working with facts or a representation of a fact or process which is personally meaningful. What makes sense to a proportion of the children in the class will not necessarily be meaningful to all the children. They will have different experiences and knowledge upon which to draw and will react differently to any given stimulae, of course. They are usually asking for help in the process of construction of knowledge.
The question is: which form of help is best? Intellectual maturity and disciplinary values generally favour those strategies which build upon levels of abstraction according to the disciplinary rules. What are used as disciplinary forms of validation become the preferred learning style and teachers work to indoctrinate students to adopt the canons of the disciplines. Fortunately the understanding derived from Piaget's work (that young children do not usually demonstrate abstract thinking processes) does temper to some extent the vigour with which `disciplinary methods' are imposed and we find teachers working to present their subject matter in concrete forms and to accept concrete processing at least 'until the children are old enough' to be expected to be able to learn to work in the abstract.
The result of this approach is that we find many students 'falling off' in the secondary schooling phase and being placed in areas where they can continue to work in concrete ways, in areas such as mechanics, arts and crafts, and so on. These students often do very well and it is easy to assume that they have been placed appropriately. But it is revealing to ask an experienced mechanic to explain how something works. Such a 'physics drop-out' will often be able expound at length on the physics involved in the working of some mechanical device despite having been alienated from 'physics' at a young age at school. Sylvia Weir (Cultivating Minds, 1987) argues that these students have found their niche. They continue to learn in their preferred style, thinking in concrete ways, and many achieve very high standards of performance. Turkle and Papert (1990) offer the conjecture that the propensity for working closely to objects, which often categorises these students, is developed before children are expected to perform abstractly.
There seems to be an anomaly here. Turkle and Papert (1990) have suggested that it is the custodians of knowledge who have missed the boat. Turkle (1986) points to computer programming virtuosos, known in computer science circles as hackers (not to be confused with criminals who share the name), and claims that these people too work in concrete ways on many occasions. In fact there is a growing body of research which examines the working styles of many in science and mathematics and shows that, particularly with the participation of proportionately more women, a lot of excellent scientific and mathematical work is being done in concrete ways alongside the more traditional ways of working. What is being exposed is the falsity of the old assumption that concrete processes lead to inferior thoughts. There is no reason to lower the quality of the products being demanded but perhaps there is room for acceptance of a wider range of developmental thinking processes even if the validation processes cannot be varied.
Turkle and Papert argue that it may be time for teachers to take account of this and that it is appropriate to do so in an era when we can use the computer to help us. Working in an electronic medium, especially a programming environment, provides students with the facility to work in concrete ways alongside their colleagues who are working in more abstract ways or, and this is so often forgotten, to work concretely at times and abstractly at others. Again, this does not mean that the task or the concepts need be any less sophisticated, merely that alternative representations be credited with equality of status.
What then does it mean to work concretely and abstractly and how does the computer help?
In this context, working abstractly can be thought of as working according to the rules of a discipline, building one level of knowledge upon another without transgressing the processes which are considered valid in such cases within the discipline. Working concretely is well-described as working as bricoleurs, the term being defined as it has been used by Levi-Strauss who argued that it was primitive, immature thinking. As Turkle and Papert write (1990, p. 135), Levi-Strauss used the term 'bricolage' to contrast the analytic methodology of western science with what he called a 'science of the concrete' in primitive societies. The bricoleurs he describes, do not move abstractly and hierarchically from axiom to theorem to corollary. Bricoleurs construct theories by arranging and rearranging, by negotiating and renegotiating with a set of well-known materials.
Turkle and Papert claim that bricoleurs share a number of characteristics in their work: they like to work collaboratively; they like to have a sense of the product in mind all the time and from it to discern the nature and role of any particular piece with which they are working; they see mistakes as bits which need more polishing and tend not to scrap the whole but to work with the mistake as for an in-flight correction; they have a sense of being 'close' to the product, they need to negotiate its development rather than deliver the specifications; they like to 'polish' their products. When using computers, such people seem more akin to artists and musicians than prototypical scientists and mathematicians.
When Logo was first used in schools, it was claimed that using a programming language such as Logo, which works very well for planned, modular construction of programs, would help develop planning strategies in the children who used it. To the disappointment of many, it failed this test badly (Pea, 1984). Since then, it has been seen as one of the virtues of Logo that it is not prescriptive in this way (Papert 1985). It seems now that with an environment such as LogoWriter provides, sharing of pieces and working as bricoleurs is easy.
All the computer needs to make this type of working possible is suitable programming facilities and the magic of 'invisible mending'. The programming facility allows the user to represent, in concrete form, the processes being used and the invisibility of the mending encourages the user to reconsider the work many times, and the openness of the product allows for collaboration both `off the computer', when the user can seek advice about a particular aspect of their work, and 'on the computer' when a technique which has been applied in some other circumstances can be cut and pasted into context for modification and re-use.
The obvious stumbling block is the acceptance of programming as a legitimate alternative to already established representational media; not a small problem. For many people, and most particularly those who are high achievers in their field, there seems to be no reason for changing the rules or extending the criteria but for those who are excluded there is every reason. Many experts use computers and programming to achieve their goals and develop a relationship with the computer in which the programming language is merely the vehicle for transmission of control, for stating the definitions. For others, programming languages can be used as a medium in which to develop the definitions and this is achieved by bricolage techniques.
Turkle and Papert argue that in many cases the products which are achieved by those working in this way are as significant as the products of those who use the traditional ways but that far more
people will be able to participate in the work if we are more tolerant of these concrete working styles. It is hard to see why there is a problem. It is not an argument for one or another style but for plurality of styles.
Abelson (1990) extends this argument in his paper about the possibility of raising the status of imperative knowledge. He argues that programming provides a suitable medium for the representation of much that is known within a field, in his case engineering, and that the computer extends the range of media for the development and presentation of knowledge in ways that should not be disregarded any more. Abelson shows that in some cases, how-to is as useful as what-is and in his own work he has used programming representations to give access to extremely sophisticated concepts to relatively naive engineers with useful results.
The acceptance of knowledge as dynamic and involving the processes as well as the product of any discipline opens the way for a wider acceptance of learning styles and with the necessary tools available, what is stopping us?
References
Abelson, H., 1990. Computation as a framework for Engineering Education in (ed.) Dowling, C., Sunrise Notes No 4, pps. 6 - 15 Melbourne: ACER.
Papert, S., 1985. Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking in Logo 85 Theoretical Papers, pps 53 - 68. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pea, R.D.,& Kurland, D.M., 1984. Logo programming and the development of planning skills Technical Report No 16. New York: Center for Children and Technology, Bank Street College of Education.
Turkle, S. and Papert, S., 1990. Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 16, no. 1, pps 128 -157. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Turkle, S., 1986. The Second Self. Cernt5r1tViciffituss-----. Weir, S., 1987. Cultivating Minds. New York: Harper and Row.