Pedagogical Paradigms#

Summary of Dron and Anderson (2022)

Immediate reflections#

Learning outcomes are inherently a more objectivist construct. There is a tension with those and holding to other paradigms. A tension to be managed.

"Bricolagogy" captures my approach and the authors argue better represents the what is needed in contemporary practice/society. The recognition that there are diverse ways of approaching a complex task and the ability to be able to judge, select, and apply methods that are the best fit for the specific contexts.

Paradigms#

Traditional

objectivism - A paradigm of teaching
subjectivism - A paradigm of learning
complexivist

Emerging

Data-drive pedagogy: A theory-free paradigm
Hologogy: A cultural paradigm
Bricolagogy: A theory-agnostic paradigm

Annotations (3/31/2023, 11:51:07 AM)#

this chapter is concerned with analyzing the three broad pedagogical paradigms -- objectivist, subjectivist, and complexivist -- that have characterized learning and teaching in the field over the past half century (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 1)

It goes on to discuss new paradigms that are starting to emerge, most notably in "theoryfree" models enabled by developments in artificial intelligence and analytics (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 1)

hologogic methods that recognize the many cultures to which we belong, and a (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 2)

"bricolagogic," theory-agnostic paradigm that reflects the field's growing maturity and depth. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 2)

By examining how pedagogical approaches have developed in a complex dance with tools and systems that enable them, we seek to highlight how distance learning pedagogies owe their origins to in-person learning, how this has impacted their development, and how the pedagogical pathways of open and distance learning have increasingly diverged from their in-person ancestors. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 2)

Alan Kay quipped, "'technology' is anything invented after you were born (as cited in Brand, 2008, loc. 189)," (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 2)

From a naïve perspective, new technologies of in-person learning are typically introduced into an already well-established system rather than changing the system itself. The tools are usually incrementally better ways of addressing the same problems, and their significance is usually limited because they seldom change structural components of the overall system. This helps to entrench a widespread belief that pedagogy must come first (e.g., Chumley-Jones, Dobbie, & Alford, 2002; Nation & Evans, 2000; Wilkinson, Forbes, Bloomfield, & Fincham Gee, 2004). (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 3)

While pedagogy (in the sense of being the art and science of teaching) underpins all our teaching interventions and is the purpose of what we do, pedagogies (by which we mean methods of teaching or instructional methods) never come first. There are countless other technologies (from curricula to timetables to classroom architecture) that impose limits and create problems that pedagogies must solve (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 3)

Pedagogical methods evolve in a specific context in which they solve new problems and take advantage of new opportunities. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 4)

Perhaps the most fundamental problem that an in-person pedagogy has to solve is motivation. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 4)

Self determination theory posits that, for intrinsic motivation to occur, support must occur for autonomy (students must feel in control), competence (students must feel capable of overcoming meaningful challenge), and relatedness (students must feel that there is social value and meaning in the activity) (Ryan & Deci, 2017) (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 4) Hence driving questions as important for relatedness. But also the visual to some extent

Some of the most common solutions to these problems just make them worse. Notably, the use of extrinsic rewards and punishments such as grades and gold stars, though achieving some kind of motivation (in the sense of encouraging students to comply with teachers' demands), reliably and persistently inhibits intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1972; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000; Kohn, 1999) (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 4)

Lecturers who enthuse, who ask questions that intrigue students, who seek to know their students so that they can make connections with their interests, and so on are dealing with these issues, as are those who take advantage of the inherent social nature of the situation by encouraging discussion or just by remembering every student's name. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 4)

In our previous work (Anderson & Dron, 2011), we described the evolution of pedagogies in distance education as falling into three fairly distinct generations (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 5)

each of which was codetermined not just by developments in pedagogical knowledge but by changes in the affordances and constraints of the information and communication technologies that emerged during each period, as well as other systemic factors (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 5)

Objectivism: A Paradigm of Teaching#

The objectivist paradigm, as the name implies, involves pedagogies that assume both that there is an objective reality to learn about and that there are clearly defined objectives to be achieved. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 6)

There are two broad psychological models underpinning this paradigm. The first (behaviorist) focuses on ways to bring about terminal behaviors. The second (cognitivist) focuses on the ways that people are believed to learn, in terms of internal cognitive processes. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 6)

although the principles they entail -- such as spaced learning (Fields, 2005), direct instruction (Stockard, Wood, Coughlin, & Rasplica Khoury, 2018), or media mixing theories (e.g., Clark & Mayer, 2011) may also be of value when learning is self-guided. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 6)

In reality, learners rarely followed such instructions to the letter (Haughey & Muirhead, 2005). Additional pedagogies used by the learners themselves in their homes or offices were seldom observed, because they could not be observed (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 6)

It is significant that not only were these distance universities but they were also open, meaning that many of their students lacked formal qualifications or experience, unlike the highly selective models of the vast majority of conventional universities. Again, this was heavily influenced by technological factors. On the one hand, in-person universities suffer from problems of finite space and location dependence that inherently limits their enrollment capacity, so selective filtering is as much a necessity as an aspiration. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 7)

Subjectivism: A Paradigm of Learning#

As the name implies, the focus of the subjectivist paradigm is the subject: the learner. Subjectivist theories acknowledge that learning is a subjective process in which knowledge is constructed in the context of existing knowledge. There are two main models in this paradigm, the cognitive constructivist and the social constructivist. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 7)

he cognitive constructivist model, epitomized in the work of Piaget (1970), focuses on how knowledge is constructed by individuals. The more influential social constructivist model, which builds on the work of Dewey (1938) and Vygotsky (1978), sees construction of knowledge as both an individual and a shared process, in which not only is individual knowledge constructed with, for, and through others, but knowledge itself is perceived as a social and situated phenomenon. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 7)

The focus of subjectivist models is on how we know and how we come to know: these are not (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 7)

theories of teaching, as such, but of learning. They do not dictate any particular method, though they do imply that some approaches -- especially those that involve social interaction, open-ended tasks, and active engagement -- will be more promising than the typically instructivist approaches of objectivist models. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 8)

A wide range of research-backed theories and models emerged from this, such as communities of inquiry (Garrison & Anderson, 2003), transactional distance (Moore, 1993), and curated or shared web explorations (Furuta, 2000). (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 8)

Though subjectivist pedagogies acknowledge that every learner will learn something different, and in different ways, their context of application remains firmly rooted in the institutional paradigms of mediaeval universities. Subjectivism focuses on collaborative processes to support shared but largely teacher-led goals, and though its emblematic view of the teacher is that of a "guide on the side" rather than a "sage on a stage," the role of the teacher is as leader of a named group of students, who retains control, who assesses student learning, and who establishes and enforces group norms and rules. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 8)

Complexivism: A Paradigm of Knowledge#

The complexivist paradigm goes further than the social constructivist paradigm in seeing knowledge as non-negotiably distributed, situated, complex, and emergent. Learning must, by necessity, inherit the same characteristics, and the knowledge that results does reside not only in the heads of students but also in the networks of both individuals and the physical or conceptual artifacts they create. Complexivist (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 8)

heories posit that individual knowledge cannot be neatly separated from the knowledge of others and that our minds are not just phenomena emerging in the brains but are extended and instantiated in the world around us; that learning is an inherently complex, unrepeatable phenomenon, always including emergent as well as planned consequences; that learners must be active agents, in control of their own learning; and that connections between what we learn matter as much as or more than what they connect. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 9)

Complexivist models are concerned with how knowledge emerges in individuals and populations, so seldom dictate ways to teach though, again, some methods, such as open sharing of the process and products of learning, are strongly implied, and many methods are frowned upon as imposing too much structure and order on a complex system. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 9)

From a complexivist viewpoint, teachers may play important roles in the network, especially as role models and sources of wisdom, but they are not so much guides on the side nor sages on stages as they are co-travellers, part of a complex matrix of interacting agents who learn together, in a broader networked context that extends far beyond that of a defined, goal-focused group. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 9)

In previous work, building on Paulsen's(1993) theory of cooperative freedoms, the authors (Dron & Anderson, 2014) identified ten distinctive realms of freedom that may be potentially available to online learners that are, without complex and demanding pedagogical processes, rarely available to their in-person counterparts: - Place -- where learning happens - Content -- what you learn and where you learn it from - Pace -- how fast you learn it - Method -- the pedagogies you use and how you are assessed - Relationship -- who with and how you relate to others - Technology -- what tools you use - Medium -- what form media take - Time -- when you learn - Delegation -- who dictates what happens next - Disclosure -- what you reveal to whom (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 10)

Blurred Lines and Overlaps#

Although we first presented these as distinct generations, the reality of the lived learning experience is and has always been that all generations coexist in any learning journey of any length or complexity. Though only recently recognized, complexivist learning has always occurred in classrooms and families and especially for distance learners (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 10)

who, at least as much as campus-based students, learn in a social (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 10)

space with others, influenced by many people and many things. Even the most fullfrontal behaviorist teaching in a classroom is mitigated by the fact that students live much more of their lives outside it, and complex things can happen within it. Furthermore, none of the generations excludes the possibility of the others. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 11)

There are even times when behaviorist methods can be useful in otherwise far less structured ways of learning, from actors learning their lines to children learning to ride bicycles. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 11)

Data-Driven Pedagogy: A Theory-Free Paradigm#

Educational data mining and learning analytics systems seek patterns in datasets that provide clues about how students are learning, often relating them to intended learning outcomes (in the objectivist tradition) though sometimes to explore other aspects of behavior, such as social engagement or self-directedness. Often, such as in adaptive systems like Knewton (Wilson & Nichols, 2015), the data are used to provide recommendations about how to learn, based on how others have done so, not (like traditional adaptive hypermedia) based on teacher-specified paths, but on the interactions of countless other learners with the resources and one another. The pedagogical underpinnings of these recommendations are often opaque to even their creators as patterns mined from the crowd come to dictate how and what we learn and who we learn from. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 11)

When those outputs are credentials or grades, they are seated firmly within the objectivist paradigm and to a large extent to the behaviorist end of the spectrum, where what matters is not how learning occurs, but what results are achieved. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 11)

The goals of the system are determined by the means of measuring success, and these will, in most cases, fail to recognize what they are not trained to seek: the creative, the tangential, and the expansive outcomes that a human teacher could celebrate. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 12)

Hologogy: A Cultural Paradigm#

The term "hologogy" has been defined to describe ways of learning to be a part of a culture with shared values and practices (Cumbie & Wolverton, 2004), though largely as an extension of the subjectivist paradigm in an in-person setting. At its heart is a networked-individualist (Wellman, 2002) view of humans as individual agents, becoming part of a culture, that Cumbie and Warburton describe as a pedagogical process of identifying, connecting, relating, becoming, and joining as they learn together. To a significant extent, education is concerned with the transmission and development of culture. As education becomes more global and the dominance of Western culture recedes, the networked individualist perspective that underpins subjectivist and complexivist paradigms is being challenged. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 12)

Bricolagogy: A Theory-Agnostic Paradigm#

The wealth of pedagogical paradigms available to us makes it possible to think of learning as a process of bricolage, selecting the most appropriate pedagogical models for our current needs from the many available options. More and more learning is about charting (Littlejohn, Milligan, & Margaryan, 2012) and wayfinding (Siemens, 2012) in a cornucopia of information, competing values, and incompatible worldviews where we are members of not one society but millions of fragmented sets, networks, and groups. Pedagogically, the challenge is not one of integrating, constructing, or knowing, but of being able to know what is worth knowing, and how best to learn in the whitewater world of conflicting ideals and opinions. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 13)

There is a need for learning how to choose the right tools and how to assemble and orchestrate them most effectively in different contexts. Though lessons can be drawn from the field of critical pedagogy (Giroux, 2020), complexivist accounts, and the discoveries of the emerging theory-free paradigm, this theory-agnostic approach may become a paradigm in itself. We hereby christen this bricolage-based approach "bricolagogy." (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 13)

Conclusions#

Among the positive outcomes of increasing globalization and connection is increasing recognition that we share a common global environment, that there are different ways of learning, different ways of knowing, and different ways of acknowledging competence. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 13)

We foresee a fragmented future of increasing diversity, where paradigms rarely blend but instead compete for the ever more valuable attention of those seeking to learn. The powerful will succeed: we will see the robot-taught and goal-driven bigdata-based variant of the objectivist paradigm become ever more successful, competing more and more with traditional institutions and, often, being embraced by those institutions as essential to a viable future where economic constraints make traditional roles less affordable. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 14)

Powerful group- and identity-based hologogic learning that stresses affective commitment and belonging, some driven by echo chambers and filter bubbles, will also thrive. Finally, we see the growth of theoryfree approaches as inevitable. These pedagogical designs will become the remit of machines that have no intrinsic care for the needs of people and their communities. (Dron and Anderson, 2022, p. 14)

References#

Dron, J., & Anderson, T. (2022). Pedagogical Paradigms in Open and Distance Education. In Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education (pp. 1–17). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0351-9_9-1