A documentary film about Chinese senior high school students and my thoughts about why a certain educational philosophy ceased to be philosophy

The following link is a documentary film which describes the life of Chinese senior high school students. How they spend the whole senior year struggling to prepare for the college entrance exams, the scores of which will be the only standard to determine whether they could enter college. The website Youku.com is a Chinese website similar with Youtube, the documentary film has fairly good English subtitle, if anybody intrested in this film could just click the link and watch the film, and just ignore other Chinese characters if you couldn't read Chinese^_^

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzQ3NDMyNTI=.html

My high school senior year was almost the same. It touches the miserable memory in my heart. This is why many Chinese students get very high math and science scores, why the higher education system in China produces so many engineers each year, one of the reasons that China becomes the world factory, and also why somebody said the "Made in China" would never turn to "Created in China", because students are educated out of the ability of creativity (Ken Robinson). I am not sure whether it's proper to quote George's word here, but I really agree with what he wrote in the A Brief Philosophical Primer post that "I do not know a single member of the Academy who believes in his/her heart that a university education is not a place for growth and development of the individual as a whole; however, the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour." China has good origin of educational philosophy. Confucius taught his pupils almost the same as Socrates did, using dialogue and taught informally. He also believes that students should be educated according to their capacities and also their own needs and interests. Chinese people regard Confucius as the "Father of Education", some schools even have the sculpture of him to show respect, but no one is really practising or developing his ideas of education. I agree with what George said "the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour", and there are also the reasons of power and monetary corruptions, just like Dall'Alba says "Power differentials often play a key role in influencing the outcome of challenges to established routines and practices", There was no openness and mutual respect during the two thousand years of feudalism in China, so the philosophy of education of Confucius lacks of good development, and has ceased to be philosophy--it's only a history of education now.

P.S.
To be honest, I wasn't sure whether it's good or not to post this documentary film here, because it seems irrelevant to our readings and also because I might still feel unsafe since different "rumors" about the bolg are going on and I haven't got much comments for my previous posts. Now I "deeply understand" the famous Shakespeare quote "to be, or not to be--that is a question." ^_^ "To post, or not to post--that is a question." As a human being, facing these possibilities, I finally decided to post, to speak what I want to say, because we are discussing education in class, everything about education should be relevant, and as educational researcher, we should explore problems of broad appeal(Borrego, 2007), so I kind of feel it's right to push the boundary of this blog to make it further beyond our class readings and the quantity of 8 posts. If we are constrained by the boundary, we are not practising the ideal type of education we are talking and looking for. Actually, another important reason I posted this documentary film here is that Alice said in the first or second class that educational thoughts from other cultures are also welcome(Thank you, Alice!). So the result that I chose to post according to my own belief as a human being, which is also influenced by what Alice, Robin and our cohorts said about this blog (the education I received from this class), is what I would call, "Dall'Alba effect".

Reference:
1. Confucius
2. Socrates
3. George
4. Dall'Alba
5. Maura Borrego, Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Trained Engineers Learning Educational Research Methods, JEE, Aprial 2007
6. Ken Robinson

Fodder for youtube videos

Our YouTube project is motivated by this video.

However, you can make your team's video as involved or simple as you like. Past years have gotten pretty involved; you can do something completely different for them. But in case you want a way to calibrate yourself, here is a list of all our past years' YouTube videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/alicepawley#grid/user/841ECAED68149FD0

Blog interaction guide

Opportunity to:
Engage with colleagues
That the blog space is "different" than our class space
Use blog to help you think (reflect, synthesize, connect to readings, etc.)

Need:
Foundation for trust (recognizing this is a process...this is a start with a little leap of faith)
Safe space to explore ideas and to make mistakes (large and small, even very small)
Being comfortable with less coherent posts (for me to be comfortable, for others to find value)
Ways to connect with other ideas and have a dialogue (need help with "threading" and "tagging")

• Create tags / labels to help people know what you want / need

A place to put struggles and questions
A place for guiding questions
A place for fragmented ideas
Okay to say "I'm not looking for a comment" and "I am looking for a comment"
How to respectfully disagree / challenge people to explore their ideas (encouragement to think differently)

• engage with the ideas and other ideas - speaking to the "third place"
• first show you understand (e.g, restate what you saw), then engage philosophically
• help clarify the part you disagree with 
• put some distance between the post, the responder, the response and the comment

How much "grounding" needs to be in the blog posts?
Is it OK to not blog?  
Freedom to "author" own growth
Questions of audience
How to get email notification of comments - in future blog post :)

What are our purposes for blogging in this class?


What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 1)


What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 2)

about Dall’Alba article

In general, if I understood correctly, Dall’Alba talks about transition & transformation from school to professional level. She reconsidered the process of professional education not just as a collection of “right” knowledge, but as a process of “becoming” a professional. It takes time for a new college graduate to adapt a new culture and an organizational environment where new graduates are going to work. The author discusses this transformation from a “school-boy/girl” to a professional from epistemological and ontological perspective. She said that we need more than knowledge in particular field (gained in school), we need skills –how to become a professional.
Dall’Alba names a few features, which explain when aspiring professionals (after school) become a practicing professionals: “The features include: continuity over time with change in ways of being professionals; possibilities in the ways we can be with constraints on those possibilities; openness in taking up possibilities with resistance to doing so; and
individuals who are becoming professionals with others involved in that process” (p.38).
This article brought to my mind some thoughts about differences between features of novices and experts. It takes time for a novice to become an expert, so, in the same way, talking about Dall’Alba article, it takes time to transform and be accepted by professionals. This transformation is not always easy, and to say the true - it is hard time for many graduates.
Last Spring 2010 semester I took a S. Brophy’s class here at ENE department. He gave as a very interesting article (Jonassen et al., 2006) about attitudes of expert/professional engineers towards their new colleagues (novices after graduation). I think that Dall’Alba is trying to describe the same problem but from the different perspective. Jonassen’s study included more than 100 participants, which were engineers with different background and working experience. The main purpose of this study was to discover how and why the problem-solving in classrooms is different compare to the problem-solving in the real workplace. The problem is that all problems that are solved in the class are well-defined. Students are expected to present the only one “right” decision of the problem. On the other hand, all tasks in the real workplace usually are ill-defined; there is not a “right” decision; for any particular situation many equivalent choices can co-exist. On the other hand - skilled engineers usually refer to the previous experience in problem-solving. But novices –they don’t have this “previous experience” yet. Theoretical and conceptual knowledge are important, but not dominant or prevailing. Often engineers are involved in absolutely-not-engineering activities, like: how to stay inside of the budget, or “how to keep the client happy”, and how to earn money on the project. Many engineers noticed that new graduates have to work 1- 3 years to become “real” engineers.
I had a similar experience in the past. After my MS graduation in Russia (almost fifteen years ago) I worked as an engineer-technologist on the factory, which produced microchips. My first year was very frustrating, I felt like my college knowledge were not connected to the real life and workplace. At the first week of my employment a couple of “old” engineers took me on the floor and showed me equipment and machines, which produced microchips. I had no idea what those engineers are talking about. I felt like I am a newborn, and as a result of my “newborness” some jokes about my “professionalism” were produced by the ‘old’ engineers. (to say the true- it was very unpleasant). It took almost two years to figure out what I have to do and what I was responsible for. Now I understand why it was so difficult: because my college experience to solve well- defined problems was insufficient for ill-defined tasks in the real workplace.
So, for me, the main idea of Dall’Alba article is: professional education has problems and we need to do something about that because the transition from a school to a real working place is not easy for many graduates.

I hope it is enough for today, see all of you in class…………

References:
Jonassen, D.H., Strobel, J. & Lee, C.B. (2006). Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering: Lessons for Engineering Educators. Journal of Engineering Education; Vol. 95 (2) ProQuest Education Journals.

Personal answers and thoughts to guiding questions on Dall’Alba

What is the basis of Dall'Alba's critique on current views of education? (what is her argument?)

Dall’Alba’s argues that currently there is so much focus of epistemology (theory of knowing) and not at all on ontology (theory of being). She argues that ontology is as important as epistemology.
According to Dall’Alba, professional education programs needs to be more than just instilling necessary knowledge and skills when preparing professionals for practice in their respective fields. There needs to be ways to develop and transform aspiring professionals to “ways of being”, which according to Dall’Alba, is to engage young professionals with set of routines, histories and traditions of their chosen respective career to the extent that “they are manifest in the present and relevant for the future”.

What alternative framework does she put forth?
Education as Transforming ways of being.

What might it look like to design an education based on this alternative framework?

Based on reading Dall’Alba, a new design of an education system, I believe, must have following items.

1) Learning through experience – Dall’Alba suggests that teacher trainees “learn to design learning activities and to assess what students have learned. As they do, develop their own knowing and acting…, at the same time extending and elaborating their understanding and embodiment of what it means…” Some forms of learning through your own experience, I believe, is suggested by Dall’Alba. This allows aspiring professional to not only integrate what is known and clarify what is lacking in the current practice, but also allows them to take a step (or steps) towards becoming an experienced professional (transformation taking place by learning through experience).

2) Include interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary subjects into current curriculum – Meeting and learning about other disciplines allows aspiring professionals to expand their horizons, opportunities and possibilities and “potentially enriching the process of becoming”. Dall’Alba strongly suggests in the paper the importance of “interdependent” and “broader social world”, and that individual cannot become a “professional in isolation”. To develop and enrich ontology, I believe, Dall’Alba is suggesting to incorporate subjects from other disciplines into professional subjects.

3) Learn to seize on ambiguity rather than shy away from it – Learn to question the norms and current practices despite the pre-conceptions and challenges from experiences teachers. By doing, aspiring professionals would not only advance the field but develop professional ways of being. This will enable one to look into deeper questions, as suggested by examples illustrated in Dall’Alba, “Addressing or resolving such tensions involves questioning assumptions, not only about what teaching involves, but also about what it means to be a teacher.” This process is developing not only epistemology but ontology of aspiring professionals.

Thoughts on the Dall'Alba Paper

I had a much larger post regarding this article that I was going to make, but it was fairly oblique. I think I've been able to filter it down some to this:

At one point the author states "The process of becoming a professional occurs, then, through continual interaction with other professionals, as well as those outside the professions. It is misleading to attempt to separate the individual from engagement with others in this process of becoming."

I agree with this completely. I also believe that it serves as an excellent argument against what the paper is suggesting - that we "reconfigure professional education as a process of becoming." The process of becoming occurs in large part through the interaction with other *professionals*. The belief that educators are equivalent to a given professional in the same field is foolish. Moreover, even if this were true the educators are fewer in number, and the interactions between student and educator are far less involved than those between professionals.

I think the author summarizes it best for me:
"For instance, in what ways and to what extent is it appropriate to shape another's becoming? Whose knowing, acting and being serve as ‘golden standards’? Questions such as these underpin the design and implementation of professional education programs, whether or not they are explicitly addressed in those programs."

I would argue that questions such as those patently do NOT underpin the design and implementation of any professional education program. Those questions are intimate, personal questions that are decided on an individual basis by individuals based on their interactions with other *professionals*.

Thus, I respectfully disagree with the core argument made in this paper. Schools that emphasize ontology exist already – for instance, the entire Catholic School System. Leave the facts to the schools and the beliefs to the people.

Ambiguities of Becoming - Examples

I really appreciated this week's reading assignment. There were many things about Learning Professional Ways of Being: Ambiguities of becoming that really resignated with me. For some reason, it was relatively easy for me to think of examples that helped me understand some of the point(s) that Dall'Alba was making when she was explaining the "features" of the "ambiguities" associated with becoming. Hopefully, someone who may have wrestled with this article can find a little clarity in the two examples that resounded loudly in my mind while thinking through the content. Finally, if anyone else had a similar experience (that examples came to mind that really brought the content home) feel free to enlighten me.

The example likened to ambiguity of becoming (in general) was that of a child first learning to communicate with words. During the months leading up to the first 'DaDa', the parents (and others) have been talking to the child with words and even in the months immediately leading up to that climactic moment, more than likely, the parents were emphatic with over-enunciating the future-first words - in an attempt to teach the child the mechanics of speaking. Some day, out of the blue, the child struts into the world of communicators (with words) and utters the infamous words, 'DaDa'! From the limited experiences I've had with this, the child is, on some level, startled by everyone's excitement. At that moment, the child doesn't understand what's all the rage - they are just reciting the script that has been so purposefully fed to them for the past few months. What the child doesn't realize is that they are BEING a verbal communicator. In this case, the child does not have the "knowledge and skills" (i.e. spelling, definition, correct pronunciation, phonetics, etc.) associated with what they've done. Many moons later, the child will learn that their first word was actually a derivative of the word "Daddy"; the spelling; the formal definition; that so many other children use the exact same word and have a completely different person in mind, etc. It's not until later in life that the parents begin to improve the child's communication abilities by educating them with grammatical relationships between the word(s) they learn and other words in the language (verbs, plurality of the word, etc). For now the parents are just enjoying the presence of the new initiate "being" a verbal communicator. Even later in life, the child may have spelling quizzes in classes ( demonstrating a mastery of learning other words), take communications courses, maybe someday even pursue a Ph.D. in Linguistics! But even during the time of acquiring this knowledge and these skills, they are still "being" a verbal communicator. Sorry for belaboring this point, but this example really brought home the idea of the relationship between an epistomological approach and an ontological approach to educating and how both of them work well together in the formation of a professional. Of course there are a lot of implicit assumptions in this example, but I hope this helps.

One other example that really helped me understand the Openness with Resistance feature of the "ambiguities of becoming" directly relates to an experience I have had as an ENE student. Engineering Education is a community of scholars to which I aspire to join someday - as a professional. However, at this point in my career, I am just now learning the "ropes" (customs, jargon, culture, etc.) of ENE. Because I am so emersed in this environment and I aspire to be more than a "visitor" someday, I am open to learning whatever I can learn - in an attempt to begin to form connections that will someday lead to my success as a scholar in this community. At the same time, there are things that I am learning that are not easily recieved; I am resistant to some things. One of the clearest examples of this is that in the African-American community (of which I was raised and am a member), calling people in positions of authority by their first name is considered unacceptable. In response to a slip-up of this sort, my aunt would kindly advise me or my cousins to "put a handle on it" - that was her way of saying, please "hook" a title to the front of the name you just said the next time you say it (Ms., Mrs., Dr., etc.). In the ENE culture (at Purdue), it seems as though referring to professors (those in positions of authority) by their first name is strongly recommended by the majority of the faculty. In the African American culture, calling peers/friends/colleagues by their first name is expected. I suppose I'm in a tricky place right now because my professors are both authority-figures and very-soon-to-be colleagues. Of course, in the meantime, I'll take the "route less traveled" (by my fellow cohort members), with the hope that I will find a balance that will weave my upbringing with ENE customs. Until then, I'll be a living paradox!