Below are Egan’s (2001) 3 fundamental and incompatible ideas that underlie the purpose of education:
1. Socializing the young (socialization)
2. Shaping the mind with a disciplined academic curriculum (quality education)
3. Facilitating the development of students’ potential (unlocking potential)
It seems a grandiose attempt to postulate that there is a way to address the incompatibilities of fundamental ideas in educational thinking. These fundamental ideas are incompatible and so they remain to be incompatible – it is what it is!
I was prepared to accept that I can only do so much in teaching and learning, and so I begin to just focus on one fundamental idea sacrificing the other two. However, here was Egan again (his afterword in his book The Educated Mind) who argued that there is a way to address these incompatibilities. He proposed the idea of imaginative education and pioneered this movement.
Egan’s Way of Addressing the Incompatibilities
In Egan’s (1997) afterword, he drew upon the ideas of philosophers and pioneer education scholars suggesting that there are clues to answering these incompatibilities. From these ideas, he contended that stimulating imagination in the later years facilitates flexibility to the seemingly inflexible and ‘developed ways of thinking’ of the students based on their previous experiences. In Egan’s theory, the child develops throughout life with progressing ways of understanding (somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, ironic) and a previous way of understanding is replaced by another developed way of understanding in the further stage of human development. Because of this, one may tend not to use the previous way of understanding and focus on the new way of understanding or one may be stuck in the previous way of understanding and may have difficulty moving forward to a more developed way of understanding. Either way, there are consequences. Egan proposed that by stimulating imagination, we can harness the powers of these ways of understanding into the learning process leading to the big idea of critical thinking. This answer has been influential to the 21st-century approach to understanding teaching and learning even before the founding of the Imaginative Education Research Group in 2001. A quick look into the impact of his ideas on other scholars would lead us to his 2 influential masterpieces – teaching as storytelling and the educated mind.
Is Egan’s idea the single answer to the question of incompatibilities? I would say ‘no’. And Egan will agree with me on this – there is no limit to one’s imagination! Here, I attempt to offer my answer to the challenge of incompatibilities through the concepts that I encountered in our course readings and through my own theorizing.
An Answer from Zuckerman: Interpsychological independence, Intrapsychological independence, and Reflective Intelligence
The importance of socialization rests on the development of interpsychological and intrapsychological independence. In these 2 components of independence, the student interacts with the teacher and co-learners throughout the learning process (from asking help to approach the task to working independently to complete the task). In the process of interacting with the teacher (or the expert), the student learns the ‘big ideas’ in one’s discipline and this contributes to quality education. Moreover, to fully unlock one’s potential, Zuckerman emphasized reflective intelligence – the ability to monitor one’s knowledge and delve deeper into what is unknown. In the end, Zuckerman (2003) argued that mastering the power of reflection helps transcend the student from just learning what is known to producing what is to be known.
An Answer from Galperin’s Model: The Ability to Look Ahead
Galperin built upon Vygotsky’s concept of internalization which is the capacity of humans to make use of symbolic representations to process and produce knowledge (Arievitch & Haenen, 2005). Emphasizing the movement from material to verbal and to mental levels of abstraction, Galperin was able to put forward the importance of socialization in the learning process through the use of communication. Quality learning occurs when the student transitions from having a physical object (present and tangible) in front as a reference (i.e., material level) to replacing these physical representations with words and expressions (i.e., verbal level) and finally to creating a network of knowledge (i.e., mental level) that exists (and can be retrieved with less effort) in one’s mind even without explicit expression and physical manipulation of the object. Unlocking the potential occurs when the student goes through the levels of abstraction repeatedly and with each repetition attains a higher level of orientation to one’s knowledge – that is, the ability to monitor one’s learning capacity and the natural inclination to look ahead from what has been already known.
An Answer from the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: A Vygotskian Perspective
Cole and Gajdamashko (2009) wrote:
‘Both in theory and practice, developmentalists have long stressed that the developmental changes manifested by a child are reciprocally related to changes in the child’s environment, that one cannot occur without the other.’ (p. 127)
The quote above, I believe, perfectly captures socialization that scholars and thinkers within the developmental perspective put prime importance to. The authors’ ideas on the vertical and horizontal dimensions of development emphasized that learning the ways of thinking in one’s academic discipline does not only necessitate learning from an institution where the knowledge is generated and transferred but also from other settings where knowledge is transformed and practiced in ways that fit one’s or community’s needs. It is when vertical and horizontal development is taken into account that one’s potential is unlocked. After all, as part of their conclusion, innovations are sparked by young ones in search of ways to interact with and understand the world.
An Answer from Bruner’s Logical and Narrative thinking and Meaning-Making
Bruner (1996, 2009) emphasized that scientific logical thinking is just the first step of quality education. To truly unlock the immense potential of a student, he/she has to situate his/her logical thought within his/her own experiences and context through a more deliberate process of narrative thinking. In this connection, the recognition that learning is a social activity laden with social/cultural/historical meanings, the socialization process of learning helps transcend the student from just knowing what is already there to thinking about what might be possible.
My Answer to the Challenge of Incompatibilities
The challenge of addressing the incompatibilities of the 3 fundamental ideas of educational thinking is, I would say, an ongoing story. The ideas I presented above in addition to Egan’s imaginative education are in one way or another able to give clues to address the incompatibilities. I will end by presenting my own conceptual story as my attempt to address the incompatibilities.
I call my story capsule learning. In this story, I see the classroom (I call the capsule) as a place for socialization that reflects the sociocultural reality. In this capsule (a non-threatening environment), both the teacher and the students are simultaneously working to produce knowledge guided by a disciplined way of thinking. There are moments that the teacher initiates, the student experiences, or the teacher-student dynamics generates which serve as a fertile ground for knowledge production. Specifically, there is a moment when a student’s or a group of students’ views are in contrast with the presented information (this is what Bruner called dilemma, Radford called object, and Vygotsky called an opportunity for expanding ZPD) – in this case, there is an opportunity for the teacher to facilitate a learning environment that can help the student resolve the differing views. This, I would argue, is an opportunity to unlock the student’s potential. This story is a work in progress, and I hope to make it more elaborate, lucid, and concrete as I learn more throughout the program.
References
Arievitch, I. M., & Haenen, J. P. (2005). Connecting sociocultural theory and educational practice: Galperin’s approach. Educational Psychologist, 40(3), 155-165. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4003_2
Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (2009). Culture, mind, and education. In Contemporary theories of learning (pp. 167-176). Routledge.
Cole, M., & Gajdamashko, N. (2009). The concept of development in cultural-historical activity theory: Vertical and horizontal. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels, & K. Gutiérrez (Eds.), Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory (pp. 129-143). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511809989.009
Egan, K. (1997). The educated mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding. University of Chicago Press.
Egan, K. (2001). Why education is so difficult and contentious. Teachers College Record, 103(6), 923-941.Zuckerman, G. (2003). The learning activity in the first years of schooling: The developmental path toward reflection. In A. Kozulin, B. Gindis, V. Ageyev, & S. Miller (Eds.), Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, pp. 177-199). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511840975.011
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