Jerome Bruner: The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Theory 9781472541369, 9780826484024

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Series Editor’s Preface

Education is sometimes presented as an essentially practical activity. It is, it seems, about teaching and learning, curriculum, and what goes on in schools. It is about achieving certain ends, using certain methods, and these ends and methods are often prescribed for teachers, whose duty it is to deliver them with vigor and fidelity. With such a clear purpose, what is the value of theory? Recent years have seen politicians and policy makers in different countries explicitly denying any value or need for educational theory. A clue to why this might be is offered by a remarkable comment by a British Secretary of State for Education in the 1990s: ‘having any ideas about how children learn, or develop, or feel, should be seen as subversive activity.’ This pithy phrase captures the problem with theory: it subverts, challenges, and undermines the very assumptions on which the practice of education is based. Educational theorists, then, are trouble-makers in the realm of ideas. They pose a threat to the status quo and lead us to question the common sense presumptions of educational practices. But this is precisely what they should do because the seemingly simple language of schools and schooling hides numerous contestable concepts that in their different usages reflect fundamental disagreements about the aims, values, and activities of education. Implicit within the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is an assertion that theories and theorizing are vitally important for education. By gathering together the ideas of some of the most influential, important and interesting educational thinkers, from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary scholars, the series has the ambitious task of providing an accessible yet authoritative resource for a generation of students and practitioners. Volumes within the series are written by acknowledged leaders in the field, who were selected both for their scholarship and their ability to make often complex ideas accessible to a diverse audience. It will always be possible to question the list of key thinkers that are represented in this series. Some may question the inclusion of certain

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thinkers; some may disagree with the exclusion of others. That is inevitably going to be the case. There is no suggestion that the list of thinkers represented within the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is in any way definitive. What is incontestable is that these thinkers have fascinating ideas about education, and that taken together, the Library can act as a powerful source of information and inspiration for those committed to the study of education. Richard Bailey Roehampton University, London

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Foreword

Jerome Bruner has been the major thinker on education in the United States for the last 50 years; quite possibly, he occupies a role of equal importance in a global context. As a psychologist of human development, his influence in educational circles equals that of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky; as a philosopher and theoretician, his work rivals that of John Dewey, his predecessor as the most influential American focused on educational issues. I have had the privilege of knowing Jerry Bruner for over 40 years, as teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. His intellectual and personal vitality have remained unsurpassed across that considerable span. Whether he is occupying the role of scholar, empirical researcher, speaker, or writer, Bruner’s contributions are remarkable. First and foremost a psychologist, Bruner was instrumental in launching the cognitive revolution – the most important conceptual advance in the field. At the same time, Bruner emerged as a world leader in efforts to improve the thinking about, and the quality of, precollegiate education. Bruner’s influence has been pervasive. Almost 20 years ago, I attended an international meeting of scholars interested in education, in Paris. A dozen of us, unknown to one another beforehand, went out to dinner. It turned out that at least six people in the group had shifted their focus to education as a result of reading Bruner’s seminal volume The Process of Education. Wherever I travel, educators are fascinated to learn that I actually know Jerry Bruner. At the most outstanding educational sites, such as Reggio Emilia in Italy, his work has had especially strong impact. Of all the thinkers I’ve been privileged to know, no one has the intellectual breadth of Jerry Bruner. His intellectual antennae span the globe and cut across the full gamut of disciplines, arts, and professions. He is a masterful synthesizer. But unlike most others of that genre, Bruner’s syntheses are original and they advance the fields to which they are relevant, sometimes even sprouting new subfields. Whether it be the study of language, the arts, the sciences, narrative, or the law, Brunerian contributions are manifest. For me and for many others, Bruner has served as an invaluable transmitter

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of the intellectual trends of the time. But it would be more accurate to say that Bruner has been instrumental in defining the intellectual temper and tempo of the last several decades. Bruner belongs to intellectual history, as much as he belongs to the sciences of the mind or the improvement of educational understanding and opportunity. David Olson is the right person to provide an intellectual biography of Jerome Bruner, with special focus on educational issues. He has known Bruner for decades, has collaborated with him on many occasions, and has a deep sympathy with the approach that Bruner has crafted. In this volume, he characterizes Bruner’s manifold contributions in a clear and concise manner – bringing together strands and themes that cut across 50 years of thinking and writing. David Olson’s excellent biography features two bonuses. First, he provides his own comments on Bruner’s work, as well as his perspectives on the obstacles that stand in the way of a full adoption of a Brunerian approach to education. Second, borrowing a leaf from James Boswell, he includes an extensive transcript of a conversation with Bruner. Jerry Bruner is an incomparable conversationalist and readers can catch a whiff of what it is like to engage in dialogue with this intellectual master of our time. Howard Gardner Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Preface

Writing this account of the impact of the work of Jerome Bruner on education is the consummation of my 40-year personal relationship with Bruner that began with Post Doctoral studies under his supervision at the legendary Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. And now, over 40 years later, it continues, through my interview with Bruner – who although at the time of writing in his 90th year remains as thoughtful and lively as ever – at his home in New York where we discussed some of the issues raised in this volume. I first met Bruner in the fall of 1964 when I was a fledgling professor at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. I had recently arrived from the University of Alberta where I had completed a Ph.D. and where I had been an avid reader of Bruner’s work. Inspired by both Bruner and Vygotsky, I was busily conducting an experiment on the role of self-generated language in children’s problem solving. At his suggestion I wrote him about this work and received in turn a long, detailed, and enormously sympathetic, informative letter on the topic. This discussion led to an invitation to do a Post-Doc at Harvard at the recently formed Center for Cognitive Studies. At the time of writing, in 2005, I returned to talk to Jerry, as he is known to everyone, not only about his work and influence but also about my perspective on it. His infectious enthusiasm for ideas that bear on cutting-edge issues in psychology, education, narrative, and most recently, the law, is inspiring. In the course of a long and productive career he has addressed many topics in many fields but, as we shall see, these initiatives are expressions of an underlying vision or passion for how persons, whether infants or adults, go about making their own knowledge and understanding of the world and each other. Viewed from a distance, his career has taken many turns and he has addressed many issues. When I showed him the transcript of our discussion he was dismissive: ‘such transcripts never fit the image I have of my thoughts; in my mind they are written in a more economical form.’ In fact, Bruner is a gifted writer as well as an engaging conversationalist and a mesmerizing lecturer.

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Bruner had always been, as he continues to be, more of a ‘formative’ than a ‘summative’ theorist in that he is more concerned with thinking and inquiry, and taking on ‘ventures of high optimism’ than adding footnotes to established closed, deductive systems. My task in writing this introduction of his work is more to keep alive the invigorating ideas, perspectives, and lines of inquiry that Bruner nourished than to construct a formal system around them. Bruner’s themes are always more exploratory than deductive; formalisms are there, of course, but only in the service of interesting questions. As he wrote: what is needed is the daring and freshness of hypotheses that do not take for granted as true what has merely become habitual . . . to have the courage to recognize what we do not understand and to permit ourselves a new and innocent look. (Bruner 1966a, p. 171) Only if we truly recognize the cultural and developmental significance of education, he argued, shall we be able to work out worthwhile goals and help teachers and children achieve them. Those goals, as we shall see, are to make the school as cognitively challenging and intellectually exciting as are the advanced sciences that the school is charged to represent. Howard Gardner, like me a student of Bruner’s, caught the Bruner e´ lan: For those of us who have had the privilege of knowing Jerry Bruner well, and of counting him as a friend, he has been and remains a role model of the compleat Educator in the flesh; in his own words ‘communicator, model, and identification figure’. As he plunges forward in his ninth decade, one month in the classrooms of New York University Law School, the next in the preschools of Emilia, he remains the most eager student in the class. (Gardner 2001, p. 129) Dear Reader, I am one of you. Whereas Jerome Bruner, first and foremost, is a psychologist who has devoted his life to studying how the mind works and how the mind comes to be the way that it is, I, like many of you, am an educator, first a teacher, and second an educational theorist. So my mission, my undertaking so to speak, is to help you see the theory and practices of education through Bruner’s eyes. My purpose in writing this is to both show you the man, his theoretical contributions, his practical achievements, as well as the intellectual excitement he brought to our understanding the role of education in human development. But that is only my first goal. The second, as the last section of the book shows, is to appraise the validity and relevance of Bruner’s work in the larger context of educational theory and practice as it has developed in the past century. Here we must ask how Bruner’s work relates to the educational

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theories of his predecessors, including that of the great John Dewey, and we must ask how the institutional constraints of public schooling influence the ways in which even the best new ideas, including Bruner’s, are taken up, or as is often the case, neglected altogether. So I try to steer between the roles of an adoring sycophant and that of a grudging critic. I trust you’d not be satisfied with yet another encomium to the great Bruner but would prefer rather to join the Brunerian discourse about education – to think again about the goals and the means of education and the kinds of research and theory that would not only improve schooling but also would advance the troubled tradition we think of as the science of education. As this book went to press it was announced that the Bruner legacy was to be written in stone, so to speak. The new headquarters of the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University were to be named after Jerome S. Bruner in a ceremony on 13 March 2007. DRO

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Chapter 1

The Making of St Jerome

Our pedagogical objective . . . is to accustom teachers to thinking in more general terms about the intellectual life of children. ( J. S. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction, 1966c, p. 100)

If you have even a remote interest in education, no doubt you have at least a name-recognition-level acquaintance with Jerome Bruner. In this chapter I shall try to explain how Jerome Bruner became, if not a household name, at least a rallying point for the educationally informed, the group that, Bruner would graciously insist, includes you, the reader. Let me acknowledge that you do not really need me to tell you what Bruner has written about education. Bruner is an eloquent exponent of his own views on psychology and education and you will be amply rewarded by reading him, and if possible, catching one of his lectures, for yourself. Indeed, have a look at his The Process of Education (Bruner 1960) and you will be hooked, or look through his In Search of Pedagogy (Bruner 2006), his two volumes of collected papers on education and their helpful introductions. But if you stick with me, I will help you to pick up the main points and, in addition, tell you why I think they are important and where they lead. I’ll also suggest ways that I think those ideas could be expanded so as to increase their chances of playing as definitive a role in educational thought in our generation, as John Dewey’s were to play in his. But first let me introduce Bruner to you. From a distance, for example if you are fortunate enough to see him on a platform addressing an audience, often of a thousand, you would be tempted to perceive him as an impossibly remote higher-up insider. He is routinely introduced to audiences as ‘America’s most distinguished living psychologist’1 and hearing him speak you have no reason to doubt it. His deep, sonorous voice, his erudition coupled with intellectual modesty, and most importantly his way of capturing the big ideas of the time are completely captivating to both highly specialized and more general audiences. On hearing him speak one could

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Intellectual Biography

be forgiven for thinking that we are at a turning point in our understanding of the world; he is a saint leading a lost people to the Promised Land. Bruner has earned the lofty regard with which he is held by his colleagues, disciples and generations of students. He has had an astonishingly productive career: 30 books, over 400 articles. In one particularly productive two-year period, 1956–58, when he was 40 years old, he published ‘22 papers and a book’ (Bruner 1980, p. 115). Most of us would do well to read that much in a two-year period. But he became a celebrity in educational circles with the publication in 1960 of The Process of Education, which insiders came to refer to as ‘St Jerome’s gospel’. Not only has he been extraordinarily productive, but also he has been similarly influential. His original perspective on the psychology of perception brought him into a close personal friendship with Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb, who reinforced Bruner’s view by saying: ‘Perception as you psychologists study it can’t, after all, be different from observation in physics, can it?’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 95). Similarly, his work on child development led to a long friendship with the Kennedy family, John, Robert and Sargent Shriver, as well as Lyndon Johnson. He became an advisor to government, leading to such initiatives as Head Start and to the formation of educational research laboratories and institutions, including my own, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. But unlike most higher-ups, Bruner maintained, maintains, and demonstrates a remarkable intimacy with colleagues, students, and friends. In conversation as well as in his writing he treats both listeners and readers as ‘confidants’, that is, as close personal friends with whom he is sharing a particular and personal understanding. One becomes an ‘insider’ along with him. As a result one benefits not only from Bruner’s interesting and original ideas but also from participation in a community of thinkers and scholars. If you take up my suggestion to read some of Bruner’s books you will discover for yourself the directness of his discourse that leaves you with the feeling that he is talking to you about ideas, ideas that you share with him; you become an ersatz intellectual. If you keep it up you become a real one, a member of an intellectual community, in which you are invited to advance and explore your own ideas in the safety of comradeship. So Bruner’s network is not limited to those who know him well but to all those who join him in the intellectual quests he undertakes in his books. No doubt you would like to know something of how one born Jerome Seymour Bruner came to be the Jerome S. Bruner who stands before us, revered and decorated. He was born in New York on 1 October 1915 into a well-off Reform Jewish family. He was born blind, an infirmity corrected only when he was two, and that left him with the thick glasses that, he says, made him feel self-conscious as a child, but which most of us these days

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take as the trademark of his erudition. Of his own schooling he wrote ‘[my] formal “secondary” schooling was appalling, though my scholastic record was satisfactory enough’ (1983a, pp. 17–18). He had a French teacher that he adored and from whom he quickly learned a second language. He was good at mathematics, enjoyed history, read widely, learned to sail, and in his final year attended a ‘tutoring’ prep school that prepared him for the college entrance Regents’ Examinations and he did well enough to get into a premier college, Duke University, from which he graduated in 1937, and later Harvard University from which he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1941. He was fortunate in both of these institutions. At Duke he was introduced to psychology by William McDougall, the social psychologist who had recently arrived from Britain, and by Donald Adams and Karl Zener, fresh from Berlin, who taught Gestalt Psychology. At Harvard he found himself surrounded by the luminaries of the field: Gordon Allport, Edwin Boring, Karl Lashley, Henry A. Murray (of TAT fame), Talcott Parsons, and many others. And although he was captivated by Tolman’s idea that even the lowly rat possessed knowledge of its environment in the form of a ‘cognitive map’, he never became anyone’s disciple but, ever the avid student, captured ideas from many sources and turned them to serve his own hunches. Two critical ideas were dominant in his thinking. One was that the basic cognitive processes involved ‘hypothesis testing’ and the other was that these hypotheses were produced from a mental model. Although we shall discuss these ideas more fully presently, I mention them here because they influenced very much the development of his career, our concern in this chapter. First, as mentioned, they led to his relationship with Robert Oppenheimer, who was then at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies (Einstein’s famed domicile), a relationship that helped to inspire radically new work on the psychology of thinking. Bruner wrote: Robert Oppenheimer and John von Neumann had argued the year before that any efficient system of information seeking could be characterized by a ‘strategy’ that specified . . . not only what information would be taken up, but how that information would be searched for. This was the germ of the idea that started us off on the experiments that went into A Study of Thinking [1956]. (Bruner 1980, p. 112) Now, to most of us even today, and certainly to almost everyone in the midtwentieth century, hypothesis testing was something that scientists did; the rest of us just learned stuff. But that was why Bruner’s idea was revolutionary. He suggested that everyone, even young children, did not just respond to the stimuli presented to them but were already in fact busy trying to make sense of the world and to bring it under control. Not just ‘seeing’ but actually

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‘looking’. In Bruner’s hand the mind came to be seen not as a receptacle for impressions but an active, as we say ‘agentive’, strategic, idea forming, indeed, thinking organ. Apparently Oppenheimer, a physicist, knew this fact from his attempts to build control systems for nuclear weapons; Bruner saw that it was true of the mind generally. You cannot form and test a hypothesis unless you already know something. So, out had to go John Locke’s famous ‘tabula rasa’, the mind as a blank slate that experience wrote on. Rather, the mind had a ‘structure’. A structure is little more than what others had called a cognitive map, or what would later be called ‘mental representations’, but Bruner came to think of the contents of the mind as ‘mental models’. He wrote: I was becoming much more attracted to studies of the ‘models’ we use for sorting out the world perceptually and conceptually. George Miller was probably as responsible as anyone for my choice. He is such enormous fun to talk to that one is lured into studying whatever he is interested in. (Bruner 1980, p. 110) Mental models and hypothesis testing are core to everything that comes up later in our discussion of educational ideas, but I mention them here because Miller, and later Roger Brown, together with Bruner are largely responsible for what is widely known as the ‘Cognitive Revolution’, the turn in psychological research and theory from associationism and behaviorism to the study of mind ‘as a scientific object’ (Erneling and Johnson 2005). Bruner and Miller organized the first ‘Center for Cognitive Studies’ at Harvard where Fellows and Visitors rallied together to remake psychology2 by changing the very idea of mind from that of a passive record of what happened into that of an ongoing, dynamic information gathering and hypothesis testing system. It was the cognitive revolution that was to suggest to Bruner that he may, after all, have something to contribute to education. It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the Center for Cognitive Studies on the development of modern psychology. Not only did it draw a fleet of young, energetic scholars including Don Norman, Janellen Huttenlocher, Molly Potter, Jerry Fodor, Tom Bever, Noam Chomsky, and Pim Levelt, but also such distinguished visitors from around the world as Ernst Gombrich, Marx Wartofsky, Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky, I. A. Richards, Roman Jakobson, Ragnar Rommetveit, and B¨arbel Inhelder. Here ideas about language and mental representation took shape and inspired everyone involved with the enthusiasm that comes from the perception that one is at the cutting edge of science. Moreover, Thomas Kuhn (1962), a frequent visitor to the Center, had just published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which not only made the

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concepts of normal science and paradigm shifts part of everyone’s vocabulary but also, more importantly, instilled in cognitive psychologists and cognitive developmentalists the certainty that they had just lived through such a shift and were indeed the vanguard of the new paradigm! In fact they were; Kuhn had used some of Bruner’s work on perception and thinking as exemplary of how scientific breakthroughs occur. Scientific revolutions involve a shift to new frames of reference rather than simply adding more information to existing one. ‘Cognitive’ became what psychology was all about. At the Center Bruner added three new dimensions to his work on cognition. One was through a relationship with Jean Piaget and his distinguished collaborator Barbel Inhelder. This link was what allowed him to think of mental models as not only growing in complexity with age and experience but also actually undergoing shifts in ‘modes’ of representation, an idea he found importantly applicable to education. Second, he established a relationship with Alexander Luria, a student of the renowned Lev Vygotsky, that led him to write an important introduction to Vygotsky’s book Thought and Language when it was first translated into English. Vygotsky’s insistence on the role of culture in human development became one of Bruner’s foundational ideas. And third, Bruner began a series of research projects on infancy. As I mentioned, it is all very well to talk about models or cognitive maps in the mind but surely, one would have thought, such models are not innate. They must be learned through perception and action. Bruner suspected that even infants may be predisposed to form models, to ‘go beyond the information given’, and he began experiments which largely justified his expectations. Even infants do not passively perceive what is given by the stimulus, but work to bring any stimulation into some complete or graspable model. One of his experiments illustrated this nicely. He showed 3-month-old infants a picture on a screen that was slightly out of focus but which could be brought into focus by sucking on a pacifier. Sure enough, even these infants modified the stimulus to make it comprehensible rather than just storing or reacting to the incomprehensible stimulus. Furthermore, that when 2 or 3-month-old infants were shown a screen with a face on it they looked attentively; when it was out of focus they looked elsewhere. Thus, even infants try to make sense of the world or, as it came to be said, infants are active processors of information not passive recipients. If a stimulus remains uninterpretable, infants just look away. This observation resonates with any educator’s experience; if students don’t ‘get it’, their eyes cloud over or they just look away. In 1972 Bruner gave up his position at Harvard to become the Watts Professor of Psychology at Wolfson College, Oxford University where he continued his infancy work and his work on child language, and in the

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process gave an enormous boost to Developmental Psychology in Britain. In 1980 he returned to America, taking up a post first at the New School and then at New York University where he is now University Professor. A list of accomplishments, however enormous, gives an inadequate picture of a scholar like Bruner. Not only is he widely honored by a grateful public through numerous honorary degrees3 and awards such as the Bolzan Prize, Europe’s major intellectual award, he is venerated by his students who benefit from his encouragement and support as well as his often penetrating insights and advice. But even his peers and colleagues have found Bruner a source of information and inspiration. Fully half of the dozen eminent psychologists of his generation that were invited to contribute to the History of Psychology in Autobiography (Lindzey 1980), including Barbel Inhelder, Lee Cronbach, and Roger Brown, commented on the influence of Bruner on their work and on their discipline. Roger Brown, for example, wrote: Jerome Bruner, then as now, had the gift of providing great intellectual stimulus, but also the rarer gift of giving his colleagues the strong sense that psychological problems of great antiquity were on the verge of solution that afternoon by the group there assembled. (Brown 1989, p. 52)4 The effect of Bruner’s gift for stirring intellectual excitement was equally felt by generations of students. He sponsored the exploration of ideas, especially those that created ‘a lively sense of the possible’ (Bruner 1966b, p. 24) whether in philosophy, in psychology, in linguistics, but equally in students of education. He drew no lines between novices and experts nor did he align himself exclusively with any one discipline. Although, it must be said, he brings enormous prestige to educational studies. He, too, is indeed one of us. This book is concerned with examining just what he brought to our understanding of mind and, more importantly, how education contributes to the mind’s development. As we shall see, he broadened our understanding of the goals of education and he made original suggestions as to the pedagogies we use to achieve them. We shall then consider how those ideas have been received in educational thought and practice. But having come that far, we will take the more demanding task of appraising the relevance of Bruner’s work in the context of a century’s efforts to reform and otherwise improve educational thought and practice, and to construct a science of education. I will conclude by exploring more fully some of Bruner’s speculations as to where we go from here. My analysis is complemented by the transcription of a discussion on the issues raised in this book, which I held with Bruner at his home in New York on 8 February 2005.

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Notes 1. As I myself have done on the occasion of his being awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Toronto in November 2003. It was his 32nd such degree. 2. I was a Fellow at the Center from 1964–66 where my eyes were opened not only by Bruner, Miller, and Brown but also by my remarkable colleagues, two of whom – Howard Gardner and Frank Smith – became lasting friends. 3. Currently numbering 33. 4. I certainly had that experience with Bruner. Although the ‘air’ at the Center for Cognitive Studies was full of talk of ‘models’, ‘coding systems’, ‘concepts’ and ‘strategies’, the penny dropped for me only when I realized we were all talking about ‘representations’ rather than about ‘realities’. I rushed into Bruner’s office to inform him that there were alternative ways of ‘representing’ spatial relations; he shared my delight as if the idea was as new to him as it was to me and that it was worth pursuing through research. Thus I stumbled on to the problem of mentally representing diagonality (Olson 1970).

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Chapter 2

Bruner’s Psychology and the Cognitive Revolution

Learning as hypothesis testing [whether in cats, children or adults] led me to a theory of thinking and then of education. (Bruner 1983a, p. 25) What has come to be known as the Cognitive Revolution was the shift in topic taken as defining psychology. In the early part of the twentieth century, psychology as a discipline, including the department of psychology at Harvard, was split into two primary divisions. There were those, like Edwin Boring, who thought that psychology was the study of brain and behavior, and there were those, like Gordon Allport, who thought that psychology should focus on the study of the characteristics, of whole persons. Both were empirical sciences, the former conducting experiments on the factors involved in perception and learning, the latter studying variability amongst persons in their traits, attitudes, dispositions, character, and the like. Both honored the announced goal of predicting and controlling behavior. The hottest topic in which these contrasting concerns met was on the psychology of learning (Hilgard 1956) in which learning was defined as a change in behavior. Consequently, there was no place for the concentrated study of mind as a scientific object (Erneling and Johnson 2005). The mind was thought to be too ‘spiritual’, too flighty and too difficult to measure to be amenable to scientific study. Furthermore, knowledge (cognition is the Latin word for knowledge) was thought to be a topic for philosophy not for an empirical science like psychology. Of course there was always much to be done even within those traditional folds. One may identify new cognitive traits such as ‘reflectivity’ and use them to predict behavior such as the score on an achievement test. But the systematic study of such things as beliefs, plans and goals seemed impossible within either of these dominant traditions. Bruner despaired of traits and equally despaired of finding relations between stimuli and responses. Persons and their minds deserved some attention.

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Critical Exposition of Bruner’s Work

The Active Mind Bruner’s break with behaviorism was based on the belief that the mind was not just responding to the stimulus environment but rather interpreting that environment, that is seeing or interpreting the environment in a particular way. He called this the ‘new look’ in perception. He was inspired by Karl Lashley’s (1951, p. 112) claim that ‘the input is never into a quiescent or static system, but always into a system which is already excited and organized’. In a word, stimuli do not cause responses but alter existing cognitive states. Furthermore, Edward Tolman had convinced Bruner that behavior was purposive and composed of ‘means-ends readiness’ and that learning resulted in a change in knowledge, a ‘cognitive map’ that linked actions and goals. In Bruner’s hand this became the theory that perception and learning involved ‘hypothesis testing’, that is, exploring the world to confirm or disconfirm one’s expectations. ‘The world, in short, was providing not sensations but fodder for our hypotheses’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 95). In any science, a theory gains its value if it yields new findings and if it leads to new lines of research. And Bruner’s theory led to a flurry of research on the new look designed to show how prior knowledge affected one’s perception of a stimulus. In a simple case, one inspired by the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, if a stimulus 13 is presented in a string of numbers it is seen as one three. If perceived in a string of letters it is perceived as a somewhat carelessly written B. If a coin is thought to be valuable it is seen as larger than one the same size thought not valuable. Expectancies determined perception; to study learning one must turn from the stimulus conditions to the ongoing purposive and intentional behavior of the learner. The radical claim here is that a stimulus is not equivalent to a perception. You do not see things simply because they are there. A compelling example of this point is your experience in watching a magician. If you do not know the magic trick, what the magician is actually doing is invisible to you. But once you grasp the trick of the magician, you can see exactly what he is doing. Knowledge makes aspects of the world visible; ignorance leaves much of it invisible. The educational implications of this principle, important as they are, I leave as a take-home assignment for the reader. The claim that what entered the mind depended not only on the input but also on the existing state of the mind was, at the same time, also being developed in information theory. Information theory not only gave rise to computer modeling of cognition but it also contributed to our ordinary ways of speaking – everyone these days talks of ‘information’ and ‘information processing’. The insight of the information theorists was that you could not look at the stimulus to determine its information value; one had to look at the alternatives available to the listener or viewer . A ‘bit’ of information

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reduces the options available to the perceiver by one-half. As now seems obvious, the information a reader takes from a text is not given by the text but by what the learner already knows and needs to know. Bruner’s hunch about hypothesis testing fit nicely with this conception of mind, and indeed information theory and the theory of computing were essential allies in the cognitive revolution.

Cognitive Strategies Conjectures about hypothesis testing turned into a novel research program when Robert Oppenheimer urged Bruner to think about the strategies one would actually use in seeking information. ‘Perception as you psychologists study it can’t, after all, be different from observation in physics, can it?’ he had asked Bruner (Bruner 1983a, p. 96). Thus began Bruner’s work with Jacqueline Goodnow and George Austin (1950) on the strategies people use in seeking information to solve problems that was published in A Study of Thinking , a book some say sparked if not launched the Cognitive Revolution. The study of thinking involved asking adult subjects to select from an array of cards those that they thought would give them information about a concept that the experimenter had in mind. The critical concept may be that of ‘all cards with an even number of objects on them’ and subjects would be told after they selected a card whether or not it was an exemplar of the concept or category. Different subjects used somewhat different strategies, some working with a single feature at a time, others with sets of features, but the interesting fact was that the strategies they used were systematic and comprehensible to both subject and experimenter. It was, after all, possible to scientifically study the workings of the mind. Bruner with his students and colleagues undertook to find the cognitive strategies underlying activities in several domains (Bruner, Olver, and Greenfield 1966). What strategies were children using when they compared an object to a standard? Younger children tended to compare whole objects one at a time to the standard; older children tended to be more analytic, looking for features that discriminated the set and then testing those features. Similar strategies could be identified for many cognitive tasks including those for playing 20 questions. Younger children tended to go from a clue such as ‘animal’ to a specific hypothesis: ‘Is it a horse?’; older children would delimit the field by asking if it was large or small, person or other animal and the like. The optimal strategy, of course, is to find questions which divide the possible answers in half. The goodness of the questions is just what had been described by information theory; one bit of information divides the possibilities in half. Experts sometimes require only five or six

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questions to arrive at an answer, whereas the children’s strategy of enumerating all animals may take dozens. The range of possible solutions came to be thought of as the ‘problem space’ and the solution a particular position in that space. Thus, thinking and problem solving came to be seen as one and the same.

Cognitive Structures Thinking was not simply the application of ad hoc strategies; the strategies themselves reflected a broader understanding of the domain of possibilities, that is, the body of beliefs about a topic and the options needing exploration. This body of knowledge was thought of as a cognitive map or a cognitive structure. Knowledge was not merely a list of facts but of facts organized into a coherent network of concepts with causal links to other concepts, the whole structure forming a general explanatory theory. It was this structure or ‘coding scheme’ that permitted one to ‘go beyond the information given’ (Bruner 1957). This general knowledge structure is what allows experience of one event to transfer to another event. This is what allows a child who knows that past tense is indicated by adding the inflection ‘ed’ to form ‘walked’ to infer, incorrectly it turns out, to say ‘goed’ when he or she means ‘went’. More elaborate cognitive structures such as those representing the knowledge that ‘Friction causes heat’ allow one to understand why people rub their hands together on a cold day as well as why wheels need grease. Cognitive psychologists contributed to the elaboration of cognitive models, sometimes called ‘schema theory’, to explain both everyday and scientific knowledge that people carry around in their minds and what they learn from the environment. Bruner described these knowledge structures in terms of coding systems. A coding system is a way to represent knowledge or subject matter so that it will ‘guarantee maximum ability to generalize’ (Anglin 1973, p. 225). He contrasted ‘coding’ with traditional assumptions about learning and overlearning. Memory and transfer were achieved not by memorization but by reorganizing information into a more basic, generative coding system. Suppose one was to memorize a string of digits: 58121519222629. A person could rehearse repeatedly and thereby eventually learn the sequence. Or, one could look for patterns: break the series into 5-8-12-15-19-22-26-29. Then one could devise a rule such as begin with 5 and then alternate between adding 3 and adding 4 to generate the series. Then one is thinking, making hypotheses, rather than rote learning. In this way thinking came to occupy the central place previously accorded to learning and memory. The theory of coding systems or structure helps to explain why learning the facts is easy if they are organized into a theory. A theory is a high-level

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coding scheme that makes all of the details not only comprehensible but also memorable. Bruner summarized his view this way: The question of mastery comes down to this. Learning often cannot be translated into a generic form until there has been enough mastery of the specifics of the situation to permit the discovery of lower order regularities which can then be recombined into higher-order, more generic coding systems. Once a system of recoding has been worked out whereby information is condensed into more generic codes, the problem of mastery becomes one of mastering the recoding system rather than mastering the original set of events. (Anglin 1973, p. 232) And again: General education does best to aim at being generic education, training men to be good guessers, stimulating the ability to go beyond the information given to probable reconstructions of other events. (Bruner 1957; reprinted in Anglin 1973, p. 237) Using minds for thinking, Bruner claimed, is exciting and satisfying; mere learning is often drudgery. Again, I leave it as a take-home assignment for the reader to figure out how educators can negotiate between those structures characteristic of adult knowledge and those available to novice learners so as to turn learning into thinking.

Culture and Cognition What is significant about the growth of mind in the child is to what degree it depends not upon capacity but upon the unlocking of capacity by techniques that come from exposure to the specialized environment of a culture. (Bruner 1964, p. 14) It was a small step, but one of importance, to infer that if the mind is busily constructing models or representations of the world, those representations are not newly invented by every learner independently, but are in some sense taken over from the larger culture. That is, if one’s mental model incorporates Newton’s laws of motion, it is clear that in some way that mental model or structure came from the culture, and that as cultures change, minds change too. Bruner drew his interest in culture from his close friend anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn who had recently published Mirror for Man (1949), which showed how a knowledge of other civilizations allows us to see ourselves. In another early and influential paper The Nature and Uses of Immaturity (1972) Bruner argued that one of the benefits of prolonged

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infancy and childhood was that it allows for the learning of distinctive cultural ways of thinking and acting. This was what allowed cultures to evolve. Because of an extended childhood, children could learn what their elders had already mastered so that when they themselves became adults they could add to this stock of cultural knowledge. Bruner had an aphorism for this saying that whereas biological learning was Darwinian – we inherit the traits and instincts of our parents via our genes – social learning was Lamarckian – we ‘inherit’ the knowledge and perceptions of our parents through our training and education. It was this insight that made Bruner’s writings of such interest to educators in that it made education central to human development. Human minds were what they were, not because of their biology but because of the accumulated culture into which infants were born and that was passed on through education. In this Bruner took enormous encouragement from the writings of Lev Vygotsky, the Russian developmental psychologist who had died in the 1930s after a short but brilliant career. Vygotsky had both argued and provided considerable evidence of the transformational value of cultural learning on development. For example, he had argued (shown is too strong a word) that language learning was a social process by which the child came to share a way of viewing himself and others in common with a social community. Similarly, learning to read and write allowed a learner to think in decisively new ways. Bruner wrote the preface to the first English translation of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language (1962), at the same time becoming friends with Vygotsky’s colleague Alexander Luria with whom he shared a deep interest in the role of language and literacy in culture and cognition. Luria (1976) had shown how patterns of reasoning of adults depended upon whether or not they had been exposed to the literacy of the school. In perhaps the most discussed example, he found that unschooled peasants frequently failed to draw the expected logically necessary inference from the premises given as follows: All the bears in Novaya Zemlya are white. Ivan went to Novaya Zemlya and saw a bear there. What colour was the bear? The expected answer, of course, is ‘white’. But his subjects tended to reply, much to our amusement: I’ve never been to Novaya Zemlya; you’ll have to ask Ivan. Luria interpreted this as a failure of logical reasoning that could be traced to the forms of traditional discourse. Schooling and exposure to a culture of literacy would be necessary to teach people to reason more formally and logically. This interpretation has been contested by Scribner and Cole

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(1981) who argued that the logical abilities of all humans are intact and that such mistakes are rather as result of a failure to grasp the requirements of the task. For my part, I argued that the expression was taken as ‘hearsay’ rather than as a logical premise from which a conclusion could be deduced. The very existence of a logical premise from which necessary inferences could be drawn, I suggested, was associated with literacy (Olson 1994). Whatever the correct interpretation there is no doubt that schooled children come to take such statements as a standard form of schooled discourse and become quite skilled at reasoning with them. The more general claim advanced by Vygotsky and Luria, and elaborated by Bruner, is that mental resources are less invented by an independent mind than they are cultural forms that are progressively taken over by a learner to become modes of thought. Education in general and in schooling in particular was therefore essential to cognitive growth. Bruner and his student Patricia Greenfield (Greenfield 1966; Greenfield and Bruner 1966) extended this line of research to show that the children who had even a few years of schooling tended to be far more adept at using formal categories for thinking and giving reasons for their answers. They observed the reluctance of children in traditional societies to ask questions or to offer answers, make guesses or provide reasons. They concluded that schooling was peculiar in that, unlike the learning that occurred in the home, learning in the school was out of the context of action and it tended to rely on means that were primarily symbolic rather than experiential. Reading and writing were not only the goal of the school but also the primary means for learning and thinking about everything else. Again, the reader is invited to speculate on how cultural differences may affect the ways that learners take up or understand the lessons prescribed by the school. One may further speculate on the implications for curriculum of the fact that the mind is the product of mastering the resources of the culture rather than as a direct expression of some innate ability. For these are among the questions that interested Bruner.

Stages of Cognitive Development We can conceive of growth as the emergence of new technologies for the unlocking and amplification of human intellectual powers. Growth of the intellect is not smoothly monotonic. Rather, it moves forward in spurts as innovations are adopted. (Bruner 1964, p. 13) If there are cultural ways of interpreting the world, there are also developmental ones. Bruner first outlined them in The Course of Cognitive Growth

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(1964) and set them out in more elaborate form, accompanied by a wealth of evidence collected by himself and his students in Studies in Cognitive Growth (1966d).1 Inspired by the pioneering research program of Jean Piaget, and indeed his personal friendship with Piaget, as well as his close working relation with Piaget’s long-time associate Barbel Inhelder, Bruner proposed that the cognitive processes did not develop in a uniform manner but underwent a series of transformations. These transformations were in the ‘modes of representation’ that children acquired and used for keeping track and making sense of their experience. Hypothesis testing that Bruner had earlier taken as a universal was now seen to take on different forms at different ages. Infants explored all right, but they did so by trying and noting the consequences by a kind of trial and error. Piaget had described this as ‘sensory motor intelligence’, the ability to ‘make interesting things happen’, and Bruner referred to this kind of representation as ‘enactive’. It was intended to capture the fact that even infants learned how to do things to get results and they could interpret the actions of adults using the same ability. Consequently, enactive was seen as a mode of representation that permitted expectancies of what is likely to happen in the environment and to anticipate the likely consequences of their own actions. Anticipations are the seeds from which hypotheses will later be born. At a later, pre-school stage children’s representations consisted of models of the relations amongst things – what goes with what – the patterns in the world. Piaget called these ‘pre-operational concepts’ in that they did not allow logical operational notions like ‘necessity’. Pre-operational thought is a mode of thought that is expert at capturing the structure of appearances and patterns, at forming concepts and attuning one’s expectancies to the patterns in the world. Piaget’s special contribution was to invent many demonstrations of how this mode of representation frequently leads children awry, into error. Pre-eminent among them are those involving various conservations – of quantity, mass, and number. In the first of these, preschool children are shown a beaker half-filled with water and then observe as the water is poured into a narrower but taller glass. Then the children are asked: ‘Is there the same amount of water as before, or is there now more or less water?’ Until they are about six years old they tend to reply there is more ‘because it is higher’. Later, when they become ‘conservers’ they say: ‘It’s the same ’cause you just poured it.’ Bruner described these pre-operational children as being bound by ‘iconic’ representations in that the patterns captured were based on appearances and so were picture-like. Perhaps the most appropriate label for such representational systems is ‘mimetic’ (Donald 1991) in that such representations permit imitation and they are participatory or culturally shared and yet they are neither linguistic nor logical. They are expressed through

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gesture and ritual and social play. Indeed, such ‘mimetic’ children frequently use their hands to gesture the height of the column of water when they say that the tall, narrow beaker has more. I can illustrate the uses and limits of this mode of representation with some observations I recently made on my three-year-old grandson. I read a picture-book story about a picnic in which the picnickers set out their picnic lunch on the back of a large sleeping turtle, thinking it to be a boulder. When the picnickers turned their backs the turtle walked away with the picnic lunch. When they look again and find the picnic gone they are greatly surprised. I have narrated this story to this child several times and when we come to the picture of the turtle that the picnickers take to be a boulder, he points to the picture and says ‘It’s a rock’ but then he adds ‘It goes into a turtle’. Note that adults would say, ‘They think it is a boulder’ or ‘They don’t know it’s a turtle’ or ‘It looks like a boulder but really it is a turtle’. For the three-year-old there is no awareness that boulders cannot turn into turtles; to him it just changes. This is why one may call such representations ‘mimetic’; they lack the logic of necessity, a logic that says it has to be either a boulder or a turtle; of necessity it cannot be both nor can it change from one to the other. One has to be at least four, it seems, to appreciate magic as magic. Bruner (1971) suggested that the shift from iconic to more formal modes of representation might be cultural rather than strictly developmental. He suggested that modern literate societies might train children to abandon iconic or mimetic modes of representation and adopt more formal modes. This hypothesis took encouragement from the work of early anthropologists such as Levy-Bruhl (1923) who found abundant evidence of ‘magical’ thinking in so-called ‘primitive’ or traditional societies. Although chary of the notion of primitive thought, Bruner reported a similar kind of magical thinking in Senegalese children who had never been to school, but did not find it in those of the same age who had. In the typical conservation of quantity experiment mentioned above, in which a certain quantity of water is poured from a short, wide beaker into a thinner, taller one, most young children are misled by the appearance of the display – taller means more. But some of these unschooled children would say, ‘It’s not the same’ because ‘you poured it’. Pouring was seen as a magical change in the water. Bruner adds, ‘the school suppresses this mode of thinking with astonishing absoluteness’ (1971, p. 29). Only in the early school years do children begin to represent the world and each other in what Piaget called ‘concrete operational thought’ by means of what Bruner called ‘symbolic representations’. Here, for the first time, children succeed on such tasks as those mentioned above. They recognize the conservation of quantity and they realize that operations may be

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reversible, that is, that addition and subtraction may cancel each other and that the quantity necessarily remains the same ‘because you didn’t add or take away anything’. And they come to accept that a stone cannot ‘go into’ a turtle. Bruner agreed that this transformation was extremely important but, unlike Piaget, he suggested that this development might be cultural, that is, acquired through the training embodied in learning language. He wrote: ‘Learning to encode the world linguistically and then to operate on language rather than on the world – that was the ultimate stage of cognitive development’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 161). At one point he even speculated that this form of competence might be tied to learning a written language (1971, p. 47).2 Piaget described a fourth stage that he called ‘formal operations’ involving the uses of formal symbols, whether in algebra and geometry or in the formal scientific and philosophical theories one encounters primarily in the high-school years. Such thinking involves clear distinctions between theory and evidence and complex concepts of knowledge such as assumption, inference, and concepts of probability. The point about developmental stages is that all of them allow for representations of persons and events but they do so in different ways. Properties that seem irrelevant at one point come to be seen as essential at another. Modes of representation allow us to shift between alternative ways of representing the same thing. When asked to think of a cube, some people will think iconically, that is, they will think concretely of a dice or a sugar cube; others will think more formally or symbolically, that is, of a formally defined geometric structure with 90 degree angles and sides of equal length. As we shall see, it was this insight into alternative modes of representation that allowed Bruner to claim, famously, that ‘any subject can be taught to any child at any stage of development in some intellectually honest form’ (Bruner 1960, p. 33).

Cultural Evolution and Cultural Development If we put together Bruner’s views of the importance of culture in human development with his belief in distinctive stages of development, we can see why he also held the view that whole cultures may undergo evolutionary changes in ways of thinking. Although such somewhat recent cultural developments as the invention of writing and mathematics are plausible candidate explanations for changes in mentality, the theory has also been applied to the evolution of the human species. Merlin Donald (1991) described the stages in the evolution of the human species Homo sapiens from ape to man in two major stages. In the first of these, some 200,000 years ago, humans

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became capable of what he called ‘mimetic intelligence’ which enabled them to imitate the actions of others, to practice and perfect actions on their own, to represent their experience by means of ritual and dance and even to practice some forms of magic. But only about 50,000 years ago did Homo sapiens develop the ability to represent the world symbolically in drawings and perhaps grammatical speech. Infant development shows an analogous pattern; infants learn to imitate the actions of others much earlier than they learn to talk or to understand other forms of symbolic representation. While both are distinctively human forms of cognition, the mimetic generally precedes the symbolic. So we have three primary modes of representation – enactive, mimetic, and symbolic – acquired in a fixed order but all three remaining functional throughout one’s life. There was a second, more practical reason for Bruner’s concern with culture and cognition and that was that cultural differences were, in the early 1960s, being called upon as a preferred explanation of educational failure. The concept of ‘cultural deprivation’ seemed to offer an explanation as to why many minority children, particularly poor black and Hispanic children, fell behind in school. Middle-class white children were known to have ample experience not only with literacy but also with the rituals of asking and answering questions, giving reasons and following explicit rules, activities that, it was believed, were less frequent in the homes of poor, often minority children. The concept of school culture at odds with minority culture not only helped to explain school failure but also suggested a pragmatic model of reform, namely, the establishment of compensatory pre-school programs, programs that came to be known as Head Start. Head Start was a logical implication of the view that cognition was largely the product of internalizing the language and technologies of the culture, a view that Bruner outlined in a paper entitled ‘The Course of Cognitive Growth’ (1964). Different cultures produce different types of minds. Not only is education a culture’s way of reproducing itself, education is a cultural tool for improving the society. Poverty in America had become a pressing political issue during the Johnson administration, leading to the ‘War on Poverty’, a key property of which was a renewed emphasis on education as the route out of poverty. In fact, social economic factors are the single largest contributing factor to school achievement (Coleman 1966). Moved by these inequalities Bruner, along with Urie Bronfenbrenner and Nicholas Hobbs, urged the US Federal government to initiate the early intervention program known as Head Start as part of the War on Poverty of the Johnson administration in the 1960s. While he took no official part in organizing that program, he nonetheless provided a conceptual basis for the initiative. In addition, he became a leading advocate for sound pre-school programs, for designing programs that would come closer to meeting the needs of students

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most at risk of failure, and he called for research that would explain why students become disenfranchised from school. As we shall see, he retains his unreserved enthusiasm for early childhood education (I interviewed Bruner on this point and our discussion is reported in Appendix H).

Intentionality, Intersubjectivity, and Language Development [Infants have a] preternatural sensitivity to the way the world is represented in the minds of others. (Bruner 1996, p. 165) For some time, Bruner had noted ‘the absence in psychology. . . of certain forms of psychological analyses . . . of the role of intention and perception of intention in others’ (Bruner 1980, p. 141). The attempt to take not just mental models of knowledge but also intention seriously marked another transformation in Bruner’s thinking. Intention, a concept that had been used by Scholastic philosophers such as St Thomas Aquinas and Abelard to argue that in the eyes of God intention mattered more than the overt act, had been set aside as too mentalistic and too spiritual for a modern science. Behaviorism was the result. But if thinking could be brought under scientific study why not intention? Intention, and the recognition of intention in others, was inescapable in the study of infants. Not only did infants seek information – recall that they would look with rapt attention at a screen showing a picture of a face but would look away if the picture went out of focus – when a novel picture appeared they would often glance back at the caretaking adult as if to say, ‘Did you see that?’ These close-knit interactions Bruner took as demonstrating a shared understanding or intersubjectivity. Even the youngest children recognized the agency of action, discriminating doings from happenings. Later, by about 12 months, they recognize the intention in an action, that is the goal being sought and the means for achieving it. Such recognition is the key to imitation. Children by 12 months imitate not just a motion but imitate an action as a means to a goal. That is, they recognize the purpose or intention of the action (Tomasello 1999). Although Bruner had long maintained that behavior was purposive and that the mind was active, only in the 1970s did he begin to use the concept of intention to explain behavior. Intention has to do with ‘the selectivity imposed by action and purpose, the biasing effect these have on our knowing and on the uses of knowledge’ (1971, p. xii). The concept of intention played an explicit role in Bruner’s attempt to describe how children learned to talk, that is, how they acquired a language. It also marked a turning aside somewhat from the views of Piaget.

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Although Bruner had enormous admiration for the elegant structural theory of Piaget, he believed it paid insufficient attention to the role of social interaction, and culture more generally, in human development. Whereas for Piaget, children built their own cognitive structures using whatever aliment, food, was at hand, for Bruner what the child constructed depended on the close social interactions that the infant engaged in with adults and with the particular activities and models provided by the culture. In this, Bruner was more in sympathy with the writings of Vygotsky than with those of Piaget. It should be acknowledged that Piaget insisted on the importance of interaction with peers as a means for refining one’s own perceptions and perspectives, but he was unsympathetic to the idea that culture can substantially alter the nature of mental growth. For Piaget, the mind was a biological organ with its own internal mechanisms for development. For Bruner, as for Vygotsky, mind was intimately tied to culture. In his later writings Bruner (1996) argued that such cultural models were co-constructed with adults through a process he called intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is a technical term that refers to the universal form of nonverbal communication expressed through the ‘knowing looks and glances’ that signal solidarity and agreement as if to say, ‘Did you see what I saw?’ This intersubjectivity occurs not only between adults but it is also readily observed by interacting with any child and noticing that the child tends to check your eyes to see if you are looking at them and later at what they are looking at. This mutuality or intersubjectivity is what allows joint attention and later joint intention as when children cooperate with others in playing games or making things. Bruner argued that the child did not simply learn from individual experience but from sharing a social world with others. The concepts children acquired were therefore not unique to individuals but a common store that came to be expressed in the shared language. Bruner elaborated this conception of development through a research program on infancy with Colwyn Trevarthan and Barry Brazelton and others first at Harvard, and later at Oxford with Judy Dunn, Kathy Sylva and others. Bruner thought of this work in terms of infants’ predisposition to culture; cultural knowledge became part of one’s representations of the world through such interactions and eventually through the social enterprise of education. Bruner noted the uncanny intersubjectivity of infants, the way they coordinate their attention with that of adult caretakers – ‘their preternatural sensitivity to the way the world is represented in the minds of others’ (1996, p. 165). What makes both human culture and cultural evolution possible, he wrote, is the ‘close-textured pattern of reciprocity about the intentional states of one’s partners’ (1996, p. 182). Joint-attention, the tendency of infants to look in the same direction that an adult is looking and their interest in examining an object held up for inspection by an adult, and

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their later enjoyment of simple peek-a-boo games, all point to the fact that when children are constructing mental representations of the world they are building representations that are shared with adults. Indeed, shared rituals and routines are primary gateways to culture. It is this joint or shared attention and sensitivity to the meanings and intentions of others that makes the acquisition of language possible, Bruner argued. Although Bruner was an enthusiastic supporter of Chomsky’s notion of a generative grammar, a kind of linguistic competence unique to human beings, Bruner thought Chomsky attributed too much of language learning to an innate grammar. On the basis of his observations of children he wrote: What was very soon plain was that mother and child were negotiating their respective intentions through communication: using whatever conventional means could be brought to bear and inventing conventions where none had yet been established. The last thing our children were doing, it seemed to me, was concentrating on literal utterances, extracting deep rules of universal grammar from them. And the last thing our mothers seemed concerned about was giving ‘grammar lessons’. (Bruner 1983a, p. 167; 1983b) The pragmatics of language, its use for communication and for elaborating subjectivity, was seen as primary; acquiring the structure of language was the byproduct of shared meanings.

The Narrative Turn It is not that we lack competence in creating our narrative accounts of reality – far from it. We are if anything, too expert. Our problem, rather, is achieving consciousness of what we so easily do automatically, the ancient problem of prise de conscience. (Bruner 1996, p. 147) In his recent writings, Bruner has become a leading advocate of the notion that narrative is the primary mode of representation of intentional action across all stages of development. He drew a distinction between the paradigmatic mode, a type of explanation favored in the natural sciences, and the narrative mode, more common in the social sciences and humanities (Bruner 1986, Chapter 2; 1990, Chapter 4). The paradigmatic mode includes those impersonal scientific laws that spell out entities and causal relations among them – the pressure and volume of a gas are inversely related; the intensity of light is the inverse square of the distance from its source and so on. The narrative mode is more common and more basic and describes events from the more human perspective of actions and

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consequences (Bruner 1996, Chapter 7). The appeal of the narrative mode is that it fits superbly with the concepts of agency and intentionality. An agent is someone who does something for a reason or to achieve some goal. Troubles may upset the scheme and the agent invents alternative means to reach the goal, which, when reached provides resolution leading to success or failure. Psychology had long admitted goal-directed behavior; what narrative adds is a role for the agent as part of the representational scheme. Furthermore, as Bruner points out, narrative is perspectival, constructed from a point of view, whereas the sciences attempt to construct what Thomas Nagel called ‘the view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). Narrative is particularly appropriate to first-person accounts and to accounts in which the intentional states of the actors play a role. Narrative is the handmaiden of what is called ‘the theory of mind’ – the theory that attributes beliefs, desires, and intentions to persons. When those persons are seen as agents with goals and plans, when they are capable of success and failure, and when the vagaries of the world interrupt their ‘best laid schemes’, we have a narrative. Bruner’s claim is that such narrative representations are the basic format for representing human experience. Narrative modes of representation and explanation are not only for telling stories but also they are the representation schemes we live by; what Bruner sometimes refers to as the embodiment of culture. The beliefs, desires and intentions of actors are the ‘stuff’ of narrative: people, including ourselves, do things because they believe x, want y, and try to z. Actions fail because of obstacles to those intended actions; overcoming those blocks allows the achievement of desired goals. So narratives are not just entertaining stories, they are structures in terms of which people interpret the world and explain their actions to themselves and to each other. This ‘narrative turn’ in psychology, of which Bruner is again a major figure, has enriched educators’ understanding of student knowledge and understanding. The comprehensible is not merely the assimilation to structure but the rendering of experience in terms of the formal properties of a narrative, properties that indicate what happened and why. Bruner adds: Our predisposition to structure interpersonal experience in terms of the arguments of action makes narrative recounting inevitable, and makes our susceptibility to narrative explication incorrigible. All one needs to generate narrative is some ‘canonical’ expectancy about how action plays out in the world and some setback or violation of that expectancy. (2001, p. 211) When such events are accompanied by the emotions of satisfaction, frustration, disappointment, surprise, and joy we have a narrative.

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Narrative construals of reality were not to be taken at face value. For them to be valuable as means of thinking about the world, for offering hypotheses, it is necessary to bring those stories into consciousness and make judgement about the stories themselves. Bruner suggests three strategies for evaluating the stories told: contrast, confrontation, and metacognition. Contrast allows one to see that there are alternative versions each with some advantage and some disadvantage. Confrontation results in judgement for or against, as in a court of law, which story will be regarded by the jury as possessing the greatest verisimilitude. Metacognition, as Bruner says ‘converts ontological arguments about the nature of reality into epistemological ones about how we know’ (1996, p. 148) and later into why we believe or think something. Bruner allows that narratives cannot produce truth; that remains the prerogative of the sciences, the paradigmatic mode of knowing. But that does not lessen the value of narrative nor its importance for learning and thinking. Scientific methods specify a reality but, as Bruner says, ‘we live our lives in a world constructed according to the rules and devices of narrative’ (1996, p. 149; 2002). Consequently, he argues, education should provide rich contexts for creating an understanding of the narrative form and uses. The stories we tell may provide the hypotheses for our scientific theories; in this way we think with the help of our stories. They are the things we use to invent hypotheses with so they deserve a place in the school program. Our take-home exercise: What are the narrative forms learners use in understanding not only their lessons but also their lives in a classroom? Narratives are also, as Bruner would say, the stuff of literature. Literature involves more than the bare bones of story, the fabula, the events to be set out in the narrative, but also the plot, the sjuzet, the way and the order of telling them so as to control the ways in which the actions and events in the story come into the consciousness of the reader. Bruner calls these the two landscapes of narrative, the landscape of action and the landscape of consciousness. Because the two may come apart in narrative, narrative becomes a primary instrument for the examination of consciousness. Consequently, the study of literature has come to be seen as an important educational resource. Harvey Siegel (1989, p. 116) asks: ‘How can fiction teach? What are the pedagogical possibilities of fiction?’ and argues that literature creates a personal involvement not possible in the paradigmatic mode. There is a rapidly growing literature on narrative in many disciplines, including important works by Nussbaum (1990), MacIntyre (1984), McEwan and Egan (1995) and Holtz (2003) that examine the ways that texts affect readers and the diverse ways that readers make meaning of the texts they read. Alasdair MacIntyre (1984, p. 216) related fictional narrative to mental functions this way:

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Bruner’s Psychology and the Cognitive Revolution

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[M]an is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters . . . and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories . . . that children learn or mislearn . . . what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born. Thus, the primacy of the narrative mode. Even those working in the paradigmatic mode, including not only psychologists but economists as well, have to rely on the narrative mode when their causal calculations fail to work out. Bruner (1986, p. 43) adds: ‘Narratives may be the last resort of economic theorists. But they are probably the life stuff of those whose behavior they study.’

From the Active Mind to Storied Mind I can attempt to summarize Bruner’s theory of cognition in terms of a set of propositions, but in doing so I risk losing the overriding flavor of the work. That flavor can be expressed by saying that Bruner was less interested in a set of provable propositions than in finding ways to raise interesting questions about the mind, its growth and its nourishment by the culture. Nonetheless here they are: 1. The mind as an active process which seeks information and tests hypotheses, rather than a passive recipient of information; the cognitions formed on the basis of an input depend upon the state that the mind is already in. 2. The product of experience is a set of mental structures that give meaning to the input and that ‘permit one to go beyond the information given’ (Bruner 1957). 3. These mental structures undergo a series of reformulations into different formats or modes in the course of development – from enactive, to mimetic to symbolic. 4. Mental structures are organized bodies of implicit knowledge. They are constructed both by the internal, endogenous reorganizations of prior

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5.

6.

7.

8.

Critical Exposition of Bruner’s Work experience and by the acquisition of explicit cultural meanings, rules, norms, and tools, the primary one of which is language. As much of the knowledge stored in the mind is cultural knowledge, instruction in the forms of this cultural knowledge plays an important role in cognitive development. Mental structures do not represent knowledge purely objectively but rather are constructed in the service of intentional states, the beliefs, desires, and goals of agents in interaction with others. These intentional states and the actions they serve are represented in the mind primarily in terms of narratives of agents, actions, problems, and outcomes, or more simply in terms of who does what to whom for what reason with what outcome. These narratives provide the hypotheses we offer for comparison and judgement.

Although Bruner’s early focus was on the cognitive processes of individuals, his later theories were much more socially and culturally informed, and he made notions of agency, intentionality, subjectivity, and especially intersubjectivity part of his theory of mind. So much so that now Bruner is more often thought of as a Cultural Psychologist than simply a Cognitive Psychologist. (I asked Bruner about these issues and an edited version of this discussion may be found in Appendix A.) Once we understand Bruner’s theory of cognition it will be a relatively simple matter to see how these ideas play out in his contributions to educational practice and educational theory, our next concern.

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Chapter 3

Bruner’s ‘Fresh Look’ at Education

It never crossed my mind that ‘Education’ in any formal sense was the chief or the most powerful means for passing on or recreating the culture. (Bruner 1983a, p. 178) Now you know that Bruner is first and foremost a psychologist. As one of the leaders of the Cognitive Revolution he helped to redefine psychology as the science of mind and then went on to show that mind is the subjective side of culture. Surely that is a sufficient ground for entering the field of educational studies. But as he acknowledged, ‘it never crossed my mind that “Education” was the chief or the most powerful means for passing on or recreating the culture’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 178). Bruner attributes his ‘consciousness-raising’ to Jerrold Zacharias, an eminent physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zach, as he was known, was a man with the enormous self-assurance, bequeathed by his status as a world-renowned physicist and co-developer of the atom bomb. Zach had dedicated himself to developing a new physics curriculum for schools. He was a man of strong opinions but of nothing was he more sure than that ‘schools were a scandal and should be reformed’ (Bruner 1980, p. 118). Actually that sentiment was widely shared in America after 1957 when, to the surprise of the world and especially to the United States, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first manned space satellite. The urgent call for reform was reiterated in the 1980s when it was claimed that American educators were presiding over failing schools that put ‘the nation at risk’ (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and is currently being revived under the threat of global competition. Zacharias wanted to talk to Bruner about thinking in children and how thinking could be encouraged in the teaching of science. Bruner conceded that ‘somebody ought to have a fresh look at the field of education’ (Bruner 1980, p. 18). Little did he know at the time that that somebody would be him! The ferment in education was sufficient to lead the US National Academy of Sciences to sponsor a workshop to which some 24 disciplinary experts,

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curriculum designers, educational researchers and developmental psychologists including Lee Cronbach, John Carroll, Barbel Inhelder, George Miller, and many others were invited. Somebody had to chair the workshop and take on the task of writing up the proceedings. That somebody was Bruner; it provided just the opportunity needed for him to sort out his ‘fresh look’. The product was the justly celebrated The Process of Education (1960) and it became a centerpiece in the debate on educational reform in America and around the world as it was translated into more than 20 languages. What is so special about The Process of Education? First, one must not discount the renewed enthusiasm it brought to educators and educational researchers. Whether the ‘low status’ of educational discourse was earned or ascribed, it has long been the case that the public response to education was often critical while the response of the academic community was often condescending. Even the great John Dewey despaired at his contemporaries’ failure to recognize ‘education as the supreme human interest in which, moreover, other problems, cosmological, moral, logical, come to a head’ (Dewey 1984, p. 156). The Process of Education injected a new life into education, not only to those in the field but also to the intellectual world generally. ‘What is needed’, he wrote, ‘is the daring and freshness of hypotheses that do not take for granted as true what has merely become habitual’ (Bruner 1966a, p. 171). Courtney Cazden, Howard Gardner, and I were only three of many who, on reading the Process became convinced that education was serious, interesting and, furthermore, a fertile field for original research. Educational theory at the time seemed to many to have atrophied into a research program of diminishing returns and a rather sterile policy debate between the Progressives, inspired by Dewey, who were committed to the slogan that ‘we teach children not subjects’, and the Traditionalists, committed to ‘we teach subjects to children’. Whereas for the Progressives, education was measured against a sliding scale of personal growth, the Traditionalists insisted on assessing knowledge against fixed standards. Whether warranted or not, there was a consensus in the 1950s, a consensus bordering on outrage, that the school was providing ‘too little for the mind’ (Neatby 1954). Bruner (1960, p. 1) stated it more modestly: ‘What may be emerging as a mark of our own generation is a widespread renewal of concern for the quality and intellectual aims of education.’ The publication in 1960 of The Process of Education, a slight book of less than 100 pages, made Bruner the most celebrated educational theorist in America. Paul Goodman pronounced the book a ‘classic, comparable in its philosophical centrality and humane concreteness’ to John Dewey’s essays on education. It prompted debate and hope for reform around the world. It brought phone calls from John F. Kennedy, then running for President, a call from the White House – would Jerry be tempted to ‘join the

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rough-and-tumble’ down here – from the President’s Science Advisory Committee, and from numerous educational associations. The book had taken only a couple of months to write. It was originally scheduled as a chairman’s report and, while it did deeply respect the ideas threshed out over the preceding two weeks of discussion, the book has the clear imprint of a single coherent perspective. The book was an assault on traditional notions of coverage and achievement, and it offered a bold proposal for again making learners a critical part of their own education. Readers everywhere came away with the idea that education was important to the growth and preservation of culture and that advances in the sciences, including psychology, showed that a high level of education was possible. I urge you to read it. If read along with John Dewey’s (1976) The Child and the Curriculum you will be proud to be or inspired to become an educator. In fact, Bruner is more modest about the extent to which it revolutionized education, adding education is an enterprise whose ways and whose knowledge base are still much too unorganized to revolutionize. As far as there was anything revolutionary, it grew out of the ‘cognitive revolution’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 183). The book reflected the knowledge explosion that occurred in science and technology in the 1950s, which inspired a new and needed confidence that something could be done to improve the ‘experience’ of schooling as well as its outcomes. Its focus was epistemological, that is, on knowledge and the growth of knowledge, and its perspective is indicated by the prominence of the word ‘process’ in the title. And its goal ‘was to examine the fundamental processes involved in imparting to young students a sense of the substance and method of science’ (Bruner 1960, p. vii). In the book, Bruner addressed three of the perceived limitations of educational thought: its discontinuity from the frontiers of knowledge, its disinterest in the intellectual structure of classroom activities, and its conception of knowledge as content at the expense of process. The discontinuity from the frontiers of knowledge in the basic sciences, he suggested, was what allowed education to be seen as low-esteem applied art, a kind of useful but nonintellectual activity that was often referred to disparagingly as ‘women’s work.’ If education was be taken seriously and earn its place in the academy and at the top of the agenda of any progressive modern state, teachers along with their students must be allowed to be participants in the growth of the advanced sciences rather than retailers of preformed knowledge. Teachers must be working at the frontiers of knowledge and they must share the intellectual excitement of their new discoveries and understandings with their students and with each other. Secondly, the intellectual structures that Bruner advocated for the classroom were drawn from the Cognitive Revolution. Recall that, for Bruner, perception was not caused by a stimulus nor was knowledge caused by a

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‘lesson’; perception and knowledge were the result of the activities of the learner. The perceivers and learners were seen as advancing and testing hypotheses, not just recording and storing up facts. Children brought their own interpretations and hypotheses and that determined what the lesson was for them, and only through expressing their understanding and misunderstandings and discussing them with others could they come to some deeper understanding. And third, the traditional conception of knowledge, harking back to ancient times, was that knowledge was the authorized truths, largely stored in books, which were to be conveyed from one generation to the next. That is not how it was viewed after the Cognitive Revolution. Knowledge was the product of ongoing inquiry. It is the very possibility of asking new questions and searching for possible answers that gives the sciences their excitement as well as originality. Sciences are seen as open-ended domains of inquiry and it was this inquiry that was to be shared with learners. The goal is nothing less than to replace the drudgery of learning with the excitement of discovery. As he wrote: The schoolboy learning physics is a physicist, and it is easier for him to learn physics behaving like a physicist than doing something else. The ‘something else’ usually involves the task of mastering what came to be called at Woods Hole [the conference site] a ‘middle language’ – classroom discussions and textbooks that talk about the conclusions in a field of intellectual inquiry rather than centering upon the inquiry itself. (Bruner 1960, p. 14) The Process of Education elaborated four main themes: the structure of knowledge, the development of more advanced modes of representation, the emphasis on discovery as a method of pedagogy, and the problem of motivation. These themes reflect the more general concern with raising the intellectual goals of the school. We may examine them in turn.

The Structure of Knowledge The principal task of the intellect is in the construction of explanatory models for the ordering of experience. (Bruner 1971, p. 18) The structure of discipline is composed of the basic principles and theories and methods of a discipline such as history, biology, physics, or mathematics. These are the ‘generative’ principles that permit inference and consequently, transfer of learning. The structure of a discipline is usually

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expressed as a theory – Newton’s theory that explains both the motion of falling apples as well as the motion of planets around the sun; the atomic theory that explains how complex molecules may be made up out of an alphabet of elementary atoms. ‘Functions’ in mathematics, causes in history, theorems in geometry, tropisms in biology, all exhibit structure. They are ideas to think with and that allow us to go beyond the information given. In addition, they are powerful aids to memory, thereby providing an alternative to simple memorization. Bruner illustrated the concept of structure with a social studies experiment. Sixth grade children were asked to locate the major cities of the American North Central region on a map that had noted on it the physical features and natural resources such as agricultural lands, mineral resources, bodies of water and the like, but not the actual location of cities. Class discussion produced several plausible theories as to where cities would grow. The ‘water transportation theory’ put Chicago at the junction of three of the great lakes; the ‘mineral resource theory’ put it near the Minnesota iron deposits; the ‘food supply theory’ put it near the rich agricultural lands of Iowa, and so on. Combining the theories led to plausible, and evaluable, theories of where major cities actually grew. The question generated considerable excitement and confirming their theories against an actual map provided a major source of satisfaction.3 Thus the processes of education include hypothesis formation, collecting evidence, organizing it in terms of higher-order explanatory principles, and checking out those facts and principles against the evidence. It is an exercise in the growth of understanding. The emphasis on structure is not simply a matter of enhancing the intellectual content of schooling but also a reflection of Bruner’s views about intelligence and culture. Unlike traditional theories that treat ability as distinct from knowledge, for Bruner, knowledge and intelligence are indistinguishable. Intelligence is not thought of as an inborn talent but rather as a description of an educated mind. The growth of structure is the growth of intelligence. The culture is represented in its arts and sciences and it is an understanding of and competence with the resources of the culture that make up one’s intelligence. The concept of structure, furthermore, is an extrapolation from Bruner’s earlier interest in models and cognitive maps as the primary furniture of the mind. Mental models organize fragmentary bits of knowledge into conceptual schemes that permit understanding and inference. A general model enhances memory in a dramatic way. Not only does the general model allow one to ‘chunk’ seemingly unrelated fact into a general idea but also knowing a general theory allows one to reinterpret previously encountered facts and to infer and predict new ones. So, just as mental models are basic to cognitive psychology they are critical to formulating the goals of education.

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Bringing the basic structure of any discipline into the school curriculum requires that ‘the best minds in any particular discipline’ cooperate with educators to rewrite curricula and devise materials ‘in such a way that the pervading and powerful ideas and attitudes relating to them are given a central role’ (Bruner 1960, p. 18). It is of more than passing interest to note that Bruner emphasized the role of the disciplines in determining their basic explanatory concepts whereas Dewey, to whom we shall return, had sought those basic explanatory principles in the intuitions of the child. Dewey’s locating the basis of understanding in the child rather than in the advanced knowledge of the disciplines is perhaps what condemned him to the charge of eroding standards (Ravitch 2000). But Bruner’s locating them in the ‘frontiers of knowledge’ means that he will have to find a way to link advanced knowledge to children’s minds. All of his earlier experiments had shown that knowledge cannot be simply ‘transmitted’ from adult to child. The child’s mind already has structure, including interests and expectancies that will influence how any lesson is interpreted. Bruner found a new route to the child’s mind by appealing to Piaget’s and his own theory of intellectual development. Rather than look to the intuitions of the child for the basic principles of disciplinary knowledge, he asked what makes learning of the basic structures of the disciplines possible; this was the question of readiness for learning.

Readiness for Learning We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. (Bruner 1960, p. 33) With this somewhat incendiary claim Bruner began his discussion of how to both honor the mental life of the student while at the same time achieve the high intellectual aims of the school. What makes this claim defensible is Bruner’s view that fundamental ideas may be ‘represented’ in the mind in distinctive ways, ways that are characteristic of children’s stage of intellectual development. As he later wrote: ‘The problem is one of converting the most powerful ways of knowing into a form that is within the grasp of a young learner’ (Bruner 1971, p. 18). Consider gravity. Infants learn something about gravity both in learning to sit up and later to walk. At about the same time infants take great delight in releasing objects and watching them fall, and so on. Sensory motor intelligence is a kind of physical attunement to the laws of nature. But of course, at this time they do not think about gravity, they think about walking.

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At a later stage they may begin to think about gravity as a pull that can be nullified by a push – lifting, for example. At still a later stage they may think of gravity as a causal force that explains both the attraction between an apple and the earth as well as that between the moon and the earth. Gravity will have become a theory. Each way of thinking reflects a particular form of representation and a particular stage of cognitive development. Or consider number. Children virtually from birth can recognize the number of objects in a collection if the number is small. Through play, at a later age, they can learn the basics of mathematics by grouping and regrouping objects into collections, thereby learning the principle of commutativity (A + B) + C = A + (B + C)4 and they can learn the principle of reversibility by pouring liquids back and forth between differently shaped containers. However, there are constraints on the development of more advanced modes of representation. An infant may understand regularities in the physical and social world in terms of actions and consequences, that is, in terms of sensory-motor intelligence, but still be unable to grasp those relations if expressed verbally or in terms of explicit rules. By the time children enter formal school they can learn principles of invariance, including the conservation of quantity, if they can confront their expectancies with concrete evidence and engage in discourse with others as to why their expectancies were not met. Thus, although there are constraints on representation, experience and teaching can do much within those constraints and, indeed, nudge the constraints themselves. Bruner quotes Barbel Inhelder: In view of all this it seems highly arbitrary and very likely incorrect to delay the teaching, for example . . . of physics, which has much in it that can be profitably taught at an inductive or intuitive level much earlier. Basic notions in these fields are perfectly accessible to children of seven to ten years of age, provided that they are divorced from their mathematical expression and studied through materials that the child can handle himself. (Bruner 1960, p. 43) Bruner highlights the high intellectual goals to which education must aspire all the while seeking ways to make them achievable and comprehensible. The aspiration is to lead learners not only to grasp the core ideas but also to grasp them on their own terms. This goal is achieved when these early understandings are transformed into ever more explicit and generalizable forms that permit the learner to ‘go beyond the information given’. Topics worthy of study are those which when fully developed are worth an adult’s knowing. The procedure of revisiting topics and themes, and exploring them at ever more advanced levels of representation was described by Bruner

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as the ‘spiral curriculum’. In literature it could involve an ever-deepening understanding of tragedy and compassion and in science it could include not only the traditional subjects but also the neglected topics of likelihood and probability. Such a curriculum would attempt to accommodate the predispositions of the child to ‘the great issues, principles, and values that a society deems worthy’ (Bruner 1960, p. 52). The idea of a spiral curriculum is perhaps prone to the misinterpretation that topics will simply be retaught each year so there is no need to be too concerned about student failure in any particular year. Rather the intent is that when a topic is revisited, it is revisited from a new perspective or a more general frame of reference, not simply retaught.5

On Discovery Learning Discovery teaching generally involves not so much the process of leading students to discover what is ‘out there’, but rather, their discovering what is in their own heads. (Bruner 1971, p. 72) Max Beberman, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Illinois, headed a committee to investigate what could be done to better equip high-school graduates for the demands of university mathematics. The emphasis turned from computation to comprehension, and the most promising way of guaranteeing the latter was to focus on ‘discovery and precision in language’ (Lagemann 2000, p. 167). Discovery would lead students to work out the principles at work rather than simply memorizing them. Learning the principles was what would allow transfer of learning from one domain to another. The precision of language, too, would require students to think in terms of logical necessity rather than merely remembering facts. Halfway through the Woods Hole conference, David Page demonstrated for the assembled academics how mathematics could be taught to a group of local schoolchildren using methods based on Beberman’s ideas about discovery. Page encouraged students to advance conjectures that could then be tested out, refuted, revised, and accepted. No idea was ever seen as wrong but rather as springing from the wrong theory or as being addressed to a question other than the one the teacher had in mind. Bruner’s emphasis on discovery adopted the same principles but generalized them to reflect the ‘structure of the discipline’ in any content area, the social sciences as well as the natural sciences and mathematics. How are we to understand discovery? Discovery is not merely a matter of hacking around until something interesting turns up. Discoverers may be usefully contrasted with inventors

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but the contrast is not absolute. True, Edison, a great inventor, did try out almost every conceivable material in the search for a suitable filament for the light bulb, but even that search was guided by a deep understanding of the tradeoffs between temperature and friability, resistance and illumination. Columbus’ voyages of discovery were not accidental findings resulting from sailing too far from shore. Rather they were the consequence of testing out a possibility suggested by contemplating the relation between the maps of the known world and the geometric properties of a spherical earth (Olson 1994, Chapter 10). Nonetheless, the emphasis on discovery is justified by the fact that discovery relies more on the prepared mind than on good luck. Discovery is the expression of theory-based exploration; it is premised on having a good idea of what to look for. By encouraging discovery Bruner was promoting the formation and application of that prepared mind. Nor does the emphasis on discovery imply that the student is to reinvent the knowledge that has been accumulated over a millennium. Great discoveries were made by extremely talented adults working under ideal conditions in the context of other experts. Children cannot be expected to rediscover the basic principles of nature nor would we want them to. Rather the educational goal is to let them participate in the processes of the sciences and rediscover for themselves the basic ideas of the domain and the excitement that comes with understanding. As Bruner put it: ‘you don’t think about physics; you think physics’ (1983a, p. 185). Students are to be led to see that the great ideas in a discipline are solutions to intellectual puzzles and that solving them is an extremely satisfying experience. Scientists routinely describe the intellectual excitement that accompanies insights into and understandings of how things work and there is no need for children to be deprived of those experiences. Discovery is an important means of removing the classroom pressures to give the ‘right’ answer while allowing thinking of the group to advance. No thought is wasted; those that don’t ‘pan out’ or ‘have legs’ can be dropped, sometimes to be revived later, while the discourse, sometimes with the teacher’s guidance, can lead to those that do. Note that the goal is not only to arrive at the truth but also to learn something about the process, the way conjectures and refutations work in arriving at workable hypotheses in both science and life. From Bruner’s pragmatic perspective, a workable hypothesis is about as close as we ever get to the truth. As we shall see later this relativism makes many critics edgy as it seems to erode or at least soften concerns with absolute standards and accountability. Giving the student a ‘sense of discovery’ depends upon an appropriate blend of what Bruner called ‘intuitive’ and ‘analytic’ thinking. Analytic thinking is a matter of working through a series of explicit procedures to obtain a result, what we think of as problem solving. Bruner argued that

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such problem solving should be balanced with more intuitive methods that include ‘problem finding’ and that, in turn, ‘involves maneuvers based seemingly on an implicit perception of the total problem. The thinker arrives at an answer, which may be right or wrong, with little if any awareness of the process by which he reached it’. Yet this is not sheer guesswork; ‘usually intuitive thinking rests on familiarity with the domain of knowledge involved and with its structure’ (Bruner 1960, p. 58). The drive to the correct answer is death to intuitive thinking. And neither is it a free-for-all; thoughts have the virtue that they can be evaluated, set aside, recalled, and so on, all activities of the active mind. Again, knowledge is not to be simply mastered and stored but to be thought about. The lively discussion of thought, the process, is to be valued equally with the resulting knowledge. As Bruner put it, physics is not something to know but something to do: ‘intellectual activity anywhere is the same, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom’ (Bruner 1960, p. 14).

Motivation for Learning Ideally, interest in the material to be learned is the best stimulus to learning, rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive advantage. (Bruner 1960, p. 14) When Bruner summarized The Process of Education in his later writing (Bruner 1983), he mentioned the first three concerns of the book – structure, readiness, discovery – but not what he had said about motivation. Perhaps he later thought that motivation was taken care of under the topic of discovery learning because making a discovery, even coming to understand something previously not understood, is an enormously satisfying experience. The fact that motivation remains a critical problem in the school indicates that it requires further study. Traditionally, psychology distinguishes intrinsic from extrinsic motivation, the former generated by interest in the topic and satisfaction from mastery, the latter from rewards and punishments allocated by the teacher. Discovery learning plays on intrinsic motivation. Bruner added two further considerations. First, students may be motivated by the very idea of the pursuit of excellence and an admiration for scholarship as exemplified by the teacher and the school. And second, not to be discounted, is the dubious factor of competition to earn a top place in a meritocracy. Bruner thought that too much emphasis on competition extracted too high a price from those not in the top half of the class – the late bloomer, the child from the educationally indifferent home, and the early

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rebel may suffer needless loss of self-esteem, itself a primary disincentive. Hence his re-emphasis on the satisfactions from learning and understanding for all children at all levels of competence. He summarized thus: Motives for learning must be kept from going passive in an age of spectatorship, they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is to be learned, and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression. The danger signs of meritocracy and a new form of competitiveness are already in evidence. Already it is possible to see where advance planning can help. (Bruner 1960, p. 80) Bruner (1966a) elaborated on these motivational issues by contrasting the emotions resulting from coping with tasks and those leading one to defend oneself when comprehension fails. Clearly coping, like understanding, is a major motivation for learning. Defending is rather a way to avoid having to deal with problems that appear too difficult and those on which one is unlikely to succeed. Attaching too much weight to a task may lead some children to avoid it just as a history of failure may lead children to avoid challenging tasks altogether. And that avoidance, of course, is what makes it impossible for learners to gain the more normal satisfaction of success and understanding. As we shall see, defending and resisting learning may be as much social as it is cognitive; children who see themselves as failing may ‘drop out’ of the enterprise because they no longer see themselves as members of the class or group. Whether they are sidelined by themselves or by others the result may be a complete unwillingness to try. While The Process of Education was far from Bruner’s last word on the subject, it launched a flurry of research and commentary that continues to this day. (I asked Bruner about how he got interested in education and an edited transcript of our discussion may be found in Appendix B.)

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Chapter 4

From Educational Theory to Educational Practice

It gave me a very good feel for what school looked like to children. (Bruner 1980, p. 117) We are being forced, finally, to recognize that tradition and history, institutional rigidities and individual predilections, are as important in the conducting of education as technical insights into the learning process. (Bruner 2006, p. x) Education is both a domain for scholarship and a practical enterprise. While theories may be lofty, to have impact they must be, as we say, implementable. There must be some way to put them into practice. Indeed, one of the appeals of The Process of Education was that it appeared to have direct and immediate implications for educational practice whether in the design of curricula, in the pedagogical practices involved in teaching that curriculum, or in the assessment of learning and understanding. These were combined in an ambitious curriculum innovation project called ‘Man: A Course of Study’, or MACOS, for short.

MACOS – Man: A Course of Study Writing The Process of Education had given Bruner the opportunity to take a ‘fresh look’ at education, but a logical next step was to see if one could do anything about improving it. Bruner was given a two-year leave of absence by his Harvard Dean to undertake to develop a new curriculum that would embody the principles worked out at the Woods Hole conference. The goal was to improve the teaching of social studies in the middle grades by developing a new curriculum that combined recent developments in the sciences of anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology in a course on the nature of man as a species. The focus of the course was on ‘What is

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uniquely human about human beings?’ and ‘How did human beings get that way?’ ‘What could be done to make them more so?’ The goals of the unit of study were, first and foremost, to give pupils respect for and confidence in the powers of their own minds, the power to think about the human condition, to develop a set of models for understanding the social world, and to show that human evolution is an ongoing process (see Bruner 1996c, Chapter 4). Notice how the goal of getting the students to think was seen as more important than, and indeed, the key to the learning of content knowledge whether in anthropology, psychology, or biology. Peter Dow, a participant in the project and later its principal administrator, drawing on the vast archives from the project, has written a brilliant and detailed history of the project from its inception, through its development to its impact. The aim, as Dow (1991) put it, ‘was to construct a new model for social studies education that would change the existing pattern’ (p. 73) and ‘close the gap between intellectual discovery as it occurs on the cutting edge of scholarship, and learning as it occurs in a growing young mind’ (p. 273). In collaboration with experts, teachers, teacher trainers, and graduate students Bruner developed, extensively piloted with groups of children, and revised course materials, films and texts dealing with the life cycle of different non-human animal species, including baboons, as well as two ‘traditional’ human societies, Netsilik Eskimos and Kalahari Bushmen. The goal was to explore what was distinctive about humans as a species and to explore the relationship between environment, culture, and behavior. Topics such as why Eskimos ate raw meat were particularly appealing to children and drew both emotion and debate. Topics that did not work were dropped from the program. One such unit of instruction, the ‘containers unit’ that ‘challenged children to create from simple materials durable carrying devices that would allow safe transport to and from school of two raw eggs and a cup of water, failed to produce a measurable impact on children’s thinking about technology, even though it was hugely popular with students’, quipped Petter Dow (1991, p. 114). Language, of course, was one of the things that make humans unique and so was part of the curriculum. However, teaching children what made language special proved to be unexpectedly difficult, nigh unto impossible. This was 1966, shortly after Chomsky had defended the claim that what was unique about humans was their innate grammatical competence. The grammar, namely rules for turning separate words into sentences, was to be distinguished from the semantics, the meaning that sentences expressed. Thus ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ was a grammatical sentence even if it did not mean anything. Children simply could not grasp that that was a sentence while they were quite willing to accept ungrammatical strings such as ‘The man hat has’ as a sentence because they knew what it meant.

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Grammar as a metalinguistic concept was too difficult and so had to be approached in another way.6 In this other way a series of simple sentences was written on the board and the children were encouraged to read one word from each column to make up new sentences. The A The My

man boy dog father

ate stole chased skidded

his a my the

lunch bike cat car

Some sentences such as ‘My father ate a car’ were undoubtedly odd but by this means children were able to grasp the notion of the grammar as composed of parts such as nouns, verbs, and modifiers, and to think about what a language was (Bruner 1971, pp. 73–4). Yet, despite the heroic efforts of teachers, these ten-year-olds were reluctant to grant that the sounds made by other species were any less ‘linguistic’ than those made by humans. Nor did they easily shed their anthropomorphism, identifying easily with the young of all other species including salmon, herring gulls, and baboons and expressing a willingness to project human feelings on to them. The research was indeed exemplary. It combined the best of current knowledge and advances in the human sciences, it had clear goals and appropriate means of assessment, it was tried out with the types of students that it was designed to teach, and teachers and educators were taught how to use the program and how to introduce it into their schools. It involved a gargantuan effort. Bruner devoted his two-year leave of absence from Harvard to the development of the program, assembled a staff of over 60 people to try out the new curriculum over two summers, conducted systematic appraisals of the program and, after several attempts delivered this into a publisher’s hand. In its final form it included nine teacher’s guides, 30 children’s booklets, 16 films, four records, five filmstrips, three games, 54 artifact cards, two large maps, three large charts, 11 posters and a ‘take-apart seal’ (Dow 1991, p. 134). Dissemination of the program was almost as complex as developing it. Lectures and workshops, demonstrations and word-of-mouth contacts spread the program, trained the teachers, and developed materials even before publishers came on board. The program was enthusiastically received by reform-minded educators and by 1970 there were 918 teachers using the program with more than 22,000 pupils. The American Educational Research Association together with the American Educational Publishers Institute presented Bruner with an award for ‘one of the most important efforts of our time to relate research findings and theory in educational psychology to the development of new and better instructional material’ and praised it as ‘enormously suggestive of what we could and should be doing to equip the instructional process adequately’ (Dow 1991, p. 135).

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Yet, by and large, it failed not only to survive but also to have a lasting impact on schooling. Schooling has tended to revert to the old standard methods of teaching and testing. Why? There are many answers that I shall examine when we come to discuss the reception of Bruner’s work. But in a word, although progressively minded educators enthusiastically received and adopted the new curriculum, it was treated skeptically by a conservative, indeed, a reactionary public and it became a battleground on which governing officials and policy makers fought their internecine battles.

Scaffolding: Explorations in Pedagogy If one can describe a trajectory in Bruner’s thinking from his efforts in curriculum development to his later work, it was his increasing attention to what actually happened in the instructional processes. He set out to describe ‘the close-textured pattern of reciprocity about the intentional states of one’s partners’ (Bruner 1996, p. 182). He would later describe this reciprocity in terms of intersubjectivity. But at the end of his curriculum efforts, he looked for the analysis in terms of the actual pedagogical moves available to the teacher as instructor. It was a kind of teaching by modeling, showing and telling, that he called scaffolding. At the time that Bruner was writing, the perspective on pedagogy, like the perspective on curriculum, was still essentially teacher-centered and teacher-controlled. It was a deliberate attempt to bring the behavior of the learner into compliance with the ideas and goals of the teacher. Of course, what else is instruction but the attempt to shape a learner’s habits, attitudes and beliefs? But, unlike some of the proposals Bruner examined later, he saw instruction as essentially the attempt to bring the learner up to the adult’s standard by providing a framework for the child’s learning. Scaffolding was the application of an engineering model to pedagogical practice. The teacher constructed a scaffold that could be used to support the efforts of the learner to construct his or her own understandings. Once complete, the scaffold could be removed and the learner’s own mental structures would sustain understanding and enquiry. With David Wood of Nottingham University, Bruner studied the process involved when an adult tutored three- to five-year-old children on how to assemble a complex pyramid puzzle. Rather than teach in the conventional sense of telling and explaining the adult tutor would ‘scaffold’ the efforts by carrying out the parts of the task that the child could not quite successfully manage for itself. As the learner mastered parts of the task, the adult would give control of those aspects back to the learner. Ultimately, the child could manage the entire process by him or herself.

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These interactive structures Bruner re-described as ‘formats’ and found them not only in situations with a specific pedagogical intent, as in the scaffolding context for teaching, but also in the routines that parents engage in with their children, routines important for language learning and cultural learning more generally. A format is a cultural routine in a conventionalized setting in which parent and child take on interactive roles to complete a task or play a game. One such format he studied in more detail was that of ‘book reading’ in which the mother pointed out and named pictures in a book, a practice progressively taken over by the year-old child. Here is Bruner’s description: What a strikingly stable routine it was. Each step of the way, the mother incorporated whatever competencies the child had already developed – to be clued by pointing, to appreciate that sounds ‘stood for’ things and events, etc. The mother remained the constant throughout. Thereby she was his scaffold – calling his attention, making a query, providing an answering label if he lacked one, and confirming his offer of one, whatever it might be. As he gained competence, she would raise her criterion. Almost any vocalization the child might offer at the start would be accepted. But each time the child came closer to the standard form, she would hold out for it. What was changing was, of course, what the mother expected in response – and that, of course, was ‘fine-tuned’ by her ‘theory’ of the child’s capacities. When he switched from babbling to offering shorter vocalization as ‘labels’ (still quite nonstandard), she would no longer accept babbles but would insist on the shorter ‘names’. Then finally, sure that her son knew the standard label, she would shift to delivering her ‘What’s that?’ with a falling intonation on the second word and a special smile to distinguish a rhetorical from a nonrhetorical question. And so it went. (1983a, pp. 171–2; see also Bruner 1983b). Scaffolding learning, as Bruner acknowledged, was what apprenticeships traded on. A novice would be given small tasks at the margins of a complex task and, as mastery increased, be given greater and greater responsibility for more and more complex tasks. Apprenticeships had long been studied in traditional craft societies but the applicability of these methods to education in a modern industrial society had been largely overlooked. More recent studies by Greenfield and Lave (1982), Lave and Wenger (1991) and Rogoff (1990; Rogoff, Mutusov, and White 1996) have not only shown the importance of these methods to contemporary schooling but also that they are already inescapably common if unacknowledged. Students in classrooms tend to be given responsibility for tasks for which they have a reasonable chance of success, with requirements increasing as they demonstrate

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increased competence. What is often neglected, however, is the fact that students often fail to grasp ‘the larger purpose’ behind these more local tasks. Studying punctuation, for example, may have limited returns unless the learner sees how punctuation can actually increase comprehensibility. It is worth noting that Bruner’s pedagogical explorations tended to involve one-on-one teaching episodes. In such a context it is enormously easier to keep track of what the learner is thinking. In whole-class teaching, on the other hand, such close monitoring is virtually impossible and teachers have to monitor for general signs of incomprehension, say, watching the modal student, and adjusting teaching accordingly. Just how teachers do this has not been studied in detail and as Bruner acknowledged, ‘The chemistry of classroom still eludes me – whether it produces leaden gloom or total and concentrated involvement’ (1980, pp. 129–30).

Head Start As mentioned, as an insider to President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s Bruner was drawn into Project Head Start, a program that was designed to overcome the difficulties faced by poor and underprivileged children on entering school. Although Bruner has been an advocate of and spokesman for Head Start’s early educational intervention program, and although he served on a White House committee, he did not play an active role in that program. The idea was fueled not only by obvious social need but also by psychological research that had shown the debilitating effects of sensory deprivation in animals. Animals reared in impoverished environments were found to be severely disabled on later learning and problem-solving tasks. At about the same time, studies of human infants showed that they were alert, attentive to the social world, and more active than reactive than had been suspected, and in addition, were rapid learners. So somewhere between these intelligent and engaged infants and the onset of schooling something seemed to have numbed the intellect. The problem was seen as one of the impoverished conditions experienced by children of the poor. What was called ‘cultural deprivation’ was seen as limiting their continuing mental growth. Head Start was created to fill that gap. Head Start was premised on the notion that if pre-school children could be given a richer environment they would be more intellectually developed and more prepared for formal schooling. Faith in the effectiveness of these early interventions faded in the 1970s when the research began to show that the advantages gained tended to disappear within a few years. Bruner disagreed, arguing that the disappointing results that were reported did not give a fair account of the effectiveness of the programs because the

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criteria used to evaluate them were limited to simple skills. He had urged rather that those criteria should have included the growth of an interest in and thoughtfulness about the world and a willingness to share those experiences with others. Nonetheless the disappointing data, coupled with the costs of the program (which in fact were trivial in comparison to those required by the Vietnam War) led to severe reductions in the program although it did not disappear completely. Although Head Start was not ‘a magic elixir’ (Bruner 1996, p. 75), recent re-evaluations have shown that if the interventions are continued over a longer period they do indeed have cumulative and long-lasting effects (Schweinhart and Weikart 1980; Barnett 1993). Disadvantaged children can indeed be helped. Bruner continues to be a staunch advocate of pre-school education. Head Start, he said, ‘created a new consciousness that, by intervening in the developmental scene early enough, you could change the life of children later’ (1996, p. 74). Indeed, currently, pre-school education is high on the agenda of most developed nations.

Reggio Emilia Over the past two decades Bruner has been advisor and consultant to a unique education program in Reggio Emilia, an autonomous region of Italy, that combines a strong socialist stance with a deep commitment to educational equality. The program is very much built on the constructivist principles described by Bruner in which children take control of their own learning and in which the teacher’s role is primarily helping the children achieve their own goals and succeed with their own projects. The primary observations Bruner made in this context were that no child was incapable of actively participating in the enterprise, no child failed to learn both the skills and knowledge valued by the school, and furthermore a true learning community was possible. For his help with this enterprise Bruner was made an honorary citizen of the community. Lillard (2005) has recently appraised the Montessori early education program and found it to possess many of the virtues that Bruner found laudatory in Reggio Emilia. Programs which put the mental activities of the learners at the forefront of pedagogical efforts are not confined to foreign shores. Bruner observed and commented on the encouraging effects of the reciprocal teaching and collaborative learning practices implemented by Ann Brown, Joe Campione, and Anne-Marie Palincsar in a disadvantaged area of Oakland, California (Palincsar 1984; Brown and Campione 1994). What was distinctive was not only that the children achieved unpredictably well but also that they had succeeded in creating a collaborative school culture, a community of learners

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(Bruner 1996, pp. 76–9; see also Rogoff, Matusov, and White 1996). Children worked on shared projects, they put their proposals up for common discussion, they assigned various roles – researcher, chairman, reporter – to different children at different times, they shared their discoveries, summarized, questioned, and clarified their views and thereby jointly contributed to a common project. The teacher played a critical role in the process but one of helping the community to get the job done, thereby keeping the agency and responsibility in the hands of the learners rather than in the hands of the teacher. Bruner attributed the success of the practice to an established principle: ‘We have known for years that if you treat people, young kids included, as responsible, contributing parties to the group, as having a job to do, they will grow into it.’ The school culture that results from such practices he described as ‘creating communities of learners . . . Learning is best when it is participatory, proactive, communal, collaborative, and given over to constructing meanings rather than receiving them’ (1996, p. 84). These were the very practices he had identified in Reggio Emilia. Bruner’s contributions to pedagogy, then, were both theoretical and practical. He showed that the new understanding of mind as hypothesis testing and model building could provide an alternative approach to both curriculum development and pedagogy. In the former, he showed that a curriculum with a defined content with high intellectual goals could be developed and taught using what he called the ‘hypothetical mode’, namely, getting children to invent hypotheses, discuss them, weigh them against alternative hypotheses and against further evidence. Furthermore, he showed that such practices could be implemented in an ordinary classroom. In regard to the latter, he demonstrated the complementary roles between teacher and learner could be seen as a form of scaffolding in which the actions of the teacher served primarily to allow the learner to progressively take over the component skills as competence developed. Thus the role of the teacher moved aside somewhat to allow greater freedom for the child to increasingly take responsibility for his or her actions. And as an advocate, he provided both the encouragement and the rationale for education in a modern society and for methods that acknowledge the role of the learner in constructing his or her own knowledge and understanding. (I interviewed Bruner about his concept of teaching the hypothetical and a transcript of the discussion is presented in Appendix C. Our discussion of Reggio Emilia is found in Appendix E.)

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Chapter 5

From Practice Back to Educational Theory

I was interested in the teaching for its own sake – as a theoretical problem (Bruner 1980, p. 124) Bruner’s interest in teaching as a theoretical problem was elaborated in his attempt to work out some principles for a theory of instruction, a topic that as he said ‘lies deep and virtually unexplored in education’ (Bruner 1980, p. 124). Of course, he was not implying that nothing was known about ‘effective instruction’ as assessed by achievement tests. Rather he wanted to know what was going on in the minds of the teacher and learner in the processes of coming to understand or misunderstand something. He had earlier discussed this problem in terms of teaching to the appropriate stage of development of the child and he had returned to it with his discussion of scaffolding as a pedagogical device. Here his attempt was to generalize these earlier ideas and apply them to the growth of particular understandings in learners. Bruner (1996c, p. 31) stated the problem in this way: One is struck by the absence of a theory of instruction as a guide to pedagogy – a prescriptive theory on how to proceed in order to achieve various results, a theory that is neutral with respect to ends but exhaustive with respect to means. It is interesting that there is a lack of an integrating theory in pedagogy, that in its place there is principally a body of maxims.

The Theory of Instruction Bruner set out his theory of instruction (1996) in four principles, which he exemplified by reference to some of the activities mentioned above from Man: A Course of Study. The principles were seen as applicable to any discipline or domain. We have already considered how they are played out in the study of man as a species. But they are equally applicable to another

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domain, as we can see if we attempt to apply them or illustrate them by reference to the teaching of science. One such topic drawn from recent science education literature is the nature of light. What is interesting about this topic is that it involves not simply the accumulation of more information about light, but rather a dramatic shift in point of view regarding light, a shift that has come to be described as conceptual change (Carey and Spelke 1994). Roth and Anderson (1988) and Shapiro (1994), building on some early experiments by Piaget, showed that middle school children explain how we see something, say a plant, by saying that the light shines on the plant and then we look at the plant. By means of a unit on light, children are taught to think of seeing in terms of Newton’s optics, thus: The light shines on the plant which then reflects the light to the eye. But this is not simply a matter of learning a new bit of information, because if one does further tests it becomes apparent that for many learners the old view has remained intact. Thus, if asked ‘Why can’t you see what is behind a brick wall?’ they answer, ‘Because you can’t see through a brick wall.’ To these children the light continues to be thought of as originating in the eye and failing to pass through the brick wall. Had they achieved a conceptual change through the teaching, they would have acknowledged that the object cannot be seen ‘Because light cannot pass through the brick wall’. What is to be explained is how teaching takes or fails to take its effect. It is not sufficient to say that they learned Newton’s optics or that a unit on Newton’s optics caused the learning. Rather one must capture what the learners were doing and thinking that resulted in the learning and, second, the conditions of instruction that prompted this learning. What goes on in the learner’s mind seems to be the following. Younger children explain natural phenomena in terms of an intentional theory, a theory of doing things and things happening in response. We look at the object so we see it; looking is an intentional action. What they must learn to do is to shift from this intentional, subjective frame of reference to an objective frame of reference that explains the mechanical properties of light. Current research suggests that rather than simply insisting that the first explanation is wrong, it is more effective to make explicit the basis for the children’s wrong hypothesis, thereby setting the stage for the newer one, thus producing conceptual change rather than mere learning. Now let us consider children’s understanding of light by reference to Bruner’s proposals for a theory of instruction. Predispositions The first task is to isolate and activate the predispositions to learning a particular topic. These predispositions are expressed in the children’s na¨ıve

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stance to the topic. In the study of light, this would consist of an attempt to determine the student’s preferred beliefs about the properties of light. As we saw, children tend to collapse the question about light into the question of ‘how we see’: ‘We look at the plant and we see the plant; if we did not look we would not see it.’ ‘Of course you need light (a flashlight in the dark for example) to shine on the plant so that we can see it’ and so on. These explanations are what, above, I called intentionalist explanations. Those are the kinds of explanation that the child brings to the school and that often override what they are taught. Indeed, even educated adults prefer that way of talking and assume that we see by projecting something from our eyes to the seen object. Even the celebrated seventeenth-century French painter Poussin talked of the ‘rays of the eyes’ and children and most adults see nothing anomalous about Superman’s ‘X-ray vision’ (see Olson 2003, p. 165). Predispositions for learning (or against learning) rest deeply in our human biology and in our ordinary ways of talking about the world. Sometimes these have to be set aside, or more correctly, subsumed within a more general set of understandings. Structure of knowledge Secondly, a theory of instruction would specify how a body of knowledge should be organized so that it can be readily grasped by a learner. In the understanding of light, this may be achieved by contrasting their preferred intentional explanation with the purely mechanical or causal explanations offered by Newton’s optics. We show the children that we can ask either the intentional question – what is the person doing? – or we can ask what the light is doing, that is, what the properties of light are. This contrast will highlight the fact that the science of optics is concerned only with the latter. Indeed, it was because Newton was able to focus on and formalize the latter that the theory of optics is named after him. Children are unlikely to change their frame of reference without adult help and they are unlikely to do it unless their preferred explanations are made explicit. When they are, the children may change their frame of reference thereby producing conceptual change. Sequencing Third, a theory of instruction would set out the appropriate sequences of instruction to assure the development of structure such that it allowed for the greatest possible transfer to new problems. In our case, if the properties of light are learned, not in isolation but by reference to the general mode of explanation, namely, intentional versus mechanical or causal explanations,

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this new knowledge may be expected to transfer to and be applicable to other domains. One candidate here is the similar shift in understanding required for children to understand force and motion. Just as is the case for light, children tend to think of force as something they do, namely push or pull, lift or drop. But the laws of physics require one to think of force as a property of nature that exists, whether or not anyone is there to observe it. The intentional mode must be set aside. Force has to come to be seen as the relation between mass and acceleration, as in Newton’s laws. So depth of teaching, the building of structure, would allow transfer of learning to new tasks and domains. The structure of knowledge of the domain would include not only entities and relations but also modes of explanation, the intentional mode and the causal mode. (Bruner will later label these modes of explanation the narrative mode and the paradigmatic mode, claiming that both have a place in education. The narrative mode puts the human agent at the center whereas the paradigmatic mode places causal laws at the center.) Once we grasp the distinction between the intentional mode of explanation preferred by the children and the causal or mechanical mode preferred by the natural sciences, we are also in a position to better understand the cognitive revolution that began our account. It was the behaviorists’ goal of making psychology a ‘natural science’ that had led them to adhere to the strictly causal mode of explanation and to disparage the intentional mode even in the explanation of human behavior. And it was the Cognitive Revolution that overturned that assumption and allowed concepts like agent, action, and intention to play a role in explanations of behavior. Along with abandoning the strictures against intentional explanations, it broadened the range of methods considered appropriate for a science. For Bruner, the question was primary and the choice of method had to secondary, to use whatever methods were at hand. Rewards And fourth, the theory of instruction, Bruner argued, would include the setting of rewards and punishments. Talk of rewards and punishments is decidedly old-fashioned, harking back to the vocabulary of behaviorism. But the topic remains. What is in it for the learner? Thus, the topic is now more commonly discussed in terms of entitlements and obligations and more specifically the nature of the assessments to be used in awarding grades and credentials. Bruner’s concern has always been that an equal emphasis be given to process as to content – as much to learning to ask questions as learning to answer them. And the experience itself should be rewarding for the learner.

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Method The heart of the instructional process is the matching of the predispositions and expectancies of the child to the demands of the new content. Bruner’s preferred means for achieving that match are through the process of discovery. It is not a matter of simple input and memorization. Bruner urged the ‘hypothetical mode’; as he wrote, ‘It avails little to give information that is not asked for.’ And again, ‘It is far more interesting to learn the facts after one has tried to figure them out for oneself’ (1996, pp. 94–5). This is the art of getting and using information to test out one’s hunches and conjectures, what he had earlier described as cognitive ‘strategies’. Bruner cited some evidence produced by his wife and collaborator Carol Feldman that nicely illustrated the common absence of the hypothetical mode in most classroom contexts. Feldman had recorded the teacher’s use of terms that indicated the teacher’s stance to what they were saying. Hypotheticals such as might be, possibly, perhaps, I think, it seems to me, and the like, expressions that leave scope for the listener’s own views, commonly occurred when teachers talked to each other. But they rarely occurred in the classroom. Bruner adds, ‘The world that the teachers were presenting to their students was a far more settled, far less hypothetical, far less negotiatory world than the one they were offering to their colleagues’ (Bruner 1986, p. 126; see also Astington and Pelletier 2005, p. 218). Correctness matters but so does openness to ideas that ‘render the world less fixed, less banal, more susceptible to re-creation’ (p. 159). And Bruner’s concern is to open up topics for learners to think about, as he says ‘to make their own’, an opening up that is made difficult by the schools’ relentless pressure to achieve fixed goals. Not surprisingly, Bruner’s invited address to the National Academy of Education on the occasion of his 90th birthday was entitled ‘Teaching the Hypothetical’. The attempt to formulate a framework or theory for instruction was a bold attempt to introduce theory into what has before been relegated to a practice. It has the further virtue of addressing instruction in terms of what teachers and learners are actually thinking and doing rather than trying to predict outcomes by more remote factors such as treatments given and measures of ability. But the theory of instruction lacks the precision that would be needed to deduce testable hypotheses from it so it remains an insightful interpretation of good teaching practices rather than a rigorous science. This is not a failure. As Bruner has pointed out, in complex domains such as teaching and education, the most appropriate methods are interpretive and hermeneutical rather than deductive and empirical. And clearly, the theory of instruction, as we have seen, provides a way of understanding what is going on in instruction and why it often fails.

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From Instruction to Enculturation The theory of instruction was very much a theory of schooling, namely, what the school can do to assure the uptake of knowledge and skill. It is very much directed to producing a particular effect or understanding in the learner. In that sense it is in effect a top-down theory, even if the attempt is to reach the learner’s mind. The teacher knows the effect to be achieved and the theory explains what can be done to achieve that effect. In his later work, Bruner broadened his topic to that of education in general, what may be more appropriately called enculturation, which addresses the more basic processes involved in coming to share a social world with others. Schooling is just one part of enculturation. The view of education that developed was less one of how children come to know about the world than how they come to participate in a shared community, a community that can accommodate some diversity of beliefs. Fixed goals and their achievement became less important to his account than participation in a shared intellectual life. Education came to be discussed in dialogical rather than monological terms; discussion of beliefs and reasons for believing came to share the stage with the narrower fixation on truth and validity. In The Process of Education (1960) Bruner had pointed out the ways that instruction on important topics could be adjusted to the intellectual structures and strategies of learners but it continued to be, as mentioned, ‘topdown’. The knowledge of the society was seen as lodged in the sciences, and mental growth was seen as a result of acquiring that knowledge. While he had discussed the problem of motivation, emphasizing the importance of intrinsic interest and the satisfaction attendant on discovery, he had had less to say about the actual processes of engagement. That is, he had little to say about assuring children’s interests met those insisted on by the teacher. Clearly, not just any interest, regardless of how gripping it may be, will meet the agenda of the school. The teacher’s goal is to turn student interests to the teacher’s agenda; to, so to speak, use the child’s interests as the chink in the armor through which the teacher could insert the required knowledge. The teacher and the child need not, to use another metaphor, be on the same page. That required the later notion of intersubjectivity. Enculturation was the product of that intersubjectivity, the meeting of minds rather than the molding of minds.

Teaching as a Meeting of Minds The important development in Bruner’s thinking at this point was to expand on the earlier concept of subjectivity. While his earlier educational studies

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had highlighted the importance of subjectivity, that is, the importance of the learner’s experience and understanding, the work on infancy in the 1980s led him to highlight the importance of intersubjectivity. The distinction is important. Subjectivity acknowledges that the learner has a point of view that the teacher attempts to address. Intersubjectivity expresses the idea that the child and teacher can see and think together, can come to share a point of view. Intersubjectivity is a shared subjectivity. As we saw earlier, Bruner’s ideas about intersubjectivity were formed around his studies of language learning in infancy. If language was a key to mind, a view that Bruner never relinquished, surely the acquisition of language would mark the emergence of mentality. Noam Chomsky had convinced Bruner that the grammar was the heart of the language and Roger Brown had shown how children’s grammatical competence developed through the early years. But Bruner was more interested in how children used their growing competence to ‘do things with words’ as J. L. Austin (1962) had first formulated that problem in his William James Lectures at Harvard. Doing things with language, such as pointing things out and requesting objects or services, was clearly as important as learning the grammar. By placing language in a social context of use, Bruner was able to argue that the attempt to use language to communicate was the ‘engine’ that drove language development. Stated more formally, the argument was that the pragmatics (use) of language trumps semantics (meaning) and grammar (syntax), a claim that remains controversial. His empirical work clearly showed that children attempt to communicate, to make requests and express greetings long before they acquire any formal linguistic structures. Indeed, what lay at the basis of it all, Bruner argued, was intention and the ‘perception of intention in others’ (Bruner 1980, p. 144). Even prelinguistic children want things and they attempt to communicate those desires to others by making non-verbal requests by pointing and making characteristic sounds, including crying, to fulfill their desires. Intention and the recognition of intention in others became central concepts in his psychology that would have important implications for understanding teaching and learning. Bruner and his colleagues looked for the beginnings of intersubjectivity in infants in their social interactions in ordinary life. Why do babies and mothers spend so much time looking into each other’s eyes? Why does such eye contact bring on the infant’s first smiles? Is it the same for them as it is for us? Bruner and his colleagues noticed how even infants follow the adult’s gaze to look at (or for) a new object and that even one-year-olds would shift attention to a new object if the mother named it with a rising intonation. What they ‘see’ soon includes not only the recognition of the

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familiar and an interest in the new but by 12 months most infants also see actions and the intentions lying behind them, and they begin to imitate the actions of adults. Imitation is a remarkable achievement that has been carefully analyzed by another disciple of Bruner, Michael Tomasello (1999). We ordinarily assume that other animals imitate: ‘Monkey see, monkey do.’ But it is not true (see Visalberghi and Fragazy 1996). Even chimpanzees, our nearest primate cousins, fail to imitate each other. Yet by 12 months human infants observing the actions of an adult recognize the goal or purpose of the actions, as well as the means employed to achieve it and so become competent imitators. They understand what adults are doing and how they are doing it and with that understanding comes the ability to imitate those actions. Indeed, Tomasello (1999) has provided a useful scheme for describing the growth of intersubjectivity. At about six months, human infants begin to show joint attention, looking at the same thing as the adult. By about one year they recognize others as intentional agents who do things to achieve goals. By about four years of age they recognize others as ‘mental’ agents who do things because they think or believe things. We could summarize these three stages as recognizing agents, recognizing goal-directed intentions, and recognizing mental states. Mental states are usually described as having the property of ‘intentionality’. Bruner’s role was to call for and initiate research on intention and the perception of intention and to call for a turn from a ‘causal’ psychology modeled on a natural science to an intentional psychology that treated persons as agents rather than as objects subject to the laws of nature. Persons should be seen as agents who acted intentionally, for reasons, and who were responsible, as he argued in his Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1976 (to, he felt at the time, a largely unsympathetic audience) (1980, p. 144). Nonetheless, a great deal of important research on children’s acquisition of a ‘theory of mind’ currently goes on in laboratories around the world, much of it inspired by Bruner (see Astington 1993 and Perner 1991; for a history of the development see Astington 2000). Bruner explored the implications of intersubjectivity for education in his book The Culture of Education (1996) in which he defined culture as a network of intersubjectivities of an entire social group. We have already seen how Bruner sided with Vygotsky’s view that what we call ‘mind’ is best seen as the subjective side of culture. That is, mind and its development has to be seen not as a product of natural growth but rather as the product of learning the folk ways of seeing and doing in a particular culture. On this view, people think mathematically because they benefit from the accumulation of two or three millennia of mathematical tradition. Children are introduced to these traditions largely in the school and to the extent that they become

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competent participants in this tradition, they come to think mathematically. Mathematical abilities are the product of this learning rather than, as they were traditionally thought of, predispositions to or ‘abilities’ for learning. While clearly not denying that the human mind is evolutionarily designed in such a way that makes the learning of mathematics possible, it denies that mind was designed for that purpose. Rather the persons working through time found a way to use the resources of the mind, whatever they were, for a culturally significant purpose. As Bruner wrote, ‘mind could not exist save for culture’ (1996, p. 3). Again, this marks a major divergence from traditional conceptions of mental ability.

Culture and Education But Bruner had long since been a cultural psychologist; what was new in The Culture of Education was to look at the school in its cultural setting, to see ‘education and school learning in their situated, cultural context’ (1996, p. x) as a critical part of a cultural psychology. The cultural approach to education would acknowledge that ways of knowing are ‘perspectival’, that our ways of thinking about the world are our interpretations or construals of the world that reflect both individual and cultural interests. While such perspectives are subject to judgements of truth and validity, they ‘are just as often dominated by commitments, tastes, interests, and expressions of adherence to the culture’s values relating to the good life, decency, legitimacy, or power’ (Bruner 1996, p. 14). No one criterion has an absolute monopoly on judgement, so one should balance the desire for the one best or truest perspective with the principle of tolerance for contending interests and intepretations. Recall Bruner’s insistence, early on, for exploring ideas, and for making meaning, rather than insisting on the final word. A cultural appproach would also, Bruner suggested, emphasize the interactional or intersubjective nature of education, interactions between teacher and student but equally importantly between the students themselves. But these interactions, to become part of the culture, must be externalized in the form of a ‘work’ or a product that provides a record of one’s mental effort and that becomes subject to appreciation and criticism by others (see Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon 2001). Third, a cultural approach to education would acknowledge the gap between the institutional constraints of a publicly supported institution that provides credentials and is accountable to the larger society on the one hand, and the subjective experiences and growth of understanding of the students who participate in it, on the other. He calls for an institutional

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anthropology of schooling (Bruner 1996, p. 33) that would spell out the school relation to the family, the economy, the religious organizations, and the labor market. Indeed, as we shall see, a failure to fully come to terms with such institutional constraints is what has limited the impact not only of Bruner’s writing but also of educational reformers going back to Dewey. Fourth, a cultural approach also acknowledges that persons have their identity by virtue of the membership in a culture. Hence, to educate children is to allow and encourage the experience of agency, of setting and achieving goals, and of earning self-esteem and the recognition of one’s peers. Successful participation in the routines of the school is important to the formation of one’s identity as a person. And finally, the classroom is a culture, a community, and student participation in it depends upon the feeling of membership in that community and the acknowledgment by one’s peers that one is a member. Alienation from the group has catastrophic effects on the willingness of students to participate, to take on the goals of the group and to work to their fulfillment. Students, importantly, are not the clay to the potter. To become competent interpreters of the world they must be allowed to be agents, to take responsibility for their own learning, and to experience the satisfactions of meeting their responsibilities. (I asked Bruner to comment on what he took to be the major trajectories in his thinking and that discussion is presented as Appendix G.)

Notes 1. I was one of them. See Bruner, Olver, and Greenfield 1966, Chapter 6, on conceptual strategies. 2. This idea became a major feature of my book The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Olson 1994). 3. In fact, Bruner did not distinguish between the excitement in generating the theories from the satisfaction derived by checking the theory against the factual map. Perhaps this indicates his concern for process over a concern for truth. 4. Did you know that children find it easier to solve 3 + x = 8 than x + 3 = 8? Why? 5. I am indebted to Joan Peskin for this observation. 6. In fact, I observed this failed lesson but I learned from it the more general lesson that semantics always ‘trumps’ grammar unless people are quite highly literate (see Olson 1994, Chapter 7).

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Chapter 6

The Intellectual Uptake: The Debate About Education and Human Development

A classic (Paul Goodman, New York Herald Tribune, 1960) . . . unrealistic (David Ausubel 1968, p. 101) The influence of Bruner and his colleagues on the theory of intellectual development and education was immediately apparent. The very way of thinking about children, their mental growth, and the role of education in that development had been altered in a fundamental way. This was nowhere better described than by Eleanor Maccoby, a renowned Stanford University developmentalist. She wrote: The idea of development began to take on more and more importance in my mind . . . it is difficult to describe the sense of discovery and excitement in the early 1960s. For me, some of the compelling ideas were that learning and development were not the same thing: To view a child’s development as a process of bringing items of behavior ‘under stimulus control’ as S-R [Behaviorist] theories did, was to miss the role of the child as an active selector, processor and organizer of what the environment had to offer; . . . children utilized only what could be processed via the child’s currently available repertoire of concepts and mechanisms; . . . what children learned might be systematically different from what [teachers and models] provided. (1980, p. 318) These ideas, in the twenty-first century, perhaps seem obvious but only a few decades ago they were quite revolutionary and Bruner was at the center of the revolution in psychology that placed the child as agent of his or her development. Yet when these revolutionary ideas are taken back to educational theory we find a remarkable precedent in the uptake of the work and writing of John Dewey.

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Bruner and Dewey It is not inappropriate to see Bruner as the heir to Dewey’s Progressivism. Certainly Bruner has acknowledged (tape interview) that he sees himself fitting firmly within the broad band of American Pragmatism of which John Dewey was the leading exponent. But beyond that, the link between Dewey and Bruner is largely after the fact. Dewey had arrived at his views on education by means of a philosophical analysis of the practical politics of a democracy and the role that education could play in enhancing democracy. Dewey had dismissed the behaviorism of his time and had offered a theory of personal agency, intentionality, and responsibility, features essential to thinking about an individual’s role in a democratic society. And he offered proposals for education based on nurturing students’ competence and judgement so that they could act as equals in the democratic institutions of the state. Students were not to be trained into mindless conformity with authoritarian norms, but to be liberated to play active and responsible roles in creating a participatory democracy. Bruner came to many of the same conclusions about mind and about education, not so much from his worries about the competencies one needed to be a citizen in a democracy, but rather from his worry that the intellectual aims of the school had been crushed by the weight of merely ‘acquired’ knowledge. Knowledge, separated from the experience of acquiring knowledge, that is, content separated from process, he saw as dead weight – the heavy hand of tradition. Bruner, like Dewey a half-century earlier, wanted to vault experience, sense-making, and discovery to the top of the agenda, to get the learner into the knowledge-making process, for ‘unfortunately, the formalism of school learning has somehow devalued intuition’ (Bruner 1960, p. 58). But The Process of Education was more than a defense of Dewey’s childcentered Progressivism. Dewey had concluded his famous 1902 essay The Child and the Curriculum with the exuberant claim: The case is of the Child. It is his present powers which are to assert themselves; his present capacities which are to be exercised; his present attitudes which are to be realized. And then continued: But save as the teacher knows, knows wisely and thoroughly, the raceexpression which is embodied in that thing we call the Curriculum, the teacher knows neither what the present power, capacity, or attitude is, nor yet how it is to be asserted, exercised, and realized. (Dewey 1976, p. 291)

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For Bruner, the two paragraphs would have been reordered. Bruner’s concern in The Process of Education was primarily with promoting educational excellence, and he looked for that in the advanced sciences whereas Dewey looked for it in the intuitions of the child. Of course both are essential; but the priorities had changed. One could say that Bruner’s early writing on education was as much a reaction to what was seen as too much child-centeredness as it was an advocacy of child-centeredness. Though sympathetic to natural development, Bruner thought that merely providing materials and encouragement would never do; more directive pedagogical involvement would be required. Educational historian Diane Ravitch (2000) concluded that at least some of the responsibilities for what is seen, if not the decline in standards then the somewhat cavalier attitude to them, can be laid at the feet of Dewey. Dewey’s project method, a method that allowed children to take more responsibility for their own learning, often resulted in products with charm but little intellectual content. Progressivism had degenerated into permissivism and with it the decline of academic content and academic standards. In fact the 1950s and 1960s were flooded with critical accounts of failing schools and failing standards, usually laid at the feet of Dewey and the Progressives. It remains unclear to this day whether or not such criticisms had merit. One of the few careful studies comparing a traditional academic program with a Progressive one, the celebrated EightYear Study in the 1940s, yielded no clear winners (Cremin 1961, p. 255). But no losers either! A thorough analysis of achievement trends (Berliner and Biddle 1995) showed that recent claims of declining standards were ungrounded. Ravitch’s criticisms of Dewey were not unlike those that educationists leveled at Bruner. David P. Ausubel (1961, 1968), who was best known for his work on meaningful verbal learning in the school, was critical of Bruner’s emphasis on discovery not because discovery was unimportant but because it left little place for direct teaching and reception learning and ‘most classroom instruction is organized along the lines of reception learning’ (1963, p. 17). Furthermore, Bruner’s emphasis on ‘generic coding systems’ was ‘unrealistic’ because it underestimated the importance of simply assimilating subject matter. Historian Mary Alice White (1966), in her review of Towards a Theory of Instruction, expressed considerable enthusiasm for Bruner’s ideas and yet acknowledged a certain ‘uneasiness’ about their generality and applicability, adding: ‘I really doubt that pupils can really think as historians unless they have the training of historians’ (1966, p. 78). In general, Ausubel, White, and others who studied learning in the school saw Bruner’s theories as too remote from the actual practices of schooling to be directly applicable.

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Dewey’s theory led to many curricular initiatives but produced little science. Dewey was a philosopher who tried to deduce the necessary implications of a set of assumptions about the competencies needed to perpetuate and enlarge a democratic society. Then, as now, some educational researchers hoped for a takedown of their opponents by discovering the one best method, ‘what works’ (see Slavin 2002 and Olson 2004 for a critical assessment). But whereas Dewey’s philosophy justified certain pedagogical innovations it was not based on an empirical science, whereas Bruner’s proposals were and led to a flurry of research that continues to thrive. So while Bruner’s fresh look may be read as a reprise of John Dewey theory it has quite different roots. There is a certain irony in the fact that it took psychologists more than a half-century to discover through research what Dewey already seemed to know by reflection. Agency, intentionality, subjectivity were concepts that Dewey justified because they were essential to the freedom and autonomy of citizens in a democracy. So the refrain that education is slow to pick up advances in science is, at least in this case, wide of the mark. Here educational theory led psychological theory by at least a half-century. The comparison is not entirely fair as psychology was busily defeating the idea of a spiritual realm that went beyond the natural, a realm that was thought of as the mental. Yet that very mentalism, now naturalized and freed from its otherworldly associations, was later rehabilitated by advances in the cognitive sciences. These advances are not without their critics who disparage this move as mere return to ‘folk psychology’ since it appeals to the common-sense notions of belief, desire, and intention. These are the concepts with which Dewey worked and that, dusted off and examined empirically, remain central to Bruner’s work and to the Cognitive Revolution. Dewey was influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, who in 1805 had argued that education is needed not merely to train children to play the particular social roles allotted to them by the larger society but rather to help them become all that of which they are capable as persons. In Kant’s words: ‘Man can only become man by education. He is merely what education has made of him’ (Kant 1960 (1805), p. 6). Education was to respect and foster individuality, to help children become the best they can possibly be. Dewey and the Progressives were, of course, the primary advocates of designing education to serve children rather than to shape them to the pre-existing needs of society. In fact, for Dewey, education of a certain sort was seen as a means for changing society, for making it more democratic. Bruner’s cultural psychology, on the other hand, is an attempt to put the relation between persons and society on a more scientific footing. But Bruner’s stance, it may be argued, is essentially a conservative one in that he sees mind as reflecting social and cultural practices and he rarely poses

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the individual as critic of those practices. This is not to say that Bruner the person is not an outspoken social critic – recall our earlier discussion of the Head Start and his concern for the exaggerated gap between rich and poor. Yet, unlike Dewey, Bruner sees education as social reproduction more than as the agent of social change. Again, this is because Bruner is primarily concerned with explaining minds not explaining social change. And as for Dewey, the failure to fully acknowledge schooling as an institutional practice with its own entitlements and obligations meant that Bruner’s views tended to be praised and then set aside while the ‘serious’ business of shaping schools to meet their state-mandated goals goes on unabated. This, as mentioned, had been the fate of Dewey, who as Scheffler (1974) noted failed to recognize schools as autonomous institutions which tended to accept whatever they found useful in meeting their mandated goals while giving lip service to utopian ideals. We consider this issue more fully in Chapters 8 and 9. The reforms that Dewey urged on education sprang from his views about democracy as much as they did from his views about children. Democracy, in Dewey’s eyes, was never complete but as open-ended and progressive as the sciences that it nourished. A thriving democracy required not only people who could fill professional roles but also persons who could find personal fulfillment by participating in the democratic process of working for conditions that increased justice and equality. If school was an apprenticeship to living in a democracy, it seemed obvious that schools themselves should be more democratic, that student interests should be respected, and their independence and initiatives be recognized. As long as the school sponsored personal growth and understanding, it followed that the social system itself would evolve towards becoming more democratic.1 Indeed, Bruner put the relation between individuals and societies on a different footing, seeing the two as mutually defining. He wrote: It is man’s participation in culture and the realization of his mental powers through culture that make it impossible to construct a human psychology on the basis of the individual alone . . . To treat the world as an indifferent flow of information to be processed by individuals each on his or her own terms is to lose sight of how individuals are formed and how they function. (Bruner 1990, p. 12) What educational reformers wanted from Bruner and what he attempted to deliver was a richer theory of mind that could help to enrich the intellectual life of the school. It was not a call to use the school to reform society but a call to make the most of the educational experience. And it was assumed that a better understanding of mind would be instrumental to this goal.

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Again, we must ask if this expectation was justified let alone met by the work of Bruner and those working within a cultural psychological tradition. It is not out of the question that schools could be more culturally sensitive but it is not clear that the school is willing to put up for negotiation the traditional goals of the school, namely, those of providing credentialed competencies mandated by the dominant society. Consequently, when Bruner turned to education he did not do it to revive a somnolent Deweyism but rather, because, like Dewey, he rejected the dominant psychological theories of learning and behavior and he was convinced that schools were in such a sorry state that something had to be done. He rejected as diffuse and static the notion of intelligence and other personality traits and he rejected the notion that learning was a simple product of the stimulus conditions, the lessons. He wanted ‘something more daring’ (1983a, p. 36), something that brought the mind into focus, something that recognized persons as free, intentional agents capable of acting and thinking. This put him on a collision course with the then dominant paradigms in psychology and especially educational psychology. Furthermore, there were important skirmishes even with the allies. (I interviewed Bruner about his indebtedness to Dewey and an edited transcription of that interview may be found in Appendix D.)

Bruner and Piaget The fact that Bruner’s cognitive theories were largely taken up by the Cognitive Revolution is not to say that important conceptual issues did not and do not remain unresolved. The purpose of any theory is not only to make sense of what is known but also to raise issues for further research and discussion. Certainly this was the case for the question of the role of education in cognitive growth. Bruner’s theory of the cognitive development of children in the preschool and early school years promised to provide a rapprochement between the internalist theory of Piaget, the theory that the learner’s own mental operations explained their progress through the various stages, with the externalist theory of Vygotsky, the theory that the culture, through teaching and education, accounted for progress through those stages. Bruner’s emphasis on culture and his sympathy for Vygotsky’s theory soon put him at odds with Piaget. Like Piaget and his long-time associate Barbel Inhelder, Bruner held the view that children construct their own understandings and that the growth of understanding is not simply incremental but stage-like. Piaget’s ‘genetic epistemology’ advanced the view that knowledge, whether in an organism, a mind, or a society, grows in distinguishable stages. Piaget

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saw the growth of knowledge as a biological function like any other and took it as the scientist’s task to characterize the development of that function. Piaget’s careful observation of children, including his own, led him, as we have seen, to distinguish four such stages – sensory-motor intelligence, preconcrete operational intelligence, concrete operational intelligence and formal operational intelligence – to describe cognition for, roughly, infancy, the pre-school years, the elementary school years and the high school years. Bruner’s own take on this scheme was influenced by his ideas of modes of representation and symbolic forms advanced by Nelson Goodman, a Harvard philosopher and friend (Goodman 1976). In Bruner’s hand, the stages became modes of representation that he labeled enactive, iconic, and symbolic forms of representation. The child would come to see the same thing differently depending on the mode of representation characteristic of his or her stage of development. For a middle school child, a tragedy would be seen as simply sad; for an adolescent it would be seen as sad but largely inevitable. In an early paper Bruner and I (Olson and Bruner 1974; Bruner and Olson 1978) elaborated on this view, pointing out that each of these modes of representation implied a particularly appropriate mode of instruction. If children represent ‘enactively’ the teacher’s role was primarily that of providing demonstrations and models for imitation; if the children represent ‘iconically’ the teacher’s role was primarily to provide working models, illustrations and depictions; if children represented ‘symbolically’ the teacher’s role was to provide reasons and verbal explanations. The link between conceptions of mind and pedagogy is an open and exciting topic that will come up later (see Bruner 1996, Chapter 2; Olson and Bruner 1996; and Chapter 9, this volume). However, a critical and unresolved issue was what advanced children from one stage to the next. It was on this question that Bruner ran into some disagreement with Piaget. Whereas Piaget saw cognitive transformations as spontaneous, internal reorganizations in the attempt to maintain equilibrium, Bruner saw them as the consequence of learning to deal with the world in terms of progressively more advanced cultural forms and cultural modes of representation. Bruner had even argued (1972) that the long period of dependence of human infants relative to other species was to be explained in part by the evolutionary advantage of having a long immature period during which one may acquire increasingly elaborate cultural knowledge. The impact of cultural forms on intellectual development, a view he shared with Vygotsky, Bruner called his Lamarckian intuition. Lamarck, as everyone who has had some encounter with biology will know, attempted to show that acquired characteristics could be inherited. That was why, it was thought, someone who became a great athlete may be more likely to have

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children who are also athletes. Experiments purporting to demonstrate that same principle in simpler species were later completely discredited. But Bruner added an interesting twist to the argument. While Bruner was Darwinian in agreeing that acquired properties could not be inherited biologically, they could, he argued, be inherited culturally, through education. This idea, stripped of all subtlety, has ‘morphed’ into the somewhat oversimplified idea of ‘memes’, ideas that are said to propagate themselves using people as their instruments. While one may indeed ‘inherit’ the knowledge of one’s culture, it is because both adults and children take considerable pain to propagate them, and create schools to see that ideas are passed on from generation to generation. Consequently, human development is in large part a matter of acquiring the accumulated knowledge and technologies of one’s ancestors. And acquiring them was what propelled cognitive growth: ‘taking over the stored representations of the culture and then achieving knowledge by reconstructing them’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 139). On this he parted company with Piaget. Bruner often phrased his disagreements with Piaget in terms of individual versus social development. He wrote: The world is a quiet place for Piaget’s growing child. He is virtually alone in it . . . He begins his journey egocentrically . . . others give him little help. The social reciprocity of infant and mother plays a very small role in Piaget’s account of development. Piaget’s children are little intellectuals, detached from the hurly-burly of the human condition. (1983a, p. 138) The different emphasis placed on internal versus external factors in mental growth not only led to disagreements in research but also in the emphasis each put on education. Bruner’s insistence on the importance of education for mental growth, the dominant theme of The Process of Education, conflicted with Piaget’s much more casual attitude to the effects of schooling. The difference in perspective played out in a line of research on children’s understanding of ‘conservation’, a topic famously introduced by Piaget that became widely known in America upon publication of John Flavell’s highly influential book The Development Psychology of Jean Piaget (1965). As mentioned, Bruner was greatly attracted by Piaget’s notion of stages of development, with knowledge taking different forms at each stage, but whereas for Piaget progress through these stages was natural and proceeded at its own pace, for Bruner development was a result of deliberate and systematic forms of enculturation. Indeed, for Bruner, it was enculturation itself that was natural. Bruner wrote that Piaget’s ‘was a needlessly quiescent account of development . . . Was there no way of tempting growth

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through systematic instruction?’ (Bruner 1980, p. 125). Piaget dismissed such a question as ‘la question americaine’. Bruner’s attempts at teaching had convinced him that instruction led development so long as the instruction fell within the limits of the comprehensible, what Vygotsky had called ‘the zone of proximal development’, a notion that leaves unresolved whether or not the learner is confined to a particular stage of development. And instruction could surely, Bruner argued, speed the transition from one stage of development to the next. Piaget had invented dozens of enchanting demonstrations of how children, although understanding much, failed to note many things that adults took for granted. Conservation of quantity, as mentioned earlier, was one of these tasks. Pre-school children are shown a beaker half-filled with water and then observe as the water is poured into a narrower but taller beaker. Then the children are asked, ‘Is there the same amount of water as before, or is there now more or less water?’ Until they are about five or six years old they tend to reply there is more ‘because it is higher’. Later they say, ‘It’s the same ’cause you just poured it.’ Conservation of mass tasks involved taking a ball of play-dough and then flattening it or breaking it into small pieces and asking ‘Is there more now or is it still the same?’ Again, children tend to be misled by appearances. Parents, believing their own children to be geniuses, often refuse to believe their children erred, insisting that the child was merely misled, but in fact, the findings are robust. (Try these on your own siblings or children. But don’t try to correct them; do as Piaget and Bruner did, try to figure out why they say what they do and then try to figure out the conditions under which they may change their minds. Then you too will be thinking like a child psychologist.) The question was: Could development be accelerated? As mentioned Piaget thought that only Americans were desperate to hurry their children along. Bruner, convinced on the importance of language, culture, and education in intellectual development not only thought that it could but also that it was important to do so. Cross-cultural studies, conducted with Patricia Greenfield (Greenfield 1966), had clearly demonstrated that schooled children in a traditional African society did far better on a variety of cognitive tasks than those who were not schooled. Among other things they were far more capable of ‘giving reasons for their beliefs’ than were unschooled children – surely that was proof enough that schooling mattered. But Bruner went further to claim that Piaget’s theory was faulty, a claim that Piaget apparently found unforgivable. Piaget had claimed that children’s understanding of conservation of quantity was the result of ‘internalized operations’, the action of pouring the liquid back and forth repeatedly and extracting the higher-level invariance, a kind of epiphany: ‘Eureka, it is

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the same amount’. Bruner claimed that it was a result of children’s coming to distinguish between ‘how things look’ and ‘how things really are’ (Bruner 1966d, p. 205), an understanding prompted by language. Bruner added an interesting twist to the conservation task. If you screened the new beaker as you poured the water, children would say it would be the same but when you showed them the higher water level in the new glass, they reverted to saying they were different. In fact, a full generation later the contrast between appearance and reality became the subject of a remarkable series of studies by John Flavell and his colleagues that helped formulate another important development, namely, children’s ‘theory of mind’ (Astington, Harris, and Olson 1988). On this point Bruner was right; pre-school children do indeed conflate appearance and reality, and he was right in saying that culture and language can enhance development. But it also is clear that while an impoverished culture can delay development, an enriched one does little to accelerate it. Development is step-wise as Piaget had insisted. There is still no consensus on the Piagetian view that mental operations are the result of ‘internalized actions’. The most common view, these days, is that all conservation tasks involve metarepresentation, the ability to represent or think about thoughts as well as about things. These judgements, such as true or false, looks like or really is, are higherorder cognitions that take as their objects other thoughts rather than the things themselves, and so are metarepresentational in form. Such metarepresentational judgements almost universally make their first appearance in children’s thinking at around the time Piaget suggested, late pre-school or early school years. Clearly there is something uniquely human about such judgements but theorists continue to argue about just how such judgements are made, why they are so late to appear, and what role a public language plays in their development (Astington and Baird 2005). Bruner dedicated Studies in Cognitive Growth, the book that reported these findings, to Piaget ‘in honor of his seventieth birthday’. But when it was presented to him at a luncheon at the International Congress of Psychology in Moscow in 1966 ‘It was a stiff lunch, for he did not like the book’ (Bruner 1980, p. 127). For some years, I myself, have wondered how a small theoretical difference could poison a close, productive working relation such as that between Bruner and Piaget. Perhaps Piaget’s European formal politeness was offended by the more assertive American style that Bruner uncharacteristically betrayed when he wrote: ‘We believe [Piaget] has missed the heart of conservation’ (p. 185). What was offered as an argument was perceived as an insult! Yet Bruner was the featured speaker at the celebrations in Geneva of the centennial of Piaget’s birth in 1996 and he remained a close friend of Piaget’s collaborator Barbel Inhelder until her death in 2003.

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Bruner and Vygotsky It is a fact that Bruner’s curriculum efforts and his writing on instruction never wavered from his insistence on the importance of instruction for development, a perspective he drew from Vygotsky. But it is equally true that he was less concerned with using instruction to advance children from one stage to another than in finding ways of providing instruction that exploited the intellectual resources at hand, as when he famously claimed that ‘any subject can be taught in an intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’ (Bruner 1960, p. 33). That is, the effort should be made to present or discuss an issue or problem in a form that children find engaging and comprehensible without giving up the goal of grasping the fundamentals of the subject. Although there is little doubt that cognitive development is in part a product of mastering the ways of the culture as Vygotsky had argued, a clear cognitive explanation of just how this occurs has yet to develop. It is a convenient shorthand to say that the child ‘internalizes’ the culture, or more cagily, that the child ‘appropriates’ cultural knowledge, or that children can acquire cultural knowledge so long as it falls within their ‘zone of proximal development’. None of these proposals is clear on how what is ‘out there’, in the practices of the culture, come to be ‘in here’, in the mind. Both Piaget’s claim that the internal reorganization of the child’s cognitions is what allows growth – the epiphanies mentioned above – and Bruner and Vygotsky’s claim that uptake of cultural products is what allows cognitive growth seem true, indeed obvious. Where is the hitch? One promising proposal, largely congruent with Bruner’s general theory, is that, in fact, the individual and the social are not as discrepant as they first appear. This idea is implied in the notion of intersubjectivity and it first became clear in the research on children’s understanding of false belief, when they acquired what is referred to as a ‘theory of mind’ (Perner 1991; Astington 1993). Experiments with four- and five-year-old children showed that children’s understanding of other’s minds was concurrent with their understanding of their own minds. That is, if they could understand that another person had a false belief, they could then, and only then, understand that they themselves may have had a false belief. This view was formalized in a model by Barresi and Moore (1996) in terms of an ‘intentional schema’ that coordinated one’s own first-person knowledge with third-person knowledge about the other. Simply put, knowledge of others – the cultural knowledge to which the child is attuned – is the very knowledge that is being reconstructed or reorganized internally by the child. Barresi (2005) has recently proposed that the newly discovered ‘mirror

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neurons’, neural structures that link the perception of the actions of others to the actions of oneself, may lie at the base of this mutuality and at the basis of intersubjectivity. Simple examples include why you tend to cry when you see someone else cry or why you lift your leg slightly when you see someone try to high-jump. So-called ‘microgenetic’ studies of development promise to advance our understanding of these issues. While there is no longer any dispute about the ongoing activity of the developing mind and of the agency of infants there is some question as to whether young children, as Bruner had argued, are best described as testing hypotheses. Hypotheses may more usefully be thought of as verbal propositions, the truth of which may be evaluated by gathering or appealing to evidence. Clearly, this is a conceptual process that is essential to scientific thinking and that schooling does much to enhance. Yet, even many high school students fail to distinguish their beliefs, hypotheses, or theories from the evidence that could be used to evaluate these beliefs and hypotheses. Consequently, it seems more likely that infants and young children have expectancies about what will happen next and how to achieve their goals or fulfill their desires. They begin to turn those expectancies into beliefs and hypotheses only when they become capable of expressing them in language and comparing them to the views held by others. It is not unreasonable to argue that their ability to formulate hypotheses and test theories develops along with other aspects of a theory of mind (Kuhn and Pearsall 2000), beginning when they are five or six years of age. Expectancies, on the other hand, are present from birth and are common to both humans and other animals. The conceptual issue closest to Bruner’s heart, a conceptual issue that is also the most important and most difficult to grasp, is the idea that children actually construct their own knowledge and understanding even while they are being taught. There is, he insists, no way for knowledge to get transferred into the child’s mind from the adult’s mind. Bruner talks of the learner’s role as meaning-making and later he talked of it as constructing one’s own narrative. The claim that the experiencer makes his or her own knowledge may strike you as counter-intuitive. Surely, you may say, you can just teach children some things. Indeed, you can. But when you are teaching, the learner is making something up on the basis of his or her prior experience in relation to what they are being taught and what they make up may or may not correspond to what the teacher had in mind. That is where prior knowledge, hopes, interests, and goals of the learner come into play. Children make up a representation of any new experience out of the internal resources of their minds; those resources determine how any experience is interpreted. A simple example: When you watch a movie and see someone in pain, you tend to experience it as their pain. You may

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think to yourself that you empathize with their pain. But, in fact, the pain you feel is your pain and it draws your tears. Their pain is not mysteriously transmitted into your body; your own body generated the painful feeling.2 The same is true for all knowledge. You may feel that you learned something from Bruner, and no doubt you did. But the cognitive fact is that, in learning it, you were busily constructing your own representation, your own version, your own knowledge. You were building it out of the resources at hand. This knowledge-building process, sometimes called constructivism, is at the heart of all learning. Constructivism is sometimes thought of as anti-realism as if our knowledge were all an imagined fantasy. But that is far from the case. What we make up with our minds, just as the theories we make up about nature, are about something real. That is what makes them true or false. So constructivism is not the threat to the possibility of knowledge that some critics make it out to be. (See Geertz 2001; Olson 2003, Chapter 5 for a discussion of this issue.) And what is this construction in aid of? In the service of one’s pragmatic aims. Bruner’s study of children’s language acquisition showed convincingly that the pragmatic functions of language, pointing out and requesting things, signaling greetings and agreements, tend to precede the acquisition of the linguistic means for expressing those pragmatic functions. His hypothesis was that pragmatics, that is language use, provided the scaffold for the acquisition of language structure, that is, grammar and vocabulary. The acquisition of language structure was instrumental in achieving pragmatic communicative goals. So too for the acquisition of all knowledge. Children will acquire the structures they need to achieve pragmatic functions; consequently, all learning is goal directed. For example, it is relatively easy to learn punctuation if one understands what purpose it serves in making meaning clear. Scientific knowledge will be understood to the extent that the learner grasps how such knowledge helps to do something or to explain something. This is the limit of didacticism. Simply setting out knowledge to be learned without the learner grasping how it can be used in his or her own thinking is unlikely to produce much learning. Thus Bruner’s pragmatism goes deeper than an affinity to William James and John Dewey and other Pragmatists (Menand 2001). And yet pragmatism frames Bruner’s entire discourse, of language, of cognition, of education, and of philosophy. Bruner’s views have found a place both in psychology and in the discipline of educational psychology where the idea of children constructing their own knowledge with the aid of the scaffolding efforts of teachers, as well as the importance of classroom discourse, have considerable currency. Certainly such concepts have become a part of teachers’ understanding of

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teaching and learning and there is some consensus that such ideas actually improve their teaching. The heightened levels of classroom discourse are of great value both for motivation and knowledge construction. There is some risk, however, that the belief that children construct their own knowledge could be used to justify a kind of laissez-faire pedagogy with a serious loss of accountability.3 In fact, the idea of constructivism may be in danger of becoming a kind of fetish as did Dewey’s ‘project method’. Followers of Dewey became so enamored of projects that they railed against the use of textbooks as a source of knowledge altogether. If the cognitive theory of constructivism turns into a pedagogy of constructivism it may swamp the equally important pedagogy of didactic teaching. While every idea deserves consideration, schools also have a responsibility for true and valid or warranted ideas and sometimes the best means of establishing those ideas and standards is through directly teaching them. Even direct didactic instruction, recall, assumes that the learner is constructing his or her own understanding and it deserves a place in the educator’s repertory along with more open-ended pedagogical means. Again, judgement is everything. There is no question that Bruner’s psychology has become part of the mainstream or standard view of teaching and learning. This is nowhere more clearly indicated than in the synoptic account of the psychology relevant to learning published by the National Research Council of the US under the title How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and the School (Bransford, Brown and Cocking 2000). The volume emphasizes how learners construct their understandings in terms of the knowledge they already possess and how they may fail to grasp the new concepts or revert to their older misconceptions outside the classroom. Second, the book emphasizes how facts learned must be part of a conceptual framework, what Bruner called a ‘generic coding system’, if those facts are to be understood, retrieved, and applied. And third, it advocates a metacognitive approach to instruction that allows students to learn to take control of their own learning by encouraging them to define their own learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them. These summary principles, now justified by overwhelming evidence, could easily have come from Bruner’s own writings. The volume includes many interesting examples of ongoing research inspired by these principles and their relevance to the context of classroom learning. But Bruner’s aspirations go further than those of working out law-like relations between teaching and learning, the traditional goal of educational psychology, to those of rethinking and reconfiguring schooling as an institutional practice more generally. Reconfiguring the institution of the school has long been the rallying point of reformers everywhere and when Bruner published The Process of Education it led to a number of initiatives, including the reform of early education in Ontario, Canada (The Hall-Dennis Report,

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Provincial Committee, 1968). Yet, within a decade those reforms were seen as an assault on standards and accountability and they were scrapped. Such are the difficulties of bringing original ideas into an existing institutional structure. And nowhere are these issues more clearly drawn than in the attempts to implement in the school the ideas Bruner explored in the lab. That is our next concern.

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Chapter 7

Institutional Uptake: Bruner’s Theory and Educational Reform

What we need is a school reform movement with a better sense of where we are going, with deeper convictions about what kind of people we want to be. (Bruner 1996, p. 118) While there was wide agreement with the goal Bruner set out in The Process of Education, that of raising the ‘intellectual aims’ of the school, the apparent agreements soon fell apart. On the one side were those who believed that high intellectual aims were to be met through setting higher standards and testing students to see that they had been achieved, and on the other side were those who believed that the aims themselves had been defined too narrowly. These were two quite different notions of what was meant by ‘higher’. The one wanted a higher score on the skills already being taught, the other wanted to achieve higher, more intellectual goals, goals such as thinking that previously had been ignored. Bruner advocated not just more knowledge but more epistemology, more attention to how we know, the goals associated with ‘process’. He later expressed these higher cognitive goals in terms of engaging the hypothetical mode of thinking and the narrative mode of discourse. The distinction between these two conceptions of ‘higher’ is lost when knowledge is thought of in purely quantitative terms. Higher simply means more and more can be translated into a test score on a single scale. Reading ability, to the test maker, is considered to be a single competence and persons have more or less of it, ignoring the fact that one may read poetry, another prose, one science, another literature, one as a believer, another as a cynic, and so on. Ease of assessment reinforces the interpretation of higher as more with the result that the new intellectual aims urged on the school by Bruner have tended to be sidelined if not ignored. Legislation enacted as No Child Left Behind (2002) in the United States reflects this trend in that it specifies a level on a single scale in each domain that is to

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be achieved as a basis for entitlement to educational resources. No points are awarded for student knowledge, satisfaction, curiosity, excitement, garrulousness, or sophistry, let alone for music, art, drama, or sport, activities known to be important to mental growth (Tishman 2000). Score one for the traditionalists; zero for the progressives. An acquaintance with the history of educational reform over the past century makes the traditionalist victory largely predictable. Early in the twentieth century John Dewey had pointed out the dead end of behaviorism and had offered an alternative conception of education and an alternative pedagogy for achieving its goals. Dewey’s ‘Progressivism’, as Howard Gardner has written, was ‘America’s gift to the wider educational world’ (Gardner 2001, p. 128). And as we have noted, Bruner’s educational writing falls comfortably within the Progressivism tradition with its emphasis on active, intentional learners engaged in making sense of their world in the service of their own purposes and goals. But in spite of Dewey’s liberalizing views, within a generation Progressivism was relegated to a few private schools while the vast majority of public schools in America, indeed worldwide, fell under the spell of an increasingly bureaucratized school system designed to achieve a small set of explicitly formulated goals, goals defined in terms of specific competencies such as reading and writing and specific domains of knowledge such as science and literature. How are we to understand this neglect?

Schooling and the Margin for Reform The intellectual ferment in the latter part of the twentieth century that provided a favorable environment for Bruner’s fresh look at education must be understood in relation to the longer term, historical framework of public education, a framework, the importance of which, Bruner acknowledged in the epigram to this chapter. As we shall see, however, even the best new ideas have the effect of altering the course of an enterprise of titanic proportions only a degree or two, enough to avoid disaster but rarely enough to put it on a new course. Schooling is such a familiar experience to all of us that it is difficult to realize that it is only over the last century that schooling has become an essential part of growing up. Western democracies are all remarkably similar in the institutions that they have created for the education of children. It was only after the French Revolution in 1789 that the new Republic declared the importance of a publicly supported educational system that could turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ who would contribute to the national economy, pay their taxes and, if necessary, defend their borders (Weber

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1976; Chartier and Hebrard, 2001). In other nations as well, school systems were legislated into existence, school buildings were constructed, teachers trained, examinations set, and credentials offered. Typical of this development in North America, is the history of public schooling in Ontario, Canada and its move to publicly funded, universalized, and later compulsory, education. Canadian models for schooling were drawn largely from American sources with due regard for Canada’s sovereignty and its status as a British territory. In Upper Canada in 1807, for example, the District Schools Act, generally known as the Grammar School Act, was passed marking the beginning of government involvement in what had been ‘chiefly a local and parental concern’ (Houston and Prentice 1988, p. 30). The responsibility for who a child was to become was passed, in large part, from the family to the state. Typically, the goals of the public school reflected national priorities of the emerging modern nation states. In the eighteenth century these focused primarily on obedience, piety, cleanliness, and good behavior and such knowledge as was thought to be useful and morally uplifting. A favored method was the Lancastrian method by means of which one teacher could teach a hundred or more children in a single classroom. Lessons would be set out, memorized by learners, and recited individually to a monitor. By the beginning of the nineteenth century such methods seemed too militaristic and oppressive. Consequently, the goals of the school were broadened, the conception of the learner changed, and the school’s resources changed with the increasing availability of inexpensive textbooks. Schools in Ontario, for example, put intellectual aims above behavioral ones and adopted methods of teaching said to be more suited to engaging lively minds than to filling passive receptacles. The so-called ‘object method’ brought real objects of interest into the classroom and the teacher was expected to engage in whole-class discussion and exploration with the children. Intellectual aims were framed less as mastery of content and more as the development of the mind. This shift reflected the dominant psychology of the time, namely, faculty psychology, later reconfigured to become the theory of mental abilities, and the information taught took second place to ‘the harmonious and proper development of the faculties of the mind’ as the chief superintendent of the public schools of Ontario, Egerton Ryerson, said in 1840. Traditional teaching, it was suggested, exercised only the memory faculty; object teaching would exercise the faculties of thinking and judgement. The procedure was not always successful. One superintendent reported a teacher ‘asking of a class, say, 100 questions, and answering 80 or 90 of them himself, not in brief and simple propositions, but with many explanations and much lecturing which drown their pupils’ apprehension and destroy

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their interest and attention’ (Houston and Prentice 1988, p. 259). Perhaps you once had a teacher like that! On the basis of an examination of the school superintendent’s reports and diaries of the period, Houston and Prentice (1988) were able to show that the realities of the school rarely met the aspirations of the society. They report that Ryerson, the superintendent of schools, faced the enormous problem of bringing some order or system to common schooling: ‘The anarchy had become proverbial; virtually no two schools were alike; facilities were haphazard at best; the teachers untrained, pupils of all ages (and both sexes) generally were jumbled together and, worse still, each attended according to necessity or whim’ (p. 237). A painting by Dutch artist Jan Steen of A School for Boys and Girls, painted in 1617 and hanging in the National Gallery of Scotland, shows that the problem was not unique to Canada. The picture captures perfectly the properties of a typical ungraded school of the period with its ‘islands of calm, concentration, and absorbed interest . . . interspersed among the foolery, laziness, and discord’ ( J. H. Astington 2002). The solution, universally adopted, was the increasing reliance on the new availability of published school textbooks that were ordered for difficulty and cheap enough for schools to purchase multiple copies. Houston and Prentice (1988, p. 253) recount the experience of one Ellen Bowes on taking over her first school in 1855: She encountered a class of forty-two students, some reading aloud, some talking, some had slates, some stood up by the teacher and read to him . . . The teacher kept order by the vigorous use of a cane. Her first step was to classify the students into groups on the basis of the graded reading series and then impose an order of silence. As Houston and Prentice (1988, p. 237) noted, ‘school textbooks proved to be a key element in Ryerson’s design for school improvement’. The role of textbooks in ordering school experience is often thought secondary to the more conspicuous factors as increasing urbanization, mercantilism, social demands, and expert public leadership. Figures like Horace Mann in the United States and Egerton Ryerson in Canada are thought to have given the school its defining properties and its established place in society. Their leadership, however important, was not what gave schools their modern character. It was the availability of books, one per student, that allowed children to work quietly at their desks. It was the books, graded for difficulty, that invited the classification of children into grades and levels. Further, the books defined the content for which a student could be held accountable and the standard against which student performance could be judged. And as the

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teacher was the proprietor of that knowledge, the teacher gained a new professional status. As one Ontario teacher in 1856 said to a student whose parents had taken an interest in their son’s education, ‘tell your father that it is not for him to say what you study’ (Houston and Prentice 1988, p. 195). Furthermore, the textbooks had an enormously universalizing effect. In Ontario alone, by 1866 all but 54 of the roughly 4,000 common schools used the same set of textbooks (Houston and Prentice 1988, p. 238). This universalizing pattern of adoption resembled that of Comenius’ Orbis pictus, the seventeenth-century textbook that was translated into virtually every European language and adopted as a standard for almost every school. Graded series of readers, translated and appropriately refined, became the common currency of educational systems throughout America, Western Europe and within a few years around the world. A common hierarchically organized school system with more or less common goals, a common set of graded textbooks, and shared means of assessment, gave schools around the world a similarity best described as ‘institutional isomorphism’ – all schools, the world over, are now much the same. The isomorphism is now sufficient that meaningful comparisons can be made of children across some 41 different nations by means of the international tests sponsored by UNESCO and the OECD. Truly, the world has become homogeneous at least in regard to common schooling. It is this universalism of programs, books, and assessments that makes reform extremely difficult; nations are horrified of losing their rank in international comparisons! Not only are schools much the same, they are equally resistant to major reforms, even such enlightened ones as offered by Bruner and Dewey. This is not to say that major reforms have not been offered, reforms such as privatizing schooling, turning the administration of some schools to particular ethnic or religious groups, playing schools off against each other, funding students rather than schools, and so on. This is a large literature but the results are somewhat ironic (Tyack and Cuban 1995). Schools do well as long as they believe they are on the cutting edge, regardless of that edge; when enthusiasm fades the reforms fade with them. As long as the goals are fixed and modes of assessment set, schools tend to homogeneity. They are not only much the same, but also the purposes for which the reform was imposed, namely, reducing failure and raising standards, are rarely affected. Dewey’s progressivist reforms, including the child-centered movement, the subordination of content to method, and the broadening of criteria to be monitored for competence, while endorsed by educators, were resisted by a large segment of the public. Furthermore, the evidence was ambiguous. Consider in more detail the earlier mentioned and frequently cited eight-year study (Lagemann 2000, p. 141) that pitted the claims of the progressivists against those of the traditionalists. Thirty public and private

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alternative high schools implemented a progressivist curriculum over an eight-year period that integrated subject areas and encouraged the arts as well as community involvement. The performance of graduates of these programs at college entry was then compared to that of matched samples of students graduating from traditional schools. Performance differences were slight, although students from progressive schools were found to be more interested in the arts and community activities. Noteworthy was the fact that a decade after the conclusion of the experiment, little trace of these reforms remained (Tyack and Cuban 1995, p. 100). While it seemed meaningful at the time to conduct large-scale experiments to see if, in general, progressive schools were superior to traditional ones, such studies no longer seem appropriate nor are they suggested by Bruner’s theories. Bruner’s theories are more relevant to specific, pointed, well-defined research of the kinds described above. School comparisons hide all the variables that Bruner thought most worthy of study, namely, those aspects of the process such as agency, intersubjectivity, and deep understanding. Bruner’s agenda, unlike Dewey’s, was to improve certain aspects of schooling not to restructure it completely. Yet, the existing structure of the school and the school system determine, in large part, what aspects of Bruner’s, and for that matter Dewey’s, views are taken up and which are rejected.

On Discovery Learning One of the pedagogical initiatives set out by Bruner in The Process of Education that did find a place in educational theory and practice was the emphasis on discovery. Discovery learning is now a part of every educational psychology textbook and part of the vocabulary of every teacher. It is also given some place in the school curriculum, often in the form of guided discovery. While Bruner gave the topic a new urgency, discovery was in fact a return to a Deweyan theme. In Democracy and Education (1980, p. 257), Dewey distinguished traditional ‘logical’ methods of instruction with what he called the ‘psychological’ method, one modeled on the natural sciences, and relying heavily on experiment and discovery. Critics at the time were sympathetic but not convinced. Hirst (1967, p. 58) conceded: ‘Certainly discovery is one way of learning, but it is not the only way, and whether or not it is in general the best way, is an open question that Dewey never seems to consider.’ Bruner’s advocacy of discovery learning has met much the same fate. So what is its place in schooling? There is no escaping the satisfaction and the memorability of conclusions that one has discovered for oneself or with a group of like-minded others.

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But discovery is difficult to engineer and it is time-consuming. Sometimes children can be led to the brink but still fail to make the leap and the teacher is driven to making hints or, in many cases, pointing out the solutions. A sound pedagogical device is to let the students find out for themselves by looking up information in the text or on the internet. Looking up is hardly synonymous with discovery but has an equally important place in pedagogy. This was the conclusion reached by the many critics of discovery learning when Bruner made it a focus of his own pedagogy. For Bruner discovery was not the result of random ‘hacking about’ but the search for answers to questions or for explanatory theories or for evidence for or against one’s theories. Critics such as Friedlander (1965) and Ausubel (1961) criticized both the assumption that discovery results in deeper understanding and that it is a realistic alternative to straightforward teaching. Others such as Dearden (1967) argued that discovery may be relied on in the pre-school but as education becomes more planful, discovery should be thought of as guided discovery and it should hold a place along with exposition, explanations and systematic instruction. And, I would add, reading. What is the relation between discovering for oneself or with one’s group and being told about, or reading about, a solution? Put another way, what is the difference between discovery and learning from books or from teaching? If the goal is framed as one of understanding rather than merely remembering what someone said, the difference is less pronounced. Discovery and teaching both require that the learner construct an understanding. Recall that learning is building a model in the mind. Building a mental model that explains the phenomenon is very satisfying, which is to say, understanding is an emotional experience. The difference between exposition and discovery, then, boils down to a difference in the size of what is called the problem space. Discovery involves a large problem space – many hypotheses are equally plausible; exposition involves a smaller problem space, fewer hypotheses are plausible because the teacher has carefully prepared the ground. Bruner pushed for the larger problem space and its commodious opportunities for hypotheses, stories, and discourse. Hence, there is an important place for both discovery and teaching; both are routes to understanding. As with Dewey’s project method, there is an important place in education for hypothesis testing and discovery learning; the mistake is to take either as the method, certainly not a mistake that either Dewey or Bruner made. Yet as Bruner argued, when children find out that they are actually capable of inventing hypotheses and comparing their hypotheses with those held by others and revising them in the light of new data, they are learning something in addition to the content, they are learning to think. In fact,

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Bruner (1986, p. 127) returned to the topic of discovery learning in the context of a more general discussion of hypothetical speech and its use in creating wonder and possibility. He wrote: Some years ago I wrote some very insistent articles about the importance of discovery learning – learning on one’s own, or as Piaget put it later (and I think better), learning by inventing. What I am proposing here is an extension of that idea, or better a completion. My model of the child in those days was very much in the tradition of the solo child mastering the world by representing it to himself in his own terms. In the intervening years I have come increasingly to recognize that most learning in most settings is a communal activity, a sharing of the culture. It is not just that the child must make his knowledge his own, but that he must make it his own in a community of those who share his sense of belonging to a culture. It is this that leads me to emphasize not only discovery and invention but the importance of negotiating and sharing – in a word, of joint culture creating as an object of schooling and as an appropriate step en route to becoming a member of the adult society in which one lives out one’s life. There is no doubt as to the intellectual satisfaction of discovery, its uniqueness in provoking thought, nor to its usefulness as a method of teaching. The problem arises only when it is taken as the one best method rather than seen as an important option available to the teacher to be used with discretion depending on topic, resources, talents, and time. Discovery is important but so too is reading. And sometimes the best results are obtained when the two work together. Bruner never intended discovery learning as a panacea but rather as a means of making learning more in tune with the learning that goes on in the advanced sciences, where thinking is at a premium. Yet, faced with accountability for achieving fixed standards, discovery has come to be seen as a frill rather than an essential.

Discourse and Learning A further pedagogical suggestion that has been taken up by the schools is the importance of discourse. Although Bruner developed this theme in The Process of Education and in his later writings (Bruner 1996, Chapter 9) it is one that has much in common with Dewey’s emphasis on the importance of classroom discourse. The tradition of quiet classrooms, introduced as we saw in the interest of management, has been relaxed as it became clear that

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children learn much by expressing their ideas and critically discussing their ideas with other children as well as with the teacher. Educational theory and educational programs, since Bruner, have come to place greater emphasis on the processes of education, on the ‘hypothetical mode’ of classroom discourse, and on what is called ‘critical thinking’, the kind of thinking that is useful for any serious intellectual discourse. Bruner’s emphasis was on thinking within disciplines and encouraging the expression of diverse perspectives on the intellectual topic at hand rather than through teaching thinking as a subject in its own right. Offering hypotheses and learning how to evaluate them is an important part of learning to think critically. Janet Astington and I (Olson and Astington 1990) have elaborated on this topic by arguing that learning to use the metalanguage for talking about beliefs and reasons for believing, concepts such as suggest, claim, infer , acknowledge, allege, and conclude is itself learning to think about the thinking of oneself and others. Tishman, Perkins, and Jay (1995, p. 8) showed how teachers could create a culture of thinking in their classrooms by framing questions in terms of hypotheses, evidence, theories, and reasons for believing. One major difficulty raised by a new emphasis on the hypothetical mode, that is, on the process of thinking and learning as distinguished from the content learned, is the difficulty of assessing whether or not an improvement in thinking has been achieved. It is a straightforward matter to measure knowledge of a particular content but it is far less clear how one would go about measuring whether children had learned to think imaginatively and critically about that content. Hence, the simple issue of accountability tends to drive out the very processes that Bruner has emphasized. It may be argued that if the hypothetical mode was used more widely children would become more adept at expressing and evaluating their ideas and this would in itself help with the mastery of content. This, however, remains a conjecture. While it is entirely possible that an improved pedagogy based on the hypothetical mode will in fact improve student learning as measured by objective tests, two other possibilities may be mentioned. One is to acknowledge that the ability to entertain and evaluate possibilities is a valued educational goal in its own right and then to devise new objective measures of students’ ability to think, to advance and evaluate hypotheses, to invent possible scenarios and plausible stories. It is not clear that such objective measures could actually be invented. The other is to adopt less formal methods of assessment, including student engagement and student satisfaction, to complement the more formal objective assessments. Setting the processes of learning and thinking on the same status as acquiring specific skills and knowledge would be to revise the very goals of schooling. Schooling, as Dewey urged, should be a worthwhile experience in itself rather than simply as training for some

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specific outcome or some future world. Surely childhood is valuable in its own right and schooling should be a satisfying and intellectually challenging experience in itself, quite independently of the effectiveness of discovery or any other pedagogical method for instilling content knowledge. This is the view that would be endorsed by both Dewey and Bruner.

Bruner and the Prospects for School Reform A cynical friend of mine once remarked that good ideas are a dime a dozen. The problem, he suggested, was in making a good idea have an impact. Bruner’s ideas are both original and challenging but their impact, with the notable exceptions mentioned above, is less than conspicuous. Are the ideas at fault or are the schools at fault? The standard claim is that educators are unacquainted with the research and therefore fail to implement the best ideas. Indeed, a large part of educational research is devoted to the search for ‘What works?’ which is to say, the search for the best method under the assumption that when it is discovered it could be implemented universally. When research reveals new facts, it is assumed that schools will come around to reflect those discoveries. Bruner has contributed a new understanding of cognitive growth, and it is hoped that with this new understanding schools will change to accommodate these advances. If they fail to it is the failure of the schools. But it is equally plausible that even brilliant research is often of a form that is not compatible with the set of constraints within which schools operate. Schools display both a degree of stability and an occasional vulnerability to dramatic change but the role of ideas, even brilliant ones, in either preserving stability or precipitating change remains unclear. When schools refuse to change and when they ignore the research, as they did in the case of Dewey and as they appear to do in the case of Bruner, it may be the fault of the theory. The research findings may not be appropriate to existing structures of the school system. The fact that schools are difficult to change combined with the public sentiment that schools need reform has fueled a rich tradition of research on educational reform. For well over a century researchers have searched for appropriate ways of defining the goals of schooling and for the most effective means for achieving those goals. As we have seen it was a concern for higher intellectual standards, provoked in part by the Cold War, that led Bruner to become involved in education. At other times it was, as we have also seen, the needs of the nation state for a loyal and competent citizenry, at other times a concern for deviancy and crime, and still at others for truancy and dropouts. Other reforms sprang from the availability of a

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new teaching resource, the graded level textbooks. And some reforms rose from the increasing professionalism and independence of the teachers. Those reforms that succeeded in taking hold had to do with making the system more coherent and manageable and comprehensive. These included a bureaucratic organization, graded textbooks with specified content, and systems of appraisal that indicated whether or not the schools met their mandated goals. Other even brilliant proposals, while given lip service, fell on stony ground. Early in the twentieth century education became the subject of extensive research, conducted with a view to improving the quality of schooling. Ellen Lagemann (2000) reviewed that century of research and concluded that reform has been dominated by a tradition traceable, not to Dewey, but to his contemporary, E. L. Thorndike and his successes in the field of tests and measurement. Anything that exists exists in some amount, he had claimed, and this included psychological traits and learning outcomes. Under Thorndike’s influence, tests were constructed to measure not only the outcomes of education but also the factors that contribute to those outcomes. Lagemann described this as a ‘management’ approach to research in that its goal was to isolate the factors that account for, and thereby predict, the outcomes of schooling. This knowledge then allows for the management and control of at least some of those factors in the effort to better meet the goals of schooling. Such research allows the fine-tuning of this institutional function. But as Lagemann further pointed out, the dominance of the Thorndike technical model of measurement and prediction has eclipsed more liberal research that is more ‘genuinely investigatory in an open-ended, playful way . . . research that is aimed at understanding more so than at control tended to be eclipsed’ (Lagemann 2000, p. 236). She added: The technical, individualistic orientation of scholarship in education helped school administrators become competent managers, who could calculate budget efficiencies, formulate regulations, and otherwise oversee, regularize, and maintain the stability of a complex organization . . . But it did not provide them with the insights and self-confidence that might have helped them become leaders able to guide school boards as well as policy makers at all levels of government. (2000, p. 237) Lagemann called for research on broader, less technocratic, more situated and developmentally oriented conceptions of education that explore the relations between school and society and between researchers in education and those in allied disciplines. All these are needed, she argued, if education is to achieve recognition as an intellectually respectable domain of

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scholarship. For these reasons she was enthusiastic about the proposals offered by Bruner. Bruner (1996, pp. 116–17), too, contrasted what he called ‘curriculum reform’, reform designed to alter the educational experience with what he called ‘governors’ reform’ that focused exclusively on improving assessed outcomes. He added: ‘What we need is a school reform movement with a better sense of where we are going, with deeper convictions about what kind of people we want to be.’ Another distinguished educational theorist, Lee Cronbach (1975), a leader in the tests and measurement domain, made much the same point, acknowledging that the research program directed at discovering law-like regularities between treatments and outcomes had not helped to develop the explanatory concepts needed to ‘help people to use their heads’, and added: ‘I am therefore ambivalent about psychologists’ quest for lawlike propositions . . . Psychological findings are contextual’ (p. 126). Bruner’s fresh look fits this prescription exactly and so has contributed to the scholarship that Lagemann and Cronbach called for. But while these contributions have indeed given educational research a new standing among the disciplines and equipped teachers with a new vocabulary, it is unclear that they have advanced the practice of education. Educational practice remains firmly in the hands of the managerial tradition with its eye on the single criterion of higher achievement test scores. The research tradition that evolved to meet these management objectives was, as mentioned, Thorndike’s test-based psychology. Thorndike’s laws of learning treated the mind as purely reactive rather than as active and his theory of persons was limited to causal traits and abilities that defined dimensions on which persons could be tested and ranked, as more or less bright, for example. Outcomes of learning were products of these stimulating conditions, that is, lessons, and measurable factors in the learner, that is, their traits. Non-personal factors such as social class could also enter the account. The main requirement was that any factor be measurable, preferably on a single dimension such as IQ or reading ability. Just as in the natural sciences, in which one could find the laws relating pressure and temperature to the volume of a gas, so too one could determine the relations between the instruction and the characteristics of the learner on the learning outcomes measured by a test. This ‘predict and control’ perspective was both compatible with the traditional conception of knowledge and amenable to statistical research. With such a model one could not only account for learning but also use the results to assign children to grade levels, to award credentials, to judge schools and other managerial functions. Consequently ‘Edward L. Thorndike, the Teachers College psychologist, “won” and the philosopher John Dewey “lost”’ (Lagemann 2000, p. xi).

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There was no need to point out, as Dewey had, that children, too, had interests and goals, that they could take responsibility for their own discourse and their own learning, that they had to form their own understandings, and that what they understood depended upon what they already knew and so on. As long as the testing provided useful objective information for managing the functioning of the school, for passing or holding back students, for judging the success of the teacher, for explaining failure by appeal to the factors that correlated with test scores, such research was, and continues to be, considered a success. Dewey was interested in persons in a democratic society not in statistical norms. He was interested in what children thought and why they did so, and how an environment could allow them to think more productively and validly and with some e´ lan. But success of a program based on such an interest was difficult to evaluate by means of standardized tests because not every child was assumed to have learned precisely the same thing or to have provided exactly the same answers. So although teachers may be able to hold children accountable for what they did and learned, there was no metric that management could use to hold the school or school system accountable or to compare one class or one school or one child to another. Dewey did not see that as a problem. In fact, he urged the state to get rid of middle levels of supervisory bureaucracy and to focus attention on the quality of the interactions between the teacher and the child. Bureaucracies, however, demand accountability and monitoring and it was the needs of the system as a whole that eventually sidelined Dewey. When Dewey wrote, schools and school systems were more local and had yet to fall completely into the systematic bureaucracies – with common curricula and common standards – they have now become. Classrooms are identical across not only school systems but also across nations and increasingly across the world, with an enormous gain in accountability. Accountability, at least, for the achievement of a narrowly defined set of highly valued, if somewhat superficial, goals. But any attempt at reform, it seems, has to be seen as not jeopardizing that accountability. The school has its government-specified responsibilities, which, understandably, it is reluctant to compromise. Dewey failed to recognize that schools are now semi-autonomous systems with their own structure and obligations and they are not readily changed. As Ryan (1995, p. 369) noted, Dewey ‘took for granted a malleability and predictability in institutional arrangements that all experience refutes’. Is there any reason to suspect that Bruner’s progressivism would succeed where Dewey’s had failed? Bruner’s initiatives, like Dewey’s, ran into institutional constraints. But while Bruner was more sympathetic to high intellectual aims that would meet fixed standards and objective assessments, his proposals ran into

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opposition from conservative elements in society that again asserted the value of achieving fixed knowledge outcomes rather than the doubts invited by critical thinking. More under suspicion was the goal of his program Man: A Course of Study, namely, to teach children that man was one species among others. As we saw, the opposition was sufficiently strong to force the National Science Foundation to cut its support for the program. Although the program reaped many honors and generated a useful public debate, it was eventually drowned by conservative politicians and a reactionary public. Why was it that the high intellectual goals that Bruner, like Dewey before him, aspired to, have been set aside while the building of more highly organized institutional systems with universalized goals, fixed programs, and regimens of testing continue to thrive? Lagemann (2000) suggests that educational research dominated by such management issues as sorting children into levels and groups, stating stepwise goals, controlling, so far as possible, the factors that contribute to group achievement levels is unfortunate. She suggests: The most powerful forces have [pushed educational scholarship] in an unfortunate direction – away from the close interactions with policy and practice and toward excessive quantification and scientism . . . the forces favoring a narrowly individualistic, behaviorally oriented, and professionalized conception of educational study were sufficiently strong . . . to marginalize those people who favored broader, less technocratic, more situated and developmentally oriented conceptions of education. (Lagemann 2000, p. xi) Bruner’s focus was on improving the quality of learners’ experiences and their achievement of worthwhile goals. Identifying ‘successful schools’ as synonymous with ‘successful learners’ puts an undue emphasis on comparative test scores. Rather than aspire to be the top ranked in reading or mathematics, he argued, the school should aspire to those topics that reading and mathematics are instrumental to, namely, a deep understanding of the physical and social world and the enjoyment that comes from that deeper understanding. The focus shifts from the school to the person. The traditional goal of educational theory to ‘predict and control’ a learner’s behavior neglects, indeed sacrifices, that person’s autonomy and freedom. That trade-off was welcomed by Thorndike and the behaviorists but was repellant to Bruner who saw learning as a matter of acquiring knowledge that increased the learner’s autonomy and self -control. Education was to be not a matter of controlling behavior but encouraging thinking. The goals of the school system and the goals of the reformers seem at loggerheads. And one cannot but be sympathetic to Bruner’s concerns and goals.

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Yet, even if an improved understanding of learners is possible, it is not clear that such knowledge, generated by the best research, will have an impact on the practicalities of schooling for the reasons we listed earlier. Schooling is an institutional practice that has been shaped up to meet a number of social constraints and it is willing to take on board only those initiatives that affect the achievement of their mandated goals, including higher scores on specified tests. And it is not clear that research, even that inspired by Bruner, has the instrumental value of raising those scores. As we shall see, his proposals may have more to do with revising our conceptions of the goals of education than with improving the methods for their achievement.

The Reception of MACOS The intellectual aspirations of Man: A Course of Study (Bruner 1966c) (MACOS) to turn learners into knowledgeable thinkers by reducing the gap between the activities of learners and those of researchers working at the frontiers of their fields, immediately gripped the younger generation of educators. It gave educational theory a vigorous and pioneering new frontier and it added an excitement to learning that contrasted sharply with the tedium of traditional school learning designed to insure uptake rather than thought. Yet even before the new curriculum could be adopted by state Boards of Education it was assaulted as dangerous to young minds, as a threat to local autonomy, and as a misuse of public funds. How could something so idealistic be received as an instrument of oppression? How could something designed to open minds be seen as an instrument for indoctrination? Yet it is not difficult to imagine that if MACOS were invented even today it may fall foul of the political imbroglio between liberals and conservatives (recall the recent debates about creationism) and, even more so, of the debates over accountability for learning the mandated curriculum (think of the ongoing debates over testing for specific skills). Part of the explanation for the failure of MACOS to become a permanent and important part of American public school education was its revolutionary aspiration. Not only students, but also parents and teachers had difficulty in thinking of man, or as we would now prefer to say, human, as just one species of animal alongside fish and baboons. To the general public, men (humans) are not animals, period. Second, they had difficulty granting that other cultures such as those of the Inuit or the Bushmen were valid cultures in their own rights rather than primitive cultures the sooner modernized the better. And third, they rejected the notion that knowledge is a body of working beliefs rather than fixed truths. Schools were to teach truths and

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American values, not to undermine them with what these critics saw as a fuzzy relativism. Education is, of course, always somewhat subversive and subject to public scrutiny and criticism. But in this case the criticism was hysterical. The generous funding from government that made MACOS and other curriculum reform projects possible was reduced and then withdrawn completely when politicians, responding to their constituents, condemned the curricula as ‘liberal’ and ‘godless’. Lagemann (2000) appraised the public reaction to MACOS and other curriculum reform projects, noting: ‘The furious reaction to MACOS was phenomenal. In Lake City, Florida, the Citizens for Moral Education waged a campaign to have MACOS barred from the schools because it was godless, humanistic, evolution-based, socialistic, and “sensual in philosophy”’ (p. 174). Funding was withdrawn, publishers were frightened off and the project came to an end. The topic of what to teach had become too controversial. From then on research funding tended to be directed to ‘how to teach’, leaving issues of curriculum to local boards and to an increasingly powerful, but largely unregulated, publishing industry. Good ideas, thus, got lost in the complexity of educational politics. To this day, advances in science such as the theory of evolution are resisted or rejected by the school, if they run counter to prevailing local sentiment. Bruner saw his curriculum efforts being hostilely attacked by a reactionary public (Bruner 1983a, p. 195). A recent film by the National Film Board of Canada entitled Through These Eyes (Charles Laird, Director 2006) captures both the remarkable ingenuity of the MACOS project and its hostile reception by a Congress opposed to a curriculum perceived as ‘liberal’. Perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of the design, implementation, reception, and finally rejection of MACOS is provided in Peter Dow’s Schoolhouse Politics (1991). He endorses the program as a major contribution to revising our conception of what school learning could be. Yet, he acknowledges that the program was overly ambitious in attempting to change the curriculum, the teachers and the traditional structure of schooling in one fell swoop. Dow raises the question as to whether centralized educational planning is appropriate in a democracy devoted to local control. He raises questions about the appropriateness of trying to bypass educational professionals in the attempt to reduce the gap between the ‘frontiers of knowledge’, that is, the academy and the learners. Dow also points out that although MACOS acknowledged the importance of involving teachers in any attempted reform and, in fact, made extraordinary efforts to keep in touch with the teachers who used the materials, ‘unfortunately, the way we usually market educational innovation leaves little room for enlisting the power of teachers’ (Dow 1991, p. 257). Getting the program implemented

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required the long-term commitment of administrators. Like earlier reform movements, MACOS tended to disappear when those who brought in the innovation moved on. Furthermore, MACOS with its novel materials and methods presented unbridgeable hurdles to publishers with a tradition of publishing authoritative textbooks. Any innovation, Dow argued, has to meet the needs not only of the student but also of the institutions, such as the publishers, who are important participants in school design. So Dow’s analysis of why MACOS tended to be marginalized and eventually abandoned was not that the program failed but that it lacked the ‘legs’ to get from the laboratory to the classrooms of America. He continues to assert that the goals and means developed by MACOS are both valid and vital: ‘reformers, na¨ıve as they may have been from a political point of view, were on the right track in attempting to close the gap between intellectual discovery as it occurs on the cutting edge of scholarship and learning as it occurs in a growing young mind.’ To do this, he goes on to say, we must ‘bring off the desperately sought transformation of the schools’ (Dow 1991, p. 273). The problem may be even more serious. As the epigram to this chapter indicated, Bruner looking back (Bruner 2006, p. x) acknowledges that technical insights into the learning process, while important, must be set in the context of the practical realities of schooling as ongoing institutional structures with their own mandates and responsibilities, indeed, rigidities. Negotiating these may require not only changing the schools but also changing the focus of our theories. Educators are in a dilemma. Even if they share the scientists’ view of knowledge as an open-ended inquiry, they may run foul of a public that wants its children to be taught the ‘faith of the nation’, the certainties not the doubts, as indicated by increasing test scores. Inquiry, of course, proffers doubt when the public wants certainties and hence politics intervene. ‘That’s how it ends. That’s how it always ends,’ Bruner bemoaned when he reflected back on his involvement in these bold educational reforms (1983, p. 195). Bruner acknowledges that the hostile reaction of the American public to such a needed and well-meaning effort made more appealing the invitation to take up the Watts Professorship at Oxford University.

The Reception of Head Start When Head Start appraisals tended to indicate that short-term intervention failed to solve the problem of school failure, the program was drastically cut. There is no short-cut method, it appears, for solving the problem of educational readiness or for what was called at the time ‘cultural deprivation’.

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Nonetheless, Head Start was an important factor in creating a new awareness of the importance of those early years, an awareness that now is leading to pre-school and child care programs around the world. But it is increasingly obvious that pre-school education is not just an educational issue but a social one as well, namely, the problem of childhood poverty. All education programs have to be paid for, and in the US the reluctance of the Federal Government to provide resources and the limited tax base of poor communities to support local schools makes reform of schools in poor districts extremely difficult. Not only can poor districts not afford good schools, but also they have limited resources for pre-school education. Thus early educational programs such as Head Start are treated less as educational issues than economic ones. To see this point it is necessary to make a brief excursion into the economic side of education. As some commentators have noted, an important part of the solution to the vicious cycle of poverty and poor school achievement is to fund education from the state rather than from local tax resources, a move that has been taken by a small number of states of the US, including Vermont, and in many other countries including Canada. The move in Ontario, Canada to fund schooling from central funds rather than from local property tax, a move implemented by a previous Conservative government as part of a comprehensive reform package called Bill 160, was not only or even primarily an attempt at social justice; although it was that, it was primarily a way of reducing educational funding overall. This was done by averaging cost per student across the province and providing funding at that level, thereby reducing funding for half of the schools of the province. The Liberal government that succeeded it has done much to restore funding to pre-Bill 160 levels thereby assuring that even schools in poor districts are as well financed as those in more advantaged districts. In the US, however, massive inequality persists and the areas most in need of programs like Head Start are least able to afford them. The current Republican administration of George W. Bush shows little interest in reducing inequality through political means, as for example, urging states to adopt Vermont’s strategy for school funding. So rather than addressing the economic issue, the No Child Left Behind legislation pins the hope for reform on the increased efforts of educators. Again, political considerations trump worthwhile educational reforms. During the four decades that Bruner has watched this problem, economic disparities have become even more severe. The consequences show up in the international tests of adult literacy carried out by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Bruner points out that in a comparison of the means for the 19 wealthiest countries, America does not do well, coming in the bottom half of the countries on such tests. He goes on:

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But where we undoubtedly ‘lead’ the world is in variability, or dispersion. American standard deviations on all the tests are just about at the top . . . We lead the world in the standard deviation of composite scores – the most diverse country in the well-off world . . . Our lowest percentile is way, way down; our top tenth is way, way up. America seems to have a gift for fostering maldistribution or inequality. No country in the civilized world can match us in terms of the maldistribution of wealth, the gap between rich and poor. (Bruner 2003, p. 51) To his dismay, schooling has done little or nothing to erase the flagrant inequalities in the society. He acknowledges that the problems of inequality and cultural diversity are not solvable by the school alone but he is optimistic that the school is a vital part of the solution. That part will come from offering universal pre-school programs along the lines of Head Start, a move he reports with some pleasure that has recently been taken by Britain. These programs will be most successful when they recognize and exploit student agency, intersubjectivity of the learners and the school’s embeddedness in the culture. As to nature of quality pre-school education, Bruner listed three properties he thought essential. First, the provision of opportunity for playing and interacting with adults as well as peers; second, that they be provided with challenging materials with intrinsic structure; and third, that they be involved in play and games with considerable elaborated rule structure (Bruner 1980, p. 140). He cites with enthusiasm the pre-schools of Reggio Emilia in Italy that emphasize the imaginative ‘hypothetical mode’ of discourse between teachers and students and between the students themselves. Even if the school cannot solve the poverty problem, there is no excuse for not making early experience as intellectually challenging and intellectually satisfying as possible: ‘We know from intensive studies that with improved teacher expertise and classroom conditions, these low achieving groups can be greatly helped if we in America are willing to do something about it’ (Bruner 2003, p. 52). (I interviewed Bruner about his current attitude to Head Start and School Reform and an edited transcript of that discussion is found in Appendix H.)

Improving Instruction in the School Every teacher in training learns that children must construct their own understandings and they know that scaffolding is a useful means for encouraging that construction. Further, they have all heard of the advantages of

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discovery learning, and informal surveys indicate that teachers find these ideas helpful in their work. Educational writers and researchers commonly acknowledge their indebtedness to Bruner’s work. It is not uncommon to read, for example, that Bruner’s writing on the psychology of learning ‘has exercised a formidable influence on the New Literacy over the past two decades’ (Willinsky 1990, p. 205). In literacy studies, in research on science education, in research on the teaching of history, researchers and writers alike appeal to Bruner’s work to buttress their own innovative work or draw new implications from it for practice. Chief among the ideas appealed to are that the learner constructs his or her own knowledge and meaning, that such knowledge is pragmatic, that is, embedded in practice, and that learning is communal and shared. In emphasizing these aspects of learning, Bruner has sponsored or encouraged a revival of thinking about what students are doing and how teachers may best approach them. I have already mentioned Bruner’s enthusiasm for the work of Ann Brown and her colleagues Joe Campione and Anne-Marie Palincsar in teaching disadvantaged children in the Oakland Public Schools (Brown 1994). Their program embodied all of the features Bruner thought essential to school learning, giving agency to the children, encouraging collaborative efforts, reflection on the processes involved in learning, and organizing a ‘learning culture’ – the school as a place where one does and learns things. Bruner lauded the fact that children generated hypotheses and evaluated them together, that learning was a joint rather than an individual project. The discussion, often involving narrative, in the production of knowledge was not only about the content studied but also a reflection back on how one knows, a lesson in epistemology. This is not as complex as it seems for children often fail to distinguish what they know from what they guess, they often fail to distinguish the reason for believing from the belief itself, and so on. Reflection may be thought of as a form of folk epistemology, that is, of thinking about one’s beliefs and reasons for holding them. Programs that take this form acknowledge that they take both inspiration and direction from Bruner’s writings.

Improving Educational Research and Theory Bruner has ‘long since given up the vanities of positivism’ (Bruner 2001, p. 205). He is open-minded to method, urging narrative and interpretive approaches for some problems, and the search for more law-like regularities for others, and he ‘would like to urge an end to the kind of “either-or” approach as to what psychology should be in the future’ (1996, p. 160).

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What does this imply? Well, for one thing it implies that one cannot restrict educational theories to universal and invariant features that are subject to causal laws analogous to those found in the natural sciences. Does that mean it cannot be an object of systematic study? No. Cultural psychology is an interpretive discipline. Its strategies are hermeneutical rather than causal or correlational . . . Obviously [factors] can be measured and correlated with other ‘variables’. But in a deeper sense, there are no truly independent variables, ones completely independent of the interpretations placed upon them by those ‘subjects’ whose reactions constitute our dependent variables. (Bruner 2001, p. 205) It is the task of such a science to determine the strategies, rules and processes that a person appeals to in deciding what to do or what to believe. These will vary depending on the knowledge available, the purposes at hand, the standards of appraisal and perhaps other considerations as well. Bruner had early on given up the notion of traits and dispositions and of the correlational methods used to study and ascribe such traits. In his autobiographical account of how he came to his groundbreaking research on thinking, he reports that he was at first at a loss for a useable method. At first he tried the correlational methods for discovering individual differences in methods of problem solving. He thought he could contrast the cognitive style of the ‘plodders’ with that of the ‘leapers’, between those who were doggedly systematic and those who were more intuitive and risk-taking. But he quickly realized that ‘the study of individual differences, however important it may be, is not my style’ (1980, p. 117). Describing individual differences in terms of traits does not reach the individual at all; to be a plodder is a rough characterization of a range of practices; no one intentionally plods. What Bruner eventually hit upon was that he could actually determine what ‘strategy’ any individual was actually using in testing their hypotheses and that is what opened up a whole new field that became cognitive psychology. Bruner discovered that he could actually determine the hypothesis that a subject was testing and the strategy being used to seek out evidence to test that hypothesis. These were the processes that were fundamental to all learning and thinking. Individuals were not clusters of traits but rather agents who acted to obtain information, test hypotheses, form plans, and apply strategies. And a more cognitive type of psychology could tease these out. Many of these methods are now commonplace in cognitive psychology and in developmental psychology. Much of educational research, on the other hand, continued to consist of the search for features of the environment (treatments) or properties of individuals (traits) that could be used to predict, and once isolated,

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be manipulated to control the outcomes of instruction. Such research does have an important managerial function, allowing decisions regarding school programs and organization. As such research produces few surprises, educational theory was the somewhat dreary exercise of attributing the variance on some achievement to some factor such as IQ, SES or years of schooling. The actual mental life of students and teachers alike – the beliefs and goals relevant to action in any particular situation – was seen as unreachable scientifically. Bruner put it this way: ‘Educational psychologists turned their attention with great effect to the study of aptitude and achievement and to social and motivational aspects of education, but did not concern themselves directly with the intellectual structure of class activities’ (1960, p. 4). Or, one may add, to what the students were actually thinking, hypothesizing, wondering, inferring, or any other aspect of their subjective experience. Such questions have been slow to make their way into educational psychology, which traditionally has been concerned with predicting outcomes. Here the science has lagged far behind the knowledge and actions of any teacher. For example, every teacher can tell if a child was paying attention, has understood or failed to understand, was excited or frustrated by an academic task, was engaged or going through the motions, and the like. When things go wrong experienced teachers can usually troubleshoot student difficulties and modify teaching to accommodate them. One such rule, apparently universal, is that if the teacher is monitoring student work and the same error occurs more than once, the teacher calls the whole class together for a brief lesson. But existing educational theories left this closeknit intersubjectivity aside in the quest for factors that were both easily measurable and could be shown to correlate with class-average performance. Actual lived experience of schooling was ignored, as was the process of negotiation between teacher and student that mediated these effects. These were the considerations that Bruner’s followers have begun to address. Educational research is a pretty deadly science if all it does is find more correlations. By the 1920s most of these correlations were well known and yet a vast number of such studies continue to this day. As Lagemann (2000) pointed out, a science thrives only when it is continuously infused with new and invigorating ideas. That was what readers found in the new approaches to knowledge and development set out in The Process of Education (1960).

Notes 1. It should be noted that for many conservatives democracy has now been achieved and no further social change is called for. Rather it is to be defended and spread.

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2. Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, suggested that this is what happens in the best of reading: ‘Has it ever happened to you,’ Leon went on, ‘to come across some vague idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?’ (1992 (1965), p. 68). 3. I am indebted to Joan Peskin for raising this possibility.

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Chapter 8

Appraisals: The Bruner Legacy

[We have] the tools for exploring the limits of man’s perfectibility [and a responsibility for] keeping lively the society’s full sense of what is possible. (Bruner 1966a, p. 38)

The Role of Ideas in Educational Research and Educational Reform What precisely is the Bruner legacy? In the first place, Bruner would deny the appropriateness of the question. In his view, scholarship, like the school activities he encouraged, is communal. What matters is the creation and nurturing of a tradition in which many take part and join efforts. Singling out one person for credit is misleading. Gardner captured this nicely: Broadly speaking, Bruner is situated in the tradition of great American pragmatists and progressive thinkers: William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, James Mark Baldwin, and, above all, John Dewey. His sentiments are Deweyian at a fundamental level; the curricula he helped to create, and the classes that he taught and inspired, fit comfortably under the rubric of progressive education – America’s gift to the wider educational world. For Bruner, knowing is never inert; it emerges from a genuine concern about the world, and it feeds back to that world, enriching it in the process. (Gardner 2001, p. 128) So, on one reading, one that Bruner himself feels comfortable with (see Appendix D), Bruner’s contribution is to advance the movement represented by Dewey’s Progressivism. Bruner would be honored to be shelved with Dewey. And shelving is not altogether a bad thing; although Dewey was shelved he was never discarded. He continues to be the most frequently consulted and referred to educational theorist, even by those who prefer to lay the current problems of education at his feet (Ravitch 2000). As are

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Dewey’s, Bruner’s books and articles are read and discussed by educational theorists and practitioners, and their reading and thinking undoubtedly influences their actions. Although Dewey’s writings on education remain part of the intellectual background of education, the proposed reforms based on the theory have been marginalized or rejected, perhaps for invalid reasons, as too permissive, too undisciplined, as lacking serious content, as lowering standards, or even as too liberal. Any assessment must attempt to make clear where Bruner may have succeeded in going beyond Dewey. But even then we may still not have quenched the nagging suspicion that Bruner’s ideas, however good, may be shelved just as Dewey’s were, under the constraints of schooling as an institutional practice with its mandates and obligations. As we saw earlier, Bruner’s contributions to psychology – cognitive, intentionalist, cultural, and interpretive – provide a scientific basis for what Dewey had treated as a set of assumptions. Whereas Dewey had correctly attributed to the child, agency and intentionality, on one hand, and while he had claimed that development was a social, communitarian process on the other, Bruner put empirical flesh on these bones. Through his studies of infancy, he had shown the nature of this early subjectivity and he elaborated how through social interactions the cognitions of the child could be scaffolded into mature forms of competence. Through his studies of perception, learning, and thinking, he provided compelling evidence that learners are engaged in hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing. They were not merely active, they were mentally engaged in making sense of their experience. And through his studies of narrative, he showed that learners are not only making sense of the world but of their own cognitive makeup composed of beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, as well as feelings of satisfaction and disappointment. Learners, he found, are responsible for the construction of their own knowledge and understanding to an altogether unanticipated degree. Yet, here too lies an irony. When Dewey was shelved it was not because anyone denied his claims about agency, intentionality, and communality, but rather because educational theory and practice could simply assume them and go on to look for higher-order factors relevant to school management and to the explanation of input–output relations. So although Bruner provided an empirical base for these notions, educational theory and practice may, as they had before, continue to assume these ideas rather than making them a part of an educational theory or allowing them to alter educational practice. What goes on in the school may continue to be guided by stipulating mandated goals and searching for factors that advance their achievement. Such an input–output model works quite well without worrying about what those in the middle – teachers and students – are actually

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doing, so long as we know the factors that contribute to the achievement of an acceptable standard. (Bruner and I discussed the meaning of assessment and our discussion is found in Appendices E and F.) How, then, are we to explain the fact that Bruner’s writings have provided an inspiration for scores of researchers and teachers who conceive of their purposes in a more cognitive way? And those scores of researchers who now explore infant and child intentionality, belief, conceptual change, classroom discourse, and other topics either launched or encouraged by Bruner and the Cognitive Revolution? There is a now a considerable body of work that as we say, has educational relevance, but it remains unclear that it alters in any obvious way either the goals of the school or the pedagogical practices employed. Schools continue to be as dominated by textbooks and tests, by coverage and accountability, as they have been for over a century.

Was Bruner Wrong? There are two reasons one may advance to explain why Bruner’s focus on agency, intention, consciousness, and responsibility has been marginalized in educational theory and practice. The first goes back to Thorndike and the behaviorism that displaced Dewey’s model for schooling; the second, to some recent advances in cognitive computational neuroscience. Both deny intentionality and the freedom, responsibility, and rationality that go with it, insisting rather that brain processes are causal processes, that consciousness and intentionality and rationality are epiphenomena that can safely be ignored while we search for the real mechanical causes of behavior. Only the latter are relevant to producing children who meet the mandated standards set by the school. Psychology, the behaviorists claimed, is a natural science and as such its explanations are limited to causal processes not to rational ones. Reasons, they suggested, must be reduced to causal ones, as they were in Thorndike’s laws of learning. The science of education, they say, should be dedicated to discovering the causes and then arranging those causes in such a way as to achieve the desired effect. Modern behaviorists no longer deny the mental but they assume that mental events are as directly caused as the behavioral events examined by the earlier behaviorists. Educational reformers, too, search for ‘what work’, that is, for the input factors that may be discovered or invented to produce specific effects (NCLB 2002; but see Olson 2004). Such a theory regards children in the same dispassionate way that an entomologist regards a colony of ants or a beekeeper a colony of bees. The beekeeper’s problem is to get the greatest amount of honey out of the hive. Of course, one must know something about the bees, but there is no need to fuss about

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the beliefs and desires of the bees or whether they share your goals. There is little room for negotiation or intersubjectivity. Nor are the neurosciences sympathetic to explanations of behavior based on consciousness and intentionality. Findings by Benjamin Libet that neural precursors of voluntary actions preceded the conscious decision to act lead many to infer that consciousness is at best after the fact and not relevant to psychological explanation. The conscious will is seen as an illusion (Wegner 2002). The neurosciences are completely justified in treating the brain as a biological-chemical mechanism that operates on purely causal principles in some ways no different from spleens and hearts. So the neurosciences do try to explain intentional processes in purely causal terms. And perhaps one day they may succeed with at least some aspects of brain function. Bruner is no more optimistic about the neurosciences than he was about behaviorism. He distinguishes causal explanations such as those valued in the natural sciences from the meanings and reasons valued in the human sciences, insisting that mind has the properties it does because of the tie between mind and culture, education being a primary link between the two. Again, Bruner sees the need for both sciences but rejects the notion that one can be reduced to the other. So if we are to address educational issues, certainly Bruner’s goal, we cannot abandon the enterprise to the behaviorists or the neurosciences. The reason is obvious. Education itself is an intentional enterprise; it is a matter of setting goals and working for their achievement. Education consists of teaching and otherwise training children in such a way that they can accept responsibility for themselves, their actions, and their beliefs. And they cannot be agents, nor take responsibility, if their behavior is the result of forces over which they have no control. People are responsible for what they do not for what their brains do. Education, as Dewey pointed out, is not something that happens to you; it is something you do. Doings, agency, intentionality and responsibility are written right into the foundations of the entire educational enterprise. So if Bruner’s goal is to address education we can conclude that he is not wrong in putting agency, intentionality, and the like at the forefront of his inquiry. As a corollary, it may be argued that both behavioral and neuroscientific theories will either have to take intentionality and responsibility into their theories or acknowledge that, at least for the foreseeable future, they have little to contribute to educational theory.1 So it appears that Bruner’s fresh look at education can best be seen as a more contemporary and scientifically valid rewriting of Dewey’s (1980) Democracy and Education. In itself no small achievement. He provided a contemporary, informed and empirical frame to educational thought and he provided practitioners with useful concepts of constructivism, of

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scaffolding, and of discovery. But even these achievements, themselves of considerable import, fall far short of capturing Bruner’s legacy. That may best be described as a new educational discourse.

The New Educational Discourse Something happened to educational psychology a few decades ago that brought it to the low status it now enjoys . . . Part of the failure . . . was to grasp the full scope of its mission . . . (Bruner 1966a, p. 37) Bruner’s gift to educational thought and practice may best be described as contributing to a new discourse on education. The traditional and still dominant educational discourse consists of talk about abilities, lessons, achievement, and accountability, all within a causal framework set in place early in the last century with the testing movement and elaborated since through a century of educational research. Dewey attempted to alter this discourse by insisting on the addition of two poles, one, the intrinsic purpose-driven nature of the child, a child who was to be the primary instrument in the construction of his or her own knowledge. And two, on the nature of a fully democratic society of which the child was to become a participating member through education. Dewey’s discourse continues to thrive as a kind of metaphysics of schooling and the discussion of philosophical ideals. But as we have seen, the ongoing research and practice in education ignored both of his central claims. Thus the Thorndike input–output management model came to frame the dominant discourse, these days thought of in terms of resources and accountability. An important part of that dominant discourse assigns psychology to a limited role, namely, as one educational psychology textbook puts it, ‘to improve teaching and learning’. That is, psychology is a science of means, of how to help children achieve the goals that have been set elsewhere, either by philosophy or by the larger society. The new discourse, in which Bruner is the leading exponent, raises the question to what and why, leaving questions of how secondary. ‘Why do we choose to educate the young?’ ‘Do all societies educate?’ ‘Why educate through schooling?’ ‘What are the goals?’ ‘Who sets them?’ ‘Does psychology allow us to formulate better goals?’ ‘What are the basic human dispositions and dilemmas that cultures are built from?’ Only then can we ask about optimal means of teaching. Bruner’s disenchantment with educational psychology came from its limited ability to ask new questions – to ask if there is anything here to get excited about. Is there anything here that could stir the imagination? The sciences are exciting because they can ask new questions, and the excitement of

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science comes from the possibility of finding new and unexpected answers to those questions. The new educational discourse in which Bruner has played a leading role, thinks of schooling as a society’s way of creating and preserving culture – to understand ‘the complex pursuit of fitting a culture to the needs of its members and their ways of knowing to the needs of the culture’ (Bruner 1966a, p. 43). Dewey saw the school as an instrument of social change; Bruner saw the school as a culture’s way of reproducing itself and perhaps improving itself in the process. Bruner, too, desires social change but he would argue that that has to come from an informed citizenry through political and social reform. A changed culture will produce a changed education. Hence his involvement in MACOS, in Head Start and the War on Poverty and his tirades against the growing economic disparities in the United States. Culture is an expression of human intersubjectivity, the things people can do jointly and share intellectually. This sharing begins in infancy in an intimate environment, and it proceeds through education to the sharing of a distant past and the remote future. This cultural sharing is to be found both in the joint attention between children and adults and in the mastery of the fundamentals of a scholarly discipline. Bruner attempted to re-center educational discourse away from the school in isolation to the more general relations between human and other species and between biology and culture. He examined how an extended immaturity in the human species allowed the young to be induced into a complex and evolving social order. And he showed the rich inventory of means available, first to the child, and also to the ‘teachers’ with whom the child interacts that lead the child to be a competent participant in a complex society. He spelled out the growth of mind in terms of the increasing competence with the primary modes of representation available in a society. The new discourse was to be evaluated on the basis of whether it gives rise to new lines of enquiry and to new forms of research. And ultimately whether it gives new shape or form to the practice of schooling. Dewey sought to reform educational thought by working out a new relation between the child and the curriculum, that is, between the personal psychology of the child and the demands of the larger society. He found these in a new understanding of the child:

The old education [with its] uniformity of curriculum and method . . . [had] its center of gravity outside the child . . . Now the change which is coming into our education is the shifting of the center of gravity. It is a change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the astronomical center shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the

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child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he is the center about which they are organized. (Dewey 1976, p. 23) Bruner, too, studied the mind of the child and Bruner’s pedagogy is clearly child-centered. But he did not need to center education on the child as Dewey had done. He found the meeting between the child and the adult, between the mind and the society, in the notion of intersubjectivity. The meeting was to be found in the objects and ideas and goals that the adult could negotiate with the learner. The child is expected to make just as many concessions to the adult as the adult had to make to the child. Bruner observed this process in mother–child interactions and in the ideas of joint attention – both people coming to see the same object in the same way. And it could be achieved in school, he believed, if the gap between the experts working at the frontiers of their discipline and children at the frontiers of their understandings could be reduced. Although Bruner never worked out the details of how one achieves such mutual understandings in the school, or how joint plans and agreements could be worked out in a classroom, the notion of intersubjectivity has played a role both in improved understanding and in an array of research programs. Bruner may have aspired to rid the world of behaviorism but he did not aspire to replace the traditional managerial stance to educational theory and research: ‘I would like to urge an end to the kind of “either-or” approach’ (1996, p. 160). Rather he aspired to add a new set of considerations that could both broaden our conception of the goals of education and enrich the means available for pursuing them. As to goals, Bruner placed the growth of mind, that is, the ability to think, to give reasons and explanations, right up there with the traditional goals of the acquisition of valid knowledge and useful skills. It may be important to urge the achievement of high levels of competence, but what is the use of competence, he would ask, if one fails to enjoy the benefits of thinking and discovery? Schooling can be fulfilling and satisfying if it is experienced as a deepening of understanding and an increasing level of control. New goals require new methods, new pedagogies. Bruner’s preferred means were those that sponsored thinking and imagination, what he called the hypothetical mode of teaching. This involved making guesses and fashioning narratives that could explain events. To this he added the collaborative or discursive dimension, that these guesses and stories be told, shared, evaluated in ways that made thinking engaging. First, generate many stories; later evaluate them through discussion and, still later, formulate them in writing. ‘Put the emphasis back on the process of science problem solving rather than upon finished science and “the answers”’ (Bruner 1966a, p. 127). And do not ask only if discovery methods are as ‘effective’ as

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didactic methods; they serve different goals, namely, the satisfaction of figuring things out. And new goals require new settings. Bruner’s cultural approach casts a new light on what we mean by an educational setting. Schools are only one of many of the institutional arrangements made for the raising and education of children. It is well known that the home and family account for a disproportionate percentage of variance in school achievement. For example, vocabulary assessed in the first grade predicts over 30 per cent of the reading comprehension variance in the eleventh grade (Cunningham and Stanovich 1997). From the managerial perspective, the home is seen as either advancing or obstructing the effectiveness of the school. Bruner’s cultural perspective reverses the field. The mother, the siblings, the peer group, the neighborhood, the church, the shop are all educational environments in which the child works out distinctive modes of competence. Formal education is merely one, albeit primary, educational agency among many. Bruner calls attention to the importance of early role-playing, on routines, on contexts calling for rule elaboration, on learning to cooperate and collaborate, forms of learning that occur in many contexts. All of these forms of learning are important in making a human adult; they are valuable in their own right not only because they correlate with later school success. Furthermore, new settings may put older settings, such as classrooms, to new uses. Rather than treating a class as an educational unit, the classroom may be reconceived as a community or a set of communities that take on and cooperate in the achievement of shared goals. It was this that he so admired about the classroom innovations of Ann Brown and her colleagues. Some aspects of this new discourse have found their way into the language of teachers who talk of discovery, scaffolding, constructivism, and the like, as we saw earlier. Further, they play out in some classrooms such as those inspired by Ann Brown and in some learning programs such as ‘Knowledge Forum’ developed by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter (2005), and sponsor a rich output of research in the psychology of human development. Yet, this is not the discourse that currently organizes or is used to justify public schooling. Again, we must ask why the new educational discourse has been slow to find its way into educational theory and practice. Again, who is at fault, the school or the theory? The failure to incorporate the new discourse into the structure and rationale of public schooling may be a result of the sclerosis of educational bureaucracies, focused as they are on common standards, fixed curricula, and accountability. But it is important that we consider the possibility that the failure is the result of the inappropriateness of the science. In a word, it is not obvious that the discourse and the research actually address the realities of the school as an institutional structure and the options available

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to teachers in meeting their obligations. Let us consider one of these, the problem of norms or standards. The new educational discourse on education that, as we have seen, helps bring new goals into view, that fosters new means and new contexts for their achievement, and that brings a new excitement to the field, fails to defuse the bomb that ultimately sunk Dewey’s Progressivism. It is the problem associated with the notions of norms of correctness or the standards that are central to the modern concern with accountability. Dewey, with his notion of continuous, open-ended growth, thought that fixed standards were inappropriate in any case. He thought that growing understanding nourished by experience and discussion would inevitably result in mature and valid forms of knowledge. So a theory of inquiry-based or process-based pedagogy would make unnecessary any explicit concept of norm or standard. This view was brought up to date by Kohlberg and Meyer (1972) who based their notion of standards on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. They argued that Piaget’s cognitive mechanisms of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration would produce the very advanced cognitive structures that educators aspired to. They expressed the entirely laudable idea that the learner him or herself would be able to judge which views were most sound and most worth holding and these judgements would advance them from one cognitive stage to the next and ultimately to the most valid and most warranted views. External standards were unnecessary. But we must also recall that Dewey’s neglect of the problem of fixed standards gave credence to his critics’ claims that he presided over an era of falling standards. Bruner is less vulnerable on this point as he began his program with a concern for higher intellectual aims for the school. Furthermore, his emphasis on the importance of teaching as the mastery of cultural forms, his commitment to the frontiers of knowledge, his pedagogy of scaffolding, were all means of sustaining high standards. However, Bruner’s avowal of the hypothetical mode and his emphasis on discovery, on narrative, and on process generally, leaves unaddressed a problem many see as the non-negotiable criterion of schooling, namely, the achievement of measurable, fixed standards. Critics would say, it is all perfectly all right if children entertain dozens of hypotheses but we want to insist as well that they recognize, learn, and remember the one hypothesis that experts take to be correct. It is all perfectly all right if they write interesting historical narratives but we want them to write the ‘valid’, or normative, ones as well. Not all narratives are equally valid; not all explanations of the origin of the species are equally warranted. Only the ones taken as more correct or more valid are counted as part of the society’s stock of knowledge and the school has a duty to see that they are taught. Bruner’s constructivism and

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his pragmatism led him to prefer exploration over dead certainties, saying, as we saw earlier, he wanted children to think, to entertain possibilities and uncertainties; ‘the society, alas, wanted certainties’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 195). And, whether for good or ill, so do schools and if we wish to affect schooling our new discourse of education must either address those standards or repudiate them. So, here, I am more sympathetic to the standards and norms of the disciplines and of society at large than I take Bruner to be. Children, I believe, not only have to think, they have to know what the society takes to be valid knowledge. In my view, in a free country, people may believe whatever they like, of course, but to earn a credential, say as a biologist, one must know what biologists take to be the truths of their disciplines. Thus, teachers are obliged to teach evolutionary theory as that is a pivotal part of the discipline of biology. No matter that these truths change with advances in the science; the learner has to know ‘what is known’ and that is addressed by acknowledging the norms and standards of the discipline. (See Olson 2003, for a fuller discussion of this issue.) Perhaps this concern can be addressed in terms of Bruner’s notions of joint intention and shared understandings, so long as it is acknowledged that not any joint understanding will meet the required norms and standards. The joint intention shared by teacher and student has to be made between unequal partners, the student holding to what they can imagine, the teacher holding to what is a socially acceptable goal. If these two can be brought together, one has an educationally valid joint goal. Although this is routinely achieved in the classroom, just how it is achieved has yet to be explored scientifically. A better understanding of the process, one hopes, will make the classroom more effective. So the question remains as to the scope of application of the insights into learning provided by the cognitive sciences in general and by Bruner in particular. Policy makers and educational researchers promised that a better understanding of the mental processes of learners would help to solve the two big problems: raising standards and closing the achievement gap. What they got, rather, was an explanation of why those problems are, if not intractable, at least not solvable by the school. The cognitive sciences explore, and indeed, value this diversity, but in any case have limited means for reducing it. Social problems, such as racism and poverty, are political and economic and the school has limited, though not negligible, means for addressing them. If they are to be solved they will have to be addressed by the larger society (Ladson-Billings 2004). Bruner’s psychology and the new educational discourse make an important contribution to understanding how school relates to mind and society. And that understanding is valuable

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even if standards refuse to budge and human diversity remains as great as ever. Perhaps such criticism is too harsh. Dewey, although a reticent and modest man, compared his contributions to those of Copernicus, and although Bruner’s followers (including myself) are comfortable in comparing Bruner to Dewey, it must be remembered that even important contributions to educational theory, as to any science, are additions to an ongoing institutional practice. Bruner’s educational goal is to make the school experience more fulfilling and enjoyable, to allow students to experience the joys of discovery and the powers of their minds, whether or not that raises their achievement scores. This was Dewey’s goal too, but that goal was trumped by Thorndike’s input–output model that stressed outcomes over experience. Bruner aspired to make school interesting, to show even poor students the satisfactions to be had from mental engagement. True, engagement is essential to achievement so increasing engagement may raise scores somewhat. But for Bruner the purpose is not to raise the score on some fixed criterion so much as to make education a truly worthwhile and fulfilling experience. This is the new goal of educational theory but one that is forever likely to be trampled by the demands of a meritocracy and the rewards assigned to the highest score. Bruner is not so na¨ıve as to abandon achievement scores, of course, but rather to urge that a place be made for personal growth and for the quality of experience. If adult society can value the quality of experience why cannot the same be assured for children? Yet, to some, this sounds like a consolation prize for cognitive theory. We may view the theory in a more appropriate way. Theory not only informs practice, but also it provides the conceptual structure that underlies and helps to explain the entire enterprise. The new discourse of education is justified not only by the hope for improved effectiveness of the school in meeting its obligations, but also for the improved understanding it offers of schooling as a personal and an institutional practice and for the new lines of research and theory that it sponsors. Two of these lines of research are the concerns of the final chapters.

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Chapter 9

Brunerian Perspectives on the Way Forward: An Anthropology of Schooling

It is astonishing how little systematic study is devoted to the institutional ‘anthropology’ of schooling, given the complexity of its situatedness and its exposure to the changing social and economic climate. (Bruner 1996, p. 33) Some work of noble note may yet be done. (Tennyson’s Ulysses) Bruner’s contribution to education, then, is best seen as offering a new discourse about educational theory and practice. This discourse has at its core a set of assumptions not unlike those of Dewey, namely, that learners actively construct their own meanings and beliefs through hypothesis testing, that knowledge is pragmatic, embedded in practice and social discourse. With it comes a new, progressive pedagogy, a pedagogy that encourages learners to formulate their own views and test them against the views of others: ‘teaching the hypothetical’, as Bruner put it. Bruner expanded on these themes, adding a new conception of the role of culture in mental growth and urging us to see schooling as one among many cultural practices that have evolved for child-rearing in different social and cultural contexts. The role of culture in this new discourse raises new questions and sponsors new lines of research and theory, two of which we may explore as ways of forwarding our discipline. The first is an anthropology of schooling. The second is a cultural psychology of pedagogy. As we shall see these two are closely related.

An Anthropology of Schooling Bruner (1996, p. 33) called for an ‘institutional “anthropology” of schooling’ that would be dedicated to looking at the situatedness of education in the larger society and its institutions, including communication,

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economics, politics, and family life, adding regretfully ‘there is no such field’. But at the same time he offered some suggestions as to how the study of education could be raised from that concerning the effectiveness of schooling to the larger question of how any society reproduces and improves itself. Schooling is just one method of child rearing. In what social or historical context does it arise and with what consequences? And what alternatives are there? The questions are anthropological in the sense that the approach assumes that rather than there being one universal best way to rear children, alternative arrangements are called for in different social, cultural, and historical contexts. Understanding these contexts will help us to understand why schooling has taken the form it currently has and point us to other arrangements that have been employed in the past and that may develop in the future. An anthropology of schooling is important not only for helping us to understand the social conditions under which schools operate but also for addressing the deeper question of why reform initiatives are not taken up more fully into educational theory and practice. Modern schools, as we saw earlier, are semi-autonomous institutions with a set of government-imposed mandates or responsibilities that they must meet if they are to claim their entitlement to public funding. In this, school systems are comparable to other institutional systems in a society such as the economic system, the justice system, and the health system. Schools are funded by the larger society so long as they are seen as meeting their mandated responsibilities. But tuning up the institution to effectively and efficiently meet a specific set of responsibilities with a particular inventory of resources, tends to make all schools, and consequently all children, much the same. Schools have all increasingly been obliged to address the same basic content and meet the same criteria or standards of achievement. Consequently, schools manifest an ‘institutional isomorphism’ or sameness of structure that makes them comparable the world over and, in addition, makes them very resistant to change. Only those changes that increase their effectiveness in terms of reducing cost or increasing output in terms of levels achieved or number of students graduated, will be adopted into the system. For well over a century educational research has primarily been directed to the search for factors that either increased output or that provided explanations for why the mandated goals could not be achieved. Improved curricula, standardized textbooks, trained teachers and tests that improved accountability were readily taken up. And lines of research that explained success or failure became part of the tradition. The theoretical proposals and pedagogical initiatives offered by Bruner and Dewey, on the other hand, neither conspicuously enhanced the achievement of mandated outcomes nor improved accountability and hence they tended to remain

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marginalized. Teachers talk about the whole child but they also know about test scores and league tables. Governors talk only about the latter. Thus, some valid proposals for reform tend to be given only lip service. The schools’ failure to take on board the theoretical advances offered by Dewey and Bruner is, perhaps correctly, blamed on the rigidity of the school system. However, as I suggested earlier, it is equally plausibly laid at the feet of the theorists. Neither Dewey nor Bruner sufficiently recognized schooling as a somewhat independent institutional practice. Scheffler (1974, p. 254) had argued earlier that Dewey had been set aside because he identified the school with the society at large, rather than recognizing that the school has an autonomy that allows it to ‘stand sufficiently apart’ from more pressing social issues and allows it to pursue its own more precisely defined goals. Dewey, his suggestion was, aspired to change the society by revising the school, whereas he should have acknowledged that the school had a much more limited set of responsibilities. Recall, too, Ryan’s (1995, p. 369) appraisal that Dewey ‘took for granted a malleability and predictability in institutional arrangements that all experience refutes’. Both Dewey and Bruner saw growth and development as characteristic of the human species in which education played a part. Both failed, to different degrees, to recognize that school is an autonomous institutional structure with its own goals, its own definitions of knowledge and competence, and its own systems of accountability. These are all somewhat distinguishable for more general issues of human growth and social change. For a theory to have an impact on the educational practices of any given society, it is necessary to understand the nature of the school as an institutional practice in a particular kind of society. Research and theory in that context will then be able to offer suggestions that will aid that institution in better articulating its goals and that will help it achieve its own goals more effectively. Just as Dewey failed to sufficiently distinguish the school from the society, Bruner failed to sufficiently distinguish the responsibilities of the school from the educational aspirations of the children who attend it. Neither fully acknowledged the autonomy and independence of the school with its specific mandates. It was this gap, I suggest, that Bruner signaled with his call for an anthropology of schooling. Some of Bruner’s own work and that of his colleagues allows us to take some steps in filling in that gap. To understand education, we may begin with the general question of why offspring come to resemble their parents in any culture. One answer is that the young resemble their parents because of biology; they inherit their genes from their parents. But the young also learn from their parents, and in the cases of most interest to us, the parents or others often teach the young to talk, act, and think in ways that preserve their cultural traditions. These ways of raising the young may be seen as means of ‘cultural

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reproduction’, that is, the ways that the young are raised to resemble the parents so that the social group will be preserved. Schooling is only one of these ways of child rearing, a relatively recent one. As is well known, schooling became a mass institution little more than a century ago in the West and is only now becoming universal. Only recently, in 2005, did China guarantee universal, free primary education to its 700 million peasants. So, to understand schooling we must begin with the broader anthropological question of how the young come to resemble their parents. In an early paper entitled ‘Education as Social Invention’, Bruner (1966b, p. 25) argued that: what is transmitted by the culture is a pool of acquired characteristics, a pool that can get lost just as surely as the Easter Islanders, the Incas, and the Mayans lost whatever skills made it possible for them to leave such splendid ruins to disabled descendants whose genes were probably not one whit changed. Education is a primary means by which the skills and tools of a culture are passed to the young during their long period of immaturity and dependence. In his concern with the transmission of culture Bruner has allies in three other leaders in this field of comparative psychology: David and Ann Premack and Michael Tomasello. Premack and Premack (1996, p. 315) argued that animals have neither culture nor history and, consequently, the social practices of mammals, including our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees, have remained the same over centuries and differ very little from one colony to another. Human cultures on the other hand are widely different and pedagogy is a primary means for preserving the extending these differences. They suggest that teaching along with practicing, the repetition of an action in the attempt to achieve a certain standard of performance, as well as the ability to speak a language all go together to make up a set of defining features of the human species. Although teaching is pervasive, they deny an ‘instinct to teach’ (Barnett 1968), calling instead for an ‘anthropology of pedagogy’ that would raise such questions as what teaching is, who does it, to what is it applied, and with what effect. Is it verbal and intentional, are the practices similar across different species and different cultures? Is teaching limited to humans? Some researchers have suggested that we broaden our search for the diversity of ways of teaching and learning in different species, different cultural groups, for different purposes, in different contexts in order to arrive at a clearer notion of just what teaching is, its place in the preservation of culture and the growth of mental life (Kruger and Tomasello 1996).

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Premack and Premack (1996) distinguished three major levels of socially transmitted information in any learning system depending on the degree of intention involved. At the lowest level, there is learning but no intention to teach and no intention to learn, found for example in an infant rat’s learning to accept solid food that had an odor it had encountered in its mother’s milk. The learner did not seek the information nor did the model, the mother, seek to impart it. At a higher level, the learner behaves intentionally, although the mother remains unintentional. This is the case in imitation; the novice observes the model and learns a new form of behavior but the model behaves the same way whether the novice is present or not; little brothers imitating their older siblings would be such a case. At the highest level, both learner and model act intentionally. The novice observes the model but the model also observes the learner, helping and correcting the learner when he or she fails to meet the standard. Only the latter is a true pedagogical exchange. The Premacks concluded that only humans have pedagogy, that pedagogy is at the base of culture and history, that some human cultures have more of it than others, and that the pedagogy depends on a ‘disposition to share experience’ (p. 309). This disposition, we may recall, is what Bruner referred to as intersubjectivity. The other of Bruner’s allies, Michael Tomasello (1999, pp. 180ff.), traced cultural learning to the unique ability of humans to imitate the actions of others by attributing intentions to them. Tomasello, too, links the growth of culture to the intersubjective ability to learn from others. He distinguished three levels of understanding of others. The first we share with higher primates and young infants, namely, the ability to understand others as being self-propelled animate beings. The second is unique to humans and develops between one and two years of age, namely, the ability to not only see the behavior of others, but also the intention or goal that motivates the behavior. Two-year-olds understand the tie between the goal and the means for its achievement, which is to say, they understand what someone is trying to do. This understanding is what permits imitation. Imitation is rare to the point of non-existence in all animals, excluding perhaps a few hand-reared apes, whereas it is trivially easy for even 18-month-old children (Visalberghi and Fragaszy 1996; Tomasello 1999). Imitation relies on a mode of representation that we earlier identified as mimesis. The third stage depends on the availability of language, and it involves an understanding of oneself and others as mental agents who act on the basis of their beliefs, hopes, and plans. Most children grasp this at about the end of the pre-school period and it permits them to learn through collaborative talk, telling, providing reasons, learning rules, and so on. As mentioned earlier, this is the age at which we say that children acquire a ‘theory of mind’ and gain a sense of responsibility or ‘get sense’ (Lancy 1996).

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Kruger and Tomasello (1996, p. 375) found very little evidence of actual teaching in our nearest primate relative, the chimpanzee. While the young do learn from their interactions with adults, there is little evidence that the adults intend to teach. The difference is that humans do whatever is necessary so that the young will learn skills for themselves, and when they learn them the adult withdraws. They go on to distinguish three types of intentional instruction. First, they expect the young to learn and if they do not they may intervene. Second, they guide or model activities for learners. And third, they may appeal to more or less direct instruction in which the adult has a rather clear goal and teaching efforts persevere until those goals are met. They go on to show that these forms play out in quite different ways in different traditional societies. Cultural differences in informal education of the young in human societies are also the concern of cultural psychologists. Cultural psychologists examine children’s development less in terms of cognitive changes than in terms of integration into ongoing social practices (Greenfield and Lave 1982; Newman, Griffin, and Cole 1989; Lave and Wenger 1991). The tradition is distinctive, too, in that it tends to treat the knowledge acquired as secondary to the issue of responsibility for action and for learning. Greenfield and Lave (1982) examined the ways that the young come to participate in the activities of the adults and found that a major difference between societies was the degree to which adults took responsibility for raising the children. In some traditional societies, responsibility for learning may be left entirely in the learner’s hands with little or no intentional teaching. Kruger and Tomasello (1996) disputed the claim that adults ever leave responsibility for learning and development in the hands of the young. Rather, they claim that intentional instruction is a universal human trait albeit manifest in quite different ways ranging, as we saw, from simply monitoring expectations, to guiding action, and to providing explicit direction. Universal or not, the degree of responsibility left in the hands of the learner or turned over to the learner is fundamental to understanding pedagogy. Rogoff, Matusov, and White (1996, p. 397) have shown how, even in a school environment, a ‘community of learners’ may be established in which children ‘take responsibility for their contribution to their own learning and to the group’s functioning’. This, of course, contrasts importantly with the traditional notion of schooling in which the institution takes responsibility for the children’s learning (Olson 2003). Attributing and sharing intentions and responsibilities are seen as universal characteristics, common to education in all human societies. What we require, in addition, is some account of how these competencies are adopted and realigned in those modern societies that rely on schools. Let

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us attempt, then, to ‘scale up’ the stages involved, from zero pedagogy to full-scale institutionalized schooling.

How Humans Learn Learning without Teaching Learning may result from personal experience or from the efforts of others. But even learning from others may not involve teaching. I witnessed a fawn attempt to suckle the mother doe and the mother vigorously kicked the fawn in the head. That is one way to teach the young that its nursing days are over! But was the doe attempting to teach the young or was she merely irritated by the fawn’s attempt? Presumably the latter. There is no need in such a case to attribute a pedagogical instinct or intent to the mother. Yet the fawn learned. Such social learning requires no recognition of intention, no intersubjectivity. Imitation Many species, like the aforementioned fawn, learn and thereby become socialized into the adult ways of the group. But such methods do not allow the growth of culture. The importance of imitation as a distinctive human ability is that it explains how knowledge once acquired by the adult may be learned by the young even in the absence of any intention to teach on the part of the adult model. A species that can imitate can transmit a culture; knowledge fortuitously acquired by an adult may be learned by a child through imitation. Thus we come to a startling conclusion: it is not the ability to teach that is fundamental to human culture but the ability to imitate. Teaching is a more rare and sophisticated competence that first becomes common in more complex societies. So far as we know, both imitation and teaching are limited to humans. Imitation requires the agency of the learner and it requires the ability of the learner to recognize the goals or intentions of the person who provides the model. Yet the adult who serves as the model need not recognize the intention of the child. Little brothers imitate older brothers whether or not the older brother is conscious of the imitative actions of the younger. Yet the younger brother learns from the older brother, a form of learning without teaching. Agency, intentionality, and responsibility remain in the hands of the learner. The adult or older brother merely goes about his own business. Similarly, in a classroom a kind of learning may be prompted without any intention on the part of the teacher to produce any lasting effect on the learner. For example, a child may learn to not ask questions if a teacher

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ignores the child’s efforts, even if the adult has no such intention but is simply distracted. Such inadvertent teaching is sometimes referred to as the ‘hidden curriculum’. Sorting out responsibility for learning is difficult to impossible in such contexts. My suspicion is that a court of law would find the teacher not guilty of causing such negative learning as it was unintentional, more like manslaughter than murder. Modeling Learning from a model may be turned into a form of teaching when the model becomes aware of the intention of the learner and adjusts his or her actions to make imitation easier. This is what is involved in providing a demonstration, what we call modeling. A verbal narrative that highlights aspects of the performance may or may not accompany the demonstration. Yet the goal is simply that of helping the learner achieve his or her own goal. Responsibility remains in the hands of the learner. The picture changes somewhat when the desired action originates with the model, who then induces the learner to copy them and provides feedback to see that the behavior is learned to an acceptable standard. Here responsibility lies with the adult, and the child is responsible to the adult for meeting the standard set by the adult. This is perhaps the simplest form of teaching in the strictest sense; the intention originates with the teacher who takes responsibility for bringing the learner’s behavior up to some acceptable level. Yet, as before, it is the learner who has to do the learning, that is, to construct knowledge out of his or her own resources. The child cannot imitate every action, but only those for which they can recognize the goal and the means employed by the model. That is why, for example, young children may try but fail to imitate certain sounds or certain sentences. Janellen Huttenlocher (1964) once reported an exchange with a child in which she repeatedly attempted but failed to succeed in correcting the child’s grammar from ‘Nobody don’t like me’ to ‘Nobody likes me’. She noted the irony of such a lesson. Teaching Teaching in the classical sense [‘to impart knowledge’, OED] is the deliberate attempt to change the behavior by means of changing the beliefs of a learner. Whereas teaching appears to be a characteristic of humans, there is a categorical break in cultures when teaching is institutionalized in what we refer to as schooling, with their mandates to transmit or otherwise convey knowledge. While some aspects of teaching and learning may be universal, more anthropological and ethnographic research is needed before we can

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provide even satisfactory definitions, let alone characterize the dimensions of variability. While imitation, demonstration, communication, and some forms of teaching are no doubt universal human characteristics, the forms they take differ dramatically from one society to another. The anthropological and ethnographic studies of pedagogy mentioned above have indicated how pedagogies differ from one society to another. Furthermore, some attempts have been made to show how the forms of pedagogy reflect the social structures in which children are raised. These patterns of child rearing, to which we now turn, involve a mixture of intentional and unintentional means, and a progressive realignment of responsibility for learning from the learner and from the family to increasingly remote public institutions.

How Families Teach: Patterns of Child Rearing While parenting manuals may lead you to think that there is one best way to raise children, even a modest acquaintance with anthropology will soon reveal the widely different processes involved, only some of which rely on explicit teaching and even fewer on schooling. And those that rely on schooling do so in quite different ways. Esther Goody (2006), who has made extensive observations on patterns of child rearing in Ghana, noted that these patterns reflected the social structure of the societies in which the children were raised. Parenting in Traditional Societies with a Low Degree of Division of Labor In small-scale farming communities, Goody noted that children were raised by their own parents. They participated in family activities, and eventually replicated the social practices of the parents to become farmers themselves. Lancy (1996) observed a similar pattern of child rearing in a traditional society in Liberia, noting that such education as occurred in childhood was dependent primarily on the initiatives of the learners. Children observed adults as they went about their daily activities and then imitated those activities in their play, and participated more and more fully in adult activities. Adult interventions were negligible. Only if the child insisted would an adult offer advice or correct a mistake or provide a demonstration. Spittler (1998), too, in his study of the nomadic camel herders of North Africa, reported the absence of any attempt on the part of parents to either select children to become camel herders or to train them when they so aspired. Rather, on their own initiative, some children simply progressively took over responsibility for the camels. Again, this implies that the secret of cultural learning

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is less the pedagogical instincts of adults than the personal initiatives and remarkable imitative and linguistic abilities of human children. Foster-parenting and Apprenticeship In slightly more complex societies that had more specialized skills such as blacksmithing or weaving, Goody observed that child rearing often went outside the family. Children were often ‘fostered’ by kin who possessed those special skills. This fostering is an informal apprenticeship in which the child carries out the more menial aspects of the craft and performs other household duties in exchange for care, eventually acquiring a specialized skill unavailable within the family. In still more complex societies centered on towns, Goody discovered that children may be fostered by non-kin so that the child may attend school or train for a more specialized career, craft, or trade unavailable within the kin-group. Thus responsibility for learning is passed from the child to the family, to kinfolk, and eventually to strangers as the possible career roles differentiate. When non-kin adults take over more responsibility for child rearing and the child has less control over whom he is to become, the child has access to a wider range of social roles. Even when there is some degree of division of labor, as in craft and trade cultures, apprenticeship may involve little more than indicating duties and criteria for promotion. In others, apprenticeship is more interactive, a joint activity in which the master progressively transfers increasingly difficult tasks to the learner as he or she becomes competent, a pattern of interaction that has much in common with what we described earlier as scaffolding. It should be noted that apprenticeship is not reserved for traditional societies. Even the most bureaucratic forms of expertise such as those involved in law or science require that one learn the ‘craft’ of the discipline informally through observation and imitation, at the same time as learning the technicalities through careful study and debate. Formal Apprenticeship When child rearing is passed to a more formal agency, such as a guild, with more explicit conditions for entry and exit, we have a formal apprenticeship. A rich literature exists on the psychology and anthropology of apprenticeship (Coy 1989). An apprentice learning to make traditional Japanese mingei pottery was told to make 10,000 small sake drinking cups in the exact shape, thickness, and size of the model provided by the master (Singleton 1989). Only then could one be judged sufficiently competent to advance to the next step. Apprenticeship took on a major role in Western Europe with the

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growth of towns and cities. In some City States a man’s right to marry may depend upon completing an apprenticeship and earning membership in a guild. Thus, standards monitored by experts and judged on the basis of ‘knowhow’ or skills, were essential to earning a credential and the rights that went with it. Apprenticeships remain the most common way of learning skilled trades and crafts, but they appear also in contexts such as music lessons which rely largely on one-on-one tutoring and that earn a further privilege even if only more lessons!

How Institutions Teach: The Invention of Schooling When the responsibility for child rearing is passed over to the institution of the school, so many factors change that it is conventional to think of schooling as incommensurate with other forms of child rearing. Schooling reaches outside the local community into the larger society, whether church, state, or other imagined community. Schooling assumes that knowledge can be distinguished from the knower, it assumes that knowledge can be distinguished from the skills or activities it sustains, and it assumes that knowledge is stored in books. Even within the general structure of the school, enormous diversity prevails. Schools serve different communities, each with its specific goals and relatively fixed standards. In fact, the diversity of schools is so great that historical and ethnographic methods may be more appropriate for describing them. Despite the fact that schooling involves different societies, different languages, different historical periods, different goals, different modes of assessment, by the end of the twentieth century schools had become remarkably alike, so much so that common metrics have been applied across them and international comparisons made. Schooling is the form that child rearing takes when the child is assigned to a knowledge institution rather than to a practical craft or trade. Responsibility for learning is displaced from the learner and from the parent and assigned to the school with its own goals, means, and standards for achievement. The goals of the school, in turn, derive from the institution, whether the Church or the Nation State, that funds and organizes them. In medieval Europe it was the Church that took responsibility for an important part of child rearing, creating schools, setting the goals, and monitoring their achievement. These goals included basic skills, knowledge of Scripture, and an appropriate degree of piety. It also provided a means for entry into the clergy. As the influence of the Roman Church waned, the rise of secular states, along with a ‘startling proliferation of knowledge and books’ (Bushnell 1996, p. 118), created schools that offered a compromise between

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the humanistic goal of being an educated person and more specialized training for roles in a more complex society. With the rise of nation states in Europe between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, with their strong central governmental bureaucracies and taxation, came an emphasis on mass literacy: ‘A centralizing regime discovered that a nation of readers and a common language were required to spread republican ideas’ (Resnick and Gordon 1999, p. 19). Not only schools but also school systems with graded levels of difficulty and standards for graduation were required, curricula were invented, and institutes for training teachers were set up. Along with state funding came new demands, goals, and accountability. Schools were not only responsible to the parent, but also to the state. And responsibility for learning slipped further from the learner’s hand. An educational system, as any other system, is a bureaucracy, organized to meet a set of specified goals as effectively and economically as possible. Foucault (1979) is famous for pointing out how systems of this sort, whether prisons or schools, develop powerful mechanisms of surveillance and control, including punishment and rewards to assure that they achieve their goals. Such arrangements may be, and historically have often been, oppressive indeed. But making them more humane did not, and does not, alter their accountability to the state, nor, consequently, their intrinsic form. The conclusion to be drawn was that pedagogy changed in concert with the changing patterns of responsibility for the raising of children. Those patterns, in turn, reflected more general social changes. When a nation state took on the task of educating all of its citizens, it not only set the goals but also, in order to cope with the sheer number of students, developed group methods of instruction. Tutorial methods that had been common for the education of princes and the wealthy were too expensive for mass education. Group methods, in turn, required that students were sorted into classes or levels, and passing from one to the next required explicit criteria for passing and graduation, procedures that underwrite schools to this day. The intrusion of the state into schooling was also observed by Esther Goody in her studies of schooling in rural Ghana. She noted an interesting relation between the complexity of the society and pedagogy that was employed that parallels her earlier observation on social complexity and child rearing. She observed that: teachers from small-scale egalitarian societies engage children in working out ideas in class [whereas] those from the hierarchical states are literally obsessed with controlling every aspect of classroom activity, and with being given appropriate respect. This leads them to focus on getting correct answers (= memorizing) to prove to themselves, and through test

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results, to prove to others that they are competent teachers. (Personal communication, 10 April 2005) An anthropology of schooling, then, is concerned with how arrangements for rearing the young vary from one society to another and how those differences alter the goals, the pedagogies, and the responsibilities for learning. Reform is always a response to existing social arrangements. Both Dewey’s and Bruner’s initiatives are attempts to alter not primarily the means but the goals of schooling. They both objected to an increasingly bureaucratic institution designed to meet a narrow set of socially mandated goals, namely, to provide a somewhat narrow set of credentialed competencies. They aspired to put the learner back into the picture, to make the school the servant rather than the master of the learner. As both discovered, their proposals ran counter to ‘institutional rigidities’. As Bruner recently acknowledged, ‘We are being forced, finally, to recognize that tradition and history, institutional rigidities and individual predilections, are as important in the conducting of education as technical insight into the learning process’ (Bruner 2006, p. x). Their reform proposals have been taken up only to the extent that they have been seen as instrumental to the achievement of the state’s overly narrow, mandated goals. A better understanding of how societies reproduce themselves and how they may be led to change is the goal of a new anthropology of schooling. It remains to be seen how the teachers and learners themselves see the problems of teaching and learning from within those institutional contexts, and that is our second attempt to set out a line of research sponsored by the new discourse of education.

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Chapter 10

Brunerian Perspectives on the Way Forward: A Cognitive Theory of Pedagogy

It is this close-textured pattern of reciprocity about the intentional states of one’s partners that defines the new pedagogy. (Bruner 1996, p. 182) Joint attention is the cognitive foundation of pedagogy. (Donald 2001, p. 207) Understanding cognition as intentional and intersubjective allows us to see pedagogy as an intentional attempt by an adult to alter the intentional states, the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others in such a way as to bring them, so far as possible, into congruity with those held by the adult. As we have seen, such pedagogy goes far beyond that found in societies and in contexts in which social control is more important than the acquisition of bodies of knowledge. And this intersubjective conception of pedagogy goes far beyond the traditional notions of learning and instruction that focused on fixed behavioral outcomes and in which, as I noted earlier, students were regarded as an entomologist does an ant rather than as ‘one of us’. Dewey took an important step in this direction by framing pedagogy as the meeting ground between the child and the curriculum. For Dewey, this meeting was to be found in the intuitions of the child, certainly a revolution in thinking about learning. The child’s experiences were to be cultivated and elaborated until they corresponded to those represented by the curriculum. What Bruner and his colleagues added to this picture was a new conception of the meeting ground between the child and the curriculum, namely, in the concepts of joint attention and joint intentions negotiated and shared between teacher and learner. This ‘close-textured reciprocity’, as Bruner called it, is the meeting ground between the child and the curriculum. The nature of this reciprocity, however, has changed along with changes in the society, modes of child rearing, and the stage of development of the child. An understanding of these relations we may think of as a

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cognitive theory of pedagogy, premised on notions of agency, intentionality, and joint-intentions. At the same time it is a cultural psychology of pedagogy, in that these very concepts play different roles in different social and cultural contexts. The magnitude of this task is not often recognized and is hidden inside the notion of ‘psychologizing’ the content to make it comprehensible to the learner. Even theorists who acknowledge the child’s point of view routinely fail to recognize that the information purveyed is at the mercy of the perceiver and not the stimulus.2 Or, and as Bruner insisted, it is the learner who actually makes the knowledge. That this point is difficult for even very clever people to grasp is nicely illustrated in an episode that Bruner described involving the famed physicist Jerrold Zacharias, whom we met earlier in our discussion of how Bruner came to be involved in curriculum reform. Zacharias proposed to develop an extremely polished ‘teacher proof’ physics program for American high schools. Along with a variety of learning resources, the program would feature films and recordings, and to have the desired impact, as Zach said to Bruner: ‘The room must be good, not too noisy, and the people have to want to listen, but that all depends upon the piece.’ Do you, dear reader, see the problem? Bruner noted the critical flaw : ‘They were, I think, running into their first troubles – discovering what a mouthful was the claim that wanting to listen ‘all depended upon the piece’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 179). It doesn’t. It depends on the present state of the learner. Like all top-down curricula, it assumed that you could ignore the vicissitudes of children’s minds, their knowledge, interests, and goals, and by sheer quality of the input assure the desired learning. Bruner knew that knowledge could not be delivered, regardless of how elegantly it was packaged; it had to be constructed by the learner. Dewey, too, knew that one had to find in the intuitions of the child the roots of the systematic knowledge one hoped to convey (Dewey 1976). Only then would teaching provide information; only then would teaching help children to test their own hypotheses. Need I add that this is not an argument against content; as we shall see, the content of a discipline provides the standard against which students’ hypotheses can be evaluated. A theory of pedagogy takes seriously the mental life of individual persons, their beliefs, goals, and understandings as they unfold in the context of the school. What a teacher needs to know is how to engage children in learning. As mentioned, Dewey looked for this engagement in the intuitions of the child. Bruner’s notion of intersubjectivity takes this engagement a step further. Joint attention, joint actions as in scaffolding, and joint intentions are the meeting ground between teacher and learner. Of course, just how they are negotiated – how what the child is willing to do or think is negotiated

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with what the teacher is willing to accept or take as true – is far from clear theoretically, and even more difficult to manage practically. How a teacher goes about establishing worthwhile goals and negotiating with learners so that they are willing to take them on as their own, makes up an important part of a future theory of pedagogy. While we know how governments and courses of study set goals and standards, we know very little about how students set goals for themselves or how they negotiate these goals with their teachers and how they take on responsibility for achieving them. With pedagogy one does not always get what one wants. Jacqueline Goodnow (1996) talked about this as negotiating acceptable ignorance and disagreement. While we know how teachers go about judging student knowledge and competence, we know very little about how students monitor their learning to see if they are coming close to meeting their goals. Young children wildly overestimate what they learn and remember (Flavell 1985), and it is not clear how they come to make more realistic appraisals or how they judge whether they have grasped the point of a teacher’s lesson or a text. How does a teacher intervene to help students establish intermediate goals and criteria for meeting them as they work on a topic or problem? Do students see the relation between the immediate goals of the task they are working on and the higher-level goals that the teacher may have in mind? All of these are questions raised by the new discourse on education but which remain to be addressed empirically. Teachers routinely judge learners’ understanding by oral questions and examinations. But an even more fundamental question is whether or not children can make such a judgement. To judge whether or not you understand something requires the set of epistemological or metacognitive concepts we met earlier – the relationship between explanation and understanding, between theory and evidence, between assumption and belief, and the like. Barbara Bell (personal communication) tells me that even middle school children have only the vaguest notions of the difference between knowing and guessing, or between knowing and the feeling of certainty, concepts necessary for judging one’s own understanding. Children’s unwarranted feelings of certainty may lead them to ignore evidence and act prematurely. Unwarranted feelings of ignorance may lead them to ignore their hunches and intuitions. Teachers’ and children’s responsibilities for thinking, learning, and understanding are central to Bruner’s new discourse of education. Whether or not such issues will find a place in educational research and theory depends on their usefulness in upholding the traditional mandates of the school, particularly those pertaining to goals and standards. Concepts like intersubjectivity and negotiation of understandings are essentially egalitarian concepts in which teacher and learner meet on equal terms. Yet teachers

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and students do not meet on a level playing field. Although children’s minds are active, and learning is a matter of achieving intersubjective and mutual understandings as Bruner has insisted, schooling requires more. What it requires is that the learning reach or match a predetermined standard or norm of correctness set by the school. Schools are not exclusively or even primarily places for thinking; they are also places for knowing. That is to say, the beliefs acquired have to meet a social standard of truth. Knowledge, as we say, is justified true belief. Truth and other standards cannot be finessed; in part they define schooling. It was that non-negotiable concern that led more traditional educational theory to ignore process and to be content with examining the effects of instruction to see if the required knowledge had been learned. The gap between the goals of intersubjectively held beliefs and valid knowledge is not unbridgeable. Although schooling requires that the learning be directed towards mandated goals and standards of quality and quantity, they are to be achieved through joint intention and intersubjectivity. The norms and standards are not merely imposed but rather negotiated with the learner. If the goal can be agreed upon, then the student in meeting his or her responsibility for learning, at the same time meets the teacher’s responsibility for teaching. Joint intention, therefore, provides the basis for a new cognitive pedagogy. Rather than the top-down command and control or ‘management’ theories that have dominated educational discourse for a century, we shall have a theory that highlights the intellectual and social lives of both teachers and learners. Because such theories depend upon social and cultural arrangements, Bruner and I have dubbed them ‘folk pedagogies’.

Folk Pedagogies: Three Ways of Thinking About Teaching and Learning In writings on education, Bruner and I (Bruner 1996, Chapter 2; Olson and Bruner 1996) pointed out how any conception of teaching is borrowed from the prevailing conceptions of mind and knowledge. In so doing we were extending a theme we first explored when we tied modes of representation – enactive, iconic, and symbolic – to modes of pedagogy – demonstrations, depictions, and verbal explanations (Olson and Bruner 1974). The newer approach would take into account the new understandings of intentionality and intersubjectivity. Such a ‘folk pedagogy’ would be the educational side of ‘folk psychology’. Some writers insist that folk psychology is universal (Fodor 1983; Searle 1983); we suggested that explicit forms of folk psychology are historical and tied to a particular cultural frame. Bruner (1990, p. 34)

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had earlier argued that folk pedagogy was an instrument of culture: ‘It is culture, not biology, that shapes human life and the human mind, that gives meaning to action by situating its underlying intentional states in an interpretive system.’ What we attempted to do was to link ways of thinking about the mind, that is our folk psychology, to ways of thinking about teaching, that is, our folk pedagogy. Schooling generally reflects the psychology that Fritz Heider described as na¨ıve psychology (Baldwin 1967), roughly, that knowledge is the result of experience, that knowledge is conscious, and that knowledge can be translated into words. Symmetrically, words can be translated into knowledge; hence, one can learn or acquire knowledge by being told. In a sense, folk pedagogy is little more than a parlor game (if appropriately dressed up, it would be called philosophical analysis) that anyone can play by asking the question, ‘Why would a parent or teacher intervene in a child’s learning and development by teaching them something?’ Or what are the conditions under which one would tell a child something. It becomes apparent that one would teach someone something only if they assumed that the child didn’t know; one would help a child if one assumed the child is not able and so on. Using this method we may quickly round up the set of concepts about mind, knowledge, and ability that frame our ordinary discourse about teaching. Putting them into some order makes up our folk pedagogy. Folk pedagogy attempts to spell out the obligations of the adult or teacher in terms of the assumptions one makes about children: if children are thought of as willful and undisciplined, the teacher’s obligation is to provide the needed correction. If they are thought to be helpless and innocent, adults may need to provide care and protection. If they are seen to be lacking in skills and abilities, the teacher or adult may be obliged to provide demonstrations or occasions for practice. If they are thought of as ignorant, that is, lacking in the knowledge, teachers may be required to provide the knowledge or access to other sources of information. If they are thought of as holding personal egocentric beliefs, teachers may be obliged to evaluate them against normative reasons and standard beliefs. It is a simple matter to see how traditional and progressive pedagogies map out as folk pedagogies. Traditional pedagogy assumed the learner to be ignorant, with the teacher having the obligation to provide the requisite knowledge in a form both graspable by the learner and that meets the requirements of accountability. In his study of schooling in Renaissance Italy, Grendler (1989, p. 409) described how this pedagogy proceeded: The subject matter, whether beginning reading, Latin grammar, advanced rhetoric, or abbaco, had to be divided into very small individual bits of

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knowledge. Teachers and textbooks taught by breaking a skill into its smallest components, drilling them intensively, and then assembling the bits to make the whole. Progressive ‘folk’ pedagogy regarded the learner as a believer or thinker whose knowledge needs to be revised on the basis of experience and discussion, yet with the goal of meeting the same standard. A third pedagogy premised on notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity may advance this scheme in three quite different ways. First, it would explain the lack of pedagogic efforts in non-human primates. As we saw earlier, there is little evidence of imitation in primates and, even more conspicuously, little attempt at teaching. Imitation and instruction fail to occur in non-human primates because they do not naturally attribute beliefs and knowledge to others nor recognize the presence of such states in themselves. We humans show, tell, or teach someone something only because we first recognize that they do not know, are ignorant or hold a false belief . Thus the failure of nonhuman primates to ascribe ignorance or false belief to their young explains the absence of pedagogic efforts. It is only when these states are recognized that one may try to correct the deficiency by demonstration, explanation, or discussion: ‘the general point is clear: assumptions about the mind of the learner underlie attempts at teaching. No ascription of ignorance, no effort to teach’ (Olson and Bruner 1996, p. 12; Strauss, Ziv, and Stein 2002; but see also Csibra and Gergely 2005). Second, it permits us to tie our folk pedagogy to the different social arrangements found in radically different societies. Simple hunter-gatherer societies such as the nomadic camel-herding Tuareg of North Africa leave responsibility for learning in the hands of the learner and provide only care and sanctions to the developing children. Societies with a low division of labor may rely on fostering children to families in which children can take on apprenticeships. In modern bureaucratic societies parents pass the responsibility for child rearing to a public institution, the school, which sets its own goals and standards and adopts methods for their achievement. It is the altered patterns of responsibility and accountability that determine the role that pedagogy plays in rearing children in different societies. And third, it allows a new understanding of pedagogy premised on the notions of intersubjectivity and the role of thinking in coming into agreement with others. Knowledge comes to be seen as discursive, sharable. The task of the teacher shifts from imposing truths to that of finding tasks and goals that teacher and student can agree to as being both worthwhile and achievable, goals that would acknowledge the cognitive resources of the child and yet meet the intellectual demands of the larger society.

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Pedagogy for Thinking Bruner’s ‘fresh look’ may be seen as a continuation of Dewey’s progressive pedagogy that we may now recognize as having two parts, a richer conception of knowledge and a more open-ended, self-conscious kind of teaching. The attempt was to shift the center of gravity from the knowledge transmitted to the cognitive activities and competencies of the learners. The child was to be seen less as a knower than as a thinker. A thinker is one who, like Descartes, answers the question of ‘Who am I?’ with the answer ‘A thing which thinks.’ Descartes continued: What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which conceives, which affirms, which denies, which wills, which rejects, which imagines also and which perceives. (1960, p. 85) The pedagogy appropriate to this modern theory of a person as a thinker, rather than a knower, is one which abandons the notion of transmission of information, replacing it with one that makes room for the learner to construct his or her own thoughts, to share them with others, and to revise them in the light of evidence and argument. You may recall our earlier discussion of ‘information’ where it was pointed out that it is only information if it allows the receiver to choose between alternatives that he or she is already considering. It is a pedagogy that returns some of the responsibility for learning back to the learner, leaving some latitude as to what the learner comes to know and think. Pedagogy is the intentional effort on the part of the teacher to recover, to make explicit, and thereby to share a set of views with the learner. Learners are seen as constructing models of the world through inventing causal and narrative models of their experience, that is, through what Bruner called the ‘hypothetical mode’. Knowledge has shifted from what is contained in books to the subjectively held beliefs, hunches, and intuitions of the learner. Such knowledge is pragmatic, designed for use, open to revision. Thus the learner is invited to form his or her own understandings rather than to merely recite those of the authority. This pedagogy is child-centered not in the sense that it stoops to the level of the child but rather in that it treats the perceptions and explanations of the child seriously while it attempts to construct an understanding that can be shared between the learner and the teacher. There are three achievements to be credited to this revised conception of knowledge with its progressive, intersubjective pedagogy, and one cause for concern. The first is that teaching becomes self-conscious; the method can be thought about separately from the content being taught. Consequently, one can think about the effects of a form of pedagogy such as discovery versus exposition and ask about their effects separately from the effects

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of learning a particular content. Of course, this is not to endorse the now prevalent assumption that one method is best overall; rather it is to acknowledge that different methods are means to different goals. Another of the achievements is the lively research on children’s cognitive understanding that began as child-study almost two centuries ago but has been transformed by Bruner and the Cognitive Revolution and now includes research on imitation, theory of mind, and epistemological development and pedagogy. The third achievement of this intersubjective folk pedagogy is that it has created the possibility of a language of learning, thinking, and reasoning that can be shared by teacher and learner alike. Whereas a scientific psychology and a management educational theory introduce explanatory concepts that remain opaque to laypersons and especially children – concepts like intelligence and achievement motivation – this folk pedagogy brings into focus a set of concepts equally available to learner, teacher, and, last but not least, even to policy makers. Every child can come to think of him or herself as Descartes did, as one who understands what it is to know, to guess, to believe, to doubt, to explain, to judge, to evaluate, to have a theory, to tell a story. When these concepts become conscious and intentional, they can be used for controlling one’s own cognitions, allowing one to be, as we say, metacognitive. One discovers, for example, that the best way to test one’s own understanding of a concept is through attempting to teach it to another. Through helping children to apply such concepts they can become responsible for what they know, understand, believe, and do. Such a pedagogy would be, as Dewey noted, democratic. But it also raises an important concern. Pedagogy as the negotiation of subjectively held mental states might be vulnerable to the very flaw we noted earlier, namely it appears to fail to provide an adequate account of the standards for which the school holds students responsible. As Bruner and I noted earlier, but perhaps failed to correct: ‘It tolerates an unacceptable degree of relativity in what is taken as knowledge’ (Olson and Bruner l996, p. 20). As a pragmatist, Bruner rejected absolutist conceptions of knowledge; knowledge is made, not found, it is perspectival, and it is open-ended, he insisted. Yet he also rejected extreme subjectivity, that knowledge is whatever is taken as true by some interpretive community. So he ‘settled’ for a variety of ways of knowing, for entertaining possibilities, and for judging the value of knowledge on the basis that it opened up new views rather than that it settled old questions. But in so doing, it may be argued, Bruner has failed to align his conception of knowledge with the mandates of the school as an institution. That is, although the pedagogical theory rests on a sound cognitive theory it does not meet the needs of the institution it hopes to reform. Learning as continuous growth, as it was for Dewey, just as learning as hypothesis testing, as it is for Bruner,

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cannot – at least cannot easily – provide acceptable standards or criteria for mastery that are acceptable to the school as an accountable institution. The school is mandated to judge whether or not a student has met an acceptable standard of knowledge and competence as the basis for graduation. That is, the school can say, indeed is required to say, whether or not the learner is sufficiently knowledgeable and competent to fill a social role. Students who pass a particular grade or earn a particular degree are required to know more or less the same things. Progressivism failed to have the impact it deserved, I suggest, because it was unable to spell out what knowing the same things or having the acceptable level of competence, was. Put another way, it failed to address the issue of accountability. Consequently, this progressive pedagogy has been overridden by the more traditional managerial folk psychology. To get out of this impasse we require that our folk pedagogy set out a way of thinking about teaching and learning that avoids the limitations of both the managerial and the progressivist pedagogies. Norms and normativity are technical ways of talking about standards and accountability. These norms are somewhat different from statistical norms where the norm is the average. Instead, by norm I mean acceptable standard. Scoring 60 per cent on a test may be an acceptable standard, whether the class average is 50 per cent or 70 per cent. It is the level above which the student will be judged competent. These standards are essentially arbitrary, based on experience and consensus, but once set, they serve as one criterion for passing or failing. Other standards are less arbitrary and are set by disciplines and professions. These include what is to be taken as true, what methods are acceptable for obtaining evidence, what is taken as a satisfactory explanation, what margin of error can be tolerated, and so on. These are the norms and standards that originate outside the school but are part of the mandate of the school. And the school is obligated to use these standards to judge the learning of the students and the activities of the teacher. If we grant the right of an outside agency to determine what will be taken as demonstrating competence and knowledge, what pedagogical options are we left with? Notice that if we abandon progressivism as too relativistic, we lose with it the latest developments in our understanding of mind and knowledge, and we tie our pedagogy to the objectivist tradition that we rejected as invalid. We may escape this conundrum if we add one caveat to Bruner’s intersubjective pedagogical exchanges. We may agree with Bruner that the child is responsible for his or her own learning, that the learner is a hypothesis tester and a maker of stories, that the knowledge that is constructed is the product of inquiry and that the teacher’s role is to engage intersubjectively with the learner in the attempt to come to some common understanding.

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But to this we must add that the exchange is not one between equals. It is not only that the teacher knows more, but rather that the teacher has the power and responsibility to judge the student’s efforts. Yet it is negotiation. The teacher’s role is to negotiate with the student a goal to which the learner can commit him or herself and take responsibility for, and which the teacher can accept as meeting his or her own responsibilities to the school. As before, the pedagogy consists of the student’s thinking and imagining and building their understanding and expressing it in speech or writing. The teacher’s role is to appraise those products in the light of the norms and standards of the school and to indicate to the student where their productions succeed and fail and what could be done to make them meet the acceptable standard. In other words, this pedagogical strategy adopts all of Dewey’s progressivism and all of Bruner’s intersubjectivity but adds the teacher’s responsibility for monitoring students’ beliefs and products in the light of agreed-upon standards. It would certainly be incorrect to say that Bruner overlooked the issue of standards. In the interview reported at the end of this book he said: ‘The great aim is to assure that a kid experiences this kind of shared mind with a teacher, even if only to know what it’s like in the public domain.’ That is, although Bruner emphasized the importance of intersubjectivity between teacher and student, he tended to treat that as a sharing between equals rather than emphasizing, as I add here, the inequalities resulting from their differing mandated responsibilities. It is not hard to imagine that this is what good teachers have been doing all along when they monitor student progress. Yet an explicit pedagogical theory that appropriately characterizes teachers’ actions and teachers’ responsibilities may help teachers to implement their pedagogy in a more reflective fashion. In his discussion of language learning, Bruner introduced the concept of ‘formats’, frameworks for engaging in social action whether playing peek-aboo, participating in a conversation or in teaching a child. For Bruner, the art of teaching relies on just such formats, which allow both teacher and student to know how to engage and how to participate. What is distinctive about teaching is that the pedagogical format is not one between equals; they are what Jose Linaeze (personal communication, September 2005) has called ‘asymmetrical formats’, but formats nonetheless. The asymmetry results from the fact that the teacher is the one who is responsible for what is taken as known and who monitors the social norms or standards. In summary, this discussion of a pedagogical theory premised on the new educational discourse sets out in a preliminary way the general relation between social structure, pedagogy, and the theory of mind. Non-humans lack the skills of imitation and teaching and pass on their cultures largely through their genes and through learning through one’s own experience.

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Human societies accumulate culture primarily because of the imitative capabilities of the young. But these are greatly augmented as societies become more complex to include special social arrangements, such as fostering out children to adults with special skills who in turn pass them on through demonstration, advice, and criticism. In complex bureaucratic societies, child rearing is delegated to school systems in which knowledge is separate from action and pedagogic means become primarily verbal and symbolic, a point emphasized by Bruner. This development is largely dependent on the availability of printed materials and books that set out content and standards to be achieved. Only when pedagogies became explicit and separated from the content taught, did schools begin to insist on newer more progressive pedagogies, yet directed to more or less the same content. Bruner, like Dewey before him, argued that the content too should change so that students participate in the growth of knowledge rather than acquiring only the products of knowledge. Dewey formulated the basic questions about learning, thinking, knowing, and teaching that put the learner at the center of the educational enterprise and that ran counter to the prevailing psychology. Bruner advanced this conception of mind and turned these basic questions into empirical ones, thereby initiating a new discourse on the education of children. That discourse involves new lines of research, new pedagogical practices, and it suggests new goals for education. In doing so Bruner took an important step towards what Dewey envisioned as ‘a science of education’. There is always more to be done, more to be said, more interdisciplinary collaborations to undertake, all carried out as ‘ventures of high optimism’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 292). Bruner never sought ‘the last word’; in his view there is no such word. The process, he argued, is what is important. Education needs not only truths but also a ‘lively sense of the possible’ (Bruner 1996, p. 24). That is the real legacy of his ‘fresh look’ at education.

Notes 1. And stop making incursions into those funds directed to educational research. 2. As advertisers know, for a message to be effective it has to be attuned to some vulnerability of the audience. Advertising, however, is a widely inappropriate model for teaching. Teaching requires a critical reception not persuasion.

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Appendix A: On Constructing Meaning

Olson: Comment on the relation between the personal and the social, on the relation between making and finding meaning. Bruner: [Pulling from a drawer a paper he has been working on for an upcoming lecture to High School teachers in Rome, he in part reads and in part adds commentary]: . . . We construct the meaning of things, including the meaning of the physical world, in the service of our goals and plans. So it’s not only collectively but individually, our own personal ways, of making sense of things. When we make sense of things we believe we have discovered the true reality, particularly when we get others to agree with us. But please do not misunderstand me. Reality is not something constructed by a free act of the imagination. There are social and physical constraints. Even within these constraints there are alternative versions of reality. They are often in competition with each other. Both within society and within our own minds. Now for education. What follows from what I said seems to me that in any system of education, the goal is not simply to pass on to the young some canned version of knowledge and know-how that we derived from the past but also to transmit a lively sense of what is possible – how to construct and re-construct our knowledge for the present and the future. Education must strive to cultivate habits and skills that make it possible for the young to go beyond the past so that they can put their learning to use in shaping the future. Schools are not like moving vans carrying furniture from one generation to the next. Education must cultivate a lively sense of the possible, to cultivate ways of meaning-making appropriate for the present and useful in constructing the ways of the future. Not surprising then, one of the first challenges that we must face as educators is how to explicate what we mean when we speak about realities, how one constructs such realities and its versions; versions are useful and enlightening and worthwhile. In addition, our task as educators is also to teach about the real world with respect to different eras; we must mind the old philosophical adage that is ontology recapitulates epistemology. That is to say, that beliefs about reality always and inevitably reflect our notions of how we gain our

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knowledge about reality. Or to put it the other way around, theories about how we acquire our knowledge of what is real inevitably predetermine what we take reality to be. I apologize for diving so deeply, so quickly and with such velocity into the problems of epistemology, how we know, but I’m only heeding the advice of the great eighteenth-century Italian thinker, Giambattista Vico, who had greater counsel about schooling than we realize. Please recognize with Vico that the reality problem is not just for philosophers. Did we say why? What for example is history? Is it simply an account of what happened? If I may be Vicoian for a moment, I can assure you that anything in history could only be an interpretation, just one interpretation of what was going on in the world at some period of time. This is not to devalue history; in fact it’s the contrary. It is only to say that there is no history without historiography, and again I speak of Vico’s picture, that history is not found but constructed. It is a product of human thought or of human culture or of whatever else it may be. This is not to say that things didn’t happen but only the how and why things happened, when and where they did, is deeply affected by how you think about the world and its past. And of course we all know this quite well even from personal experience as when children – call them Alessandro and Giovanni – end up quarrelling about what actually happened to set them against each other. Which of them can tell what really happened? Olson: Hmm . . . Bruner: [Setting aside his text] So I’m proposing this as one concrete example that we cannot teach history without historiography, even to 12year-olds. Indeed I suspect that what makes history so boring for kids at school is that we make it seem like it’s some fixed set of dates and facts, no questions asked. Why should we not make it plain that history always reflects the perspective of some historian, what some historian brings to bear on some record of the past or something like that? It’s just strange! And indeed even those records of the past reflect what those people then thought had happened. Why shouldn’t these matters be explored in school? That’s what I mean by tying history to historiography. Why for example was the death penalty used in Italy for thousands of years and then all of a sudden abolished in 1961? How did historians before and after that date represent the facts? And why did women not have the vote for years and then suddenly, presto, given voting rights in 1962! How can anybody claim to understand such matters historically without taking into account how historians of the period saw them? Again historiography. Again, pace Giambattista Vico. Olson: Yes, yes . . . Vico’s notion of ‘Makers’ knowledge’ – we know best what we ourselves have made – is a very nice approach.

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Bruner: So that’s what happens. Olson: It certainly brings us back to your emphasis on process. You know I’ve been reading your, all of your books. I’ve read a lot of Bruner in the last few months. Bruner: Oh my God! Poor you. Olson: And you see several themes running through them. One theme is the one you just mentioned here, namely, that it is not just a matter of acquiring the knowledge. It’s knowing how the knowledge is constructed. That’s the emphasis on process. Remember you hit that very early on in The Process of Education. Bruner: Yes. Olson: Yeah, that’s right. And that in turn came from your notion about hypothesis testing in perception. Bruner: Yeah, yeah, it comes right at the start. Even at the entry point of perception, even what gets in is selected. Olson: Yes. Bruner: The hypothesis theory of perception. So the notion of mind is one of not just registering or forming a representation, but basically that the mind is a possibility generator. I don’t develop it in this particular talk for high-school teachers. The nature of language is generative, and narrative too contains the possibility of generating possible worlds in the way that goes beyond what we have experienced. Olson: Uh-huh. Bruner: But it can’t be just language by itself. Because language is just a syntactic device if we are to believe Chomsky. The mistake is to think that just because you have an instrument in your hand you have already discovered the world – but you haven’t. You should say I’ve got an instrument . . . Olson: And now let’s see what we can do with it – the pragmatics. Bruner: Yes, the pragmatics. So I don’t know what to make of Noam. You know, what’s so funny is that Noam [Chomsky] has two sides. There is the one side which is very pragmatic, the politician. Olson: Yeah. Bruner: Uh-huh. It could kill you if you don’t agree with it. And on the other side there is Chomsky the formalist grammarian. And the formalism and the pragmatics never meet.

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Olson: He never admitted, it seemed to me, that he was dealing with such a tiny part of language; if he admitted that what he deals with is this possibility of recursion, people would say, well that’s very interesting but that does not have much to do with how language is used. Bruner: And he’d say that other part may be interesting but it’s not right. Olson: That’s right. That’s what you were saying. Bruner: [Laughs] Olson: So he pretends to be explaining more but he’s explaining it in a particular manner. Bruner: Um, yeah . . . it’s so funny, you know. Well he was, he was down about a month or so ago and um . . . Olson: Oh that’s nice. Bruner: Yeah, but we always had this interesting kind of thing, Noam and I, we never . . . I’ve never been able to have a real conversation with him. Olson: Even you. Bruner: Even me. Olson: I understand how mortals like myself get ‘the lecture’. But even with you he goes into a lecture mode? Bruner: Well, he says . . . he tells you your ideas are very interesting but not linguistically interesting. Olson: Oh. [Laughs] Bruner: The principle, the principal response you know, is that if that’s the way you feel, that’s OK, forget it. Then let’s talk politics instead and then we agree on many political things. [Laughs] So that’s easy. Olson: Go back to this business of the process of learning, not just the content but the moment of discovery, this mode of invention. Can that be taught? The point is that the content can be taught. Like it’s rather a straightforward matter to teach that content, the structure for knowledge. That’s rather doable and you can test for it. The process, the emphasis on process, that’s what I’m worried about . . . Bruner: Well, it’s doable. How many things can you teach? And I meet people who say, Jerry, you’ve, you’ve been a very successful teacher and I think I can teach what I have been describing. You can teach it . . . teaching it is not teaching content, it’s teaching the mode. It is getting students to

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stop acting as if they already know the answer and getting them to want to know what else there is. I guess I could revert to my theory about teaching people to hypothesize. Olson: Get the learners to do it. Get the learners to make the hypotheses. Bruner: Yeah, that’s right. Get the learners to help generate the hypotheses. And there are various kinds of tricks that you try. Some critics say, ‘You’re so bright so it’s all right for you to speculate but the rest of us are just trying to hang on to the core ideas.’ My response is ‘Rubbish.’ Sure, I’m bright. They’re bright too. Olson: And you get them to start asking the questions and thinking about possibilities. Bruner: Yeah. I have to tell you what I’m working on. I’m going out next week to a meeting in Monterey, California where we’re talking to a bunch of death penalty appeals lawyers. The death penalty; it appalls me that human beings think they can get retribution by killing someone on the grounds that that person killed somebody else. You’re gonna double the killing so it makes it even? It’s crazy. Tony Amsterdam and I are going to have some kind of dialogue on the history of the death penalty. That’s great. Olson: So you are going to talk about possible hypotheses about the death penalty? Bruner: Well, yeah, I’m going back to, to the history of it in Christianity, and the big turning point from the twelfth to the fifteen hundreds. Olson: The Scholastic philosophers? Bruner: And in the 1580s in Spain . . . Olson: Oh, the Inquisition? Bruner: Yup. So that year the Inquisition came in and then everything changed. And also the extent to which it’s used is a power ploy and, and somehow heresy gets to be the basis. I have a little bit of a feeling that the notion of heresy to some extent gets taken out of the religious mode, secularized to cover anything that is unusual. Somebody has disrupted the order of things. So dissenting opinions are disruptive and we stick them in jail. Geezus, do we stick people in there. Two and a half million in jail in the United States compared to Canada with 140,000. Olson: Is that right? Bruner: Well, if we’ve got 700,000, in Italy, France, and Spain they have 70. It’s punitive.

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Olson: Amazing. Bruner: I don’t want to get into that now. But I see prisons as a sort of anti-possibilitarianism, giving up. And yet prisons and heresy can be set side by side. You ever have a portion of the American creed that draws this out. The American creed is that everything is possible if you can chance it out. In conflict with encouraging the possible is the creed of security; don’t do anything daring. Watch out. It may take advantage of you. Be tough. Olson: Yes, it’s trade-off. Bruner: I was commenting to these lawyers the other day. The thing that is so amazing about the United States is that it has very lively contradictory movements. The same time. The same cities. One against the death penalty and the other movement, let’s get tougher on crime. Olson: Tough on crime. Bruner: The Americans are crazy. This business of generativeness has always caught my thinking. Looking for new possibilities. I remember my little gang as a kid. Our little gang. Four musketeers as we called ourselves. We would tell stories, make up stories, stuff like that. I remember one time I scored a high point with the gang when we were going by our mailbox and Freddy pointed at the sign ‘US MAIL’ and said, what’s that mean? And I said Uncle Sam Married An Irish Lady! Olson: [Laughs] Oh, that’s very nice. Another thing that is quite conspicuous in your writing is that the questions will interest you moreso than the answers. If you can formulate an issue into a question that looks like one could maybe make some progress on, you are very taken with it. What is the expression you use? Oh yes, you look for ‘ventures of high optimism’. A lovely expression. Bruner: People say, for example, that I’ve worked in different parts of psychology, of education, political psychology; the cognitive part of course was the basic part. But it occurs to me that in any field the strategy of ‘Let’s nail this down so that we really know about it’ is too limiting. I like that too, but I’m much more interested in opening it up than closing it down, so to speak.

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Appendix B: How Bruner Became Interested in Education

Bruner: My interest in education had a funny, funny kind of beginning. I had always, I had always been interested in my kids’ education and um, and I was for example on the Advisory Committee of, where was it, Shady Hill School Nursery School. Olson: Oh yes, I remember that school, we did a study there . . . Bruner: And where my kids went. And, um, there was a guy by the name of Ed Yeomans who was always in some, um, odd kind of way pushing in the direction of giving kids some sense that they weren’t finished if they only knew the details of science or algebra and that pushed me because, ah, I learn by making things my own. I know it’s my own funny style of thought. When I start reading a book, for example, I say ‘What’s this book really about?’ I want to locate it somewhere and locating it somewhere, um, is an interesting kind of thing because I can locate it in terms of the theories I already know. One of the first theorists who, and I have written about this, analyzed how we sort things, was Crazy Krushchevsky, who became, the renowned psychologist, David Kresh. Olson: Oh. Bruner: Ah, I mean, ah, I practiced his theory of learning that you learn things from your own hypotheses and learning became interesting. His experiments really moved me about this. This was . . . I was in graduate school then, um, when I first saw through this. One of the other people, one of the people who moved me in this direction was Edward Tolman. Olson: Yes, I’ve read that ah . . . Bruner: There were two important books that both appeared in 1932, or maybe this one was 1938. One of them was this Bartlett’s Remembering with this meaning-making central to it. And, the other was Purposive Behavior in

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Animals and Men where he talked about hypotheses and maps, cognitive maps. Olson: Yes, um, the cognitive maps and remembering. Did it drive you or anybody else to talk much about agency in those days? Bruner: No. Olson: Curious. Lots of knowledge and, and purpose but no agents . . . no agency. Bruner: No notion of agents. It was an interesting kind of thing. To some extent, it was very late in my career that I started paying attention to the notion of what is the character of man? All the stuff that I have been exposed to by Gordon Allport and on the notion of functional autonomy of motives and blah, blah, blah. But um, if you mind my saying so, that was, that was too driven by the Christian conception of the individual which I admired, sure, but I wanted, I wanted a man who, I’ll give it you, in a funny kind of way in an Italian folktale. It’s just . . . it takes a few minutes to read. Olson: Calvino’s? Bruner: This is from Calvino’s section of Italian folktales which he writes so beautifully. Um, this is about the people of Biella with Bielleses, where is it? Page 60 . . . I can’t pretend to be Biellese but I know how these people talk. Olson: [Laughs] Bruner: This stubborn soul is Biellese. A farmer was on his way to Biella one day. The weather was so stormy that it was impossible to get over the roads but the farmer had important business and pushed on in the face of the driving rain. He met an old man who said to him, ‘Good day to you. Where are you going, young man, in such haste?’ ‘To Biella,’ answered the farmer without slowing down. ‘You might at least say, God willing.’ The farmer stopped and looked the old man in the eyes and snapped, ‘God willing I’m on my way to Biella but even if God isn’t willing, I still have to go there all the same.’ Now the old man happened to be the Lord. Olson: Hmm . . . Bruner: ‘In that case you go to Biella in seven years,’ he said, ‘in the meantime jump in the swamp and stay there for seven years.’ Suddenly the farmer changed into a frog and jumped into the swamp. Seven years went by. The farmer came out of the swamp and turned back into a man, clapped his hat on his head and continued on his way to the market. After a short distance, he met the old man again and ‘Where are you going, my good man?’ ‘To Biella.’ ‘You might say God willing.’ ‘If God wills it, fine, if not, I

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know the consequences and I can now go into the swamp unassisted, thank you.’ Nor for the life of him would he say one word anymore. Olson: [Laughs] Bruner: He was carrying out his own agency. Olson: Yeah. Bruner: He was determined and this, this kid’s . . . Olson: Not to be deflected. Bruner: So I have very strongly the ideology which some of my friends used to say to me was very Western, I’m a Western man. I think . . . Olson: To talk so much about purpose and goals and intentions and agencies? Bruner: Right, goals and agency. Olson: Yeah. Bruner: And, so I go back now to an interesting turning point in my life in the mid-1980s which is way, way later in life. I got to thinking about agency more and more and I thought, psychologists don’t talk about it, they talk about mechanisms as if the mechanism was sort of free-floating and in some sort of bell jar. So, I got to thinking once more about the two ways in which we think about the way in which we do our science. One of them is the kind of thing that we talk about from the outside as if observed in some sort of objective, enlightened way in some sort of rationality as if we as psychologists were gods looking down from the outside. The other, I got interested in the question of how in fact people talk about it themselves and it was that that led me increasingly to the notion of narrative and I say now, what has more impact on the way in which people actually carry out their activities? What psychologists say or what people say themselves in their stories? And the first thing about narrative is agency, and it was that particular point that I first – I remember I was in London at the time staying at a friend’s apartment – I read Kenneth Burke’s book. Olson: Yes. Bruner: So, um, it got me reading Kenneth Burke, re-reading Kenneth Burke. I was in London and this friend of mine had a copy of The Grammar of Motives where he talked about the underlying nature of, of narrative – that there is agent, an act, a scene, an instrument, a recipient of the action, a goal, and then a sense of place and time.

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Olson: So the notion of agency came into your thinking from the analysis of the narrative, the grammar of narrative. Bruner: Which is absolutely impossible without an agent. Olson: Yeah, that’s right. Bruner: Ah, and the other thing, and the other thing that is so striking about narrative is that it’s not only about an agent carrying out an act or goal, but it doesn’t make the story unless there is a paripatita, a problem. So, ah, then, then I started I went back after reading Kenneth Burke’s idea and . . . I can’t remember who it was . . . um, this is ancient history we’re talking about here . . . Olson: [Laughs] Bruner: So I [Laughs] anyway, I read lots of stuff in Aristotle Poetics. So I went to the Poetics and said, Aristotle’s analysis was that there is some initial state of world, somebody is carrying out some kind of action and then there is . . . the . . . upset, paripatita, they’re going to upset the plan. Olson: Trouble. Bruner: It’s, it’s the trouble that can . . . that literally, it’s a, I think it’s a tortea which means competition with the world. It’s something that competes with . . . Olson: I see, it interrupts a plan. Bruner: And there is the action which at times in some cultures resolves some things. So, I came, this was in, in the 19, mid-1980s, I gave a talk at the International Congress of Psychology. The International Congress of Psychology invited me to give a talk, and I gave a talk which to me was one of the great turning points of my life. It was called ‘Narrative and Paradigmatic Modes of Thought’. Olson: I remember that. Bruner: And I still read that paper with a certain pleasure and amusement. It’s pretty na¨ıve in some ways but . . . Olson: Well, you still use those categories because you haven’t completely eliminated the paradigmatic, have you? Bruner: No, no, no, no, I mean . . . Olson: Because you’ve been able to turn many of your ideas into research programs.

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Bruner: And I later came to realize that, in some funny backhand way, I’ve been thinking about this all my life. I even wrote a little book called Essays for the Left Hand, in which I talked about the left hand and the right. I was operating on the assumption that the left hand could hand things over for the right to do and that the left hand was the dreamer and the right was the doer. But if narrative is dreaming, it’s some dreaming; we go to wars on the basis of stories! Olson: Oh, I see. The left and right hands became the two modes of thought. Bruner: So, ah, the other thing about narrative that’s so freaky that nobody doubts it at all – and this is the one thing that makes the narrative mode so deeply human – is that nobody doubts that there is more than one story that we could tell. So we could say, that’s your story, let me tell my story now. Or when we want somehow to denigrate what somebody said, we say that’s just, just, just a story. Ah, which means it’s just a story that either lacks some elements or is serving some purpose. It recognizes the fact that the telling of stories as such has usually some aim. The minimal aim is to convince somebody, it has to do with getting someone to join me within my world. We tell stories to get others to come into our personal world. Similarly it’s an, it’s an interesting thing to me I mean, when, when I look at things like the teaching of history. I know perfectly well, as I say, you cannot teach history without historiography. You’ve got to talk about the different stories – how they arose and things like that. And I would even argue that in science there’s the same kind of thing. I mean, you know, we got a morphologically driven story from Darwin and we decided that creationism didn’t work. We had a very bones and stones kind of thing. Today, we are getting a new behavioral evolutionary kind of thing coming along, like, for example, that cultures may prosper not just by the fact that we have a 600 grams of brain capacity, but by the fact that we have the capacity for intersubjectivity and then with this intersubjectivity it makes it possible to work side by side with another person for a total of 1200 grams capacity. Olson: So it’s surprising that science has the reputation of a loner discipline. You know the people, the big names, they’re all treated as if they were these geniuses working in a closet with no contact from anyone else, never contacted or read anyone else, working alone. Bruner: Or in a vacuum. Olson: I like your emphasis on the means by which we come by or to the story; you know, the emphasis on epistemology as opposed to just on the content. Now, that’s captured to some extent by these people who talk

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about inquiry methods and so on. Are you sympathetic to that kind of discourse? Bruner: Well, of course I’m sympathetic as I was one of the people who got this thing going, and still think so, and if it’s true that, as Sandra Bosacki said, there are 20,000 published works on classroom discourse, the importance of discourse in the classroom must be catching on. Well, discourse is fine. But, it’s like talking about the fact that a lot of people are walking but not talking about where they are walking to, that they’re walking is OK, but what is the aim? So, with all those things it can lose its point. I mean I so strongly believe in culture and discourse that I get labeled, labeled as a cultural psychologist. I am a cultural psychologist! I think it’s impossible to talk about humans without talking about the cultural surroundings in which they operate. But the cultural surrounds ain’t just the stimulus world, it’s what you make of it. It’s one of the things, it’s one of the things that, that I loved early on about Edward Tolman and why he’s always been my hero for talking about the cognitive maps that we make to navigate the world. Olson: Yeah. Bruner: My first and early heroes were Gestalt psychologists like Kurt Levine. But the Gestalt psychologists are too preoccupied with getting the true organization of experience in terms of figure-ground blah, blah, blah, that basic kind of thing, you know. And Kurt Levine got more and more interested in the pushes and pulls in terms of getting the vectors and valences and the rest of them like that. Without enough consideration of what it was that helped create things and so when I first read Vygotsky and the emphasis of his historical, cultural kinds of things it was great. What bothered me about Vygotsky and it still bothers me about Vygotsky, and other culturalists, is that they’re perfectly willing to live with some cooked-up notion of an effectively internalized culture. Come on! Truly internalizing the culture is like saying we’re going to explain respiration by effectively internalizing the air. Olson: Yeah, internalization always seemed like a non-starter to me. Bruner: Yeah and um, they get so angry when you say, come on let’s get beyond that. Let’s take a closer look. So I realize, you know, I go back to the hypothesis theory of perception. Where do hypotheses come from? Most have come from expectancies. Expectancies have two characteristics in addition to the ones that I worked on in perception. One of them, the expectancies come from some kind of reality principle of Sigmund Freud. What is likely to be here in the environment? And the other from what we want to be there and what we want to be there tends to be also a kind of habitual thing that we pick up from a culture. For example, I have gone to

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the grocery store or the post office before and when I do that I know what I’m looking for, what I’m searching for is conventionally either in the post office or the grocery store. Funny thing, Colwyn Trevarthan sent me a beautiful photograph that he had picked up from a local post office in a small town in Scotland. He has this place there, it’s actually beautiful and I said, jeepers creepers, how did you come by that? It’s an interesting kind of thing in Scotland, he said, to take local artifacts and put them on sale in the post office, and I said, I wish they did that in Ireland, uh? [Laughs] This small village where I live in Ireland, they don’t do that. So the culture plays on expectancies, provides opportunities and also provides opportunities for you to define yourself. So, let’s get back to school, I think I’m dodging away from that a little bit too much. I think it’s very important for kids to get some sense of what the world is like and what they may expect to see in it, for kids to get some sense of what their culture is like, to see the alternative possibilities in the present and the past, to make up stories.

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Appendix C: Teaching the Hypothetical

Olson: Do you think that teaching possibilities applies to the teaching of creationism, because, as you know, there is a lot of pressure to teach creationism, so-called intelligent design, in Canada as well as in the US? People could cite your work on narrative and say, well the argument from design is a very good narrative so why not teach that narrative along with the more legitimate, biological account? What I mean is that when you advocate narratives, you also have to have rules for judging the validity of the narrative, don’t you? Bruner: There are all sorts of master narratives that form the basis of the way in which we orient our accounts. And Darwin’s theory, in particular modern-day Darwin theory, modern-day versions, were not just telling good stories but were taking some view of the fact that man has to adapt to changing situations, who has to change, to change not just morphologically but culturally. I see that as a foundational narrative and the notion that the only reason a story is good is because it’s a good story, that’s very silly. Now with respect to the Creation narrative, I have no question at all that it is great literature and it’s absolutely wonderful to read and anybody who said kids should be prevented from reading Genesis ought to be strung up on the lamppost. Genesis is a fantastic narrative. Olson: Yeah. Now how do you, how do you adjudicate these narratives or how do you assign them to these categories? Let’s say, why not just say that the Darwinian scheme is a paradigmatic explanation and ah . . . Bruner: Which is the paradigmatic matter? Olson: Darwinian. Bruner: Is paradigmatic? Olson: Yes, it’s deducible in a sort of way.

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Bruner: Well, I’m not going to throw away evidence. It’s very interesting to me. You know I sat through courses with the great biologists. Olson: Ernst Mayer died yesterday. Bruner: That I knew. Olson: Ernst Mayer died . . . you knew him? Bruner: Yes. Olson: He’s the grand old man of biology. Even I studied him in my first year at the University in Saskatchewan so it’s back some days. Bruner: Um, but in any case what I want to say is, there’s an evidentiary kind of thing. But you’re not going to catch, you’re not going to catch me in that odd kind thing of saying some narratives are fictional and some narratives are based on observation. You know, sometimes it’s very difficult to fight free from the notion that scientific accounts are free from narrative. The observations themselves may be guided to some extent by the story you are trying to tell which makes it sort of quasi-fictional. I’m not the only person who’s talked about this. Olson: Are you softening the line between the narrative and the paradigmatic? Bruner: To recognize the constraints that some narratives, some narratives are testable, some are fictional. But there are some interesting things about fictional narratives; I want to argue that fictional narratives sometimes have the characteristic that they are, what’s the right word, exemplary. There is something exemplary in Italo Calvino’s crazy story about the farmer meeting God that tells you something important about the character of the people of Biella, the people in the Alpine section of north of Italy. And their skepticism. They are very, very self-reliant because they have little farms with which they make do. It’s the way they do it. They have little farms and lots of independence and they stay apart and the state never dared dominate them. And they raise sheep, and because of this, they discover things. They did their own kind of thing and ended up with the best, most beautiful wool in all of Italy. Then in the early eighteenth century they sent people to England, which is way the hell away, because they had wool and they knew those people made cloth out of wool. Olson: Well, they made their own story. Bruner: [Laughs] We all do it and so there are narratives about what we do and there are narratives about what we possibly do and that puzzles me a lot because people tell stories, but seem to want only one story. For example,

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why would anyone say that the only story you should read about creation is Genesis? Well, why? Why should you read only one story about anything? So let’s, let’s hear, ‘Does anybody in the class have another story that they heard, let’s hear it.’ And then . . . Olson: And then do you want to show people how to reformulate stories into the devices for making predictions, for gathering evidence, for telling you where to look, for finding out . . . Bruner: Finding out, finding out, ah, finding out contradictions, something that makes you contradict yourself. How come? You claim x, and now you’re saying y. Olson: So, you’re a little bit like Karl Popper who’s argued that science is just a branch of literature. Remember that claim? Literature is just a generic form and science is in some way one kind of literature. Bruner: I’m not that Viennese. I think Popper was trying to shock the English who . . . [Laughs] Olson: Have such firm categories? Bruner: Firm categories of what is science and what is literature. Olson: Yeah. Bruner: This is the way I see my role in the law school that’s not unrelated to education. What you do when you are pleading a case, pleading a case before the Supreme Court, is that you look at the so-called corpus of the law and you look at similarities and precedents that let you read the statues in particular ways. Olson: How so? Bruner: You can always look at the same precedents in other ways so you take a look at the series of things. My favorite example, in 1740 Lord Mansfield made the argument that the natural state of man is free, and that slavery can only exist where there is a statute defining slavery and its conditions. There is no such statute so there should be no slaves. So really, so what you do, is you’re constantly looking at lines of stories that were told and finding the one that is canonical. It’s interesting but the best of the law schools are becoming more interested in literature, ah . . . to see how predicaments are handled in literature. Olson: So your gift to the legal community is to get them to think in possible stories a little more, a little more openly about possible ways of viewing and interpreting events – as stories to be contrasted.

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Bruner: I hope so. Olson: What you are saying is that the law can be read in different ways? You know this has become a big issue for me in my work on literacy. I’ve been looking at writing all of these years and the way you could shape writing to achieve a particular effect. But I’ve become much more interested, in the last couple of years really, in the ways of reading and the history of reading and the alternative ways of construing the same text. You know you can look at it from the writer’s side or the reader’s side of course, as literary types like Roland Barthes have argued. But I think that if you want to make a more coherent theory of literacy you do have to look at both those things and balance those ways of writing with those ways of reading. And of course they don’t mesh but there may be a small set of ways and maybe you can sort out those ways and perhaps even teach them. Bruner: So it’s an interesting kind of thing and the most successful kind of seminar that I’ve ever taught in my life, which was last term, a brilliant group of students, third year, hand picked and what we did was to go over novels alongside the legal cases teaching them to, to tie them together. Olson: Yeah, that’s an interesting . . . Bruner: And a whole other way to think about law. They loved it and a couple came up to me and said this is the best class they ever had, and I said it was the best class I ever had. Olson: So come back to schooling. Bruner: So come back to teaching arithmetic. For example, we just go and find some examples of numbers – house numbers, numbers on hockey jerseys, license plates, price tags, we start off with those and say, well hey we’re dealing with these numbers, right? What do you think that this means? Olson: Yeah. Bruner: It started off with, um, showing, showing them the different ways in which numbers are not about reality – it’s not about reality, it’s about the way in which you choose to deal with reality, with the uses of numbers. Um, people will say, oh, that’s OK for graduate school but not for 12-year-olds, to which I say, ‘Bullshit’ because the fact of the matter – I’ve done a bit of teaching myself and I know – kids love this stuff. Until we get people to realize that kids love to use their heads, nothing is going to happen. Olson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Bruner: So, yes, I would do it there. I would also do it, I would also do it in science; what does it mean to talk about the evolution of man as we did in Man: A Course of Study. Olson: I think that’s very nice and it shows your focus on the process of thinking about a topic and keeping the discussion open-ended. As a matter of fact, it seems to me, if you said the final word on the topic it’s no longer a very interesting topic. Right? Like a real topic is one for which there is no final word! Bruner: There is no final word. And this is what discourse is all about. It’s an interesting sort of thing. There’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t say, for example, ‘Let’s get some hypotheses for that’ and sometimes the best hypothesis is the one you could test, but, um, it ain’t so when we’re writing stories. So why do we say one story is better than another one? Why, why for example is that crazy little Italian folktale about Biella a good story? Olson: I agree kids love discussing these kinds of things. It’s quite remarkable that they don’t get much of a chance to do it in school. Bruner: And is it because of the authority of the teacher? Olson: No, it’s because the criteria that have to be met in order to pass the test and so on, to meet the goals, narrow the discussion to the correct answer. Bruner: You know that has strangled education up to now and now we have a president whose whole concept of education is based on, what’s the fancy word they use? Olson: Ah . . . accountability? Bruner: Accountability. Accountability. Yeah, accountability. So we’re going to throw the whole thing back up. I think that made the whole system of education absolutely deadly. Olson: Yes, this leads to a question I was going to save for later but it seems to fit in here. I wanted to ask how you thought your work applies both to the means of education, you know the pedagogy – you and I have talked about that a lot – as opposed to the goals of education which are far more important and which you’re certainly addressing now. Bruner: Both goals and means are important, obviously but, but the means should not get dissociated from the ends. When I talk to some of my Italian friends who make trips to the United States and look at our American classrooms and they said, well it’s interesting, there’s a lot of discourse

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going on, um, there’s always a lot of talk, but what are they doing? What are they, what are they getting at, what’s the end? What’s the point? Well, is it so they, they become good conversationalists with each other? Olson: Yeah, that’s a problem. Bruner: So there’s an interesting kind of thing in the ends, the ends of education, this is not to say they are the same for everybody, but there are some things that are in common, there are things you do in educating somebody in order to make it possible for them to do other things. So you do an assessment of what the present situation is. To see what kids understand. I said, OK fine. But the other, the other, the other task is to somehow to have in mind where you are trying to go. We’re trying to produce kids, for example, who have active minds, who don’t just take stuff and store it like a computer but who can think about possibility. They can live in a democracy, and eternal vigilance is the price of democracy. Secondly, that somehow they are capable of looking at some of the major issues that prevent progress or the issues that can further progress. They have to understand that civil liberties have to be preserved if we are to have open discussion. To make progress we cannot surrender our rights just because of risks of terror. There’s always terror. Olson: This, this is really interesting. It’s critical here in the US more so than in Canada but it’s important there too. The fact is there’s always these rival concerns. On the one hand you teach history so as to inspire patriotism, loyalty, citizenship and all that. But on the other hand you teach it to make students reflective and critical of society and to think of what you need to do to make a decent society. Bruner: We have always had the two creeds, of preserving the past and criticizing it. Vitality comes from internal debate, not closing it off. A country’s vitality comes from internal debate and conflict. Olson: We’re certainly in a period of reactionary politics. Bruner: And so why do we kid ourselves, why don’t we talk about our past? We Americans are a kind of stormy people. Storminess makes not only bitterness but it makes the choices clear. I mean, what the hell, do you want to have a windless day everyday? Olson: I think it is really interesting because this is a way of trying to think about the goals of education and not just the means but the very conception of knowledge and authority. I recall from my teaching days a feeling of enormous responsibility for stating the truth. If I made a mistake in my teaching I felt guilty about this, as if saying something incorrect should

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not happen. I actually felt guilty because I had made the assumption that what I said in the classroom was to be above the dispute and just had to be the final truth. That left very little room for open discussion. Bruner: [Laughs] Olson: Yes, the truth. Um, and that is very much embedded in the entire structure of the school system in the fixed curriculum and fixed outcomes. But what you’re saying is that you really like to see the schools not be so concerned with fixed outcomes and with fixed answers and with the last word on these topics, but would encourage learners to think about the many possibilities. Bruner: First I sense that . . . Olson: Debates, discussion, considering all alternatives, being able to generate alternatives for yourself, and so on. Bruner: The best use of mind is the discursive use of mind, to deal with alternatives and possibilities. Olson: Yes, but as you know you run into a lot of problems. As you mention in one of your books, I think the last book, that what you tried to encourage in, I think it was Man: A Course of Study, was the possibility of doubt and reappraisal, whereas the school boards wanted certainty. You wanted to open up, to create doubt; they wanted certainty. Bruner: Yup, I don’t even want to call it doubt; what I want to do is to keep curiosity alive. Olson: Yeah. Bruner: About how things happened. What are we? Are we a troop of ants or something of the sort, moving in a fixed pattern? Yeah!

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Appendix D: On Dewey

Olson: You know I wanted to ask you what your current estimate of Dewey is. I know you’re not a Dewey scholar by any means, but you’ve been praised and enjoyed being praised, for being like Dewey. And after the favorable reception of The Process of Education people said, well we haven’t read something like this since Dewey. Bruner: Since Dewey. Olson: Since Dewey and um, I’m wondering what your feelings are about Dewey and about the relationship between your ideas and Dewey’s ideas. I know not your line of work really but the comparisons are there, for example the emphasis on inquiry, on projects, on agency, that was all in Dewey. Bruner: I think, I think both Dewey and I are in one very deep trough of the American pragmatic tradition. Olson: I understand. I think so and how would you describe that tradition? Just as American pragmatism or what? Bruner: Well I think I would pick three things, maybe more. With respect to pragmatism, my version of pragmatism is basically that there are various ways of looking at things and you pick the one that suits your purpose within some historical continuity. For example, in the school segregation case, Brown vs the Board of Education, we had to rethink the notion of separate but equal, which had come up in the 1890s, and that version could no longer be seen as valid. The American tradition takes a long time and constant effort; you constantly have to redefine the thing. We have to look at it again from the point of view of whether it filled the bill and whether it needs to be rethought. Olson: Yeah.

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Bruner: Redefining issues is a very Deweyesque approach as Dewey was much concerned with social reform and the law. He was concerned, but he never got himself expert enough in the law to be really effective. Olson: Oh. Bruner: I had thought that the law is important because of the fact that the function of the law is never to describe what you should do, it is to say that you may not do, you can’t do, sets limits. And by setting limits it changes the nature of what is the natural right of people themselves. People have a right to act free from restrictions that cannot be justified on the basis of any law. Vigilance is one of the functions of a good constitutional lawyer. When you introduce free education, what are you bringing with it? Do civil service examinations revise our notions of who is best able to run the government? How do decisions affect our society generally? I see Dewey’s pragmatism as a kind of a historical sensitivity. On the other hand, I don’t like to think about pragmatic theory of truth because I don’t like that concept. Olson: I agree with you, but you can still talk about what best suits your purpose. Bruner: What suits the purpose. Olson: You still can honor truth. Bruner: What suits the purpose as originally stated? That’s right. The trouble is people have made pragmatism sound like something opportunistic. It is more. I do this because it works, yes, but it nicely fits with respect to the objectives you stated. Dewey was very mindful of this but somehow the Deweyans got carried away. Olson: Yeah, well it degenerated into this relativism that seemed to make truth subordinate to use. And the other thing was that his program didn’t seem to meet any set standards. The process of learning was virtuous in its own right so it did not need to meet any standard for truth or validity. It’s as if Deweyans weren’t willing to make any judgements about the quality of the arguments that kids made or the projects they completed. Bruner: He didn’t pay sufficient attention to his theory of learning. He resisted associationism but not much more. I’m a great admirer of Dewey but I’m not such a great admirer of what the Deweyans did to Dewey. Olson: It’s tragic what happened to Dewey. Everyone now points out how Progressivism became a farce and The Process of Education moved away from Progressivism because in the very first paragraph of that book you said, you’re interested in the intellectual possibilities of the school. You know,

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we’re not just interested in the involvement but rather in real intellectual aspiration, in the use of mind . . . Bruner: So it needed the theory of mind, the theory of mind. I put an emphasis on the structure of knowledge, structure is good because structure allows you to make deductions and inductions and so on. You know, I don’t mind when people include me along with Dewey. Olson: No, certainly not. No, um Dewey did right on when he wrote his book on thinking, what was it called, How We Think and it’s, it’s the very much theory that thinking is hypotheses generating, much like your view. But here’s the one thing that I noticed, unlike you, he didn’t try to make a science out of it nor did he ever have the follower who ever, ever tried to make an empirical science out of his theory of learning or thinking. Bruner: Absolutely amazing. Olson: Yeah, isn’t that amazing. Bruner: There was a book that came out in Italy. It pointed out that we Americans don’t like to think about how we come to master knowledge. I don’t know whether it’s because of the fact that we’re so anti-elitist we don’t like to say that anyone is brighter, smarter, or more effective cognitively than anyone else. Thinking about thinking in America is something that produces enormous ambivalence. In an interesting kind of way, for example, the appeal of jurisprudence is that it is all about how we think about the law and how it affects us and other ways. One of the elite points of the study of law is thinking about thinking! In most fields they don’t think about thinking but rather about how you do business or be a good doctor or whatever. But no thinking about thinking. Olson: [Laughs] Bruner: The business of the role of intelligence as such, the kind of thing done by Spearman’s g , always bothered Americans because they think of it only as discriminating among people, whereas I want to raise everybody’s g . I gave a lecture at the University of Texas earlier this year on going beyond what you knew. Olson: On um, going beyond the information given? I think it’s a masterpiece. Go back to Dewey. You said there were three aspects of Dewey that you endorsed. Bruner: One of them, one of them was the forward-reaching nature of intelligence. You found out that uncertainty, alternative meanings, that there was no one truth, made a 22-year-old teacher feel guilty about saying

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something that may not be the truth? It may be that some of the truth which you missed out on may have already stimulated a lot of good thinking! Not that you should find ways of lying to make students think but that you should not assume you monopolize it. So, that, that is one, um, the other thing that I like very much about Dewey is that Dewey to a degree saw the relationship between society and culture in the education system. Olson: Yes, you know I, I make a fuss about that in my book. Bruner: Yes, I know you did. Olson: Yes, when you want to talk about school and society, Dewey is the obvious place to start because that was fundamental to his whole enterprise. Bruner: The social philosophy of his work was so very important. That everybody that you stopped on the street is equally responsible for the way which you educate the young. There is a semi-permeable membrane between the school and the society. We set this institution up. We set it up once for all, we stick with it and give exams and think that that’s the way it has to be done. And this idiot in Washington, you know, who doesn’t give a damn about education . . . Olson: No, it’s quite an issue, we have our own tirades back in Toronto too. We watch the American news because everything that happens here affects us too, though it’s a bit muted. Bruner: No, on the other hand you [Canadians] represent a good source of resistance and a source of encouragement for the American public. Olson: Well, that’s good . . . Bruner: Well now, let me, let me see if I can characterize these. The first was this pragmatic approach to knowledge, the second was his linking school and society. The third thing that I liked about Dewey was his making moral and ethical issues directly relate to practice. Morals were not a bunch of beliefs, do you believe in God, do you believe in teachers, in the constitution, and so on, but basically the moral aspects of pragmatic action. If the mayor of the city of New York makes an effort to set up small schools, you don’t want to ask only are they more effective. You want to ask if it addresses the moral issue of equal opportunity. So social experiments have a moral dimension. Who gives a damn whether gays live together or get married or not? Moral issues have a pragmatic basis just as knowledge does. People say, are we teaching Christian morals; I want to ask what are the moral dimensions of practical action. Olson: Quite interesting. In Canada we are close to approving same-sex marriage but a lot of people think the issue is some sort of definitional matter

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or that there is some fundamental truth of matter as to what marriage really is, rather than recognizing it is a social agreement or convention. There seems to be no interest in whether this changes the way people act in any sort of way or the way we react to them. Does it have, does it have anything to do with the world? Do they take on more responsibility? I think that is what you mean by a pragmatics of morality – what difference does it make? Bruner: I know, I know. And, so here comes the question. Can we bring these things up in school? Who, who? Now I want to raise the question that’s sort of in the back of my head. Who now determines what takes place in school? Fixed curricula is one notion which we hear about, but if you go take a look at fixed curricula you realize they’re about as fixed as the clouds in the sky. Yet we have fixed curriculums and we have examinations, the classes are stuck with them. If I were the teacher, I would tell the class, we’re giving over an hour to getting you ready for the test and when that is out of the way we can go on and do something interesting. Perhaps, I’m sure I would get in trouble for it. Olson: I’m sure you would because now almost the whole day has specified activities and specified outcomes to make sure that every itemizable bit of knowledge gets listed and taught and tested. It makes a funny assumption about knowledge. This goes back to your comments on pragmatism. Bruner: Knowledge comes to be what is going to be on the exams. Olson: Yes, knowledge. Knowledge is what is going to be on the exam but it makes the further assumption that knowledge is, it’s itemizable. You know knowledge is this set of things, a list of things you can check off. Amazing. Bruner: I know, it actually has this splitting quality, like a shopping list. Olson: Exactly, a long shopping list and then you can assess to see how many items on the list you achieved.

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Appendix E: Reggio Emilia and International Comparisons

Olson: There was a recent article in a Canadian newspaper that said let’s be number one in the literacy Olympics next time that international comparisons are made. [Laughs] What do you make of testing as a form of accountability? Bruner: I know. I mean it’s a very interesting kind of thing. What am I to make of the fact that, for example, the United States, which has the highest per capita income of any country of the world, also has the largest standard deviation in literacy scores in the world? What am I going to think about the fact that the US comes out fourteenth in the world? Olson: Yeah. Yes, what are we to make of that? I don’t think the right thing to be made about it is that we should direct more of our limited resources to tuning up the kids so that they’ll be number 12 rather than number 14 on these world comparisons. I don’t think that’s the way to go but that is the way it is going. You know, I’m not opposed to these tests because they tell you something, I don’t know what exactly, but they do tell you something. I’m more critical of the extreme cost for such little benefit – pragmatism again. Bruner: Yes, how are we to understand what these differences mean? I know for example that as of January 42 per cent of the death sentences in the United States are imposed on blacks and they are only something like 12 per cent of the population. Olson: Yes, you can’t understand school scores if you don’t understand how other aspects of the society contribute to these differences. Bruner: Reggio Emilia in Italy had developed a scheme that linked school and society and development in a more progressive way. They were interested in getting kids to participate in their own education.

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Olson: I think this is a very, very nice idea. You know, changing them from being consumers of knowledge into people that are actually generating the knowledge. When I was a young teacher I never thought that possible. Bruner: It’s, it’s an interesting kind of concept. Getting kids to participate in their own education. The first thing you have to do is to say that part of knowing something is thinking about it and what it means. So, in Reggio Emilia and in my own experience, when a teacher asks a question and a kid comes up with an answer you say to the kid, it’s interesting but why’d you come to that idea? And if the kid says, well I don’t know you turn to the next kid, ‘What’d make Giovanni come up with something like that?’ and you can say, well I think it’s because you considered such and so, or because you already know – and then they go at it for a while and then the teacher says, this is interesting, so what are the different ways in which you come up with an idea, and so on. Olson: Yeah. Bruner: And the kids love it. And to teach about light you show some shadows, cast, change, size, distance between shadow and cast, and so on and what is the light doing. Or you raise questions about cities; I’ve always loved the business about cities and five-year-olds know lots about cities and what you do in the city. So what is a city? One Reggio Emilia kid says ‘a city has gotta have houses for people to sleep in so a city is where you have houses for people to sleep in,’ and another kid says ‘what do you mean, I come from the country and we have houses. So houses don’t make cities. What are you talking about?’ Olson: Uh-huh. Bruner: [Laughs] What the other kid said was that people gotta be near each other for some kinds of things and so on and so on. And the thing is that if you start thinking about it and you say, you know maybe it’s because of the fact that some of the things you need have to be traded or some things need to be stored or some things need a lot of people to make and so on. Kids start thinking about it. Maybe it has something to do with storage of goods. Olson: The problem of dealing with surplus. The issue of surplus; Jack Goody is interesting on the relation between surplus and cities. Bruner: The issue of surplus and specialization. You need the people to work and they have to live somewhere and you can’t have them just hanging around the place and so on and so on. And one of the kids says, you have

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to have a hospital. So the kids are creating urban science. You can do it so many different ways. Olson: Yes, but what about the goal, the criterion, the standard. Is there some attempt to arrive at something like a definition or some other criterion that is being used so you know when you’ve gotten there, when you’re finished? How do you set measurable standards? Bruner: Well, it’s an interesting kind of thing. I would say, well I don’t know, but I have very strongly the feeling as I’ve said many times today that the process is just as important as the product. Yeah, American schools may be a bit different from Reggio Emilia, but maybe we don’t have to get an absolutely set answer, that this is the only answer. I realize that because of the fact that they don’t have examinations and they won’t allow their kids to be subjected to these testing schemes, these standard testing. Sometimes to the objection of North Americans. How do we know they are any good or as good we are? Precisely. Go sit in one of their classrooms and you’ll be convinced that they have something that we have missed. Olson: Do they have forms of assessment? Bruner: I think [teachers in Reggio Emilia] are very much interested in forms of communicating including drawings. They find ways of putting things up on the walls, which communicate and then finding ways to say it and then finding ways to write it. Olson: Sure. Bruner: And different ways to say it and sometimes the teachers will write it or say their versions. Olson: Oh, they are very much interested in language. Bruner: The fact of the matter is that the whole program is organized around discourse. They refer to a book called The Thousand Languages of Childhood and they are interested in the different ways of communicating because communication is terribly important. You know, when some kid says something and another kid says I don’t understand that, what do you mean by that? The kid will say or the teacher will say, tell us what you mean by that. Why do you say that? And when they get something just right you get massive agreement. Olson: Yes, you know in Canadian schools if a kid says something wrong even in a very open context, there is an enormous amount of embarrassment and hence a reluctance for children to say anything. Sandra Bosacki’s book The Culture of Classroom Silence points out that some kids are very reluctant to

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say anything because they are afraid to be thought to be stupid. You know, it takes a real culture of expressiveness to get kids to be willing to put out opinions. Bruner: It’s expressiveness, yes, but it is also a matter of just allowing time for ideas to rise. Epistemological emotions are evoked somehow en route to discovery. To see things in an interesting way we have to try out things; it does not come too easily. And the kind of things she talks about in that book, the notion of silence, the fact of the matter is that, if someone does not come up with ideas immediately, eventually . . . Olson: . . . it is going to be a very quiet place! Bruner: The kid gets lured into the discussion. The teacher asks, ‘Michael, you haven’t said anything about this, is this right?’ When you are a successful teacher you ask, are your kids participating and if they are not participating, what you then do is to find some way to assign a job the kid can do that allows them to enter the activity by another route. That is very much like Ann Brown used to do in Oakland. She would pick out the non-participating child and say something very much like ‘check out which people are doing what’ or ‘make a list of who is doing what’. She would take a look at the list and then she would turn back to the class and she would say, ‘Eric, what are we all doing?’ Then all of a sudden everyone is arguing about what they are doing. She was such a dear; did you know her at all? Olson: Yes, I knew her quite well, but I was not a confidant, I did not spend much time with her, I knew Joe as well. I was interested in classroom discourse but my emphasis for last while has been on the issue of norms and standards that schools parade around rather than the discourse itself. Bruner: Parading norms and standards: that is exactly what they do. Olson: Yes, that is what they do. And partly they do it because, well, you know, standards are part of making judgements. Isn’t this what you wrote about the law, the law tells you what is forbidden practice? So using a norm or standard in a classroom is getting kids sensitive to what the boundaries are, what makes some kinds of talk legitimate. Bruner: But it narrows it, rather than saying, ‘You can’t say that, or that’s wrong’, you could persuade people by all sorts of means. But the moment you strike them out of bounds, you silence them . . . Olson: But how do you reconcile the norms, standards, you need to judge that you have met your goal, as opposed to that you have not met your goal? Kids may express all kinds of opinions but the teacher has to judge which

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ones are true or correct. All those things are important to you but of course as you say, we have to measure them against keeping the discourse going. Now, are you worried about how those things come together? Bruner: That is a very interesting kind of thing. Here is the kind of thing you see in a Reggio Emilia pre-school. One of the things about making norms work is stating their aim properly, but not doing it too abstractly. For example, when you get into the business of teaching about light, does it help to say we are studying light? No, not at all. But if you say, ‘What are shadows anyway?’, kids are very interested in shadows, you take a go at it and you let it fall out to some extent where you are going. Your aim is to get them thinking about something that is sort of in the back of your mind, ‘This year I am going to teach them something about the visual environment’ – and maybe you could draw something and try to put in the shadows, and you have to let it go and let the shadow thing go where it will, within limits try to get them to think about possibilities. You don’t have to have a final thing because they are not tested (and I am not saying that testing is not good) because the teacher is looking at them and the teacher is evaluating them and going to write a report on them at the end of the term. Now you can do this because they are pre-schoolers. Olson: That’s very interesting. Bruner: It is interesting because on several occasions we have brought in teachers from the primary schools for meetings with the pre-school teachers and we got a fair amount of resistance, because the fact of the matter is they are very criteria and exam conscious. That is what I am battling against. They have made education too much like commerce, taking a commercial image – what have they gained? – they do a kind of cost-benefit analysis which I do not mean to knock. But when it becomes the exclusive thing rather than the more general and more difficult goal, namely, that we want to produce thinking human beings who also care about things, care about their thoughts, who take their thinking seriously, and who also discover what thinking is. This is a new opening for the schools, but the schools then get stuck with the business of knowing that somebody on high from Rome is going to set the criteria, set the hoops for us to jump through. The schools are beginning to open up, to move in that direction, but it is slow. Olson: And it is hard to judge whether you are being successful at it. Bruner: There are two ways of finding out if you are being successful . . . that is to say, one of the ways of showing you are successful is essentially to ask what does the community think of it? Which is a valid question I think. And the other one is to say, are we taking advantage of the fact that kids

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come in full of curiosity and have we succeeded if we have dampened that curiosity? Olson: The effort in school reform is to make schools efficient and effective; you know this mantra. So the way you do that, of course, is narrow the goals and then you select means that are most effective for the narrow goal and if you can show that that has achieved the goal at minimal expense, then everybody is obliged to duplicate the practice. That is the assumption – you tighten the screws, which is what it amounts to. Whereas of course, what you want to do is make schools a worthwhile experience. This is what Dewey wanted too; you are putting your kids in there for years; it should at least be a worthwhile experience in its own right. As Dewey said, it is school as life not preparation for life. That is a very hard notion to implement in contemporary schooling.

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Appendix F: The Meaning of Assessment

Bruner: At a recent meeting of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, I had the chance to discuss Mike Smith’s (former Undersecretary of Education for the US) report on educational reform. The first point he made was that there has to be a good fit between what a program for educational improvement is seeking to improve and how it goes about assessing its results. In assessing a program, to put it briefly you can’t use any old standardized test. The assessment test needs to fit the objectives of your attempted intervention; there are no all-purpose assessment procedures that fit all needs. Adequate assessment has to be relevant to the theory behind the intervention program you are evaluating. You cannot fly blind. I remember this classic problem from the early days of the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), one of the first curriculum reform projects. A lot of people urged Zacharias and Freedman to evaluate the PSSC curriculum effort with the standard physics tests available at the time. Zacharias replied boldly, ‘Hell no, we are not teaching that kind of physics.’ So PSSC developed new assessment procedures with the help of the Educational Testing Service, geared to their own instructional objectives and to their own ideas about what it meant to understand physics. It was a real step forward. Indeed, every educational intervention program has an underlying theory which shapes it implicitly and explicitly and the more explicitly the better . . . even when the theory is simply that small classes get better results than larger classes. There is an underlying theory that it is not as simple as it seems. If you mindlessly attempt to replicate what they did in Tennessee in the State of California, the chaos is unbelievable. First of all, the way in which you set up small classes has to have some accommodation for who is teaching. Teaching a small class requires skills and communication abilities. So what of California’s replication? They did not have enough teachers available, so they started hiring teachers willy-nilly and got more than the usual proportion of weak and inexperienced teachers. And small classes also require more classrooms. Not just cramped, remodeled closets and bathrooms. It is not surprising that reducing class size did not bear the same fruit in

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California as in the more carefully controlled study in Tennessee. But there is more to it than that. We don’t fully know why small classes work better given the right conditions. We haven’t thought through the question: is it that smaller classes lead to a different strategy on the part of the teacher?; to different discourse patterns?; do they change the teacher–pupil authority relationships? We need a lot more theory to proceed wisely. Let me give an example from the famous pre-schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Here is a surprising finding : when a teacher asks a child something, she waits for an answer; if the child has some difficulty answering, the teacher typically asks the children in the class to help little Giovanna or Giuseppe to figure out an answer and a discussion starts. The context changes – knowledge seeking becomes communal. I have seen some astonishing scenes there. I have even started using this approach to teach my own graduate students. I am still trying to think through the theory behind it and I’m even making some progress. As Mike Smith has been trying to tell us, people need to think about the dimensions of the goals they have in mind, then they will be able to evaluate properly. Olson: How should we think about test scores? Bruner: I want to bring up Fred Mosteller’s admonition about attending not to means but to variance. I would like to look at if from a point of view of American performance on a test now being widely used for assessing adult literacy for the 19 most well-off countries of the world, including top-ranking America. These tests developed by the OECD are thoughtfully designed and carefully translated into the languages required. They have three subtests, one for understanding prose as it pertains to understanding news stories, another for document literacy or the ability to understand what procedure to follow and so on, and a third for quantitative literacy, testing how to perform such tasks as balancing a cheque book, etc. First of all, as everyone knows, America does not do well on international tests; for example among those 19 well-off countries, we are ninth on the prose score, fourteenth on the documentation score and thirteenth on the quantitative score, and twelfth among the 19 on the composite score. You would think given our riches, we would do better than that. Where we undoubtedly lead the world is in variability or distribution. American standard deviations on all the tests are just about at the top. For example, on the prose test, we ranked first on the size of our standard deviation, on the document test and the quantitative test we ranked second. We lead the world in the standard deviations! If you look at the test scores between the top ten percentile and the lower ten percentile of each country, again we lead the pack. Our lowest percentile is way, way down and our top ten is way, way up. America seems to have a gift for fostering maldistribution

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or inequality. No country in the civilized world can match us in terms of the maldistribution of wealth, the gap between rich and poor, and it seems too that none can match the gap between our most literate and our least literate countrymen. Ours is a diversity of inequality. What about the history of all this? Are we getting better or worse in the same capacity as other nations? We can estimate this by looking at different age groups, and what comes out is not encouraging. Our youngest American age is 16 to 25, ranked fourteenth out of nineteen in the world on the composite literacy score. The age group 26 to 35 ranks eleventh, with the group that is 36 to 45 in fifth place and the two oldest group ages 46 to 55 and 56 to 65 are second and third in the world ranking. So either America is falling behind or the rest of the world is surging ahead in literacy. How much of this has to do with immigration? Our native-born Americans run tenth out of the 17 countries in which immigration figures. Our foreign-born ranked sixteenth out of the 17. Our own past history suggests that when immigrants get segregated in conditions such as inner city slums, second generation immigrants continue to lag behind or get pushed down further. So immigration is an issue all right but not an enormous one in America. I suspect though that the ones who are falling furthest behind within world standards are poor blacks and poor second generation Latinos, yet there is an irony in this decline, for we know from intensive studies that with improved teaching expertise and classroom conditions, these groups can be greatly helped. If we in America are willing to do something about it, plenty can be done. But not so much is being done, so our world position remains bleak, not to mention the conditions that produce that inequality here in the United States. If we follow Mike’s wisdom we can begin to turn the tide, but we will have to take measures beyond the usual educational ones. For instance, insuring a more equitable distribution of wealth for one thing. After all we know that the sense of helplessness and despair produced by poverty is the worst block against improved school performance. On that basis school reform without co-commitment of economic reform is not sufficient. So to return to Mike’s message, we should indeed look more deeply and more theoretically at the causes of poor and good school performance. Propose reforms that take into account what makes American society so prone to inequality; what is it that puts us in top position for variability in international tests.

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Appendix G: Trajectories of Bruner’s Thinking

Olson: I am going to ask you a couple of general questions about the trajectories of your work. Which things have changed over the years in your perspective and which have tended to stay the same? Is there any particular domain that you have seen your views shifted dramatically on and some that they have remained much the same? Bruner: Well, I think the two principals that have changed are, first, I became much more mindful in the 1970s about alternative modes of thought. These modes of thinking are all narrative and they are all narrative not only in thinking but in the way we justify and structure our culture. And second, I have become much more deeply concerned about the nature of human culture and the way in which culture shapes individuality and the way in which individuality works back into the culture. Those are the two big changes as I shift toward narrative. I think I would add a third change, an emphasis on agency. Narrative, culture, and agency. Olson: In your 1996 book, you have a section in which you list the things that you think teachers should take into account and I think that agency is the first one on the list. Bruner: There is no question in my mind and I think that the way that it comes up is in relation to culture. It is agency and the counterpoint between individual human agency and culture, and the way in which those two have to be made to fit. Olson: In my own book, I tie agency to the issue of responsibility. Who is responsible and who gets the credit? In the school reform literature, the child is not given any agency at all, he is taken in as an object or a number, the school is the agent, and then you look at the output of the school. Schools are agents to a degree but so also are learners and teachers who are agents with distinctive sets of responsibilities. So I worked back from a

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legal judgment, what would a court of law say – are you responsible or not responsible for a particular line of action? And of course, for a young child, in some contexts you would say he is responsible, in others not. We tend to draw a line at what we call the age of accountability and so on. I tie agency to accountability and then work it back through the school system; I am sure that is quite compatible with your theme of agency. Bruner: I think it is and the issue of responsibility is an odd one because the fact of the matter is I think I can be accused of having neglected it. I need a little bit of a preface to that. I keep getting told here of the enormous impact my thinking has had on the education of our time. How does anybody know that? How the hell do we know what they are doing in school today – we have no idea. I hear people talking and I know that they are sincere and my emails are full of things from people who are applying my ideas to education. Graduate students of education tell me they were inspired and the usual kind of stuff. I tried to exercise my sense of responsibility – and I am not an irresponsible person – by becoming a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee. I was the person who was particularly responsible for making people aware of the extent to which the educational system is critical to the advance of science. I also recall when we began to find out the extent to which those first few years of childhood were important. I did my best to see whether we could set up some way for kids who were not doing well because of early disadvantage to get a head start. That helped lead to the program Head Start. So I acted responsibly but responsibility was not really part of my theorizing.

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Appendix H: Head Start and School Reform

Olson: Tell me more about how you got involved in Head Start. Bruner: I went to see Sargent Shriver and I said, on the basis of what is coming out now, kids from poor backgrounds have to get some sort of head start before they start school or they can’t take advantage of school. He got interested in it and that evening I got invited to a reception and dinner at the White House in Washington and we were going down the reception line and we came to Ladybird Johnson and he said to Mrs Johnson, this is Bruner down from Cambridge for the day and he is urging us at the Federal level to give poor kids something before they start school so that when they get there they’ll have some sort of head start – I keep telling him that is not something the Federal government can do. And Ladybird Johnson said, ‘Sarge are you sure? – That’s a great idea.’ So then I went up to Capitol Hill and went to the people I knew – the one I knew best was Pat Moynihan – who had responsibility for education. That was in the Senate then. So I said to him, what do you think about the possibility of some sort of Federal role that would make the funds available for a special head start program? He said Jerry, it is a great idea, but you are out of your mind. He thought it was impossible. It is interesting – I have to say it was finally Pat who helped run the fight and get it through. Olson: What do you make of the assessments of Head Start? You remember they did all of those assessments at the end of the full-scale Federal funding for Head Start. They came up with all these mixed reports. Most people said the effects disappeared by the fourth grade . . . Bruner: There was a kind of a cloud or at least a miasma or something over the whole program. I will never forgive Shep White and Jerry Kagen for the stupid way in which they handled the testimony. Olson: Oh really, that fixed it, did it? Tell me a little more.

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Bruner: They were well intended and all that, but they only raised the standard sort of things. They should have asked, ‘Did the kids ask better questions or did they have more knowledge?’ There was not a single question of that sort. Not a single question about involvement or thinking. They just gave them word identification tests and things like that. Word identification tests and how they compared to mainstream kids. Olson: You know the program called High Scope. The project leader Weichert died last year. That program continued over a long term, several years, and that showed whopping effects. Bruner: If you do it well, it works. If you drive well from here to Toronto, you get there, you know. But if you sleep half the way you are likely to be dead before you get there. Olson: Early education is becoming an issue in Canada. Both federal and provincial governments are supposedly going to fund either what’s called pre-school, childcare, or early education – it has different names. But you can see the dilemma they are in because some want it to be day care and some want it to be pre-school (which is like a little but formal school), and some want it to be early childhood education which I think is a little bit wiser a description. As you said, early years are important if you use them for getting kids to think about things and talk about things. You might not be able to demonstrate that they are better readers when they go to Grade 1, although they probably will be, but you could probably demonstrate that they are quite interested in things, that they are able to express themselves, that they think that school is a place you can actually learn something. You could probably demonstrate things like that very well. Bruner: There may have been something in the New York Times about this battle in Ontario. There has been a lot of discussion about the business of pre-school versus early childhood education. Why does it have to be one thing or the other? Olson: The issue comes down to teaching the same curriculum but just starting it earlier as opposed to trying to imagine a different curriculum. But of course there is no reason why kids can’t learn some particular things as well as learning to take on responsibility for their actions, learning to express themselves and how to work with others. Essentially, I am not ruling specific learning tasks out. Bruner: I could imagine assigning some games that are alphabet games that would be fantastic. It is just that early education policy gets so rigidly formulated and so ideological.

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Olson: You know one of the things that you have done systematically through your career is get issues raised so that people take an interest in them. You phrase them well. Like: ‘What is actually going on when somebody teaches something?’ Or ‘What is actually going on when a person comes to understand something?’ Now those still aren’t being played out terrifically well, although there is a lot more work on those questions these days, as you know. Work on the Theory of Mind is much more concerned with what is going on in the learner’s mind. Do you have any suggestion as to where you think we should be going? We have already discussed so many of these that I don’t know if I am just asking the same question over. Bruner: I would love to see some interim period in which teachers are made aware of this objective and asked to try out their best ideas and come together for some meetings to discuss their ways of doing it. There is not enough communication between teachers or about how they do it. I want to tell something: we used to have a weekly meeting with the teachers in Reggiano. I do not know if they are still doing it or not because things are changing and there is a new Instituto d’Educationi. But, in the discussions, teachers would tell about what they were doing, what their successes were, and where their boo boos were. It was very interesting. Rather than asking if they were following the method – meeting the objective – let’s see them gradually work the thing up – what do they do? It has to be on a local level. I mean one of the things I learned on this board and that committee in Washington, was how hard it was to find out what they were actually doing in schools. Some kinds of teaching come much closer to conversation and, what is a conversation – a conversation is a topic comment structure in which you pick your topic and you as the older wiser person in the situation lead it in certain kinds of useful directions. Useful in the sense of useful and rich for the kids – knowledge of how he thinks or what the topic is about. For example, if you start using numbers, just don’t throw the numbers in there as though numbers were one thing God gave you. Rather ask: ‘Giuseppe, what is a number?’ What do the other kids think? What if a teacher said: ‘Our favorite discussion in Canada is our Hockey player Wayne Gretzky, who has the number 99 on his shirt.’ All the kids want to know why he has 99 on his shirt. It’s a big number; maybe that’s the number of goals he got! Open up curiosity again – is not school supposed to be interesting? When I try to teach something, I make it as interesting as possible, which means I show its effect on life, show what an enormous greater generality it has or less generality, but something about it that makes the conversation interesting,

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even if you tell a story about it. And education schools, everyone tells me, are among the dullest. Your courses in the Ed School are not dull. And, no my course is not dull either, the students quite like it. What makes for dullness is the business of turning education into commerce. How many hours do you have to spend in one company in order to deliver such and such a score? If they don’t deliver such scores you say the company is bankrupt – you remove the kids and send them to another school, and so on. Olson: One remarkable thing about school reform, for example, is they don’t ask the question how can we make school a richer intellectual environment? They would rather do things at a managerial level: maybe if we add a year or take off a year of schooling; maybe if the school is privatized or maybe if it is owned by the community scores would go up; or maybe if the boys are separated from girls, and so on. They don’t ask what can you do to create interest and engagement? Apparently kids are dropping out like flies in the higher grades; this too is now a big problem in Ontario. Bruner: What are the options? You have compulsory schooling until 18 – now that prohibits dropouts. Maybe you could hold a gun to their heads. Alternative programs – maybe that is their goal. What can you do to actually make it engaging to those students is rarely asked. Why should I go to school? Kids have no answer. Olson: Obligation is one part of it. People must learn to meet deadlines, that is part of life, but it does not create engagement. Bruner: What this system lacks is common sense and the lack of common sense has to do with the fact that it is not thinking about what it is doing. Reform talk is sort of stuck in sloganeering. It tries to – it drafts a universitylevel committee to define the goals of education: to be a good citizen, employable, etc. Those goals are all OK – but to get from there to anything that is engaging for students is the problem. The gap is horrendously wide and I don’t think the gap is bridged very well. Olson: So what does one do? Bruner: What does anyone do? – what one can, I suppose. I have to decide how to engage my life, because I have had all sorts of temptations. In fact, I don’t operate through many institutional channels, I operate through a lot of channels; through the law, for example. I am a member of the National Academy of Education, but I have not been active for the past few years because I have not known what to do that would be worthwhile. I have limited time (like we all do, nothing strange about that) . . .

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Olson: Yes, I sit on a policy committee at my institution. I am very optimistic about the agenda that you set out in The Process of Education and then elaborated in The Theory of Instruction. I read you as trying to ask: What are the options here? What are the degrees of freedom that we are playing around with? That is the place I have put myself in. I see myself trying to set out the dimensions at play: social and individual norms, productivity versus norms of appraisal. What are the dimensions? I think that is reasonable territory to try to straighten out. It also leads to certain kinds of research, but I have decided I am not going to do any more research. No more research groups and that sort of thing, although I loved it for all those years. I am trying to encourage some people to take up research on how students understand what they are doing when they do school work. If the teacher announces a task, or a project or a goal, such as ‘Today we are going to study the comma or quotation marks’, some children will immediately take that on as their task and they will do the work and they will know when they have got it. But other kids seem not to realize that there is a problem here and they won’t know when they have got it. I suppose it is the question of engagement and intersubjectivity. If teaching is one on one, it is quite easily achieved, I have found. But you take a classroom of 25 kids and you announce a topic like punctuation, you will get a normal distribution of involvement. There will be a few people who know what’s required and who say OK let’s do that. Others will ask what do we have to do, ask their peers and raise questions until they figure out what they are to do. And then there is another group that ends up being the problem; they just don’t get with the program. I think that is a problem that should be studied. I like the idea of joint attention and joint projects, topics you have written a lot about. You can get the joint attention established with some kids – but with what percentage of the class? Maybe that’s where class size makes a difference. Bruner: Shared attention and sharing the results of shared attention. Working up a subculture, a group that can focus on a problem, is so hugely important. And it is absolutely fundamental in all these aspects of teaching and yet the research people have not gotten all that close to teaching. They achieve it all the time in Reggio Emilia schools. Olson: So what have we agreed on? Bruner: It is so important that we find out more about the nature of mind and shared mind. I will ask you this question – how do you get knowledge, curiosity, from the world of conjecture into the world of practice? That is

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so hard and I feel sometimes like such a quitter because I have not done enough on that. I come up with the ideas but then I don’t go around telling people how they should use the ideas and try them out. It gets down to the question of how do you define your life? I know I am an intellectual, I am a concerned intellectual, I’m also in that sense a public intellectual. Being an intellectual has some effect, but how you make the process move along has become baffling to me; maybe it is because I am a private person. Olson: Think of Dewey. Dewey was undoubtedly the most influential educational thinker in America and yet his impact on education in the long term, at least according to historian Diane Ravitch, has been of more harm than good because, as she argued, he failed to set high standards and relentlessly pursue them. I don’t think she is right about that, mind you, but there is this problem about Dewey. All teachers have Dewey’s ideas in the back of their minds but does that make a scrap of difference? The school as a system has its rigid goals and serious procedures of accountability, and that just doesn’t leave much room for thinking about the life of the mind and the life of the child. That’s where the crunch comes. Should we be thinking about alternative schools? No, I think we should be thinking about alternative goals in education. You say you helped for 50 years to bring the process of hypothetical thinking into the school and you say that things have not really changed. Perhaps they have changed more than we know. Certainly the talk has changed. Bruner: I hope it has changed more than I think it has. Olson: School roles are cashed out in narrow prescriptive terms and they are not terms like reflectiveness or ability to evaluate an argument or anything like that. They are cashed out in terms like knowing the facts, reading a paragraph, deriving the necessary inference or conclusion, spotting a flaw, writing a coherent statement. All technical easily evaluated outcomes. Bruner: It is an interesting kind of thing – this kind of conversation we are having. These rarities come about every ten years. Olson: The reason I joined the policy group was that I began to suspect that all this good psychology we are doing had no effect on anyone – nobody cared. The people who ran the schools and set the programs and even the teachers couldn’t care less about what the kid was actually thinking. What they cared about was what were the goals and whether the kid meets them: Can the kid do fractions? Do the teachers have enough training in maths so they can teach fractions? How can we devise a test so that we know the kids learned fractions? And can we get some sort of feedback into the system?

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Bruner: What is a fraction does not come up? Amazing isn’t it? Olson: Lot of pizza slices – dividing pizzas. The curriculum is not bad – the curricula I have seen seemed quite reasonable. What the kid actually thinks while performing those tasks is what remains unclear. Bruner: Let me ask a question about the importance of bringing in the leading lions of the fields to decide what a subject is about. Should teachers be allowed to go it alone? Doesn’t the growing edge of knowledge have an effect on how you teach the knowledge? I would like to see much more done on that. The curriculum product, which was the PSSC, based the science curriculum at the frontier of knowledge. It was exhilarating. Is the subject matter of education something that should be left completely with the teachers? Can the teachers be the administrators? There is not much discourse between people in education and the people in other disciplines. There is some – science people and science educators tend to be pretty good scientists – conceptual change, Sue Carey kind of stuff – but that’s at high school level. Olson: Ellen Lagemann pointed out that schools of education need to be more closely linked to their host universities. I see myself as almost unique at OISE/UT for my degree of involvement with the rest of the university. I keep up with friends in psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and history. It seems to me that OISE/UT is needlessly isolated. Some of my colleagues say there is more cross-talk than I realize and I hope that is true. Even within OISE/UT psychologists do not have much of an impact on teacher training, educational policy, or planning. People who are in policy tend to be people who are principals of schools; they are a different breed of cat. That is why I have joined this policy group. I tell these people we do know about some of those things and should be consulted. Of course they know things, too. But I don’t know how to bridge the gap. Bruner: So take me as a man who hasn’t been entirely devoted to education. I have just put in ten valuable years doing something about the war and about law. What could a person like me do in education? How would I now bring my thinking to bear in some official way on education? Should someone make me Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare? Should I become President of the University of Miami or some such? Or should we call a press conference? Suppose by some sort of miracle Bush asked me to be Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, how could I contribute? I have learned about forms of injustice studying war and the death penalty, a barbaric penalty. I could

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organize groups to fight injustice. I could argue against school segregation before the Supreme Court. Influencing education is so difficult. Olson: Your question is such an important one and I do not have an answer to it either. The reason I spent my time on literacy was that I thought that since schools are so concerned with literacy, studying literacy could help schools be more successful, but in fact schools do what they have always done. I am now interested in pedagogy but I would be hard pressed to say that there was anything I could do that would matter much to what goes on. Bruner: How do you affect it? The school is responding to other voices. Olson: One of the things you have done and that I have followed up is to try to make the children’s voices count in schools. Agency is never attributed to the children by policy makers. Students are treated as an object to be moved. They are the dependent variables at best. The independent variables are what teachers do, how many years of math, how many pages of exercises. And policy makers act as if all the agency is in the state, the system, the principles, and the teachers. As if it is not the learner who, ultimately, is to take responsibility for their learning. Bruner: Agency for the learner and the voice of the learner. What you are doing by having the children voice or express an opinion on things is to try to get the kids’ voices heard in schools. I hope the idea is coming through that kids are thinking and they are trying to make sense of this and that, and perhaps it is time to give kids a voice. Talk to your policy group about this: How do we test our hypothesis? How do we get past comparing league tables? The policy makers don’t want to know what the kids are thinking or why they are dropping out. They just want to know what to do to stop them from dropping out. To answer that question you have to ask what would keep them there. Will policy makers be willing to change the school? To make it in the student’s interest to stay there? Olson: I think it has something to do with institutional isomorphism. I use that term in my book a few times. Institutional constraints. The teacher has a fixed set of responsibilities, assessable outcomes, fixed knowledge, fixed categories, honeycombed all through. No room for teacher or child to have opinions or to take on responsibilities. Bruner: I am delighted that there are people pushing the education arguments. At least we may stir it up a bit. Olson: Let us conclude with a few short answer questions: What relative importance for education do you assign to modes of representation?

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Bruner: I am more concerned these days with multiple modes as providing a basis for going meta. Olson: What about intersubjectivity – joint attention, joint intentions, shared goals, and the like? Bruner: I agree with Mike Tomasello that joint intention and intersubjectivity is the precondition for culture. Olson: Is intersubjectivity the key to teaching? Bruner: Education is part of culture. In teaching, my task is to make the familiar strange again, to rescue things from the taken-for-granted and make them new again; not wrong, but new. Olson: Marie Clay once said that teachers teach ‘classes’ but only individuals ‘learn’. Psychology has been good on individuals but educational theory seems to be concerned with classes and class averages and the like. How do we link individuals and classes? Bruner: I’ve always felt that, like all human groups, classes need division of labor, little societies in the class that have particular tasks and roles. So they think of an ‘us’ rather than an ‘I’. Ann Brown convinced me of this years ago, bless her memory. Olson: I have asked many educational professionals what they think Bruner’s most important contributions to education to be. They invariably reply ‘scaffolding’ and, after a moment, ‘discovery learning’. They are looking for practical, useful ideas. Are you content with that? You get the last word. Bruner: I’m less concerned with any specific technique. My lifelong interest has been in how human beings acquire and use knowledge and I’d like to share that interest not only with educators but also with the children themselves.

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Index

abilities, as product of learning 58 accountability and agency 175–6 of schools debates over 92 improved 90, 115 and norms 111, 135 and process based pedagogy 76, 86, 182 and testing 89, 90, 107, 158, 166 action, landscape of 28 Adams, D. 5 Africa patterns of childrearing 122–3 responsibility for learning 132 schooling 125 agency 27, 64 of action 24 of children 97 and culture 175 and narrative 149–50 and policymakers 184 and responsibility/ accountability 175–6 see also intersubjectivity; responsibility agents 27, 59 intentional 57, 68, 118 ‘mental’ 57 Allport, G. 5, 13, 148 analytic thinking 39 Anderson, C. 51

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Anglin, J. 16, 17 anthropology of pedagogy 117, 122 of schooling 114–20 apprenticeship 46, 123–4 Arnheim, R. 14 assessment 32 of adult literacy 95–6, 166, 173–4 meaning of 172–4 problems with 86 and rewards 53 see also testing Astington, J. 72 Astington, J. W. 54, 57, 72, 73, 86 attention, joint 25, 26, 57, 108, 109, 127, 128 Austin, G. 15 Austin, J. L. 56 Ausubel, D. P. 63, 65, 84 Baird, J. A. 72 Baldwin, A. L. 131 Barnett, S. A. 117 Barnett, W. S. 48 Barresi, J. 73 Bartlett, F. C. 147 Beberman, M. 38 behavior 13, 53 and belief 121 controlling 13, 45, 63, 91 goal directed 27 intentional 14, 24, 53, 106, 118, see also intentionality

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196 behavior(cont.) links with culture and environment 43 and responsibility 106 behaviorists 53, 105 belief, false 73, 132 Bell, B. 129 Bereiter, C. 110 Berliner, D. C. 65 Biddle, B. J. 65 Biella (Italy) 148, 155, 158 Bolzan Prize 8 ‘book reading’ study 46 Boring, E. 5, 13 Bosacki, S. 152, 168 Bowes, E. 81 Brazelton, B. 25 Brown, A. L. 48, 97, 110, 169, 185 Brown, R. 6, 8, 56 Bruner, J. character, life and influence xi–xii, 3–9 contribution to pedagogy (summary) 49 and Dewey 36, 64–8, 103–4, 114, 161–5 interviews assessment, meaning of 172–4 on Dewey 161–5 education, initial interest in 147–53 Head Start and School Reform 177–85 hypothetical, teaching the 154–60 meaning, construction of 141–6 Reggio Emilia and international comparisons 166–71

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Index thinking, trajectories of 175–6 and Oppenheimer 4, 5, 6, 15 and Piaget 20, 24–5, 68–72 as a theorist xiv, 29–30 and Vygotsky 18, 25, 68, 69, 71, 73–7 see also cognitive revolution; culture; educational discourse; educational practice; educational reform; educational research; educational theory; ideas; instruction, theory of; learning; pedagogy Burke, K. 149–50 Bushnell, R. W. 124 Calvino, I.(folktales) 148–9, 154 Campione, J. 48, 97 Carey, S. 51 causal mode of explanation see paradigmatic mode Center for Cognitive Studies (Harvard) 6, 7, 9 Chartier, A.-M. 80 child centered learning 48, 64, 65 Child and the Curriculum, The (Dewey) 33, 64 child rearing patterns 116–17, 122–4 childhood, extended 18, 69, 108, 117 children, intuition 36 Chomsky, N. 6, 26, 43, 56, 143–4 class size 172–3, 181 classroom discourse 75–6, 85–6, 158, 162, 169 Clay, M. 185 coding systems, generic 16–17, 65, 76

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Index cognition Bruner’s theory of (summary) 29–30 role of language and literacy 18–19 cognitive computational neuroscience 105–6 cognitive development 73 stages of 19–22, 36–8 theories of 68 cognitive maps 5, 7, 14, 16, 148, 152, see also cognitive structures; mental models cognitive models 16 cognitive psychology beginnings of 6–7 research methods 98 cognitive revolution 6, 13–30, 53 active mind 14–15 cognition, Bruner’s theory of 29–30 cognitive development, stages of 19–22 cognitive strategies 15–16 cognitive structures 16–17, 25, see also cognitive maps and culture 17–19, 22–4 and intellectual structures for classroom 33–4 language development 24–6 narrative mode of representation 26–9 see also intentionality; intersubjectivity cognitive strategies 15–16, 98, see also hypothetical mode cognitive structures 16–17, 25 Cole, M. 18, 119 Coleman, J. S. 23 Comenius 82 communal learning 48–9, 55, 85, 97, 173

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197 communication 25, 26, 168, 179 commutativity 37 competition 40–1 conceptual change 51, 52 concrete operational thought 21–2 confrontation 28 consciousness, landscape of 28 conservation of mass 71 of quantity 20, 21–2, 37, 71, 72 constructivism 48, 75–6 constructivist principles 48 contrast 28 control 88, 91 coping 41 Course of Cognitive Growth, The (Bruner) 19, 23 Creation story 154, 156 Cremin, L. A. 65 critical thinking 86 Cronbach, L. 8, 32, 89 Csibra, G. 132 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 58 Cuban, L. 82, 83 cultural deprivation, and educational failure 23, 47, see also learning, readiness for cultural forms, and intellectual development 69 cultural knowledge, inherited 70 cultural psychology 58, 66, 114, 128 cultural routines 46 culture and behavior 43 and cognitive revolution 17–19, 22–4 and cognitive structures 25 and education 23, 58–9, 85, 108, 117, 185 and intelligence 35 internalized 152

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198 culture (cont.) and intersubjectivity 57, 108, 118, 151, 185 and mind 57–8 and modes of representation 21–2, 69, 108 role in human development 7, 18, 25, 72, 73, 119 role of language and literacy 18–19 Culture of Classroom of Silence, The (Bosacki) 168 Culture of Education, The (Bruner) 57, 58 cultures, validity of 92 Cunningham, A. E. 110 curiosity 79, 160, 171, 179, 181 curriculum early years 178 fixed 160, 165 hidden 121 spiral 38 curriculum development 42–4 curriculum reform 89, 93 Damon, W. 58 Dearden, R. F. 84 defending 41 democracy, and education 64, 66, 67 Democracy and Education (Dewey) 82, 106 Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget, The (Flavell) 70 Dewey, J. 32, 33, 36, 64–8, 79, 82, 83, 85, 90, 103–4, 106, 108–9, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 126, 127, 128, 137, 161–5, 182 didacticism 75, 76 discourse classroom 75–6, 85–6, 158, 162, 169

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Index lack of, between educationalists and others 183 new educational 107–13 Reggio Emilia 168 discovery learning 38–40, 54, 83–5 Donald, M. 20, 22 Dow, P. 43, 44 Dow, P 93, 94 Duke University 5 Dunn, J. 25 early childhood education 23–24, 177–178, see also pre-school education; Reggio Emilia economic reform, and educational reform 174 education child centered approach 48, 64 and culture 23, 58–9, 85, 108, 117, 185 and democracy 64, 66, 67 and frontiers of knowledge 33, 109, 183 and human development 18–19, 63–77 and intellectual development 63, 80 as intentional enterprise 106 and narrative 28 pre-school 48, 95, 96 role of 66 as social reproduction 67 Education as Social Invention (Bruner) 117 educational assessment see assessment educational discourse, new 107–13 educational failure 31, 65, 94 and cultural deprivation 23 see also learning, readiness for educational goals changing 87–8, 91–2, 126, 182

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Index common and rival 158–60 effect on learning 75 and evaluation 173, 182, see also assessment intellectual 37, 39, 43, 78–9, 170 and mental models 35 negotiation of 136 ‘predict and control’ 88, 91 revision of 86 setting 124, 182 traditional 68 educational practice 42–9 Head Start 47–8, 94–6 MACOS (Man: A Course of Study) 42–5, 92–4 Reggio Emilia 48–9 scaffolding 45–7 educational reform calls for 31 discourse and learning 85–7 discovery learning 38–40, 54, 83–5 and economic reform 174 Head Start, reception of 47–8, 94–6 ideas, role of 103–5 implementation problems 93–4 instruction, improvement of 96–7 MACOS, reception of 42–5, 92–4 margin for reform in schools 79–83 prospects for school reform 76–7, 87–92, 115, 126, 170, 180–4 public reaction to 45, 82, 91 report on 172–3 research and theory, improvement of 97–9 educational research funding 93 ideas, role of 103–5

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199 improving 97–9 management approach 88–91, 99, 104, 107, 115, 130, 134 and reform 87–92 educational settings 110 educational theory 31–41, 50–9 discovery learning 38–40, 54, 83–5 enculturation 55 improving 97–9 instruction, theory of 50–4 method 54 predispositions 51–2 rewards 53 sequencing 52–3 structure of knowledge 52 motivation for learning 40–1 readiness for learning 36–8 structure of knowledge 34–6, 52 value of ix see also intersubjectivity educational thought, perceived limitations 33–4 Egan, K. 28 Eight Year Study 65, 82–3 empirical studies 56, 66, 104 enactive mode of representation 20, 23 enculturation 55, 70 engagement, process of 55, 86, 113, 128, 180, 181, see also intersubjectivity epistemology 68, 78, 97, 141–2, 151 Erneling, C. E. 6, 13 Essays for the Left Hand (Bruner) 151 expectancies, and perception 14, 74, 152–3 experience of schooling see schooling transfer of 16, 38, 53

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200 exposition 84 expressiveness, culture of 169 failing schools 31, 65, 94 failure see educational failure false belief 73, 132 Feldman, C. 54 fiction see stories Flaubert, G. 100 Flavell, J. 70, 72, 129 Fodor, J. 130 folk pedagogies 130–2 folktales (Italian) 148–9, 154, 158 formal operations (Piaget) 22 formats 46, 136 foster-parenting 123 Foucault, M. 125 Fragazy, D. 57, 118 frames of reference, changing 52 ‘Fresh look’ at education (Bruner) 31–41, 66, 89, 106–7, 133–7 Friedlander, B. Z. 84 frontiers of knowledge and understanding 33, 36, 109, 183 funding for early childhood education 178 for educational research 93 for Head Start 177 for schools 95, 115, 124, 125 Gardner, H. xiv, 32, 58, 79, 103 Geertz, C. 75 genetic epistemology (Piaget) 68 Gergely, G. 132 Gestalt psychology 5, 14, 152 goals 27, see also educational goals Goodman, N. 69 Goodnow, J. 15, 129 Goody, E. 122, 123, 125

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Index Goody, J. 167 Gordon, J. L. 125 governors’ reform 89 grammar 26, 43–4, 59 Grammar of Motives, The (Burke) 149 Greenfield, P. M. 15, 19, 46, 71, 119 Grendler, P. F. 131 Griffin, P. 119 Harris, P. 72 Harvard University 5, 25, see also Centre for Cognitive Studies Head Start pre-school program (US) 4, 23, 47–8, 94–6, 177–8 Hebrard, J. 80 Heider, F. 131 High Scope 178 Hilgard, E. R. 13 Hirst, P. H. 83 history and historiography 142, 151 History of Psychology in Autobiography, A (Lindzey) 8 Holtz, B. W. 28 Homo sapiens 22–3 Houston, S. 80, 81, 82 How We Think (Dewey) 163 human characteristics, universal 122 human development acceleration of 71 and education 18–19, 63–77 and language 72 role of culture in 7, 18, 25, 72, 73, 119 Huttenlocher, J. 6, 121 hypothesis formation and testing 5, 6, 14, 34, 98, 145 about death penalty 145–6 and age 20, 74

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201

Index hypothesis theory of perception 143, 152–3 hypothetical mode 49, 54, 86, 96, 109, 111, 133, see also cognitive strategies hypothetical, teaching the 54, 154–60, 170 iconic mode of representation 20–1 ideas Bruner’s, marginalised 105–6 new educational discourse 107–13 role in educational research and reform 103–5 imitation 57, 118, 120–121, 122, 123, see also mimetic intelligence immaturity, extended 18, 69, 108, 117 In Search of Pedagogy (Bruner) 3 inequality, social (America) 95–6, 173–4 infancy 7, 23, 36–7, 56–7, 69 research program 25–6 information looking up 84 theory 14–15 Inhelder, B. 6, 7, 8, 20, 32, 37, 68, 72 input-output model 104, 107, 113 institutional isomorphism 82, 115, 184 instruction and development 71, 73 improvement in 96–7 intentional 119 metacognitive approach 76 theory of 50–4 intellectual aims 64, 78 intellectual development

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and culture 69 and education 63, 80 intellectual structures 33–4 intelligence and culture 35 role of 163 stages of 69 intention 24–6, 56, 57, 118 intention, joint 25, 112, 127–8, 130, 185 intentional agents 57, 68, 118 intentional instruction 119 intentional mode of explanation see narrative mode intentional theory 51 intentionality 24–6, 27, 64 denied 105 interactions see intersubjectivity intersubjectivity 24–6, 109, 128, 129, 130 and culture 57–8, 108, 118, 151, 185 and education theories 99 growth of 57 and infancy 25–6, 56–7 and neural structures 74 pedagogy based on 132 and subjectivity 55–6 intuitions of the child 36 intuitive thinking 39–40 Jay, E. 86 Johnson, D. 6, 13 Johnson family and administration 4, 23, 177 joint attention 25, 26, 57, 108, 109, 127, 128 joint intention 25, 112, 127–8, 130, 185 Kant, I. 66 Kennedy family 4, 32

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202 Kluckhohn, C. 17 knowledge construction of 74–6, 97, 121, 128, 133, 167–70 fixed 91, 92, 142, 184 frontiers of 33, 36, 109, 183 as ongoing enquiry 34 prior, and stimuli 14, 74–5 shared 132 structure of 34–6, 52 and testing 165 and transfer of experience 16, 38, 53 validity of 76, 109, 111, 112, 130 working belief vs. fixed truth 34, 55, 92–3, 130, 160 ‘Knowledge Forum’ 110 Kresh, D. 147 Kruger, A. 117, 119 Kuhn, D. 74 Kuhn, T. 6–7 Ladson-Billings, G. 112 Lagemann, E. C. 38, 82, 88, 89, 91, 93, 99, 183 Lamarck, J-B. 69 Lamarckian intuition 69–70 Lancastrian method of teaching 80 Lancy, D. 118, 122 landscapes of narrative 28 language and human development 72 role in culture and cognition 18–19 and understanding 118 use of 56 written 22, 59 language development 24–6, 56, 75 language learning 22 language of learning, shared 134 language teaching 43–4 Lashley, K. 14

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Index Lave, J. 46, 119 law, and literature 156–7 learner, role of 74–6 learning by imitation 118, 120–1 by modeling 121 by teaching 121–2 child centered 48, 64 as communal activity 85, 97 discovery 38–40, 54, 83–5 and language 22, 134 motivation for 40–1, 55 multi-context 110 predispositions to 51–2 process 144–5 psychology of 13 readiness for 36–8 social 18, 120 and theory 16–17 and thinking 17 monitoring 47, 99 without teaching 120 see also responsibility for learning; scaffolding Levine, K. 152 Levy-Bruhl, L. 21 Libet, B. 106 light, children’s understanding of 51–2, 167, 170 Lillard, A. 48 Linaeze, J. 136 literacy adult, assessment of 95–6, 166, 173–4 new 97 role in culture and cognition 18–19 ways of reading and writing 157 literature as educational resource 28 and law 156–7 Locke, J. 6

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Index logic of necessity 20, 21, 22, 38 logical reasoning 18–19 looking up information 84 Luria, A. 7, 18 Maccoby, E. 63 McDougall, W. 5 McEwan, H. 28 MacIntyre, A. 28 magical thinking 21 Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) 42–5, 91, 92–4, 160 management approach to research 88–91, 99, 104, 107, 115, 130, 134 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 31 Matusov, E. 46, 49, 119 meaning, construction of 141–6, 147 membership 59 memes 70 memorization 16, 38 memory, and models 35 mental models 5, 6, 7, 35 and culture 17 mental representations 6 metacognition 28 metacognitive approach 76 Miller, G. 6, 32 mimetic intelligence 23, see also imitation mimetic mode of representation 20–1, 23 mind active 14–15 and culture 57–8 prepared 39 study of 13 theory of 27, 57, 67, 72, 73, 163, 179

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203 minority children 23 Mirror for Man (Kluckhohn) 17 mirror neurons 73–4 modeling 118, 121 models cognitive 16 and memory 35 see also mental models modes of explanation 53 narrative 26–9, 53, 175 paradigmatic 26, 53, 150 modes of instruction 69 modes of representation 7, 9, 20–2, 23, 36–7, 69 cultural influence on 21–2, 69, 108 enactive 20, 23 iconic 20–1 mimetic 20–1, 23 symbolic 21–2, 23 monitoring, of learner’s thinking 47, 99 Montessori early education program 48 Moore, C. 73 morality, and pragmatism 164–5 motivation for learning 40–1, 55 mutuality see intersubjectivity narrative and agency 149–50 evaluation strategies 28, 154 fictional 28–9, 151, 154–6 landscapes of 28 underlying nature of 149–50 narrative mode of explanation 26–9, 53, 175 Narrative and Paradigmatic Modes of Thought (Bruner) 150 National Academy of Sciences (US) 31

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204 National Commission on Excellence in Education (US) 31 Nature and Uses of Immaturity, The (Bruner) 17 Neatby, H. 32 necessity, logic of 20, 21, 22, 38 Neumann, J. von 5 neural structures and intersubjectivity 74 neuroscience, cognitive computational 105–6 New Literacy 97 Newman, D. 119 No Child Left Behind 78, 95 norms 111–12, 130, 135, 136, 169–70, 181 Nussbaum, M. 28 Oakland, California 48–9, 97, 169 object method of teaching 80–1 Office of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 82, 95, 173 Olson, D. R. xii–xv, 9, 19, 39, 59, 66, 69, 72, 75, 86, 112, 119, 130, 132, 134 Olver, R. 15 Ontario history of public schooling 80–2 reform of early years education 76–7 state funding of schools 95 Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto) 4, 183 Oppenheimer, R. 4, 5, 6, 15 Orbis Pictus (Comenius) 82 Oxford University xv, 7, 25, 57, 94 Page, D. 38 Palinscar, A. M. 48, 97

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Index paradigmatic mode of explanation 26, 53, 150 parenting in traditional societies 122–3 participation, encouraging 169 Pearsall, S. 74 pedagogy anthropology of 117 cognitive theory of 127–37 folk 130–2 lack of in non-human primates 132 scaffolding 45–7, 96 social aspects 122–6, 132, 137 for thinking 133–7 traditional 131–2 see also discovery learning; intersubjectivity; teaching the hypothetical Pelletier, J. 54 perception and expectancies 14, 74, 152–3 hypothesis theory of 143, 152–3 ‘new look’ 14 and stimuli 14 Perkins, D. 86 permissivism 65 Perner, J. 57, 73 Physical Science Study Committee 172 Piaget, J. 7, 20, 21, 22, 24–5, 51, 68–72 policymakers and agency 184 Popper, K. 156 possibilities evaluation of 86 generation of 143, 146 teaching 54, 154–60, 170 possible, the, lively sense of 8, 137, 141 poverty, and education 23, 47–8, 95, 174

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Index pragmatism 75, 103, 161–2, 182 and morality 164–5 pre-operational concepts 20 pre-school education 48, 95, 96, see also early childhood education prediction 88, 91 predispositions to learning 51–2 Premack, A. 117, 118 Premack, D. 117, 118 Prentice, A. 80, 81, 82 primates, non-human level of understanding 118 and pedagogy 132 problem space 16, 84 problems 39, 40, 150 Process of Education, The (‘St Jerome’s gospel’) (Bruner) 3, 4, 32, 34, 40, 41, 42, 55, 64, 65, 70, 76, 78, 83, 85, 99, 143, 161, 162, 181 Progressives 32, 66 Progressivism 64, 65, 79, 82–3, 103, 135 proximal development, zone of 71, 73 psychology as an empirical science 13 cultural 58, 66, 114, 128 of learning 13 publishers 93, 94 Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men 147–8 questions, goodness of 15 Ravitch, D. 36, 65, 103, 182 readiness for learning 36 reality, versions of 141–2 reasoning, logical 18–19 reciprocity 127

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205 reflection 97 reform see educational reform; schooling Reggio Emilia (Italy) 48–9, 96, 166–71, 173 relativism 39 Remembering (Bartlett) 147 representation see modes of representation research see educational research Resnick, D. P. 125 responsibility for learning 122, 130 adult’s/teacher’s 121, 123, 136, 175, 184 institution’s 119, 124–5, 132 learner’s 48–9, 59, 90, 119–21, 123, 132–4, 136, 175–6 see also agency, intersubjectivity reversibility 37 rewards 53 Rogoff, B. 46, 49, 119 Roth, K. 51 routines 26, 46, 59, 110 Ryan, A. 90, 116 Ryerson, E. 80, 81 ‘St Jerome’s gospel’ see Process of Education, The satisfaction 40–1, 83, 109–10 scaffolding 45–7, 96 Scardamalia, M. 110 Scheffler, I. 67, 116 schema theory 16 Schoolhouse Politics (Dow) 93 schooling anthropology of 114–20 how families teach 122–4 how humans learn 120–2 how institutions teach 124–6 and cognitive development 19, 21 and enculturation 55, 70

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206 schooling (cont.) experience vs. outcomes 89, 99, 113 worthwhile 86–7, 91, 109, 113, 171 importance of 71 and inequality 95–6, 174 intellectual aims 64, 78 invention of 124–5 Ontario, history 80–2 reforming 76–77, 79–83, 87–92, 170, 180–184, see also educational reform schools autonomy of 116 collaborative culture 48–9, 97, 109 as democracies 67 failing 31, 65, 94 funding 95, 115, 124, 125 similarity between 82, 90, 115, 124, 184 and society 112, 164, see also Reggio Emilia traditional goals of 68 traditional vs progressive 82–3 see also accountability Schweinhart, L. J. 48 Scribner, S. 18 Searle, J. 130 semantics 43, 59 sensory deprivation in animals 47 sensory motor intelligence 20, 37, 69 sequencing 52–3 Shapiro, B. L. 51 Shriver, Sargent 4, 177 Siegel, H. 28 Slavin, R. E. 66

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Index Smith, M. 172–4 social complexity, effect on pedagogy 125–6, 132, 137 social inequality (America) 95–6, 173–4 social interaction, and human development 25 social structure, and child-rearing patterns 122–5 societies, traditional see traditional societies Spearman, C. E. 163 Spelke, E. 51 spiral curriculum 38 Spittler, G. 122 standards falling 111, 174 fixed 32, 85, 90, 111, 124 unmet 162 see also norms Stanovich, K. E. 110 Stein, A. 132 stimuli, perception of 14 stories 28–9, 151, 154–6 of Creation 154, 156 see also folktales; history; narrative strategies, cognitive 15–16, 98, see also hypothetical mode Strauss, S. 132 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn) 6–7 Studies in Cognitive Growth (Bruner) 20, 72 Study of Thinking, A (Bruner et al.) 5, 15 subjectivity 55–6 surplus and specialization 167 Sylva, K. 25 symbolic mode of representation 21–2, 23

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Index ‘tabula rasa’ 6 teaching the hypothetical 54, 154–60, 170 of language 43–4 and learning 76, 117, 121–6 folk pedagogies 130–2 methods 133–4 pre-20th century (Ontario, Canada) 80–2 testing 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 105 international 82, 95–6, 166, 168, 173–4 and knowledge 165 single scale 78–9 see also assessment textbooks 81–2, 105 theories 35 cognition 29–30 cognitive development 68 information 14–15 instruction 50–4 intentional 51 of the mind 27, 57, 67, 72, 73, 163, 179 schema 16 thinking about thinking 86, 163 alternative ways of 157–8 analytic 39 critical 86 intuitive 39–40 and learning 17, 43 magical 21 monitoring 47, 99 pedagogy for 133–7 process of 39–40 study of 15–16 Thorndike, E. L. 88, 89, 91, 105, 107

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207 Thought and Language (Vygotsky) 7, 18 Thousand Languages of Childhood, The 168 Through These Eyes (film) 93 Tishman, S. 79, 86 Tolman, E. C. 5, 14, 147–8, 152 Tomasello, M. 24, 57, 117, 118, 119, 185 Toward a Theory of Instruction (Bruner) 65, 181 traditional societies parenting 122–3 responsibility for learning 119, 122 Traditionalists 32, 82–3 transfer, of knowledge 16, 38, 53 Trevarthan, C. 25, 153 truth changing 112 fixed 92, 159–60 Tyack, D. 82, 83 understanding 109, 118, 129, 134 children’s, of light 51–2, 167, 170 see also knowledge versions of reality 141–2 Vico, G. 142 Visalberghi, E. 57, 118 Vygotsky, L. 7, 18, 25, 57, 68, 69, 71, 73–7, 152 War on Poverty (America) 23, 47, 108 Weber, E. 79 Wegner, D. M. 106 Weikart, D. P. 48 Wenger, E. 46, 119 White, C. 46, 49, 119 White, M. A. 65

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208 Willinsky, J. 97 Wolfson College, Oxford University 7 Wood, D. 45 Woods Hole conference 38, 42

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Index Zacharias, J. 31, 128, 172 Zener, K. 5 Ziv, M. 132 zone of proximal development 71, 73

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