League of Worlds » An Examination of Influences of a Social Constructivist Conceptual Framework on Creating Virtual Worlds for Graduate Teaching and Learning

An Examination of Influences of a Social Constructivist Conceptual Framework on Creating Virtual Worlds for Graduate Teaching and Learning

by Roma B. Angel, John H. Tashner, Richard E. Riedl, Stephen C. Bronack, Robert L. Sanders

The Conceptual Framework

Faculty members of the Reich College of Education at Appalachian State University have worked with a version of the social constructivist conceptual framework outlined in this paper for approximately eighteen years and engage in a comprehensive revision every five years. At present a college-wide committee, with frequent feedback from all faculty, is reworking the conceptual framework and the document is in its final stages of revision. While the conceptual framework outlined below is not in its final form, the summary version presented herein provides a view of the distinct nature of the elements that guide our work.

A copy of a summary draft from October 14, 2005 follows. The document in its completed state will be approximately twenty-five pages in length and will be found at www.ced@appstate.edu.

THE RCOE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
A Working Draft
In Pursuit of Knowledge: A Community of Practice Linking the Past and Present to the Future

An Executive Summary

In the Reich College of Education [as the professional education Unit], we see faculty and students coming together as a community of inquirers to examine the aims of education and the nature of teaching and learning for achieving worthwhile educational goals. We view teaching and professional service as dynamic, goal-oriented, social activities which reflect our commitment to both the value of cultural diversity, and to the identification and solution of social problems. Learning is seen as an active process of acquiring, assessing, and producing knowledge in an environment of care and respect for others. We embrace the exploration of new forms of teaching and learning through experimentation with emerging technologies, and we are committed to the promotion of areas of excellence in the study of teaching, learning, and professional service. (RCOE Vision Statement, 1990).

The RCOE Vision Statement is reflected in all programs within the professional education Unit and serves as a focal point for ongoing development for the Unit’s programs. Supporting this vision is the Unit’s conceptual framework which is based upon five principles that are supported by a rich theoretical and research base.

Principle 1: Community of Practice

Learning occurs through participation in a Community of Practice

The knowledge required to be a successful educator is acquired through active participation in a Community of Practice (CoP). Preparation of educators occurs in at least two overlapping CoPs: the university, college or department where prospective and experienced educators are prepared, and the public schools and/or agencies where they engage in teaching, administration or other service and eventually their life’s work. Entrance into a CoP is by “invitation,” informal or formal; members come together because they are engaged in common work to reach agreed upon goals. While technical knowledge is important, it is always embedded in a complex set of social relationships. Out of such relationships emerges a set of shared knowledge, skills, values, and other characteristics that define the CoP.

The knowledge an individual must possess to gain full membership in a CoP takes two forms: one comes through acquisition, the other through learning. The process of acquisition focuses more on active participation than what is learned; an example of this is the young child who learns the basics of language without any formal grammar instruction in order to become an active participant in a community. Learning involves direct teaching and conscious reflection and is most typically found in formal schooling; for example, learning multiplication tables, the technical names for parts of an animal, the elements of leadership, or those of clinical practice. Membership in CoPs requires both kinds of knowledge, and the unit strives to provide an environment in which both processes take place and complement each other.

The Importance of Language

Language is the critical tool in the balancing of acquisition and learning, of formal instruction and social participation. Dialogue becomes an essential tool in the traditional learner-expert relationship but also the process of dialogue is the means for identifying and defining problems, exploring alternative solutions, monitoring activity, and evaluating results. A healthy CoP is always concerned with the open flow of dialogue. Members must feel that their ideas are taken seriously and should never feel threatened that they will be condemned or ostracized solely on the basis of their dialogue.

Principle 2: Knowledge is Socially Constructed

Knowledge is socially constructed and learning is social within the Community of Practice.

Learning does not occur in isolation but requires interactions among people and is, therefore, shaped and transformed by one’s social and cultural environment. Diversity in the cultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical contexts in which teaching and learning occur contributes to different practices, experiences, and outcomes. We believe that individuals appropriate the practices, knowledge, skills, dispositions and values of their social groups. In other words, participants in the CoP have experiences “outside” themselves that create new meanings and understandings “inside” themselves—a process of transformation from the external to the internal.

Through such a transformation process, our aim is to educate candidates who seek to understand the views and experiences of those with whom they will work, to engage candidates in co-creating knowledge, and to make their learning relevant to real world situations. From this viewpoint, candidates learn and educators model the concept of praxis, the intertwining of theory and practice in the service of the reflective transformation of the individual’s participation in the world (Freire, 1970).

Principle 3: Novice to Expert

Learners proceed through stages of development from Novice to Expert under the guidance of more experienced and knowledgeable mentors in the Community of Practice.

Expertise in a profession results from absorbing the knowledge gained from theorists and research that frame perspectives about that profession. Experts clearly have “acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment”; such knowledge later “affects their abilities to remember, reason, and solve problems” (Bransford et. al. 2000, p. 19). Hence, for experts, knowledge is not merely a list of isolated facts but a highly organized and contextualized structure.

In the case of teaching, for example, teachers must decide about the goals for instruction; identify their students’ instructional needs, learner characteristics, and individual differences; decide what to teach and how much time to allocate to instruction; identify appropriate instructional levels; choose appropriate instructional materials and strategies; group students for instruction; decide how to measure the effects of instruction; monitor the lesson as it is taught; interact with students; make decisions about providing further instruction based upon student achievement; provide students with feedback, and, ultimately, analyze and reflect on the overall results and their effectiveness.

The expert has to evaluate the novice’s readiness to take on greater responsibility for the cognitive work necessary to move from novice to expert. The Unit’s faculty views its interactions with novice candidates in terms of the “zone of proximal development (ZPD) or the “distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under …[expert] guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).

Members of CoPs often assume interchangeable roles; at one point they may be novices acquiring or learning new knowledge and skills; at another time, they may be experts teaching others who assume the role of novice. An example of this can be found in the area of information and communication technologies; frequently supervisors will report that candidates have such an advanced level of knowledge and skill in this area that they have taught the supervisors how to handle a technological problem that otherwise would have remained unresolved. Consequently, we see the Unit’s classrooms and internship settings as a culture of practitioners with distributed expertise, and we value settings that are populated with candidates and faculty who are in different zones of proximal development.

Experts also possess the license to interpret and evaluate the performance of novices who are undergoing an apprenticeship in relation to the expected practices of the community. The apprenticeship provides an environment of trust in which novices and experts can co-construct mutually recognizable and desirable social roles. To this end, we rely upon performance assessments such centered on critical concepts and activities embedded in actual educational and social service contexts, and we employ a variety of approaches to document the transition of candidates from novice to expert.

Principle 4: Knowledge Base

An identifiable knowledge base that is both general in nature and specific to program areas emerges from the Community of Practice.

One of the defining characteristics of a profession is a scholarly knowledge base (Shulman, 1998). Beginning teachers, for example, need knowledge in three general areas to be successful in the classroom: knowledge of learners, knowledge of subject matter and curriculum, and knowledge of teaching. Professionals in all fields develop a personal knowledge structure that guides their activity, but candidates also need “to both understand and move beyond their personal knowledge and experiences to bring to bear a wider set of understandings on the problems of helping others learn” (Bransford, Darling-
Hammond and LePage, 2005, p.12).

Knowledge of Learners

A number of fundamental concepts about learning will provide teachers and other practitioners with a foundation for their continued professional growth. These concepts include:

• Learning as a constructive process–the active construction of knowledge with an emphasis upon
building a sense of context, interaction, and situation (Salomon & Perkins, 1998);
• The zone of proximal development–”the distance between the actual development level as
determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined
through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers”
(Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).
• Metacognition–”how people learn to monitor and regulate their own learning and thinking”
(National Academy of Education, 2005, p. .
• Cultural competence–selecting materials that are inclusive of the contributions and
perspectives of different groups (Ladson-Billings, 2002) and that are responsive to
the particular cultural context within which one teaches (Irvine & Armento, 2001).

Knowledge of Subject Matter and Curriculum

Educators need to become diagnosticians of learners’ interests and ideas. This leads to engaging students in the study of subject matter in ways that encourage a deeper and richer understanding of how the content they study relates to their lives and needs. To be able to lead such study, educators, them-selves, must have a deep understanding of the content for which they have responsibility as well as knowledge and ability to represent that content in meaningful way for all students and clients (Shulman, 1987). We place a premium on knowledge related to all of our majors in the Unit. Such knowledge is addressed through program standards at either the state and/or national levels. All of our programs are built on such standards and are held accountable for demonstrating their candidates’ performance in relation to the standards.

Knowledge of Teaching

Subject matter knowledge must be synthesized with pedagogical knowledge. The latter is defined by Shulman (1986):

The most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most useful forms of representations of these ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations—in a word, ways of representing and formulating subject matter that make it comprehensible to others. Pedagogical content knowledge also includes an understanding of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult; the conceptions and preconceptions that students of different ages and backgrounds bring with them to the learning of those most frequently taught topics and lessons (pp. 9-10).

It is not possible that candidates will leave with all the skills and knowledge necessary to perform effectively throughout their careers without further study. Instead, the Unit’s faculty help candidates develop the core understandings and skills that will prepare them for a lifetime of learning from their experiences in professional contexts. The Unit’s purpose is to develop “adaptive” experts who are capable of making the complex judgments they will have to exercise daily in practice but who also understand that education is a lifetime commitment.

Principle 5: Dispositions

All members of the Community of Practice develop a common set of dispositions that reflect the CoP’s attitudes, beliefs, and values.

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) defines dispositions in the following way:

The values, commitments and professional ethics that influence behaviors toward students, families, colleagues, and communities and affect student learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator’s own professional growth. Dispositions are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice. (NCATE, 2002)

What habits of mind and behavior are essential to candidates in the programs of the Unit? Three key dispositions are generalizable to all program areas:

1. Candidates exhibit a commitment to meeting the needs of all learners.
2. Candidates exhibit a commitment to reflective practice.
3. Candidates exhibit a commitment to professional and ethical practice.

For the behaviors associated with the these dispositions to emerge and be strengthened in candidates, faculty work collaboratively to insure that every candidate is offered situations that evoke the appropriate dispositions and related behaviors. Candidates must have multiple opportunities to display the key behaviors associated with each disposition so that both candidates and observers might reasonably reach the conclusion that the candidates will be likely to display the disposition in the future in similar situations. The presence of these three dispositions for all candidates does not in any way suggest that program areas do not also have other dispositions that may be governed by levels, subject being taught or other factors and for which candidates may be held responsible by their respective program areas.

Summary

Our conceptual framework is based on what is termed a “social constructivist” perspective.
We see the preparation of candidates in the Unit as essentially a social activity, which includes a period of apprenticeship. To become a graduate from the Unit requires candidates to participate in the communities of practice both in the Unit and in public schools and other professional settings. Learning to become a participant in the Unit involves the transition from partial to full participation in the community. Becoming a graduate of the Unit’s programs requires the mastery and acquisition of large amounts of knowledge, and extensive experience in applying and testing that knowledge in practical settings. Becoming a truly accomplished professional requires that one continue to learn and acquire knowledge throughout one’s entire professional life. It is within this theoretical and practical framework that the Unit prepares its candidates to become full-fledged members of the community of practice appropriate to their major field of study.

As a result of their work in the Unit’s programs, graduates and faculty of the professional education Unit at Appalachian State University will…

• Provide positive professional contributions within the various Communities of Practice of which they are members;
• Embody the view that learning and teaching are active, social, and transformative processes that are enhanced when new learning is linked to prior knowledge;
• Use theory and research to inform practice and use experience from practice to inform theory and research;
• Plan and adapt teaching and learning experiences, assessments, and interventions with reference to the learners’ diverse needs and characteristics;
• Demonstrate a commitment to three key dispositions:
a. meeting the needs of all learners;
b. engaging in ongoing reflective practice and lifelong learning;
c. embodying the highest standards of professional and ethical practice.

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