Brad Ovenell-Carter’s Master’s Thesis

Introduction

Can K12 teachers use emerging web technologies to improve the development of meaningful conversation in their students?

My experience in the Graduate Liberal Studies (GLS) program at Simon Fraser University (that's me in the beard) reinforced a personal conviction that liberal studies are essential studies. While the sciences explain how we might do things, the humanities explain why we ought to do them at all. Liberal studies, as their name implies liberate us from ignorance and liberate us for the pursuit of human excellence. For the past seven years I have been teaching literature, history and philosophy at Island Pacific School, a 50-student co-educational independent middle school on Bowen Island. During my coursework in GLS, I began looking for ways to enrich my own teaching, especially in philosophy where the existing curriculum focussed on developing rudimentary skills in practical reasoning and surveys of Western philosophy.

Along the way, I published a paper in the International Journal of the Humanities and presented at the International Symposium on New Directions in the Humanities at Columbia University in 2007. In A Shout in the Dark: A Call to Reanimate Metaphysical Discussions in Grade Schools, I suggested that grade schools--public and private, alike--need to reinvigorate the discussion of epistemology in general and of metaphysics in particular in the classroom. The aim is not to promote a particular philosophy, indeed that would be inadmissible in a pluralistic society, but to begin to develop in young people the capacity to make meaningful conversation. As in my experience they are currently woefully ill-equipped to do so, they are cut off from a rich tradition of inquiry into the human experience:

Conversation and dialogue are not simply the means that informal educators use, but are also  what educators should seek to cultivate in local life. They may be approached as relationships to enter rather than simply as methods...Cultivating conversation lies at the centre of what informal educators do. It is not simply the form that their work takes, but also part of their purpose. Through conversation, testing out prejudices (prejudgments), searching out meaning, we become more critical. Language, discourse 'exists not for the sake of expression alone but for the sake of the community it makes possible among those who become parties to it'. We become better able to name our feelings and thoughts, and place ourselves in the world. We can develop a language of critique and possibility which allows us to act.

(Smith, M. K. (2001) 'Dialogue and conversation', the encyclopaedia of informal education).

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I will admit that I am generally sceptical about the usefulness of these technologies. In my own classrooms I am reluctant to adopt any new technology unless it allow me to do something I couldn't otherwise do. As Alan Kay says, "Most ideas you can do pretty darn well with a stick in the sand."  But emerging web technologies do allow my students and I easily to capture or record conversations, even those spread out over time and great distances--something we couldn't do before, not practically anyway. And in an IM transcript or the collection of edits and comments behind a wiki page, we have a ready record of both the content of the conversation and the way the conversation itself developed. I wonder that if by teaching the students to analyze these records, they will better see both the form and purpose of conversation.

If this is the case, and I'll make a defense of the idea later, then schools should work to develop meaningful conversation, or dialogue or critical discourse, not as a secondary idea, but as a principal goal.

The GLS experience has shifted my thinking on the development of critical discourse in middle school students. I had initially approached the problem by attempting to enrich the content of my curriculum, bleieving better material would yield better discussion. In part that’s true: it’s hard to make a dull book interesting. However, much of the content of philosophy is simply beyond the understanding of my students who range in age from 11- to 15 years. It occurred to me that the success (and my enjoyment) of the GLS program came from the way it developed the capacity to engage in critical discourse as much as (if not more than) the way it delivered quality content. I learned more about the human experience when I stood back took the various courses I took as voices in a larger dialogue. I wondered that even if my students could not grasp content I might be able to recreate this spirit of dialogue.

Web 2.0, or the Read-Write-Web, may offer teachers new tools for developing an increased capacity for critical discourse in their students. While much of the literature written about Web 2.0 addresses the destabilizing force of the new technologies and the way they challenge current assumptions about the structure of schools and methods of teaching, I believe there is a counterbalancing force inherent in Web 2.0 that has yet to be exploited in K12 schools. The Read-Write Web technologies let consumers of content also be creators of content; yet, even as users create that content, the same technologies automatically capture the processes by which those creators worked. A wiki page, for example, records every edit ever made to a page giving us a kind of dialogue—between several authors if the page is a collaborative project or within the mind of a single author—we can review. Thus students and teachers have access not only to content, as we would have in a book, but also to a potentially rich set of meta-data: the give and go between writers or points of view, the crafting of words and so on.