Critic of the Socials Studies 11 course from the BC curriculum
The role of the constructivist teacher is claimed to be more of facilitation to provide opportunities for individual students to acquire knowledge and construct meaning through their own activities, and through discussions, reflection and the sharing of ideas with other learners with minimal corrective intervention.
These kinds of statement are almost directly opposite to the successful recipe for teaching and learning…” (Hattie p. 26)
In his synthesis of over 800 meta-analysis, John Hattie concludes that “active guided instruction is much more effective than unguided, facilitative instruction” (p. 243). Often relying on elaborate sets of data, researchers and administrators put their faith in practices that have been “proven” to be effective. So called informed educational practices aimed at improving or maintaining student achievement often fail to consider the quality of the learning they measure. The irony of this situation is that, in some cases, the very tools used to inform teachers’ practices are the root cause of stagnation for a system that, year after year, perpetuate the problem of shallow learning. In this paper, we examine one case, the case of the Social Studies 11 course from the British Columbia curriculum for secondary education. We will demonstrate how the provincial exams scores influence teachers to adopt methods that are in direct conflict with the course’s own learning objectives.
As laid out in the official Ministry of Education IRP , “the aim of social studies is to develop thoughtful, responsible, active citizens who are able to acquire the requisite information to consider multiple perspectives and to make reasoned judgments. The Social Studies 11 curriculum provides students with opportunities to reflect critically upon events and issues in order to examine the present, make connections with the past, and consider the future”. (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2005, p.11)
The fact that this course is subject to a ministry exam contributes to shifting the focus of the course, from helping students to engage in the deep learning necessary to make sense of the issues, to surface learning that leads to greater scores on the mandated provincial exam. To illustrate the influence of the exam scores on teachers’ practice, I can draw on my own experience. Every time I or a colleague have taught the course, the principal in charge at the time would infallibly come to us after the results were released and give us a nod or a frown depending on how well or poorly our class did on the exam. Because this is one metric that administrators can use to evaluate their school’s performance in relation to other schools, there is direct pressure put on teachers to stick with the factual content of the course. Compounding that pressure is the annual school report cards published by the British Columbia Fraser Institute’s (2014). Although the institute claims that they use several indicators to rank schools, half of them–average exam mark, the percentage of exams failed, and the school vs exam mark difference–are directly derived from the provincial exam results.
Standardized exams have merits and can indeed inform educator’s practices. If someone is successful, it does make sense to identify the causes of their success and share it with other educators. That strategy also works for SOC11. If a colleague gets good results, we tend to adopt the elements of their practices that we associate with that success. The result in the case of SOC11 is that doing well on the exam involves sacrificing the main objective of the course (to develop thoughtful, responsible, active citizens) in order to assist students in memorizing and regurgitating content that is often meaningless to them. Knowing facts about our past history does not necessarily translate into an understanding of contemporary issues. In fact, as shocking as this may sound, it is possible to score 100% on the provincial exam without knowing which political party forms the current government, let alone understanding each parties’ position on the complex issues we are facing today. Some could argue that the exam does assess students’ understanding of some current issues through the exam’s essay questions but, when we put the relative value of that question in perspective, it is very negligible. The exam includes two essay questions, and only one of them, if any, usually addresses a current, albeit very general issue such as the deterioration of the environment, overpopulation, or economic disparities. That one question represents 15% (of the exam’s total mark) which ends up accounting for only 3 % of the total mark for the entire course. Such a small portion of the assessment to measure the most pertinent, and also the most complex learning task is not enough of an incentive to prioritize process over content. In this, I am also overlooking the fact that one of the four criteria to mark the essay is the “recall of factual content” (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2005b). This plight and the teachers strategies to address it are also reflected in the fact that, at least from my experience marking essays, approximately 25 % of students do not answer the question or do so very poorly. So, essentially, the standard by which we assess our societal objective to develop thoughtful, responsible, and active citizens is guided by a multiple choice exam of 55 content oriented questions which leads teachers to adopt direct instruction methods that are limited to the transmission of information set in a textbook and passed on to student via directed readings or via a teachers’ lecture. This results in the yearly ritual of graduating drove of citizens that do not have the ability to critically analyze current events or the rhetoric of politicians and interest groups.
Some would argue that a constructivist approach to the teaching and learning of social studies is futile because it is impossible to create meaning without factual information. This fact is clearly acknowledged by the proponents of constructivism but, as von Glasersfeld mentions, it is indispensable for teachers to make the distinction between knowledge that has to be memorized and knowledge that needs to be understood (2008b). While facts such as the articles in the charter of rights or the immigration policies at a given time in our history are rigid–each individual does not invent their own–, their significance depends on the learners point of view. It is one thing to know that we have legal rights, but it is another to understand the significance of those rights. For instance, how do I determine whether my rights are violated or simply superseded by someone else’s rights. What we are suggesting is that the nature of the content be secondary to the process of assigning meaning for the purpose of critically reflecting upon events and considering their future implications. While the details of a particular historical event in Canadian history may inform a student’s understanding of a current event for the purpose of evaluating the future, a different sets of factual information can help another student achieving the same goal. Google cannot, at least for now, give you the answer to “who should I vote for?” because who one should vote for depends on who they are and what they believe in.
In a constructivist model, the knowledge, as in understanding, does not exist outside of the learners (Dougiamas, 1998; Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Savery & Duffy,1995; von Glasersfeld, 2008). Moreover, in order to be useful, knowledge has to be situated in a given context. As an example, the phenomenon of population, more specifically overpopulation, may be seem less significant to a student who lives in rural communities where the next neighbour lives half a kilometre away than the student who lives in a densely populated urban center. Factual knowledge about the differences between urban and rural communities certainly help in understanding some problems related to overpopulation but, in general, we can expect that urban learners would have a greater interest in it and give it more importance. The answer to which environmental issue is the most urgent to address today, will vary with the factual knowledge that informs the decision as well as the belief of each individual. We should not expect students to find the answer to such question in a textbook; we need to give them time to access and process the factual information they need to make sense of the issue.
The author of the textbook that guides the learning for the SOC 11 course (Cranny & Moles, 2010) attempts to address this reflective process by posing critical thinking questions which, more often than not, are irrelevant to the students’ life and therefore demand of students to adopt a hypothetical persona to relate to them. As an example, “Imagine you are the Prime Minister of Canada. Compose a letter to the Prime Minister of Britain explaining why you do, or do not, support an alliance between Britain, Russia, and France.” (Cranny & Moles, 2010). In theory, this is a sound question because it requires students to synthesis factual knowledge and apply some higher thinking skills such as evaluating and synthesizing to formulate a defensible answer. In practice however, it causes most students to roll their eyes and groan a nearly unanimous collective sigh of exasperation. There are several issues with this type of question. First, it fails to engage learners because there is no avenue for students to connect the problem with their reality. In this case, the problem is posed in an artificial context therefore students would approach it as a school problem rather than a genuine geo-political one. Hence, the goal becomes to find an answer that will earn a mark or get the teacher of their back. In most cases this means to revert to one of the various academic survival strategies such as copying the answer from someone else or writing the closest approximation with the least amount of effort. I have personally witnessed a student enter the following sentence as a Google query: “What do I think of the Canadian immigration policies in the early 1900’s”. Secondly, the factual knowledge necessary to answer the question can be overwhelming for students as it is unlikely that, even after a lesson on the topic, they have a good enough understanding of the issue to meaningfully address the question. The end result is usually an answer that is composed of bits of text extracted from the textbook to which students attach little meaning and therefore has little chance of being reproduced in a genuine context. According to Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989), this type of academic behaviour leads to shallow learning and makes the case to introduce a type of learning that is situated in a genuine context.
With a inscapable sense of irony, we can conclude that educators attach different meaning to the idea of constructivism. For some, it appears to be a fad that involves an idealistic view of institutionalized education. For others, it holds the promise of a much needed reform of the predominantly objectivist model. Objectivists claim to hold the empirical proof that a constructivist philosophy cannot translate into an effective school reform. Educators who have tried it will readily admit that they are fighting an uphill battle because the demands for such reform seem to be too impractical. This reality is well captured in the concluding words of Potter’s exposé (2013) on the implementation of constructivist ideals in higher education. “Constructivists, analogously, do not realize the extent to which they work with objectivist ideals in objectivist contexts. If constructivism is to succeed as an educational philosophy, it must move beyond shaping pedagogy and curricula; it must shape the structures and assumptions within which pedagogy and curricula operate.”
References
Aikenhead, G. S. and Jegede, O. J. (1999). Cross-cultural science education: A cognitive explanation of a cultural phenomenon. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. 36(3), 269 – 287.
British Columbia Ministry of Education, (2005a), Social studies integrated resource package 2005 retrieved from: http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/pdfs/social_studies/2005ss_11.pdf
British Columbia Ministry of Education, (2005b) social studies 11, civic studies 11, BC first nations studies 12 step-by-step guide to marking written responses. Retrieved from:https://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/exams/marking_materials/step_by_stepSS11.pdf
Brown, S.J., Collins, A., and Duguid, P. (February, 1989). Situated cognition and the culture
of Learning. Educational Researcher. 18 (1), p32-42.
Cranny, M. and Moles, G. (2010). Counterpoint; Exploring Canadian issues. Toronto: Parsons.
Dougiamas, M. (1998). A journey into constructivism. Retrieved from: https://connect.ubc.ca/bbcswebdav/pid-2468743-dt-content-rid-9868406_1/courses/SIS.UBC.ETEC.530.65B.2014W2.44677/download/dougiamas%20article%20530%20unit2.pdf
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning. New York, NY: Routledge.
Fraser Institute, (April, 2014). Report card on British Columbia’s secondary school 2014. retrieved from: http://www.fraserinstitute.org/uploadedFiles/fraser-ca/Content/research-news/research/publications/british-columbia-secondary-school-rankings-2014.pdf
Potter, M. K. (2013) “Constructivism in the shadow of a dead god, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 7 (1), Retrieved from: http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol7/iss1/19
Savery, J. R., and Duffy, T. M. (1995). Problem based learning: an instructional model and its constructivist framework. Educational Technology, 35 (5), p31-38.
von Glasersfeld, E. (2008a). Constructivisme radical et enseignement (Part 1 of 7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnsQVbVnzjk&list=PL98B548412F614B65&index=1
von Glasersfeld, E. (2008b).Constructivisme radical et enseignement (Part 6 of 7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NtHqcqhKM8&list=PL98B548412F614B65&index=6