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Case studies and the future tense

Submitted by Rob Walker on Wed, 27/02/2008 - 10:39.
Project: Design and the pedagogy of spaces
Categories: classroom design | scenario planning | schools for the future | teaching and learning in virtual spaces

Ethnographers sometimes talk about their use of the 'ethnographic present' in their writing. In classical ethnographies, the accounts that were 'written up', often some years after the field notes were 'written down', disguise the fact that communities had changed, or even disappeared in the spaces between words. There is slippage in the process that suggests a timelessness, and insulation from social change and presents the world as stable, cultures as continuous and enduring and an image of 'other' societies as distant from our own actions.

This idea has been carried across into educational case studies, which too suggest a continuing present that is based on evidence that is frozen in a false present. Many years ago, Willard Waller described the American Elementary School as a 'museum of virtue', by which he meant that teachers were expected to maintain standards of honesty and modest behaviour that the society at large knew to be, at best, a polite fiction. In educational case studies there is a parallel fiction at work, that the account is the actuality. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the accounts that are currently being given of the BSF program. There is a descriptive language at work, and a style of photographing buildings, that is more about image than actuality.

This comment was prompted by a supplement in this week's Guardian Education called Tomorrow's Schools (26/02/08).

Is this the article Rob?

Submitted by Sys Admin on Thu, 28/02/2008 - 08:16.

Is this the article Rob?

What sort of schools? What kind of tomorrow? | News crumb | EducationGuardian.co.uk

This idea of school buildings as an educational tool comes high up the sustainability agenda. Partly, it's about schools practising what they preach, but it's also about enriching the curriculum. "If we want to prepare children for a sustainable future they should be able to interact with their buildings. They should be able to talk about temperatures, wind speeds, the amount of energy the school uses and what it generates," Finlayson argues.

I wonder if a more appropriate argument would be with a kind of 'educationist future' which is based on the assumption that every change in the outside world is or should be reflected in education. What you call 'fiction' and 'image', I would call 'sympathetic magic', i.e. the belief that outward similarity stands for profound causal implications. For instance, having new buildings will make it easier to teach about temperature (why not old buildings?). The use of videos is another good example. For almost 50 years now, people have been talking about how moving pictures so commonplace in the 'outside' world will change the nature of instruction whereas they have barely made a dent.

On the other hand, what I've been working on in the area of discourse analysis suggests that trying to locate the causes (or even contributive causes) of action in words is a very dangerous (perhaps because it's easy) thing to do. Speakers seem to be very well able to uncover linguistic opacity if it serves their purpose and leave it opaque when it doesn't. So for instance, noone would really be tricked by the 'ethnographic present' into thinking that the culture being described has remained the same. That's simply how language works, you use the present tense to describe the past ("And then, in 1066, the Normans win the battle of Hastings." "So, I'm sitting there yesterday, and this guy comes up to me." - no confusion, there). The real complaint is against actions or other things unsaid.

Equally, re Sandy's comment, the real problem is not with the 'we' or the 'passive' voice but with the content surrounding them. 'Hiding' things is a beneficial function of language, without it, it would be useless. And speakers/listeners/readers seem to be able to uncover these things without much effort when it is necessary.

Prepositions and pronouns

Submitted by Sandra Leaton Gray on Wed, 27/02/2008 - 16:38.

All too true - considering language and the image it portrays is paramount when considering issues of educational policy too. Government policy often makes use of a particular type of powerful rhetoric involving the first person plural - in other words 'we' - which fails to make explicit exactly whom the 'we' might include. Although on the surface it sounds inclusive, this use of such a preposition has a dark and sinister side. It essentially pathologises and distances anyone who contests a policy, or even the idea that there is any kind of collective desire underpinning a policy.

 For example, from an 'Every Child Matters' key document:

"A central part of the Every Child Matters: Change for Children programme is addressing the weaknesses in how we work together including with children, young people and their parents and carers. We know that the picture on working together is inconsistent".

This inadvertently (or even advertently?) conditions the reader and paves the way for a children's database, amongst other things, which many people have objected to. Yet the use of the word 'we' in this context suggests that no reasonable person in education would object to such an apparently laudable aim (until someone downloads the database onto a couple of CD Roms, perhaps, and leaves them on the bus. But I digress).