Vandana Thadani

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"Please Return Desks to Their Original Positions”:
Hidden Assumptions, Hidden Ideas that Infuse Our Learning & Teaching Practices

Written by Vandana Thadani

Years ago, a few weeks into the semester, a note was left on the whiteboard in my classroom: “Please return the desks to their original position.”  During my class meetings, students sat in circles or semi-circles. This note was apparently from the instructor of the class following mine. Curious, I thought! “The original” position — straight rows of desks facing the front of the classroom — somehow occupied a privileged place in our classrooms! Was this “default” configuration perceived as more legitimate for learning/teaching than other possible configurations that might have been used, and if so, why?

Teaching has been called a “cultural activity,” an activity we learn about through “informal participation,” over many years, beginning in childhood (Stigler & Hiebert, 1998, p.1). Our teaching practices are shaped by our historical and cultural contexts, values, and beliefs. The often-invisible nature of these contexts/values/beliefs makes their effects on our teaching that much more profound. In their classic paper, Stigler and Hiebert write, “Our “scripts [for teaching] are widely shared, and therefore they are hard to see....” Akin to activities like family dinners, “We rarely think about how [teaching] might be different from the way it is. But, we certainly would notice if a feature were violated…” (Stigler & Hiebert, 1998, p. 1).  Furthermore, “The widely shared cultural beliefs and expectations that underlie teaching are so fully integrated into teachers’ worldviews that they fail to see them as mutable. The more widely shared a belief is, the less likely it is to be questioned, or even noticed. This tends to naturalize the most common aspects of teaching, to the point that teachers fail to see alternatives to what they are doing in the classroom, thinking that this is just the way things are” (Stigler & Hiebert, 1998, p. 6).

In other words, cultural/historical influences (values, belief systems) make teaching practices “sticky”; we educators replicate the structures and practices that we witnessed and took part in for years, often without querying why we’re doing what we do. This diminishes our control, both over goals we set, and our efforts at achieving those goals.  Many of my colleagues are dedicated and masterful teachers. Some are innovators, ever ready to enact new cutting-edge pedagogies and practices. Others are tinkering towards improving their practices, sometimes a lesson a time. These efforts could ALL be aided — our teaching could be better controlled — by understanding cultural/historical values and beliefs that underly our teaching actions. EVERY ONE of us could do more work to uncover and think about the assumptions that underly our practices.

This semester, in a CTE event titled “Please Return Desks to Their Original Positions”: Hidden Assumptions, Hidden Ideas that Infuse Our Learning & Teaching Practices,” we explored three cultural/historical influences on our teaching practices: (1) the “factory model” of workplace efficiency applied to educational contexts; (2) the subfield of behaviorism within Psychology; and (3) the individualistic (as opposed to collectivistic) cultural system in which we live (Marshall, 1988; Plaut & Markus, 2005; Stigler & Hiebert, 1998). The intersections of these three influences are reflected in teaching practices and policies that we educators have either taken for granted or battled to try and change. For example:[1]

• Even in a student-centered model, teachers’ actions occupy the center of our attention (those rows of desks!).
• Learning is framed as absorbing, memorizing and, practicing.
• Teaching is framed as transmitting, managing, rewarding, and punishing (rules!).
• Abilities (learning and teaching abilities) are viewed as inborn, intuitive, talents vs. skills that are developed.
• Learners’ and teachers’ work is produced in isolation, and when it is not, we are skeptical of what it reveals about individuals’ abilities.
• We underestimate the cognitive load, skill, and experience needed to teach well.

The factory model, behaviorism, and individualism have influenced teaching/learning practices that the U.S. educational system adopted over the past 100+ years. But these were not the only options available to us. Educational theorists known as the constructivists — theorists such as John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky — had entirely different visions for education (Dewey, 1899; Vygotsky, 1978), visions that are more closely aligned to the reforms many of us strive to enact today. An often-quoted passage in teaching reform papers provocatively notes: “I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike [i.e., the behaviorists] won and John Dewey [i.e., the constructivists] lost.” (Lagemann, 1989, p. 185).

Control over our teaching requires us to uncover and understand the values and beliefs that might underly our actions. From there we can choose our teaching goals and teaching practices deliberately — arrange those desks in circles or in rows, as they suit our intentionally selected aims.

*Please Note: The presentation described here will be offered again in Fall, 2022. Additionally, in response to the unfortunate isolation that many of us experience as teachers (one of the points made in the presentation), Karie Huchting (CTE Director) and I created an informal no-agenda space for faculty to gather in community — a CTE Watercooler (substituting water with wine). Conversation with others provides a mechanism for reflecting and sharing. It is also a means for revealing both hidden assumptions and new ways of thinking about teaching and students’ learning. The vision for these events: To add no work, add no additional demands on faculty who are already doing a great deal, and to provide the space for good people who care about teaching to talk informally, and trust that ideas will pollenate, reflection will occur, and a community of faculty will emerge who can support each other to hone teaching practices.[2]

References

• Dewey, J. (1899).  3--Waste in education. In The school and society (pp. 39-56). The University of Chicago Press.
• Lagemann, E. (1989). The Plural Worlds of Educational Research. History of Education Quarterly, 29(2), 185-214.
• Marshall, H. H. (1988). Work or Learning: Implications of Classroom Metaphors. Educational Researcher, 17(9), 9-16
• National Research Council. 1995. Reinventing Schools: The Technology is Now! Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
  Plaut, V. C. & Markus, H. R. (2005).  Chapter 25, The “Inside” story: A cultural-historical analysis of being smart and motivated, American style. In A. J. Elliot & C. S. Dweck (Eds.), Handbook of Competence and Motivation. New York: Guilford Press.
• Stigler, J. W. & Hiebert, J. (1998).  Teaching is a cultural activity. American Educator, 22, 1-10. 
• Vygotsky, L. (1978). Ch. 5 - Interaction between learning and development. In M. Gauvain & M. Cole (Eds.) Readings on the development of children (4^th ed., 34-41). Worth Publishers.

[1] Disclaimer: My CTE event did not advocate for any specific changes, practices, or initiatives; it did not advocate for abandoning sensibilities for rigor, and it did advocate for abandoning any particular pedagogical or assessment strategies. Rather the idea was about uncovering hidden influences so we can intentionally select the practices that serve our aims.

[2] K.J. Peters (ENGL) merits a shout-out here; this idea came up with him over drinks (the birthplace of many good ideas)!