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In the last part of the 20th century,
we get these things called teaching machines.
This one is one that I really like, it amuses me.
It's actually a pretty important image to be quite frank.
B. F. Skinner, the great behaviorist,
was always interested in education.
And even before the computer in the 1950s,
they were building teaching machines which is like adding machines,
sort of calculators or whatever.
So, the student gets a question up there, I don't know,
a card or something like that,
and they click the answer and it's right or wrong.
So, in a sense what this does is,
this is a fancy machine circa the 1950s.
And in fact, we're just replicating didactic pedagogy in this space.
In some sense, it's worse because there's not even another person in the room,
it's just the student and the machine.
Now, my provocative question is how often do our e-learning environments today,
how often do our educational technologies today do exactly the same thing?
They replicate didactic pedagogy.
They do exactly what didactic pedagogy has done for a century and a half.
In terms of these basic dimensions that I've been looking at,
epistemological dimensions, discursive dimensions and so on,
we can use this dimensional framework to pass our e-learning environments,
and we'll find a lot of didactic pedagogy still happening.
I want to end by complicating didactic pedagogy in several ways.
The first is that history is not a straight line,
we can say didactic pedagogy is a thing of the past and then we moved on,
and we did progressive education, ala authentic pedagogy,
and now it's time to do transformative pedagogy and all's well with the world.
Well, in fact, the complicated thing is that in our moment,
didactic pedagogy is alive and well alongside authentic pedagogy,
and if there's something new in transformative pedagogy,
it's the fact that we have bits of all this stuff swirling around us all the time.
So the complicated thing is,
history is not a straight line and we have
very modern versions of didactic pedagogy in our presence,
directly in front of our eyes.
So, that's one form of complication.
It's not as if this is the past and we're just talking about the past,
it's very much the present.
The second form of complication is that
I don't want to totally dismiss didactic pedagogy.
So, let's say, I'm coming into a new domain.
Let's say, I really don't know much about
quantum mechanics and I want to understand what all this Einstein stuff's about.
And the best way for me to understand is actually for someone to tell me,
to be quite frank, to give me a chapter in a textbook which makes it simple for me.
The teacher can stand at the front of the room and explain it to me.
On one side, it's the best.
But one way to do it which is viable and actually it's sort of efficient,
to be quite frank.
Rather than me trying to figure out quantum mechanics myself, what am I going to do?
Reinvent the world the way Einstein did?
Rather than me trying to reinvent that wheel,
it's actually efficient for me to be just explicitly told something.
And in fact, one of the interesting pieces of research,
which we got to come to later in the series
so I'll just mention it now briefly, Lisa Delpit,
an African-American, says, "Look,
African-American students need to be told things explicitly because
the implicit assumptions that the white kids have in the same class, they don't have".
So, there is no argument for explicitness, directness,
about its efficiency, about accessibility if you're
an outsider to a particular idea or a particular culture.
We also can't dismiss didactic pedagogy because it becomes
a traditionalism which we can't just simply write off and say it's not important.
When parents want traditional education, they understood it.
When in certain religious settings,
Quranic learning for example which is based on a lot of memorization,
we maintained those traditions.
These pedagogies are absolutely enforced.
So, there are a lot of cultural spaces where people want to do
didactic pedagogy in order to maintain continuity with the past.
And look, it's complicated.
We can't just simply dismiss those things as irrelevant, useless, not important.
They are traditions and if people want to maintain those traditions,
we have to be in dialogue with that.
So, in sum, what I don't want to do is dismiss didactic pedagogy.
What I've done in order to build the model,
to characterize it is not a dismissal,
it's saying, "Ok, this is what it was for.
This is how it worked in its times.
This is what its purposes were".
And there may be some aspects of that,
not all aspects but there may be some aspects of that which we want to
keep as part of a repertoire of learning today.
For example, it might be a good idea to memorize things, still.
For example, when you're learning a foreign language there's a fair bit of
memory work to be done around vocabulary and
maybe even being explicit about grammatical forms might be useful in some instances.
So let's not dismiss that.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisDean
