A Ghost in the Classroom

Since we are talking about talking, I want to talk about our good friend Lev V. because I'm not sure that I could talk about talking without talking about Mr. V. (for the record, that is supposed to be a little loopy).

Maybe it is because I'm a little elitist, or over confident, but I'm all for the upheaval of the modern classroom structure. I don't think we took Lev to heart--he haunts the curriculum and the jargon and even the classroom: we talk about scaffolding instruction, and social cognitive development, and then we let our kids talk amongst themselves briefly during lessons that we present. What we don't do is create social learning environments--environments where learning is organic.

Actually, that isn't true. I mean, where do you think your kids are learning the 'bad words' from? Certainly not their teachers (unless you live in Manhattan, in which case it's probable). The thing is that students learn from people that are like them--and most learning in school takes place in the informal social context rather than the dispensational forum anyway, so as teachers really the only option is to harness that information so that students are learning more than the 'f' word from their peers--unless that f word is friction, fiction, faction, or France.

I spoke briefly about it in Dr. Wilson's class, and I want to expand on what I said here: Lev Vygotsky is more than ZPD and Scaffolding. He's about interactive, socially relevant learning; and he isn't about a teaching strategy, so much as a pre-existent phenomenon. The zone of proximal development isn't the capacity of development of the student--it's a zone that is a natural development of the interaction between two people. That is to say that no matter whom you interact with, a zone of proximal development exists. Lev does talk about optimal Proximations--formations that foster learning to a greater extent, and we must understand that no learning in this context is one way: enter scaffolding.

I read a few semesters ago in the Oxford Commentary on Vygotsky something that stuck with me, and that is that we have badly misrepresented scaffolding. When we think scaffolding, and how we are taught the concept of scaffolding is assisting a student to reach a concept, like the concept of a building--as the building is developed, the scaffolding is removed. Not only is this a misunderstanding of Vygotsky, but it's a misunderstanding that leads directly to our conclusions that a teacher must control the classroom. It is a one way interaction--we must scaffold our instruction so that students can have access to primary concepts. What is forgotten is that necessary part of what scaffolding actually is--a relational development. In this way both people learn and grow from the scaffolding relationship.

How does all of this relate to talking? Well, all students are an expert at something. Some students will be experts at things the teacher will not. No two students have similar backgrounds. And every student interaction fosters a zone of proximal development that, well, develops a student. Talking is the conglomeration of all of this. Students learn from each other. They learn in the thirty-five minutes at lunch things with more social relevance than they do in the rest of the day. Talking is the way we harness this in the classroom so that students learn from each other. Talking in dynamic roles, understanding perspectives within a social context, and learning from the diverse pool of tools that community provides: such as in a debate, in a discussion of what 'love is,' what a cycle is.

Education is the communication of socially relevant concepts, the provision to a future generation the tools necessary to maintain the future society. All of this underscores community, and community learning--not a sage with answers to pass out. It is often said that our generation will have to solve problems that our parent's generation did not know existed, and that underscores our parent teacher's inability to teach us how to solve them. Martin Luther King, Jr. once stated that you cannot solve a problem using the same logic that created it. All of these demonstrate the need to let students have control of the classroom: what problems will our children have to solve that we do not even know are problems, and that they will have to develop their own logic to solve?

Talking needs to happen in class because it is the context of social learning--what is language but the indicator of two people's need to communicate information to one another? All of this to say that Lev shouldn't haunt education, but to take center stage--and perhaps that means the teacher needs to sit down, and let the students talk.