On manuals and text-books

The other day I indulged myself by going to one of the world's great physical bookshops to browse and buy.

Convenient as the online bookshops are, there is to my mind no substitute for physical browsing. And browsing in a bookshop and in a library are quite different experiences, which inform and feed off each other. In a library I look up the UDC/Dewey reference to find a text on a shelf and may browse round it to find associated stuff on a similar topic, but usually I am pretty clear what I am looking for, and either I find it or I don't.

The bookshop is different. Certainly it is organised--much more broadly--by subject area,  but then by author, which leads to some interesting juxtapositions on the shelves which you can't find anywhere else, other than perhaps in a particular person's library.

Almost as a penance for the browsing and buying motivated purely by my interests (and some potential presents--why else would I clean out their stock of Frankfurt H (2005) On Bullshit Princeton N J; Princeton University Press? *), I had a look on the education shelves, in particular those on teaching in post-compulsory education, to note if there were more recent editions of any of the standard works on our reading list.

There were, so I flipped through them to see where the differences were and, being in that context in the bookshop, I was instantly bored stiff. Truth to tell, of course, I have never read any of these things. I've raided them for bits of information and to give a reference to something for students, and I do read the next level of collections of papers and research-based studies and the like, but I don't read the text-books.

Thinking about this driving home, I realised anew that the text-books, in a professional/vocational discipline, may well be inimical to effective learning how to practise. The text-books have been contaminated, or perhaps more generously constrained, by the pernicious micro-managed compliance culture of post-compulsory education promulgated by LLUK and the now-defunct Learning and Skills Council (it's not often I link to something just to show that it's not there!), but that is not the whole story.

They have managed to reduce all the knowledge to something to be learned about (See here for a very quick and dirty exposition) rather than something to know by direct experience. (Sorry; that is a very sloppy usage of one of the most venerable distinctions in philosophy). It is a slab of indigestible dough sitting out there which needs to be consumed**. It is inert.

Some might recognise that "inert knowledge" like that, is another of David Perkins' categories of "troublesome knowledge" (2006).

Many of our teacher "trainees", especially those from craft and practical disciplines, experience these 400-page tomes as serious obstacles to learning how to practise. And Howard Becker, in his excellent 1972 article, which pre-figures all the "situated learning" discussions of the '90s onwards, shows how the culture and conventions of the educational system militate against the effective learning of practical disciplines.

Now Sean has identified another instance of this in the case of a textbook all about management which is a liability to his students who need to learn how to be entrepreneurs and to manage a small business.

This is not of course to deny that there is value in these books and their counterparts which fuel further investigation into policies and practices; after all, this blog in its trivial way fits within that tradition. But just as a weed is a plant in the wrong place, much of the literature is a stumbling-block to new practitioners.

As I drove home, I was asking myself why we were putting our new students through that obstacle course. There are many reasons, of course; the academic level of the course, the inspection regime, even our desire to show off our academic credentials by announcing that we know all this stuff--and a corresponding desire to put initiates through a rite of passage, whose irrelevance and futility is of course part of its potency. But none of it is about getting them to teach better.

So perhaps we should forbid them to read anything like these textbooks for the first year? (Bearing in mind that for some of the graduates, that will work as a paradoxical injunction which will guarantee they devour the reading list...) Let them gain knowledge by acquaintance first, like people do in the real world, perhaps?

Strangely, something like this is happening by accident. The current structure of teacher training in post-compulsory education in England and Wales requires that all new staff undertake a short, survival-oriented course at the start of their job (PTLLS) and then go on to a full two-year part-time programme as soon as possible. In practice, that "as soon as possible" may well be the beginning of the following academic year. So they get a year's experience under their belts (with support, theoretically) and will only then get all these books thrown at them. That won't reduce the academic step some craft colleagues have to take, but it will mean that they may be ready for this more formal approach to learning when it comes.

And the reference to manuals? There are some authors out there who have little interest in covering the standard ground, but just presenting concrete advice to newcomers. They don't write textbooks; they write manuals. Their agenda is set by what their readers want to know. At different ends of the scale, Sue Cowley and Phil Race stand out, but they are not alone. They may not go far, but they make a much better start.

On the other hand, avoid like the plague anything which is sub-titled "meeting the LLUK standards" or "achieving QTLS" (it doesn't matter what it means). Those sub-titles are testimony to the authors having lost the plot; they are writing to "cover" the inert knowledge entombed in the standards and the syllabi, as a very poor proxy for improving practice.


* Actually, I wasn't terribly impressed. The whole thing is really summed up on p.47, "the essence of bullshit is not that it is false, but that it is phony." It's a conceit, that's all.
** Sean has a very interesting blog post about bread-making, incidentally, here.

Becker H S (1972) "A School is a Lousy Place to Learning Anything in" American Behavioral Scientist vol 16: 85-105 doi:10.1177/000276427201600109
Perkins D (2006) "Constructivism and troublesome knowledge" in J H F Meyer  and R Land (eds.) Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge London; Routledge.

On Levi-Strauss

No, not jeans!

Today is the centenary of the birth of Claude Levi-Strauss. Indeed it is his birthday, for he is still alive. But age is not his claim to fame; that lies in his theorisation of anthropology through "structuralism". He sought underlying principles of human thinking through the discovery of common themes in the culture and language of disparate peoples. That is as close as I will go to the edge lest I sink into mire of gallic intellectualisation; if you want to know more, google him at your peril.

I have no idea what to make of him. I read most of his major works thirty-odd years ago when I felt the need to justify myself as an "intellectual"--a need now happily past. Like many others, I wore my membership of the club of those who had finished The Raw and the Cooked or The Savage Mind, more as a badge of my conquest of tedium than as testimony to my own thinking having been informed in any useful way. Later, of course, he appeared to be a model of clarity and simplicity alongside his "post-structuralist" heirs.

Sorry to be dog-in-a-mangerish on his birthday, but he has outlived his reputation. Not because he was "wrong"--there is no way to demonstrate or argue that in his weird world--but because nowadays, intellectual fashion can pass over one in the course of a lifetime. And I still have no idea what he and his gang thought they were contributing to any understadning of the real world... But, he did persuade lots of people to play his game!

On opportunity costs again

I keep on about threshold concepts almost as much as I do about Frank Coffield, and anyone familiar with the idea will be aware of the economists' favourite TC—opportunity cost. It is discussed very well by Robert Frank in his entertaining new book [Frank R H (2008) The Economic Naturalist; why economics explains almost everything London; Virgin Books]. I don't think he has ever heard of TCs, but he acknowledges the significance of the concept in very similar language (pp. 4-7).
Incidentally, the book is also based on an exercise he routinely uses in an introductory economics class; clearly an excellent teaching device!

On books and blogs (roughly)

You may have noticed that the blog has had a re-design. Frankly, I managed to break the previous template with a tweak too far, so I had to choose another but then I couldn't resist messing with it a bit...

So, being self-referential, that coincides with a message from a correspondent enquiring whether I have written or am going to write, the book of the site. I get such emails every other week or so, which is gratifying, but I usually respond very briefly; "No!" or words to that effect. Perhaps because I have been working on (grandiose term! I have been messing about with...) the re-design, on this occasion I decided to explain myself a little. And the more I got into it, the more interesting the issue became. (And of course, now I have a ready-made explanation to refer other correspondents to in future.)

I hear [an author my correspondent mentioned rather unflatteringly] is doing well out of his books and his consultancy; good for him and others (some of them friends of mine) in the same business. But in business terms his "offering" is really rather different from mine. People pay up-front for his expertise. Either they buy books (or more likely, libraries buy books), or they engage him for staff development sessions and pay for it. They do this because they have reasonable expectations of the quality of what he will offer, and he doubtless takes considerable care to deliver to meet those expectations. It's a traditional model, and it does tend to lead to slightly staid and conventional material.

The web is an entirely different medium; it is far more casual. People only have to click on a link to come to my site, and they can leave just as easily. They can glance at a page for six seconds (I read that somewhere, but this is not a topic I reference punctiliously); if it is not what they are looking for they can move on at no cost.

I get over a million unique visitors a year (as you may know, web hosting companies provide incredibly detailed statistics). But over a quarter of those visitors (28% at the latest count) only look at one page; presumably they then decide it is not for them and they move on. I get appreciative notes from people like you who stick around—and many thanks for them—but all I know about the others is that they did not stick around, because visiting a web-page is not like picking up (still less, buying) a book.

And for me that means that I can mess about a bit. I'm not constrained by much of a contract with the reader, and certainly no financial one. I can do my "heterodoxy" stuff, without taking it too seriously; see http://www.doceo.co.uk/heterodoxy/index.htm I can crack jokes, and if some people don't like them and move on, that is no big deal. I can take risks.

I could of course even misrepresent ideas and be sloppy or biassed or unfair about the material, and that is the risk you as a reader take if you decide to trust me. Even Wikipedia is monitored by editors; personal sites aren't. There is no peer review process, and no quality assurance mechanisms. (Actually, I did take the first steps to setting up an "advisory committee" in 2005. Several of the people I approached pointed out it was a bad idea—the Unique Selling Point of the "brand" was my distinctive voice. Of course they may just have been trying to get out of serving on it...) Certainly, no-one should trust just my site.

There is also another, quite different reason for choosing this medium. It is what accounts for its appearance in the first place: and although books can manage it quite well, readers rarely make use of the facility;

Hyperlinks, and non-linear reading. About half of the present material on the "learning" side of the site started life in the form of handouts in the mid-90s. I used to give handouts to support lectures. But they were only about one topic—the topic of the lecture. And it frustrated me that my students, even Master's level students, were not making the connections between the topics. They were not fitting individual ideas into a coherent (or even incoherent—even better) whole. I was impressed by how the "Help" files of various packages used hyperlinks to help create such connections, and I found a package which would build such .hlp files from word-processor files. So I distributed these things on floppy discs... Eventually, web access came along and I put them up there. (Fortunately before VLEs, or the whole thing might have got stuck in that dead-end, but that's another story...) But the hyperlink is critical; it enables readers to construct their own mental image of the topic, rather than being dragged along by an author.

That's the rationale behind the web-sites. The blog is different again.

The point, in terms of teaching? We use many media, and often treat them as interchangeable. They're not. Often the differences don't matter much, but sometimes they do, and they go quite deep.