Never heard of Hirsch there

Posts and threads, 2023–2025

I do have a PhD in education and technology from a good Canadian university (don't work in education now), and it feels so strange. On the one hand a lot of what we were doing there was too uncritically radical and student-centered and inquiry-based etc. Never heard of E. D. Hirsch there, and we never really mentioned what a curriculum should look like — everything was focused on studies of interventions lasting a couple of weeks, because that was what was possible to pull off.

On the one hand we were too radical, on the other hand what we actually managed to do was completely out of reach for regular teachers (with all the resources and effort etc). And now it feels like it's all completely meaningless — people fly all over the world to discuss discourse analysis and advanced theories, while at our place we've had the experience of not being able to help with homework on fractions, because all that comes home is a worksheet and no math textbook that shows the method. I hear the same from friends with kids at other schools.

What is even the point of lots of fancy theories and PhDs when you don't do the absolute simplest thing possible, you know?

Eleven floors of education

I really wonder how teachers and education researchers get taught about this at universities in Norway. I did my own PhD in education in Canada, at a top university, and looking back I feel pretty brainwashed.

The whole building (which was great, and cozy, and everyone was super nice, and incredibly engaged) was filled with cute slogans like "education is not filling a pail but lighting a fire", and we all believed in problem-based learning, authentic learning, discovery-based learning etc.

On top of that, as far as I know nobody in the whole school (11 floors of nothing but education) was doing research on how a whole curriculum (over several years) should be built up... Everything was focused on small interventions with teachers, design-based case studies. And sure — we did cool things, when you have a couple of PhD students, a super motivated teacher, and cool technology and can transform a whole room into an earthquake zone with AR technology and stuff like that, then you can get the students to learn a lot in a couple of weeks about exactly those ideas, and probably more deeply than if you'd read a chapter about it in the textbook...

But the problem of course is that it's completely unrealistic to do any of this out in regular school... And if the whole year of physics looked like that you'd probably get pretty worn out too ;)

The new app as a Trojan horse

One last point — one of the reasons a lot of researchers think it's fun and exciting to do research on technology is actually that it's seen as a Trojan horse... what the researchers are really interested in is trying out different pedagogical approaches... But because teachers have professional pride you can't just walk into a classroom and say "you've been doing it wrong all along, this is how you have to do it"... But if you show up with a new app, a new technology (could also be VR etc), you can say "this is something completely new that gives you new possibilities"... The problem of course is that the teacher you're studying might follow your new pedagogical approach, but when this technology then spreads out into the classrooms, the pedagogy of course doesn't come along.

That said, I also wish all the enthusiasm parents express around screens in school etc also went a bit toward what gets taught in school, not just the joy of reading, but what gets read etc. Against screens — but what are you for? →