Summary: Your first job as master teacher is to wake them up. After the last echo of the wake-up call has fallen silent your students will be left with a hunger and a vision. The vision will enlighten each act of specific learning. The vision is necessarily new and the hunger is for its realization.
The vision is a context, a framing, a meaning system within which all of the specific content of your teachings will fit. As with pieces of a jig saw puzzle, each teaching is seen, by the awakened, to be a specific and partial realization of the vision, "big picture". The struggle to acquire the piece that fits just so, or, possibly, the struggle to find any piece that clearly fits anywhere in the design, is driven by the vision of the awakening.
Without the vision your students are reduced to doing what they're told to do, to "behaving" in a teacher-approved way.
(Picture from Tulare county (USA, CA) library online photo archives. As typical as this picture is for its time, I thought it an evocative nonexample of vision-guided individual learning.)
Alright!, you say. I'm going to explain my whole philosophy for the course right at the beginning. That way they'll get the big picture. Sounds good!!Not really! The creation of an integrating vision is a huge challenge. The vision must leap over the ignorance that the specific teaching that follows is meant to erase. In my own case, for example, I've found that without suffcient care and creativity my previews can be an explanation which is constructed from the yet-to-be-mastered pieces. Appropriate as a review, perhaps, but NOT as a preview, even less as a vision.
Even less? Well yes! You can't construct an explanation from concepts and principles not yet mastered. So that's mistake one. But, because the vision has two jobs, there's yet another problem. The other, deeper, problem is that a set of terms does not equal a vision. The vision has to make an end-run around unknown content in order to achieve two objectives: to create useful expectations of the content, the pieces and the whole. The vision should also make the need for personal realization of the vision understandable, thereby creating a sense of a possible personal future that is both:
- higher (better in some moral sense), and
- better (in the sense of personal efficacy)
An Integrating Vision can help all sorts of "teacher + class" groups achieve common learning goals.
| Vision: Its Uses at Different Levels of Learning/Knowledge-Making | ||
|---|---|---|
| LEVEL | DESCRIPTION | INTERPRETATION |
| Instructivist | Learning material is acquired in presequenced, "bite-sized" chunks that have been preassembled by curriculum developer. In the Instructivist world, where knowledge has been analyzed into a sequence of objectives which when mastered progressively move the learner from not knowing (e.g., 'non reader') to knowing (e.g., 'proficient reader') the vision can motivate and inform the learner so that her/his energies and intellect can support the instructional efforts which are working on her/his behalf. | I think of this as the passive learning mode. This is how we typically teach reading and arithmetic skills in US schools. Even here ... a vision, which affords an alternative view (the same end, even the learning route, as seen from a different, and accessible, perspective) can support learner efficiency and motivation and commitment. Each will enhance total learning efficiency. |
| Deuterolearning | In the Deuterolearning world, where sequences of objectives play a varying yet always part-time role in learning, the vision can integrate and organize as student switches back and forth between instructivist and self-chosen experimental learning methods, as dictated by both strategy and vision. | The vision is a constant source of reference, here, as next objective and strategy are chosen from the staging platform which is present level of mastery. On more than one occasion the vision itself will be questioned and possibly be redesigned as its reality and accessibility are tested. |
| Research | And finally, in what may seem a novel twist, we have learning in the research world. In the research world the learning that is sought is knowledge presumed to be not yet known. There are no precut learning sequences. Here the vision is all there is. | In this situation there is no triangulation of already established method and predetermined sequence and end result, on the one hand, and the vision-based view of the same object, on the other. In this situation, it is not established that the vision is anything but a fantasy, an imagined allegorical possibility. In this situation, therefore, the vision plays an immense part of learning sequence design for the researcher or research team. At the same time, and of necessity, it is also subject to constant scrutiny and revision as its utility in moving researcher/research team to the desired end is put to the test. |
In all cases the vision serves an orienting and motivating part which helps separates empty learning activities from those that are in fact inspired.
