University Times

In a typical lifetime, more than 80 percent of all time spent learning takes place outside the classroom. What’s more, traditional school structure ignores and isolates itself from, rather than encourages or engages, outside-the-classroom learning activities, according to a national educational researcher who spoke here May 5.

Beginning with a quote from Howard Becker, his mentor and colleague at Northwestern University, Reed Stevens, professor of learning sciences, said: “Institutions create myths to explain to their participants and the public generally what they do, how they do it, why society needs it done and how successful they are. Every institution fails in some measure to do the job it promises. …

“Institutional apologias divert our attention from the way the very organization of an institution produces its failures. Further, they divert from comparisons which might show how others, under a different name and rhetoric, actually perform the institution’s characteristic function more effectively.”

So it is with the traditional educational system in this country, said Stevens, who spoke on “Why School Is Still a Lousy Place to Learn Anything: Rethinking Motivation and Engagement From an Ethnographic Perspective on Youth Culture and Learning,” one of a series of lectures at the School of Education’s two-day conference marking the school’s 100th anniversary.

Stevens conducts observational field studies of cognition and learning, with special attention to these phenomena in out-of-school settings.

“I have a very strong focus on knowledge of people actually doing things together, on know-how, not on just what facts are recognizable on a test,” he said.

“I analyze learning and cognition as both an interactive phenomenon and a social-organizational one,” he added, reflecting his background in both cognitive and learning science and sociological and anthropological influences.

“Where can we find a school’s purported characteristic function of motivated learning? One study I’ve done was in a place where we don’t expect to find it, and that’s playing video games. This source of moral panic is actually performing the characteristic function of motivating people a lot better than the schools do,” Stevens said.

In the study, he and colleagues observed grade-school-aged siblings and friends playing together with video games of their choice in their homes, without parental supervision.

“We tried to understand what role game-play has in the rest of kids’ lives, just like you might try to figure out at what role math plays in the rest of kids’ lives,” he said. “I took this study on because I’m interested in what young people are interested in, what they’re dedicating their time to. And this is time they’re not required to put in.”

Recent survey data show that young people spend more time playing video games in a given year than they do on any single, or even any two, academic subjects in formal school settings, including doing homework.

But his study was not intended as an endorsement of video games per se, Stevens cautioned.

“It’s not the content of video games that matters. What I want to focus on is the fact that these are contexts, mostly without adults present, and I want us to think about the question: What’s going on in these settings?” he said.

What the researchers discovered across the board about these settings was compelling evidence that teaching and learning come naturally among young people, despite an absence of supervision, especially when they work together to get something done, Stevens maintained.

“We found out that when young people are motivated to learn, they in fact create the learning arrangement, which is the term I coined,” he said. “It was remarkable how many different ways kids learn and teach together to get done what they want to get done. There’s no official pedagogy in the room; there’s no one who’s required to be the teacher or the student,” but the young people naturally create an apprenticeship environment, often switching the roles of teacher and student based on their individual skill or knowledge, Stevens said.

“I propose that video game-play and video games are contexts in kids’ lives where they believe things are learnable and teachable by themselves. They don’t need special authority; they don’t need special books; they can find what they need to know by themselves,” Stevens said.

Why is motivation occurring in these settings but not in schools where it should be happening?

To answer that, Stevens cited an example of a preteen girl’s revealing interviews which led his team to conclude that the girl’s video play is intertwined with her family life and how she relates to her friends, to her gender identity and to her imagined future, all of which are motivating factors not explored in formal subject-matter schooling.

Stevens noted that the girl differentiated between her own passion for certain video games and her father’s playing “only boring army and sports video games,” and her mother’s not playing video games at all. In doing so, she was in essence revealing her different relationship with her parents, Stevens noted.

The girl also revealed that she’d kept secret her so-called “cheat web sites,” which provide shortcuts and tips on video games, from her friends so they would remain impressed with her playing prowess. She further rejected certain games as “too girly,” providing a glimpse into her emerging gender development, and she hinted at future life directions by rejecting games “where you only shoot stuff,” saying she would never want to join the military.

“The point is here’s a case of a young woman for whom the culture of games is so important her whole life is tangled up in them. Again, it’s not the content of the video game that’s important. It’s that there are places we can look outside of school in kids’ lives where we will see this kind of motivated, dedicated, resourceful and resilient learning.”

Why are schools by contrast lousy places to learn?

“I would argue that school has the wrong uni-directional relationship with the rest of young people’s lives, and it has a general indifference to their interests and concerns,” Stevens said. “School is too much of an island. If that’s right, we have to rethink the general structure of school. We have to rethink how to relate to kids’ lives and how schools relate to the rest of the institutions and activities in which kids are involved.”

Traditional educational research, Stevens said, focuses on “closed-world” questions, like measuring individual performance on school tasks, such as fractions or grammar. Those measures have no real connection to a more important question: Can the individual apply that knowledge to other subjects and contexts?

“You can get data on performance, achievement gaps, school preparedness. What there’s very little serious study of is the relation between knowing and doing, critical questions about whether school knowledge actually means something to the rest of kids’ lives. [Researchers] ask questions about attainment, but not about the actual practical, functional value of these things that school has taught,” he said. “Normal educational science, except for a few marginal voices, takes school for granted. It doesn’t raise the question about how might a school have a different relationship to other institutions, to kids’ lives, to parents’ lives, to communities. That’s what we need to do.”

Stevens said those in the educational research field, including himself, sometimes fall into the trap of practicing “academicentrism,” that is, education’s own version of ethnocentrism.

“Our field is too focused on learning as it’s understood in schools and disciplines, because of our own history: We are schools’ winners; we got here through this path so it makes sense to us that other people will get here through this path. I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think most of the pathways to learning are through school. Some are; some aren’t. We need to know more about that,” he said.

In the post-cognitive science revolution of the 1960s, educators began with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

As noted educational research-er Jerome Bruner wrote in “The Process of Education” in 1960, “Motives for learning must be kept from going passive. … They must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is be learned, and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression.”

Stevens said, “Bruner’s idea was that, since the content or subject matter can be taught at any stage of development, you didn’t start with interest, you used content to arouse interest. I think that was a mistake. I want to reframe that argument: We begin with the hypothesis that children’s interests and concerns can be the basis for intellectual substantive experience across the learning environments of their lives and can eventually and gradually be connected with adult concerns.”

Stevens offered a few suggestions for improving school structure.

On the research end, he said, “We need research that really takes seriously the idea that learning happens outside the classroom. We need a more serious direct approach to uncover and continually refresh our understanding of young people’s interests and concerns.”

While learning and cognitive science have a rich vocabulary and researchers know how to study learning and knowledge and the different methods of educational delivery, “We have a pretty impoverished vocabulary to get to concerns, motives and forms of engagement. That’s the place we have to look at,” Stevens said.

Further, while schools should not diminish the goal of delivering knowledge, “we need to help these interests and concerns become visible — and here I’m talking to the schools — and cultivate and connect them to the school environment, and if learning is taking place outside of schools, we have to go there, we have to follow that,” he said. “We need to make connections so that learning pathways that are visible in one setting, like a home, can be visible in a setting like a school.”

Audio and visual presentations of all the May 5 and 6 education conference lectures and discussion sessions are expected to be posted online this month at www.education.pitt.edu.

—Peter Hart