Cognition and Diversity

Last summer the Conference on College Composition and Communication (which is part of the National Council of Teachers of English) asked me to contribute to their blog on diversity. What I wrote for CCCC resonates with issues that have been emerging on this blog, so I’m reprinting, with some editing, my post below. As its name suggests, CCCC’s primary focus is on college-level writing instruction, but I think the themes in “Cognition and Diversity” have broader application. See what you think.

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The issue I want to discuss is intelligence and the broader construct of cognition: attention and perception, conceptualizing, thinking, problem-solving, etc. We tend not to think about this cluster of topics when discussing diversity – unless we’re discussing exceptional children – but beliefs about intelligence are woven throughout beliefs about race, gender, social class, and ability.

I’ll begin with a little personal history.

I’ve been interested in the way we think for a long time. When I was an English major, I found myself drawn to accounts of a writer’s creative process: What was the inspiration for a story or a key defining moment or image that was the germ of the thing? Or what happened to a poem through various revisions; what did we know about why changes were made? Or I was fascinated by those bursts of creativity that seemed to come out nowhere: for example, how you couldn’t have predicted the intricacies of Moby Dick from Melville’s earlier novels.

Then came psychology and reading in perception and cognition, in child development, in cross-cultural studies. All this got me on the road, provided bodies of knowledge and ways to understand and study.

But not without complication.

The history of psychological and social science – and the humanities as well – is laden with research and writing that reflects the biases of the larger culture from which in emerges. So, as in the larger culture, you have claims about the intellectual inferiority of non-white races, or immigrants, or rural folk, or women. You have claims about linguistic inferiority. You have all sorts of claims about the working-class and the work they do.

I won’t weigh the present essay down with the details of how I found my way through all this and begin using the cognitive perspective toward what I hope are egalitarian ends. (Anyone interested in more of that detail can find it in a book of mine titled An Open Language.) But I do want to zero in on two things that I think are central to my own development, and are pertinent to the upcoming discussion.

One is my own background as the child of immigrant working-class parents growing up in a poor neighborhood. I know intimately many of the kinds of people who are the focus of claims about intellectual and linguistic inferiority. And what I heard and read didn’t always match up.

The second is that I started tutoring and teaching at a relatively young age in schools and programs that served poor and working-class people from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and the settings spanned kindergarten to college. So, again, I saw first-hand the processes of teaching and learning, and I saw what people can do with their minds.

Both of these elements of my personal history certainly contributed to the way I saw myself, my values and dreams, and they contributed as well to an empirical and skeptical bent, useful both to question the ugliness I’d hear on the streets, on the radio, in my own neighborhood and extended family as well as the claims made in some of the academic material I was encountering.

This empirical skepticism, this need to test what I was studying against my own personal and professional experience, enabled me to use cognitively-oriented research to both critique work within the cognitive tradition that diminished human ability as well as critique the many and ongoing claims that rise like crabgrass in our society about the intellectual capabilities of underprepared students, poor folks, people of color, women, manual workers, you name it.

So let me fast-forward now to a few quick summaries of this work.

My study of cognition combined with other areas of study in the humanities and social science led to a series of articles that, collectively, tried to do the following. I wanted to explore the way flawed assumptions about cognition and language have influenced remedial writing curricula; the limiting institutional definitions of remediation and of writing instruction; overgeneralizing explanations as to why some students have difficulty with writing; and the classroom processes by which some students get defined as intellectually and linguistically deficient.

In addition to critique, I advocated a richer, more multifaceted model of cognition and writing and a way to think about curriculum and instruction that honored that richness. (Some of my earlier entries summarize this approach, see 07/08/08 and 07/24/08).

All of this work played itself out in a series of articles that you’ll find in that Open Language collection and, in more narrative form, in Lives on the Boundary.

I can give you a flavor for this writing by doing a pretty unblogospheric thing here and quoting the closing paragraph from one of the articles, “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism”:

If I could compress this essay’s investigation down to a single conceptual touchstone, it would be this: Human cognition – even at its most stymied, bungled moments – is rich and varied. It is against this assumption that we should test our theories and research methods and classroom assessments. Do our practices work against classification that encourages single, monolithic explanations of cognitive activity? Do they honor the complexity of interpretive efforts even when those efforts fall short of some desired goal? Do they foster investigation of interaction and protean manifestation rather than investigation of absence? Do they urge reflection on the cultural biases that might be shaping them? We must be vigilant that the systems of intellect we develop or adapt do not ground our students’ difficulties in sweeping, essentially one-dimensional perceptual, neurophysiological, psychological, or linguistic processes, systems that drive broad cognitive wedges between those who do well in our schools and those who don’t.

Though some of this work is of its time (it was written in the 1980s), it unfortunately is pertinent today. Consider the number of basic/remedial/preparatory writing courses that are still built on problematic notions of cognition and language, leading to deadening skills and drills curricula. Or an article that appeared in the June Atlantic Monthly (that we’ve discussed on this blog) in which a disgruntled community college professor depicts his students as academically dense and marginally literate. Or that old bad penny Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame peddling again in True Education methodologically flawed notions about intelligence and the social order.

O.K., one more fast-forward, this one to The Mind at Work, a recent book in which I continue exploring questions of cognition, intelligence, and achievement. I blend case histories of blue collar and service workers with cognitive and social analysis to challenge longstanding Western distinctions between mental and physical activity, offering, I hope, a more psychologically and educationally productive way to consider what we do with hand and brain.

From Classical Greece on down, we have tended to make sharp and value-laden separations between the mental and physical, between the philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual versus the practical, applied, and concrete – and, more recently, between the academic and the vocational. These distinctions have affected the way we define intelligence, create curriculum, and organize work. This kind of binary thinking is inadequate to describe what actually occurs as waitresses or welders (or, for that matter, teachers or surgeons) apply knowledge, solve problems, arrive at decisions, and make aesthetic judgments.

This set of issues seems especially important for those of us who teach students from working-class families and/or who work in programs aimed at providing occupational training.

I think these issues are also important for all of us, for with our educations can come a predisposition to elevate the intellectual content and value of one kind of work over another and make cognitive judgments about people based on the work they do.

Having said that, I feel the need to explain further, and, if you’ll indulge me one more time, I’m going to do the boorish thing of quoting myself again, this time from The Mind at Work:

This is not a call for a simplified egalitarianism. I am not denying the obvious fact that people come to any pursuit with different interests, talents, knacks for things, motivations, capabilities. Nor am I claiming that all bodies of knowledge and expressions of mind are of the same level of cognitive complexity and social importance. All the cultures I’m familiar with make judgments about competence in the domains that matter to them. (Though ours is more obsessed than any I know with developing measures of the mind and schemes to rank them.) No, the distressing thing is that both in our institutional systems and in our informal talk we tend to label entire categories of work and the people associated with them in ways that generalize, erase cognitive variability, and diminish whole traditions of human activity. Attributions of merit and worth flow throughout the process. We order, we rank, we place at steps upon a ladder rather than appreciating an abundant and varied cognitive terrain.

In closing, let me offer a cautionary tale that illustrates how easily overgeneralized and ungenerous judgments about other people’s thinking can come to us.

About ten years ago a graduate student came to see me with a sketch of a dissertation proposal. It had taken this person a fairly long time to get to this place, having begun then abandoned a previous research topic. And the sketch I was looking at was also the result of many months of deliberation. Along the way another faculty member had commented to me that this person was a “weak” student.

I read the new sketch, and it wasn’t good at all. It was general in some places. In others, one claim didn’t line up with the next. Some sentences were difficult to understand. It was hard to know exactly what the research project was. The comment from my colleague flipped into my mind like a pop-up ad. And so did a sense that’s hard to describe, but was kind of a half-thought/half-feeling that this student might not have the ability to complete a dissertation.

We met and caught up a little, stuff about family and work. Then we turned to the proposal. I decided to avoid its problems and asked the student to talk to me about the project, not in dissertation lingo, but in everyday speech.

What followed was clear, elaborated, interesting. A solid, engaging project. We talked a while longer, getting some notes down on paper. I then turned to the piece I’d read and pointed out a few places where I had had trouble. And the student explained – frustration seeping out – that what I read was an attempt to reconcile conflicting advice from another faculty member, several peers, and an activist in the community to be studied.

This student’s dilemma is familiar to all of us, I’m sure – the way conceptual (and interpersonal) conflicts can negatively affect our writing. But look what went on in my head when I first read the proposal sketch. Without realizing it, I had absorbed the informal norms of graduate study: that, for example, time-to-degree is a measure of ability or that flawed writing equaled flawed thinking. I had drunk the cognitive Kool Aid.

As I write in that paragraph from The Mind at Work, I’m not trying to ignore the fact that we, all of us, do have different talents, interests, etc. It is possible that the student was, for all sorts of reasons, not ready or equipped to write a dissertation. And, after all, as educators we’re obliged to make judgments about performance and respond accordingly. What is troubling in the anecdote, however, is the ease with which a one-dimensional judgment about intellectual ability came to me.

But the anecdote also points to some ways out of this mess. It reminds us that we live tangled in systems of bias, and that we will always blunder, and, therefore, we need in our teaching some methods to keep us aware, some tools of mindfulness: asking different questions, shifting languages, listening closely. We need certain habits of mind, for example, a testing of our own judgments, a willingness to have them disconfirmed. We need to be alert to the social contexts we inhabit – this was the root of my error – and the norms and beliefs we absorb in them. We need to publicly question the vocabulary and assumptions that constitute these settings. (This blog is a tiny gesture in that direction.) We also need to be creative in fashioning other kinds of spaces within those worlds we inhabit.

These are the kinds of issues and questions we – I – need to keep raising. They keep in sight the ease with which we reduce each other. They contribute to a richer pedagogical imagination. Ant they can help fashion a more humane institutional and civic life.

“Reform,” “Accountability,” and the Absence of Schoolhouse Knowledge in Education Policy

Over the last few months on this blog I have been wishing for a politics that is more educational, more worthy of the citizens in a democracy. Well, wouldn’t you know it, some of the most uneducational political discourse of the last month or so emerged around the selection of Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education. I hope this is not a sign of the national discussion of education to come.

One example of the quality of last month’s discussion was the use of the word ”reform” or “reformer,” in the media campaign and reporting related to the selection of the secretary. As things played out, there were two camps vying for the position.

Camp One labeled themselves the reform camp, and they in essence favored a continuation of high-stakes testing as our primary accountability mechanism—and, depending on the person or advocacy group, also supported alternatives like charter schools and/or non-standard teacher certification. Top contenders here were people like New York Chancellor Joel Klein and, the eventual nominee, Arne Duncan of Chicago.

Camp Two was in effect a camp of one person, Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of Education at Stanford, who was a primary author of Barack Obama’s campaign platform on education and led his education transition team.

In the jockeying that preceded the selection of the secretary there were letter-writing campaigns and the internet was abuzz with charges and countercharges. At times, more heat was shed than light. But what is worthy of our attention here was the Orwellian way that Camp One claimed the reform mantle and characterized Darling-Hammond as a “traditionalist” and an advocate of the “status quo.” The labels stuck. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times calling for a synthesis of the policies of the two camps—a reasonable compromise stance—still used the labels: People like Mr. Klein are reformers and Professor Darling-Hammond is a traditionalist.

It’s hard to know where to begin to unpack these labels. For starters, the attempt to measure complex human activity (like learning) with a single statistical measure (like a standardized test score) is a century old, and has long been criticized in so many fields on so many fronts as reductive, inaccurate, outdated, etc.. In what sense is this a new approach? It is new to education only in its scale and consequence, but not at all in its innovation or creativity, or—as NCLB has made clear—in its effectiveness.

And Darling-Hammond as a champion of the status quo? She has pushed from the beginning of her career on issues of equity, the education of underserved populations, the structure of schooling, teacher development, and reform of the teaching profession itself. Her work is certainly open to scrutiny, and one can take issue with particular studies or initiatives, but to label her a traditionalist is a distortion of her record and of language.

In fact, there is something Rovian in all this. “Reformer” became the new “patriot,” a term of assault that constrains and distorts and shuts down further discussion. Come on, people; we have to do better than this, especially where education is concerned. Such use of language is not only inaccurate and unfair, but also keeps us from creative analysis and, yes, with coming up with fuller, richer reforms.

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Another term we need to consider—one that I hope we will be able to think collectively and publicly about—is “accountability.” Accountability is central to effective governance, and a citizenry has the right to demand accountability of its institutions. The reigning model of educational accountability is high-stakes standardized testing, and it so dominates mainstream educational policy that few other models are given any consideration.

A new book provides the occasion to rethink accountability. Written by Richard Rothstein with Rebecca Jacobson and Tamara Wilder, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right begins with a blistering critique of NCLB and offers a more comprehensive state-based accountability model that includes a richer array of tests combined with school inspections. This new model goes hand in glove with a call for a broader—and more traditional—set of goals for American education that include basic skills in math and reading (NCLB’s focus) but, as well, proficiency in science, history, writing, critical thinking and the arts and literature. As well, education should address social and ethical development and preparation for citizenship and for the world of work.

Some readers may be put off by the authors’ take-no-prisoners criticism of NLCB and their call to abandon it completely, but even those folks should read the central section of the book: a summary of some of the areas (health care, job training, criminal justice, corporate incentive systems) where reliance on solitary quantitative measures to assess institutional quality have failed. It is a sobering, thought-provoking history lesson. And that history should be part of our discussion of accountability as educational policy is drafted in 2009.

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As I was finishing this entry, I heard one of National Public Radio’s “Letters to the President,” a spot in which various experts weigh in with advice for President Obama on pressing topics: health care, national security, the economy, the environment. This one was on education.

There were three people interviewed. A person from a conservative think tank led off with a call for standing tough on NLCB-style accountability and for alternatives to the public education system like charter schools and vouchers. She also took a swipe at teachers’ unions. Then one of Obama’s education advisors said the president needs to avoid the stale skirmishes, e.g., over NCLB, and put forth a bold initiative, like merit pay for teachers. The third speaker was from another advocacy group and spoke to the need to change our beliefs that poor kids can’t achieve in school.

Regardless of the merits of what each person said, I couldn’t help but notice that all three were from the policy world. There were no teachers or principals interviewed for this “Letter to the President.” There were no parents interviewed (though of course the three speakers might have kids in school, but they didn’t speak in that capacity.) There were no youth workers, no one from social services. There were no educational researchers. And there were no artists or writers or scientists or diplomats. And there were no students.

The NPR spot illustrates a big part of the problem with our national discussion of education, such as it is. It is dominated by policy analysts and advocates, by institutes and think tanks. And those folks have the ear of media; it’s part of what they do, part of the professional network. No surprise, then, that the labeling of the two camps I mentioned earlier made its way so readily into media accounts of the scramble for the top job at the Department of Education.

And there’s a bigger issue here, one that has to do with the nature of policy formation itself. Public policy in the United States is grounded in a technocratic managerial ideology that privileges systems thinking, abstract models of human and institutional behavior, finding the large-scale economic, social, or organizational levers to pull to initiate change. This broad view has its value to be sure—is rich in legislative, legal, and economic knowledge—but it is often accompanied by an unfortunate and counter-productive tendency; the devaluing of on-the-ground, local, and craft knowledge. In the case of education, pedagogical wisdom and experiential knowledge of schools is at best tolerated but more often dismissed as a soft or irrelevant distraction.

Though “qualified teachers” are praised in public documents and speeches, teachers are often pegged as the problem. And classroom knowledge is trivialized. Teaching or running a school is characterized as just not that hard. And the field of education in general is bemoaned as bereft of talent. I’ve heard these phrases. The sad and astounding fact is that at the state and federal level there is little deep understanding of the intricacies of teaching and learning involved in the formation of educational policy.

The trivializing and distorting of Linda Darling-Hammond’s record was made possible by this disdain for education knowledge coupled with the media’s overreliance on the policy community for news about education.

Barack Obama wants to build bridges, to build consensus. He’ll need to work some magic or exert some will in the Washington education policy community, will need to open up that culture to the wisdom of the schoolhouse. For the history of public policy failure—in health care, in agriculture, in urban planning, in education—is littered with cases where local knowledge and circumstance were ignored.