Fred Kemp writes:I think people who "chafe at the theory of the month" are simply chafing at what they don't understand or believe in and would like to discount as mere trendy behaviors. I, for instance, am more than willing to call anything I don't like a "theory of the month." In fact, I can easily call the idea that there IS a "theory of the month" simply this month's theory.
The best theory that has underpinned online interactivity for the last twelve years is Bruffee's version of social constructionism lite, the notion that people learn best through the negotiation of their understandings with others who are basically at their same level of learning. Seymour Papert calls this "constructionism" as opposed to "instructionism," which is the 'theory' that people only learn what somebody has taught them. William E. Doll goes a bit further by attaching a bit of complexity theory, saying that people learn best through attempt, feedback, and adaptation.
So we just have two theories, actually: (1) people either learn for themselves by trying things out, getting responses from a variety of people, and making adjustments (Bruffee, Paperts, Doll), OR (2) they learn by assimilating rules and guidelines that have been abstracted by others and then go out and try to make their behavior fit the rules and guidelines (assuming that they haven't fallen asleep sometime during the lecture), what Friere has called the "banking model" of learning.
Those who pride themselves on rejecting the "theories of the month" are in effect resisting the notion of change itself in favor of the presumed tried and true, or the principles of instruction that Drucker, in the interview mentioned above, called "Benedictine." There are really only two theories: that people have to make knowledge for themselves, or that knowledge can be ported in already packaged. About the only way to generate knowledge is through what Gadamer called "conversation, mere conversation," or the interactivity that allows the negotiation of knowledge, with all the intricacy and psychology that negotiation implies (what is commonly called rhetorical engagement).
I don't think that either theory or pedagogy (if the two can be separated) have much to do with how most people teach. Rather the greatest influence on teaching is the instructional environment, which, up until a little after 1980, was fixed in (Drucker again) an 8th century mode, which has a lot more to do with how sermons are presented than how people actually learn things. Many of us who have been working with computers and writing all these years have come to understand that you can't persuade people with a better theory or even with a hoard of statistics and research proving this and disproving that: you only persuade people by getting them into a situation where they have the opportunity to learn for themselves. Putting them into a well designed computer-based classroom that runs good collaborative software is one possibility. Having them work through the internet is another. The job of the person who would change teaching is not to harangue people into changing, but shape the instructional encounter in ways that reveal the advantages of a different way of doing things.
Hence I write web applications and design syllabuses.