A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.

Main Article: Narratives

Theme: Commonalities, differences, and implications of teaching-learning for life chances of learners.

A LEARNERS’ VIEW (ALV) represents a paradigm shift from conventional views of education, including of special education. Peter Skelton illustrates this kind of shift in his cartoon of whether three or four pieces of wood are between two observers. The difference in conclusions rests in each viewer’s perspective. A learners’ view refers to common choices learners make while learning, including people with disabilities and those who for other reasons attend special education programs. Special education programs provide instruction to remediate individual differences that distract learners from learning.

Special education and ALV both address ways to accelerate, increase, and deepen (AID) learning, the central social use of education in society. Research results that identify students not likely to learn to read in school drew attention to options of providing special programs to increase the likelihood of reading. A learners’ view refers to common description of learning in research results across more than a century of studies. ALV also refers to the usefulness of these commonalities rather than differences for accelerating, increasing, and deepening (AIDing) learning of all learners in and out of schools.

Overlapping Descriptions

Special education and ALV give priority to different, but overlapping research results that describe teaching and learning. They both give priority:

1. To how people learn;

2. To experimental empirical research findings that describe learning;

3. To ways teachers can use these descriptions to prepare (socialize) people to live by the norms and values of society;

4. To socialization as occurring between two or more people (in a dyad or larger); and

5. To variation in the results of socialization; and

6. To ways to reduce variation in the consequences of socialization for participating in daily social life.

Differences in Descriptions

To meet those priorities, special education and ALV use different points of view of some of the same vocabulary, research, and theories. Special education relies on third party views of disabilities and of ways to remediate them; it uses assessments by teachers, parents, medical personnel, psychologists, et al. A learners’ view (ALV) refers to first party choices that learners show observers to match in lessons that learners learn. Differences in these views yield different academic and other performance results.

Special education gives priority to ways to apply theories of cognition and human development. ALV gives priority to describing common choices people make while learning from teaching as described by experimental behavioral and social scientist. From a learners’ view, the choices occur as social actions rather than as cognition and other categories of mental or central nervous system activity.

Emphasis on Programs and Individual Differences

Special education compensates for the failure of regular school programs to teach all students to learn all lessons. It began with a premise that grew out of the 1890s effort in France to identify who will likely learn to read in school. The premise, after identifying the problem, develop a remedy, still drives special education. People not likely to learn to read have been the problem. Earliest and subsequent tests of intellectual (cognitive) abilities have been used to identify individual differences among students to account for not reading. Those tests were later used to identify patterns of variations that make up a range of individual differences, for example, a person can see but not hear in ways to learn lessons without assistance.

Special education was formally organized to remedy the likelihood of people not learning to read and not developing other academic skills that age peers develop. It began in Wayne County, Michigan in 1936. The premise from then to now has expanded to include people with a range of disabilities (then classified as handicaps) in public schools. This experiment started with the premise of conducting special programs in special locations. It has evolved into programs in which special education students and teachers also move in and out of regular classrooms.

These programs have mostly emphasized methods of instruction related to empirical descriptions of cognition, emotions, and physical functions in classrooms. Educators have adapted this model for teaching school age people with social and academic remedial issues, such as learning English as a second language. Such programs have altered the way schools socialize people throughout the world.

Emphasis on Commonalities across Scientific Research

A learners’ view refers to the minimum common choices that experimental behavioral and social scientists have described as occurring while people learn. Scientists have described with increasing precision these choices in studies during more than a century. ALV treats choices as social actions, since they refer to selecting options from among social activities that teachers can observe and manage during instruction.

To identify these choices, scientists observed people with a wide range of intelligence test scores. Their studies emphasize how people learn more than who learns and what they learn. These studies include learning in and out of schools. Together, they identify the relevance of instructional methods irrespective of individual differences and classifications of personal background and other attributes learners bring to instruction. Teachers apply ALV whenever someone learns from instruction of a lesson.

From a learners’ view, learning occurs through choices learners make. Learning of lessons in schools most likely occurs when instruction includes choices of learners. Descriptions of learning features vocabulary of technical operations of methods learners use to make choices, rather than of inferences of cognition, culture, emotions, etc. of learners. By using this vocabulary, teachers manage the likelihood of who learners which lessons and who does not learn them. Failure to learn lessons rations learning in ways that likely affects the life chances of learners.

Implications

Technically, teachers can instruct lessons that all learners learn. Research that ALV represents describes ways to do so in and out of special education. Given the technical capacity of instruction, the extent that learners do not learn lessons, educators ration learning.

Professional development programs that feature research a learners’ view represents will likely increase the chances that educators arrange instruction of lessons that more learners learn. Different vocabularies used in special education and with ALV distract educators from including the overlap in research when planning, instructing, and analyzing learning.

Whether or not teachers and other educators adopt the ALV of teaching-learning rests in policies set by Boards of Education.

References

Farber, B. (19 ). Mental Retardation: Social Context and Social Consequences. Boston: Little Brown.
Harvey, D. (1993). Potter Addition: Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland Community. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
Heiny, R. (1971). History of special education. In L. Deighton, Encyclopedia of Education. NY: Macmillan & Free Press, 8, pp. 341-350.
Individual Differences and Other Diversities from a Learners’ View (ALV)
Parsons, T. (1975). The Present Status of “Structural-Functional” Theory in Sociology. In Talcott Parsons, Social Systems and The Evolution of Action Theory New York: The Free Press.
Rationed Learning: ‘Yes, but …’ Report Revisited

Special Education and a Learners’ View (ALV)