This class was mostly a chance to get organized for our group project, but we did have time to consider issues related to evidence and causation.  It also featured a memorable quote from our colleague Lisa who deftly summed up a key insight in the ongoing consideration of equity in our society: "It is not enough to verbally check one's privilege.  One must face the consequences of privilege and no longer seek protection from it."  The debate in literature and the discussion in class on "weight of evidence" vs statistical tests for causation was interesting for me.  I'd like to consider how both of these approaches have suffered in the field of K-12 educational policy.  

Whether on the local scale, in setting school district priorities, school-based growth plans, and even personal teacher plans for improving their practice, or at the provincial scale, in designing and implementing curriculum and related educational policy, there is a constant return to "what is the evidence telling us."  This seems like a healthy approach, but runs into trouble when there is disagreement on what evidence is worth paying attention to, and what evidence is of limited relevance or even background noise to what's actually going on in schools.  For local decision-making the evidence being gathered is either data from standardized test or from direct observation under the guise of "action research" and usually part of an inquiry grant or teacher collaboration group.  The standardized tests are notoriously problematic; considering the history of the FSA tests alone highlights many issues related to the reliability of the tests, the misuse of data coming from the tests, and resistance against these tests (thus affecting results) by teachers, parents, and students themselves.  

The direct observation method is also problematic, especially when the data is being gathered by practitioners with little or no research background or ability to apply statistical analysis.  Generally, outside of actual research by universities, the wide range of inquiry and "action research" that is conducted in K-12 schools by teachers themselves (not dissimilar to what happens in corporations and some industries) is not guided by any ethical review or peer review.  This has consistently resulted in multiple layers of causation errors -- mistaking correlation for causation.  When false causes, or in the least dubious causes and compelling correlations, are established as the basis for making claims about a particular educational practice, they become part of the narrative for what's going on in schools, a narrative that is perpetuated among new teachers arriving in the schools and among the students themselves.  For example, in one school growth plan I reviewed, there were the results of "study" to gauge the effects of a series of lessons in a newly designed unit on the ability of students to acquire and use vocabulary in a beginner French course.  The study used a pre-test before the new unit was taught, and a test afterwards.  The results showed (and celebrated) a 28% improvement in the student's vocab skills based on raw test scores.  What the summary didn't consider was that almost any group of students who knew nothing about a topic would likely know something after sitting through a dozen lessons on that topic.  The study didn't consider how this data compared with student progress before the new unit was used; one would assume that things would be collapsing if there was not some significant improvement in vocabulary in any beginning French class after a series of lesson designed to teach vocabulary.  The real kicker was in the data. It turns out that the group being studied averaged 19% on the pre-test and 47% on the post-test.  Essentially, the new unit did not bring the students up to a passing grade for the course expectation related to vocabulary.  That was all some time ago, but the hasty nature of in-house research is still a common feature in school district across the province.  Luckily their hearts are in the right place -- they carry on this work because they wish to improve results for students, but their heads need to catch up by creating more partnerships with actual researchers.

Having visited the Pit House near UNBC with my School of Education group a few days prior, I though it would be a good idea to invite the PhD cohort out there as well, in part an orientation to the geography and ecology of the UNBC environs, in part an introduction to the local Indigenous culture -- the Lheidli T'enneh / Dakelh peoples -- and in part as an activity to bring the group together. It's been a busy Fall so far, and one of my few regrets is that I have not made more of an effort to make this group of virtually all international students feel more welcome as special guests in Prince George.  

​The Pit House came about through a collaboration of local Indigenous leaders and teachers, Indigenous (Lheidli T'enneh) high school students, and an experiential learning class from UNBC.  "The pit house the students built is in the Dakelh style. Dakelh translates as the “people who travel by boat” and are the indigenous people from the north-central interior of British Columbia. It’s a traditional winter dwelling historically used by many indigenous peoples around the world" (UNBC). One of folks working on this was Jen Pighin, a colleague and friend of mine.  She told me that they named the place "Tsasdil Yoh" which means House of Frogs," because there were so many frogs about when they were building the pit house. Jen encourages visitors to light a little fire, and use this space to reflect and dream, and to learn more about Dakelh culture. So, on Friday, after NRES class, we had a little fire (and lots of smoke) in this unique spot after a leisurely walk on a portion of the Greenway Trail discussing local flora, fauna, and landforms with the help of Roger Wheate.  I'm still surprised that I remember most of the Latin names of the local plants after not having used this arcane knowledge for 25 years.  For the record I did not name all the plants as we went along, but I did pass on some knowledge I had about Dakelh culture and the Lheidli T'enneh in particular.  We didn' stay long, most of the group wanted to carry on and see Shane Lake.

My internal reflection in the pit house, and what I was conscious of even while I was talking, was that my background as a Social Studies teacher and a white settler who has spent almost his entire life in this city and region, has conditioned me to frame discussions and characterizations of local Indigenous culture in the past tense.  It has always seemed so much safer to me to compartmentalize traditional culture, ways of knowing, and modes of subsistence in an academic box of the Past, and treat modern Indigenous culture, issues, and realities as something different, something to be problematized or "solved."  I think this bias goes deeper in that where there are obvious links between the past and present, I have perhaps tended to see these as symbolic, or manifestations of "creeping determinism" (hinging an argument on hindsight), rather than actual instances of historical continuity.  The deep problem here is that Indigenous attempts at reclaiming culture or reviving traditions can be treated as exercises or experiments, and not serious attempts to move into a new cultural norm that is still in sync with the past, with the ancestors.  I sense that this bias is not unique to my own trajectory, but is systemic, and is a real barrier to reconciliation.  It is not unlike the impact of residential schools that tried to create a sharp break between the past and present.  I am resolved to break down this bias and work at seeing the past and present linked through efforts of reconciliation.  I am reminded of a graphic I have used with a School of Education class from author Jennifer Katz's book Ensouling Our Schools that compares Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with a Kainai First Nations concept of actualization through Cultural Perpetuity.  In my mind,  decolonizing our institutions (and for me, a teaching practice) is to make some serious space for Indigenous people to bridge their own past and present, to weave traditional ways of knowing with modern concerns and daily life in a way that promotes personal wellbeing (in every sense, including economic) and cultural perpetuity.

One of the things I like most about being a student is that coursework, specifically class time, provides a rare opportunity to think abstractly.  So many of the tasks that fill my week are practical or purpose-driven in some way, but the interplay of ideas, dialogue, reading, and provocations that feature in a good class are like a spa visit for my brain.  Of course, there are expected outcomes, assignments to complete, curriculum to absorb, and designated discussion topics of the day that command one's attention while in class, but the mind is a big enough place to wander around and outside of the syllabus, especially when the main expectation in a class setting is to think.  One of my colleagues at D.P. Todd Secondary, where I worked from 2003-2018, used to place a note on his wall for students to see:  "How have I invited you to think today?"  This was both a powerful invitation for students to become engaged in class, but was also a significant commitment on the part of the teacher -- he was in fact holding himself accountable for facilitating lessons each day that engage minds.  Unfortunately, there are many secondary classrooms where this is not the case.  There might as well be the same sign in the wall in our NRES classroom, because here I have been invited to stretch my thinking, not just forward (i.e. consideration of new ideas of engagement with concepts from fields that are outside of my experience), but backwards -- the sense that everything I have learned in 50 years about the old, science, nature, ecology, education, society, geography, language, philosophy, etc., is being called upon to synthesize responses.  A process most enjoyable.  For the most recent class, my thinking went a little more whimsical, hence Mondrian's Law.

Mondrian's Law, an invention of mine as far as I can tell, is the result of my fixation on Simplicity from last week's class and readings, and perhaps a response to drawing some intersecting lines on paper or a consideration of the difference between Occam's Razor and Occam's Hill.  Mondrian's Law is an attempt to set a scene for social science methodologies that embraces the abstract.  Who's up for blurring the lines between theory and practice?  This idea, from all appearances, is inchoate at best, barely set free from the barn.  Piet Mondrian was a brilliant Dutch artist who developed an abstract style of painting that sought to access universal truths and yet remain in tension (or dialogue?) with reality.  Here is a link to a good bio <Guggenheim on Mondrian>, and sense of the art that is most often connected with Mondrian <google search: piet mondrian art>.  I associate Mondrian with trees and his wonderful geometric representations of them, and have often thought that if I ever took art more seriously (speaking of inchoate) I would start with Mondrian because I love trees and been enamoured with what he has done with them. The Law, as I imagine it, is about the comprehension and distortion of phenomena in an attempt to simplify forms such that they are resonate on the same frequency as universal grammar (c.f. Chomsky) or create what the architect Christopher Alexander popularized as "Pattern Language," and are then built back up into something of internal and external beauty that reflects a more poetic, and yes, a simpler explanation, than direct representations of phenomena.  Basically, Mondrian's Law is about stripping down reality to basic elements as they are perceived by participants, and using those basic elements to recreate portrayals of reality that have a deeper connection for the participant than what they get from direct observation.  I suppose this could be Picasso's Law as easily as Mondrian's.  What;s that quote from Picasso?  "We all know that art is not truth; art is a lie that makes us realize truth."  I'm hoping this is sufficiently weird that it has not already been theorized by someone else.  On the other hand, it is extremely common in art, from what I can gather, although it may be a newcomer on the social science scene. I'll need to sit down with a bona fide phenomenologist to find out for sure.

During this class, we spent a considerable amount of time discussing simplicity.  I can certainly understand that simplicity is held as a virtue in most scientific fields, Occam's Razor and all that, but I find myself trying to generate arguments against this virtue, perhaps because of my experience with bureaucracy, or as a result of cogent arguments that question the limits of Occam's Razor. At many times during my career I have seen simplicity used as a weapon to silence critics of various proposed changes or "improvements" in public education.  A decision to close this program here or cut funding there is tied to "simple facts" but unfortunately using "simplistic arguments" to justify the use of these facts, and not others.  Too often, simplicity, particularly in a policy and governance context, is used as a shield to prevent others from prying into how little work was done to establish the facts, or how thin the grounds are for making claims about the veracity of those facts.  Without getting into details, I got to see this pattern repeated many times at the local level, sometime with a front row seat, sometimes from afar.  If I had to offer a defense of this practice, that is, the oversimplification of cases and contexts by discouraging anything more than superficial analysis and reliance on the first set of facts that present themselves on a preliminary investigation of the thing being decided on, I would suggest that educational leaders have virtually no training in the kinds of fields that would normally offer challenges to perfunctory treatment of issues.  We need more philosophers to become educational leaders!

This may seem tangential to the notion of simplicity as discussed in the class, but it is important to know about the association I bring to this subject if I hope to dispel or at least challenge my pre-concieved notions and biases.  It  also raises the question: if important decisions have been made in education by masking complex issues with a cloak of complexity, then what else have we been sold because someone (a company, a group of experts, a government) has offered up a Simple Truth or conclusion about something because it was the easiest path through a bureaucratic quagmire.  At any rate, I believe it is as healthy to have a robust skepticism of all claims to simplicity as it is to seek out simple theories or models of best fit.

Speaking of bias, I was stopped by this line from one of the articles we read: "Preferences for simpler theories are widely thought to have played a central role in many important episodes in the history of science."  (Simplicity in the Philosophy of Science from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).  The history of science, here and elsewhere, is probably taken to mean the history of Western Science.  I can't help but wonder about the correlation with colonial, andocentric, and Eurocentric perspectives.  Does the use of a contrasting perspective to traditional Western Science, feminist standpoint theory for example, challenge the appeal to simplicity as a virtue and use of simpler theories?  What is simplicity, again, is masking complexity because it contains perspectives and interpretations within existing paradigms?

I wrote two quotes at the top of my copy of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the noted social and political Viennese philosopher Karl Popper..I'm really not sure if it was his words or something I picked up in class: "science must begin with myths, and the criticism of myths" and "science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplication."  Taken together, these quotes could furnish a course-length study on their own, but I appreciate how they frame, for myself anyway, the important bookends of a study on the faith in simplicity in scientific research, particularly of a social kind applied to policy and culture.  I made a note to return to Popper's disdain for historicism.  I sense that many Social Studies teachers are unwitting acolytes of historical determinism, so perhaps Popper will suggest a cure.  I should also note that the most interesting word I learned while reading about Popper was amanuensis, as in Popper's wife was also his amanuensis.  It means secretary.

Day one with a new cohort, and there was some expected nervousness and excitement on the faces as they moved into the classroom. Not all would make it for the first class -- there were apparently some problems with travel -- but we would eventually become a group of fourteen.  This reminded me of the party of 13 dwarves and one hobbit that set out for the Lonely Mountain in Tolkien's beloved story The Hobbit.  I would not hazard a guess as to who is who in the group... not all the dwarves met with a happy fate.  The fifteenth member of that party was of course the wizard Gandalf and we have our own wizard in the form of Dr. Bill McGill.  

We are an international crew.  I'm from Canada, a high school Social Studies teacher with some forays into other "Educational" work and some distant but memorable roots in forest ecology.  Mahboubeh, Mahboobeh, Maral, and Nahid are all engineers and from Iran.  Shannon and Lisa are both Americans by birth and connected to wildlife biology, but have travelled, lived, and studied in many places.  Gbenga, Ajibola (Jibbs), and Ibukun are from Nigeria, with some detours, and are also engineers.  Sidney is originally from China, and has a diverse research interests that I'm still not sure how to characterize. Jose is from Equador and is involved in environmental management.  Miguel is from Colombia and is involved in geomatics.  Zawad is from Bangladesh and completes our list of engineers.  Dr. Roger Wheate is the Acting Chair of the NRES Grad Program and a frequent guest in our class; I suppose he is competition for the role of Gandalf.  Dr. Bill McGill is an excellent fit for our group.  I really appreciate the course design and emphasis on thought and discussion; this may not be everyone's cup of tea but I'll drink it any day.  This ages me a bit, and Dr. McGill as well, but I must say this experience has reminded me of my undergrad days at UBC in the late 1980s and early 1990s, sitting in a classes and listening to sages, trying to keep up with powerful ideas and challenging questions.  I knew we were in for a great adventure when Dr. McGill set up his juiciest questions with "let me torment you with this" or "let me harangue you with this."  

NRES 801 and 802 have been fully integrated for our cohort.  This means that we will examine issues in biophysical sciences and social sciences through similar lenses. For example, problem-solving in the biophysical sciences might relate to use of technology, whereas in the social sciences it might relate to policy development.  For me, as someone squarely from the social sciences (even my approach to teaching physical geography to high school students centred on humanistic and human-environment adaptive perspectives), standing upright at the mirror of hard science is daunting.  Do I belong here?  Does my limited background in chemistry, physics, and mathematics make me look fat? (I am standing at a mirror, after all).  Knowing that my colleagues, mostly engineers, are thinking the same thing about social sciences gives me pause to realize that this will be ok.  As I'm understanding the unfolding syllabus, this program is not so much about diving into the sciences themselves but about examining critical issues related to these sciences, such as bias, ethics, methodological considerations, and interdisciplinarity. I'm finding that the biophysical research and social science research have a lot in common in terms of philosophic issues, but usually go in different directions when it comes to methodology and appeal to objectivity.  On this last point I must add my amusement about how so many researchers in my field of Education (e.g. K-12 education, K-12 Social Studies education) are on a quest for some objective stance on best practice, for the most effective way to plan, teach, and assess.  If we had as much respect for subjectivity and less trust in elaborate frameworks, perhaps we'd really get somewhere.  This sounds like a preference for a form of dead reckoning over a more scientific approach to navigating education, and that is indeed what I mean.  It is the stories we tell about where we are going in education that are proving most useful for new teachers, a series of course corrections with shifting goals, a sense of abandonment to the process and trust in our own values that guides our course and fills in the map.  I feel as if I have not explained myself too well, here, so I hope to return to this topic.  To me it is about exploring the dissonance between educational philosophy and practice that has become pronounced with the introduction of new K-12 curriculum in BC.

Q1: What is a principle, law, or fundamental concept that is generally accepted in my discipline?

First , what’s my discipline?

Education -- an “educator” or something more specific?  I teach Social Studies, I teach teacher candidates, I have an administrative role related to teacher professional development, I have a leadership and curriculum design role in both teacher education and social studies education, I have official and unofficial roles as a advocate for and within K-12 public education for both public education itself and also specific curricular and pedagogical issues, and I have a consultancy arrangement that combines all of these things

Geography -- not really a geographer in the sense that most would recognize, but very much involved in geography education within and without the context of “Social Studies” as it is understood in the K-12 system.

So, for the purpose of this activity I’ll settle on my discipline as secondary Social Studies education and pick the “Big Six” Historical Thinking Concepts (and their counterparts, the Geographic Thinking Concepts).

Background - Principles: 
Various educators have tried to establish principles or laws by which learning takes place, but these are best called theories due the difficulty in proving that singular theories are correct in what is generally recognized as a Sea of competing theories, approaches, and agendas.  No unifying theory of learning has proven stable enough to completely drive education at scale and over time (e.g. within provincial or national jurisdictions).  

Examples of some existing/well-accepted “classic” theories of education (in no particular order): 

• BF Skinner -- Behaviourism -- learning takes places through reinforcement and repetition
• Edward Thorndike’s “Laws of Learning” -- readiness, exercise, and effect
• Jean Piaget -- Theory of Cognitive Development (1936) -- Constructivist -- intelligence is not fixed -- discrete stages of child cognitive development
• Lev Vygotsky -- Contructivist -- Social Development Theory -- interrelatedness of social and cultural contexts, individual development, and higher mental processes
• John Dewey -- Constructivist -- active participation by children in their own learning, social context for learning, experiential learning, foundations for problem- and inquiry-based learning

Background - Laws: 
Literally -- the School Act, the BC Curriculum, and the Collective Agreement... but in the sense probably intended there are few Laws by which Social Studies proceeds; nothing, at least, that garners anything approaching universal agreement.  Certainly there are themes in Social Studies such as the Five Themes of Geography but these are closed to Concepts than they are Laws.  See Principles (above) and Concepts (below).

Background - Concepts: 
The most relevant for this exercise appear to be the Historical Thinking Concepts, as developed by Peter Seixas and others at the Historical Thinking Project, that are embedded within the current (revised) Social Studies K-12 curriculum documents and other provincial K-12 curricula across Canada, and the related Geographical Thinking Concepts as developed by Roland Case and others in association with The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2).  While there is some disagreement that these concepts are not the only way to frame History or Geography education (for example, the “Five Themes of Geography” used to be provide a common framework for teachers), they are the chosen vehicle to reframe Social Studies courses along the ideas of “competency-based” education, as opposed to a solely content-based curriculum, which was ostensibly (and arguably) what we had until now . The use of competencies is itself a sort of guiding principle or suggested “Law” in my field, but is, again, a theory that does not yet command widespread agreement, even within the BC education system where it is the theory-du-jour.

Q2: What is the basis for such agreement? Why do people in the discipline accept it?  What (if any) is the evidence for it?

I’ve posed a variant of these questions on twitter to Social Studies teachers in general, and to two "experts" in this field: Dr. Lindsay Gibson in particular, who is a professor of Social Studies Education at UBC, a student of Peter Seixas and deeply involved in the development and suffusion of the Concepts, and was on the curriculum writing team for BC Social Studies, and to Dale Martelli, a well-known secondary teacher of Social Studies and Philosophy, the president of the BC Social Studies Teacher's Association, and also a member of the same curriculum writing team.  I asked: “Assuming that the Historical Thinking Concepts are generally accepted as a basis for sound practice in Social Studies classrooms, a) What is the basis or evidence for such agreement? b) Why do people in the discipline accept it?”  I’ve also posed these questions to executive members of the BC Social Studies Teachers’ Association.  My assumption, of course, is not a certain one but is so close to my intended area of research that I’d be remiss not to start there.

While awaiting responses, I’ll make some predictions.

Basis for agreement:

• the HTC/GTC have gained general acceptance as guiding concepts in Social Studies education because they are embedded in our revised curriculum and have been promoted widely as part of the curriculum implementation process
• the HTC/GTC fill a gap in traditional practice where the skills, mindsets, and disciplinary thinking associated with Social Studies did not have a single over-arching purpose or organization schema.  The HTC propose to develop the ability among students to “think like a historian” (and the GTC to “think like a geographer).

Basis for acceptance:

• the concepts were picked as the basis for the competency-based curriculum because the Ministry needed a framework and the HTC cam ready-made and supported by influential members of both the academic historical community and history education community in Canada, largely (but not solely) through the work of the Historical Thinking Project
• the concepts were already familiar to many Social Studies teachers and there is a growing body of literature and teaching resources to support their use in K-12 Education.  Sometime the practice follows the principles, sometimes the practice follows the resources.  In this case, they came packaged together
• compatibility of the HTC/GTC with numerous accepted parallel or integrated approaches to Social Studies including skills-based, content-based, thematic vs chronological (historical) or sequential (geographical) course designs, active citizenship, focus on Indigenous reconciliation, “maker” and inquiry-based programs, identity work, and place-based/land-based/place-responsive education

Evidence for suitability of principle, law, or concept:

• respect for level and longevity of research, theory-making, practice, and output (e.g. learning resources) from Seixas et al for the HTC and Case et al for the GTC
• the theories behind the HTC (and to some extent the GTC) are influenced by and compatible with Contructivist Theory, which has dominate education off and on for decades, and Inquiry-Based Learning, which is another direction supported by the revised BC curriculum
• use by Ministry of Education and uptake by BC teachers -- maybe some circular reasoning here: faced with many choices, the Ministry picks a great framework; the framework is great because the Ministry picked it from among all the alternatives​

Update (Sep 7):  I didn't get a whole lot of uptake on the twitter end of things, but targeting Dale Martelli and Lindsay Gibson proved to be fruitful.  Dale Martelli, The BC Social Studies Teachers' Association president,  replied with a detailed challenge to the question (wonderful) and provided me with a list or recommended reading that positioned other "portal concepts" and ways-of-knowing as important for History/Social Studies educators and challenged the universal applicability of Historical Thinking Concepts. In his personal correspondence with me (Sep 5, 2019),  he made salient points about how this trend to associate Social studies with Historical Thinking has featured in educational debates for decades, and that his sense was that compartmentalization was never a common pursuit among practitioners.  He wondered at the provincial table "why we are not looking at the whole thing from a deeper ontological lens." Predictably, this was met by giggles -- the curriculum process was not invested to solve academic debates within the discipline, it was there to provide something simple enough to be be used by all teachers and consistent with the competency-driven theme being written into all of the other course curriculums.  Dale also made a case that our curriculum should not be so focused on skill development and should respond to more of a Building approach to education.  As always, my conversations with Dale leave me with more questions than answers.  That's a good thing, from my perspective.  By the way, here are the articles that he recommended for me -- a nice start for my own research on this topic.

​Lindsay Gibson, Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Pedagogy at UBC, also replied with a challenge to the question, that Historical Thinking was not necessarily seen as a basis of sound practice.  Over the course of a series of related exchange, he share the following graphic that goes some way towards the view that Social Studies is more interdisciplinary that a simple reliance on Historical Thinking would suggest:

So, I now feel as if I asked the right question to determine whether my question was valid, and determined that it was not particularly valid!  The answer appears to be that there is no solid basis for agreement on how Social Studies education should work, and that the many teachers are perhaps not very well informed about why the Historical Thinking Concepts were picked to headline the new Social Studies curriculum.