Baruch Schwarz just asked me to contribute something on the ideological or otherwise nature of CSCL so I did - I think it is meant for a spcial article in ijCSCL. 

Theme 12: CSCL as Ideology
The charge has been made that for some the belief in collaborative learning at the heart of CSCL and the claim that it is occurring is not a consequence of analysis but an ideology of sorts. This raises the question of whether our research seeks to answer questions of *if* collaborative learning is occurring (and if so if it is better than some other alternative) or if we only ask *how* collaborative learning can best be supported, presuming already that it is a desirable goal. More and more voices have begun to raise these questions and point out that people who are co-present while learning together are not necessarily collaborating and groups of learners do not always comprise a community. Is there a need for CSCL researchers to become more critical of the foundational premise of collaboration and when it is an appropriate learning strategy? Some are that such criticality is necessary to more clearly define the reach and limitations of our field, while others claim that is outside of scope and distracts from the central concern of understanding collaborative processes when then do occur.
 
My response 

The accusation that CSCL is ideology implies a distinction between ideology and real science. This distinction, while plausible in an everyday use of language sort of way is not as straightforward as some people seem to think it is. Taking a broadly pragmatic stance – and most CSCL researchers take a broadly pragmatic stance - scientific knowledge could be said relate to human interests (Habermas, 1968). This is true of natural sciences as well as educational sciences but the interest in natural sciences – broadly the prediction and control of nature – is often less subject to dispute than the interest in educational sciences which always involves a political vision of the good life.

Ideology means universalising a particular point of view. Literacy education, for example, is presented in many studies as if it was an unproblematic good. But in oral cultures literacy education can mean outsiders coming in and stealing their children away from them. Literacy changes brains making an oral world-view less comprehensible (Dehaene, 2009). Education – and therefore the study of learning - is always bound up with visions of the good life that are subject to debate.

This does not mean that there is no difference between our ordinary language use of the terms ideology and science (fact and value or ‘is’ and ‘ought’). Taking literacy as a goal could reasonably be described as ideological since it universalises one point of view, that of a literate society, over others, e.g various non-literate groups. But the way in which we study the causal processes involved in learning literacy and the factors that might prevent or hinder becoming literate can be more or less ‘scientific’ or ‘ideological’ (where ‘ideology’ here translates as self-interested and self-deceiving science or, simply, bad science). By ‘scientific’ we are referring to the process of inquiry. What makes it scientific is not a neutral fixed definable  good method but social and cultural virtues and practices like integrity, transparency, systematicity, peer review, supporting multiple perspectives, responding to challenges with further reasoning and inquiry etc. (Wegerif et al 2013).

Science, described as a social practice which values an ideal of the truth, could be described as an ideology. If we accept this we have to note that it is a special kind of ideology that enables us to question and develop other ideologies through systematic reflection and discussion between alternatives based on evidence, ( usually this is empirical evidence but sometimes also, analytic arguments as in mathematics and philosophy). Science, in the German sense of ‘wissenschaft’, can be expanded to investigations about the educational value of collaborative learning or other goals to the extent that the investigation exemplifies scientific virtues of openness, multiplicity, transparency, systematicity etc. Philosophical discussion about educational aims can and does progress even if this progress is slower and less obvious than progress in natural science areas.

The CSCL community is self-consciously founded on a commitment to science as a means of shared inquiry and a commitment to the value of collaborative learning as an educational goal and focus of research. Both commitments could reasonably be described as rooted in ideology. But they are different kinds of ideology, one relating to process of inquiry and the other to the content or goal of education. The best way to resolve the tensions between these two commitments would be to subject the concept of ‘collaborative learning’ to systematic inquiry of a broadly scientific kind.

Any area of scientific study has presuppositions that can and should be subjected to reflective investigation as part of that area of science. So the area of CSCL should systematically investigate the nature and value of CSCL in theory as well as in practice.  My conclusion to this challenge is that theory needs to be part of the ‘tool-kit’ of the CSCL educational researcher and theoretical exploration of the nature of CSCL should be a prominent part of every conference as well as a strand in the CSCL journal.

Habermas, J (1968) Knowledge and Human Interests
Dehaene, S (2009) Reading in the Brain
Wegerif et al (2013) Science Education for Diversity

My last blog sounded positive about the participatory thinking of children. Perhaps this was because it was about dialogic relationships with trees and trees are generally considered to be nice. As Steve Jobs said, or at least the actor playing him in the recent movie about his life, ‘God sent his only son on a suicide mission but people still like him because he designed trees.’  But in my experience when you open spaces so that children can express themselves freely in classrooms what often comes out are jingles heard on the TV or YouTube the night before (see. E.g Wegerif , 2005[i]). Being participatory and ‘open to the other’ is problematic in a culture where the messages carried by the technology that surrounds us are not always benign.

​A neat experiment reveals the extent to which we do not always know why we make the decisions that we do[ii]. I always quote this when teaching on our education research masters to challenge the idea that the ‘objectifying’ ‘non-dialogic’ quantitative methods of natural science are not appropriate for researching people. The abstract is clear: ‘Over a 2-week period, French and German music was played on alternate days from an in-store display of French and German wines. French music led to French wines outselling German ones, whereas German music led to the opposite effect on sales of French wine. Responses to a questionnaire suggested that customers were unaware of these effects of music on their product choices’.

There is plenty of research to suggest that brains make decisions to act before the supposed owners of those brains have any consciousness of the decision that they are about to take [iii]. When asked about their decisions after the event people are not aware of this but rationally reconstruct good reasons coherent with their self-image of being in control.

This research evidence fits well with the claims from Foucault and others that ‘the discourse speaks the subject’. Barad’s quantum physics version of this is that ‘we’ are produced as ‘subjects’ out of entangled quantum systems that include the material environment. In other words , who we are is shaped on the inside by the environment including all the advertising images and musical jingles. So where does that leave freedom and agency?


Well actually this is not as bad as it looks. Consider the research study that I quoted. This kind of science gives us a collective awareness of how environments impact on us which gives us collectively the freedom and agency to redesign those environments. Smoking, for example, has almost disappeared now in public places in the UK, where once it was ubiquitous, after a massive collective redesign of all the messages given to children, including banning smoking from films and adverts. This kind of agency is not the agency of an autonomous rational self. It is a participatory and dialogic kind of agency. A good dialogue can lead to decisions and actions that I can feel happy with and identify with through an extended sense of self that includes the dialogue as a whole. Science is a long-term powerful dialogue that enables us to become self-aware collectively and so enables us to redesign ourselves in ways that reduce toxicity and promote flourishing.
 

​It is through education, perhaps more than any other institution in society, that we collectively redesign ourselves. Freedom and agency here are not found only at the level of the individual child or the individual teacher but also at other, longer-term and larger system levels where decisions are taken about the design of schools, the design of curricula and, really, the design of people.

We each of us have a voice only insofar as we participate with other voices in dialogues. Collective decision-making can be more-or-less monologic or dialogic. Where it is dialogic people can experience freedom and agency but only as participants in larger processes. The message of the new materialism of Barad and others is that matter enters into these dialogues. The media that we use in education, for example, whether cave paintings, slate and chalk, pencil and paper or electronic tablets linked to the internet, shape how we think and how we are able to think and so must be given a voice – that is to say we must become aware of these material voices and include them as part of the larger dialogue.

In the previous blog I challenged Vygotsky’s account of education as drawing children out of participatory thinking into autonomous reason. But another way of describing his view of education might be as drawing children out of one kind of participation into another. Out of the short-term circuits of addictive distracting kinds of participatory thinking, the thinking of advertising jingles and consumerism, into those longer-term dialogues of the culture as a whole through which they can participate in shaping their own world and their own future, our collective world and our collective future. Education enables freedom and agency when it challenges what we think we are and opens us up to the infinite strangeness of what we really are and what we might become.

​
[i] Wegerif, R. (2005). Reason and creativity in classroom dialogues. Language and Education, 19(3), 223-237.

[ii] The influence of in-store music on wine selections. North, Adrian C.; Hargreaves, David J.; McKendrick, Jennifer Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 84(2), Apr 1999, 271-276.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.2.271
 

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will