Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions

Introduction

This article begins with the claim that current theoretical frameworks in education artificially splinter the holistic experiences of teaching and learning. While perhaps oversimplified, the main challenge for us as researchers, theorists, and practitioners is that the three main driving perspectives create false, unproductive distinctions. Such distinctions are often overly restrictive and separate theorists and researchers from how teachers and learners encounter educational experiences: the objective, subjective, and relative realms impacting them all at once. This is especially true in the development of instruction, curriculum, and design of research questions.

In our field, it is common to view learning models as valid only if they are internally and externally consistent within a single epistemic and ontological frame. The disparate views of what makes up reality, truth, and knowledge and how we may know these concepts bring stakeholders in educational settings into conflict about the practices of teaching and learning. For the purposes of this article, we frame our views in the context of the social and political sciences as depicted by Bernstein (1976, 1983) and the constructivist educational system language of Prawat and Floden (1994).

Many who take their perspective from the empiricist, Positivist, or objectivist epistemic stance claim truth and knowledge exist separately from the minds that perceive them and they may be fully understood through the senses (Hollis, 1994). Therefore, learners may read, observe, hear, or use other acquisitive means to know what is true and real as given them by a teacher, school system, and larger state and federal political systems. According to this view, researchers may only know whether learning occurred and teaching was successful through objective assessments that ask students to repeat this knowledge from memory. We refer to the empiricist, Positivist, or objectivist epistemic stances using Bernstein's (1983) term "objectivist," in that there is an objective reality that we can know through our senses. This is not Ayn Rand's big "O" Objectivism and should not be viewed as such.

This objectivist view is in conflict with the contextualist or social constructivist that believes that while an objective reality exists (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), our limited senses and cognitive capacity restrict our understanding of truth, knowledge, or reality. For the remainder of this article, we will refer to this as the contextualist position.

It has been proposed that it is only through discourse with others that we may assent to some approximation of truth and knowledge that has emerged through social negotiation and agreement among a group of participants in the process of learning (Savery & Duffy, 1995). Further, the role of the instructor is that of facilitator and coach rather than provider of objective truths and knowledge to be memorized. For researchers, this makes the use of objective learning assessments invalid as the blunt instruments available to them for perceiving what is true or real privilege only one view of truth.

Finally, the relativist views all truth and knowledge as individually constructed by the individual, with a lack of transfer from one person to the next. As Hollis (1994) describes, it is the problem of "other minds" (p. 241), which states that we can never know what truth or reality is for each individual; therefore, there is no universal truth. This makes learning and teaching challenging as it requires the instructor to develop personalized instruction for each individual student.

The Dilemma

We claim that this current view of knowledge fails to comprehend the holistic nature of reality and knowledge. We claim that instructors and learners do not experience the objective world separate from the subjective or internal/relative cognitive states. From a review of case studies and qualitative research, it is clear that they instead experience all things at once and understand them in all their complexity and relationships concurrently.

Therefore, educational experiences and curriculum should not be designed from only a single perspective; instead, a coherent view recognizes the complexity of teacher and learner experience by creating learning and instructional tasks that encourage understanding from and with each perspective on truth, knowledge, and learning.

Theoretical Foundations

Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action

The primary perspective guiding this framework was the pragmatic theoretical work of Jürgen Habermas (1981/1984; 1981/1987). Building on his social theories, Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) has the goal of developing methods for understanding and improving the effectiveness of human communication towards goals and has been a work of more than 40 years. In 1991, Ewert reviewed a large number of articles in which Habermas was referenced, with a goal of identifying aspects of TCA that have implications and applications for education.

From a philosophical perspective, it is problematic that many researchers place themselves in one epistemic category or another with the contextualist battling the objectivist by claiming one form of knowledge to be superior to another. It is especially troubling for many practitioners who tend to understand all forms of knowledge to be occurring concurrently rather than through only a single acquisition or construction model (Sfard, 1998).

Epistemic and Ontological Fragmentation in the Social Sciences

In order to address the fragmenting of worldviews into objectivist, subjectivist, and relativist positions (Bernstein, 1983), we begin by providing a theoretical overview of Jürgen Habermas, a German sociologist, pragmatist, and critical theorist. Critical perspectives include a critique of ideology to enable individuals to become aware of distortions in knowledge stemming from the nature of human communication (Habermas, 1981/1984). Both empirical and interpretive social scientists use their senses to describe the world around them; critical theorists seek to understand why the social world is the way it is. Carspecken (1996) further notes that criticalists "find contemporary society to be unfair, unequal, and both overtly oppressive for many people" (p. 7) and want to change it.

Self-awareness of knowledge distortion is enlightenment necessary as a pre-condition for individual freedom and self-determination. Underlying the process of critique is the idea that existing social structures and beliefs are constructed in a participatory fashion by stakeholders and are therefore also changeable through further social action.

Habermas proposed the Theory of Communicative Action in which human speakers, by the act of communication, create intersubjective or shared meaning, reach mutual understanding through "transmission of culturally stored knowledge," and coordinate action through the "fulfillment of norms" and "formation of personality structures" (Habermas, 1981/1987, p. 63). Communicative acts are "oriented to achieving, sustaining, and reviewing consensus" (Habermas, 1981/1984, p. 17). Speech acts raise validity claims in which speakers assert acceptable representations of a facet of the world that they claim to be true or real.

An act may be called "acceptable" if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a "yes" position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer.

Habermas further argues that with the participants' response of "yes" or "no," the speaker accepts a speech-act offer and grounds an agreement: accepting validity claims brings about an agreement that grounds obligations relevant to the sequence of interaction (Habermas, 1981/1984, p. 310). If one does not agree, one may reject the bid of the initial speaker and propose claims that counter or modify the validity of the truth claims inherent in the original speech act.

Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions

In order to understand the role of Habermas' work in the context of educational settings, we propose the theory of Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions. While originally outlined in Warren and Stein (2008) and Warren, Bohannon, and Alajmi (2010), we expand our concept of learning and teaching as activities that have inherent claims to truth or knowledge. Such acts emerge from the designed instructional activities as well as the social discourse that accompanies them.

In instructional settings, communicative goals from the teacher include conveying structural content information and drawing out student responses that confirm understanding. Habermas' communicative actions inform the design of learning activities, and each must be included to spur learning discourses within a classroom. These speech acts include:

• Strategic actions geared towards learners determining the validity of objective knowledge
• Constative actions geared towards allowing students to interactively make and challenge claims to the validity of objective knowledge
• Normative actions related to the validity of claims of truth about group, institution, and societal rules
• Dramaturgical actions that allow for individual expressions of truth through artistic forms of communication (Habermas, 1998)

Four Actions for Learning and Teaching

The goals of learning and instructional communicative actions generally have one of four purposes. The first goal in educational settings has traditionally been to transmit objective, empirical knowledge or facts commonly accepted in the present as valid by society.

Strategic or Teleological Actions

These relate to technical or administrative actions that are intended to direct students to do something. They are speech acts phrased in the imperative in which students have no option but to do or not do (transgress). During such acts, there are generally only two options that result from evaluating specific empirical knowledge: to determine whether it is useful or not and therefore whether or not they should accede to the direction.

In current instructional settings, strategic communication is the most commonly employed action. The instructor often accomplishes this by giving explicit directions that learners may either follow or not. From the perspective of the instructor, this may be to have learners read a text, listen to a lecture and take notes, or some similar activity, and then requiring that they be prepared to take a test. Strategic actions can only be accepted or rejected in terms of the validity of the speaker/teacher's claim. If the information gained through the strategic action is successfully transmitted, the learner perceives it as useful, factual, or objectively true, allowing her to form beliefs and develop meaning, thereby finding her fit with the ontological view (Habermas, 1981/1984, p. 87).

Constative Actions

Also viewed as conversations, these communicative interactions allow further development and critique of the theoretical understandings of speaker and hearer. Either participant may be the teacher or student who may make claims which can be challenged or accepted through communicative negotiation in a manner beyond that allowed by strategic actions, which are limited because they do not allow for challenge or negotiation of the validity of a statement. It is through constative acts that speakers make claims to the validity of knowledge and hearers may challenge that validity through rejection and negotiation.

In an instructional setting, this is achieved by designing learning activities that allow students to make claims about the validity of a piece of contested or somewhat ambiguous understanding. For example, the teacher could provide students with a book like William Gibson's (1984) Neuromancer, which depicts a future filled with digital constructs and an Internet-like space in which people interact and face massive social and economic challenges. The instructor could then develop activities in which students compare this dystopian future with their own, identifying pieces of knowledge that individual students view as useful or true within their "lifeworld" experiences.

Lifeworld, as presented by Bernstein (1976) and informed by Husserl, is "the intersubjective world that every man [or woman], in his wide-awake consciousness, experiences and participates in during daily life" (p. 141). This is the social, practical world which we experience every day; it is the space in which we seek to understand the actions of others with whom we interact in bound contexts of culture and society.

Students engage with peers in conversations about the validity of truths they see emerging from the text, challenging one another's claims to knowledge, and building consensus about what they believe is true and useful for their small groups. With this consensus, the instructor may then require that students make predictions about the future and express this through a creative writing or visual design activity that is presented to the class for respectful critique. Further, different forms of assessments can be given that measure the level of objective knowledge students achieved in terms of understanding important facts about plot, character traits, and other relevant details.

Normative Actions

A third possible goal of communicative action is to provide socially valid normative understandings that have been generated through past consensus within the social world the participants belong. This occurs within the socially or culturally bound groups through shared experience, which generate claims to truth such as social rules leading to legal or moral conceptions through normatively regulated action. In the classroom, we see the teacher initially communicate the norms of appropriate behavior through strategic communication in manners that do not allow them to be challenged. This often comes in the form of establishing rules for grading, appropriate learning behaviors, required assignments, attendance, and other important expectations as communicated through written or digital syllabi combined with verbal review of each.

A school also establishes social norms related to cheating, plagiarism, or expectations of faculty. For students, the consequences of rule transgression are communicated and can range from loss of points towards the final grade to expulsion. Normative actions provide two world perspectives: the objective and the social world where norms establishment is commensurate with legitimacy. Many normative expectations stem from societal expectations of fairness and result from larger rules established by legal avenues such as courts.

Dramaturgical Communicative Actions

Lastly, the speaker may attempt to express some internal state or "lifeworld" understanding towards the goal of taking some future action, claiming an identity, or producing some artwork towards a goal of self-expression. The dramaturgical action inhabits two worlds: the subjective inner world through which the speaker may express personal identity and understanding, and the objective world through utterances (Habermas 1981/1984, p. 93).

The future action or goal is related to personal identity and internal understanding expressed through individual artistic creations such as painting, or graphic design; construction of digital avatars, writing a poem, or thoughtful reflection in a blog (Warren & Stein, 2008). These convey what spoken communication may only hint at to the learner. Instructors must make available opportunity for learners to safely express their personal identities, passions, and other internal, relative, or subjective truths, which further need to be open to respectful critique through discourse with peers, instructor, and others.

References

• Airasian, P. W., & Walsh, M. E. (1997). Constructivist cautions. Phi Delta Kappan, 78(6), 444–449.
• Bernstein, R. J. (1976). The restructuring of social and political theory (6th Paperback ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Bernstein, R. J. (1983). Beyond objectivism and relativism: Science, hermeneutics, and praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Carspecken, P. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research. New York: Routledge.
• Carspecken, P. (1999). Four scenes for posing the question of meaning and other essays in critical philosophy and critical methodology. New York: Peter Lang.
• Chouliaraki, L., & Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
• Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.). (2003). The discipline and practice of qualitative research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Duffy, T. M., & Cunningham, D. J. (1996). Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology. NY: Macmillan.
• Ewert, G. (1991). Habermas and education: A comprehensive overview of the influence of Habermas in educational literature. Review of Educational Research, 61(3), 345–378.
• Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group; Ace Books; Penguin-Putnam, Inc.
• Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1981)
• Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action: Lifeworld and system (T. McCarthy, Trans., Vol. 2). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1981)
• Habermas, J. (1993). Justification and application: Remarks on discourse ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Habermas, J. (1998). On the pragmatics of communication (M. Cooke, Trans.). Boston, MA: MIT Press.
• Hollis, M. (1994). The philosophy of social science: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Prawat, R. S., & Floden, R. (1994). Philosophical perspectives on constructivist views of learning. Educational Psychologist, 29(Winter), 37–48.
• Rebell, M., & Wolff, J. (2009). NCLB at the crossroads: Reexamining the federal effort to close the achievement gap. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Savery, J. R., & Duffy, T. M. (1995). Problem based learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework. Educational Technology, 35, 31–38.
• Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4–13.
• Warren, S. J., Bohannon, R., & Alajmi, M. (2010). Learning and teaching as communicative actions: An experimental course design. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.
• Warren, S. J., & Stein, R. (2008). Simulating teaching experience with role-play. In D. Gibson & Y. Baek (Eds.), Digital simulations for improving education: Learning through artificial teaching environments (Vol. 1). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
• Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs (Morningside Edition, Vol. 1). New York: Columbia University Press.