William A. Perry
Different Worlds in the Same Classroom:
Students' Evolution in Their Vision of Knowledge
and Their Expectations of Teachers
Reprinted from On Teaching and
Learning, Volume 1 (1985)
I want to describe an orderly variety in the ways
students in your classroom make sense -- including their
sense of what you should be doing to be a good teacher. We
labor among our students' individual differences daily, and
yet the way these differences are categorized tends to
mislabel the variables I have in mind. In the parlance of
college pedagogy, the phrase "individual differences"
usually refers to relatively stable characteristics of
persons, such as academic ability, special talents or
disabilities, or the more esoteric dispositions called
"learning styles." We are, of course, expected to
accommodate all such differences in our teaching, perhaps by
broadening our teaching styles, and you may anticipate that
I am about to add to our burden.
My hope, rather is to lighten our burden, or at least to
enlighten it. The variations I wish to describe are less
static; they have a logical order, and most students tend to
advance from one to another in response to teachings or
readings that impinge on the boundaries of their
intelligible universe of the moment. These variables are
therefore more fun to address, and in my opinion often more
determinant of what goes out of our classrooms than all the
other individual differences put together. At the very
least, an understanding of them makes intelligible many of
those aberrations of the pedagogical relation that we must
otherwise ascribe to a student's stupidity or, more
generously, to a clash of "personalities."
Let's start with one of the ordinary enigmas -- students'
persistent misreading of examination questions. Perhaps
"unreading" would be a better term. We commonly struggle in
staff meetings for nearly an hour over the wording of an
essay question for the midterm. The choice of topic takes
only five minutes. It is the wording of the intellectual
issue we wish the students to address that takes the labor.
At last the issue is stated clearly, concisely, and
unambiguously. Yet, if the class contains a large contingent
of freshmen, the blue books will reveal that a third of the
students looked at the question to locate the topic and
ignored all the rest of the words, so carefully crafted. It
will seem as if these students read the question as saying,
"Tell all you know about . . . ," and then did so, sometimes
with remarkable feats of irrelevant memory.
Such evidence of misplaced diligence can be marvelously
depressing, but we realize we should not be surprised. In
their years of schooling what else have these students
learned to suppose an examination question intends? Clearly
we have an educational job ahead of us, and we undertake it
with spirit in class and in office hours, student by
student. We explain with patient clarity. The students
assure us that they understand and thank us profusely.
At midyears, however, most of our grateful benficiaries
dismay us by doing just what they did before. Our
instructions were quite simple, and when intelligent
students cannot keep a simple idea in mind, we can suspect
them of being diverted by more pressing considerations. I
choose here an example, extreme for this community, in the
hope that stark simplicity may lay a foundation for more
general observations.
A top student from a good rural school came to Harvard at
a young age, possibly a year too young. Since he had won a
regional prize in history, he enrolled in a section of
Expository Writing that focused on writing about history. He
consulted me in a state of some agitation, having failed in
three attempts to write a satisfactory response to the
assignment: "Consider the theory of monarchy implied in
Queen Elizabeth I's Address to Members of the House of
Commons in 1601." "Look," he says he doesn't want that. What
is this 'theory of monarchy implied' stuff anyway? He says
to read between the lines. So I try to read between the
lines and -- huh -- there's nothing there."
The intellectual problem is not too obscure. The student
cannot see a theory of monarchy because he has never been
confronted with two. Until he sees at least two, a monarch
is a monarch and who needs a theory? I was aware, of course,
that his writing instructor had tried hard, but I decided
said, "I can tell what she said -- all her main points. I've
done it three times, longer each time. But he to try once
more. We devised alternative theories together, but the more
he seemed to understand, the more agitated he became. Then
he complained that his mind had gone blank. I shall return
later to this student's shock to help us understand the
courage required of more advanced students if they are to
hear what we are saying about the world. After all, why
should two theories of monarchy be so terrifying?
Such curious reactions are not limited to exceptional
students. In Freshman Week over the years the staff of the
Bureau of Study Counsel has asked entering students to grade
two answers to an essay question. Again, fully a quarter of
the class gives higher grades to the essay crowded with
facts utterly devoid of relevance to the question. In
response, we have tried to help these students see that
college instructors consider relevance the sole
justification for memorizing a fact. Accordingly, we try to
teach them simple reading strategies, such as surveying for
a sense of the author's purpose before starting to collect
detail. Half the students catch on with enthusiasm; the
other half accuse us of urging them to "cheat."
This brings me to the last enigma we need to share: the
range of perception in students' evaluations of their
teachers. Most evaluations are invited by rating scales. The
computer will give the mean and the standard deviation. As a
teacher I have never found the figures very informative, and
on occasion I have ventured to inquire beyond them, inviting
my students to write me anonymous "free comments." I expect
a range of opinion; I would not want to please everybody.
But nothing ever prepares me for the range I get. How can I
possibly be the one who has "opened the world to me. Now I
know what learning is about; and the rest is up to me!" --
and at the same moment "the most dishonest, hypocritical and
careless teacher I've had the misfortune to meet -- and
Harvard pays you !"
Can differences in "personality" explain all this? Every
student who came to us for counseling seemed, if we listened
long enough, to be attending a different college; each
student enrolled in a given course was in a different
course, and the instructor was an angel, a dud, and a devil.
Was this variety common only among the fifteen percent of
undergraduates whose distress brought them to us? We thought
not, and we set out to inquire of some students who had
expressed no need of our wisdom.
We asked half the freshman class to submit to tests
measuring aspects of personality we thought relevant, and in
May we invited representatives of all dispositions to come
to tell us about their year. They responded
enthusiastically. We soon learned not to ask them questions
that imposed frameworks of sense-making on a conversation
that we intended to be an opportunity for the students to
inform us of theirs. The individual variety then exceeded
our expectations, the students enjoyed it, and we parted in
agreement to meet again next spring, and also in junior and
senior year.
It was in this setting that the students rewarded us. As
we first listened to them as freshmen, they interpreted
their experience in ways that seemed harmonious with those
traits of "personality" our measures had ascribed to them.
But then, in sophomore year, to our astonishment, most of
these students changed their "personalities" -- and did so
again as juniors and as seniors. Each year they interpreted
their educational experience through frameworks of
assumptions and expectations that placed knowledge and
learning, hope, initiative, responsibility, and their
teachers, in new relations. Perhaps our original tests in
freshman year had reflected not so much enduring bents of
personality as temporary constellations of perceived
relations. Gradually we came to see that these
constellations through which the students made sense of
their worlds followed one another in an orderly sequence.
Finding that their current ways of making sense failed to
comprehend the increasing complexities and uncertainties in
their intellectual and social lives, the students "realized"
(as they phrased it) that the world was other than they had
thought; that only a new way of seeing and thinking could
encompass the new set of discrepancies, anomalies, or
contradictions. Each of these new realizations comprehended
the old as the old could not encompass the new. This was
development, a visible, even explicit broadening of the mind
-- not simply change, but evolution.
We sensed that each step in this evolution involved a
challenge. We had yet to realize the depth of these
challenges, but we could see that some students refused, at
one point or another, to take the next step. We went so far
as to dub the sequence a Pilgrim's Progress and made a map
of it, Slough of Despond and all. Every student, as we saw
it, spoke from some place or "position" on this journey.
* * *
But it is now time to enter your classroom. You, however,
are late -- unavoidably, but conveniently for our purpose.
The last thing you said, on Friday, was, "Next week we'll
consider three theories of the economic cycle" (or the
equivalent in your particular field). As restlessness sets
in this Monday morning a conversation begins, and I am going
to cast it in the mold of our Pilgrim's Progress. That is, I
shall label the dramatic personae First Student, Two, Three,
etc., letting each express in sequence the outlook from the
several positions of our map.
By this device I hope not only to convey a sense of the
order in the varied perceptions and expectations that await
your arrival, but also to make it possible for you to
imagine that each of the speakers might be one and the same
student speaking from outlooks attained sequentially over a
number of years -- perhaps in just the four years of
college.
I have already mentioned the First Student -- he of the
history prize. He saw me on Saturday. He sits near the door
watching for you. He is too anxious to speak or even to
think well. His despair about theories of monarchy has
probably left him so mute that if he heard you mention
"three theories of the economic cycle" at all, it only added
boundlessness to his terror. His inability to understand the
nature of knowledge as Harvard sees it has become less an
epistemological problem than an ontological horror. If there
are several theories of monarchy, why shouldn't there be
infinite theories of monarchy? So is there such a thing as a
monarch? Is the same true of all authority and so of all
obedience? Of parents and sons? Of all meaning?
The camaraderie of the dorm might have carried him
through this existential crisis, but this lad seems to lack
the humor to become one of the boys. His is primitive shock,
but we shall find in the class other, more sophisticated
approaches to the abyss.
Several low-key conversations are now going on in the
room. The voice of the second student -- I shall call him
Two -- rises above the rest as he talks to his neighbor.
"What's this rigmarole about three theories of the cycle
anyway? Why doesn't he give us the right one and forget the
bullshit?"
Someone laughs. "You're not in high school anymore,
Joe."
"Yeah, I know. Here they give you problems, not answers,
I see that. That's supposed to help us learn independent
thought, to find the answer on our own. That's what he said
when I asked him -- or I guess it's what he said, along with
the rigmarole. OK, but enough is enough. We gotta know what
to learn for the exam." Two's voice has become plaintive,
almost desperate; there is silence as he pauses. "My
roommate's in the eleven o'clock. He says his instructor
really knows and really answers your questions. Maybe I
should go ask her."
It is hard to portray Two's thinking without seeming to
caricature it. Do I need to assure you that he exists? He
has brought with him from years of schooling a clear
epistemology. Knowledge, he learned early, consists of right
answers, and there is a right answer for every question:
e.g., spelling words, arithmetic problems, dates. These
truths are discrete items and can be collected by
memorization; so some people know more, others know less.
("Better" or "worse" are not applicable.) Teachers know
these answers in their own fields. The answers seem to exist
up there somewhere, and the teacher is privy to them.
In the stage setting of this epistemology the roles of
the actors are clearly prescribed. The teacher's duty is to
"give" the student the truth, the right answers, in
assimilable, graduated doses. Two's duty is to "absorb" them
by honest hard work known as "study." Then the teacher will
"ask for them back" in the same form in which they were
originally given. Two's responsibility is then to re-
present them unmodified and unabridged for the teacher's
inspection.
The morals of this world are equally coherent. The
teacher must not ask questions in a strange form -- "trick
questions." That teachers often give problems to solve,
withholding the answers which they already know, can at
first seem an anomaly in this world, something to make sense
of. As the First Student might say, "I think they're hiding
things." Two has made sense of it, acknowledging that
beneficient Authority should help us learn "independent
thought": i.e., to find the answer for ourselves. Assigning
problems therefore falls within the bounds of the moral
contract so long as the teacher makes the problems clear and
the procedures for solving them memorizable.
As student, then, Two's reciprocal moral duty requires
him to collect truth through honest hard work, never by
guessing. Right answers hit by guesswork (including
"thought") are false currency, and when he accepts credit
for them he feel guilty.
Freshman Adviser Perry (after November hour exams): How'd
it go?
Freshman: Four 'A's.
Adviser (swallowing praise): How do you feel about
that?
Freshman: Terrible. I didn't deserve any of them.
Two's logical corollary, of course, is that if he's
worked hard he should get some credit even when he comes up
with the wrong answer. The gods and similar authorities have
always been bound by the rituals they have established for
their appeasement. This myth, to the extent that Authority
shares it, provides safety to the weak. The vital
requirement of ritual is that nothing be omitted -- that it
be complete. Since neglect of the smallest detail
invalidates the whole, every detail is of equal import.
It is therefore of fundamental urgency for Two that you
stipulate the nature of the ritual, particularly its length.
He has been stopping you in the door at the end of
class.
"You said three to five pages, sir. Does that mean
four?"
Can Authority refuse to answer? "Well, whatever you
need."
"Oh, then, four will be satisfactory?"
"OK, sure, if they make your point."
"Thanks, sir -- oh, will that be double-spaced or
single?"
I have more than once found myself pressed to the wall
and settling, to my chagrin, for "1200 words." And I have
received them, tallied in the margin, the final entry a smug
"1204."
Quantity and "coverage" are visible entities, making
obedience palpable. "Organization and coherence" -- meaning
the logical subordination and sequencing of relationships in
the service of an overarching theme -- these are not yet
visible to Two. A recent study has revealed that the
students who think as Two thinks use "coverage" as their
criterion for "coherence" as they write, sometimes going so
far as to "organize" by putting "similar" details together.
If you ask Two to rewrite his paper to improve its
organization, he will therefore submit more of the same.
Two knows that there are Rights and Wrongs and a cold
world outside of Eden. In Eden the only role is obedience;
the only sin is arrogating to oneself the knowledge of good
and evil (the power to make judgments). In the Bureau's
class in strategies of learning, when we urge students to
find the main theme of an article or chapter first (perhaps
by starting at the end) so that they can judge the function
of details, those who think like Two cry out, "Do you want
us to be thrown out of here?" Two recognizes the college
instructor who asks him to exercise his judgment as
Serpent.
Two, then, construes the world (and teachers)
dualistically. Along with right and wrong, he has come to
see that some teachers know, and some do not. The truth is
One and Invariable, yet teachers disagree about it. There is
only one possible sense to make of this without disaster to
Truth: just as there are right answers and wrong answers, so
there are good teachers and frauds, beneficent teachers and
those who are mean. ("My roommate says his instructor really
knows.")
Two thinks in a noble tradition. A study of examination
questions given to freshman at Harvard at the turn of the
century reveals them all to be just the kind that Two
expects questions to be. They ask for memorized facts and
operations in a single assumed framework of Absolute Truth.
It wasn't until midcentury that half the questions would
require consideration of data from two or more perspectives.
And surely today there are still many ways in which we
confirm Two's vision.
Indeed, the meanings Two attributes to the educational
world are so sensible -- and he has such ready categories
for dismissing incongruities -- that his system seems almost
closed. And if this system were as perfect as Locke
portrayed it, then all knowledge, judgment and agency would
reside out there in Authority, and the student's sole duty
would be to absorb. Some Twos do indeed stay closed. Our
Two, however, has unknowingly opened a door by conceding
legitimacy to Authority's assigning problems instead of
giving answers. Solving problems, he has found, is kind of
fun, and he derives more satisfaction from doing than from
memorizing. In arithmetic one can even check an answer for
oneself to see if it's right or wrong. This temptation to
agency and judgment is the first step in a path that will
lead Two away from the safety he presumes to lie in
obedience in Eden toward ultimate questions about the very
nature of truth itself.
What is required next is for Authority to be allowed just
a bit of legitimate uncertainty. Student Three supplies it:
"Well, there may have to be some different theories for a
while," she ventures; "after all, Ec. is sort of a new
science and there's lots they don't know the answers to yet
-- like some things in Physics even." By using the word
"yet" she has legitimized present uncertainty without
disturbing her vision of an orderly Laplacean universe out
there waiting to be known, bit by bit. Three's assimilation
of temporary uncertainty makes the system even more
vulnerable. A little temporary uncertainty legitimizes a
little difference of opinion. "Temporary" can now reveal
itself to extend longer and longer, and uncertainties can
appear in wider domains. The mind is then likely to be
overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of possibilities.
There are two Fours in the class, one a bit of a fighter,
the other more trusting. I shall call them Four A (Adam) and
Four B (Barbara). Four A makes sense out of the impending
chaos by exploiting it. He "realizes" that the world,
instead of being divided between right and wrong, is divided
between those things about which right/wrong can be
determined and those about which not even Authority knows.
In this new domain of indeterminacy, where "Everyone has a
right to his own opinion," he feels a new freedom. In this
domain no one can be called wrong because the right is
unknown. By implication all opinions are equally valid. This
broad tolerance provides for peace in the dormitory before
dawn. At the same time it means that Four A will feel
outraged when you question his opinion, especially if you
asked for it.
He says to Three: "Yeah, that's right. There's so much
they won't know for a hundred years, so why only three
theories? Anyone can have a theory, and if it's neat for
them it's neat for them."
This ultimate individualism, when applied to the moral
sphere, is of course absolute license, and since it is often
spoken of as "relativism" it has given actual disciplined
relativism a bad name. There is of course no relationship in
sight, only solipsism: "My opinion is right because I have
it." We called this view multiplicity, an awkward word we
stole from Henry Adams. In any case, the view is not
relative but absolute, just as absolute as the right/wrong
dichotomy. What Four A has done is to save the dual
character of the world by doubling it, leaving right/wrong
on one side and if-I-can't-be- called-wrong-I'm-right on the
other. He feels no need as yet to relate opinions to their
supporting data and limiting contexts.
Three's interest in how to solve problems and her
realization of temporary uncertainty are leading her to a
curiosity about "how" we know, or if we can't know yet, how
we develop an opinion tenable on grounds other than "It's my
opinion." Four B (Barbara) has taken a course in literary
analysis in which she has discovered that "What they wanted
wasn't just an answer but a 'way,' a 'how'. I came to see
that what a poem means isn't just anybody's guess after all.
The way they wanted us to think was maybe special to that
course, but you had to put all kinds of evidence together to
build an intepretation and then try it out against others.
So we'd end up with a few good interpretations to choose
from, like three theories maybe, but a lot of others turned
out to be nonsense -- at least that's how it was in that
course. Maybe . ."
Four B is on the brink. She has allowed a special case
into the world of "right answers for credit." With this
"way" she can be an agent in using relationships among data
and contexts to generate intepretations. She realizes then
that these interpretations may be compared to one another.
Some few may appear most valid; others less so; others
unacceptable. In the special case of this one course,
Authority itself has introduced knowledge as qualitative.
But a special case can be a Trojan horse. Its contents can
burst forth to take over the whole fortress.
Four A (Adam) is entrenched in his efforts to expand the
realm of indeterminacy at Authority's expense. If he is to
discover a contextual qualitative world, he may do so more
readily when the prodding comes from peers. In the bull
sessions in the dorm a colleague more advanced than he may
ask him, "Well, how do you substantiate that?" again and
again until he discovers that things relate and that he can
relate them.
Five: "Hell, everything's like that -- like Barbie says,
not just in one course. There isn't a thing on earth
sensible people don't disagree about -- and if they don't
today they will tomorrow! Even the hard scientists: look
what Godel did to math! It's not like Adam says, 'When no
one knows anything goes.' Just because there's no single
certainty in the end and individuals will have to choose --
that's no reason to give up thinking. Maybe it's the reason
to begin, I mean, you've gotta use all the analysis and
critical thinking and stuff as advertised. Theories -- they
aren't the Whole Truth anyway, they're just models like they
say, some of them pretty good. So you've got to know how
each one works, inside with its logic and outside with the
world. It's like different geometries . . . Iike games
really."
Two interrupts. "I can't follow all this bull you're all
talking. Isn't anyone going to help pin him down? How can
you study for an exam with all that crap you're talking
about?" Everyone looks at Two, but no one reponds. "Well,
maybe it's me. I mean I can learn things, but I can't seem
to do what people do around here, whatever it is --
interpret or something." He hangs his head.
Three attempts a rescue. "Well, I kind of agree. I mean
he ought to tell us sooner or later. After all, there are
right answers, right ways."
"Sure, there's rights and wrongs if you know the
context," resumes Five. "It's all set by the context and the
assumptions and all. Sure it gets complicated and some
contexts are looser then others. Like in History and in
Lit., there may be more different, defensible things to say.
But still, idiot opinions, they're infinite. I thought
everybody knew that."
Five "realized" all this only eighteen months ago, but he
has so completely reorganized his view of the world, and in
the process perhaps recatalogued his memory, that he has
forgotten that the world ever seemed different from the way
he now sees it to be. We wouldn't forget -- or might we?
* * *
We should pause here. A rift has been revealed in the
class, and the rest of the conversation will further our
understanding of it. Five has taken us over a watershed, a
critical traverse in our Pilgrim's Progress. On the first
side of the watershed the students were preoccupied with the
frightening failure of most college teachers to fulfill
their assigned role as dispensers of knowledge. Even
Barbara, who has mastered the initial processes of
analytical, contextual, relativistic thought, has
assimilated this form of thought by assigning it the status
of an exception in the old context of What They Want. Five,
in crossing the ridge of the divide, has seen before him a
perspective in which the relation of learner to knowledge is
radically transformed. In this new context, Authority,
formerly source and dispenser of all knowing, is suddenly
authority, ideally a resource, a mentor, a model, and
potentially a colleague in consensual estimation of
interpretations of reality. What-They-Want is now a special
case within this context. As for the students, they are now
no longer receptacles but the primary agents responsible for
their own learning.
Not all teachers will furfill these expectations, of
course, but to Five, Six, Seven, and Eight their failures
will not be so demoralizing -- or preoccupying. Most
students will turn their attention to the implications of
the new perspective: choosing among interpretations in their
studies, making decisions in a relativistic world, and
deciding how to make commitments to career, persons, values
and to what they "know" in a world in which even Physics
changes its mind. Some, perhaps lacking support or stuck in
old resentments, will opt out by shrugging off
responsibility.
As students speak from this new perspective, they speak
more reflectively. And yet the underlying theme continues:
the learners' evolution of what it means to them to
know.
Another student now speaks to Five. 'Well, I've just come
to see what you're talking about and it helps. I've begun to
be able to stand back and look at my thinking -- what
metaphors and stuff I'm using. Not just in my studies, I
mean I find the same goes for people. I've begun to get the
feel too of where the other guy is coming from and what's
important to him -- huh, this sounds corny, but I get along
better with most people."
There's a silence, then Five speaks more tentatively in a
lower voice: "Yeah, I can do this all in my head. I like
learning the games and seeing what model fits best where and
all. But I can't see how to make any big decisions --
there's always so many other possibilities. That's been a
real downer. I list all the reasons for doing this and for
doing that and all the reasons against and then I get
depressed [laughs], so I go back to playing the
games, 'cause that's something I can do well. I mean I get
'fine critical thinking' and jazz like that all over the
margins of my papers and it keeps me going, but where to? I
know it's I'm still trying to be too sure, but I can't let
go, I don't want to just plunge."
A student is sprawled in the back of the room. "Games is
right! So who cares? If they want independent thought, just
give it to them. Always have an opinion, I say -- but don't
forget to be 'balanced' and all that crap."
"Yeah," replies Six, "and then when you get to General
Motors, what's good for them will be good for you. I was
lost a whole year, felt like copping out like that plenty --
then thought what'll that be like when I'm forty? Now I've
got it narrowed down some. I don't see how some guys seem to
know from age two -- always knowing they'll be doctors. Did
they ever have a doubt? Or will it hit 'em later? Like
midlife crisis, huh? Anyway guys like me -- you gotta
plunge, I think. I'm not quite there yet, but I can see
there's different ways of plunging. You can jump in just to
get away from the agony -- or you can do your thinking, and
when your guts tell you 'this is it,' you listen. They're
your guts. I mean you gotta plunge, in a way, because you
know you can't be sure -- you're risking it -- but it'll be
sort of a positive plunge. And once I'm in, I think
everything else will fall in line."
"I did that last spring," says Seven, "and now that I'm
getting deeper into things -- I'm in Bio -- it helps, feeds
on itself I guess and I see it isn't narrowing down like I
thought it would but spreading out bigger than I can handle.
But I wouldn't say -- I wouldn't say.
"That it straightens everything else out?" The prompting
comes from Eight. She laughs ruefully, "I got everything
straightened out last spring. I'd gone round and round.
There was premed I've been in forever, I'd got more and more
into Linguistics, and here was this guy I'd been going with
who wanted to get married. So I thought all my thoughts and
everyone else's and then one day told my parents, 'Sorry,
Linguistics is it. I've really listened, but this has to be
mine.' And then I let the guy go to the Amazon to study
birds without me. Did everything straighten out? Like hell
it did, and then it did, in a funny way. I mean there was
the thesis in Linguistics; I still love that guy and don't
want to marry him; I'm all wound up in this day care thing;
my father's sick in San Francisco, and I met this intern
who's taking care of him, and and and. Before, it seemed
there was just premed or Linguistics, marriage or no
marriage, so now I ought to feel worse, all divided up, but
it's better. I find I even believe in some things, like
they're really true." She pauses; no one says anything.
"It's like with the thesis, somehow. Seems I hit on
something new -- well, not new, just joining a couple of old
procedures to tackle an old problem they'd never been used
on before. My tutor says I'm really on to something -- we
can't find anything wrong about it or too far out. I've
never known something new to be mine like this before. And
the feeling goes over into all the rest in a way, only I
don't have my tutor to check me out. It's all bits and
pieces with cracks in it, but I'm the center of something, a
place from where I see things as I see them and all that
jazz. Get things together -- that's it I guess, not getting
everything I want but getting things together. Oh hell,
maybe all that holds me together is irony."
After a moment, somebody laughs, "Nice try, nice try, but
these verities seem a long way from those three theories of
the economic cycle, whatever they are. Anybody done the
reading?"
"Sure the reading's important," says Six, "but what we've
all been saying does connect. What I want to know is what he
does with those three theories. As a person, I mean, an
economist-type person. I mean he seems to care about Ec. --
he's kind of zestful about it really. I want to know what he
does with all this. Not just which he thinks is right but
does he, or if all three are valid, then what? I don't think
he's kidding himself, so what does he do? Let's some of us
ask him for lunch someday [laughs]. See if he's for
real."
At this point you hurriedly enter the room. Under your
arm you carry a sheaf of forms from University Hall. They
are questionnaires for students' evaluation of teaching --
an experimental form, it says, for trial at midterm. You
have been assured that giving them out is purely
voluntary.
* * *
You -- and I -- are at "Nine" (so we hope), the farthest
reach of our map. At Nine we have had time to realize that
growth is not linear as the metaphor of our map implies, but
recursive. We turn and turn again, and when we come across
our own footsteps we hope it will be with the perspective of
some altitude and humor. We have also seen that in the
several areas of their lives, such as their work, politics,
social relationships, family, or religion, people (including
ourselves) often employ somewhat different levels of
thought. As teachers, we often use these variations by
finding the areas of students' most sophisticated thought
and helping them to move by analogy into areas in which they
are less advanced. Indeed, students, will often do so
spontaneously.
But first, you may ask, "Am I supposed to do something
about all this development?" I must state my premise. I do
believe that the purpose of liberal education is to assist
students to learn to think the way Eight is thinking. The
goals are stated in the catalogues of all liberal arts
colleges. In these terms the development the students reveal
is a Good, and we are enjoined to promote it. You may
disagree, sensing that I am loading on you a trip into
personality development; your responsibility, you may say,
is to teach History. I hope you have sensed that this makes
no difference. Students who have not progressed beyond the
outlook of Three will be unable to understand what you as a
modern historian want them to understand about History. To
the extent that you wish your subject to become accessible
to as many students as reasonably possible, the development
we have been tracing remains a Good, and you have already
been promoting it.
After all, the students who told us of this adventure
were not taking a course in cognitive development complete
with maps. They came to "realize" through the necessities of
the intellectual disciplines as you taught them. This is not
to say, however, that as teachers we have nothing to gain
from a more explicit awareness of the steps in the students'
progresssion. At the very least, an understanding of Two's
expectations somewhat reduces the personal abrasion of his
anger. Similarly, we can feel less assaulted by the outrage
of Four when he feels we do not accept his "opinion." Beyond
saving our energies, this awareness extends the possibility
of our staying in communication long enough for seeds to
take root.
Our outline of the successive ways in which students make
sense throws some light on the potentials and constraints of
this communication. It has been observed for two millennia
that in any learning situation the learner requires the
support of some elements that are recognizable and familiar.
Then, if the experience is to be anything more than drill,
the second requirement is a degree of challenge. In the
decade since the publication of our scheme, a younger
generation of teacher-researchers has spelled out the
characteristics of learners at each position and traced the
sequential changes in the conditions students experience as
support and challenge as they progress. Two, for instance,
feels supported by explicit directions -- supported enough
to tolerate the challenge of being directed to read
contradictory authorities. Looking back at the First Student
we see him overwhelmed by challenge; he may make it through,
but only with the community's support -- and time. Looking
ahead, Five feels supported in being turned loose on the
reserve shelf to find and write up an interesting problem,
and can be challenged afterward by such a question as "And
what did doing all that mean to you?"
This question of personal meaning leads toward the
concerns voiced by Six, Seven, or Eight, who are searching
to orient themselves in the profusion of legitimate
possibilities they discovered in the relativism of position
Five. They seek a way to make commitments to career,
companions, values, and to make them wholeheartedly in a
world in which knowledge and meaning are tentative. In the
midst of this challenge they seek support in models,
especially in their teachers. In providing this support, the
best we can do is to let them see that we share with them
the risks that inhere in all commitments. Then their sense
of ultimate aloneness in their affirmations becomes itself a
bond of community.
It is revealing to observe what happens when the
teacher's and the students' ways of making sense are
uncompromisingly disparate by two or more levels. If
students Five through Eight are taught in the manner
expected by Two, they may be bored or frustrated, but they
understand what the teacher is doing. In the reverse of this
mismatch, however, when students at the level of Two are
taught in a manner that is good teaching only for Five and
above, they panic and retreat. Over the past twenty-five
years the position of the modal entering freshman at Harvard
has advanced from around Three to nearly Five. Yet many Twos
and Threes and Fours are among us. Since we tend as teachers
to address the more responsive students at and above the
mode, we can be concerned about the remainder, who feel they
are outsiders to the enterprise. I hope, if only for their
learning, that they are fortunate in their advisers and
their friends, and that their instructors, if opportunity
permits, confirm the legitimacy of their bewilderment.
This concern has brought me to my last observation. What
powers do we not have? Clearly (if we remember), we cannot
push anyone to develop, or "get them to see" or "impact"
them. The causal metaphors hidden in English verbs give us a
distracting vocabulary for pedagogy. The tone is Lockean and
provocative of resistance. We can provide, we can design
opportunities. We can create settings in which students who
are ready will be more likely to make new kinds of
sense.
But what happens to the old kinds of sense? Where do
yesterday's certainties go? Are Two and Three and Four the
only ones in need of support? Five and Six and Seven and
Eight (and you and I) have dared at each step to approach
the abyss where the First student has stumbled into
meaninglessness. For the advancing students a new world has
opened from each new perspective, to be sure, but the mind
is quicker than the guts. The students had invested hope and
aspiration and trust and confidence in the simpler design of
their world of yesterday. How long will it take them to dig
out their vitality and reinvest it in the new, problematical
vision? And all the while they are told that these are the
happiest days of their lives.
The students do find their gains expansive and
fulfilling, but does no one see the losses? If no one else
does, can they? They can but wonder: "What is this cloud,
this reluctance?" It can't be grief, can it? I believe that
students will not be able to take a next step until they
have come to terms with the losses that inhere in the step
just taken.
In ordinary daily work, our understanding of how students
see, whether we agree or not, legitimizes their being as
makers of sense. If they make overly simple sense, we must
ask them to look further. But by acknowledging that making
sense as they used to do was legitimate in its own time, and
even a necessary step, we empower them to learn new and
better sense. Our recognition is most encouraging in moments
when the student is moving from one level of sense-making to
another. When the transition happens right in front of us,
we will see the eager realization and then, perhaps very
shortly, the shadow of the cloud. We say something like,
"Yes, you've got the point all right . . . but we do wish it
made things simpler." The most heartening leaven for the
mind can come from just such a brief acknowledgment as
this.
References
Copes, Larry (compiler). Bibiliography and Copy
Service Catalog: Perry Development Scheme. SIP. Paul, MN
(10429 Barnes Way, 55075), ISEM, Oct. 1984.
Knefelkemp L.Lee and Janet L. Cornfeld. ''Combining
Stages and Style in the Design of Learning Environments."
Address to American College Personnel Association, 1979.
Reprints obtainable from author at College of Education,
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.
Perry, William G. (and associates). Forms of
Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College
Years. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Perry, William C., "Cognitive and Ethical Growth: The
Making of Meaning" in Chickering, Arthur (editor). The
Modern American College. San Francisco: JosseyBass,
1981.
Perry, William G. "Examsmanship in the Liberal Arts: A
Study in Educational Epistemology." Harvard College,
1963. Reprints available at the Harvard-Danforth Center.
Also reprinted in Zeender, Karl and Linda Morris
(editors), Persuasive Writing: A College Reader
(NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981).
Wll.LIAM G. PERRY has taught in school and
college, and, as the first Director of the Harvard
University Bureau of Study Counsel, has listened to students
for thirty-four years. He is the author, with his
associates, of Forms of Intellectual and Ethical
Development in the College Years.
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