In which the reader considers our innate inability to take learning from here to there, novices and experts, and meta-thinking.
No essay, no dissertation and certainly no book on an educational theme is acceptable, today, without considerable reference to meta-this and meta-that. And quite right too. Whatever you’re studying, the meta-issues really matter. For example, in this chapter I am going to fumble towards a theoretical consideration of meta-cognition, meta-linguistics and meta-affect. It seems to me there is still a long way to go before the meta-issues around literacy are elucidated; before we are clear what they really are, what their impact really is and how we may best manage them. This is at least partly because hardly anyone is giving such matters any real thought. We should. Meta-issues are not yet an integral part either of our theory or of our practice. We appreciate meta-issues only rather tangentially and usually pass on timidly and swiftly, averting the gaze from such scary notions. We find them difficult to isolate theoretically, and so we find them difficult to consider. We do not therefore find meta-issues overtly informing our thought, our teaching or our learning, though we sometimes secretly suspect they may secretly be doing so. The influences of ‘meta-literacy’ issues are so subconsciously ‘normal’ to us fluent literates that they do not break into our teaching philosophy. The debate is not ‘main-stream’. Meta-issues seem to remain below the conversational radar. They are of major practical importance, nonetheless, and should feature in our theoretical thinking more than they do. It is my belief not only that we should make an effort to understand the meta-issues better ourselves, and hold them further forward in our own minds when thinking about literacy or teaching, but I also believe that our students should be explicitly enabled to understand and use the skills of meta-cognition, meta-affect, meta-linguistics and meta-praxis. I believe that this area of thinking is about to become very much more important, in educational theory and thereafter in teaching practice. I commend it to you, at any rate, and wish you luck therein.
Meta- (I looked it up) means (in this context) ‘of a higher or second-order kind (metalanguage)’ (The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th Edition, 1982) and ‘Denoting a nature of a higher order or more fundamental kind, as metalanguage, metatheory’ (the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 4th Edition, 1993). Textbooks commonly describe it as ‘thinking about thinking about’ something; ‘thought about thought’. You will already have observed that I have reached a conclusion on at least one aspect of this subject - I shall place a hyphen between meta and the next word, even if the Oxford dictionaries suggest I should not. (Metalanguage and metaaffect look ridiculous.)
I vividly remember the embarrassment and shock I felt when I first studied problem solving and the transference of learned skills from one situation to another. It was while taking an Open University module given by Hank Kahney, who also wrote a set book for the module. (Kahney 1986) It is an interesting text still. The human mind, it turns out, is astonishingly bad at transferring knowledge or skills learned in one situation to another, however similar, without pretty explicit instruction and advice. We don’t, apparently, do it unless we are told to. Homo sapiens is, in the event, stunningly short on sapience when it comes to taking learning from one context into another.
Imagine we have been set two ‘isomorphic’ problems (problems with the same, or extremely similar, structure - the ‘Chinese tea ceremony’ and ‘Towers of Hanoi’ problems, for example). If the same problem is presented in a different context, with the same problem structure transposed into a different situation, this new context will be enough to condemn us to experiencing roughly the same difficulty solving the problem on the second occasion as we did on the first, even if we have only very recently solved this first setting of the problem. Apparently we do not naturally, under everyday conditions, take any of the skill or knowledge we have gained from our solution of, say, the Chinese Tea Ceremony with us to the solving of the Towers of Hanoi. We take about the same time to solve the second problem, make much the same mistakes and go along much the same blind alleys, as we just did with the first. We are apparently so wrapped up in task specifics that we completely fail to notice very helpful, indeed absolutely fundamental generalities and similarities. Of course, if we are specifically told that there is almost complete similarity between problems one and two we gratefully see this and are able to solve problem two without breaking sweat - but only if we are actually told that there are fundamental similarities between the problems. This is embarrassingly dumb, but apparently deeply human.