1.4 Familiar Worlds

The learning environment of the traditional classroom is a legacy of the 15th century printing revolution - a system of schooling that relies on a print environment. Linear sequential order, uniform curriculum divided into subject disciplines, centralized bureaucracy, emphasis on book learning, a focus on content as opposed to process: these are all characteristic of TLEs (Logan, 1995). Farnham-Diggory (1990) describes how many aspects of TLEs which we take for granted today are actually modeled on the factory environment:

There are standardized ways of keeping records, planning curriculums, furnishing classrooms, dividing up school days (into periods), dividing up curriculum (into units and lessons), administering discipline, instructing, and grading. Every school, every district, and every state has manuals that detail exactly how things are to be done. Ideas of quality control and interchangeability were borrowed from the workplace and applied to education. (p.23)

The classroom environment is highly structured, controlled and organized. It is generally physically designed to be teacher-centered with a blackboard at the front facing rows of student desks. It uses a traditional text-based curriculum which is delivered through a lecture-recitation-seatwork mode, with teacher as dispenser of knowledge and with the common tools being textbooks, workbooks, ditto sheets and overhead projectors (Dwyer, Ringstaff, Sandholtz, 1992 1992b). The physical environment of schools impacts on the types of activities that take place, on the types of rapports that exist and, no doubt, on the beliefs that motivate teachers' behaviours in these schools. The classroom is traditionally bounded, not only by four walls, but by the structures, rules, procedures, schedules and curriculum. In an investigation of the types of learning that are supported by different physical environments, Stuebing, Celsi and Cousineau (1994) describe the traditional school building:

From a physical perspective, the traditional school building is a double-loaded corridor that compartmentalizes classrooms, as well as students and teachers, into what has commonly been called an "eggcrate" arrangement. This historical model for school organization has been associated with an emphasis on control of students and on teacher-centered, lecture-format learning. (p.2)

Part of the setting or organization of schooling includes the element of time. TLEs allow for instruction organized around short blocks of time (Means et al.,1993). The dynamics of clock and calendar dictate much of the activity in schools. The report of the National Education Commission on Time and Learning (1994) investigated the role of time in learning and illustrated the dominance of time in the school environment. Schools are characterized by:

• fixed times for opening and closing;
• fixed time for the length of the school year;
• a division of the day into six-periods with about 5.6 hours of classroom time a day;
• regardless of the complexity or simplicity of the school subject, the schedule assigns each an impartial national average of 51 minutes per class, period, no matter how well or poorly students comprehend the material;
• secondary school graduation requirements are universally based on seat time - a standard of measurement representing one credit for completion of a one-year course meeting daily;
• the school clock governs how families organize their lives, how administrators oversee their schools, and how teachers work their way through the curriculum;
• time governs how material is presented to students and the opportunity they have to comprehend and master it.

Farnham-Diggory (1990) has also noted the important role that time plays in TLEs. Time, structure, organization, compartmentalizing: these are all dominant features of the school environment as the author describes:

Days are subdivided into periods, periods are subdivided into lessons, lessons are subdivided into objectives (for example, working ten problems correctly). Even within a forty-minute period devoted to the same subject matter (social studies for example), there is often no clear unifying theme. There are exercises to be gone through, daily lesson "scripts" that the children have learned to expect, but there is little internal organization to the material. At the end of the period, work in one area is "put away", and work for the next area is "gotten out". Sometimes students go to another room and another teacher. The adjacent lessons seldom have any connection and the lessons that address the topic just covered, won't come round again for at least a day, and sometimes not for several days or even a week. (p. 145)

Papert (1993) argues that much of present day schooling "remains largely committed to the educational philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". Tests, "segregation by age", teachers as technicians who mold passive minds, and an emphasis on reading as the "essential route to knowledge" are the prime characteristics of today's education system according to Papert. Schools use a "Gothic Cathedral model of learning" with the "knowledge architect" who will specify a plan for the placement of "knowledge bricks" in the minds of children. Knowledge is transmitted through a pipeline from teacher to student and is "treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future". What Papert is describing is the transmissionist or instructionist models or practices characteristic of most classrooms (Cognition Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1996). Transmission models of teaching and learning are based on the following assumptions:

• Learning involves the accumulation of particular sets of facts and skills; teaching involves the transmission of facts and skills by an expert;
• assessment involves an accounting of whether the desired facts and skills have been acquired;
• the role of the teacher is to deliver information while the role of the student is to demonstrate that what has been transmitted has been attained; and
• typically, all students are taught the same thing at the same time. (Cognition Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1996)

When we examine the traditional environment of the classroom, we can identify a number of prominent characteristics and defining features. The environment is highly structured, controlled and organized, text-book centered and curriculum and time driven. It is modeled on a philosophy of learning from the past. The most appropriate metaphor to describe the model would be that of the factory or assembly line. Such an environment best supports what can be termed as a transmissionist or instructionist approach to learning and teaching. Such an environment contrasts radically with OLEs which were described in the previous section. The following section of this chapter aims to highlight the differences between these two types of environments. More importantly, it questions what occurs when the two types of environments overlap, or when teachers move from one environment to the other.