In the discussion of creator vs organizer, the majority miss the reality that you are not in the process of “creating” or even “discovering” new knowledge. The rules of math are the rules of math. Nothing you do as a teacher has any effect on the Associative Property. Grammar is grammar. Adverbs modifiy verbs and you’re not charting new sentences that have never been seen before. Only the language changes syntactical rules, not the teacher. You are not discovering new geography nor are you producing insight into the socio-economic realities of the world at large.
Those of you who think you’re creating new knowledge in the students are missing the reality that the knowledge exists whether the students know it or not. You’re only making the knowledge available to them. You are not creating anything new in terms of the content domain — although you may be breaking new ground in how to organize it. To the extent anything *new* is created, it’s the students — not the teachers — who are creating their own new connections to the knowledge which existed but of which they were not aware.
In this class I’m not creating new knowledge. The sum of the content domain will not be changed by what I do as a teacher here. Nor will it be modified in any way by your participation in the class. While it is true that I *may* discover some tool, technique, process, or paradigm in teaching you, the reality is that my activity as teacher is not having any effect on the field as a whole.
Logically, therefore, I cannot be a creator of knowledge.
My role as teacher is to organize the domain. My job is to figure out how the pieces fit together and to line them up for you to deal with. My task is to find the order, granularity, and level for this knowledge domain to permit you to operate in your ZPD — not so little that you don’t get into the zone, not so much that you’re overwhelmed beyond your ability to cope. This is the process that every teacher does for every subject for every student. It’s the identical process for math, and language arts, and history, and science. There are speciaized encodings and activities that work better for some subject matter than others, but the process — what it is that teachers do — is organizing an existing content domain to facilitate the learner’s ability to bridge the gap between not-knowing and knowing.
The “trick” part of this trick question is that I am not only a teacher, but a researcher. As researcher, this class is my lab. In a sense, every student is a subject because every teacher strives to improve his or her understanding of the processes involved in the teaching. Through the sum of that activity, new knowledge may well be created — but not in the subject areas of the courses so much as knowledge about the relationship beteween education and learning. This gets a little bit reflexive when you consider that the knowledge domain here is distance education so some of the knowledge *I* gain from teaching you may increase the general understanding of the domain as a whole, but generally speaking — not.
October 5th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Never thought of it like that, but it is true. The teacher is a researcher in a lab conducting experiments in the classroom to see what works and what doesn’t work. If something goes wrong in a lesson where the students are not getting it, we look at the results, brainstorm new ideas, and try them out.
October 5th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
[...] phaedrus » Blog Archive » Organizer. phaedrus » Blog Archive » Organizer. [...]
October 5th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I do agree with you regarding the point you made when you stated that the rules of math are the rules of math etc. and I now understand the difference between creating knowledge of just organizing it. I feel that you have organized knowledge in some areas of technology that I was not aware of; I can also say that I feel this knowledged has been organized in a very hap-hazard way that I don’t always agree with but am tying my hardest to follow. I thought that when I majored in Education Technology, this program was designed to help me learn more about technology in the educational environment and I was under the impression that Distant Learning meant that I was going to learn how to develop an effective Distant Learning course. I would have to say that in my personal opinion, I hope my student’s never have to come in contact with a DL course like this one ever in their college careers!
I sometimes am trying to figure out, am I in a Distant Learning Class in the area of Education Technology or am I taking Philosophy 101?
October 6th, 2007 at 8:33 am
[...] FINALLY!! I’ve been working all semester to get a rise out of you people!! Overlooking the disconnect between “distance education” and “distant learning” — remember there is no such thing as distance learning and all education is at a distance — this is an excellent question. From a Comment on “Organizer.” I sometimes am trying to figure out, am I in a Distant Learning Class in the area of Education Technology or am I taking Philosophy 101? [...]
October 7th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
[...] After reading the discussion about whether teachers create or organize knowledge on Phaedrus’, Organize, I started thinking about people like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. I think it can be said that they created knowledge. They discovered scientific facts that were already there, but no one knew about them previously. Using those facts, they created knowledge about these scientific laws and how they explain and predict the events in the physical world around us. Others came along after and created knowledge about how this knowledge could be used to do new things never known before. Of course, God knew this all along and these men only discovered what God created. [...]