Collective efficacy and the effect of instrumentalism on our conception of experience

While talking about how collective and self efficacy lie on two different planes, I was also simultaneously thinking about Habermas' arguments on the nature of civil discourse, as Michael had discussed this with some of us a week ago. Jurgend Habermas' theory of communicative action aligns with the adaptable notions of human behavior set forth by Dewey, and talk about how true learning occurs through communicative action or developing a shared purpose, that take us beyond the often mundane, instrumental nature of brick and mortar institutions (Habermas, 1987). Creating true, reflective understandings of social studies content is epistemologically rooted in curating reflective experience, be it aesthetic, literary or theoretical, and capitalizing on the adaptive nature of the human mind to develop collective efficacy. How can we achieve this communicative action? How can we transcend instrumentalism? When we talk about the principles of Dewey, the usual response lies in the obvious idealism associated with the way in which Democracy and Education. However, when we build upon Dewey and add the feedback cycles of self-efficacy that Bandura has posited, it all starts to take collective shape when considered in an allied form.

If we want to achieve deeper levels of processing and go beyond just 'our grades', the very level of what has now been 'labeled' as performance oriented tendencies tells us that this is what we need to focus on. This (maybe subconsciously) would induce that very sense of anxiety in the classroom, as well as the thin border between resignation and total despondency that Bandura's hypothesized relationship between efficacy and outcome expectations posits in case of failure. However, when we take away the labels and arbitrary evaluations that we've assigned and look at how to create thoughtful, and as Mezirow would say 'transformative' learners, collective efficacy plays a huge role. Why you ask? Well, naturally, it's because arriving at a shared purpose and immersing oneself into a progressively developing common consciousness is associated with taking multiple, criterialist perspectives that are based on both learning and the gifts that the overworld has given us through experience (Stoel et al.,2017).

To touch on our discussions about technology, while technology is definitely a fad today, it so happens that it is associated deeply with collective efficacy in a way that is observed in practice and transcends arbitrary numbers and statistics and surveys, but needs to be documented in such forms due to the obsession we have with instrumentalism. One can say that they don't 'appreciate the disruption' that technology has caused, but the true potential that it has is just the tip of an extremely large iceberg that needs to be chipped at by both observing and subtly manipulating student experience. If we don't explore the avenues that open source forums like Reddit and MUVE's like Second Life offer to this shared purpose that can power (especially) the social studies to add meaning to the measurement we are all so obsessed with, what's the point of the very idea of developing education to reach closer to the golden age that I hope that we all hope are harbingers of? We just need more hope and less cynicism to somewhat achieve this, as well as a true desire to move beyond instrumentalism to transcend the era of 'working for an A', and our militant insistence on the existence of a spuriously large number of what we have now labeled 'evidence based practices'.

References:

Habermas, J. (1987). The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of Communication. In THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION (2). Boston: Beacon Press.3-43.

Stoel, G. L., van Drie, J. P., & van Boxtel, C. A. (2017). The Effects of Explicit Teaching of Strategies, Second-Order Concepts, and Epistemological Underpinnings on Students’ Ability to Reason Causally in History. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(3), 321-337.