Blake, Nigel
(2000)
Tutors and
Students without Faces or Places
Journal of
Philosophy of Education, 34,1, 183-196
Reflect on distance education
P183 ‘Centrally, tuition is conducted here in personal
interaction through the written word’. P 183 ‘However, it is constantly
compared and contrasted negatively with conventional education in at least one
respect: that it is not ‘face-to-face’ it is the alternative for students who
need to study at a distance. There is a notion that interaction by means of the written word diminishes the
quality of communication between tutors and students. ‘ the belief that body
language , as an aspect of communication, is an unqualified good’ KRO what
would constitute an adequate defence of these claims?
P 184 ‘The idea that there is something special and
important about the physical co-presence of teachers and students may be
ill-articulated but it obviously has plausible appeal’ Lets take the scenario
of the way that the distance learner will study. The live teacher is replaced by a teaching text crafted by a
live teacher. P184 ‘ Instead of the text actually teaching, the student has to
actively study the text’….p185 ‘ So if we force the question what goes on,
teaching or study, on such occasions, the question has really no point of
interest. The answer is rather that a conventional link between teaching and
physical presence is less fundamental that we often think and has been broken
here’
Evaluate face-to-face
lets dissect a face-to-face interaction – what kind of
speech acts are involved, greetings & the exchange of pleasantries,
compliments, jokes, advice, warnings, rebukes, insults, evasions. Although they
all have a cognitive element (they
involve information exchange) constatives, there is also a large element
of the performative, p186 ‘ whose
character as social actions is at least as important as their character of
communicating information’ ( KRO and that has been the challenging part of
constructing the narrative) ‘ As speech acts, as events at some particular time
and place, performatives are highly sensitive to social and material context.’
In contrast constatives are not so reliant on context. Constatives tend to be
right or wrong, whereas perfomatives are either successful or unsuccessful.
Perfomatives can misfire, the social background has to be properly understood
by both the speaker and the hearer p 186 ‘Plausibly, it is the nature of the
social relationship between the speakers and how it is reinforced or
transformed which is the important issue in these speech interactions’
performatives are easily aligned with familiar kinds of intonation, body
language and facial expression. In these cases of mundane face-to-face
interaction, there seems a characteristic intertwining between the physical and
the verbal……..there is something patently appropriate about physical
interaction in these banal contexts. Those with whom we cement relationships,
are embodied people, and their personal characteristics as embodied are often
relevant to the nature of the relationship we have with them. Moreover, the
inherent actual or potential embodiedness of relationships – the inherent
address of relationships to the Other as
embodied – is betrayed by the fact that ‘body language’ and facial expression
are not in fact simply items of a kind of shared, intuitive physical ‘ vocabulary’ . They also reveal
aspects of ourselves to other quite unintentionally and often without us
realising it, thus cementing or impeding relationships all the more effectively.
So in this unconscious way too, bodies can and do intervene in the construction
of relationships’ and it is context sensitive. (KRO therefore important to retain the context for the
narratives)
What is appropriate for academic interactions,
particularly in HE?
Focus – the substance and complexities of the discipline,
not on our selves, our own interests or even on our personal reactions to the
topic.
Values – disinterestedness
Vices – bias, partiality, vested interest, prejudice
Role ‘Academic objectivity requires us to sift very carefully
questions of true and false, right and wrong, valid or invalid, good and bad,
insightful or obtuse from those of personal taste or distaste, political or
religious commitment, fear or loathing, enthusiasm or delight’
Skill/ Competence p 188 ‘the personal, the subjective and
the individual have to be somehow bracketed off and kept in their place, on
both sides of the teaching interaction….. one of the tasks of a teacher may often be to alert the
student to her own lapses of objectivity, to the moments where her own personal
values, emotions, and limitations may be clouding or distorting her
judgement’ Therefore in
face-to-face academic practice there is a presumption about the ‘non-verbal as
being inappropriate’, ‘that academic life has its own decorum, functional for
the pursuit of its higher aims. The purpose of this decorum is precisely to
bracket off, to tame or even sometimes to expunge the influence of non-academic
personal relations, personal interests and commitments’ that the personal ‘is
an impediment to distinterestedness’ ie the non-verbal (that extends the communicative
repetiore) may be irrelevant or invidious even to academic teaching.
Academic interactions online
’In the previous section we explored the idea that cognitive
use of language comes first in academia. ‘p 193 ‘ If online tuition is to be
genuine teaching, then insightful interpretation of the student’s written word
is at a premium. The question is not ‘ “What do these words mean?” but “What
does this student mean [by these words]” And in addressing that particular
problem, any indications the tutor can garner from the student’s text may seem
relevant and appropriate to the task. Moreover, we cannot assume any a priori
limits as to what aspects of a student’s life and experience will influence or
inform her own attempts to make sense of academic material and ideas’
Then mostly on identity
