The articles in this special issue support an 'emphasis upon specific instructional and assessmen l practices, as opposed to vague, emotive educational ideologies. It is possible, in fact, that an ideology-const.ructivist or otherwise-can obfuscate and impede the progress of education as a profession. The articles suggest that a focus upon specific educational practices has far more potentia] for advancing the field of pecial (and g neral)
Original Description:
Original Title
the Journal of Special Education Vol. 28/No. 3/1994/Pp. 356-367
The articles in this special issue support an 'emphasis upon specific instructional and assessmen l practices, as opposed to vague, emotive educational ideologies. It is possible, in fact, that an ideology-const.ructivist or otherwise-can obfuscate and impede the progress of education as a profession. The articles suggest that a focus upon specific educational practices has far more potentia] for advancing the field of pecial (and g neral)
The articles in this special issue support an 'emphasis upon specific instructional and assessmen l practices, as opposed to vague, emotive educational ideologies. It is possible, in fact, that an ideology-const.ructivist or otherwise-can obfuscate and impede the progress of education as a profession. The articles suggest that a focus upon specific educational practices has far more potentia] for advancing the field of pecial (and g neral)
THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 28/NO. 3/1994/pp. 356-367
IDEOLOGIES, PRACTICES, AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
FOR SPECIAL EDUCATION
Robert Dixon
Douglas Carnine
University of Oregon
We propose that the articles in this special issue like practices. The value of a particular instruc
Support an emphasis upon specific instructional tional or assessment practice is probably depen:
and assessment practices, as opposed to broad, dent upon, at the very least, context and learner
vague, and often emotive educational ideologies. _ characteristics, and empiricism remains the most
Often, well-researched, effective practices can be reliable means for evaluating practices,
associated with any ideology, as can poor,
The articles im this special issue suggest that a focus upon specific educational
practices has far more potential for advancing the field of special (and general)
education than an emphasis upon philosophies, metatheories, theories, or psy-
chological schools that we will refer to as ideologies. It is possible, in fact, that any
ideology—constructivist or otherwise—can obfuscate and impede the progress of
education as a profession.
Our first example of this thesis comes from a fascinating analysis of cognitive
and behavioral psychology conducted by Butterfield, Slocum, and Nelson (1992).
Butterfield and his associates pointed out that some ideological differences
between behavioral and cognitive schools are genuine and potentially incompat-
ible. Specifically, behaviorists tend to play down mentalism and cognitivists play
it up. In addition, the vernacular of each differs considerably. However, the phe-
nomena each describe are often remarkably similar, particularly in relationship to
notions of transference. Thus, many crucial instructional practices derived from
each school’s bodies of empirical evidence are virtually indistinguishable from
one another when stripped of the jargon each employs as language convention,
For example, the differences between transference in cognitive parlance and the
more traditionally behavioral term generalization are practically nonexistent in
terms of the actual phenomenon that each describes. And of far greater impor-
tance to practitioners, substantial cognitive and behavioral research. supports
essentially the same instructional conditions for achieving transference or gener-
alization,
Our thesis—that examining practices is more fruitful than examining ideolo-
certainly not profound, when viewed as a variation on a classical set of
nships: those between the abstract and the concrete. Without even specu-
lating upon the epistemology of abstractions, the suggestion that abstracti
become clearer and potentially more functional when embodied by concrete
ns.
Address: Robert Dixon, 2716 Hillside Dr. SE, Olympia, WA 98501
356THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 28/NO. 3/1994 357
examples seems not terribly controversial. We better appreciate love in acts of
love, kindness in acts of kindness, understanding in acts of empathy
Butterfield et al. have made a strong case for viewing the labels that permeate
our field as abstraction, both at the broadest level (cognitivist/behaviorist) and
in reference to “smaller” constructs (e.g., discriminative stimulus/context state-
ments). Although broad issues of ideology and psychology are by no means
unimportant, in the final analysis, the extent to which we as special educators are
able to fulfill our special moral obligations is determined by the practices we
employ: For convenience, then, we will explore some possible relations between
the abstractions represented by labels and concrete instructional practices
1. Any given set of empirically supported practices can conform to multiple labels. This
is the relationship illustrated most dramatically by Butterfield and his associates,
Most notably, the kinds of instructional conditions that result in the broad appli-
cation of knowledge (transference) can objectively be associated with any ideol-
ogy: That is, any /abel can be associated with those conditions: radical behaviorism,
social dialectology, empirical constructivism, cognitive information processing,
and so on
There is no inherent problem in this relationship. On the contrary, we should
find hope and encouragement from each instance in which effective instructional
practices are identified in the empirical work of diverse ideologies. The credibility
of those practices becomes just that much stronger. However, such encouraging
events are rarely interpreted that way in our field, possibly because of the fragile
barriers that separate ideology from dogma. The following fallacious argument
recurs with startling regularity in educational literature:
Premise: The research of my ideology supports instructional practice X.
Premise: Your ideology differs from mine.
Conclusions: a. Your ideology does not support that practice.
b. Your ideology opposes that practice.
c. Your ideology is mean-spirited.
Logically, of course, no single conclusion here is any better than any other. The
fact that well-educated adults with noble intentions engage in such unproductive
polemics is a testimony to the ease with which one can slip silently into dogma-
n. Dogma, in turn, taints our perceptions in ways that serve no useful purpose
for learners. We might embrace a popular instructional program like Reading
Recovery because we perceive it as “constructivist,” or scoff at it for its “phonics.”
We might like “behavioral phonics,” but find “constructivist phonics” less savory.
tanovich (1993) described dogmatically tainted interpretations of well-designed
research in the clearest of terms: People like the results of some research and do
not like the results of other research.
‘The articles in this special issue offer numerous examples of the extent to
which a given practice can be attributed to different ideologies. For instance
Graham and Harris (this issue) point out that constructivists advocate for signi
cantly more time to be set aside for writing than is typically set aside in “conven-
tional” or “traditional” classrooms. That, however, is different from saying that
only constructivists advocate more writing time. No ideology “owns” the idea of358 THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 28/NO. 3/1994
allocating more time to writing as a crucial but partial means to improved writing
performance.
The stages in the processes employed by adept writers were fully explicated
before the widespread advent of constructivism in language arts, and were not
inspired by constructivism in any case (e.g. Herum & Cummings, 1970). Neither
do behaviorists or neobchaviorists own the various notions of “academic engaged
time” or “opportunities to learn.” Englert (1992) attributed many of the successes
of her excellent research to principles that might best be described as social
constructivist, but one of her best known interventions (Englert et al., 1991)
employed several practices that just as easily could be attributed to other ideolo-
ies: teacher models of the writing process, “positive” and “negative” examples of
given text structures, procedural facilitators that are not much unlike behavioral
cues and prompts, and so on. Englert et al. are the first to point out that their
work has not isolated the relative contributions of the several elements employed
in their interventions.
In the area of reading comprehension, we believe it is not too far-fetched to
suggest that the work of cognitive psychologist Richard C, Anderson (1977) on
the influence of prior knowledge upon comprehension was a natural extension
of the work of behavioral psychologist Richard C, Anderson (Anderson & Faust,
1973) on the influence of prerequisite entering behavior on achievement.
Although the former and the latter are not the same thing, one can be viewed
as a natural, more specific extension of the other.
Stanovich (this issue) offers the example of a study by Cunningham in which
an “anticonstructivist” subject—phonemic awareness—is taught via practices gen-
erally considered constructivist. The research Stanovich cites on phonemic aware-
ness, moreover, seems to represent a fairly eclectic range of both ideology and
practice. What informs us most clearly from that research is a focus on phonemic
awareness itself, and those practices that seem to help students achieve it the
most. Ideology does not inform us much.
Of all the articles in this special issue, Mallory and New’s might support our
thesis most convincingly. Our own views on special education have not, frankly,
been influenced to any appreciable degree by the social constructivist ideology to
which Mallory and New subscribe. Yet the extent to which some of our most
steadfastly held views seem compatible with theirs strikes us as remarkable—even
startling. To name a few:
ion of any nd
* The outright rejec n that some children are uneducable or
“incapable of benefiting from instruction.”
* The value of peer tutoring and peer collaboration.
* The urgent need to contextualize learning.
* The concept of guided participation, including especially *
inevitable shift from other-regulated to selfregulated activity
* The contention that “boring, repetitious, and ultimately meaningless” readi-
ness tasks are overemphasized in special education,
gradual but
* The desire to withdraw extrinsic rewards in favor of intrinsic as soon as
possible.