I'm very pleased to get a paper on Ross Ashby's work accepted for this year's Society for Research in Higher Education conference (see http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2016/) in collaboration with colleagues. I always enjoy the SRHE conference and it's a good scholarly place to get Ashby onto the educational research agenda.
The majority of pedagogical theories have their roots in cybernetics or General Systems Theory, from Piaget and Vygotsky onwards. The provenance of the ideas is forgotten, and with it, opportunities to develop and critique theory by examining its origins is also lost. Piaget is covered in educational courses everywhere, but nowhere is there a critical engagement with Bertalanffy and General Systems Theory which inspired him (apart from a few like Maggie Boden or Ernst von Glaserfeld who make the cybernetic connection explicit). This is important because the epistemological and methodological territory is obscured - and the deep work is to be done in uncovering it. I was interested to discover that this is perhaps starting to change: Margaret Archer, who's contributed a lot to the sociology of education, has recently been discussing Ross Ashby, and I've been to talking to Mark Carrigan (who's currently completing a book of collected essays by Archer) about the extent of her understanding. There's a discussion to be had here.
So here's my contribution for the SRHE. If Archer misrepresents Ashby in criticising his concept of "variety", then it may be because only a portion of his work is in the wider public discourse. In fact, Ashby was a pioneer of cybernetics who developed his own epistemology of what a cybernetic science was. This is what I'm interested in. The picture below is from Ashby's notebooks (in the British Library, but available online at http://www.rossashby.info/journal/page/6741.html) where he was exploring his idea of Constraint Analysis, or 'cylindrance' - a concept which I think is critical to understanding education and educational research methodology.
Whilst face-to-face engagement is less data-rich, some constraints remain similar (for example, timetable and assessments), whilst others are identifiable as part of what Alfred Schutz calls the “pure we-relation” of face-to-face engagement (Schutz, 1960) – for example, the shared passing of time through being in lectures together. There are also dynamics of transition as shifts occur between face-to-face situations with their multi-layered constraints of embodied co-presence, and online situations with more limited sets of constraints surrounding online utterances. In each case, these analysable constraints combine with latent issues of individual background, social and professional context. We suggest that some indicators of these latent issues can be determined from learner utterances and their expression of values. In each case, the constraints applied by teachers is considered, from the organisation of learning activities, through to the explanation of assessment criteria. We explore how the analysis can be broadened to embrace the constraints bearing upon the teacher.
The majority of pedagogical theories have their roots in cybernetics or General Systems Theory, from Piaget and Vygotsky onwards. The provenance of the ideas is forgotten, and with it, opportunities to develop and critique theory by examining its origins is also lost. Piaget is covered in educational courses everywhere, but nowhere is there a critical engagement with Bertalanffy and General Systems Theory which inspired him (apart from a few like Maggie Boden or Ernst von Glaserfeld who make the cybernetic connection explicit). This is important because the epistemological and methodological territory is obscured - and the deep work is to be done in uncovering it. I was interested to discover that this is perhaps starting to change: Margaret Archer, who's contributed a lot to the sociology of education, has recently been discussing Ross Ashby, and I've been to talking to Mark Carrigan (who's currently completing a book of collected essays by Archer) about the extent of her understanding. There's a discussion to be had here.
So here's my contribution for the SRHE. If Archer misrepresents Ashby in criticising his concept of "variety", then it may be because only a portion of his work is in the wider public discourse. In fact, Ashby was a pioneer of cybernetics who developed his own epistemology of what a cybernetic science was. This is what I'm interested in. The picture below is from Ashby's notebooks (in the British Library, but available online at http://www.rossashby.info/journal/page/6741.html) where he was exploring his idea of Constraint Analysis, or 'cylindrance' - a concept which I think is critical to understanding education and educational research methodology.
Intersubjectivity and Teaching: Analysing
constraint in online and face-to-face engagement through the cybernetic lens of
Ross Ashby
Abstract
Ross Ashby’s work is little known in education, although his concepts of
Double Loop learning, Ultrastability, Requisite Variety and Self-organisation
have had a profound effect on educational theory. We focus on his work on
Constraint Analysis which, we argue, has application in understanding
educational relations, addressing concerns arising from recent critique around
sociomateriality, critical realist educational theory, and assessment
practices. We provide an overview of these techniques and demonstrate their
applicability through case-studies. We argue that Ashby’s cybernetic approach
occupies a unique position by opposing analysis of causal mechanisms, and
instead articulating a dynamics of constraint. Arguing that “the cyberneticist
observes what might have happened but didn’t” he deployed Shannon’s Information
Theory, which he saw as analogous to his own relational theories, developing
sophisticated techniques for measuring relations. In conclusion, we argue that
intersubjective relations in education become available for analysis - with
implications for new approaches to assessment.
The analysis of
relationality and intersubjectivity in education underlies recent critiques concerning
the objectification of learning (Ashwin, 2015), the technocratisation of
education (Barnett, 2013), sociomaterial approaches to online education (Gourlay
and Oliver, 2013) and critical realist accounts of education which draw
attention to absence and constraint (Kahn, 2015; Donati and Archer, 2015). Our
aim in this paper is to draw on an older tradition of examining relations
through the analytical techniques of “Constraint analysis” as they were
developed by cybernetic pioneer Ross Ashby (Ashby, 1965). Ashby’s Constraint
analysis presents a negative epistemology which, we argue, when applied to
education is necessarily intersubjective.
A psychiatrist who
became a seminal figure in cybernetics, Ashby’s ideas of requisite variety,
ultrastability, double-loop learning and self-organisation have become
profoundly influential in education although the provenance of the concepts has
become obscured. In distinguishing causation
and constraint, he argued that cybernetics was a science of constraint where
“the cyberneticist observes what might have happened but did not”. Modelling
was a tool for exploring ideal logical possibilities; experiment gave rise to
knowledge by revealing the constraints of nature that bore upon logical
possibility. It is an approach which stands in contrast to better-known realist
methodologies which focus on identifying causal mechanisms (Pawson and Tilley,
2002). At its heart was an attempt to understand learning as process whereby a
self-organising system could become self-directing.
Beyond his
epistemology, Ashby asserted an approach to measuring constraint drawn from
Shannon’s Information Theory (1948). He saw Shannon’s work and his own as
expressing the same basic principle: for one system to control another required
its complexity to be at least as great as the system to be controlled. Often
this balance requires constraining complex systems – for example, the
teacher-class relationship is constrained by the rights and obligations of the
classroom. Shannon explored how constraints operate within everyday
communication in grammars: the general term he used to describe this patterning
was ‘redundancy’ – latent rules which generate superfluous information to aid
communication. Fundamentally, Ashby suggested that the background of communication
– the redundancy – was more important than the foreground. So how might we
analyse the background of education?
Categories of Constraint and their measurement
There are clearly many
constraints bearing upon teachers and learners. Beyond the personal constraints
which form the hinterland of every individual (for example, personal histories,
attachments, values, social class, etc), there are specific constraints which
learners are subject to, including:
- The constraints of a course structure, the medium through which it operates, the timetable, the temporal dimension of lectures, assessments, discussions and presentations.
- The constraints of the social or professional environment bearing upon learners - particularly as they relate to the activities of the course.
- The institutional context of education – the need to engage students, the need to meet quality requirements
- The constraints of scholarly discourse and academic ambition – the need to publish, maintain political position within academic environments and academic communities
As with a grammar,
there are discernible patterns of behaviour which may be taken as indicative of
particular constraints: from a learner’s lack of engagement or plagiarised
assignments, a teacher’s favourite pedagogical tricks, through to verbosity (or
not) in online forums, or the asking of powerful questions. What do these
patterns of behaviour – by both teachers and learners – tell us about the
interactions between different kinds of constraint? This question forms the
basis of an analysis of a number of case studies from online and face-to-face
education.
Constraint, Uncertainty and Information Theory:
Some examples
We present three examples
from medical education with a combination of purely online engagement, blended
and face-to-face courses. The analysis provides a simple way of characterising
the differences between online and face-to-face interactions by considering the
dimensions of constraint operating in each case. For example, in the online
case, data is available concerning the patterns of student engagement as set
against the formal constraints of the course (lectures, assessments,
timetable). Analysis of this data reveals a “counterpoint” between different
kinds of redundancy: for example, repeated themes that occur in forum
discussions, particular patterns of exchange between individuals, the asking of
questions, or the coordination of understanding about assessment requirements
or broader rules of the course.
Whilst face-to-face engagement is less data-rich, some constraints remain similar (for example, timetable and assessments), whilst others are identifiable as part of what Alfred Schutz calls the “pure we-relation” of face-to-face engagement (Schutz, 1960) – for example, the shared passing of time through being in lectures together. There are also dynamics of transition as shifts occur between face-to-face situations with their multi-layered constraints of embodied co-presence, and online situations with more limited sets of constraints surrounding online utterances. In each case, these analysable constraints combine with latent issues of individual background, social and professional context. We suggest that some indicators of these latent issues can be determined from learner utterances and their expression of values. In each case, the constraints applied by teachers is considered, from the organisation of learning activities, through to the explanation of assessment criteria. We explore how the analysis can be broadened to embrace the constraints bearing upon the teacher.
Conclusions
Ashby’s techniques
provide a range of analytical tools which can be used to cut through confusion
which can become exacerbated through attempts to identify causal mechanisms or other
forms of ‘variables-based sociology’ (Smith, 2010). By focusing on the
background of education, attention is placed on relations, not individuals. By
seeing differences between educational media as relational differences, we can
explore the ways in which relations might be managed according to the
constraints exercised by agents within an educational medium, and make judgements
about effective practices which fluctuate constraints in educational processes.
Online media afford very different constraints than do face-to-face media
although as yet a coherent and empirically investigable paradigm for
understanding teaching and learning across any medium does not exist. Enticingly,
since Ashby’s constraint analysis is relational, exploring how it might
overcome objectivist assessment strategies presents an intriguing challenge for
future work.
References
Ashby, W. R.(1965) “Measuring the Internal
Informational Exchange in a System.” Cybernetica
1, no. 1 Ashby, W.R (1956) An
Introduction to Cybernetics
Ashwin, P (2015) Going global: Opportunities
and challenges for HE researchers, available
online at https://srheblog.com/2015/10/19/going-global-opportunities-and-challenges-for-he-researchers/
Barnett, R (2013) Imagining the University, London:Routledge
Donati, P; Archer, M (2015) The Relational Subject Cambridge: CUP
Gourlay, L. & Oliver, M. (2013) ‘Beyond
‘the social’: digital literacies as sociomaterial practice’, in Literacy in the Digital University: Critical
Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship & Technology, eds R. Goodfellow &
M. Lea, Routledge, London, pp. 79–94.
Kahn, P (2015) Critical perspectives on student
engagement as ‘what students do’, Presentation
to 2015 SRHE conference, available
online at https://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2015/abstracts/0138.pdf
Pawson, R; Tilley, N (2002) Realistic Evaluation New Delhi:Sage
Schutz, A (1960) Phenomenology of the Social World Northwestern University Press
Shannon, C; Weaver, W (1948) A Mathematical Theory of Communication University
of Illinois Press
Smith, C (2010) What is a
person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
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