Irreconcilable Authority

Cognitive Theory, Culture, and Technology in the Twenty-First Century Classroom

Ira David Socol

Michigan State University – College of Education

“…effective education is always jeopardy either in the culture at large or with

constituencies more dedicated to maintaining a status quo than to fostering flexibility.” –
Jerome Bruner

At first it seemed remarkable to me, as I spent this autumn reading article after article

relating to cognition, how rarely culture was mentioned. Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark in

their 2006 Educational Psychologist article attacking constructivist teaching never use

the word.1 Carnegie Mellon University's John R. Anderson writes a book on Cognitive

Psychology and Its Implications without using the word.2 Spiro, Couison, Feitovich, and

Anderson do not use the word in their 1988 description of Cognitive Flexibility Theory:

Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains.3 The more I looked, the more

I found a similar omission. In the field of education, and particularly U.S. education,

cognition is treated as a science which transcends the impact of culture on the human

brain. But then I re-thought this, and found myself unsurprised. In this view this science

seems to adhere closely to the generalized attitude in education that cultural dynamics are

less important than other influences on learning – that a classroom can be essentially the

same type of architectural construct no matter what continent – that educators may be

trained in the United States for service in Kenya, Trinidad, or Malaysia – that a student in

a French-speaking neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York should be following the same

general curricular schedule as a student in the monoculture of Zeeland, Michigan, or a

student in the wealthy walled communities of Boca Raton, Florida.

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In the fields of anthropology and psychology there is a differing stream of thought.

"People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and

of the interdependence of these," Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama wrote in

1991. "These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of

individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation."4

What might this all mean for cognition in education? How do we look at the ways these

different "construals" control what occurs in the classroom? At how they impact what

occurs in every formalized learning environment? Or, indeed, how they effect what

different parts of increasingly diverse cultures "know"? This is vital not simply because

of racial, ethnic, religious, and lingual diversity, but because in periods of rapid change –

such as this moment in time, different generations can become separate cultures, seeing

the world in such significantly different ways that the very acts of cognition may no

longer be mutually understandable. In schools, where one generation is "educated" by

another, a communications gap of this sort can make almost everything impossible.

There is a vast body of literature devoted to the differences in cognition and in learning

regarding racial identity in the United States, especially as it relates to the understood

ways of passing on information. In Michelle Foster's 1992 article, Sociolinguistics and

the African-American Community: Implications for Literacy, she relates:

 Ira Socol – p. 3
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"Several separate but related studies of sharing time undertaken

in urban classrooms in east and west coast cities have revealed

differences in the narrative styles of Black and White children.

Not only have researchers documented distinct organizational,

stylistic, and thematic differences in the sharing time narratives

of Black and White children, but, more importantly, they have

noted that the two narrative styles evoked differential responses

from teachers. Whereas White children tended to tell short,

topic-centered narratives, stories that were tightly organized,

with only one temporal marker, Black children, usually girls,

were more likely to tell longer, more elaborate narratives

consisting of a series of episodes linked by several temporal

markers (Cazden, 1988; Michaels, 1981).

"The researchers likened the narratives of White children to a

lecture demonstration, a presentation of factual information

about an object or event, with children using this style often

showing objects to support their narratives. The stories of

African-American students, on the other hand, resembled

performed narratives, with stylistic features--gestures,

dialogue, sound effects, asides, repetitions, shifts in verb tenses

for emphasis-similar to those in a dramatic stage performance

(Foster, 1982; Michaels & Foster, 1985)."5

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Her article, and many others, goes on to detail the differences inherent in telling and

understanding that separate African-American students from their schools. A failure to

employ, "a culturally congruent approach to teaching" (King, J.E. 1991, King, S.H. 1993)

that leads to what is then described as a "failure to learn" (King, 1991).

In this paper, however, it is not my intent to wade into that racially charged debate.

Rather, my hope is to use this cultural split to illustrate another. For the disconnect that

Foster describes leads me to the question of authority in cognition, which then leads me

into the rapidly expanding gulf between students and schools engendered by the current

cultural shifts in technology.

When Foster describes the comparison of white children's storytelling to "a lecture

demonstration, a presentation of factual information about an object or event, with

children using this style often showing objects to support their narratives," and African-

American students using, "performed narratives, with stylistic features--gestures,

dialogue, sound effects, asides, repetitions, shifts in verb tenses for emphasis-similar to

those in a dramatic stage performance," she is detailing how the transmission system of

any information is altered cognitively by the implied authority it generates with its

audience.

The social/cultural cognitive impact of this irreconcilable authority makes all cognitive

studies as applied to education problematical. "Instead of beginning with an analysis of

 Ira Socol – p. 5
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social processes and seeking to determine how they might give rise to individual mental

functioning, we tend to treat social processes as if they were a copy of individual

functioning," said Wertsch and Rupert in 1993.6 "To overcome this tendency, it will be

essential to view social processes from a different perspective… Instead of approaching

the analysis of social processes as if they exist solely in the service of individuals'

cognitive functioning, it is essential to take into account the ways in which they reflect

and create sociocultural settings… by starting with the assumption that the social

dimension of consciousness is primary, we believe that the very definition of mental

functioning in the individual may be reformulated in some essential ways."

In 1983 Patrick Wilson argued, "All that people know of the world beyond the narrow

range of their own lives is what others have told them. However, people do not count all

hearsay as equally reliable; only those who are deemed to “know what they are talking

about” become cognitive authorities."7 The question of who is deemed to "“know what

they are talking about” becoming the essential question.

Soo Young Rieh writes about some of the ways Wilson sees cognitive authority as being

formed:

"Wilson discusses various external tests for recognizing a

text’s cognitive authority. The first consideration is recognition

of authorship: “We can trust a text if it is the work of an

 Ira Socol – p. 6
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individual or group of individuals whom we can trust” (p. 166).

Wilson states that personal cognitive authority involves only

“present reputation and accomplishments up to now” (p. 167).

The second consideration is that cognitive authority can be

associated with a publisher: a publishing house, a single

journal, publication sponsorship, and published reviews, all can

acquire this authority. The third consideration is found in

document type. For example, a standard dictionary has

authority in its own right; people do not concern themselves

about the names of compilers in reference books. The fourth

and final consideration is the recognition of a text’s contents as

plausible or implausible and bestows or withholds authority

accordingly. Wilson is particularly concerned with the instant

recognition: “a text usually has one chance to capture our

attention; reading a few words of it may be enough to

discourage us from continuing on to reading the whole thing”

(p. 169). Wilson considers cognitive authority as one of the

quality control components in information retrieval."8

For this moment let us focus on Wilson's second and third considerations, "publisher" and

"document type," and link those to these thoughts of Carol Ann K. Winkler, a master of

library science working in a Missouri high school, as she writes about Wikipedia in the

journal Learning and Leading with Technology in 2005: " Insisting than an author take
 Ira Socol – p. 7
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responsibility with his name for what he writes is society's time-tested deterrent to the

distribution of bad information. Authors expand their knowledge and perfect their writing

to heighten their reputations. Then, society rewards them by according increased value to

what information they provide. But if they provide wrong information, they have to

accept the responsibility as well. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is entirely anonymous.

There is no responsibility. There is no deterrent to publishing bad information. And so by

intentional design, the information in Wikipedia is never authoritative."9

For Ms. Winkler, who goes on to say, "it’s better to just skip Wikipedia and go straight to

the stable authoritative resources," cognitive authority lies in the stability of print and a

reliance on publisher. She also inherently relies on the philosophies of Adam Smith and

American capitalism, in that it is individual "profit" which will insure that both author

and publisher are "accurate." Wikipedia, though, relies on the theories of John Nash – the

Nash Equilibrium - for cognitive authority. It is based on the concept that it is in the best

interests of both individuals and society as a whole for Wikipedia to be as accurate and

up-to-date as possible, and that thus, following the precepts of chaos theory, that it will

be. Wikipedia makes another assumption, an assumption perhaps even more antithetical

to Ms. Winkler's thinking than the challenge to Smithian economics. Wikipedia assumes

that knowledge is not restricted to either those credentialed or those connected, that truths

may be held by those who would never be asked to write a Britannica article.

This sounds unfair. Many who think like Ms. Winkler would argue that they never meant

anything like that – they simply will restrict student access to the "proven" (the
 Ira Socol – p. 8
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credentialed and connected) to protect students from information that may be wrong and

thus, as Ms. Winkler says, "dangerous,"10 but the result is the same. Information

restricted to the "certain" will always be older and of a more conservative nature than

information that is more "open." It thus might be more "dangerous" in some views of the

world than the reverse.

Consider two situations from human history: Would it make sense for early humans to

have relied on a few authority figures to tell them about dangers to the community? Or

was it better if anyone had the right to yell, "tiger!" Does it make sense now for weather

or traffic reporters to rely solely on National Weather Service or State Police reports or to

accept mobile phone calls from people witnessing a tornado or a major accident? Now

consider these academic questions: If a student were to consult a source regarding the

nation of Crna Gora – would they be better off with an "authoritative" print encyclopedia

from 2003 or Wikipedia? If a student were to consult a source regarding Newtonian

Physics – would they be better off with a standard high school text which implied that

this was actually the way the universe works or with Wikipedia which discusses the

validity of classical mechanics and where the "discussion" tab contains a rather lengthy

debate as to where Einstein's Relativity Theory belongs in the canon of physics? Which is

"accurate"? Which might be "dangerous"?

The problem here is that "which is which" is entirely dependent on the image of authority

in the recipient culture. In ancient Greece the traveling dramatic troupe would have held

the authoritative history. In many Middle American communities the local minister might
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hold this – far above any printed source. In the American White House in 2003 the

evidence of hundreds of "experts" was completely discounted not because they lacked

credentials or information from "authoritative sources" but because they failed to share a

visionary world view. On university campuses across the United States research and

opinion are routinely rejected because it is presented in a format inconsistent with time-

honored tradition.

More to the point, if I believe, through my own culturally accepted folksonomy (Vander

Wal, 2004) that Wikipedia provides me with "better" information than the Britannica or

the school textbook, and the school believes the opposite, we have reached a point of

irreconcilable authorities – in which the mismatch of belief structures necessary for the

transmission of information becomes impossible.

Recently Laurence Musgrove, an associate professor of English at Chicago's Saint Xavier

University, wrote on Inside Higher Ed about a digital book reader, "a wireless and

portable handheld device designed to make books instantly accessible. It’s actually a

graven image. A false gadget god engineered in the service of efficient data transfer and

consumer credit. Don’t be fooled, Kindle is no innocent tool. It’s not a gift that keeps on

giving. It holds a charge so it can keep on charging."11 This professor vehemently

opposes the "document type," which he blames for many sins: "Our learning culture is

awash in technology so that information can be delivered in the blink of an eye at any

time of the day or night. It’s true that more information is flowing, but it doesn’t always

result in more knowing. In this hypersphere, it may be that students are reading and
 Ira Socol – p. 10
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writing more than ever before. But practice doesn’t make perfect. It could just as easily

wear us down as lift us up."12 He is not unusual. Professor Samuel Freedman of

Columbia University wrote in The New York Times, "All the advances schools and

colleges have made to supposedly enhance learning — supplying students with laptops,

equipping computer labs, creating wireless networks — have instead enabled distraction.

Perhaps attendance records should include a new category: present but otherwise

engaged."13 Both of these academics find themselves at war with a technology. And in

that war they dismiss that which arrives via the technology as at least less authoritative if

not fully unreliable. This has nothing to do with either content or the ability of

undergraduate students to be distracted in classes, rather it is all about one culture group

finding themselves lost within another culture. As Kimber, Pillay, and Richards said in

2002: "Views of literacy practices, tied to emerging technologies of information and

communication, challenge the creativity of educators in envisioning new ways of utilising

them (Leu & Kinzer, 2000). In many cases, these thoughts are alarmist to teachers who

themselves have experienced and been trained in industrial age approaches and attitudes

to learning. This accelerating period of change represents an identity crisis for these

teachers..."14

This is not new. Plato struggled with the idea of literacy. The printed books of Gutenberg

threatened the linked imagery and text of the scribes. Kimber, Pillay, and Richards again,

"Resistance to any new form of literacy, regardless of historical period, is tied to fear of

the ‘new’ supplanting the ‘old’ where dominant discourses have held supremacy and

established credence for valued literacy practices of the day. Plato and Socrates decried
 Ira Socol – p. 11
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the supplanting of rhetoric by written texts as destructive of the immediacy of their highly

revered oral tradition. The medieval scribes who created the beautifully embellished

illuminated manuscripts fiercely opposed the threat of Gutenberg’s printing press to their

religious omniscience. In both these cases, resistance was linked to the preservation of

the authority of the oral or written text, and the sanctity of the social practices nesting

around those texts."15 Not new, still entirely cultural.

Learning, whether through Schema Theory or Cognitive Flexibility Theory or simply

through the simplest idea of transmission, requires that learner and source share similar

notions of authority, and share similar cultural understandings of that authority. "[W]e

frequently lose sight of Vygotsky's claim about the primacy of the social dimension of

mental functioning,"16 Wertsch and Rupert note, and when we do that we fail to

understand why our cognitive theories get us no closer to success in the classroom. In the

contemporary classroom "teachers" – residents of an "ink on paper" culture in which the

letters "Ph.D." spell authority (once bound into a book) – collide with students who live

in a digital culture which prizes the community cognition born of social networking and

the immediacy of information. As much as a member of the "teacher" culture might

doubt the validity of a Homeric drama performed solely from memory (and

"personalized" for each town it is presented in), the students in the classroom will doubt

the continuing validity of a text written long enough ago to have been printed, bound, and

shipped, and which contains no active supporting links.

 Ira Socol – p. 12
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Research to date struggles with this notion, whether trying to discover new methods of

applying the same "old European" standards of authority (Fritch and Cromwell, 2001) or

through personal justification (McKenzie, 2003). But perhaps more important is to ask

the question, what is the purpose of education? Is it to serve the teacher or to serve the

learner?

If the goal is to serve the teacher – that is, to serve the age old desire for social

reproduction – we can continue to debate this notion of differing authorities and continue

to hunt for ways to "re-engage" a new culture (generation) with the old forms of literacy.

If the goal is to serve the learner – that is, to provide the learner with ways to engage their

world effectively – we must instead focus on how to bring that which we deem "essential

knowledge" into an authority system our students can recognize. "A second important

component of sociocultural theory is the concept of mediation—that is, the notion that all

human activity is mediated by tools or signs (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). From this

perspective, the incorporation of mediational means—whether they be computers,

writing, or language itself—does not simply facilitate action that could have occurred

without them, but rather, by being included in the process of behaviour, alters the entire

flow and structure of mental functions." Mark Warschauer wrote in Literacy and

technology: Bridging the divide. If this is true, the first simple admission must be that

technology has changed, culture has changed, and thus, cognition has changed and the

demands for cognitive authority have changed. The second simple step is to accept that,

and to decide to work within this new cognitive environment.

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These changes have been occurring for generations, while schools have remained

essentially unchanged. If you take a student at the start of American industrial age

education – in the mid-19th Century – validity (reality, truth) was indeed represented by

two sources – the speech of those older and more educated, and printed books with text

and a few engravings. Even then there were threats to that order, though. Newspapers,

powered by the telegraph, the rotary press, and wood-pulp-based paper were rapidly

gaining popularity, carrying more immediate information than books could, something

crucially demonstrated during the Mexican and Civil Wars. Now books could only be

depended on for a type of static knowledge, and in any community with a newspaper

knowledge was no longer confined to those who had attended universities. With the Civil

War came distributed photography, and the cognitive authority of the engraving faded.

The cyclorama was embraced as a dramatic way of explaining history that did not rely on

text.17 But very soon those to technologies were themselves threatened by motion

pictures. By 1898 Americans were so used to the moving picture as a representation of

reality that when the Edison and Biograph companies could not actually film the battles

they resorted to faking them for film (most famously the bathtub-filmed The Battle of

Manila Bay) in order to provide the American public with a believable vision of the

Spanish-American War.18 As technology moved what was accepted as truth continued to

move. Americans of a certain age know there memories of World War II predominantly

through radio, with its immediate information and sonic background from across the

globe. A later generation understands the Kennedy assassination through both "official"

sources (Walter Cronkite) and the first great equivalent of a web-based document, the

Zapruder film (41 years earlier The New York Times had succeeded where all other New
 Ira Socol – p. 14
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York newspapers had failed by believing a young telegraph operator – David Sarnoff –

over the authoritative sources regarding the RMS Titanic, so there was already a long

history of this). If you simply consider fictional film, where "black and white" once

conveyed authority and accuracy (from the Italian neo-realist films beginning with Open

City), the grainy hand-held color of Vietnam films soon took over that position (see JFK).

Today, the film In the Valley of Elah uses low-resolution jpeg to demonstrate this.

Filmmakers, in order to be successful, understand the changing nature of the unconscious

triggers that say, "authority." Can schools make the same kinds of decisions?

Finding a research agenda

Columbia's Dr. Freedman attacks complaints about the “teacher-centered lesson”19 from

his New York Times column. And Kirschner, et al, declare that, "based on our current

knowledge of human cognitive architecture, minimally guided instruction is likely to be

ineffective."20 Both are chasing the wrong targets. In the former case an educator sees his

role as purely colonial, one culture imposing its understanding not just of facts, but of the

idea of knowledge itself, on another culture. In the latter there is a belief that education

can simply be reduced to the mechanics of a science – if this technique is applied the

maximum amount of knowledge will be transmitted.

But if Vygotsky was right about "the primacy of the social dimension of mental

functioning," and right again about cultural and technological changes "alter[ing] the

entire flow and structure of mental functions," then the battles of those above have
 Ira Socol – p. 15
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already been fought, and lost. Just as we cannot bring education back to where it was

before literacy appeared, we should not be investing in forcing antiquated notions of

cognitive authority on students who will need to function in a future driven by a radically

different cognitive environment.

Thus the questions have to become: How do we create communal cognitive environments

in schools which can both rely on and challenge the development of peer authority? How

do we help students to understand the authority-creation process as they face a world in

which document form, publisher nature, and authoritorial credentials will be constantly

changing? How do we allow students to understand their position in what is becoming a

global mesh of chains of cognitive authority? And how do we begin to design systems

which allow media to be simply converted into a knowledge transmission structure that

works effectively with our culture? Investigating any of these will require that we re-

think every bit of technology in our schools, from the architecture of the room to the

furniture to the devices which carry text. Investigating any of these will require that we

challenge every part of the system that is the school, from the schedule to the role of the

teacher, to the notions of subjects and grades.

These are not easy studies to imagine, much less to complete. They will require real risk,

perhaps to students as much as to researchers. Most of all they will require an acceptance

of the fact that the world has changed so radically that the two-hundred year old

structures of education no longer meet the cognitive requirements of today's humans in

 Ira Socol – p. 16
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any meaningful ways. And an acceptance of the fact that if we continue to train our

children for the world of our past, we will be doing incalculable harm.

1
Kirschner, P.Sweller‌, J. and Clark, R. Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An
Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based
Teaching. Educational Psychologist. 2006, Vol. 41, No. 2, Pages 75-86
2
Anderson, J. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. 2004. Worth Publishers, New York, NY.
3
Spiro, R. Coulson, R. Feltovich, P. Anderson, D. Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge
Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains. University of Illinois at Urbana. 1988.
4
Markus, H.R. and Kitayama, S. Culture and the Self. Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and
Motivation. Psychological Review. American Psychological Association. 1991, Vol. 98, No. 2, p.224
5
Foster, M. Sociolinguistics and the African-American Community: Implications for Literacy. Theory into
Practice, Vol. 31, No. 4, Literacy and the African-American Learner (Autumn, 1992), pp. 304
6
Wertsch, J. and Rupert, L. The Authority of Cultural Tools in a Sociocultural Approach to Mediated
Agency. Cognition and Instruction 1993, Vol. 11, No. 3&4, p229
7
Rieh, S. Y. Cognitive Authority. Paper at the University of Michigan. 2004 p1
http://www.si.umich.edu/rieh/papers/rieh_IBTheory.pdf
8
Ibid: p2
9
Winkler, C.A. Point/Counterpoint Are Wikis Worth the Time? Learning and Leading with Technology.
December/January 2005-2006 p. 6-7. International Society for Technology in Education.
10
Ibid: p6
11
Musgrove, Laurence. Blind, Deaf, and Dumb. Views. Inside Higher Ed. December 3, 2007
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/12/03/musgrove
12
Ibid.
13
Freedman, S. New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology. On Education. The New York Times.
November 7, 2007
14
Kimber, K. Pillay, H. and Richards, C. Reclaiming Teacher Agency in a Student-Centred Digital World.
2002. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 30(2):p. 156
15
Ibid: p.161
16
Wertsch, J. and Rupert, L. Op cit. p.229.
17
Roadside Georgia, The Cyclorama: http://roadsidegeorgia.com/site/cyclorama.html
18
George Mason University Communication Department. Film and the Spanish American War.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/war/recep1.htm
19
Freedman, S. Op. Cit.
20
Kirschner, P.Sweller‌, J. and Clark, R. Op. Cit. p.76

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CEP 931 Fall 2007

Foster, M. Sociolinguistics and the African-American Community: Implications for

Literacy. Theory into Practice, Vol. 31, No. 4, Literacy and the African-American
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CEP 931 Fall 2007

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