The reductive seduction of other people’s problems

by | Monday, March 27, 2017

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems, Illustration by Punya Mishra

Anurag Behar forwarded an article: The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems, which I really think is a must-read for any of us involved in education or development. The points made in the article have particular resonance for us here at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College as we seek to connect our research and practice with schools and communities.

Below are some thoughts prompted by the article that I shared with my colleagues here at ASU, edited lightly for this posting, though I do recommend reading the entire article it for yourself.

First, the idea of “reductive seduction of other people’s problem,” which I take to mean that the further we are from an issue the easier it seems to solve, is a powerful idea. It is an idea we are familiar with, but it is good to have a phrase to put on it. We know this because we understand that context and perspective matter. This is why the innovation engine work we do is driven by the concerns of the community, or the schools or teachers. This is why we seek to bring all parties into the conversation into the process. This is why we seek to embed ourselves (either through our design work, or through the rethinking of the site coordinators roles) in the contexts we seek to work in. This means that…

… second, we need to think hard about our inclusiveness – and how we define the “other.” Many of us have been challenged by the “tone-deaf” nature of Betsy DeVoss’ comments about public education (wither K12 or higher ed) and the solutions she is seeking to support. I wonder how much of it is due to this process of “reductive seduction” of other people’s problems – the operative word here being “other” – having never been in these contexts, and never having truly understood it, the problem appears simple to solve.

This is akin to something Anurag said a few years ago at AERA regarding the role of data in assessment and evaluation of programs (and I am going to paraphrase him).

The need for data is proportional to the distance we have from the actual context, i.e. the further we are from the situation on the ground, the more we need data to help us understand. The closer we are, the deeper we are embedded, the more we understand nuance, the less the need for a certain kind of data, since we have a textured understanding of what is really happening.

I am not trying to make a political point here – but rather raising it as an issue that we need to be sensitive to. It is this distance we have to be wary about. Which leads to the …

… third point, the need for humility in our own plans and capacities. In this work that we are doing in the innovation engine (and I believe in it and am committed to it) we need to be sensitive that we do not fall into the same trap. That we do not become reductive in our thinking, that we not create that “other” who we can speaking glibly about. Our commitment to collaborative participatory design should never be forgotten. Specifically…

… and finally, there are three sentences from towards the end of the article that I want us to remember as we move forward with this work:

  • Don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity.
  • Don’t go because you want to do something virtuous. Go because you want to do something difficult.
  • Don’t go because you want to talk. Go because you want to listen.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article

Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article

Back in September I wrote a long-ish blog post about something that had bothered me for years and years about the canonical TPACK diagram. It had to do with how contextual knowledge was represented in the diagram, or rather how it was not represented in the diagram....

New TPACK book chapter

New TPACK book chapter

The  Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi, recently published a book titled “Resource Book on ICT Integrated Teacher Education.” Edited by Dr. Manas Ranjan Panigrahi it is available as an Open Educational Resource...

Youth participatory creativity in digital spaces

Youth participatory creativity in digital spaces

Ioana Literat is Assistant Professor in the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Associate Director of the Media & Social Change Lab (MASCLab). Her research focuses on the dynamics of...

Cleaning and coding Interviews with AI

Cleaning and coding Interviews with AI

I have previously written about how AI can possibly help with qualitative research AND how how AI has given me a superpower which is the ability to write computer programs. Well this post is an extension of both of these topics. To provide some context, for the past...

Distributed creativity

Re-Public: re•imagining democracy, an online journal focusing on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice, has a special issue devoted to Distributed Creativity and Design. This may be a useful resource for my Learning technology by design...

Happy 2010! Stop motion movie

I have had a lot of fun this year playing with video. Most of these experiments were done with my kids (nothing like combining work with pleasure). One of the things we had done last year was a stop motion new year's card. So we just HAD to create one this year as...

The font of truth i.e. the beauty of Baskerville

I have been a great fan of Baskerville, the font for a long time. I love the manner it looks on a page and most importantly I love its italic ampersand! Check it out below... isn't that beautiful. I remember setting my doctoral dissertation in Baskerville and...

Rethinking homework, some thoughts…

Shelly Blake-Plock over at TeachPaperLess has a great post about homework and how it can be structured to act as a "cliffhanger." As he says: These days, the homework I give isn't based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do 'at home' to reinforce...

Unconscious competence, continuing the dialogue

Ken Friedman, whose article I had used as the basis of my previous posting, From incompetence to mastery, the stages dropped me an email in response to my critique. To provide some context, (you can read my full post here) I had suggested in my posting that it may be...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *