Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Field, Part II: A Proposal for How to Use “Worked Examples” to Move Forward

Introduction

In Part I of this paper “How We Got Here,” (Gee 2009) I considered what the emerging field of work on digital media and learning (DMAL) is and how we, from different backgrounds and disciplines, came to this shared interest. I argued that a series of emerging fields, including the New Literacy Studies (NLS), Situated Cognition Studies, New Literacies Studies, and New Media Literacy Studies, are relevant both as formal literature and as influences “in the air” as people from different backgrounds meet, interact, and influence each other. These sorts of personal interactions will be as much a part of the history of DMAL as the formal literature. In fact, the way forward to more commonality, sharing, collaboration, and accumulated knowledge is not, I believe, through reading and citing of more formal literature, but rather by being more overt with each other in DMAL about our assumptions, influences, and approaches. It is to this matter that I now turn.

Part II: Worked Examples

In Social Linguistics and Literacies (1990/1997/2007) I attempted to get people to see something unitary in a body of diverse work and called it “the New Literacy Studies” (NLS). I did this by singling out specific cases of what I took to be and argued to be “prototypical” work in the area. I compared and juxtaposed these prototypical cases, hoping that people would then see them as examples of “one thing,” namely the NLS.

The prototypical cases I used were Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) work on class and racial differences in how families read books to their children; Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole’s (1981) work on literacy practices in Liberia, Africa; Brian Street’s (1984) work on literacy practices in Iran; Ron and Suzanne Scollon’s (1981) work (mentioned above) on Athabaskan views of school-based literacy compared to those of Anglo-Americans and Anglo-Canadians; Harvey Graff’s (1979) work on the history of literacy; and work that people like Sarah Michaels (1981), Courtney Cazden (1985), and I (Gee 1985) had done on the differences between black and white children’s talk at “sharing time” in early schooling.

What I did not do—could not do at the time—was get each of these people to explicate how and why they had carried out their work in the ways in which they had and how their approach compared and contrasted with the other cases I had taken as prototypical, cases from different disciplinary backgrounds. I did not get them to comment on how they viewed the other pieces of work I had singled out or to say how they would have engaged with such work from their own perspective.

I did, of course, try in my book to compare and contrast the different prototypical cases, but what was really needed—and is, in fact, rare in academics—is for different authors to explicate the foundations of their work in ways that compare and contrast these foundations with the foundations of other people’s related work. Such foundations are almost always taken for granted as part of the disciplinary background of people’s research and rarely directly confronted in comparison to other people’s different disciplinary foundations. While within a discipline—like anthropology, for instance—people will compare and contrast different approaches in the discipline (usually a new one against an old or traditional one), but people do this much less commonly across disciplines.

So, for instance, though it was clear to me that Ron and Suzanne Scollon would have had a great deal of interesting and important things to say about how to analyze Shirley Brice Heath’s data—and vice versa—this never was done. Academics rarely analyze each other’s data in ways that show how they would approach the same data from the perspectives of different disciplinary backgrounds and methodological tools.

Many of the people working on DMAL have roots in or have been influenced by the NLS, the New Literacies Studies, Situated Cognition, or the NMLS. However, people working on DMAL have their own disciplinary affiliations over and beyond these spheres of affiliation or influence.

Given the diverse backgrounds—in terms of movements and disciplines (e.g., educational technology, educational psychology, linguistics, ethnography, composition and rhetoric, media studies, communication, computer science, engineering, game design, and others)—of the people contributing to DMAL, what can or does give coherence to this emerging field? What are the commonalities (in thinking, language, assumptions, methods) that can form the basis for collaboration?

A movement that is an emerging field does not necessarily have to gain coherence and commonality by actually becoming a new discipline. That—becoming a discipline—has happened, of course, for example in cognitive science and neuroscience, both of which started as emerging interdisciplinary fields. But an emerging field can, perhaps, gain coherence and commonality without becoming a discipline. It can stay a field fed by diverse disciplines, but nonetheless come to share enough common thinking, language, assumptions, and methods—or, at least, come to a situation where everyone understands each other’s diverse thinking, language, assumptions, and methods—to gain coherence, commonality, and some degree of sustained stability in terms of which knowledge can accumulate.

Work in DMAL is, for the most part, at the stage of making plausibility arguments and offering limited proof-of-concept implementations. Nonetheless, these arguments and implementations now need to begin to converge on a wider set of shared criteria of validity and warrants for claims that can serve both as a foundation for collaboration and eventually for more formal standards in the field. Doing so has the potential to shape the speed at which the field grows by creating a kind of common ground against which ideas are developed.

Such a process of accelerating the growth of new focused areas of interdisciplinary study may be a necessity today. Global problems of climate change, poverty, over-population, energy crises, political instability, and cultural conflicts are fast reaching tipping points beyond which solutions will be severely limited or nonexistent (Friedman 2008). Today we must move faster than ever to engage in innovative problem solving around pressing issues—and education fit for an “at risk” global world in the 21st century is surely a pressing problem.

How, then, can we proceed in building this new field, especially in facilitating collaboration? I will suggest one way here; of course there are others. I will argue that we can take a clue from the literature on how other new fields have developed or how old fields have transformed themselves, especially the work of T. S. Kuhn (1970a,1970b). However, I do not want to enter here into the massive and now arcane controversies over Kuhn’s work, especially his term “paradigm” (e.g., Bird 2001; Kuhn 2000; Fuller 2001). Rather, my discussion here is inspired by a now classic essay that made use of Kuhn in a specific way, by Eliot Mishler (1990), who discussed what would constitute “validity” for yet another emerging field (a field that he called “inquiry research”).

Exemplars

What I took from Mishler’s essay and my own reading of Kuhn is that for a new field, or a new approach in an established field, to gain traction and coherence it is necessary for certain examples of work—such as analyses of data, applications of methods, theory building, or inferencing from theories—to come to be seen as “shared exemplars” of what counts as “good work” or “accepted work” in the emerging field or approach.

People may first come to share an appreciation for these exemplars as “good work” before they can articulate exactly why this is so. Indeed, such articulation by members of the emerging field or approach, as well as debate over what pieces of work constitute such exemplars, is one way in which shared theories, methods, language, models, and even values, can emerge. What I was trying to do in Sociolinguistics and Literacies for the NLS was to point to what I and others thought were such exemplars. To the extent that others come to agree or propose other exemplars—as, indeed, many did in that case—the field emerges.

Of course such exemplars arise historically through the normal give and take of academic research taking place at the borders of different disciplines. What is important about such exemplars to an emerging field is that they focus debate in such a way that people, via that debate, come to articulate and share a common set of standards and values. These standards and values in turn form the foundation of the new field.

Exemplars normally arise naturally in the course of work in an emerging field, if they arise at all. What I want to propose here is that we could, in a sense, make a “game” (albeit a serious one) out of exemplars. Rather than waiting for the natural process to take its course, we could create “play exemplars” that we can use as tools for thought and debate. We could “bid” to have certain pieces of work accepted as exemplars and see if such bids—in comparison and contrast to others—began to energize debate, collaboration, and progress in the field. One way such bidding could occur would be in a sort of “market” where contributors to DMAL listed exemplars they considered central to their vision of the field or an aspect of it. In turn, people could debate their different lists, clarifying how and why they viewed certain sorts of work or approaches potentially central for progress.

To make clear what I mean by “play exemplars,” consider another notion that is, in some ways, a polar opposite of the sorts of exemplars that have historically formed new fields, namely “worked examples” (Atkinson, Derry, Renkl, and Wortham 2000). Worked examples are used commonly to teach things like science and math, as well as other subjects. In a worked example, an “expert” takes a well-formed problem and public displayers for learners how that problem is approached, thought about, worked over, and solved.

The worked example is meant to model for newcomers how an expert thinks, values, and acts in a given and well-established domain. In turn, newcomers can then try this for themselves and perhaps eventually find novel ways to solve problems in the domain as they “play” with various modeled approaches, since the model can also serve as a reference point from which to try variations.

Worked examples do not display just the individual thought of the expert. Rather, they exemplify the conventions of a domain, discipline, or field—the ways people in the area approach problems, how they recruit theories, and how they choose to continue when they face difficulties and dilemmas. Thus, worked examples are not associated with emerging fields, fields still looking for exemplars that can serve as flags for new members of the emerging field to salute; they are associated with established fields.

So exemplars are things that eventually come to be seen as exemplary forms of work for a new (and, then later, well-established field). Worked examples are teaching devices used with students studying well-established areas. At first, then, the two types of examples seem quite different. But here is where they connect: exemplars come, in a way, later in history, to be seen as “worked examples” that serve as foundations for the field, not just for newcomers, but for full members (Kuhn 1970b, p. 187). Once the new field is established, exemplars are both historically founding moments and, in the present, core examples of what counts as central and defining work in the field.

In a sense, exemplars, as they historically engendered the discussions and debates that led to their acceptance as exemplars, served in the process as proposed worked examples for a field that did not yet exist. They were proposed worked examples (where the commentary on them was not just from their authors, but from debates in the emerging field) not for “students” but for experts trying to build a new field in which there were, as yet, no real experts. This is why, once a field is well established, teachers often use exemplary work in the field as worked examples for new students, displaying the thinking of the exemplar’s author (thinking that is often discovered via historical research and that was, in actuality, a product of debate) as now “the field’s” thinking.

Let me take a now classic example of what was once a proposed exemplar turning into fodder for common worked examples for students. Thomas Kuhn (1970a) famously discussed how Galileo’s ideas about motion introduced a new “paradigm” into physics. In people’s everyday experience, an object set in motion always comes to a halt. Aristotle argued that this was a fundamental property of nature: For motion to be sustained, an object must continue to be pushed.

Galileo proposed that we always observe objects coming to a halt simply because some friction is always present. Galileo then proposed that without any friction to slow it down, an object in motion’s inherent tendency is to maintain its speed without the application of any additional force. This bold idea about motion eventually reorganized physics and came to be seen as an exemplar of what constituted modern physics as a discipline (and distinguished it from earlier physics). Today, of course, Galileo’s ideas about force and motion are the common worked examples in high school physics classes.

I propose that scholars and practitioners in the emerging field of DMAL offer from their own work or the work of others “play exemplars” (proposals about what an exemplar might look like). They would, in turn, work these examples up as one might work up examples for students (when in reality the “students” here are scholars trying to build the emerging field). They would display publically their thinking about how and why they did what they did and why it might serve as a guide for future work. This overt commentary on the example—the working of it—would initially be from the author of the proposed exemplar, but would then engender public debate, discussion, and annotation from others, as well as response from the author. This public debate would ultimately become a sort of communal public working of the example.

I am, then, proposing a new sense of and a new use for worked examples: namely, as attempts to imagine exemplars for a new field and ways to create collaboration and debate around such proposed exemplars, in service of hastening actual exemplars and the growth of the field. Thus, scholars attempting to build the new field of DMAL would publically display their ways of valuing and thinking about specific problems as suggestions about what might be an exemplar or an aspect of an exemplar for the field. They would do this to engender debate about what exemplars in the area might come to look like and, in turn, what shape the field might take. They would do this, too, to encourage collaboration that leads to new worked examples—new proposals about what exemplars might look like—that are based on more shared criteria.

Thus, it is almost as if I am proposing a game. Rather than wait however long it takes for history to tell us what the exemplars of a new field should be (if, indeed, they ever emerge), we will propose what they might look like. (For a good start see Sasha Barab’s illuminating beginning “worked examples” using his Quest Atlantis work—see, for example, Barab, Zuiker, Warren, Hickey, Ingram-Goble, Kwon, Kouper, & Herring 2007—with commentary from others: http://inkido.indiana.edu/barab_we/.) The first proposals will, of course, be a bit too rooted in our own disciplines and backgrounds, but the hope is that discussion, debate, and collaboration will lead to further proposals that move towards shared theories, languages, and models of interventions. We need not wait, as well, for full blown exemplars to show up published in well-respected journals, since transformative work in new fields or old ones often shows up at the margins of established areas, sometimes in forms rejected by established authorities, before it redefines what counts as a “center.”

Now it may seem that offering a worked example of a proposed exemplar is a pretty big task. But that is only so if we take exemplars to be always “big” things, like whole theories. But they need not be big. An exemplar—and, too, the proposed play exemplars worked over as worked examples for others to work over themselves—can be “small.” It can be one application or aspect of a method or a theory, a bit of analysis, a way of combining several ideas from different disciplines, or a “move” in a proposed research project or learning intervention. The key is to propose and explicitly comment on some way of working, large or small, that you think might become a shared element—maybe after much debate and transformation—of the new field.

The point is to publically exemplify how experts might talk about this element if and when any experts actually arrive in the new field. The purpose is not to “win” (to have your work actually become an exemplar—history will take care of that for better or worse), but, in fact, to “lose”―to see your proposed exemplar so worked over by the community that it becomes fodder for collaboration that, in the end, has no one author and becomes not “you” but a new field of endeavor.

I propose that we pretend we are experts in a field that as of yet has none. I propose that we treat each other as students working over problems as if they are well established even if they are not, so we actually know concretely what each other think and value, as a starting point, not a finished point. Then we can imagine together new ways to think and work and, if successful, actually end up with exemplars for a new field. These exemplars, if the field ever emerges, will, in turn, be used as worked examples for new students in the field. Maybe this “game” will accelerate the growth of a new field, but it will be a fine enough outcome if it serves merely to create collaboration and the emergence of common ground through interaction and debate. and not just through the fiats of funders and established disciplinary journals.

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