​Chapter Review: Designing Learning for diverse classrooms by Paul Dufficy; Chapter one.

​Designing Learning for diverse classrooms by Paul Dufficy (Newtown, PETAA, 2006)
​
Chapter one: Learning at home and at school

In chapter one Dufficy makes several astute observations about education. His keenest insight is, that there is often a completely different way of teaching children out of school from how they are taught in the classroom. The contrast is painted starkly.

In teaching a small child how to play peekaboo, parents begin by doing everything for the child, from moving the child’s arms and hands, to hiding and then revealing themselves. All the while the child is not moving themselves at all. The child is simply following the parent with his/her eyes. The parent is highly relational, showing significant enthusiasm, and engages in a great deal of direct and personal eye contact.

This, however, slowly changes as the child begins to take up more of the game’s actions and activities. The parents are scaffolding the child’s learning, extending them beyond their present abilities by being there with them in an incredibly hands-on way. Yet as the child begins to independently perform various parts of the game, the scaffolding for those parts falls away. The parent moves on towards the development of another aspect of the game with the child until eventually the child is doing it all on his/her own.

Dufficy is introducing the reader to teaching that is proleptic in orientation. In a learning environment prolepsis is where the educator presupposes the learning outcome in the learner as a precondition for creating that very learning outcome. His clearest example of this is that of children learning how to play football/soccer by actually playing it. But it is also evident in how he describes the process of learning how to play peekaboo.

Yet Dufficy contrasts all this to the classroom teaching culture that has developed. Much of the above way of learning is missing from classrooms. The highly relational approach. The scaffolding that allows the learner to complete a task in a way that moves towards independence in that task. The authentic communication that can happen in the learning environment.

Dufficy does not write off all current classroom teaching. He is very gentle in his critique, but he does critique. Introducing the IRF educational discourse (Initiation by the teacher; Response by the child; Follow up with evaluation by the teacher) as the traditional educational pathway of the classroom, he suggests ways in which it can be strengthened to be more of an authentic moment of communication.  With examples of how the IRF methodology can be done both well and poorly, he offers suggestions for settings where it is most useful in effective classroom teaching.

As I read on in Dufficy’s book, I am looking forward to learning more about creating a teaching environment with these authentic moments of communication are the norm between teacher and learner, and where both are participants in the learning environment. I wonder how what Dufficy will say is relevant outside of the western educational system, especially where the learning at home is not in a culturally western environment. But I especially resonated with this concluding comment:

I consider [building trust] to be the most important element in any talk about some authentic connection between the world of the child and that of the school. With trust, life-worlds are shared in classrooms, viewpoints are both expected and supported, courage is summoned to pose questions, disagree and enter the wider social conversation on the issue at hand, and, finally, patterns of talk might come to be seen for the role they can play, including the IRF pattern. (Page 13)

Simon van der Wel

---