Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions

Abstract

This article presents Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions (LTCA), a framework for understanding learning as a communicative process that integrates objectivist, contextualist, and relativist views of knowledge. Drawing on Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, the framework argues that learners and instructors encounter objective, social, and subjective worlds concurrently rather than as separate instructional domains. LTCA identifies strategic, constative, normative, and dramaturgical actions as necessary forms of classroom communication that support teaching, assessment, and instructional design. Strategic actions convey directions and accepted knowledge, constative actions allow claims to be challenged through discourse, normative actions establish shared rules, and dramaturgical actions support personal expression and identity. Together, these communicative forms provide a holistic account of how learners make meaning, test claims, and develop shared understanding in educational settings.

Introduction

This article begins with the claim that current theoretical frameworks in education artificially splinter the holistic experiences of teaching and learning. While perhaps oversimplified, the main challenge for us as researchers, theorists, and practitioners is that the three main driving perspectives create false, unproductive distinctions. Such distinctions are often overly restrictive and separate theorists and researchers from how teachers and learners encounter educational experiences: the objective, subjective, and relative realms impacting them all at once. This is especially true in the development of instruction, curriculum, and design of research questions. In our field, it is common to view learning models as valid only if they are internally and externally consistent within a single epistemic and ontological frame. The disparate views of what makes up reality, truth, and knowledge and how we may know these concepts bring stakeholders in educational settings into conflict about the practices of teaching and learning. For the purposes of this article, we frame our views in the context of the social and political sciences as depicted by Bernstein (1976, 1983) and the constructivist educational system language of Prawat and Floden (1994).

For example, many who take their perspective from the empiricist, Positivist, or objectivist epistemic stance, claim truth and knowledge exist separately from the minds that perceive them and they may be fully understood through the senses (Hollis, 1994).

Therefore, learners may read, observe, hear, or use other acquisitive means to know what is true and real as given them by a teacher, school system, and larger state and federal political systems. According to this view, researchers may only know whether learning occurred and teaching was successful through objective assessments that ask students to repeat this knowledge from memory. We refer to the empiricist, Positivist, or objectivist epistemic stances using Bernstein’s (1983) term “objectivist,” in that there is an objective reality that we can know through our senses. This is not Ayn Rand’s big “O” Objectivism and should not be viewed as such.

This objectivist view is in conflict with the contextualist or social constructivist that believes that while an objective reality exists (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), our limited senses and cognitive capacity restrict our understanding of truth, knowledge, or reality. For the remainder of this article, we will refer to this as the contextualist position.

It has been proposed that it is only through discourse with others that we may assent to some approximation of truth and knowledge that has emerged through social negotiation and agreement among a group of participants in the process of learning (Savery & Duffy, 1995) Further, the role of the instructor is that of facilitator and coach rather than provider of objective truths and knowledge to be memorized. For researchers, this makes the use of objective learning assessments invalid as the blunt instruments available to them for perceiving what is true or real privilege only one view of truth. While this has been described by Bernstein (1976) as one of the main goals of the Western philosophical enterprise, many constructivists reject this as a valid goal for educational research and theory. Further, this contextualist view challenges the idea that research can generalize beyond the sample from which it was drawn, because each new community in which confirmatory research is conducted is likely to be constructed of different social ideas about what constitutes truth or knowledge.

Finally, the relativist views all truth and knowledge as individually constructed by the individual lack of transfer from one person to the next. As Hollis (1994) describes, it is the problem of “other minds (p. 241),” which states that we can never know what truth or reality is for each individual; therefore, there is no universal truth. This makes learning and teaching challenging as it requires the instructor to develop personalized instruction for each individual student. Such an approach is a time-consuming affair, reducing the ability of schools to warehouse children. It further demands of the school or district low student-instructor ratios in order to meet the demands of the individual learner. Research from this perspective is thus completely relative to the individual and lacks any attempt to transfer. Instead, outcomes of such research often involve telling the stories of the learners in hopes of capturing their narrow truth, as it exists during the short window of time during which it remains true for that student. Thus, their personal experience can only be understood relative to the experiences of all other learners. Figure 1 presents an approximation of the current view:

Long description.

The figure shows objectivist and contextualist perspectives above a horizontal dividing line and a relativist perspective below it. The objectivist perspective is represented by a filled black oval, indicating an objective reality that can be known. The contextualist perspective is represented by a large gray oval with a small black spot, indicating that objective reality exists but that people can know only a small portion of it through social and contextual experience. The relativist perspective is represented by a white oval with a small pointer and text indicating that no objective reality or truth exists outside individual experience.

In the objectivist (black) and contextualist (gray) views at the top of the figure, there is an objective reality, truth, and knowledge. Contrary to the objectivist view that we can know all reality through our senses, contextualists believe that we can only know a small part of any of these at any given time as indicated by the small black spot in the larger field of gray that is hidden from the mind. Reality, truth, and knowledge are largely socially constructed and culturally bound to the context in which participants in learning build that reality and its corresponding knowledge. The relativist (white) views all truth, reality, and knowledge as relative to each individual mind; each is constructed and valid only for that mind.

The Dilemma

We claim that this current view of knowledge fails to comprehend the holistic nature of reality and knowledge. We claim that instructors and learners do not experience the objective world separate from the subjective or internal/relative cognitive states. From a review of case studies and qualitative research, it is clear that they instead experience all things at once and understand them in all their complexity and relationships concurrently as depicted in Figure 2.

Long description.

The figure uses overlapping black, gray, and white distorted circles to show that learners and instructors do not experience objective, contextual, and relativist worlds as separate domains. The circles overlap in different configurations, suggesting that one epistemic stance may become more visible or dominant at different moments while the others remain present.

In this conception, the relativist (white), contextualist (gray), and objectivist (black) views as represented by the circles above. These are not perfect circles and are often distorted in either the internal participant or external observer views. At different times, each view holds primacy in the experiences of the teacher or learner. In some instances, another view is emerging and growing larger as it begins to eclipse another view, often due to engagement with a communicative action. Such epistemic stances, expressed outward by individuals, are visible to observers and the educational participant to different degrees depending on a number of factors. Some of these include internal affective and cognitive states, external factors such as interpersonal relations, power relationships with peers and those in supervisory roles, and those that take place outside of the learning environment (e.g. family, friends, financial/economic).

Therefore, educational experiences and curriculum should not be designed from only a single perspective; instead, a coherent view recognizes the complexity of teacher and learner experience by creating learning and instructional tasks that encourage understanding from and with each perspective on truth, knowledge, and learning. The question remains how we can understand the world in a way that does not artificially limit what can and should be done in relation to learning and teaching activities, assessments, and systems, but recognize our limits and affordances as human beings that are brought to bear on understanding.

Theoretical Foundations

Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action

The primary perspective guiding this framework was the pragmatic theoretical work of Jürgen Habermas’ (Habermas 1981/1984; 1981/1987). Building on his social theories, Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) has the goal of developing methods for understanding and improving the effectiveness of human communication towards goals and has been a work of more than 40 years. In 1991, Ewert reviewed a large number of articles in which Habermas was referenced, with a goal of identifying aspects of TCA that have implications and applications for education. In addition, Carspecken (1996, 1999), Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), Denzin and Lincoln (2003), and by Paul Willis (1977) have research methods employing critical ethnography as part of understanding communicative actions in educational settings towards a goal of critiquing instructional systems. However, there has been substantially less discourse related to understanding what it means for educators to understand the roles of learners and instructors when viewed from the perspective of situational and context bound communicative actions. What has begun to emerge from our findings, examined through this lens, is a different conception of learning, teaching, assessment, and instructional design in which human communication is both the vehicle for understanding as well as the sometimes warped window that distorts it.

From a philosophical perspective, it is problematic that many researchers place themselves in one epistemic category or another with the contextualist battling the objectivist by claiming one form of knowledge to be superior to another. It is especially troubling for many practitioners who tend to understand all forms of knowledge to be occurring concurrently rather than through only a single acquisition or construction model as mentioned earlier and as described by Sfard (1998).

Epistemic and Ontological Fragmentation in the Social Sciences

In order to address the fragmenting of worldviews into objectivist, subjectivist, and relativist positions (Bernstein, 1983) as noted in the introduction, we begin by providing a theoretical overview of Jürgen Habermas, a German sociologist, pragmatist, and critical theorist to better understand the complexities of learner interactions and the social- construction of knowledge without falling prey to privileging one form of knowledge over others. Critical perspectives include a critique of ideology to enable individuals to become aware of distortions in knowledge stemming from the nature of human communication of it (Habermas, 1981/1984). Both empirical and interpretive social scientists use their senses to describe the world around them; critical theorists seek to understand why the social world is the way it is. Carspecken (1996) further notes that criticalists “find contemporary society to be unfair, unequal, and both overtly oppressive for many people…and (they) want to change it” (p. 7). More importantly, through critique, they seek to understand how society should be (Habermas, 1981/1984) and to construct avenues for the transformation they seek.

Self-awareness of knowledge distortion is enlightenment necessary as pre-condition for individual freedom and self-determination. Underlying the process of critique is the idea that existing social structures and beliefs are constructed in a participatory fashion by stakeholders and are therefore also changeable through further social action. The individual takes freeing, or emancipatory, action that changes the social system to permit the realization of an individual’s unique potential and therefore is emancipated (Habermas, 1981/1984; Ewert, 1991).

Habermas proposed the Theory of Communicative Action in which human speakers, by the act of communication, create intersubjective or shared meaning, reach mutual understanding through “transmission of culturally stored knowledge,” “coordinat[e] action (‘fulfillment of norms’) and socializ[e] actors (‘formation of personality structures’)” (Habermas, 1981/1987, p. 63). Communicative are those acts “oriented to achieving, sustaining, and reviewing consensus” (Habermas, 1981/1984, p. 17). Speech acts raise validity claims in which speakers assert acceptable representations of a facet of the world that they claim to be true or real. “[A speech] act may be called “acceptable” if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a “yes” position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer.”

Long description.

The figure represents strategic action as a black square, constative action as a sunburst or explosion, normative action as a gray circle, and dramaturgical action as a snowflake-like form with a droplet. The accompanying labels connect strategic action to imperatives, directions, and requirements; constative action to argumentation and discourse about truth claims; normative action to socially constructed norms and rules; and dramaturgical action to praxis, identity, and internal lifeworld expressions.

The black and white rectangle indicates how strategic actions are communicated; that is, they are utterances that are only accepted or rejected by the hearer. Constative communication, represented by the sun and explosion, indicate the sometimes-volatile argumentative, though illuminative nature of such communication towards reaching agreement. Normative communication is presented as a circle that includes the ever- changing shades of gray that are our socially constructed norms, cultural mores, and understood rules of behavior. Lastly, dramaturgical communicative acts are depicted as the snowflake, which represents the unique, subjective, internal lifeworld of the person and the rain drop, which indicates the constantly shifting nature of self that acts to both represent the myriad identities of the individual and also nourishes the creative, expressions of personal truth that have not been colonized by external systems.

The exchange of validity claims requires a final agreement among participants, as well as the rejection or modifications of claims based upon the strength of the stronger argument or reason (Habermas, 1993). Within an utterance, speakers are in contact with the objective world, the social world, and their own subjective world concurrently. This creates a crux of intersubjectivity (position taking) where knowledge is viewed concomitantly as objective, subjective, and relative by speaker and hearer. It is this understanding that forms the basis for our theory of learning and teaching.

Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions

In order to understand the role of Habermas’ work in the context of educational settings, we propose the theory of Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions. While originally outlined in Warren and Stein (2008) and Warren, Bohannon, and Alajmi (2010), we expand our concept of learning and teaching as activities that have inherent claims to truth or knowledge. Such acts emerge from the designed instructional activities as well as the social discourse that accompanies them. In instructional settings, communicative goals from the teacher include conveying structural content information (i.e. Denton is the county seat of Denton County, Texas) and follow by drawing out student responses that confirm understanding. In other goals, the instructor may seek to negotiate or enforce normative rules within the class (i.e. you should not copy someone else’s paper). The learning goals that teachers have for their students can come from state curriculum or from personal goals established for individual students in response to diagnostic testing or evaluation; however, each is communicated either directly through such actions as writing them on a poster board or through the implicit goals of the specific activities and linkages to assessment. Thus, Habermas’ communicative actions inform the design of learning activities and each must be included to spur learning discourses within a classroom. These speech acts include strategic actions geared towards learners determining the validity of objective knowledge, constative actions geared towards allowing students to interactively make and challenge claims to the validity of objective knowledge, normative actions related to the validity of claims of truth about group, institution, and societal rules, and finally, dramaturgical actions that allow for both individual expressions of truth through artistic forms of communication such as painting and poetry (Habermas, 1998).

Habermas (1981/1984) stated that dramaturgical action presupposes two different worlds: “the internal world and the external” (p. 93), making them different in many ways than the other three types. In order to understand what this theory means in terms of what it is to learn, teach, assess, and design instruction from the perspective of LTCA, we offer examples from each of these perspectives.

Four Actions for Learning and Teaching

The goals of learning and instructional communicative actions (i.e. discursive speech acts, textual discourse) generally have one of four purposes. The first goal in educational settings has traditionally been to transmit objective, empirical knowledge or facts commonly accepted in the present as valid by society such as information found in standardized tests. Such transmission includes several different types of communication.

Strategic or Teleological Actions

These relate to technical or administrative actions that are intended to direct students to do something, They are speech acts phrased in the imperative in which students have no option but to do or not do (transgress). During such acts, there are generally only two options that result from evaluating specific empirical knowledge; to determine whether it is useful or not and therefore, whether or not they should accede to the direction.

Table 1 provides a definition, the teaching and learning function, and a simple example of how strategic communicative action may be used in an educational setting.

This table defines strategic communicative actions, explains their instructional function, and gives a classroom example involving directive communication and student acceptance or rejection.

In current instructional settings, strategic communication is the most commonly employed action. The instructor often accomplishes this by giving explicit directions that learners may either follow or not. From the perspective of the instructor, this may be to have learners read a text, listen to a lecture and take notes, or some similar activity, and then requiring that they be prepared to take a test. In terms of valid communications, strategic actions can only be accepted or rejected in terms of the validity of the speaker/teacher’s claim. In this case, either the imperative speech act was successfully accepted and the learner engaged in the action, or it was not successful and therefore may be accepted as having been perceived by the learner as an invalid directive. If the information gained through the strategic action is successfully transmitted through the action, the learner perceives it as useful, factual, or objectively true as it allows her to form beliefs and develop meaning thereby finding her fit with the ontological view. This occurs when the learner finds her relation to the rational world and the world in harmony with her aspirations and intentions (Habermas, 1981/1984, p. 87). Such information may then be leveraged through

Constative Actions

Also viewed as conversations, these communicative actions/interactions allow further development and critique of the theoretical understandings of speaker and hearer. Either participant may be the teacher or student who may make claims which can be challenged or accepted through communicative negotiation in a manner beyond that allowed by strategic actions, which are limited because they do not allow for challenge or negotiation of the validity of a statement, only acceptance or rejection. It is through constative acts that speakers make claims to the validity of knowledge and hearers may challenge that validity through rejection and negotiation. In an instructional setting, this is achieved by designing learning activities that allow students to make claims about the validity of a piece of contested or somewhat ambiguous understanding that is generated through the reading of text such as an short story or an ill-structured problem. For example, the teacher could provide students with a book like William Gibson’s (1984) Neuromancer, which depicts a future filled with digital constructs and an Internet-like space in which people interact and face massive social and economic challenges. The instructor could develop an activity in which students first compare this dystopian future with their own, identifying those pieces of knowledge that individual students view as useful, or they view the truth of Gibson’s vision within their “lifeworld” experiences. Lifeworld, as presented by Bernstein (1976) and informed by Husserl, is “the intersubjective world that every man [or woman], in his wide-awake consciousness, experiences and participates in during daily life” (p. 141).

This is the social, practical world which we experience every day; it is the space in which we seek to understand the actions of others with whom we interact in bound contexts of culture and society.

This table defines constative communicative actions, explains their function in challenging and negotiating truth claims, and gives a classroom discussion example.

Students then engage with peers in conversations about the validity of each of these truths that they see emerging from the text, challenging one another’s claims to knowledge, and building some form of consensus about what they believe is true and useful for their small groups. With this consensus, the instructor may then require that students employ this knowledge and make predictions about how the future will look and asks them to express this through a creative writing or visual design (i.e. painting, drawing) activity that is presented to the class for respectful critique of the claims to knowledge shown in their work. Further, different forms of assessments can be given by the instructor that measure the level of objective knowledge that students achieved in terms of understanding important facts about the plot of the narrative, character traits, and other relevant details. In addition, the instructor, student peers, and/or experts grade student products against a rubric to provide multiple perspectives.

Normative Actions

A third possible goal of communicative action is to provide socially valid normative understandings that have been generated through past consensus within the social world the participants belong. This occurs within the socially or culturally bound groups through shared experience, which generate claims to truth such as social rules leading to legal or moral conceptions through normatively regulated action. In the classroom, we see the teacher initially communicate the norms of appropriate behavior through strategic communication in manners that do not allow them to be challenged. This often comes in the form of establishing rules for grading, appropriate learning behaviors, required assignments, attendance, and other important expectations as communicated through written or digital syllabi combined with verbal review of each.

Table 3 provides the function of normative communication in the context of a classroom example.

This table defines normative communicative actions, explains their function in establishing and negotiating rules and values, and gives a classroom expectations example.

A school also establishes social norms related to cheating, plagiarism, or expectations of faculty. For students, the consequences of rule transgression are communicated and can range from loss of points towards the final grade to expulsion. Normative actions provide two world perspectives: the objective and the social world where norms establishment is commensurate with legitimacy. Many normative expectations stem from societal expectations of fairness and result from larger rules established by legal avenues such as courts.

Dramaturgical Communicative Actions

Lastly, the speaker may attempt to express some internal state or “lifeworld” understanding towards the goal of taking some future action, claiming an identity, or producing some artwork towards a goal of self-expression. The dramaturgical action inhabits two worlds: the subjective inner world through which the speaker may express personal identity and understanding, and the objective world through utterances (Habermas 1981/1984 p. 93).

The future action or goal is related to personal identity and internal understanding expressed through individual artistic creations such as painting, or graphic design; construction of digital avatars, writing a poem, or thoughtful reflection in a blog (Warren & Stein, 2008). These convey what spoken communication may only hint at to the learner. Instructors must make available opportunity for learners to safely express their personal identities, passions, and other internal, relative, or subjective truths, which further need to be open to respectful critique through discourse with peers, instructor, and others.

This table defines dramaturgical communicative actions, explains their function in personal expression and identity, and gives examples of creative work that communicates meaning.

LTCA Principles Informing Instruction

Regardless of the educational level of the learner, whether they are in elementary, secondary, college, or post-graduate settings, instruction can be designed using LTCA principles that encourage communication and learning. In order for learning to occur, we have proposed that all four types of communicative actions must be present. Figure 4 offers a visual depiction approximating how learning occurs in LTCA.

Long description.

In this image, learning is shown as a living, growing tree: the learner herself. The learner remains bounded here by both strategic communications that support the trunk and roots using constructive feedback and scaffolding: the black bars on either side of the tree emerging from the normative soils which act as the foundation. Further, the instructor provides learners with these grounding contexts and communicates socially acceptable behavior: norms.

Internal lifeworld expressions of that learner are the snowflakes at the top of the picture, drifting free of social norms, novel and relative to the individual mind, only known to others through imprecise discourse or artistic manifestations of subjective truth. These often come into contact with the heat and light constative communications, represented by the sun, which are critiques of those dramaturgically expressed truths. This interaction, often explosive, melts and reshapes the individual conceptions into defensible concepts, validity claims, and meaningful communication.

Raindrops represent such communications, shifting from fragile internal states of the learner to nourishment that is absorbed, supported, and provided to the roots of the tree through normative and strategic communications. Similarly, constative discourse is bounded by strategic communications that are provided by an instructor or more learned other in order to help ensure constructive critique rather than personal attack towards a goal of improving constructed knowledge.

It is also as a result of this meaningful discourse that an additional component, practical application or practice with the concepts and skills takes place and is normatively bound, represented by the small plants on the normative ground which bounds such practices. Those practices that are successful grow larger; those that are not either shrivel or are provided with different nutrients by the instructor to improve their development. The instructor develops learning activities that have inherent claims to truth and knowledge and challenge students to apply what they have learned.

The products of these activities are open to constative critique by peers, self, and instructor towards a revision of internal mental models, knowledge, truth claims, improved communication regarding this knowledge, and improved understanding of the cultural norms and mores that bound learning discourses. This process helps transform claims to truth from internal experience and relative knowledge into socially valid, defensible claims to truth and knowledge that support learner growth.

Conclusion

Future articles will focus on practical instructional design examples, learning activities, methods of assessment, and research conducted under the auspices of this theory towards a goal of testing it in real world settings in K-12, higher education, and informal learning environments. However, our main goal in this paper was to illustrate Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions as a new model for understanding and designing teaching and learning experiences. This representation also provides a holistic context for designing, implementing, and assessing educational practices.

A main feature of this theory is that learning and teaching, at their core, are communicative practices and that these must be present for instruction to be successful and meaningful. In this context, no current epistemic framework is superior to another and we hypothesize that, instead, the objectivist, contextualist, and relativist perspectives are all valid, necessary, and concurrent in educational settings. Teaching and instructional design involve constructing learning activities that include forms of strategic, constative, normative, and dramaturgical communicative actions, which all guide learners towards understanding and allow for authentic assessment.

Instead of attempting to identify a single truth, the LTCA perspective examines the construct of valid human communication and understanding as the main unit of success. Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions proposes the idea that the teacher may sometimes be at the center of the educational process and at other times the learner takes center stage. At times, knowledge is acquired and at others, it is constructed as deemed necessary by the expert instructor, often, though not always, in conjunction with the learners. The power relationships in the classroom are constantly shifting and changing in response to learner and instructor needs.

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