By Donald M. Taylor
From early on in the education process, students are confronted with the panic of having to produce an essay. In elementary school it takes the form of a single paragraph, which, in the mind of the young student, requires them to muster up every single word they know. But by high school four and five pages of text might be required, culminating at university where fifteen and twenty page essays are common. Writing essays then is central to the educational experience.
Writing an essay has to be the most ludicrous undertaking we educators have ever manufactured. Just think, the student's essay is being written for the teacher who is in effect the sole audience. But the teacher knows the subject matter better than the student does, indeed it was the teacher who was the source of the information for the essay. Strangely, the student must presume that the teacher knows nothing, since the purpose of the essay is to demonstrate to the teacher that the student knows the material. So, the student is aware at some level that the teacher already knows everything in the essay yet must write as if the teacher knows nothing. In essence, writing a successful essay requires that from a very early age, the student must learn this implicit culture that requires a complex form of role-playing. In this essay I explore the implicit assumptions associated with formal learning in the hopes that it might orient students to successful essay writing.
Lessons from Inuit Culture
I would never have contemplated this seemingly strange exercise were it not for many many precious hours spent with Inuit educators. Inuit villages are small and remote, dotting the frozen tundra with access limited to air, and for a few short months, boat travel. Few adults have had experience with mainstream formal education, and children of all ages struggle in the classroom. Inuit culture is so different from mainstream European culture that Inuit children forced to attend a mainstream style of school find it a difficult adjustment.
It is always a challenge to pinpoint specific, fundamental attitudes and behaviours that lie at the heart of a cultural mismatch, but I have come to appreciate one fundamental difference that illuminates the essay writing experience. Traditional Inuit life was a struggle to literally survive, with no margin for error. Food, shelter and maintaining health were an all day, every day, challenge in the harshest climate in the world. Socializing young people was a serious business. Young people learned to hunt, sew and prepare food by watching and observing and asking questions and practicing. No time for games. No time for adults to ask questions of young people when the adult already knew the answer to the question. No time for trial and error in the learning process, since out on the frozen tundra any mistake might be catastrophic. Only when the young person was deemed "ready" by an elder would a young person come of age by engaging an activity, which hopefully they had overlearned to maximize their chances for survival.
From this perspective our formal education seems odd. It is designed to teach by encouraging students to engage in trial and error. Specifically, using a variant of the Socratic method, the teacher poses a question and students compete to guess at the answer. If every student could answer the question correctly, the teacher would judge that the question was too easy and quickly move on to more difficult items. If the student makes a mistake, the consequences are trivial. Well to be fair it may not seem trivial to a student who feels inadequate after offering a wrong answer, but the teacher will constantly encourage students to attempt an answer underscoring that there is no shame in failure. The idea is that students are encouraged to acquire information in the protected environment of the school where mistakes are not costly. The hope is that through this process the student will accumulate skills so that when they graduate to the "real" world mistakes will be minimized. The Inuit had no such protected environment and so could not enjoy the luxury of trial and error.
The Roots of Implicit Culture
The questions the teacher asks of students are not genuine questions. The teacher already knows the answer to his or her own question, and the students know the teacher knows the answer. So the exercise, the heart of formal learning, is disingenuine, it is a game with complex rules that defy common logic. Commonsense logic would dictate that you ask questions when you need information and don't know the answer, but at school you only ask questions when you already know the answer.
Imagine how bizarre this whole exercise would seem to an Inuit student. No wonder they seem unresponsive to mainstream teachers. Indeed, the widespread stereotype that Inuit students are unresponsive is reinforced by my own longitudinal research on the linguistic and cognitive development of Inuit students. Evidence that the "asking questions that you already know the answers to ritual" may explain the unresponsiveness of Inuit students emerged in a most surprising manner. It just so happened that one of our Inuit testers was blind. We were amazed by how verbal the students were when our blind tester asked about different colours or to describe a picture. Clearly, our blind tester could not see the material she was questioning about, and so students felt compelled to offer as much information as they could. Conversely, the exercise no doubt seemed ridiculous when a sighted tester asked questions about colours and pictures.
Yet this is the root of the essay writing experience and it is a process that begins early. Take the following dialogue between teacher and young student.
T: Hi, what's your name?
S: (shy shoulder shrug)
T: Your name is Don isn't it? Hi Don
S: Hi
T: How old are you Don?
S: I'm eleven
T: Come on Don you know you are seven, and such a big boy
S: Ya
T: What grade are you in Don?
S: I'm in grade three
T: NO I don't mean how many years have you been at school, but what grade you are in-- and you are in grade two, right?
S: Ya
But this process begins even before children enter kindergarten. Parents spend an inordinate amount of time asking their children questions, not for information, but as a mechanism to encourage and test learning. Children will be asked to name the colours that the parent points to in turn. Children will be read the same story dozens of times with the parent pausing to ask the child questions about the story, the characters, the setting, and "what is going to happen next?" Parents will engage in number games with children, and the "in thing" is for parents to watch carefully selected television programs with their children, and then question them about the program's content. In all these instances the parents are asking questions to which they already know the answer.
The children are learning a cultural ritual that lies at the heart of formal learning. It is a complex ritual for it requires the child understanding that in certain circumstances one asks questions to obtain information, but in a learning context the child will be asked questions by adults who already know the answer. Nevertheless, to be successful the child must assume or pretend that the adult does not know the answer. Only by successfully pretending can the child rationalize answering as if providing enlightenment to the adult. I have a suspicion that children will occasionally give a purposefully wrong answer in order to check the adult's reaction. This allows the child to confirm her or his implicit assumption about how the ritual is supposed to unfold. That is, when the child offers a wrong answer, the parent will quickly remind the child of the right answer. This confirms for the child that the ritual does indeed require giving answers that are already known by the parent.
This fundamental ritual is essential to a lifetime of formal learning, it begins early in the child's development, and it is implicit. Children who are not socialized into this implicit culture early will experience difficulty in any formal school environment. Such students will appear to be smart enough to the teacher, but they will always manage to not quite deliver what is required to perform well in a formal classroom. Clearly this puts many students at a disadvantage.
Inuit parents, who have not themselves been socialized by this implicit culture, will not be in a position to prepare, nor support, their children with respect to formal schooling. Indeed, all disadvantaged parents in society will have difficulty preparing their children for formal education. This is precisely because it is not enough to teach children about the more visible aspects of the school environment, but also this fundamental implicit cultural ritual that parents themselves have not had the opportunity to internalize. How frustrating it must be for parents who are admonished by the school to read to their kids, to expose them to books, to accompany them to museums and monitor their children's television for educational quality. All of these are constructive and necessary activities. They also happen to be time-consuming and expensive, which makes it difficult for disadvantaged parents to offer their children these direct forms of support. But disadvantaged parents will have even more difficulty supporting their children when they themselves have had little or no exposure to the more subtle and invisible norms of school culture. Clearly, the child will have difficulty in the formal school environment to the extent that they have not internalized the implicit and confusing ritual of dialogue in the classroom.
Full Blown Implicit Culture
I am privileged to teach at a university, which means that I read essays from students who have been successful at negotiating the implicit culture of essay writing. And oh do I read essays given that my classes range in size from two to seven hundred students. All right, to be honest I have a lot of help in grading essays from senior graduate students, but I have read enough to fill a small country.
Perhaps it is because of the increasing diversity of our student body, but you would be surprised at the extent to which students vary in terms of their understanding of the implicit culture. The challenge can best be appreciated from the perspective of university students who have shared in gory detail their successes and failures with me, and in the process made me understand the dilemmas posed by the culture of essay writing. Prototypic of the extremely intelligent, motivated and well adjusted student I encounter is Carrie Guildwood whose education included negotiating the culture of essay writing, an exercise that often makes up a significant portion of the student's final grade.
Carrie Guildwood remembers vividly her first university essay. The task was to read an article in sociology about an event that had happened some twenty years earlier and then extract the universal principles and apply them to a current social issue. Carrie put her heart and soul into the exercise, and even received a decent grade because of her obvious understanding of the sociological issue and her ability to relate it to a current issue. Where she lost marks was on, first not summarizing the article, and second, not defining some of the more simple sociological concepts that had been covered in the course. What she had failed to do was successfully engage the implicit culture of the education process. She was very much aware that the professor knew the article upside down and sideways, and so felt it would be pedestrian, if not insulting, to provide a precis to begin her essay. Ya But.
Carrie forgot that she had to write the essay while "role playing" that the professor knew nothing about the article. Similarly, with respect to concepts she had learned in the course, part of the exercise is to demonstrate to the professor that you understand the material. Thus, Carrie's decision to focus attention on the more difficult and interesting concepts was based on her assumption that the professor was eminently knowledgeable and would be inclined to reward the student who could go beyond the simple and obvious. That, of course was a correct assumption, but it is only half the story. Carrie had to forget that it was the professor who taught the basic concepts and write as if there was no shared knowledge. Again, part of the purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate to the professor that she had mastered the concepts.
Carrie was naturally disappointed with her grade on the essay, and her initial reaction in terms of how to address the next essay assignment would have actually resulted in an even lower grade. That is, for her next essay Carrie was going to try even harder to impress the professor with new information. Fortunately, prior to beginning her next essay she received feedback from the professor indicating that what she needed to do was make sure she demonstrated her comprehension of course material by reiterating the basics before proceeding to elaborate new material. This feedback was crucial because the implicit culture of essay writing is simply not intuitively rational.
The implicit culture, then, has two components. The essay must first include basic information that is redundant for the reader (professor) to demonstrate mastery. Second, the essay must have some originality, integration, or application of the material. You would think that once Carrie had digested her professor's feedback and internalized this "implicit culture" of the norms for essay writing, she would be in business. It's not that easy. For example, later in her career Carrie took a course, in fact it was my course on intergroup relations, that had an enrollment of several hundred. The essay assignment required students to apply different theories of intergroup relations to a current real world conflict. The essay was limited to ten pages thereby challenging students to carefully decide what to include, and what not to include, in their report. Carrie was one of a handful of students who I knew quite well because they were excellent students with a special interest in intergroup relations. Like each of this small elite group, Carrie was determined to write an essay that would match the high standards she set for herself as a specialist in intergroup relations, and that she assumed I would set for her. But Carrie was trapped in the implicit culture. For her essay to stand out it would require focusing much attention on some of the very subtle features of the theories she was required to apply. Unfortunately that would mean sacrificing basic tenants of the theories. Carrie is trapped because she knows that I know the theories in detail, and she knows that I know that she knows the theories in detail. But in order for the essay to be an evaluative tool it requires that it be applicable to all students, the vast majority of whom do not know, or understand, the theories in such detail. The end result is that the excellent student cannot produce an essay that is markedly better than the others because they, like all students, must ensure that they cover the basics as required. This leaves them with insufficient room to go well beyond the assignment as delineated. Unless Carrie can bear the implicit culture in mind and resign herself to writing a very, very good essay, instead of one that blows the professor away, her grade on the essay will suffer.
Carrie Guildwood gets it. After feedback early in her university career, she determined that she already had the capacity to integrate material, extract the essence of an argument, and present a reasoned argument for her own point of view. What she added was an appreciation for the fact that this intellectually challenging aspect of any essay must be in addition to, not at the expense of, demonstrating mastery of material that the professor already knows. It's time we began teaching our students about this implicit role-taking cultural exercise since there is far too much variation in terms of the exposure different students have had to this unwritten assumption.
I now understand the dilemma confronting students from a culture that is new to formal education. I also better understand the attitudes of my Inuit students to whom I teach university-accredited courses in their home villages. The students are in fact mature Inuit adults who are themselves elementary school teachers who use their heritage language, Innuttitut, as the medium of instruction. I have always been curious about the exercises and assignments that my Inuit co-instructor and the students themselves appear to resonate to. They enjoy working in small groups, which is understandable given their cultural orientation toward sharing and their anxiety in a formal education setting. Equally interesting is their tendency to take the essay exercise and turn it into a generative process. For example, instead of producing an essay to be read by only me as the professor, they will set the task of designing a poster to be hung in their school. The poster will adapt what they have learned to be relevant for their young students. Alternatively, they may produce an essay that will be the basis of a series of community meetings with parents. I get the impression that these creative undertakings arise because the students feel uncomfortable preparing material to be read by the one person who knows more about the material than they do.
The Value of Cultural Knowledge
Many of the important aspects of culture lie beneath the surface. They are not taught directly but become internalized through long-term exposure. The implicit culture of essay writing is an excellent example. The notion that formal schooling involves a safe environment for intellectual practice, for intellectual trial and error and for intellectual challenge so as to prepare young people for problem solving in every conceivable situation is central to the education process. It makes perfect sense, then, that teachers ask questions to which they already know the answer, and that student's answer knowing full well that the teacher already knows the answer.
But any student who has not been over-exposed to this central cultural ritual will have difficulty negotiating formal schooling successfully. Students who are not introduced to the ritual very early in their life, and especially those from a different culture, are at a definite disadvantage. The hope is that by exposing this cultural ritual, it will remind some students, help to better orient other students, and help me as a teacher, better understand the perfect essay.