Enduring Understanding

This post is a response to recent readings of Wiggins and McTighie on "Backward Design" and "Essential Questions"; Britzman's "Practice Makes Practice"; Kumashiro's "Against Common Sense"; and Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers."

Part I

       I know from experience teaching English as a private tutor that keeping goals in mind is key for every lesson with a student. Not only is it the most efficient use of time, but it makes the learning productive and meaningful. There is truly no way to know that a student is succeeding (throughout) or has succeeded (in the end) unless you start out with a specific target in mind. If not, there is no way of knowing where you are going. Each student has particular individual goals for his/her lives and studies which should be honed in learning. In a classroom, there should be an established collective goal as well that the teacher should help the group to fulfill. When we start with Wiggins' and McTighie's big questions in terms of creating goals: What is worth knowing, understanding, being able to do? and What enduring understandings are desired? we begin at the place of actually being able to achieve some more authentic goals with students, as long as the goals are in conversation with students' own personal goals. It is not possible at any age to acquire a “perfect” understanding. Certain things will always fall by the wayside. It will be our job to help students figure out what is worth it to know, and why. They will need to eventually learn to filter information for themselves, to be able to choose on their own what is worthy of knowing and why. 

       For Kumashiro, enduring understanding or worthwhile knowing is perhaps what happens most when learners are [safely] uncomfortable. He uses the term “crisis” to refer to the state or feeling of being pushed into uncharted intellectual territory, or when current knowledge or knowledge structures are in opposition to newly presented knowledge. This type of discomfort is essential for critical learning, but can cause some resistance. In his example of student M, M clearly responded to the Kumashiro’s expectations with resistance, preferring learning on his own accord and timeframe. Kumashiro realized in hindsight that rather than criticizing M's "bad behavior," it would have served the student better to pay attention to and engage such resistance in order to allow for the student's true learning to take place. Perhaps this particular student already knew the way to enduring understandings for himself, in his own way. 

       It is important to remember, as we have read in Toshalis’ “Make Me,” that resistance and conflict are not the end of learning or of a relationship, but are always an opportunity for engagement and finding better ways to achieve authentic learning for all students. Above all, students should be encouraged as much as teachers to study and hone those aspects of themselves (emotions and dispositions) which both desire and resist. Relating back to Britzman, “identity and pedagogy are discursively produced, incomplete, and subject to change" (32). Just as students are constantly changing and growing, so should we in our relationships to them, to pedagogy, and to ourselves.

Part II

       With all these things in mind, each student may desire a different enduring understanding, which is why I much like the open-ended question: What enduring understandings are desired? Enduring understandings should reflect student choice and identity as much as they are expansive and in some way disorienting or challenging of their current states of knowledge. In some way, perhaps, the question should always involve the notion: Does the knowledge make the student a better person in society? 

       Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers" certainly disarms (to use a word from Kumashiro) the status quo saying: “If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture you would be liberating not only Negroes, you'd be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history” (683). An enduring understanding of a unit designed around history of black/white relations in America would certainly be formed from the additional question: Does the knowledge of history liberate?