Concept, Philosophical Bases, Experiences and Evaluation
Sieglinde Weyringer
Department of Educational Science / University of Salzburg,
Akademiestr. 26, A – 5020 Salzburg, Austria
sieglinde.weyringer@sbg.ac.at
Jean-Luc Patry
Department of Educational Science / University of Salzburg,
Akademiestr. 26, A – 5020 Salzburg, Austria
jean-luc.patry@sbg.ac.at
Paper presented at MOSAIC - Moral and Social Action Interdisciplinary Colloquium Annual Conference
“The Moral and Religious Challenges Facing Education in Europe”
University of Konstanz
20.-22. Juli 2005
Questions
When watching the mainstream in the media, values seem to be a “best seller”. New technologies have widened the possibilities for communication and in a consequence these innovations have increased the speed of the developmental process in society, economics, science etc.
But where do we go to?
Values are serving as points for orientation. People are united by the traditions of shared interpretation of specific religious and cultural principles. The present period of “high-speed-change” forces the individual and the public mind to turn the focus on these points for orientation and to ask how the new elements affect the stability of the traditional interpretation. The actuality and popularity of talking about values is guided by the necessity of the trial to assimilate these new elements into a valid new interpretation, which is the base for the construction of a stabile community.
How does education in school contribute to the orientation?
Discussions about ethics and values mostly take place in special lessons. Although teacher attribute an enormous importance to ethical and moral education they complain the lack of competence in teaching values and the lack of time to work with this area (Patry & Hofmann 1998). The main emphasis is put on teaching knowledge as it is led down in the curriculum and with the aim to meet the standards. Although in any area the process of decision-making consists of the two components knowledge and values, this second component is never picked out as an explicit part. In school the students learn facts. The curriculum answers the question “what can I know?” in the sense of which knowledge might be useful for life. But the importance of special knowledge is exposed to the process of cultural development and to the personal decision of getting involved in this change. So the question “what can I know?” is followed by the question “why might this knowledge be useful?”. Education in school has not only to provide knowledge, but also has to stimulate the reflective thinking about the viability of this knowledge when sharing responsibility in a future social community. So the role of values within the decision-making process has to be brought into the awareness of any individual person. Knowledge supports the quality of argumentation pro or contra a possible action. Therefore school education has not only the responsibility for learning but also for the debate on an active participation in the social development. The current splitting of values education and teaching knowledge in separate lessons has too less efficacy in reaching this aim.
Concept of VaKE
The VaKE-approach (Values and Knowledge Education) lays claim to be a practicable way to combine values education and knowledge acquisition in a teaching-learning situation.
The concept was developed by Patry (e.g. 2001) on the basis of the principles of constructivism:
• The values education follows the tradition of Kohlberg (1981, 1984), Blatt (Blatt & Kohlberg, 1975) and Oser & Althof (1992), based on dilemma discussions;
• For the knowledge acquisition a constructivist teaching approach, deduced from Glasersfeld (e.g. 1981, 1991) or Gerstenmaier & Mandl (1995), gives the didactical orientation.
The principles of the VaKE -approach are:
• Learning is not a passive absorption of information; it is done as an active process: the new information is checked for its viability. Learning is creating an individual reality. The learning person is constructing his / her knowledge according to his/her experience (Glasersfeld 1995)
• Cognition is an adaptive process: learning is not a striving for objective knowledge and a finding of the ontological reality; it is the construction of a personal and individual world. (Glasersfeld 1991)
• Knowledge acquisition or learning is happening in situations, when people are confronted with conflicts and problems, which they cannot solve with the knowledge they have. (Piaget 1976)
• The learning process is linked to a target which is in a close relationship to the learner. So the answer of the question “For what reason do I learn?” has an enormous effect on learning: the quality of the learning process depends on the extent to meet this target. (Patry 1999)
• The gauge for the learning process is the applicability or “viability” of knowledge in a specific situation and for a certain purpose. (Glasersfeld 1981)
• To be able to review the viability of the knowledge learning has to run as an interactive process. (Glasersfeld 1995)
• The teacher has to create learning situations, which provoke cognitive conflicts for the students.
• The role of the teacher is to accompany the students in their very personal process of knowledge acquisition followed by the viability-check of the knowledge. The guidelines for this role are to give support and to provoke the knowledge acquisition “as less as necessary – as much as possible”.
• Main elements of this learning-process are searching for relevant information and the agreement about rules of discussion and of conduct, which are based on the principle “companionship – not rivalry”.
• To evaluate which argument is better, the personal solution of the problem will be compared with all the other arguments and solutions. It can happen that as a consequence of the new information the first decision is discarded, because the opposite argument is more appropriate and convincing.
Viability-check
One of the central elements of the learning process in the VaKE approach is the viability-check. According to the principles of constructivism a learning situation must provide possibilities to test whether knowledge can be applied successfully to reach a certain target.
In the VaKE lesson not only information and knowledge are proofed by the viability-check , also the arguments posted in the dilemma-discussion and also their subjective theoretical background, the effective individual ability to moral judgement, are proofed for their applicability in the definitive situation.
Five different types of viability-checks are identified (Patry 2005):
1. Experience: a concept is used in a certain context, and this use is either successful or not.
2. Simulating viability-check: the person imagines the use of a concept and how successful it is.
3. Representative viability-check: the person is watching another person who is using a certain concept.
4. Communicating viability-check: the person is taught which concept is most successful in a certain context
5. Reflective viability-check: after the use of a concept the person is evaluating the process.
Prototypical course of VaKE
In an extension of the prototypical course presented in Oser & Althof (1992, pp. 105-109) the following steps are appropriate for a VaKE -lesson (Patry & Weinberger 2004):
Table 1: Steps in a prototypical approach to teach both values and the subject matter; in italics: values education elements.
Experience with VaKE
VaKE has been applied in a variety of different learning environments, for example
• in the regular classroom: Patry & Weinberger 2004; Weinberger 2005; Hofer (forthcoming); unpublished papers of a project-seminar 2004 / Department of Education at the University of Salzburg
• VaKE in special learning environments:
- lecture for kids at the Children-University of Salzburg 2004 / Patry & Weyringer 2005
- in the education of gifted students: Kriegseisen et.al. 2003, Patry & Furlan 2005
VaKE and High Ability
Research and practical experience have shown that students with high abilities need special learning environments (for example: Cronbach & Snow 1981; Renzulli & Reis 1997; Eyre 1997; Weinert 2000).
In our context Giftedness is defined according to the Three-Ring-Concept by Renzulli (1986) and its extension by Mönks (1992):
This concept describes three personal factors and three social factors and their interdependence:
• personal factors: above average ability, task commitment, creativity.
• social factors: family, school, peers.
The studies about the cognitive development of children with high abilities have also shown that sensitivity for ethical problems is very high and can be found already in the early childhood. The decision-making process is determined by the aptitude of critical thinking and reasoning; as a consequence discussions about components of moral judgement is obligate.
Research about the moral development of gifted children is rare but very important (Tannenbaum 2000; Andreani, O.D., & Pagnin, A. 1993, 2000)
Research project at the Department of Science of Education at the University of Salzburg
Since 2004 a research – project is running at the University of Salzburg / Department of Science of Education, supported by the Jubiläumsfonds of the Austrian National Bank (Project-number: 10946; project-leader: Jean-Luc Patry).
The aim of the study is to show that with the VaKE approach it is possible to do values education without neglecting the information and knowledge acquisition as a part of teaching, or even to increase the teaching effectiveness of the latter.
The target-group are highly gifted adulescents. The research is done within in special international summer-camps, which are organized for the purpose of the study.
Special evaluation-instruments are created focussing components of the decision-making process, which are related to values clarification and to knowledge acquisition. In a pre-post design the expectations of the participants concerning the challenge in several aspects like learning, social behavior amongst a relatively homogenous group of gifted, self perception, effects on personal development, and the assessment of personal abilities are ascertained.
For the process-evaluation a questionnaire is used daily in each workshop according to the lesson interruption method (Patry 1997). The focus of questionnaire is put on situational aspects, which are appropriate for gifted students, for example amount of challenge, emotional and cognitive aspects of interest, controlling of the teacher, understanding the content, social climate in the group. Also analysis of sociogramms are done.
• Study 2004: archimedes – summer-campus In the summer camp 2004, called “archimedes-campus”, 45 students, age 12 to 15 years, from seven different Central-European countries participated in five workshops with different topics: European values (civil rights), history (French revolution), science (cloning of human beings), communication (RFID technique) and the baselines for activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross (interventions in a country at war). The campus-language was German, so all participants with other mother-language had to have a high level of performance in the German language. For the knowledge acquisition the participants also had to have competences in internet-enquiry.
• Study 2005: Platon Youth Forum The summer-camp 2005 was organized according to the experience of Archimedes-campus. The program offered workshops dealing with topics like differences between Europe and U.S.A., vaccination for public versus personal health, observation and data protection, politics for peace, responsibility of famous historical persons. 35 students between 15 and 18 years, coming from Austria, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Hungary worked on these topics, discussing special personal decisions, which were presented to them as the solution of the main actor in a story. Additional to the evaluation-instruments of 2004 also the MJT was used in a pre-post design.
The results of the study support the assumption that the VaKE-approach offers an appropriate challenge for gifted students:
they like these learning environments very much; they develope a sensitivity for the power of arguments based on knowledge; they improve their ability to find solutions through reasoning and argumentation; when having and defending an own opinion they can build stabile social relationships within a very heterogeneous group.
The experiences of the two studies with gifted students encourages to plan similar camps for young students with a special focus on the European citizenship.
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