To David and all,
Welcome to the discussion, David, and thanks for your contribution by
reintroducing why and how we select litterature.
I believe one of the central issues as far as doctoral education is
concerned is to what extent we as helping hands for the doctoral students
should select readings, or leave it to the candidate to find his/her way
through the masses of published thoughts. If we truely believe a
PhD/doctorate is a research education one of the really important skills to
master is to discover and sort out the thoughts and investigations done by
others. I actually believe that the more you point at specific works done
by others as "must read", the more you may hamper the process of breaking
out of cemented Truths. This also applies to the essence of the content of
the degree - research methodology.
I'll modify this position somewhat. If you have invited a doctoral
candidate to join an on-going stream of research, historic continuity is
important, and yes - there exists litterature the newcomer must read, that
you as the mentor should point out. The newcomer must know and understand
the methodology used so far in the on-going research, which is not the same
as saying that the newcomer should necessarily continue the stream with the
previous methodology. Maybe the research stream needs methodological
creativity to advance.
If you include education at all levels in the discussion of canons, I agree
that we do select quite a lot of mandatory readings. And yes, we should be
very much aware of what we select and why. My contention is that at the
early stages of entering a field the students should learn the most
agreed-upon theories and interpretations within the field, and reflect
established practices, the not-so-ideal and the very good. We have a duty
to prepare the students for the world of application, and give them the
current common language of the field. As the student advance in the studies
more and more the controversies and unsolved puzzles within the field
should be exposed and discussed through a dialectic pedagogy. Also, the
student should learn to discover useful knowledge on his own for addressing
applied problems. That means that you cannot any longer fully preselect the
"right" litterature for the student.
It is always attempting for teachers to councel the student too closely in
order to have the student produce the best possible thesis or term paper as
the teacher sees it. The question becomes on the day of judgement, when we
determine the grade: Who is taking the exam - the teacher or the student? I
can recollect several instances where I as an external examiner on theses
have discovered poor and insistent councel from the teacher(s). Shall you
punish the student for that? To what extent? How far shall you go in
protecting others from hiring a student who learned the wrong things?
(whatever "right" may be - there must already exist differences of opinion
in such cases) The easiest part is to give the teachers and the educational
institution feed-back and develop a process of reconciliation, because it
does not have to be done in public.
It is quite possible in a field of knowledge to discuss and agree upon what
is currently the canons of the field. This is done every day in numerous
journals, seminars, congresses, open discussion groups like the one I use
right now, and also through the production and selection of textbooks. The
most sold textbooks probably represent quite accurately the current canons
in any discipline and field - and they do more often than not include the
thoughts of the great classics of the field.
Though sometimes you wonder for how long the great classics can be
misrepresented in textbooks. According to most textbooks in marketing
produced during the last 75 years - some even today - Abraham Maslow
classified human needs into five hierarchial areas - the animalistic (food,
sex, moving in the territory, etc), safety (improving survival), social
(belonging, love, being accepted in the group), status (power, being
admired, gaining a position in society) and self-realization (learning to
develop own potential of skills, enhance the inherited, self-discovery -
the super-egoistic). Estethical and ethical needs were left out. The first
omission has damaged the cooperation that should have taken place between
design and marketing. The second omission gave the impression that
solutions in marketing were free from subjective value judgements - an
objective field filled with everlasting Truths to the benefit of mankind.
The reaction to the latter was that large gruops in society seriously
questioned - and rightly so - the morals of marketing and marketing
practitioners. We turned out large quantities of more or less ethically
unconscious marketing graduates who had learned powerful tools of
persuasion which they used and misused without a reflective thought. The
focus on hierarchy rather than changing satisfaction of these needs as time
passes, made it very hard for students to grasp the true dynamics of needs,
and all the funny compensatory behaviour we do to pseudo-satisfy needs we
are unable to satisfy by oversatisfying other needs. If you never received
love and nearness, the chances are that you do exactly that which does not
give you love and nearness - seek power and status that gives you
attention, but removes you from those you want to care about you as a
person, and put you as ikon on top of an unassailable, but so much admired
and envied pidestall. I mention this story just to remind us that we
occationally do need to check back on the original source.
In parting: Encyclopedia Britannica was wrong for 50 years: There are no
ice bears wandering around in the streets of Oslo - not since the end of
the last ice age that ended 10000 years ago - as far as we can establish
the archeological facts....
Brynjulf
---------------------------------
Associate Professor Brynjulf Tellefsen
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
PO Box 4676 Sofienberg
N-0506 Oslo, Norway
Phone: +47-2298 5000
Direct: ................. 5142
Telefax:................ 5111
David Sless <[log in to unmask]>@mailbase.ac.uk on 15.09.2000
13:21:11
Please respond to David Sless <[log in to unmask]>
Sent by: [log in to unmask]
To: <[log in to unmask]>
cc:
Subject: The Canon and other questions
Hello All
I'm greatful to Ken Freedman for bringing this list to my attention. I have
just read through the archive of contributions following Richard Buchanan's
question about the'Canon' which I much enjoyed and to which I would like to
add a acouple of thoughts.
First, to declare my interest. My design field is information design and my
primary interest these days is in the philosophy of design. I must also
tell
you that my capacity to take part in sustained contributions to lists is
limited because of the nature of my other commitments. However, I do try.
I think that Richard's original question is an excellent one and many of
the
suggested answers and critiques are useful in helping us all think through
these issues. But I think Richard's questions is most valuable in drawing
our attention to a set of question which are logically prior: ie what are
the principles and criteria we use to select texts which are important to
us
and possibly to future students in our field? Attempting to answer these
logically prior questions will tell us something about the ideas that
inform
our thinking as designers.
In drawing attention to these logically prior questions I am not suggesting
that we must resolve these questions before deciding on which texts to
choose. Rather, I am suggesting that by making choices and arguing about
them we will come to a better understanding of the implicit and
unarticulated ideas that inform our thinking and which we hope will guide
PhD students in the future.
David
--
Professor David Sless
Director
Communication Research Institute of Australia
** helping people communicate with people **
PO Box 398 Hawker
ACT 2614 Australia
Mobile: 0412 356 795
phone: +61 (0)262 598 671
fax: +61 (0)262 598 672
web: http://www.communication.org.au
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