A design for sex-segregation research in T&T: A thought experiment

While I have many criticisms and concerns with the decision to pursue sex-segregation research in education in Trinidad and Tobago, especially in the top-down manner with which it is being imposed on schools, (I have outlined these elsewhere here and here)), I want to offer for discussion a research design that I consider to be potentially viable if one wished to pursue this line of action (i.e. cognizant of the limitations to the claims that can be made, the ‘ill-definedness’ of the variables/constructs themselves, the complexity and ethical difficulty of research with vulnerable social agents, and the difficulty of generalizability to other schools and of providing a sound basis upon which policy could be founded). I invite reasoned discussion and feedback on any aspect of the design from interested parties in the media and via email. As a scientist, one has to think through and actively construct a design that is fit to the research question, i.e. one that can potentially provide evidence to support or refute the claim. Research designs or experimental protocols do not magically materialize and aren’t simply thrown together from a tool-kit of parts. Ethically, one also has to consider potential harms and iatrogenic effects, again cognizant that one cannot know all possible benefits or potential harms before-hand. One of the frequently ignored or unspoken possible harmful effects of most intervention research in education is reduction in learning/performance, i.e. lower achievement is a possibility.

While I don’t believe that we can PROVE that sex-segregation ALONE improves performance – there are too many exogenous variables that influence the latter – I am assuming that very possibility, (mathematicians can do this: assume a converse or contradictory proposition), and ask, as a scientist, how could/would I go about showing that it did or did not? I am also assuming that researchers are not going to actually analyze blood, hormone and chromosomes to determine children’s sex. Such a protocol, while informative would be invasive and expensive on a large scale. They will rely on visible characteristics, socio-cultural conventions and the assignment given by parents as authorized by medical authorities at birth as a proxy or ‘good-enough’ indicator for biological sex. I am also assuming no questions will be asked about sexual identity, i.e. feeling like a man in a woman’s body etc., and heterosexuality will be assumed as these are not considered ‘relevant’ to the question by authorities in Trinidad and Tobago at this time. Sex will be assumed by looking at visible characteristics. Male and female would have to be defined as mutually exclusive categories in all regards relevant to the experiment. Whether this is a valid assumption for researchers or sound basis for policy is another matter. What will matter to policy-makers is not what sex students are in any objective way but what researchers and society say that they are for the purpose of the intervention.

To even have a chance at proving that sex-segregation alone improved performance nothing else would have to be changed, i.e. we’d have to keep the curriculum the same, the teacher, the assessment, there could be no sex-differentiated instruction etc. The design could be easily modified to test claims of the relationship between “sex-segregation + sex-differentiated instruction on performance.” But one could not determine if it were the segregation or the instruction and we would not have previously ruled out that it was segregation alone that was responsible. If baseline data was collected we’d have to know under what conditions and try to collect the experimental data under similar conditions. Given the networked nature of societies, and especially in a small place like Trinidad, interventions, observation and analysis would have to be on short time-frames initially to limit communication among individuals involved. While scientists may speculate, conjecture or theorize, they must not ‘overclaim’, i.e. their conclusions must be warranted from the evidence available. I do believe that small, very narrow claims are sustainable if the observations are about very small time frames initially where there is little possibility of individuals’ history affecting the observations and little time for outside influences to confound. We might for example be able to support/refute claims of the form, “based upon these definitions and assumptions about sex and educational outcomes, sex-segregation leads to greater/lesser/no change in outcome on this measure of this variable (retention/attention/performance etc) we deem important, of this idea/concept x from discipline y, under these learning conditions z for the period of time t.” Specificity is everything.

Here’s the first part of my design. Begin with a class of close to equal numbers of Males and Females matched as best as possible on other variables like real-age, developmental age, SES, etc. Then separate M/Fs for a single short period of Math, English, Chemistry, or whatever. Instruction is to be a constant, delivered by the same teacher, same lesson, same jokes etc. (In variations of this design I have a strategy for separating students that hopefully would not clue them in right away that they were being separated by sex, but it relies on a little deliberate deception.) The content and structure of the lesson would have to be well-designed prior to implementation via extensive consultation between researchers, subject matter specialists, and teachers taking into account what is known about teaching that concept in general and in our educational context in particular. I would recommend the concepts/skills chosen be something with which all students, boys and girls, have fairly equal difficulty and perhaps little, ideally no prior experience with in the curriculum at their age-level (but which is part of the curriculum). In this way the knowledge/skills that are being assessed are new and more importantly have little consequence for students in the long term, i.e. they are not part of a consequential exam. Examples abound in mathematics but in order not to confound the design if pursued I won’t reveal that aspect to the public just yet. Specifically, avoid concepts/tasks that are known to favour one sex over another like spatial rotation tasks or some verbally complex reasoning tasks. Ideally I’d want to see lessons drawn from all of the disciplines from Art to English, French to P.E. and Social Studies to Zoology as we are interested in sex differences across the curriculum, not just in Mathematics, Science, and English, though we might choose to begin there. The lessons and topics chosen should span a wide range of educational levels, from first-year (infants) to Form One to first-year of University. Again all lessons would need to be well designed, pedagogically and disciplinary sound and scripted before being used in an actual classroom.

The next part of my design is about delivery. In thinking about how to have students in experimental and control classes receive the same lesson from the same teacher at the same time given the resources available one approach is to use a standardized video lesson or virtual tutor. This could then be used at all schools on both islands with little cost beyond the initial production of the video and resources for showing, thus allowing for wider application to a broader sample, for example in single sex-schools. It would add a level of similarity and redundancy to the instruction at a reasonable cost and massive potential gain in knowledge. The video content should be short, 10-15 minutes. This considers that students will be aware that they don’t have the physical presence of a teacher and the authority represented present in the normal ways as well as the limitations of working memory and human attention. We could then make sound claims about our outcome measure(s) under these fairly fixed conditions thus avoiding the complications of different tutors and feedback at this early stage of the design. These important elements of instruction should be incorporated over time in other designs but not in the beginning. Different video lessons (within the same discipline) should involve teachers/tutors/actors that differ by gender, race, dress, accent etc. If well-designed these could be used for other research studies providing a larger return-on-investment.

If a class is separated the physical space and psychological space is changed. To compensate classes should be merged so that the total numbers remain the same else we are also testing possible effect of class size on the outcome phenomenon of interest. One group should not be sex-segregated but be kept intact and shown the same video. Another kept intact and not shown the video at all and yet another sex-segregated but not shown the same video (they should be shown a video of someone teaching something). That the content of the lessons are not regular curriculum topics at that level means that performance/non-performance on the measure(s) are not academically consequential for students’ lives in the short term. We wouldn’t want students to feel that they were being ranked/scored or valued in a way that could influence their future in this experiment. They get enough of that already.
We don’t necessarily have to show these videos in school settings, though it is likely to be more practical and economical to do so. In fact, we probably could make stronger claims by not doing so initially. Though we would lose the richness and complexity of the school classroom we would gain significantly by having a controlled environment in the beginning stages. Boys and girls could register or be randomly selected (by lottery for example), and volunteer to be part of this research and come to identical centres, located in different parts of either island, either after-school or on weekends, where they would be assigned to the various groups. I like this as it allows students to be simply boys and girls and not representatives of one school or another with all that social baggage. In fact groups could be constituted of students of relatively similar backgrounds from different types of schools if we thought this would yield interesting and relevant data. This would also reduce the influence of peer and cohort dynamics as everyone in a group might be relative strangers to each other. The issue here is whether or not some of the students we would like to be part of the research would actually be part of it, but the same applies in that the students we might be concerned about might not be in school on the day the research takes place. This is a serious problem, a significant sampling error and one for which I have not thought of a solution as yet that does not involve steps that I am not comfortable taking as a researcher. Incentives for participation in the research may be necessary.

The third part is about data-collection and analysis. The actions of students in the different groups as they engaged in the lesson should be recorded. Their talk, questions, movements, notes, doodles during and after the lesson and of course the assessment, form the initial data-set. I’m leaning more strongly now to fixed laboratory styled research settings to capture this data in the initial stages as described above and not existing schools. I am again assuming we’re not after physiological data such as cortisol, adrenaline or glucose levels (indicators of stress) or eye-movement (indicator of focus of attention) – at least not on a large scale. In the pre-stages of the video-lesson design eye-tracking studies might be important with a few students of different sexes to observe what they focus on before taking it to a classroom or experimental setting. One would look at actions during the same time across various groups, for example, in the first minute, or at fixed critical points in the lesson. Keeping the time restricted in this way allows for some strong claims to be made and backed-up.
Analysis of the classroom data should be supplemented with focus group or individual interviews about the lesson, learning, the sex-segregation dimension, performance, etc. As you can see this is a difficult and data rich design. We’re talking, at the minimum, many hours of video, thousands of pages of transcripts - terabytes of data - to be analyzed. A strong set of appropriate analytic resources from a wide range of fields should be brought to bear on the data including but not restricted to tools, concepts and methods drawn from fields as disparate as cognitive science, linguistics, gender studies, cultural studies, mathematics etc. Nobody said that research was fast, easy (or cheap).

A good research design is like a good story – well thought out, plausible plot and potentially satisfying to the consumer. More than this though the design I have offered above, while still in rough form, I think, offers many opportunities for new knowledge generation and innovation in education – one of the goals of this new government. Importantly the design is adaptable, transferable, and scalable. From these perspectives I believe such a project would be valuable. When I started writing this piece the design was meant to be implemented in schools. After receiving some feedback from more experienced peers, I am more convinced that it should first be pursued (or perhaps simultaneously pursued) via research laboratories, a network of knowledge-centres, set up across both islands in various communities where not only education but health or other inter and trans disciplinary knowledge projects could be pursued using the equipment there. This might be a better way to invest in innovation and capacity building for some types of research involving humans. I envision facilities that researchers from different disciplines or interested groups could book/rent with recording equipment already set up to capture voice, video, etc. [We’ll have to deal with crime and security but we have to do that anyway.] These could probably be added to or formed from already existing infrastructure eg. in community centre/health centres. Through such an initiative I see the possibility for involving more and more people in participating in the processes of knowledge creation through research and study in their own communities. Independent groups and entrepreneurs can likely begin to pursue this strategy without government subsidization but I would wish that they did so as social businesses instead of profit-making-businesses, i.e. not for any more individual profit than one’s initial investment. In my thinking here I am heavily indebted to the ideas of Dr. Mary King, Muhammad Yunis and the late Lloyd Best’s call for more research, auto-research in particular.

In recent months I have found the local educational conversations on sex-segregation to be superficial, stale, or stalled and not moving forward in a productive or meaningful way for the national community. Few have offered anything significant or meaningful from which the population could even begin to have a reasoned conversation. My hope with this piece is that by providing something substantial, albeit provisional, concerned and interested individuals will challenge, advise, direct and shape (or reject) this research design in a way that might be useful to us all through civil discourse. My goal in crowd-sourcing is both to get more people to engage in some aspects of scientific design thinking and to actually think deeply and rigorously about what would have to be done, and how that could happen, and ultimately why we want to do this and how to improve this research so that we get value for money and the answers we seek. I know that this is the right thing to do. It is an invitation that I sincerely hope is taken up.

In closing, I wish to remind readers of my earlier concerns about the definitions used and values underlying all research endeavors and this one in particular. These are not simple problems of epistemology and ontology that can be overlooked or left to philosophers but are often important determinants of the findings themselves. I have ignored them only to be able to begin to speak to those who are not familiar with those discourses. One learns a great deal from thinking, reading, observation and experiment, but it matters a great deal with what tools and which theoretical frameworks one chooses to use and how one chooses to wield them. Not all frameworks or designs (or writers) however are mindful of their capacity for harm, respectful of the dignity of the diversity of all (human) research participants or honors the integrity of self-determining beings. Such considerations though must be among the very first in any research programme.

The Reader Bytes Back

“The ethics of criticism requires pointing out the faults in a colleague's thinking.” (Jeffrey R. Di Lio, 2010)

In the digital era one of the tasks facing teachers of the art of persuasive writing is the responsible use of source material. There are many dimensions to responsible use. One of these is appropriate attribution of sources, the breach of which, in an argumentative setting by one seeking to perform as a scholar or intellectual, public, or otherwise, is plagiarism, a species of academic dishonesty. This is a lesson Fr. Henry Charles, President Richards and T&T will likely not forget any time soon. A more difficult skill for many argumentative writers, one exacerbated by the hyper-geometric increase in available and accessible information is responsible use of source material. Irresponsible use of sources, in the context of persuasive writing or scholarly work, takes many forms ranging from the professed naïveté of students who print out Wikipedia articles or web-pages, place them in folders and try to pass them off as ‘research’ papers, to more subtle scholarly improprieties such as that employed by Kevin Baldeosingh in his article Laptops dance with danger (11/06/10).

Baldeosingh’s arguments are typically presented as an intertextual mashup – a sampling of exemplary excerpts from various commentaries made in public fora which are eviscerated with sardonic commentary while buttressing his own position by appealing to ‘expert’ testimony drawn from one or more of his stable of scientists du jour. His style is, usually, a hybrid genre blending acerbic satire and critique and last Friday’s is no exception. Now satire, when it is done well, can be an effective means of critique, persuasion and entertainment, and there have been occasions when he has achieved this harmony to great effect. Last week’s piece however is neither effective nor well done and bad satire is neither an excuse for, nor can it serve as a rhetorical sanctuary from professional irresponsibility as a writer and journalist.

The article represents an example of irresponsible use of source material as Baldeosingh excises and presents segments of text from the letters of Drs. Sharma and Kalicharan as metonymies for positions they do not advocate. Severed from the contexts of their original utterance, Baldeosingh’s injudicious juxtapositions facilitate the construction of these individuals’ contributions to the national conversation on education as simplistic, spurious and suspicious. In short, he misrepresents their arguments through selective quotation in order to generate (false) ‘evidence’ of the antagonistic position he wishes to critique. He invents his opponents.

Consider the way Baldeosingh very early on elevates the emotional ante by descriptively framing the contributions as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.” Are they really? As a scholar when one suspects that what one is reading is untrustworthy or that claims are exaggerated, or worse unfounded, it is incumbent to check for oneself, and indeed a laptop and internet connection makes this easier than ever. I mean no offense to Dr. Sharma, but in her writing she is rarely what I would call a ‘passionate denunciator’ of any kind. She is typically measured, and restrained. This is what aroused my suspicions and led me back to the sources – the three public commentaries.

I noticed - and readers are advised to check this for themselves - that Sharma offered neither dire warnings nor passionate denunciations. Rather, she attempted to raise critical “issues that need to be considered to honour this commitment” from her perspective as an educator who works with teachers across Trinidad and Tobago. She does not isolate the potential benefits from the possible iatrogenic effects and the practical difficulties likely to be encountered in implementing this election promise that voters forget is not yet educational policy. She wisely situates the decision within the culture and climate of schools in T&T where violence, indiscipline, bullying, theft, infrastructural, human and knowledge resource deficiencies, and a lack of training and supervision are commonplace. In short she does not over-simplify the matter but attempts to present and retain some of the complexity of the situation. Likewise, reading Kalicharan’s letter for myself I take it as a public intellectual’s wondering and questioning of the rationale behind this decision to give laptops away. His central point, like Sharma’s, is that laptops alone are not going to be a panacea for some of the challenges facing education in Trinidad and Tobago. Baldeosingh eschews these central points completely in his attempts to paint these educators as alarmists though it is he who lays the foundation for a media-sustained panic discourse through his interpretation and public presentation of their concerns as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.”

There is some evidence of Baldeosingh’s success in at least one case that I could find and which serves as an example of why I consider this particular piece of writing irresponsible. Consider, Trinizagada, a cotecicotelatnt blogger’s response to this article, “After reading the article (Baldeosingh’s) in the Trinidad Express I was lost for words. Now the laptop program of the People's Partnership is going to create morons? What in heavens name are these so called educated people thinking?” S/he goes on to describe details about a laptop programme in the US. To be fair, many in T&T do not read satire well. We respond to picong, brutish humiliation and humbling of authorities and experts when they can be shown to be talking/doing nonsense, and we are fortunate to have an unnatural abundance so as not to have to invent such opportunities, but that is not the case here and is certainly not my intent with this critique.

By irresponsibly misrepresenting and misreporting the central concerns raised by Sharma and Kalicharan, Baldeosingh has influenced this blogger’s, and perhaps some of the general public’s, opinion in a way that undermines their credibility as educators. This is likely not libelous as the piece is sufficiently satirical for this argument to function as a valid defense. In an academic setting however the student would be counseled to return to the sources, read them more carefully, attend to what they are actually saying and responsibly re-present their positions before critiquing them. Indeed, I note that of the three writers (Sharma, Kalicharan, Furlonge), the only person who actually constructs a link between laptops, reduced intelligence and moral questionability (morons, thieves, perverts, politicians, priests, pundits) is Baldeosingh himself. He manages however to successfully obscure this fact by creating and transferring a set of false associations with these ideas and those of the letter-writers. That deception finds any home in Baldeosingh’s argumentative algorithm calls into question his corpus of work as a reliable writer and commentator as well as his ethics. There are other examples in Baldeosingh’s piece, but taking a cue from many good math texts, and a proven strategy for prompting ‘active learning’, “the remainder of the proof is left as an exercise for the interested reader.”

Perhaps of greater concern is the way Baldeosingh deliberately uses misdirection and scientific language to fashion an identity as a knowledge-broker. Globally, there is great concern about the public’s lack of critical understanding of the science, and scientific thinking necessary for enacting democratic citizenship and in helping societies to govern themselves. News media are tasked, perhaps unfairly, with an important educative role in this project. Baldeosingh’s work this week, atypically, works against such goals. In presenting the evidence for his own case Baldeosingh also oversimplifies and misrepresents his sources. Citing psychologist Richard Nesbitt and journalist Steven Johnson he argues for the importance of play in learning and the contributions of popular culture, video-games in particular via Nesbitt, to increasing IQ scores. Baldeosingh neglects however the importance of context to learning and the limits of such learning, viz. the difficulty of transfer. Fortunately, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, (someone who also apparently doesn’t teach) provides the missing nuance. In a New York Times Op-ed piece which appeared on the same day as Baldeosingh’s article, he notes that, “If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else…Accomplished people…immerse themselves in their fields.” Despite many of my former students’ protestations, playing FIFA’s video games will only make you a better video-game player, but it won’t get you to a World Cup or improve your skills significantly on the field without significant physical, emotional and mental effort. I don’t think Farmville is going to help us solve our food problems.

Pinker also makes the important educational point that mere access to technology is not going to suddenly usher in some democratic educational utopia. I have made similar arguments in my scholarly publication Harnessing the Complexity of Children’s Consumer Culture, in particular I believe that while popular culture is a powerful pedagogue, there are some things it does not teach very well and indeed is inimical to the development of some important human and democratic values. Pinker likewise argues that good and responsible intellectual habits “of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning” have never been easy to develop, rather, “they must be acquired in special institutions…and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.” Imagining what those institutions might be like, understanding why they have found difficulty flourishing locally and then working together to actively construct ones that will work for us to achieve the goals of good, responsible habits of mind and being are what we ought to be debating. These are but a few of the tasks which the privileged people who “can’t teach” should be doing and doing well. It is partly what I have tried to do here.

Finally, Baldeosingh notes rhetorically, “when the lower orders begin to get smarter, they aren’t as easy to fool, which leads to all kinds of dangerous trends…do we really want a society where students challenge teachers…?” The same resources that destabilize the authority of the professor and the priests and their claim to being the final, irrefutable source and arbiters of knowledge can also be applied to other knowledge producing agents including media practitioners and cultural workers but we must be care full. As I continue to advocate we must learn to read and write different types of texts more carefully and critically than we have been doing. We must also teach these skills and be prepared for the painful occasions when they will be applied to our own works.

If democracy and skepticism, digital and otherwise, are to flourish in T&T it will not likely be without effort, struggle, and the courage to take on powerful gatekeepers, including journalists, when they act irresponsibly without also acting irresponsibly ourselves. If we can learn that responsible critique and debate do not necessarily have to humiliate, brutalise, or belittle others to be effective, educative or entertaining, and that compassion is not an estranged kin of argument, then perhaps we might create conditions for fecund conversations. If we can demonstrate that we are a society where thoughtful readers can challenge established writers to be first ‘better’, i.e. more conscientious, in their craft, and secondly, better human beings, then perhaps we might truly create new, more fit models of dialogue for our civilization…

Gift of a Growth-Mindset

"The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit." (Mark Twain)

I’m always somewhat taken aback, slightly hurt even, when people praise or express admiration for my intelligence rather than the effort, persistence and dogged determination I’ve put into being prepared, or, divorce my accomplishment from the sacrifices and contributions made by individuals and the opportunities afforded to me by participation in different learning networks. My response is usually an uncomfortable silence and a ‘thank you’ muttered de sotto voce. I have a confession to make. I’m not really that smart. Indeed, as we appear to be moving full-steam-ahead towards another highly contested and questionable educational innovation, viz. sex-segregation, whose outcome is likely to be an increase in the gender gap favouring girls, I want to share some research that suggests why this might not be the best approach and to offer an alternative to educational professionals that is likely to make more of a difference in the immediate and long term – the Theory of Mindsets.

Carol S. Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, in Mindset: The new psychology of success defines two types of mindsets that everyone utilizes to different degrees in different domains of life. When operating within a fixed-mindset the individual believes that some human quality like intelligence, (or some other ability), is static, pre-given or fixed at birth and that individuals possess a certain limited/fixed capacity. Growth-mindset individuals on the other hand believe that human qualities are not static, but learned and can be increased through purposeful effort. From this slight distinction a whole host of differences and associated psychological dispositions develop.

An immediate corollary is that individuals operating in a fixed mindset (FM) have as their goal proving themselves on tasks of fixed difficulty, thereby validating their sense of self through performance while for individuals operating in a growth mindset (GM), the goal, indeed the hallmark, is learning through stretching and perseverance. FM individuals view challenges as a threat to be avoided while GM individuals take these as opportunities to learn, develop and become deeply engaged. In the FM obstacles trigger a response to quit or resign while for GM obstacles trigger persistence and an occasion for exerting more effort. Indeed, effort is a key difference, for FM, effort is seen as embarrassing or fruitless – a demonstration or proof that one is not able to do something while for GM purposeful effort is simply the way one learns, gets better and ultimately the only way one can expect to develop competence or expertise in something that one does not yet know how to do. Dweck states, “it’s startling to see the degree to which people with the fixed mindset do not believe in effort.”

For FM individuals, correction is ignored as not being useful or relevant and blame is assigned to outside sources or forces while GM individuals listen carefully to what can be improved, and pay attention for useable information. For FM individuals other people’s successes are seen as threats which can detract from one’s need to demonstrate superiority while for GM other’s successes are inspirational and again provide opportunities to learn and grow. Dweck’s research has consistenly shown that FM people plateau early, sometimes as early as Grade 6-7 (10-11 years) while GM people experience consistent growth and plateaus do not persist for very long.
With respect to education, FM learners take smart to be “a perfect performance” or “100%” while GM learners view accomplishment as an indicator of progress and expanding capabilities and might make statements like “I got 60% which is great cause I got 52% last time and I’ve been working really hard.” FM students greet lack of success by attempting to avoid such occasions while GM students view it as a necessary reality check, an opportunity for important and constructive feedback and persist with changes to their previous behavior/strategies. FM learners tend to remain at a consistent level of performance, if they start high they end high and vice-versa. GM learners almost all end up higher no matter where they begin. Finally, FM learners tend not to assess their ability accurately, lie about their grades/accomplishment and effort, blame others for their failure and may cheat to maintain a level of performance and achievement they believe should come ‘naturally’ without requisite effort. If this sounds like some politicians, well, I leave you to form your own opinion. GM learners on the other hand tend be more honest about grades, their self-assessments are more accurate and they assume responsibility for their achievements or lack thereof.

A caution and a clarification. The Theory of Mindsets seeks to provide an explanation at individual, inter-individual, and socio-cultural levels of the complex relationship among individual effort, failure, persistence, motivation and societal messages, in achievement, or rather, life-long learning. It does not ignore the contributions made by biology, but suggests that it is not as critical a factor as one’s belief in (and actual) effort, persistence and challenge seeking that influences learning for the majority of individuals in a population. Indeed while there may in time prove to be a biological basis for different mindsets, and perhaps even other types of mindsets, at present, the importance of the theory is in sensitizing educational consciousness to the important role that certain types of beliefs play in achievement and success across different spheres of endeavor. While I present the mindsets dichotomously this is a simplification and I invite interested readers to check the entire book and Carol Dweck’s website for themselves where she engages with the more subtle nuances of the theory.

So how are these mindsets created and can they be changed? What can teachers and parents do and what are the wider implications of these mindsets for our society? I’ll discuss that in the second and third parts of this article.

(Part 2)
Very early in Form 4 Mr. Mercier, our English teacher graded an essay of mine as a D (fail). Looking over that piece I suspect he was being a little generous – somewhat gently telling me that the quality of work was not quite up to his standard and that I could improve with effort if I worked at it. Over the course of form four, through lots of independent extra reading, time in Carnegie library, writing practice, and without going for extra lessons my English mark crept up slowly through a C a B and eventually a low A. More importantly, I knew for myself that the quality of my writing was improving. I had learnt to assess my own work. In form 5 I finally earned an A from Mr. Mercier, it was for a short story on a hurricane and its aftermath which I had spent weeks researching and pleasurably writing and rewriting in a state of flow the weekend before submission. Several months later I would learn that I had won the “Best Short Story” prize from CXC in the 1993 examination, however it is the D and the A from Mr. Mercier on those essay which I hold more dearly as the indicators of my determination to get better at writing.

Teachers and parents play a crucial role in creating (and sustaining) fixed or growth mindsets. They are also essential in changing mindsets. According to Dweck’s research the way praise and labels are used and what is emphasized, are important. In her studies on praise she found that almost all students who were praised for their ability were pushed almost immediately into the fixed-mindset, becoming more risk-averse to challenge, failure and sources of potentially disconfirming information about their ‘brightness.’ In contrast 90% of students who were praised for their effort, i.e. for doing what is needed to succeed, took up new more challenging tasks from which they could learn. The take-away message here is if you want to create fixed mindsets in children praise their ability/intelligence or talent, say things like, “Kevin you’re so smart/dumb/bright/stupid/fast/slow.” But if you want to create a growth-mindset person, praise the effort with statements like, “Kevin, that was a great report, I can tell you did a lot of research and put in a lot of hard work, it shows, there are a couple of places you might like to go to develop your thinking on this further…”. Dweck says, “praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance” and advises, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort and keep on learning.” She offers suggestions for after-school conversations involving every member of the family answering questions like, “What did you learn today?”, “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?”

Labels and stereotypes also work to affect mindsets. Dweck’s research suggests that a great way to create FM learners is to use limiting labels such as “What type of learning mode are you? Are you a visual learner?” Rather fewer labels should be used and when necessary ones that are as expansive as possible such as, “I see you’re really good at picking up visual information from the environment…how else might you learn?” These different approaches send different messages. When teachers use limiting labels the message is “you have fixed traits and I’m judging them” while the other message is “I see you as a developing person and I’m interested in your growth.” Indeed this is one way the FM undermines achievement – by turning every opportunity to learn into a test and need to ‘prove’ oneself as ‘good/smart/bright/able’ and turning teachers into judges (sometimes jury and executioner as well) instead of allies in learning.

Finally teachers (and administrators) whose pedagogy is conducive to producing FM learners tend to focus on knowledge as product in their classroom, i.e. something pre-given and fixed, right or wrong. Growth-mindset teachers however make a subtle shift of focus to knowing as way of being – helping learners to connect disparate bits of knowledge into robust knowledge networks by emphasizing processes of coming to know. While both FM and GM teachers (and parents) may set high standards, GM teachers are honest with students about where they are, teach children how to reach them, help them to develop the tools and skills to succeed and actively enact the belief that all students can reach them. They see these as their responsibilities and they cultivate an atmosphere of mutual trust and intervulnerability where it is safe to learn from failure, including their own. Growth mindset teachers love, and live, to learn. This is critical. FM teachers (and administrators) on the other hand create an atmosphere of judging, mistrust, and fear of failure. They see themselves as “finished products” whose sole responsibility is to “impart their knowledge” and assess the correspondence between what they know and what their students have come to know. They believe that tests measure intelligence, now and forever and since ability is fixed, there’s no point in expending effort behind someone who doesn’t have the ability.

Teachers themselves have to be in the growth-mindset. The best teachers I have met in the Dip Ed and B.Ed were not necessarily the ones with the highest certificates, teaching at the best schools with the best students, but rather the ones whose emphasis in the programme, and in their classrooms was learning from and with their students – developing (as) growth mindset learners. These have been far too few though as many aspects of our education system and national culture, including teacher preparation, reinforce the fixed-mindset. The good news however, is that because mindsets are beliefs, we can choose to believe, and then do otherwise. We can change our minds. Dweck’s research demonstrates that a person can be shifted from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset over the course of 20 minutes, perhaps even over three short articles, simply by shifting focus and emphasis, drawing attention to the mindsets and being attentive to language. Conversely, a person can be shifted out of growth to fixed mode by emphasizing the wrong things, the wrong utterance, praising individual ability rather than effort etc. One wonders what happens when this happens day in day out, year in year out via our educational policies and systems? We need to ask ourselves in our classrooms and homes who/what do we want (our students) to be? I want my children to be surrounded by GM teachers at home and in school and in their community.

Finally, while I’ve used the term FM and GM teachers or learners I don’t mean to label some people as inherently possessing a fixed-mindset or growth-mindset. All of us are capable of being on either side in some domain and it is our mindset in the domain of interest that influences our actions. For example, when it comes to learning about changing and improving education, especially mathematics, I think I’m a growth mindset person. When it comes to football, I’m more a fixed mindset person, though adopting a more growth mindset position it is likely that I haven’t gotten anywhere with football because I haven’t ever put in much effort there – so who knows what I might accomplish if I spent more time and energy learning to play football? A growth mindset is infective. Dweck says it well, “with the right mindset and the right teaching people are capable of a lot more than we think.” The choice of where to expend our efforts though is still ours.

Part 3- Wider implications
When I began submitting articles as a new staff member to the UWI School of Education column, I was told, that my ideas, interesting as they were, were not presented in a style that was appropriate to the medium (Newspaper) and appealing to its audience. I could have approached this with a fixed mindset that I already knew how to write, the editors couldn’t appreciate what I was trying to say, or that I wasn’t any good at that type of writing and stick to writing in and for the Academy. Instead I approached it as a challenge – to learn how to write for different audiences. I talked with people, like Pat, whose growth-mindset and effort over a long time made her demonstrably more competent at it than I; like Lynda, who understood about the nature of the medium; and my wife Shalini who could help me with my grammar, clarity, and expression. I did that not because I like writing – indeed writing remains for me the least pleasurable aspect of intellectual work – but because I believed I had, and have, a responsibility to help others to grow and learn from my learning also. It also provides yet another occasion from which I learn.

So, why bring these ideas to the attention of educators? It is not an attempt to demonstrate superior intelligence nor is it my staking out a little space in the academic agora of educational reform ideas in Trinidad & Tobago, rather it is to say, “I’ve had opportunities as part of my Phd. thus far to engage with some really interesting ideas and people from whom I have learnt and from whom I think educators in TT could also learn and which pose some interesting challenges for rethinking education that goes beyond simply separating boys from girls but speaks to the whole fixed-mindset system of education in Trinidad and Tobago. Where and when does the fixed mindset enter into the educational consciousness of our population? How does it happen? Does our obsession with SEA, CXC and now Phds. have anything to do with it? Perhaps our tiered educational system? And what about the media attention given to the top 100 and scholarship winners? By looking at these might we find something more to learn that what we already know? Might we learn something about what we value and what we teach our children to value?

In Dweck’s research fixed-mindset learners, of all achievement levels, by as early as Grade 5 (9-10 years or about Std. 4) had come to believe that tests measured not only how smart they were at present but how smart they’d be in the future when they grew up! They defined themselves by the test. Consequently, for FM learners, not only was it important to succeed now, but such success had to be flawless and flawless in the right way – perfect and fast. I’ve heard similar sentiments from a high-achieving student in my research, where a transition from pencil to pen between Primary and Secondary school was blamed for her performance on a test as she could no longer erase and her mistakes remained as an indictment rather than a testament to her learning.

“Speed and perfection are the enemy of difficult learning” Dweck argues, providing a strong critique against timed-testing used for dubious if not dangerous sorting purposes. For FM learners, success is proof of their ability, and for high achieving FM students, this is often the route to being seen as special, better, superior and ultimately entitled to rewards without effort or (in)actions without consequences. I recognize, sadly, such a mindset among those posted on a Facebook group by students of a school which has produced two of our Prime Ministers, who mindlessly brag about abuse, fraud, cheating, laziness, lack of effort, greed and their insensitive, ignorant and uncritical individualism.

Fixed-mindset educational cultures, Dweck notes, have transformed failure from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am a failure) and continually reinforce this idea. Failing at anything becomes the great Fear and since one’s abilities are fixed, there’s no way out – why even bother trying. Growth-mindset cultures on the other hand don’t send the message that failure or success defines one’s identity – but that intelligence can be developed with effort and appropriate, knowledgeable guidance. I don’t know that this is the message we’ve been sending to boys and men over the last few months (and indeed years). Indeed we’ve got fixed-mindset and growth-mindset learners across all of our school types, gender categories, races, religions etc. and we ought to be as concerned with the ill-effects of high achieving FM learners who rise to positions of authority and (ir)responsibility as we are with low-achieving FM learners. A question we ought to be asking is “Do we produce too many fixed mindset learners and what are they doing to our society?”
What I find useful about the Theory of Mindsets is how it productively re-situates the locus of the problem of achievement from within individual gendered and racialised bodies constructed as deficient, defective or deviant in some way to a broader network of capillary relations which can be affected by a certain degree of mindfulness on every individual’s part. I also think Dweck’s ideas have implications for our culture as a whole especially leadership at the highest levels. Indeed I find a certain resonance with ideas of Wilson Harris in his descriptions of the Block Mentality and the Literate imagination, the different types of consciousness described by Fanon and Freire, Bob Marley’s endless invitation to “Emancipate ourselves from mental slavery” and the questions and pleas of Dr. Morgan Job and Lloyd Best, especially his obsession with understanding “how a culture could escape itself.” A short answer, perhaps, is that it must do more than change its leaders – it must also change its mindset.

While its been said that politics has a morality of its own, in our history thus far, such a morality seems to be have been more aligned with fixed mindsets than growth mindsets. I invite those offering themselves up for election, especially those new to national politics, to bring their growth mindsets to the parliament, serving, representing and ultimately learning from the population. For those going to the polls I suggest an alternative to choosing between person or party – vote for the candidate with the growth mindset! One way to assess that is not to look only at their history of success, but look especially at their history of recovery from failure and setback. Look at whether or not they assign blame or take responsibility. This silly season let’s give ourselves and the next generation the gift of growth mindset leaders. Primary teachers and Principals, when exam results come out in the next month or so, praise the effort not the ability. Be honest about what SEA is and does. Let’s work to break the cycle of fixed-mindset-edness among our students. When the new academic year rolls around next September it is my hope that teachers, in all schools facing the same issues and concerns that they faced this year might begin to face them with, and offer their students, something hopeful – the generative germ of a growth-mindset. Finally, maybe if we could stop pretending that we already know it all, maybe, just maybe, we might as Sprang used to say, “lun sumting.”

Experiments and Education

I want to make a few critical points in response to columnist Kevin Baldeosingh’s Express article, Experimental Sex Education of Friday April 9th. But first I want to point interested parties to Visible Learning by John Hattie, which is a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses representing over 50,000 studies related to student achievement. Of the 138 factors that he lists as key influences on student learning, gender ranks 122nd in terms of effect size (d=0.12) while variables relating to what teachers actually do in their classrooms make up more than half of the top twenty (d= 0.61-1.44). In this piece though I want to explain why it is extremely difficult to run a true experimental design in education and even more so in the educational climate of administration/governance/policy by vaps as occurs frequently in T&T.

The medical ‘gold-standard’ of controlled randomly assigned double-blind experiments is inappropriate for education. Neither teachers nor students are randomly assigned to secondary schools in T&T nor is it feasible to do so at present. Even among the entrants to ‘prestige’ schools, the legacy mechanism of selecting the 20% confounds the assumption of a randomly selected ‘statistically similar’ population in terms of achievement.

Secondly, in a densely networked place such as T&T or a small community where everybody talks, any group that was receiving a ‘placebo’ treatment would likely figure this out quickly. Also, as is already the case with the media attention given to the potential decision to pilot a shift from co-ed to single-sex schools, if you knew that you were part of a study there is a strong likelihood that some actions/behaviors relevant to one’s learning would be altered and could be attributed to the fact of being aware that one was being studied. His suggestion to convert a single-sex government school to a co-ed one is prone to this critique.

So we cannot have randomly assigned nor double-blind, perhaps even single-blind experimental designs in education. Now what about controls? There is no way to ‘control’ or perhaps even list all of the variables that might affect learning during a study Hattie’s 138 culled from the quantitative literature is a good start. In T&T the phenomenon of extra-lessons as well as (lack of) homework assistance/supervision at home would confound any attempt at ‘proving’ that a perhaps not well understood construct like gender and the decision to separate ‘girls’ from ‘boys’ ‘results’ in greater achievement. The warrant to support the claim would simply be too weak.

Now on to the ethical concerns of conducting ‘experiments’ on ‘other people’s children’ in a field as politically and emotionally charged as education. The most important one, in my opinion, being the way it robs children and teachers of any human agency and reduces the diversity and variability of human beings into the limited pigeon-holes of researcher determined categories. In the first case, experimental design assumes a correspondence between changes in the manipulated variable(s) (independent) and the observed/measured (dependent) variable(s) and since all other variables are kept constant (controlled) cause and effect can be established and one of several outcomes can be predicted. Experimental design also depends critically upon on an assumption that the thing(s) being experimented on do not, cannot (or should not) act intentionally to alter the quality of the variables being investigated or that such actions can be ignored and requires that agents’ histories have no bearing upon the experiment’s outcomes.

Experimental design depends on ignorant, passive and essentially ahistorical agents. Learners do not meet these criteria. They are not inert bits of matter buffeted about solely by external forces despite dominant discourses that continue to talk about increasing the numbers of some type of students in the pipeline or the misleading misnomer brain drain for what is a more complex phenomenon. Nor are learners eternal captives of prior conditioning, but rather they are engaged in continuously construing and re-construing their experiences, testing new knowledge for ‘fit’ with prior experiences, expectations, future goals, desires, aversions, and personal beliefs and altering their actions and their environments. Prior experience or history plays a significant role, but does not determine the complete landscape of future learning. What is learnt in any moment is unpredictable. To treat any learner, group of learners or learning system in this instrumental fashion raises profoundly disturbing ethical concerns.

Experiments are especially good at generating waste in their pursuit of determining cause and effect. Many failed experiments often precede the one that ‘works’ and being a part of a failed experiment in a consequential area such as education is not what parents, teachers or students have signed up for. In other areas, medicine for example, risks, including death, are discussed with participants. Which researcher in our system would dare say that potential risks include lower achievement and failure to complete the mandated curriculum even if the quality of what is learnt is improved? We talk only of potential benefits.

What systems, legislation and oversight are in place to seek and protect students, teachers and parents’ rights from researchers desire to know whether acting as proxies validating government’s policies or academic entrepreneurs? I do know that in T&T some schools have developed their own in-house guidelines and policies for participation in research, though at times I feel this is being used to protect reputations (read prestige) from unfavourable or less than flattering findings and limits reporting of classroom based research by teachers – another factor which robs policy makers of valuable data. Whether such policies are ‘legal’, however, remains to be tested in the future.

While ethical research policies, like other educational policies could be imposed from above without widespread stake-holder consultation, a more dialogical approach coupled with the simultaneous development of the requisite institutional, infrastructural, legislative, and enforcement capabilities would likely create a better climate for the conduct and reporting of useful education research in T&T.

Finally, a brief comment on Mr. Baldeosingh’s ‘poke’ at the UWI School of Education Express column that “99 per cent of the pedagogy in those articles was not based on any scientific research.” I don’t dispute this claim because as I have outlined above, it is next to impossible to do true experimental research in education, and I think this is how he might have been defining ‘scientific’. I also don’t dispute the claim because, as a former contributor to that weekly column, I know that many of the articles weren’t about pedagogy – education isn’t only about teaching or method after all – but there was an invisible pedagogy at work in the occasional reminders to write in a style appropriate to the format of a newspaper and the general “readership of the Express” which I was told required a less academic, less theory or research heavy focus, and a more – albeit no less difficult to learn and master – clear, concise, and convincing journalistic style.

Now, while I don’t want to, because I would prefer Kevin to spend his time on more important things, like unearthing corruption and mocking Ministerial malfeasance, but I’m calling his bluff on the invented, arbitrary, and likely hyperbolic statistic. A simple apology to my former colleagues will suffice.

‘After’ Gender: An Other Genre

I wish to add what I hope is a different perspective on the issue of the Ministry of Education’s planned experiment to convert some co-ed to single-sex schools. On the same day that Dr. Raymond Hackett’s Schooling and Gendermania appeared in the Express (16/03/10), I presented a lunchtime seminar at the UWI School of Education entitled “After Gender towards a human genre in mathematics education (research).” From the feedback received from the small audience it was well received. Given the concerns raised since by Prof. Spence in Co-ed or single-sex schools (18/03/10, 25/03/10), Dr. David Subran (23/03/10) and Kevin Baldeosingh (28/03/10), citizens, educators, and public intellectuals I have great respect and admiration for, and other interested stakeholders (eg. Sara Chookolingo, Edmund Gall (knowtnt.com)) I have decided to share some of the main ideas of that presentation. At times I restrict my examples to mathematics education, my disciplinary home, but invite you to draw parallels if and where appropriate.

I opened the presentation with several stories one of which involved an autobiographical fragment from one of my former B.Ed students, a teacher in Trinidad, who wrote, “For the past thirty years or so I have been engaged in the discipline of numbers. My first introduction was to arithmetic and the first resources I interacted with were a copybook, a pencil and a ruler. The ruler was not for measuring…By the time I had gotten accustomed to doing mathematics I had learnt to associate it with dread.” Another more recent story involved my three year old cousin Janie who having started pre-school recently was angry and sad at home after school one day. Her mother, also a teacher, investigated and learnt that her child’s unhappy mood stemmed from at least two sources. The first, a pedagogical decision by a teacher to have students make, over a hundred times, the numerals 1 and 0, justifying her decision when questioned in terms of preparation for SEA (an event at least 7 years in the future). Janie relayed her dissatisfaction with this saying “Is just too many square mummy…I get tired.” The second source of her unhappiness and sour mood stemmed from the fact that her best friend had not come to school that day. Sometimes the presence of good company can make even tiresome, tedious work, even among professional mathematicians, more tolerable.

Next I moved to an examination of some international newspaper headlines, the currency of our globalized “attention economy,” concerning mathematics and gender which included, for example, “Failing at fairness: How schools cheat girls” a 2009 piece by Wachira Kigotho out of Sub-Saharan Africa and “Girls make boys worse at English, says new study” also published in 2009, by Jessica Shepherd in the UK. I noted that gender problems are similarly framed but differentially oriented around the globe. For example, in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, the ‘gender’ problem in education is currently dominated by discussions of the “crises of masculinity”—(under)achievement, abuse, apathy, and anomie—and the concomitant consequences which include concerns with the social, political and economic uncertainties wrought by the marginalization of men, namely, increases in ‘domestic’ violence, and the political and the economic instability that has accompanied male militarization and militantism – discourses which have taken a not unexpected and important, ethnic and socioeconomic turns in exploring the complex intersectionalities among these (and other) variables with gender. Indeed in the Caribbean some researchers wonder whether or not the Caribbean male is endangered. This type of research, in my opinion, enacts/constructs “masculinity as pathology” – a disease to be feared and cured.

In North America and the UK however, gender research in education seems to be continuously framed as a power-struggle and zero-sum game between the sexes. There seems to be at times a push to ‘prove’ that females, as a population, are mathematically inferior to males, despite research which refutes this claim. There appears to be an equal push however to ‘prove’ that boys are underachieving in the arts and literature portion of the curriculum. This practice of continuing to attribute such gendered descriptions to subject areas (math/science/technology as masculine, the arts/humanities/ literature as feminine) is extremely limiting and intensely problematic. The practice seems to act to reinforce/reinscribe a perception and stereotype of biologically based sex-differences in ability that can be located in individual bodies which must be categorized as belonging to one or another sex. Such stereotypes can, for both sexes and learners of all abilities and at all stages of development, affect test-performance negatively. Furthermore, given that many recent research reports have concluded that at present there remain greater disparities within gender or between students of different SES groups one wonders, who benefits, who is disadvantaged and how by creating and continuing to maintain this extremely narrow focus on dichotomized ‘gender’ (read sex) differences?
At this point I outlined my argument based on two premises and implications. The first being that gender (like mathematics, education, and culture) is transphenomenal and therefore requires a transdisciplinary approach to its study. In addition there is a coloniality of gender which requires a decolonial attitude. The second part of the argument was based on Jamaican, Stanford Professor emeritus, Sylvia Wynter’s “After Man” project, which I framed as a decolonizing transdisciplinary approach that is “fit” to studying Gender in Education in T&T & the Caribbean. However, this requires an initial (and perhaps temporary) reframing of Gender problems as problems in Genre if any progress is to be made in changing the script which based on Hackett, Spence, Subran, Chookolingo, and Baldeosingh’s articles is unfolding as expected and is likely to be replaced by the next crisis in education or political revelation. I develop these more fully in due course.

Education, Transphenomenality and Complexity

A transphenomenon is a form (structure) or happening (phenomenon) that emerges and can only be understood by simultaneously considering (other relevant) forms and happenings across multiple levels of organization (see accompanying graphic © Steven Khan). An example is obesity where research evidence from across domains implicates genetic, biological, personal, social and cultural factors in the visible phenomenon. Education is transphenomenal with a big T. Some educational transphenomena include knowing (consciousness, comprehension, etc.), learning (memory, intelligence, creativity etc.), teaching (errors, pedagogy, burnout, etc.), leadership, management (policy making) and ethics/wisdom/holiness. In addition phenomena like violence, indiscipline, corruption, motivation, and performance are also transphenomenal. This is just another way of saying that education is a Complex phenomenon (with a Big C) and complexity thinking is a transdisciplinary approach that is “fit” to studying this type of system.

There are many ways to talk about complex systems. The easiest way perhaps is to contrast them with simple systems and complicated systems. Both simple and complicated systems are fully deterministic, another way is to say they are well-defined. Simple systems have few parts (a pendulum) while complicated systems have many parts, (think of a watch). However in both cases once the initial conditions are known and the mechanism can be described any future position can be determined to a given degree of accuracy, i.e. they are predictable once certain criteria are met. Such systems are in theory, fully knowable.

Another feature of such systems is that they can be dismantled into their components and, if put back together correctly, work in exactly the same way. Complex systems however have many parts but they also possess properties which are emergent. These are properties that emerge as a result of the interactions of the many parts/agents through iterative (feedback) processes and which could not have been predicted with absolute certainty beforehand based on our current understanding of these systems. For example, it has recently been proposed that gravity is an emergent phenomena from quantum information. Emergent properties are properties of the system as a whole and of no individual agent/part. Such systems show evolutionary dynamics, sensitivity to initial conditions (the butterfly effect) are resistant to some types of change (the bureaucratic effect) and long-term prediction is not possible. Such systems can be taken apart, but there are no guarantees that if the parts are re-assembled the whole will function as before since the initial conditions that seeded the original system are usually unknown. Ecosystems demonstrate this idea beautifully – they are easily dismantled, the complex networks of relationships that sustain it destroyed, but they cannot be as easily put back together. Complex systems cannot be built like a factory but must be allowed to grow and adapt.

Complexity thinking has, for at least two decades, been an integral part of the scientific, business and economic landscapes. The type of thinking that it entails, thinking transphenomenally, has only recently begun to enter into and impact educational discourses. Evidence of the importance of this type of thinking for re-thinking education in the 21st century is the fact that the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Conference’s theme this year is “Understanding Complex Ecologies in a Changing World” and the annual Complexity Science and Educational Research (CSER) conference will be hosted for the first time outside of North America, in China, a country that is not only revolutionizing its approach to business and industry, but also to education, later this year. Both of these meetings recognize the potential and take serious the implications for practice and policy that follow from a discursive reframing of the language of education transphenomenally.

Transphenomena require more than a mere interdisciplinary approach to their study. They often insist upon an emergent eclecticism or transdisciplinary approach as for example that advocated for and enacted in the scholarship of Jamaican born Cultural Studies theorist, Stuart Hall, who writes, “[w]e do live in a period when many of the existing paradigms established and developed within the traditional intellectual disciplines either no longer in themselves adequately correspond to the problems that we have to resolve, or require supplementing from other disciplines with which they have not historically been directly been connected.” Indeed many new domains of inquiry are being created by creatively fusing approaches drawn from or inspired by medical, psychological, sociological, artistic, performative, anthropological, biological, ecological and spiritual/theological discourses. Among complexivists multiple passageways have been and are being created between the cultures of science and the humanities.

Mathematics is Transphenomenal
Adopting this transphenomenal attitude, I defined (formal) mathematics as “a biologically constrained human activity, a deeply affective legacy of human culture that is socially mediated, enacting material, performative and discursive regimes of understanding and which is historically evolved/evolving in earth’s unique environment. This conception is far removed from neat and tidy perfect Platonic and Formalist philosophies of mathematics and mathematics education which are often, unfortunately, and unwittingly reinforced by shallow media reporting. Mathematics and mathematics education, like other complex transphenonema, are messy and difficult disciplines. I also outlined some of the current transdisciplinary approaches to studying the learning of mathematics such as embodied perspectives, neuro/psycho-analytic/affective/phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, critical mathematics, ethnomathematics, mathemaesthethics and biosemiotics, some of which I have discussed previously in the Express while working at the School of Education.

Drawing from some of this literature I presented evidence that attempted to trouble too ‘simple’ understandings of mathematics, gender and differential accomplishment. For example David Halpern and his colleagues state clearly in their review of the literature that “there is no single factor by itself that has been shown to determine sex differences in science and math. Early experience, biological constraints, educational policy, and cultural contexts each have effects, and these effects add and interact in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways.” For example, Entwistle has suggested that, “different degrees of freedom in early childhood, such as the unsupervised freedom and larger play ranges of boys versus the supervised house play of girls may provide more opportunities for boys to learn and develop spatial skills than their female counterparts” providing a social dimension to understanding a factor that perhaps contributes to differences in spatial and geometric reasoning tasks and which troubles simplistic essentialist gender readings such as that of Michael Gurian reported by Baldeosingh that “male toddlers explore more than their female counterparts.” As a mathematics educator, this finding in particular worries me given the increasingly claustrophobic restrictions on freedom of movement imposed upon children from an ever earlier age in T&T mainly due to (unnecessary in most cases) extra lessons, increased time in front of screens, and health and safety (kidnapping, accidents, and violent crime) concerns.

At a cultural level and consistent with findings from gender researchers, “countries with smaller female disadvantage in mathematics achievement tend to be countries where 1) women are less associated with home and children, 2) there is greater educational gender equality, 3) there is little gender inequality in the labor force, and 4) women have a higher status in general.” At the genetic level, Penner suggests that “while genes play an important role in sex-determination there does not seem to be conclusive evidence of sex-linked recessive genes linked to mathematical ability.” Finally as Suzanne Damarin argues, “the powers of rationality and mathematical thinking are so bound up with the cultural definition of masculinity, and "that the discursive production of femininity [is] antithetical to masculine rationality to such an extent that femininity is equated to poor performance, even when the girl or woman is performing well.” This small sampling from the research literature suggests that improving math performance among the
sexes is not simple, indeed the situation is quite complex.

According to Halpern and colleagues progress on understanding sex differences in mathematics has not moved very far. They note that “despite more than a century of effort and empirical investigation, (into sex differences in mathematics achievement) in many ways, we are still asking the same basic questions.” This is telling if not damning of the research paradigms in education that have dominated education discourse in the 20th century. It is quite likely that we’ve been using the wrong sort of frameworks and looking in the wrong places.

Shifting levels to sociological and cultural researchers sheds some light on why this might be so. Amy Parks in a 2009 paper writes that “educational measurement (re)produces regimes of ‘truth’ through pre-selecting what is measured, how it is measured and what filters are used in reporting scores (eg. race, gender, SES) and what are not used (eg. marital status, sibling order, teacher’s level of education etc.).” Parks echoes earlier feminist critiques of the gendered nature of mathematics (and mathematics education) such as Lyn Shulman who more than a decade ago noted that “the categories we choose to use, frame “what constitutes not only an answer but even the questions we can ask.” thereby already limiting ourselves only to that which we can name and classify and thereby mark as acceptable or unacceptable, normal or deviant. In my own research in Trinidad at a prestigious all girls’ high school, I found that relatively minor things can affect students’ engagement with mathematics as they transitioned to secondary school. For example, students described being limited by their move to the usage of pens in secondary school and the inability to erase mistakes, errors becoming permanently marked in their notebooks, a mark of personal intellectual failing rather than learning. They also discussed the difficulty of presenting their working and thinking in the, to them, “too small boxes” on the SEA exam form. I guess Janie will learn this too eventually.

Gender is Transphenomenal & Colonized
Gender too is transphenomenal, it is not as simple as some have made it a matter of male versus female or of sexual preference, rather one must look at the phenomenon across levels for an understanding of gender. Beginning at the embodied level, Professor Mark Blumberg, a behavioral and cognitive developmental neuroscience (Iowa) explains, “…sexual identity [is like] a meandering, unfolding path that begins early in embryonic development and continues after birth…the vagaries of development can produce alternative paths and short cuts that effectively break down our standard conceptions of male and female…although male and female human newborns are traveling on different paths to sexual identity, they must still make the journey. The destination is not fixed and it does not exist anywhere within the child. Even the path does not exist. It is rolled out…as the child interacts with its world through developmental time.” The recent case with South African runner Caster Semenya also highlights the general oversimplification of sex and gender into two dichotomous categories with one usually constructed in a superior position to the other. Arne Ljungqvist, chair of the IOC medical commission has stated emphatically that "there is no scientifically sound lab-based technique that can differentiate between man and woman”.

In education, researchers Glasser and Smith argue that the terms gender and ‘sex’ have not been carefully distinguished in research reports and are often conflated, used interchangeably or indiscriminately and that this lack of conceptual clarity has proven a hindrance in understanding how students’ educational experiences are influenced by gender. They note that “without careful exposition of how terms are being used, the common-ground assumption of a shared common understanding can lead to confusion or terminological conflation which ultimately rests upon dichotomous sex categories.” Moving outside of these categories, Julie Greenberg, in Definitional Dilemmas, notes that, “sex is still presumed to be binary and easily determinable by an analysis of biological factors. Despite anthropological and medical studies to the contrary, society presumes an unambiguous sex paradigm in which all individuals can be classified neatly as male or female.”

Based on their articles it appears that my esteemed colleagues and friends appear to be bound within this paradigm at present and while I acknowledge the value of the work they are doing in keeping this important conversation going and demanding more open and transparent dialogue and rational debate, I fear their presentations thus far offer no way out of the impasses in education in which we find ourselves in T&T. Finally, our own Professor Patricia Mohammed has repeatedly made calls for a transdisciplinary approach to understanding gender arguing that, “[t]he study of understanding of gender should not be limited by the boundaries of the contemporary intellectual imagination. In the same way that our gendered identities are at some level fluid and malleable, so too should the thought processes that allow us to explore the many dimensions of our gender and sexual identities.” Next I address briefly the idea that gender is as much a colonized concept as other categories of difference such as race.

In The Coloniality of Gender, Maria Lugones demonstrates how the concept of dichotomized sex categories based on taken as ‘normal’ and ‘universal’ European ideas of sexual dimorphism served Eurocentered global capitalist exploitation during the colonialist era and that the categories that we use to organize our world and in our case our schooling are neither natural nor neutral. Drawing on Oyéronké Oyewùmí, author of The Invention of Women, she argues that “gender was not an organizing principle of Yoruba society prior to colonization by the West”, rather, “the usual gloss of the Yoruba categories obinrin and okunrin as “female/woman” and “male/man” respectively, is a mistranslation” an imposition of a colonist’s categories upon a colonized peoples. She goes on make trace the political implications of the narrowing of the concept of gender and the introduction of the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ through which “females were categorized and reduced to “women” [thus] ma[king] them ineligible for leadership roles…” Indeed, she notes that, “it was unthinkable for the colonized government to recognize female leaders among the peoples they colonized” and in this way “State power was transformed to male-gender power by the exclusion of women from state structures.”

Selwyn Ryan (04/04/10) claims that “women in power are still a novelty” but Lugones demonstrates that this was not always the case. Drawing upon the scholarship of Paula Gunn Allen on Native American (Indian) tribal cultures she argues that gender roles were not as sharply delineated in some tribes as they have come to be in the modern West. Tribal gender roles were often determined “on the basis of proclivity, inclination, and temperament. The Yuma had a tradition of gender designation based on dreams; a female who dreamed of weapons became a male for all practical purposes.” In addition she notes that, “Cherokee women had had the power to wage war, to decide the fate of captives, to speak to the men’s council, they had the right to inclusion in public policy decisions, the right to choose whom and whether to marry, the right to bear arms. The Women’s Council was politically and spiritually powerful. Cherokee women lost all these powers and rights, as the Cherokee were removed and patriarchal arrangements were introduced.” In addition, many tribes, including the Susquehanna, Iroquois, Cherokee, and Navajo were gynecratic and recognized homosexuals and “third genders” or ‘berdache’ positively. Unfortunately little can perhaps be said of the gender organization of our own decimated indigenous populations that has not already been coloured by the vivid colonial sexual imagination.

In Trinidad and Tobago the gender and genre of our colonial heritage in education is entangled with the relics of religious sensibilities. Kwok-Pui-Lan’s Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology is perhaps one of the more important works I have recently come across as a scholar and (questioning) Catholic in beginning the important work of engaging the complex intersectionalities that make up this difficult and painful heritage. Her discussion renders it impossible to turn a blind eye or deaf ear to the complicity of the Church, men and women, colonized and colonizer, abuser and abused, teachers and students, in the suffering, enslavement, and sickness of spirit theft that continues to unfold in education in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and elsewhere. In our context, that the current discussions about education and gender have been dominated thus far by anamales (anatomical males), including myself, is not without concern. That the arguments have NOT, until this point, called into question the very categories and basis for such classification and separation, have not looked beyond the constraints of a very narrow and limited disciplinary framework suggests a commitment to a questionable epistemology and a reproduction of the coloniality of power including its gendered dimensions. Coverage of competing and refutational views to the “official knowledge” regarding education and gender are usually not vigorously pursued, promoted or reported on in a timely fashion by the media, in particular in a closeted, heteronormative, homophobic and neo-colonial society such as ours. What is really needed a framework that offers a productive way and means to transform relationships of colonized gender domination in and out of education/school.

After Gender towards a Human Genre
At this point in the presentation I turned to the wonderfully frustrating intellectual thought of the Caribbean’s own Sylvia Wynter whom I framed as a transdisciplinary scholar. Wynter’s oeuvre is a carefully fashioned theoretical bricolage which draws upon, and strategically deploys a wealth of concepts drawn from across the landscapes of human inquiry, in seeking to effect a rupture and displacement among the complex configurations and accretive articulations of institutional associations within which she sees a dominant bio-cidal episteme, cultural logic or order of consciousness, that engendered and accompanied the rise of Western Humanism, rationalized colonial expansion, and undergirded the rise of the modern world. The overrepresentation of this episteme that she calls man, as the only ‘true’ logic or way of being human, enacts a pandemic genre which negatively marks ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ as ‘defect’, deficit’ or ‘deviance’. In her own words, she states, “Man” is not the human, although it represents itself as if it were. It is a specific, local-cultural conception of the human…Its “Other” is therefore not woman…Rather because Man conceives of itself through its Origin narrative…of Evolution…its “Other” and “Others” are necessarily those categories of human who are projected…as having been bio-evolutionary dysselected – i.e…[all] who are negatively marked as defective humans within the terms of Man’s self-conception and its related understanding of what it is to be human.” The classes of humans who have been bio-evolutionaryily dysselected, constructed as disposable humans, ‘waste’ or ‘other’-than-human, chattel, include the ancestors and contemporaries of every Caribbean citizen.

Wynter’s challenge is to attempt to simultaneously re-imagine Humanism outside and beside the apparatuses employed by man to move towards an “autopoiesis of the human” i.e. following Fanon “to redefine what it is to be human.” Her ultimate concern is with human freedom and its trans-formative potential, rather than the freedom of man. This is the foundation of her ‘after man’ proposal in which she wonders, “How then shall we reimagine freedom as emancipation from our present ethno-class or Western bourgeois conception of freedom? And therefore, in human rather than as now, Man’s terms?...beyond those of Man’s oppositional sub-versions – that of Marxism’s proletariat, that of feminism’s woman (gender rights), and that of our multiple multiculturalisms and/or centric cultural nationalisms (minority rights), to that of gay liberation (homosexual rights), but also a conception of freedom able to draw them all together in a synthesis.” Wynter’s words resonate with that of my former B.Ed student, the primary teacher mentioned earlier, who also wrote in her autobiography, “I am particularly interested in freedom…I am very interested in the freedom that comes from knowledge and the knowledge that comes from enquiry rather than mere absorption…I am also interested in enquiry that seeks to find pathways to peace and self-fulfillment rather than enquiry to unearth some injustice to seek revenge. I am interested in helping students to partake of the beauty that is available to all human beings and to create beauty for others through mathematics…I think I have achieved my ultimate goal and that is a language to describe the freedom that I so dearly want and want others to strive for…The education system does not teach us how not to bury the rich gifts of humanity – love, art, collective learning, aesthetics, diversity, easy of knowing and the self transforming responsibility to the other, the fruits of which every human being has the potential to reap.”

To think “after man” is to think transphenomenally and to ask what (or who) is already besides, already existent, and thus more than potential but not yet afforded recognition or full value as being, and to begin to wonder how and why this might have come to be so. As I have argued elsewhere, what we need in the Caribbean is to develop our kumbla consciousness and to pursue intervulnerability as an aim for education.

In discussing the resistance to her discussions of gender by feminists, Wynter elaborates a position that draws attention to the instituting of ‘kind’ or genre, the discursive making and marking of difference. She says, “[a]lthough I use the term “race,”…“race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.”…there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multiplicity of modes. So I coined the word “genre,” or I adapted it, because “genre” and “gender” come from the same root. They mean “kind,” one of the meanings is “kind.” Now what I am suggesting is that “gender” has always been a function of the instituting of “kind.” Indeed the root of gender, like genre is the same as genus, and genesis, and means ‘kin,’ ‘origin,’ or ‘type.’ Wynter’s etymological reminder, her proposal that “gender” is a function of “genre” advances calls that have been made for a feminist degendering movement. Working from this position then what might it mean to conceive and perform research in mathematics education “after gender” i.e. in another, more human genre that does not essentialize, reify or neglect or overlook biological sex-differences? How shallow now does the Ministry’s experiment in gender re-socialization seem now – entrenched as it is firmly within the genre of Man?

Within the current Gender-genre, for example note a conspicuous absence of studies of ‘men’ doing femininities in and through mathematics or ‘women’ in mathematics doing any form of masculinity that is not negatively scribed. In the realm of the political too much has been focused on Mrs. Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s gender, though the headline on Mary King’s article (15/03/10) which declares “Change but no Change”, could be applied transphenomenally to much in Trinidad including the possible result of the Ministry’s gender experiment if the only thing that is changed is the sex-gender composition of the schools and not the genre of education that is at present authoritative, inhuman, aconsequential, and unholy. As I have written recently (04/04/10), the inconclusive research literature, which rests upon a too simple understanding of sex as gender, suggests that if the genre in schools remains the same then ‘girls’ are likely to increase the level of their performance at a much faster rate than ‘boys’. This will likely amplify the academic panic of the current discourses in Caribbean education which have constructed all forms of non-normative masculinities as pathologies in need of cure or rehabilitation. Politically as well as in education we need genre change.

A Closing Hope
I’ve often been asked, why, despite finishing at the top end of my undergraduate mathematics (and botany) cohort I have not pursued mathematics in any meaningful way at the graduate level. The short answer is that while I retain an interest and love for Mathematics as a discipline, my experiences, and, in particular the experiences of many of my colleagues and former students, was often not pleasant. I really was not inspired by the end of my B.Sc. to go follow that (Eulerian) path again. Speaking to many other mathematically gifted men, I hear similar stories. It is not about gender in the main, but the destructive inhuman genre of mathematics education in some university departments, or by some faculty members, a genre that is often repeated sometimes in teacher education, staffrooms, and very often in daily classroom practice by people of all genders.

Unlike expensive foreign consultants, my advice, at present, is free. I do not think it is a ‘wrong’ move to separate ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ at the secondary level – I do think we need to rethink what we think a boy and a girl is and whether this is a justifiable basis for this decision. I do think it is not going to be ‘right’ for every case. Certainly the Ministry’s continued dependence on a top-down closed-mouth approach is an inappropriate way to go about the process of educational improvement. I am not alone in this assessment. If I had to do this, following the free advice offered by Professors Spence and King over the years, I would seek to create a research grant/innovation /experimentation system open to all schools to submit proposals for their own reform/ improvement initiatives that could range from curricular innovations, social experiments to infrastructural transformations. The schools would be responsible for accounting and reporting back both to the Ministry and the public on the success of their efforts within a fixed time frame (probably 3-5 years depending on the type of project). This is an integral part of what is meant by creating schools as learning communities and building a sustainable knowledge society/economy. Such things do not happen overnight, but a culture of innovation, risk and responsibility has to be seeded and nurtured over time. Many individuals at UWI, UTT, USC, DERE and other educational research institutions as well as teachers in schools, retired, and in private practice would be able to add valuable expertise to this process. Some of these schools would likely figure out that separating students by sex would probably be a change that would have a reasonable chance of success, i.e. of increasing achievement (not the sole aim of education mind you) for the majority of students. However other contextually relevant innovations would probably emerge from this crowd-sourcing approach. (A caveat – sometimes the crowd can be very stupid). It would not though be a top-down imposed solution that few are invested in, rather like the transphenomenal complex systems that schools and learning are, such strategies would belong to the whole school community and to no one individual.

In ending my turn, it is my hope that other interested and affected parties will get into this important conversation. Indeed, while (mathematics) education and gender studies have developed alongside each other in the academy, until fairly recently and with relatively few exceptions, they have remained mutually indifferent, perhaps even estranged, to one another’s work. Going forward this has to change.
The challenges of the present demand that we read learn to across disciplinary boundaries and learn to read differently if we are to progress together. Wilson Harris describes societies that are unable to do this as block societies, he writes, “we have seen violence erupt out of block societies…If we have cultures which are locked into certain functions, which read the world in only one way, then fanaticism grows out of that, terror grows out of that…” and notes that “lots of people may be able to read and write competently, but if they are locked within block functions, either they submit or they rebel (perhaps in T&T they revel?) violently, they burn property, they do terrible things, they protest against the society without a grain of understanding that they carry within themselves the very seeds of disaster against which they protest. Unless they can understand that, complex, inner revision, complex, outer dialogue is lost.”

We cannot afford to continue to lock our children, as Janie has already begun to learn, as children in SEA, CXC and CAPE learn, into block societies to fulfill block functions. It is my hope that in approaching mathematics, gender and education transphenomenally and adopting transdisciplinary approaches to their study that we might embrace the literate imagination of what Harris calls the ‘Infinite Rehearsal’ or ‘the Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination’ in which we might discover the reality that “to convert rooted deprivations into complex parables of freedom and truth is a formidable but not impossible task.”

TT Express News 2010 - Squandermania

Mary King has always been a favourite read of minem she does address educational issues, especially entrepreneurship and innovation, two aspects of education that are seldom dealt with by traditional educators (Sam Lochan being one exception).
Squandermania - Mary King
Monday, January 4th 2010

Part I
During the property tax debate the Opposition charged that the Government squandered almost TT$300 billion over the last eight years or so. In reply the Minister of Finance and other PNM MPs waved a newspaper article which purported to demonstrate that this was not the case. One MP even suggested that this article should be required reading for the Opposition and possibly all of us.

The article argued that if we agreed that the buildings constructed by the PNM would appreciate in value then the PNM government did not squander the money! Further, that in the Ryan poll 76 per cent of the respondents agreed that there was squander-mania and extravagance yet 65 per cent approved of the National Academy for the Performance Arts.

The article concludes that this evidence does not support squandermania and challenged readers to say how they would have allocated the funds.

As an Independent Senator I repeatedly cajoled both Governments to spend, especially in booms, in order to reconstruct our socio-economy. However, both the PNM’s and UNC’s spending, respectively, is and was not socially and economic efficient - i.e. the spending was in support of an unsustainable system.

Some of us still think that our private sector in this plantation economy that exploits a depleting resource, can, if facilitated or bribed by the government, diversify this economy. This view ignores the work of the New World Group, that of Lloyd Best, Kari Levitt, Beckford etc., which is also echoed by Sir Arthur Lewis.

Diversification requires the direct intervention by the Government in, as this column has discussed in detail, the creation of a National Innovation System, wherein the government takes a hands-on role to help create a new knowledge-based innovative and entrepreneurial class which would eventually pervade the country’s private sector.


The current private sector does very well in the boom times of our economy and, like our present government, sees the energy sector as everlasting, either that or business in T&T has a short time horizon.

In 2008 the Government spent TT$28.3 billion on subsidies and transfers, of which the petroleum subsidy was TT$2.1 billion. With PM Manning as the ’de facto’ Commonwealth champion of climate-change management and in a world not only attempting to constrain fossil fuel use but also considering imposing a carbon tax on users of petroleum products, our Government is subsidising the use of fossil energy.

Our manufacturers, who have found it impossible to break into the global market, have cheap, subsidised energy as their competitive advantage. When the RIC recommended rate increases for T&TEC our Government stalled these increases for years and then allowed only certain sectors to have increases, all the while subsidising T&TEC. The subsidisation of energy, the use of cheap natural resources to foster industrialisation, including the proposed aluminium smelter, is economically inefficient - squander-mania.


The Government spent as recurrent expenditure TT$1.66 billion on pensions and gratuities. Any enlightened business entity would recognise that pensions for its employees should be based on employee/employer contributions to an investment fund whose returns on investment pay pensions -- a yearly call on otherwise generated income should not be the source of pension payments.

Further, this fund guaranteed by Government can serve as investments into the diversification of the on-shore into a knowledge-based economy. This pension transfer is economically inefficient.

In 2008 the Government contributed some TT$1 billion to the education institutions. Following the UNC’s call that no child should be left behind, the present GATE programme funds anyone who is at least marginally qualified to attend an approved tertiary institution of her choice.

Our education system is about certification and is judged by the quantity of its output -- the aim is 60 per cent of the cohort. The quality of its graduates with respect to their demonstrated ability to move this nation towards a knowledge-based society is hopelessly inadequate.

The hope that UTT could project us into such a society has not materialised, though to date enormous sums of money have been spent on it. The tremendously expensive Tamana Technology Park is useless as a vector of this transformation since, like the energy sector but without the attraction of cheap gas, the plan is for foreign investment to diversify our on-shore economy. This transfer of funds to education is economic and socially inefficient.

Happy New Year to all (continued) maryking@tstt.net.tt