Tag: behaviorism

Ed Yong wrote about that viral video of the baby bear and mama bear making their way across a snow-covered cliff. You know the one – the one that some educators have said shows the bear had “grit.” Yong points out that the bears were being filmed by a drone, and the mother would never have made her baby take such a precarious path had it not been for the technological intrusion. Come to think of it, the whole thing – the ignorance and dismissal of trauma, the lack of attention to structural violence, the use of technology to shape behavior – is a perfect analogy for how “grit” gets wielded in schools.

Source: HEWN, No. 291

Psychological models of autism tend to work on the cognitive level of explanation, with some attempting to make links to biological and neurological data. In order to produce cognitive models, all of them rely on accounts of behaviour to make inferences from. A major criticism of these models, is that they are formed (with the exception of monotropism theory, see section 2.5) from a perspective of a cognitive psychology overly restricted by its total adherence to scientific method as the gold standard, which do not value the input of ‘autistic voices’, or that of sociological viewpoints on autism. This has come about for a number of reasons, one of which being the splitting of levels of explanation into subject ‘silos’ (Arnold, 2010). Another was the triumphant victory that biomedical explanations earned at the expense of Bettleheim’s theory of the ‘refrigerator mother’. This victory would not just produce a rejection of this theory however, but it seems a total rejection of psycho-sociological reflection upon what it is to be autistic, a fatal flaw that only alienated the voices of autistic people further. The victory spared the mother, yet lay the blame at the neurology of the ‘autistic person’ themselves, in the sense that there was something medically deficient about the ‘autistic person’, and if one could only find the site of the ‘lesion’ one could find a ‘cure’ (Happe, 1994a). Assumptions of what autism is are enshrined in the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-IV (1994) and ICD-10 (1992) and based upon interpretations of observed behavioural traits. All the psychological theories base their models within this criterion of behaviour led framework, although in the monotropism theory (see section 2.5), this is thankfully balanced by the accounts of lived experience of ‘autistic people’ themselves, including one of the authors of the paper, Wendy Lawson.

The current psychological models seem somewhat inadequate at drawing the links between biology and behaviour, but even more so, between biology and the lived experience of autistic subjectivity, often attempting to obscure the ‘autistic voice’ or ignore it, in an attempt to reduce autistic behaviours to definable objective criteria. The theory of monotropism, is a welcome departure from this theoretical dominance however, largely basing its account in subjective accounts. In so doing, this theory is more applicable to the vast array of subjective differences experienced by autistic people, although perhaps not all. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have achieved the widespread recognition enjoyed by the other theories.

“…right from the start, from the time someone came up with the word ‘autism’, the condition has been judged from the outside, by its appearances, and not from the inside according to how it is experienced.” (Williams, 1996: 14).

Source:  So what exactly is autism? 

Rising autism diagnoses lead to the growth of an autism industry that caters more for the cultural expectations of parents than the needs and well-being of autistic people on the margins of society.

Source: Taking ownership of the label – Autistic Collaboration

I am watching the US education system not very subtly invite punishment back into the mainstream classroom. This appears to be driven by the field of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA).

Source: Defining Reinforcement and Punishment for Educators – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?

Autism therapy is attracting significant attention from private equity firms, a trend that could fund rapid expansion of clinics, but is also raising concerns about quality of care.

Source: As Demand For ABA Therapy Increases, Investors Buy In — Disability Scoop

Like EdSurge, Disability Scoop uncritically promotes marketing. A great many autistic people reject ABA as abuse. Private equity doesn’t care. We are commodities.

Behaviorism, particularly ABA, is primitive moral development used to commodify people. Reject it from our schools and companies.

Plenty of policies and programs limit our ability to do right by children. But perhaps the most restrictive virtual straitjacket that educators face is behaviorism – a psychological theory that would have us focus exclusively on what can be seen and measured, that ignores or dismisses inner experience and reduces wholes to parts. It also suggests that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement – and, by implication, that we can control others by rewarding them selectively.

Allow me, then, to propose this rule of thumb: The value of any book, article, or presentation intended for teachers (or parents) is inversely related to the number of times the word “behavior” appears in it. The more our attention is fixed on the surface, the more we slight students’ underlying motives, values, and needs.

It’s been decades since academic psychology took seriously the orthodox behaviorism of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, which by now has shrunk to a cult-like clan of “behavior analysts.” But, alas, its reductionist influence lives on – in classroom (and schoolwide) management programs like PBIS and Class Dojo, in scripted curricula and the reduction of children’s learning to “data,” in grades and rubrics, in “competency”- and “proficiency”-based approaches to instruction, in standardized assessments, in reading incentives and merit pay for teachers.

It’s time we outgrew this limited and limiting psychological theory. That means attending less to students’ behaviors and more to the students themselves.

Source: It’s Not About Behavior – Alfie Kohn

> I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.

(I am assuming, I suppose, that you know who these two figures are: Edward L. Thorndike was an educational psychology professor at Columbia University who developed his theory of learning based on his research on animal behavior – perhaps you’ve heard of this idea of his idea, the “learning curve,” the time it took for animals to escape his puzzle box after multiple tries. And John Dewey was a philosopher whose work at the University of Chicago Lab School was deeply connected with that of other social reformers in Chicago – Jane Addams and Hull House, for example. Dewey was committed to educational inquiry as part of democratic practices of community; Thorndike’s work, on the other hand, happened largely in the lab but helped to stimulate the growing science and business of surveying and measuring and testing students in the early twentieth century. And this is shorthand for Condliffe Lagemann’s shorthand, I realize, but you can think of this victory in part as the triumph of multiple choice testing over project-based inquiry.)

Thorndike won, and Dewey lost. I don’t think you can understand the history of education technology without realizing this either. And I’d propose an addendum to this too: you cannot understand the history of education technology in the United States during the twentieth century – and on into the twenty-first – unless you realize that Seymour Papert lost and B. F. Skinner won.

Source: B. F. Skinner: The Most Important Theorist of the 21st Century