THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 28/NO. 3/1994/pp. 356-367 IDEOLOGIES, PRACTICES, AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR SPECIAL EDUCATION Robert Dixon Douglas Carnine University of Oregon We propose that the articles in this special issue like practices. The value of a particular instruc Support an emphasis upon specific instructional tional or assessment practice is probably depen: and assessment practices, as opposed to broad, dent upon, at the very least, context and learner vague, and often emotive educational ideologies. _ characteristics, and empiricism remains the most Often, well-researched, effective practices can be reliable means for evaluating practices, associated with any ideology, as can poor, The articles im this special issue suggest that a focus upon specific educational practices has far more potential for advancing the field of special (and general) education than an emphasis upon philosophies, metatheories, theories, or psy- chological schools that we will refer to as ideologies. It is possible, in fact, that any ideology—constructivist or otherwise—can obfuscate and impede the progress of education as a profession. Our first example of this thesis comes from a fascinating analysis of cognitive and behavioral psychology conducted by Butterfield, Slocum, and Nelson (1992). Butterfield and his associates pointed out that some ideological differences between behavioral and cognitive schools are genuine and potentially incompat- ible. Specifically, behaviorists tend to play down mentalism and cognitivists play it up. In addition, the vernacular of each differs considerably. However, the phe- nomena each describe are often remarkably similar, particularly in relationship to notions of transference. Thus, many crucial instructional practices derived from each school’s bodies of empirical evidence are virtually indistinguishable from one another when stripped of the jargon each employs as language convention, For example, the differences between transference in cognitive parlance and the more traditionally behavioral term generalization are practically nonexistent in terms of the actual phenomenon that each describes. And of far greater impor- tance to practitioners, substantial cognitive and behavioral research. supports essentially the same instructional conditions for achieving transference or gener- alization, Our thesis—that examining practices is more fruitful than examining ideolo- certainly not profound, when viewed as a variation on a classical set of nships: those between the abstract and the concrete. Without even specu- lating upon the epistemology of abstractions, the suggestion that abstracti become clearer and potentially more functional when embodied by concrete ns. Address: Robert Dixon, 2716 Hillside Dr. SE, Olympia, WA 98501 356THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 28/NO. 3/1994 357 examples seems not terribly controversial. We better appreciate love in acts of love, kindness in acts of kindness, understanding in acts of empathy Butterfield et al. have made a strong case for viewing the labels that permeate our field as abstraction, both at the broadest level (cognitivist/behaviorist) and in reference to “smaller” constructs (e.g., discriminative stimulus/context state- ments). Although broad issues of ideology and psychology are by no means unimportant, in the final analysis, the extent to which we as special educators are able to fulfill our special moral obligations is determined by the practices we employ: For convenience, then, we will explore some possible relations between the abstractions represented by labels and concrete instructional practices 1. Any given set of empirically supported practices can conform to multiple labels. This is the relationship illustrated most dramatically by Butterfield and his associates, Most notably, the kinds of instructional conditions that result in the broad appli- cation of knowledge (transference) can objectively be associated with any ideol- ogy: That is, any /abel can be associated with those conditions: radical behaviorism, social dialectology, empirical constructivism, cognitive information processing, and so on There is no inherent problem in this relationship. On the contrary, we should find hope and encouragement from each instance in which effective instructional practices are identified in the empirical work of diverse ideologies. The credibility of those practices becomes just that much stronger. However, such encouraging events are rarely interpreted that way in our field, possibly because of the fragile barriers that separate ideology from dogma. The following fallacious argument recurs with startling regularity in educational literature: Premise: The research of my ideology supports instructional practice X. Premise: Your ideology differs from mine. Conclusions: a. Your ideology does not support that practice. b. Your ideology opposes that practice. c. Your ideology is mean-spirited. Logically, of course, no single conclusion here is any better than any other. The fact that well-educated adults with noble intentions engage in such unproductive polemics is a testimony to the ease with which one can slip silently into dogma- n. Dogma, in turn, taints our perceptions in ways that serve no useful purpose for learners. We might embrace a popular instructional program like Reading Recovery because we perceive it as “constructivist,” or scoff at it for its “phonics.” We might like “behavioral phonics,” but find “constructivist phonics” less savory. tanovich (1993) described dogmatically tainted interpretations of well-designed research in the clearest of terms: People like the results of some research and do not like the results of other research. ‘The articles in this special issue offer numerous examples of the extent to which a given practice can be attributed to different ideologies. For instance Graham and Harris (this issue) point out that constructivists advocate for signi cantly more time to be set aside for writing than is typically set aside in “conven- tional” or “traditional” classrooms. That, however, is different from saying that only constructivists advocate more writing time. No ideology “owns” the idea of358 THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 28/NO. 3/1994 allocating more time to writing as a crucial but partial means to improved writing performance. The stages in the processes employed by adept writers were fully explicated before the widespread advent of constructivism in language arts, and were not inspired by constructivism in any case (e.g. Herum & Cummings, 1970). Neither do behaviorists or neobchaviorists own the various notions of “academic engaged time” or “opportunities to learn.” Englert (1992) attributed many of the successes of her excellent research to principles that might best be described as social constructivist, but one of her best known interventions (Englert et al., 1991) employed several practices that just as easily could be attributed to other ideolo- ies: teacher models of the writing process, “positive” and “negative” examples of given text structures, procedural facilitators that are not much unlike behavioral cues and prompts, and so on. Englert et al. are the first to point out that their work has not isolated the relative contributions of the several elements employed in their interventions. In the area of reading comprehension, we believe it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the work of cognitive psychologist Richard C, Anderson (1977) on the influence of prior knowledge upon comprehension was a natural extension of the work of behavioral psychologist Richard C, Anderson (Anderson & Faust, 1973) on the influence of prerequisite entering behavior on achievement. Although the former and the latter are not the same thing, one can be viewed as a natural, more specific extension of the other. Stanovich (this issue) offers the example of a study by Cunningham in which an “anticonstructivist” subject—phonemic awareness—is taught via practices gen- erally considered constructivist. The research Stanovich cites on phonemic aware- ness, moreover, seems to represent a fairly eclectic range of both ideology and practice. What informs us most clearly from that research is a focus on phonemic awareness itself, and those practices that seem to help students achieve it the most. Ideology does not inform us much. Of all the articles in this special issue, Mallory and New’s might support our thesis most convincingly. Our own views on special education have not, frankly, been influenced to any appreciable degree by the social constructivist ideology to which Mallory and New subscribe. Yet the extent to which some of our most steadfastly held views seem compatible with theirs strikes us as remarkable—even startling. To name a few: ion of any nd * The outright rejec n that some children are uneducable or “incapable of benefiting from instruction.” * The value of peer tutoring and peer collaboration. * The urgent need to contextualize learning. * The concept of guided participation, including especially * inevitable shift from other-regulated to selfregulated activity * The contention that “boring, repetitious, and ultimately meaningless” readi- ness tasks are overemphasized in special education, gradual but * The desire to withdraw extrinsic rewards in favor of intrinsic as soon as possible.