ROUSING SCHOOLS TO LIFE

Abstract

BY ROLAND G. THARP AND RONALD GALLIMORE Go back in memory, to the school of your childhood Go farther, if you can--travel back in time, to the North American classrooms of your great, great grand- motherx Go back a century. The trick would be to keep your eyes closed, Of course there are fewer jeans, and the skirts are different. Textbooks are less brightly colored. But just listening to the teachers and students, you might not notice the time warp. Before the Civil War: Young teachers are very apt to confound rapid questioning and answers with sure and effective teaching. (Morrison, 1860, p.303; quoted in Hoetker & Ahlbrand, 1969, p. 153.) At the Turn of the Century: Sara Burstall, an Englishwoman, visited Amer- ican Schools in 1908 and was struck by the ubiq- uity of the time-honoured question-answer Roland G. Tharp and Ronald Gallimore are authors of Rousing Minds to Life (Cambridge University Press, 1989), from which the ideas of this article have been drawr~ Both were long associated with KEEP---the Kamehameha Elementary Education Project---and have published extensively on issues of multicultural and effective education, as well as theoretical issues of child and cognitive development. Tharp is dean desig- nate o f the School of Human Behavior at United States International University, San Diego, and professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, where he teaches in the preservice teacher education and com- munity psychology prograrrL Gallimore is professor of psychology, Department of Psychiatry and Bio- behavioral Sciences, and a professor at the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, where he teaches educa- tional and developmental psychology and the role of culture in socialization and behavioral change. recitation .... In the European schools the teacher was at the center of the learning process; he lectured, questioned the pupils, and buil[t] up new knowledge in class. In contrast, in the Amer- ican classroom, clearly... the master is the text- book. The teacher does not really teach but acts rather as chairman of a meeting, the object of which is to ascertain whether [the students] have studied for themselves in a textbook. (BurstaU, 1909, pp. 156-58; quoted in Hoetker & Ahlbrand, 1969, p. 150.) And Today: The writer is William Bennett, former Secretary • of Education: In three major studies, the National Science Foundation found that most science education fol- lows the traditional practice: 'At all grade levels, the predominant method of teaching was recita- tion (discussion) with the teacher in control, sup- plementing the lesson with new information (lecturing) The key to the information and basis for reading assignments was the (Smith, 1980, p.166) If science is presented like this, is it any wonde~ that children's natural curiosity about their physical world turns into boredom by the time they leave grade school--and into dangerous ignorance later on? (Bennett, 1986, p.26.) Recitation. Everywhere in North American schools. Recitation. The most frequently reported form of interactive teaching. Recitation has been described in the educational literature for over ninety years and con- tinues today as a major portion of all student and teacher interactions. What is this ubiquitous recitation? It consists of the teacher assigning a text (in the form of a textbook or a lecture)~ followed by a series of teacher questions that 20 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989