Dr. Leon James
Dr. Diane Nahl
(c)1979
(2) Progress Reports: The organic principle in community-classroom requires consensus-management and the essential importance of every member. Progress Reports are pedagogic techniques for prompting the students to perceive themselves objectively(5.3.a.1). Jakobovits and Nahl argue that this experience of being prompted to witness one's progress in accordance with specified criteria, is an essential experience that provides the students with a direct source of information about the process of social learning1.1.a.4). By making up "progress reports" the students are prompted to witness the events that make up their own learning. In this witnessing is contained the social data needed for understanding the natural phenomenon of social learning in community life ( l.l.a.3), (1.2.b), (1.2.b.3). (See p. l80 for 1979 Format of your Progress Report.)
(3) Discharge Reports: This calls for an overall review of the students' entire involvement with the course. Since "Discharge Reports" are read and annotated by students of the next generation, these reports serve as a rich source of information to community-classroom members. In these reports, and in the other two types mentioned above, the students find their own experiences mirrored in the sentences of other students. Thus, the ideas of self-determinative monitoring and of objective feedback and evaluation are transformed into a process of community. Their function becomes organic rather than investigatory or judgmental (see Reading Sources for (2.3.a ) (see p. 187).
(4) Project Annotations: All projects by students are prepared with the explicit intention of doing something that will be left behind for future student generations as social data (1.3.c ). Projects have two components: (i) observations students record concerning their psycholinguistic life, as it is tied to their adaptive behavioral perceptions on the daily round ( 1.3), (1.3.c.2), (1.3.c.4 ); (ii) annotations of this information (1.2.b).
From the information found in (i) above, students form a direct impression of social organization, in particular, the dynamic forces in social settings that influence people's behavior, conduct, and feeling-life. From the information found in (ii) above, students inform themselves regarding ordinary reactions: what may be called "attributions (2.1.b), "evaluations (2.3.a), and "judgments (3.1.a.1). These are the social psychological forces that are active in cognitive processes (2.1), psychodynamic life (2.3), and psychopolitics (3.1).
Jakobovits and Gordon argue that collective learning is a different condition for education than anonymous learning (3.2.b). The difference lies in the context of student relationships (l.l.b.3). That is, anonymous learning conditions (such as we have in the usual large-size classroom) provide a context in which students relate to one another through competitive feelings and speculative (often suspicious) thoughts about one another (2.1.a). They wonder who is who, who feels what, and how they're each doing relative to one another. This perpetual wonderment creates an anti-social climate: the individuals' natural curiosities about one another are suppressed or unfulfilled, and this creates room for imaginings and for speculating about others and about reality. "Speculative reality" makes room for all sorts of ordinary delusions and perceptual illusions (2.1.a.4). Clearly this is not to the advantage of the students!
Collective learning education (3.2.b) reverses these dynamic conditions of speculative reality. The classroom procedures and activities are specifically motivated by the intention to counteract the forces of anonymity: information on self is transformed into social data for the group and this now becomes the curriculum (1.3.c.4). The context of relationship is thereby altered. Student now becomes object of study to self and to the other student. A new learning relationship is established, one that might appropriately be called a context of social behaviorism (1.1.a). And in this context, programmed activity leads to experiences, experiences are sources of social data, and social data are instructional stimuli. These instructional stimuli, which Jakobovits and Gordon call psycholinguistic prompts (l.3.b.2) spontaneously evoke sentences in the form of thoughts and feelings ("discourse-thinking habits") (2.3.b.4), and utterances (oral and written) (1.3.b.1). These spontaneously thought and uttered sentences form the mirror in which one sees clearly reflected the intellectual life of the community. Suddenly, the student begins to make daily round discoveries: e.g., that to think such-and-such is quite common; that to do this at such times and to think and feel such things in such circumstances is quite common. As well, students learn that much of what they commonly share in terms of imaginings and expectations are false! The ordinary delusions of speculative daily round reality are corrected through the process of factual, inter-personal exchanges (2.1.b.4) (2.2.c.4).
The actualization of factual, inter-personal exchanges is brought about pedagogically through the four techniques described above, namely Class Feedback Forms, Progress Reports, Discharge Reports, and Project Annotations. These techniques involve students in activities that transform the context of learning from the usual anonymous context to this collective learning classroom (intentional, generational, and organic). A learning environment is thus produced which (a) acts dynamically against speculative reality (2.1.a.4); (b) suppresses the conditions that usually lead to ordinary delusions and interpersonal illusions (2.1.a.1); (c) transforms the context of relationship between students from an inferential base to an objective one based on reciprocal facts about one another. These three conditions (which are pedagogically created, monitored, and maintained, i.e., managed) lead to expected consequences, of which the following are the most important:
(i) the students' learning capacities will be demonstrably enhanced
(= the principle of collective learning) (3.2);
(ii) there will be no or few failures (except for non-attendance or non-participation) (= the
organic principle of self-determinative consensus management) (3.2.c.2)
(iii) there will be significant and new types of learning which, however, are not
manifested at all under the usual, non-community classroom conditions (= the principle
of community-awakening) (5.3);
(iv) there will be abundant evidence of the productivity of the students' work (= the principle of psycho-economics) (3.2.a); (v) there will be a generalizing or "irradiating effect" which will manifest in all sorts of new behaviors in different settings, both academic and general daily round (= the principle of professionalizing the self) (5.3.1).
"DRA" stands for Daily Round Archives (1.2.b.2) and is a student-run field-laboratory (1.2.b). This name was chosen by Jakobovits and Gordon to refer to the accumulating collection of reports prepared by the various generations of students in the study of social psychology through community-classroom (1.2). The DRA 'houses' all official records and products of the student-community generations, and is thus a veritable community depository. The DRA keeps each succeeding generation in touch with all the previous ones and also allows each generation of students to augment the generational collection by depositing their own work into the "archives"(1.3.c.4).
The contents of the DRA are constantly being treated as social data: inventoried, catalogued, classified, graphed (1.2.c.4). However, while 'libraries' always house books and other publications which are written and published by people other than the librarians themselves, of course, the situation is reversed in the case of the DRA. Here, the contents of the collection of works by the students include only the contributions of the students themselves, who also act as "research and educational librarians." Thus the students are both the writers and the librarians of the DRA. This is why we use the expression "generational annotations"(1.3.c): students of each generation serve as the Keepers of the Daily Round Archives--being the DRA's librarians, and as well, themselves contributing their own annotations (commentaries and analyses) so as to augment its contents. In this way, each generation leaves behind its own intellectual and academic mark upon the generational student-community; the latter thus actually spans across the semesters. The specific contents of the DRA provide students with social data on the community process. This will now be discussed.
Jakobovits and Gordon discuss generational annotations ( 1.3.c) as an applied psycholinguistic technique in education (1.3). The following principles are involved:
´To gain a better understanding of the functional relations between social behavior and environment (l.l.a), students of social psychology are trained to act as "Society's Witnesses" (1.2.b.3); this means to prepare standard reports which describe what they've witnessed in various social circumstances. For example, students choose a day in which all agree to keep track of some of the things they've done or noticed on that day: all the places they went to, how long it took, who they saw, what they talked about, what sorts of things they imagined in different circumstances, the emotions they've felt at certain times (as when watching T.V., or at work) and many other sorts of information such as lists of their items in their closets or purses or albums and shoe boxes, bills, subscriptions to magazines, shopping lists, and so on, including things about themselves such as their favorite foods and restaurants, the people in the community they admire, their connections in the community, the songs they like, the things they hate, the fantasies they have, and many more. But this is not all (see DRA Volumes in Sinclair Library).
´If the DRA consisted solely of what's been described above, it would be neither generational nor instructional. It would be a sort of "data bank" for survey research interests but it would not be an educational technique per se. The essential feature of the DM is its function as a living body of literary tradition to its successive generations of students. We call this a "Collective Learning Curriculum that Cumulates over Generations," (1.3.c.4). The "data bank repository" idea is 'dead,' exactly in the sense that libraries, office files and museums are repositories for inert objects of culture. These by-products serve as a repository of information in the form of catalogued files, books, art objects, or whatever. But the DRA is alive: the by-products don't stay put between book covers on stationary shelves or walls. The DRA holdings continually grow internally and change their appearance. New, unexpected, and surprising "turns of culture" occur and get impressed as "new tracks" in the community's intellectual life. What makes this kind of social and educational management possible relates to our work over the years on the speech characteristics of natural communities (1.1.a.3).
´In the terms of applied psycholinguistics as elaborated by Jakobovits and Gordon (1.3) (2.1.c), community life is standardized through a language-based ideology. Through talking exchanges of all sorts--oral, and in reading--members of a community learn to coordinate perceptions(1.3.a). That is, talking-exchanges serve to facilitate the assimilation of the individual into the community (l.l.a.4). We learn what are daily topics (2.2.a.4) (1.3.a.3), what are unusual news, what "Nothing news" means, and so on. We also learn what to notice in any ordinary situation: where the people are, what time of the day it is, whether unusual things are happening (l.l.a.l), and so on (4.3.a.1). Thus, members of a community learn to share and standardize the sentences they say out loud to others in various situations, and as well, members of a community learn to say standard sentences silently to themselves, according to the circumstances they may find themselves in (2.1.c.3) (2.2.b.1) (2.3.b.4) (2.3.c) (5.1.b.2).
´The above considerations lead us to the principle that community life is standardized at all levels through language(1.1. a.3). Social transactions and relationship moves are kept track of by remembering events in sentence form: e.g., "He failed to show up"; "I didn't go"; "The clouds were dark and my stomach was empty and so was the gas tank ..." etc. In addition to conditioning interpersonal relations, language (in the form of sentences) also conditions thinking-life, and feeling-life (1.3.a.4 (1.3.a). We appear to maintain a continuous stream of discourse thinking or intetior dialog in the course of our daily round, hour by hour, minute by minute. It is in this constant stream of talk--overt and silent--that community life is visible. In this talk, and the record thereof, the student of social psychology finds mirrored the life of community in all its natural variety. Thus, the contents of the DM are essentially records of this phenomenon of talk(1. 3.c.1) (1.3.c).
´An important methodological issue (1.2.c) is the problem of selection of DRA contents, or the sampling rationale (1.2.b.3). For quite obvious reasons it is necessary to select what items a witness is to observe and keep track of from the innumerable impressions available in any social occasion. As well, the "observation-set" itself becomes a new aspect in the situation since the requirement to observe and record particular things noticed, is not in the ordinary experience of the person. Since the interest to be derived from the pedagogic point of view is not the same as the sociolegal or survey-statistical, the selection of materials in the DRA is neither representative (of a population), nor veridical (of the whole truth), nor even authentic (since a paraphrase of the original thoughts or sentences may be what actually gets recorded by the witness). So, from the point of view of the usual experimental or legal intentions of an investigator, the content of the DRA is not directly usable, nor even relevant. But from the educational point of view, the DRA contents are usable as prompts, i.e., as social stimuli to which students are exposed through reading and other assigned exercises (1.3.c.4).
´The purpose of the DRA is to provide students with social stimuli which are relevant and actual in their daily lives. Students are given specific "prompts" to help them record their observations and their reactions to their observations. When students act as "witnesses," they record information on forms and follow models of reporting specified in their assignment instructions and in the work of former students. Students are directed to specified settings for their observation. These directions are in the form of written instructions and prior models. There thus evolves a reporting register which all students learn, and this common witnessing language puts students in contact with each other as a community, both synchronously and across semester generations (1.3.c.1) (1.3.a.4).
´An essential component of the DRA generational approach is the built-in circularity of its cumulative life across the student generations. This may be illustrated by the following chain of events: (A) In Spring 1977, students prepared a daily round report of their activities and sentences they said out loud and to themselves. For this, they used a form developed by Jakobovits and Gordon which included: (i) a taxonomy of daily round social circumstances and, (ii) models to follow. These models gave students an idea of the level of detail to be reported. (B) In Fall 1977, students prepared similar reports, but this time using the Spring 1977 reports as models. (C) In Spring 1978, students read the 1977 reports and recorded their observations regarding these reports on forms developed by Jakobovits ant Gorton who again offered models. These observations that students made of other students' reports were named annotations." (D) In Fall 1978, students read (i) the 1977 reports, (ii) the annotations of these reports that the 1978 students made, and then added their own comments, reactions, observations--in accordance with "prompts" or "forms" on which they recorded their observations. (E) In Spring 1979, students reviewed what has happened since Spring 1977 and worked to develop new "prompts" ("forms") which would generate new kinds of information not now included but which the "DRA Librarians" (students) deem desirable. You may follow all of these activities in the DRA Volumes in Sinclair Library. Consonant with this generational curriculum plan, the Fall 1979 Generation (namely, you) will be "standing upon the shoulders" of the previous generations. By integrating yourselves collectively into this generational community-classroom, you are undergoing a social psychological process: you are put on the spot of observing directly the social forces of community-building. These observations represent your field work in social psychology. That is how you discover the laws governing social behavior in community settings ("the daily round").
´The sequence of generational processing is the real data of the DRA . It can now be appreciated that the data in the DRA are about the process of community literacy, not community history, and hence, the troublesome issues of "representativeness" and "veridicality" do not arise. In the DRA, the intellectual life of the community is mirrored through scientific eyes: "how I see things" is now contrasted with "how they see things" and "how they see what I see" (2.2.c.4)--and in this generational mirroring lies the experiential and cognitive study of community life: social attitudes, personality and group dynamics, interpersonal and intergroup relations.
´Finally, at the time of this writing (in August 1979), it is clear to us (Jakobovits and Gordon) that the DRA generational annotations is a technique whose properties still need to be studied. We are aware that it has hardly been identified, yet already its value seems to us extremely promising.
The goal in this course is to learn social psychology. The method is to become a community-classroom. "Social Psychology!" is the study of behavior in social settings (1.1.a.2). Several ways for studying social psychology are possible. The way chosen for this course was developed by Jakobovits and Gordon, with the help of previous students in this course. This way was named "Community-Classroom Approach to the Study of Social Psychology" (1.2). This approach involves the idea of turning the large-audience classroom that this is, into a student learning community. In order to achieve this, the students are guided by lectures, study, and joint projects, to become social witnesses (1.2.c.2). This means acquiring skills of a special kind, the kind needed to make objective reports of what is going on in social settings in which you are a co-participant. As you acquire these new "objective reporting skills," you are able to collect social data on your own. Thus, you now become a "roving investigator of the social scene," i.e., a natural-history social psychologist (1.2.b.1). Being able to collect your own data in a social situation, you now need to acquire theorizing skills. This means having the ability to "inspect" the data and "read" patterns in them. These patterns receive titles or labels, and are then inter-related into an explanation or "scientific model." Glossary charts have been constructed as a means to help you acquire skills in theorizing about social behavior.
The objectives involve the acquisition of two kinds of skills: (a) social witnessing skills, or, the ability to make objective reports of one's co-participation in a social event (1.2.b.3) (1.2.c.2); (b) theorizing skills, or, the ability to extract data from social witnessing reports, and to describe their dynamic patterns ("functional relations") (1.2.c.4) (1.2.b.4) (1.3.b.4) (3.1.a).
Acquiring social witnessing skills needs a supportive instructional environment. In the usual large-audience classroom atmosphere, anonymity, competition, and insecurity, are social psychological factors that make it very difficult and unlikely that many students will acquire social witnessing and theory-building skills.
Therefore, what is required is to transform the usual atmosphere of separativeness into an atmosphere of collectivity. By acting as a "collective body," the audience-group becomes a community. The social psychological atmosphere is changed. Now each and every student is an active citizen-scientist(1.2.a.2). The ill effects of size are being overcome by the community network that the students establish with each other in the classroom. Size becomes an advantage; a new community resource.
In this instructional environment, you, and every student without any exception have the educational opportunity of acquiring the social witnessing skills you need to see your daily life objectively. In other words, to see where the DATA for social behavior come from.
The method of community-classroom is used in this course, for the study of social psychology, in order to provide you with an instructional environment that can teach you the two objectives of (i) being able to, yourself, generate data on social behavior, and (ii) being able to, yourself, theorize about social data. Students may expect an initial adjustment period, the first few weeks during which you are attempting to find a comfortable relationship to the course. This is an excellent instructional atmosphere for practicing social witnessing skills. We hope you agree. At any rate, there will be plenty of opportunities to voice your own observations.
The initial weeks or "orientation phase" is the time when certain dynamic social forcesare at work in an intense degree so that you may more easily observe them. In this manner, you may become objectively aware of the presence of social forces in social exchanges on your daily round of living.
There is involved here an instructional technique whose use becomes crucial: how are you all, as separate individuals, strangers to each other, even fearful and suspicious of one another, going to face each other in another way, in a more sociable, as well as social, way? How is there to be a change, a turnabout? That question needs an expert pedagogic answer. And the answer is: through the process of community integration("community-building forces" is the sub-title for the course) (5.3).
Thus, through certain instructional activities called "community-classroom" environment (1.2), each and every one of you, strangers to one another, begin the process of a dynamic social change; you, yourself, participate in this dynamic change, individually, as a collective effort of the entire classroom-community (3.2). Because of this individual co-participation in the collective intentions and efforts, you are given the educational opportunity needed for acquiring objective reporting skills involving social behavior.
The community-classroom approach to the study of social psychology has its intrinsic rationale in the fact that it creates an educational environment that is itself the object of study. The large-audience classroom within a college campus is an ideal object of study for students of social psychology. However, it is to be stressed that "self-study," in and of itself, can move in many directions, and thus the instructor must supervise and manage expertly the collective and individual focus of the students through a carefully prepared wholistic program of lectures, study assignments, projects, and tests. This aspect of the course relates to its content and is discussed next.
The content of this course is selected to represent the content of social psychology as viewed from a historical perspective, both in the sense of "history of science" and in the sense of "natural history science."
According to the UH Catalog description for Psych 222, you can expect a focus on social psychology that deals with:
"Interpersonal relations; social attitudes; group dynamics; intergroup relations, class and cultural influences. Pre 100"
This description was already 'on the UH book' when we started making up Lecture Notes for this course in 1971. Because it is a "standard description" of social psychology, we retained this "official description" of the course, adding and building around it. As a result, you will note that these "topics" in social psychology form a kind of nucleus theme around which more detailed and special issues will be examined in the course of the lectures, discussions, readings, and assignments.
Within these standard topical demarcations, much room exists for focus of study. The Fall 1978 Generation of Community-Classroom studied a textbook written by us, especially for that class, and which had a blue cover with the title, Society's Witnesses: Experiencing Formative Issues in Social Psychology. This is used this semester as Reading Source "B" (multiple copies in Sinclair Library).
What are formative issues? These are ideas, questions, concerns, and arguments that have survived in a historically dated sequence of classic books, and have formed the content of the field since its literary inception in history. These are the things all psychologists know in common, so that upon these formative issues rests the unity of the whole field. Here are some formative issues in social psychology as they appear in the historical sequence of social philosophers in the world literature:
Formative Issue No. One: Methodology (1.2.c)
How are we to record data? This is crucial because in every field of science the whole show starts with the data and there is nothing without the data. We developed a technique for recording data, based on our joint work in psycholinguistics (l.l.a) (1.2.b.4) (1.3.c) (2.1.c). There is a technique known to most social psychologists as "Kurt Lewin's field dynamic theory" or just "field theory" (3.1.a). Many social psychologists also know the term "topological psychology," which is the title of a book by Lewin, published in 1936. You'll find these Lewinian terms in the index of social psychology textbooks (Reading Source "E"). Despite Lewin's historical importance, his notation system has not been recognized as a general methodological language for social psychology.
Nevertheless we make use of it for two attractions it has: (i) there is no other integrated system available in social psychology, and (ii) with a few extensions here and there, it is made adequate for recording many significant features of routine social situations (3.1.a.1).
We predict that field theory notation system will soon become a dominant field of development in social psychology. Currently, as you'll note by reading through the standard "Social Psych Texts," there is no unified methodology at this time. Contrast this with some other of your fields of study, such as Accounting, Biochemistry, or Contemporary Japanese Literature. Some have a unified and cumulative language, and some do not.
Formative Issue No. 2: Objectivity (1.2.c.2) (1.2.b.1) (1.1.a) Howdo you talk about social behavior, the Self-and-Others, scientifically, that is, objectively? This is crucial because talk about the Self and Others and about the World can be subjective talk or objective talk. Only the latter yields data for scientific investigations. (Read the topical chart for these first two formative issues in social psychology that the Fall 1978 Generation focused on (Reading Source "B," p.Xii). We'll give here a sample, with some explanations.
(i) SOCIAL DISTANCE: lndividuals in a "social setting" are surrounded by "forces" acting upon them; you can draw diagrams of this "social field"; the changes in the distances, separating or closing, between the individuals in the diagram, correspond to the actual social distance they experience; this is then, a method of representing what dynamic events occur between individuals interacting in a social setting (3.1.a.1);
(ii) CONFLICT: A FIELD DYNAMIC CONCEPT: by drawing a diagram representing a state of conflict in which you currently find yourself, you become more explicitly aware of how conflict mechanisms operate in your experience on the "daily round"--the social settings in which you live your life (2.3.c);
(iii) ROLE BEHAVIORS: you can draw up lists or diagrams that accurately represent your station in life, your position in the community, how your life is interweaved with several other lives; you'll find multiple role memberships, role conflicts, role demands, and so on; thus, social settings are dynamic fields within which role pressures and norms act upon you, minute by minute, as you move around on the daily round;
(iv) SOCIOMETRY: you can represent indivlduals-in-interaction by drawing diagrams that show freguency of interactions of a particular kind, as you observe them, both in your own behavior and in those of others; such diagrams add up to dynamic pictures describable mathematically, or formally, in "analog diagrams" (look up in dictionary: in the meantime, analog=visual, vs. digital =numeric); data based on such diagrams or numerical matrices are called sociometric data (3.1.c.2) (2.1.a.2),
Formative Issue No. 3: Speech Community (l.l.a.3) (1.3)
What gives unity to social life? Here, language plays a crucial organizing function. Society is defined as a speech community. Generational evolution of culture is possible through literacy, which means oral and written means of communication and intellectual contact across time and space (1.3.c.1) (1.3.b.1). Among the behaviorists, B.F. Skinner has, more than anyone else, realized that human communities are essentially "speech communities," an idea he used as early as 1937. Even before Skinner, George Herbert Mead taught this in his famous lectures at the University of Chicago between 1900-1935 (approximately!). Mead coined the expression "social behaviorism" (1. l.a) to reflect the fact that we develop objectivity about ourselves through seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes and reactions of others. Thus we are objects of perception to others, and we figure ourselves in terms that others use to figure us. Since the terms others use to figure us treats us as objects, we too treat ourselves as objects ("objectively") when we use these same terms to figure ourselves (2.2.c.4).
This argument laid the foundations for the behavioristic study of social behavior. Today, it is commonplace to apply the descriptions used for other people's behavior to our own. Whenever this is done, George Herbert Mead's social behaviorism idea is alive. By combining Mead's fruitful definition with Skinner's, we arrive at a social behaviorism of the speech community (1.1.a.3) (2.1.c).
Here we can offer fruitful answers to formative issue no. 3: What is community, what in it gives unity to social life? The unity is provided by collective speech practices (1.3.a.4) (2.1.c.3). It is safe to say that there isn't a single piece of human behavior we can name (sic) that is not thereby regulated through collective speech practices. Whatever you can't name or isn't in any dictionary has no status whatsoever in our community--clearly showing that our speech practices provide us with all the things we can talk about either to others or to ourselves (2.1.c.4).
Talking is thus an excellent focus for the study of social psychology. This is so for two reasons: (1) nothing has status in the community that isn't also talked about to others or to ourselves (1.3.a); and (2) talk can easily be transformed into written records, and therefore offers an easy and inexhaustible source of social data (1.3.b.3) (1.3.c).
Formative Issue No. 4: Situated Behavior (l.l.a.2) (l.l.a)
What is the unit of social behavior? Who decides on this? Modern psychology has not as yet been able to decide on this issue. Some accept the unit of behavior as "the reflex" (physiological definition of psychology). Others use a common sense approach by deciding ahead of time what the response should be; they use an instrument of some sort which ignores everything else but counts up the "responses" decided upon ahead of time. Most of the experimental research in psychology today uses this common sense approach (1.2.c.1). Non-statistical methodologies use a justified behavioral taxonomy. This is an empirically worked out chart or table that specifies category relations over the entire range of possible behaviors (1. 2.b.4).