Choral Explanations as a way of opening the conversation

Children Singing in a choir

I’m working on several courses this fall and one of my areas of focus is trying to come up with some models of looking at building knowledge as a collaborative inside a given course. I was jamming around with my colleagues, sifting through various ideas and I remembered a post by Michael Caulfield. In this section of his post ‘Choral Explanations and OER: A summary of thinking to date’ from 2016, he describes how the choral explanation is a way of allowing for a wider number of voices to contribute to a discussion and avoid the transactional nature of a simple question and answer scenario.

I’m still trying to think my way through how to set this up for the courses I’m designing, but its always useful for my planning if i take some time to think about WHY i might want to do this. This keeps me from wandering off and letting the idea get ahead of me. And, clearly, I can’t think quietly 🙂

For the purposes of this conversation, I’m proposing taking a given concept per week and trying to support a choral explanation by participants. They will be encouraged to ‘add’ to the explanation by providing an example, by offering a citation (with an explanation) or a counter position to existing positions as a ‘YES AND’. The idea is to create a broad image of what a concept means to different people in different contexts, rather than trying to limit ourselves to a simple definition that is by its nature exclusionary of other points of view. If you have a model for doing this, I’d love to see it.

Think about defining learning. Or student success.

Supporting Uncertainty

In a recent Twitter conversation a colleague asked (responding to this interview I did on Teaching in Higher Ed) about how to bring uncertainty into the ‘current container of higher education’. The question stuck with me. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently writing about how the way we frame questions to support uncertainty. This approach focuses more about how students actually engage with those questions.

The hope here is to create space for participants to include multiple perspectives and voices to a conversation without them cancelling each other out. There will be no space for searching for the ‘right’ answer, as it depends on what you’re trying to say. It also, like any real conversation, will depend on when you come to the conversation. I’m going to need to figure out how to encourage participants to add something new to the conversation without making that annoying. (groups of five might work)

Novices vs. experts

I keep returning to the literature (a couple of links below) distinguishing between novice and expert learners. There is a fair amount of research out there talking about how they should be treated differently. A novice learner needs to ‘get a sense of the basic concepts’. A novice needs to learn the definitions so that they can know what’s going on. The problem, though, is that we often have to simplify a definition in order to explain it to someone who is not part of the field. That definition often leaves out critical voices or gives the illusion that complex concepts can be easily explained.

The idea of a choral explanation allows for a novice (whatever that is to you) to engage in a conversation with nuance and multiple perspectives, without necessarily ‘learning the words first’.

Community as curriculum

One of the reasons i’m super excited to try this is that it encourages participants to turn to each other to understand something. It also allows participants to bring perspectives beyond my own understanding (could be gender, background, race etc…) to our understanding of things. The community of participants becomes the curriculum that they are learning.

Internet as Platform

Maybe most importantly, it allows us to deal with knowledge the way it is actually created. This is certainly true for the way many people come to know things using the internet. But I think I mean it more broadly than that. We have been taught for decades now to cite where our thoughts about something come from. To situate our work in the literature. We have always been in a choral process for making knowledge… with only so many people being allowed to be part of the choir. Mike’s approach will maybe allow me to keep the conversations about concepts open, collaborative and, ideally, choral.

Tabatabai, D., & Shore, B. M. (2005). How experts and novices search the Web. Library & Information Science Research, 27(2), 222–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2005.01.005
Hmelo-Silver, C. E., & Pfeffer, M. G. (2004). Comparing expert and novice understanding of a complex system from the perspective of structures, behaviors, and functions. Cognitive Science, 28(1), 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog2801_7

Author: dave

I run this site... among other things.

2 thoughts on “Choral Explanations as a way of opening the conversation”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.