Wolff-Michael Roth and Ken Tobin began to use heuristics in their collaborative research in Philadelphia more than 20 years ago (Roth & Tobin, 2002). Since then, considerable research has been undertaken to expand theoretical frameworks for heuristics, adapt existing protocols, and design heuristics as part of authentic inquiry (Tobin & Alexakos, 2021). When we began our work, we were responding to a need for new teachers to identify characteristics of coteaching and cogenerative dialogue (i.e., cogen) so that they knew what they had to do, could plan accordingly, and review/evaluate what was done in relation to their intentions. Almost immediately, it was apparent that the heuristics we developed needed to be shape shifters since different characteristics were more or less salient in different contexts in which coteaching and cogen are enacted. Simply put, it makes no sense to have a fixed protocol that is one-size-fits-all in regard to contextually mitigating factors (Gallard, Pitts, Brkich, et al., 2020). We regard heuristics as reflexive tools that can heighten awareness about the conduct of coparticipants in the fields in which coteaching and cogen occur.
As researchers continue to use existing heuristics, new heuristics are developed, and our multilogical approach to research expands the structure and function of authentic inquiry. Since two of the authenticity criteria involve transforming practices and possibilities for individuals and collectives, heuristics are central tools for catalytic and tactical authenticity, and expanding ripple effects to include others with whom coparticipants in our research interact.
When Ken and Konstantinos (hereafter we) planned a four-volume set based on ongoing research, it is not surprising that the first volume involved authentic inquiry (Tobin & Alexakos, 2021) and the second focused on uses of heuristics as intervention tools in ongoing research.
Transforming learning and teaching: Heuristics for educative and responsible practices consists of 19 chapters written by 21 researchers. This book is authored by researchers who are diverse with respect to social and cultural demographics. Although most authors reside and are employed in the United States, 2 scholars are in Thailand and 1 is in Canada. Fourteen researchers are white and 7 are Black or Brown. Interestingly, 13 of the authors were born in countries outside of North America.
When we considered writing a book on heuristics, we had several main overarching goals – to present theoretical frameworks for heuristics and also to include a variety of different approaches to the design and application of heuristics. Also, our uses of heuristics extend beyond formal classrooms and include participants across the birth through death age continuum. Accordingly, in one place, the book publishes an impressive array of 33 heuristics that have been produced, revised, and adapted in more than two decades of scholarship involving heuristics, frequently applied in a context of authentic inquiry:
- -wait time
- -target students
- -metaphors
- -urban classroo1ms
- -emotions and values
- -coteaching
- -cogenerative dialogues
- -cultural fluency
- -difference as a resource
- -breathing mindfully
- -speaking mindfully
- -listening mindfully
- -responsive mathematics teaching
- -student-teacher interactions (teacher and student versions)
- -research
- -emotional climate
- -eightfold path
- -arts-based research
- -mindfulness in education
- -student engagement
- -student conduct
- -mindfulness in daily life
- -purposes in life
- -map-palms as heuristics
- -discussing thorny issues
- -self: healing the space, boundaries, or, me not me, heart energy
- -emotional styles
- -physiological changes in relation to functioning of the autonomic nervous system
- -breathing while speaking
- -Vipassana meditation
- -minimizing distraction and disruption
- -educating for death and dying
What’s in This Book?
In this section we include three subsections that review theoretical frameworks used in the book, methodologies employed, and key foci for the research.
Theoretical Frameworks
In many of the chapters the authors provide theoretical frameworks for their research with heuristics. For the most part, these address the use of heuristics as interventions that can catalyze desirable transformations in specified social fields. That is, heuristics as reflexive tools, can heighten awareness of actions and thereby afford reflection and other contemplative activities that can catalyze desired changes. Also, for more than a decade we have had a goal of expanding research to study how citizens, ranging in age from toddlers through to the elderly (often in nursing homes and hospice settings), are involved in teaching and learning and can develop and utilize heuristics to enhance learning about issues such as death and dying, emotional styles, meditation, and mindfulness in everyday life.
Written text is used in many of the heuristics, including questions and assertions to which responses are provided using a Likert scale, together with short responses written in several lines of space provided beneath each of the constituent characteristics. Also, text is used to create short pieces of prose and lines of poetry that serve as heuristics, objects for reflection and potential change. Often times, the prose is extracted from previously mentioned written responses to specific characteristics.
A number of authors also incorporate arts-based methodologies into the design and application of heuristics. We view these approaches as contemplative activities since participants create and/or view and re-view objects such as pictures, sketches, diagrams, and maps. In so doing reflexive acts increase consciousness and create a potential for positive changes in participants’ lifeworlds (Bourdieu, 1992). Hermeneutic phenomenology is an overarching framework used throughout the book (Ricoeur, 1991).
We are delighted that our friend and colleague, Wolff-Michael Roth (i.e., Michael), agreed to contribute a chapter to this volume, since he was collaborating with Ken when they developed heuristics for coteaching and cogenerative dialogue and opted to use the label of heuristics. Michael’s chapter traces the history of heuristics in autobiographical form and illustrates how heuristics are applied in his recent work in aviation. Michael develops a theory that relates heuristics to mimesis, examining how the practical world appears in practice, discourse about practice, and a return to practice that follows talk about practice. Michael reminds us that actions are guided by existing heuristics about which participants might be unaware.
Methodologies
Included in the chapters of the book is a bricolage of methodologies, such as authentic inquiry, event-oriented inquiry, narrative, video analysis, visual narratives, and oximetry. Together, the chapters provide considerable food for thought and we anticipate that readers will learn about numerous resources they can utilize in their professional practices.
Key Foci
What are the key foci in this book? Instead of providing an overview of each of the 19 chapters in the book, we examine the keywords or each chapter, provided by the authors. The key foci cluster into six overlapping groups, which we label as teaching and learning, learning to teach, emotions, wellness, contemplative activities, and harmony.
The application of heuristics in teaching and learning contexts extend from pre-k through graduate level college, and to citizen education in a variety of contexts that extend from traditional foci such as mathematics and science to active air pilots and elderly people who participated in a study of educating for dying and death.
In several chapters, the authors show the potential of using heuristics to transform teaching and learning, using research that was undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s. Importantly, heuristics can be used in authentic inquiry that is current and ongoing, and in much the same way, the focus of heuristics can be on research undertaken at any time. The ripple effects of research can be energized through the use of heuristics to improve teaching and learning now.
In this book, learning to teach was associated with four additional keywords – teacher education, coteaching, cogenerative dialogue, and becoming researchers. Because many of the authors are professionally involved in pre-k-12 teaching and/or college level teacher education, this cluster plays a prominent role throughout the book.
Emotions have been a central focus for Konstantinos and Ken for 2–3 decades (e.g., Alexakos, 2015, Ritchie, Tobin, Hudson, P., et al., 2011). Many of those who authored chapters in the book also undertook research on emotion. Hence, the applications of heuristics involve many aspects of the expression of emotions, including emotional styles, anxiety, emotional contagion, emotional climate, emotional responses, and emotions while teaching.
In the past decade, our research, and the research engaged by most of the chapter authors, expanded to include emotions and the study of wellness (Alexakos, 2015; Tobin & Llena, 2012). Accordingly, are among the topics that have included heuristics are self-care, know thyself, safe spaces, thorny issues, educating for dying and death, oximetry (e.g., heart rate, blood oxygenation), complementary healing methods, and universal energy.
Contemplative activities became salient in our research, including the production of heuristics in this area, in an effort to better understand how to ameliorate excesses of emotion, which appear to have a strong connection with wellness. In this context, polyvagal theory is an important framework that leads to studies of the importance of nasal breathing and nitric oxide’s role in sustaining required levels of blood oxygenation (Tobin & Alexakos, 2021). The cluster of research foci addressed under the label of contemplative activities also includes mindfulness, mindfully speaking and listening, meditation, life purposes, dignity therapy, and consciousness.
Finally, harmony is the sixth of the interrelated clusters. Harmony implies balance, equilibrium, and sustainability – all within an overarching impermanence. Additional research foci include topics such as wellbeing, boundaries, and safe spaces.
Why Read This Book?
This Foreword would be incomplete without a strong reminder that a dialectical perspective is maintained in all of the chapters, plus high value for learning from difference, and transformation being grounded in acknowledging the potential of contradictions to be catalysts of change, which coexist dialectically with patterns of coherence. Accordingly, each of the chapters is nuanced and mindful of the crisis of representation (Greene, 1994) which necessitates readers and authors recognize that all research falls short of what can be and is known. Readers and authors are encouraged to exercise radical doubt (Bourdieu, 1992) as they learn from the carefully scripted 19 chapters. It seems highly desirable to exercise radical doubt, when more can be learned from seeking to build an understanding of contradictions and how they coexist with patterns of coherence (Sewell, 2005). Also, it is usually productive to ask frequently – what more is there? We consider Transforming learning and teaching: Heuristics for educative and responsible practices to be a testament to the talents, creative energy and hard work of the 19 researchers who agreed to join with us to contribute to the production of a bold vision in which every chapter is considered a resource from which to learn and continue to participate in the journey of learning. Our book is a resource that contributes to a dialogue that precedes the chapter authors and their readers. We anticipate that the dialogue continues even in a dynamically changing flux in which participants join, stay for a while, and then leave, being mindful that at any time they are welcome to return and thereby contribute more to the ongoing dialogue.
References
Alexakos, K. (2015). Being a teacher | researcher: A primer on doing authentic inquiry research on teaching and learning. Sense Publishers.
Bourdieu, P. (1992). The practice of reflexive sociology (The Paris workshop). In P. Bourdieu & L. J. D. Wacquant (Eds.), An invitation to reflexive sociology (pp. 216–260). The University of Chicago Press.
Gallard Martínez, A. J., Pitts, W. B., Brkich, K. M., et al. (2020). How does one recognize Contextual Mitigating Factors (CMFs) as a basis to understand and arrive at better approaches to research designs? Cultural Studies of Science Education, 15, 545–567. https://doi-org.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/10.1007/s11422-018-9872-2
Ricœur, P. (1991). From text to action: Essays in hermeneutics, II. Northwestern University Press.
Ritchie, S. M., Tobin, K., Hudson, P., et al. (2011). Reproducing successful rituals in bad times: Exploring emotional interactions of a new science teacher. Science Education, 95, 746–765. doi:
Roth, W.-M., & Tobin, K. (2002). At the elbows of another: Learning to teach through coteaching. Peter Lang Publishing.
Sewell, W. H. Jr. (2005). Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. University of Chicago Press.
Tobin, K., & Alexakos, K. (Eds.). (2021). Doing authentic inquiry to improve learning and teaching. Brill | Sense.
Tobin, K., & Llena, R. (2012). Colliding identities, emotional roller coasters, and contradictions of urban science education. In M. Varelas (Ed.), Identity construction and science education research: Learning, teaching, and being in multiple contexts (pp. 141–156). Sense Publishers.