Abstract

THE PROBLEM OF THE PROBLEM AND PERPLEXITY

(Note: this paper has been published as part of the refereed conference papers , 5th International PBL Conference 99, PBL: A Way Forward? University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada, July, 1999.)

Abstract

Perplexity is one of the defining features of reflective thinking and problem engagement. Much that is described as problem-based learning fails the test of perplexity. Ignorance of specific information is not perplexity though ignorance as an affective state may be the ground of perplexity. Unless there is a personal demand for a solution (I must address this perplexity) there is no self-direction or genuine interest and no reflection because there is no problem owned by the learner through the acknowledgment of perplexity.

While this state of perplexity, of the problem of the problem, is an indicator of the reflective dialectic, it is not readily sustained. Moving from the complexity, instability, and uncertainty of unformed problems, the dialectic takes on the character of a project.

Project-driven learning may be the outcome of perplexity, however, it is not tied to perplexity and the engagement of the learner. Project-driven learning has no need of perplexity – here problems can be external to the learner. For example, the professional need to have a particular technical skill is directly owned by the profession and may only be indirectly acknowledged by the learner. Often the acquisition of a particular technical skill is disputed by the learner as genuinely belonging to a profession and so the perplexity is located, for the student, in the power-relations of the profession (an authority tells me I must know this).

These power relations can be redescribed through an investigation of long standing approaches to teaching and learning found in the master/novice relationship. By refounding these relationships in the dialectic of reflection, we are able to understand the fundamental importance of perplexity in the initiation of the learner and in the initiation of the learning process. This initiation drama takes its lead, in the West, from Plato’s Meno.

THE PROBLEM OF THE PROBLEM AND PERPLEXITY

. . . reflective thinking, in distinction from other operations to which we apply the name of thought, involves (1) a state of doubt, hesitation, perplexity, mental difficulty, in which thinking originates, and (2) an act of searching, hunting, inquiring, to find materials that will resolve the doubt, settle and dispose of the perplexity. (Dewey, 1933, p. 12)

For Dewey, perplexity is a key feature of the state of mind that initiates the growth of the individual through engagement with the problematics of the world in which they live. When perplexity is given its proper place, the true focus of Dewey’s account becomes obvious: reflective thinking, as a process, is his chief concern; problem solving, as the method of resolving the doubt, is only one half, the other half being the original psychological state of perplexity. In order to underline the primacy of this dialectic, Dewey points out that “thinking begins as soon as the baby who has lost the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of something not yet existing – its recovery” (p. 89). Losing the ball creates a difficulty, seeing that the ball might be recovered, the child is then able to move to resolve the difficulty, through action, in the real world. In this simple form we can determine the process of thesis (loss), anti-thesis (promise of recovery or remedy), synthesis (resolution of the problem with an enhanced understanding of the process). The theological allusions should not be discounted in this model.

While the account of the child with the lost ball might seem a soft version of a problem, it is only so from the perspective of those who can buy their own new balls. That is, the problem holds very real interest for the baby and therefore the problem is perplexing. According to Dewey:

These are the various meanings in which common sense employs the term interest. The root idea of the term seems to be that of being engaged, engrossed, or entirely taken up with some activity because of its recognized worth. The etymology of the term inter-esse, “to be between,” points in the same direction. Interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action; it is the sign of their organic union. (1979, p. 160)

Being “entirely taken up with” the loss of the ball, the baby experiences the situation in depth.

Anything that is approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest matters. Because “depth” means “in interrelation,” not “in isolation.” Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item seem quite secondary. Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness in particular. (McLuhan, 1964, p. 247)

There is no essential feature in a problem or situation that will get to consciousness any better than any other feature: the depth approach to the object of attention would seem to be all that is required to transform the object into the mediating material. As pointed out by Sweller (1991), “whether a problem is solved with much effort (a ‘real’ problem) or with little effort (an exercise) depends on an interaction between the material and the person attempting to find a solution” (p. 75). The recognition of the “worth” in the activity itself, as described in terms of the materials, is entirely up to the learner. That is, students learn, in depth, a great deal about a great many things in which they have an interest. Most of these things fall outside their formal professional fields of study. They often know more about using psychology to avoid formal learning than about placing themselves in the way of perplexity to acquire new understanding. Such knowledge, of how to place the self in the way of knowledge, is essential to the maturity of a professional. We are all ignorant of what we do not know, how then can we come to know unless we have strategies that put us where we will be perplexed?

While we sometimes use the word “perplexity” to described the state of being “nonplussed”, or unable to move forward, we can be forgiven for not always bringing to mind the distinct suggestions of the term’s meaning. Perplexity has its origins in the process of plaiting so that one can speak of a “plexure” as distinct to “texture” which has its origins in the process of weaving.

Texts then have the features of texture, that is, they have a regularity of form with the horizontal (incidents) and vertical (plot) features being very clear. To make a text out of a series of thoughts is to take the various strands and make a formal structure. These features one might say are found in the textbooks that formalise the body of knowledge belonging to a field of study. The ill-formed problem-sets that problem-based learning refers to, do not fit neatly inside such structures.

It is worth noting here, in passing, that the term “textbook” has its origins in a form of teaching that is currently open to resurgence thanks to the Internet and the availability of slabs of formalised information. McLuhan offers this history:

Even in the early eighteenth century a “textbook” was still defined as a “Classick Author written very wide by the Students, to give room for an Interpretation dictated by the Master, &c., to be inserted in the Interlines” (O.E.D.). Before printing, much of the time in school and college classrooms was spent in making such texts. The classroom tended to be a scriptorium with commentary. The student was an editor-publisher. (1964, p. 158)

This method of instruction has the potential advantage of situating the work of the Classick Author within a current world of active concern. It can show knowledge being transmitted, reconstructed and reinterpreted in the immediate world of students. Authority is then authored rather than being ratified by a distant and powerful medium: the publishing house. This approach allows that one is always an apprentice in the sense that one is always apprehending and being apprehended by the domains of concern that describe our worlds of interest. It allows that ill-formed circumstances that gave rise to original solutions to original problems can be again taken hold of, by the master (teacher) as apprentice (student). An example here is the perplexity caused to the ancient Greek philosophers when they discovered that no digital (arithmetic) description could be made for the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle with equal sides of 1 unit. While root 2, a surd (sounds wrong), can be seen as the solution to the problem, it was not and is not, any solution to the original perplexity. The failure to be able to make digits out of all things has not been overpowered by computers that are able to go beyond the visible level of perception of something being wrong; nor has the fact that we can get to the moon and back on a few decimal places bridged the gap between what the Pythagoreans dreamed and what can be constructed. We may have moved forward, but the perplexity remains. There is no finally determinable digit, no sequence of ended decimal places, no termination to the fractionalisation that never returns to a whole. To compare it with the child and the ball, no complete ball is ever recovered, no new ball, exactly like the old ball, is ever secured.

The affective state of perplexity is not commonly called on as a defining feature of problem-based learning courses. Perplexity may be there, but who wants to know about it? The real problem is not this initial problem, but rather the subsequent problems. How to get on with the business of acquiring knowledge of something other than knowledge of perplexity (ignorance) is the real focus. How can we know what we don’t know by simply pointing out what we don’t know? However, some part of the perplexity goes along in another guise. While it is not common to use the state of mind of the learner as a defining feature of problem-based learning, it is quite common to call on a feature of the problem-set as a defining feature. Many supporters of problem-based learning talk about “complexity” as a characteristic of good problem-sets. The precise location and meaning of this feature of complexity needs to be understood if we are to avoid confusing fundamental complexity with something like inherent simplicity disguised in lots of details and related steps.

“Complexity” also takes its origins in a closely associated word to “plexure”, that is “plexus” (solar plexus). Both terms relate to plaiting. The essential difference between the notion of weaving and plaiting is that of interweaving. In the case of a plait, each strand becomes a bearer and a worker at different points so that in order to find the origin of a particular strand, you may need to follow it all the way to its source. This is especially so when there are no neat colour codes to help distinguish the strands. This difference is further reinforced with the distinction between man-made and natural. While humans can and do interweave, nature does not weave. That is, the extraordinary formality (and inherent simplicity) of a weaving is peculiar to humans so much so that the quality of woven artefacts has often been used as a register for the sophistication of a cultural group. Remembering that “weave” comes from “web”, this claim may need to be tempered by examples of spiders and birds and other animals that make interlinked structures. The level of formality, or textuality, that humans bring to their woven products indicates human making. This textuality makes obvious the intentionality of consciousness.

Interweaving, in its many and varied forms, using less and more regular structural methods, appears in natural, creature-made and human-made things. The tangled web woven by deception indicates human resistance to the setting forth of a plexure in the guise of a texture. We resist ornate arguments where the various threads seem to take us in multiple directions that do not directly point to origins. We are weary of the fancy speaking known as glamorous talk precisely because it seems to use the very laws of language (grammar) against language itself. In spite of the spelling differences, what is going on here is the l/r confusion found in some Asian mispronunciations of “fried rice” as “flied lice”. The word “glamour”, as a non-native speaker phonetic variation on “grammar”, is an instance of its own meaning. Education seeks to underwrite the social understanding of grammar, not to cultivate glamour. That is, education seeks to establish texts, because of their order, over the ill-formed and tangled interweavings of reality.

The features we seek in an argument indicate our urge towards the textual. We look for such things as: consistency, regularity, simplicity, formality, sequence, consequence, direction, ordered development, coherence, finality, purpose, etc. Well-worked problems are like well-made arguments, they have about them the features of a text or weaving, that is they can be readily analysed, or indeed, read. Novel problems have about them the perplexity and complexity of an irregular plait, that is, they resist reading through the lack of clarity, fixity, regularity and orders of significance (just where does that strand begin and end?). This kind of distinction is made by Schon:

Complexity, instability, and uncertainty are not removed or resolved by applying specialized knowledge to well-defined tasks. If anything, the effective use of specialized knowledge depends on a prior restructuring of situations that are complex and uncertain. An artful practice of the unique case appears anomalous when professional competence is modelled in terms of application of established techniques to recurrent events. Problem setting has no place in a body of professional knowledge concerned exclusively with problem solving. The task of choosing among competing paradigms of practice is not amenable to professional expertise. (Schon, 1983, p. 19)

What Schon is pointing to here is the fundamental difference between the stages of the dialectic of reflection as proposed by Dewey. Until situations are taken from the “problem setting” stage to the “problem solving” stage, the actual knowledge of a profession is not of real use in dealing with the complexity of a novel situation: there is no text to read. This fundamental complexity relates to the apprehension of the problem as a thing-in-itself at a distance to the apprehender: the problem is found in its complexity as a thing yet to be set. The companion experience, of the problem-solver, is the affect of perplexity: the yet to be set problem is experienced as a plexure. The need to deal with this initial perplexity is prior, in the case of a novel situation, to any application of problem-solving. The state of being perplexed is not the state of problem solving. Rather, it is the state of the problem of the problem. Professionals may well be expert weavers, but the techniques of weaving, or of dealing with texts, are not the same as the techniques of dealing with perplexity and the uncertainties of complexities that have not been traced to their source (just what is causing that background radio noise? pigeon droppings?).

Looking into the poetics of authors and critics, we can find an example of this fundamental distinction between the initial problem of the problem and the subsequent stage of the problem-solving. Authors deal with the perplexity of a blank page and the complexities of issues, ideas and imaginings that have yet to be formed as texts. Critics deal with texts that have their complexities already formalised. To extend this example, we can observe that while some authors are also critics, many critics are not authors. That is, by extension, while some problem setters are also problem solvers, many problem solvers are not problem setters.

Perhaps there is a middle ground between author (problem setter) and critic (problem solver) such that problems are simply found? Case studies might appear to offer the neutrality of accidents and complexity of something discovered. On inspection, case studies, because, and in spite of their one-off nature, look more and more like texts in their boundedness. According to Cropper (1982, p. 344):

Although the case study may indeed be useful as a means of exploring the boundaries of little-researched phenomena, I would argue that such studies are the exception rather than the rule. The contrary would perhaps be a more accurate characterization of the case study; that is, it is suited more to the investigation of relatively well-bounded phenomena. The boundaries may be empirical, for example, an organization, an administrative area, or a policy sector; or they may be conceptual, for example, a conflict, decision, historical period, or network. But as Diesing (1972, p. 5) has argued:

In either case the emphasis is on the individuality or uniqueness of the system, its wholeness or boundedness and the ways it maintains its individuality.

Stake (1978, p. 7) agrees when he states:

It can be whatever “bounded system” . . . is of interest . . . giving great prominence to what is and what is not “the case” . . . the boundaries are kept in focus.

So, although the case study is unable to control contextual variables directly as in an experiment, or indirectly as in a sample survey, the process of bounding the object of concern does to some extent serve the purpose of isolating a particular unit of analysis for detailed study.

This isolation, through bounding, has a double-sidedness such that Margetson (1997) can point out that the problem with problem-based learning, for some educators, is that they see problems as being restricted “at least in educational contexts, to comparatively small, atomistic, single difficulties” (p. 39), that is, cases within cases, within cases. According to Woods (1985), such severely restricted problems are really exercises, and not problems at all. Which then begs the question of “the one and the many”. That is, do we look at the many simples or the one complex for our cases? The many simples (reductive argument) is easily dismissed in theory, though it usually returns in some form of practice (first this, then this, then this). Taking a larger view, one that approaches perplexity, Margetson embraces Dewey’s (1916) notion of a “problem situation” and offers the definition that a problem “refers to what is problematic about a situation; it is generally shorthand for a cluster, network or set or interrelated problems and related contextual conditions” (Margetson, p. 39). While this definition seems to get back the desired plexus, it cannot avoid the necessary bounding that typifies the shift from problem as perplexity to problem as well formed and formally contextualised set. The affects of the learner are left behind in the rush to resolve the problems.

. . . it must be observed that problem-based learning sometimes itself attempts to deny this relatedness, when for example, it attempts to de-contextualize a problem. In academic situations, for example, the cognitive aspects of problems are often regarded as central and are artificially separated from emotional aspects which are sometimes regarded as not relevant to education. (Margetson, p. 40)

There is no end to attempts to re-contextualise, precisely because all such re-settings are examples of setting; that is, the problem is ready to be solved as soon as it takes on the formal characteristics of a problem: the problem is set, isolated, bounded. The separation of emotional aspects from cognitive aspects points to the general social discomfort with affects and with problems that have yet to be given an appropriate setting. However, there is no way to ensure that all students will or will not experience perplexity with any given problem-set. Unless a problem is genuinely novel (absurd?) there is no way to ensure that a problem posed has the capability of perplexing.

When practical issues are added to these underlying philosophical difficulties, it becomes apparent why problem-based learning urges the dialectic forward towards knowledge of something specific rather than finding its focus on the problem of the problem and perplexity: problems are the problem! This urging, away from the problem, takes many forms, each designed in some way to avoid the actual difficulty of the plexus. Bawden (1997), for example, acknowledges that there are “problems with problems”, not the least of which is that the “idea of a problem always seems to connote trouble – worrying concerns that what is actually happening is somehow a wrong to be righted” (p. 327). Beyond this thematic and ethical concern is the more substantial issue of the need to avoid problems already very well defined that do not reflect, in their fixity, “the ever-evolving, dynamic complexity that characterizes the relationship that exists in agriculture between people and their environments” (p. 327). In looking for a setting for problems that avoids “straightforward problems” in the area of agriculture, Bawden comes up with the approach “that learning to improve situations . . . [is] a more constructive competency for professional agriculturalists to master than learning how to solve problems” (p. 328). The novice professional’s experience of the plexus would not seem to offer any advantage when learning is aimed at improving agricultural or professional situations. That is, perplexity might improve individuals, but it does not go directly to improving agriculture. Problems, as problems, remain problems, precisely because they take the learner back into the situation of perplexity; professional situations take learners forward into realms of knowledge and practice that promise improvement.

Along with the shift away from the precise difficulties of the plexus, often comes a shift in attention towards “experience” as a key feature of a “complete” form of problem-based learning. For Bawden, there is a kind of organic wholeness made possible by the inclusion of experience:

Experience combines with theory and with practice to form a dynamic praxis – an evolving set of interrelationships with the “whole” (praxis) being different from the sum of its interdependent parts (theory, practice and experience). (p. 327)

Looking at the “limits of problem-based learning”, Drinan (1997) advances experience as an additional feature to a basic problem-based learning methodology. According to Drinan:

. . . reflection, and conceptualization on any experience, whether contrived or real, a problem or opportunity or life happening, should involve a depth and breadth of thought which might ultimately lead to the freedom to challenge, rework and appreciate one’s most cherished fundamentals. Perhaps all forms of education founded on problem-based learning might have this endpoint, but such a goal would be unrealistic. (p. 335)

While this account is deeply attractive and seems to offer outcomes that all teachers might find wholesome, somehow, in the counter-swing away from reductive approaches to learning, problem-sets have been isolated from the problem of the problem and perplexity. As presented by Coles (1997), the taxonomies of contextual, experiential and reflective models of learning all share features of Dewey’s dialectic, however, perplexity has been erased.

The contextual learning model also seems to relate closely to what has been called experiential learning. Kolb (1984) describes the ideal learning cycle as proceeding from concrete experience to observations and reflections, and then through the formulation of abstract concepts in new situations, and thus new experiences. The first stages of this cycle could be related to the establishment of an appropriate context for learning. Formulating abstract concepts and generalizations parallels the information element of the contextual learning model, and the testing of their implications in new situations is clearly an opportunity for elaborating one’s knowledge. Thus the experiential learning cycle can be explained in terms of the contextual learning model . . . (Coles, p. 320)

Each of these patterns has its counterpart somewhere in the many accounts of learning given by Dewey. The following anecdote provides some of the flavour, of the original, that has gone missing in the current literature.

One of the children became impatient, recently, at having to work things out by a long method of experimentation, and said “Why do we bother with this? Let’s follow a recipe in a cookbook.” The teacher asked the children where the recipe came from, and the conversation showed that if they simply followed this they would not understand the reasons for what they were doing. They were then quite willing to go on with the experimental work. To follow that work will, indeed, give an illustration of just the point in question. Their occupation happened that day to be the cooking of eggs, as making a transition from the cooking of vegetables to that of meats. In order to get a basis of comparison they first summarized the constituent food elements in the vegetables and made a preliminary comparison with those found in meat. Thus they found that the woody fiber or cellulose in vegetables corresponded to the connective tissue in meat, giving the element of form and structure. They found that starch and starchy products were characteristic of the vegetables, that mineral salts were found in both alike, and that there was fat in both – a small quantity in vegetable food and a large amount in animal. They were prepared then to take up the study of albumen as the characteristic feature of animal food, corresponding to starch in the vegetables, and were ready to consider the conditions requisite for the proper treatment of albumen – the eggs serving as the material of experiment. (1956, pp. 38-39)

One can only presume that Dewey’s work is so well known that in its derivations one has no need to acknowledge the source? What is also missing, from the current literature, is an adequate account of the various phases of thinking that find their origin in perplexity. To again quote from Dewey:

Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire process of reflection. Where there is no question of a problem to be solved or a difficulty to be surmounted, the course of suggestions flows on at random . . . (1933, p. 14)

To rub salt in our collective teaching wounds, Dewey approaches humour:

We may recapitulate by saying that the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on “general principles.” There is something that occasions and evokes it. General appeals to a child (or a grown-up) to think, irrespective of the existence in his own experience of some difficulty that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile as advice to lift himself by his boot-straps. (1933, p. 15)

The trouble with trouble is that it causes problems. The problem with problems is that they cause trouble. The teaching example of home science, provided by Dewey, would seem the preferred path of little resistance. That is, when we move to the realm of the known, as teachers, the experiment remains inside the comfort zone of the professional. Somehow, now, it is down to having and replicating particular professional experiences rather than the having of the experience of perplexity itself. In the case of English et al (1994), part of the resistance of problems, as problems, is grounded in an effort to avoid, like Bawden, the negative associations of problems when they are viewed as problems. In the case of social work (English), and agriculture (Bawden), there are well-formed ethical features that attend problem-sets. Regardless of the vantage from which these ethical features are viewed, their presence is unavoidable. According to Fenwick and Parsons (1997):

The dominant paradigm that suffering needs to be, or even can be, eradicated seems on its face to be incontestable. A surgeon’s steel should cut out offending tissue; a therapist’s probing should heal painful memories; an agriculturist’s technology should irrigate farmland in colonized communities; a teacher’s instruction should end a learner’s struggle with the unknown. The competency of a professional is judged by ability to find, define, and take action to solve human problems. (p. 8)

Such ethical problems of real substance appear in many teaching areas. In these areas the subject matter already comes with higher purposes in tow. In the case of teaching, itself, the ethical issue of knowledge-as-virtue remains an obstinate and irritant feature. Jumping from the ethical dimension (troubling) to the experiential dimension cannot avoid the issues. One might reflect that there is a fundamental difference, for example, in the experiencing of a problem and the having of a problem such that, it may be the project of the professional to experience poverty for a day, a week, a month or a year. Out of this experience may grow, on reflection, a greater awareness of poverty, a heightened sensitivity to people who are poor, and an enlarged critical awareness of the issues of poverty. Actually having the problem of poverty is something else again – like the child who has lost its ball, the person in poverty is the owner of perplexity and not its student. For the student of poverty, any and all experiences of poverty are grounds of knowledge of poverty though they are not, necessarily, a source of perplexity. Experience minus perplexity is knowledge at a distance.

Much that is described as problem-based learning fails the test of the problem of the problem and perplexity. Ignorance of specific information is not perplexity though ignorance as an affective state may be the ground or companion of perplexity. This is clearly shown in the case of the baby and lost ball: not knowing the answer presents the baby with a perplexity. In the case, for example, of a crossword puzzle, I may not know the answer to a particular question or clue, but this does not perplex me because I know that someone else already knows the answer. I know, therefore that there really is no perplexity in the case of the crossword puzzle, there is merely a puzzle. The puzzle might in fact be very complex, but the underlying problem is not a problem intrinsic to the puzzling object; rather, the problem is external to the object and exists in the formal situation of doing crossword puzzles. Indeed, the extrinsic nature of the problem is perhaps what attracts those who enjoy solving such puzzles. Crossword puzzles serve to involve the mind with an object of attention without involving the mind in its immediate world of concern which is perhaps why they became so popular during World War II in Britain. This is not to say that crossword puzzles might not become real problems. In the example of the Coke bottle, in the film, The gods must be crazy, we can see how anything can be the source of perplexity. As Dewey says:

but if we are willing to extend the meaning of the word problem to whatever – no matter how slight and commonplace in character – perplexes and challenges the mind so that it makes belief at all uncertain, there is a genuine problem, or question, involved in an experience of sudden change. (1933, pp. 12-13)

In the case of the baby and ball, it will often turn out that a kindly parent or older sibling comes to the rescue. Ignorance is often perceived as a state of frustration not to be tolerated for too long. This transfer of difficulty and its attendant loss of engagement is a readily identifiable cause for concern in all learning: teachers are or should be on their guard in terms of supplying solutions or in allowing solutions to be given rather than found through engagement with the problem. There is, however, no formal way to remove this interruption to the dialectic. Unless there is a personal demand for a solution (I must resolve this) there is no self-direction or genuine interest and no reflection because there is no problem owned by the learner. First own the problem of the problem and perplexity, then learning will follow.

Project-driven learning has no such need of perplexity – here problems can be external to the learner. For example, the professional-need to have a particular technical skill is directly owned by the profession and only need be indirectly acknowledged by the learner. Often the acquisition of a particular technical skill is disputed by the learner as genuinely belonging to a profession and so the perplexity is located, for the student, in the power-relations of the profession (an authority tells me I must know this). For example, one can learn to type or take shorthand if such skills are suddenly made legal requirements to practice or to continue in employment. The problem is thus solved and learning has taken place and so we have an example of problem-based learning?

The distinctions being made here between problem-based and project-driven learning frequently appear in the literature without any hard definitions being made at the philosophic level (Dewey, 1933, pp. 216-218). Mostly, the questions of competency, and basic skills are taken up into larger models so that the parts within parts are seen as features of a whole. Further, pragmatics seems to tell us to only look at problems when the answers that might be found will assist us in what we are already doing. If the process seems to be working, why question it? Most often the getting on with learning something specific to a profession would seem to be the business at hand and so the subtle distinctions are perhaps less frequently approached. That is, we are mostly concerned with learning something in particular and not with the process of learning. Equally, we spend little time on the practice of learning as it is experienced by a learner (the poetics of learning) except as a form of inspection aimed at improving the acquiring of specific knowledge. To help discern what is going on in the case of Dewey’s dialectic of reflective learning, especially as experienced by the learner, we need to stay awhile with philosophy.

A problem is a problem is a problem, or so it might seem! A “problem” is a thing thrown down or put forth. Interestingly, an “object” is a thing thrown down or in the way. It is also especially an object put or brought before the mind, that is, a mental object brought to conscious attention by a subject. If we were to redescribe problem-based learning as object-based learning we might shake-up our understanding of where the notion of problem fits within a philosophy of learning. As Schon points out, the problem has to be structured as an object of attention before the problem solving skills of the professional can be used. Until the situation has become definite enough for there to be an object before the mind, then the skills of the professional are not of much use. In the case of novel problems, experts are as perplexed as the baby but perhaps less able to deal with the negative affects due to their accumulated sense of self as problem-solver rather than as a perplexed person. Expert learners, one might speculate, are people with a high tolerance for perplexity.

A “project”, by contrast, is a thing thrown forward. We may avoid a current perplexity by projecting forward: tomorrow we will find the object or problem that our perplexity has made us aware exists; on the Internet we will find a Web-site that has the answer because it has the problem. The gesture of anticipation that projecting announces is indicated by Dewey when he says the baby begins to think when it “begins to foresee the possibility of something not yet existing”, a solution. That is, the projecting shifts attention from the affect of perplexity to the cognitive set of problem /solution. There is a problem here, somewhere; when I find it I will be able to start on the solution. This gesture of anticipation amounts to taking up the position of the learner and/or the professional. Unless this gesture is made, unless this position is taken, there can be no real problem-based learning. The alternative gesture is that made by the student experiencing what is known as the imposter syndrome (Brookfield, 1990, p. 44). Here the perplexed individual foresees the possibility of their own failure through their lack of meeting the identity requirements of one-who-comes-to-know. What they make, instead, is the gesture of inadequacy.

The shift in attention from perplexity to problem is seen, with very real pathos, in the case of people who are suddenly diagnosed with a terminal illness. Here there is a predicament, a thing already spoken, already fixed. The thing in the way, the problem posed, by reality, is not to be projected in any form that offers a solution. Indeed, the only kind of “solution” relates to the affect of perplexity, and not to the underlying object that gives rise to the perplexity. That is, the process of thought must be reflexive; it must think about itself. It is in this sense that we can approach aspects of thinking that are not readily definable inside Dewey’s model of problem-based learning:

The [pragmatic] doctrine is not designed to embrace all activity that might readily be described as thinking in everyday parlance. In musing, recollecting, or imagining, one is thinking though not necessarily solving problems. The work of painter, writer, or composer, thoughtful and focused as it is, cannot readily be taken as a species of problem solving: of what problem is Macbeth the solution? (Scheffler, 1973, p. 130)

It makes sense to compare features of the poetics of literature as a practice with problem-based learning. That is, authors and critics, as pointed out earlier, share features in their practice with the practice of problem setters and problem solvers. However, Scheffler’s concern here is quite genuine. It is not only that the art work itself cannot readily be seen as an example of problem solving (like a formula), equally significant is the active status of the reader/critic in approaching the art work as a personal experience (not an objective solution). The standard methods for delivery in problem-based learning look a little silly in the context of literature. If we see the Romantics, for example, as a case study, then the status of the case or cases being raised is already the question. What parity is to be recognised between real life events and imaginary events? Are biographical details to be given privilege over literary moments? What is a text and what is a context? While each of these questions might be answered, literature itself remains as a thing to be approached, experienced and explored; it is not a problem to be solved anymore than sunlight or rain, in themselves, are problems to be solved. The same may be said for the Socratic Dialogue in the sense that the problems posed are not, in general, there to be solved. Mostly the problems are there to point out the predicament of learning and to provoke perplexity in the learner. This predicament of ignorance-in-knowledge is then taken as the ground for the quest for further knowledge. The formality of this Socratic process, as it has been handed down to us, is made evident in our language.

“Pose”, for example, means to “put forth”, just as “problem” does. Indeed, we talk about a problem being posed. There would seem to be a redundancy here: the put forth (problem) is put forth (posed). This sounds a little like the double “is” of languages with the verb “to be”: it is an it is. However, the significance of the double putting is obvious in as much as it allows that problems do not, of themselves, exist. Indeed, the difference between an object and a problem is precisely this: objects are deemed to be independent of their announcing, in as much as they present themselves before consciousness; whereas, problems are features of things, events, circumstances, that are only known in their being posed. In their being solved, problems cease to exist whereas objects do not have any sense of needing solutions nor do they go away based on some further consideration. The terminal cancer is a thing in its presentation to the mind.

Further, from “pose” we can arrive at the noun “poser”. A “poser” is a person who “poses problems, who perplexes, who nonpluses”. Part of the difficulty in problem-based learning, as a philosophy, is the attempt to exclude this aspect of the problem. That is, problems are deemed to be sets that arise, within a profession and therefore are in no need of inspection in terms of who exactly is doing the posing and how exactly that posing is done. This is not to suggest that problem-based learning does not recognise the context of its problem-setting. Indeed, this very recognition of context is what allows for the avoidance of the question of posing. If the features of ethics and/or politics are found, in context, then the setting of problems is re-set in the larger professional environment. According to Cowdroy (1994):

The relationship of each player to the Problem in a general model of Problem-Based Learning also conforms to a general model of phenomenology in which understanding is relative to context in a real and complex world of beliefs and rules (Carroll, 1987).

This application of a general model of phenomenology is related to Foucault’s view that all thought and knowledge are inevitably conditioned by contemporary “ethics or politics” (Foucault, 1970), which form part of the context within which knowledge is considered. That is, the context is part of the problem. If ethics and politics here are liberally translated to include the views of both the students and the teachers as well as the views of all the other potential participants, then the teacher cannot be “objective” about the problem or the solution: the teacher is part of the context of the problem and therefore part of the knowledge and the problem itself. (pp. 48-49)

Out of this contextual richness comes, for Cowdroy, an exponentially multiplying number of “starting points and outcomes” (p. 49). It should be noted that “context” relates to the joining together of parts of weaving or knitting and, in terms of literary works, originally related to the parts that went together (sentences, paragraphs etc) to form the whole, or text. The current stress is on the situation of a text within a larger work, of which it is a part. As an anti-reductionist approach, it offers a holistic account that seeks, in the case of texts, to reduce their individual significance and to stress their interrelatedness with other texts, many of which are not literary texts (ones that presume formality) but rather social texts (ones that are formalised in social awareness). For example, we can read a Charles Dickens novel as a text, as an object in itself; or, we can read it as a text within a larger, social, cultural, political text (the whole) of which it is then part. This multiplying of texts within an ever increasing number of contexts is the feature Cowdroy is stressing. The advantage of this approach, in terms of the location of the posing of the problem, is that the problem cannot ever be seen to be posed in any singular form. Thus, the problem is there as a multitude of possible texts, in the richness, or texture of the context. The missing objectivity is re-determined by the eschewing of the subjectivities of the participants: the problems then are objects (things found) while the subjectivities of the participants are dispersed in the richness of possibilities (things lost).

Regardless of the epistemological complexity, and the over-determination of texture, there would seem to be no ideology of problems when the problems are simply found, like gem-stones in a river of pebbles. In this post-modern model of a case study, problems are simply there as part of the case (complex as the case may be). The bounding, or framing, is yet another feature of the context that multiplies and dissolves in its multiplications. Much like a camera lens, these formal features can be pushed, pulled and distorted at will (or creative desire).

When we inquire what a “case” might be, we find that it is an “account of how things fell out”. This aspect of “falling out” would seem to forgive the problem-set of any posing while rewarding the problem-solver with a richness of context that embraces all but the moment of perplexity. Perplexity, unlike context, is marked by its singularity. As an affect, perplexity is a readily discernible state. It does not simply dissolve, fragment or alter in its impact. Perplexity has about itself the quality of viscosity. Like all affects, it requires an individual experiencer. And, like all affects, it seeks its objectification or expression. It remains obstinate within its context. By way of contrast, the ever expanding context offers to sustain its own questioning (as an area of expansion) within a phenomenology that has bracketed-out the experience of “posure”. The falling-out (case) has supplanted the put forth (posed problem). The surfeit of possibilities (mostly logical) has usurped the position of perplexity as the indicator of the experience of problem-engagement. The very machinery of problem-solving can, in this model, produce its own outcome. That is, this model allows for artificial intelligence and the mechanical production of novel solutions.

In the case of both Western and Eastern philosophy, the deliberate posing of problems, by posers, has long been central to the teaching and learning of these professions or practices. The best known Western example is where Socrates poses the problem of learning itself, in the Meno. Schon offers this account of the problem of the problem and perplexity:

The design studio shares in a general paradox attendant on the teaching and learning of any really new competence or understanding: for the student seeks to learn things whose meaning and importance she cannot grasp ahead of time. She is caught in the paradox Plato describes so vividly in his dialogue the Meno. There, just as Socrates induces Meno to admit that he hasn’t the least idea what virtue is, Meno bursts out with the question:

But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn’t know? (Plato, 1956, p.128.)

Like Meno, the design student knows she needs to look for something but does not know what that something is. She seeks to learn it, moreover, in the sense of coming to know it in action. Yet, at the beginning, she can neither do it nor recognize it when she sees it. Hence, she is caught up in self-contradiction: “looking for something” implies a capacity to recognize the thing one looks for, but the student lacks at first the capacity to recognize the object of the search. The instructor is caught up in the same paradox: he cannot tell the student what she needs to know, even if he has words for it, because the student would not at that point understand him. (1987, p. 83)

When Meno is confronted with this problem of the problem through Socrates’ refusal to relent, he replies, in genuine frustration:

Socrates, even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment I feel you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in outward appearances but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat sting-ray [torpedo-fish] that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him [puts him in a torpor] . . . (Plato, 1956, p. 127)

According to Meno, to perplex is then to be perplexed: Socrates not only causes consternation in his victim, but he suffers this same consternation in his own thinking. This focus on the state of mind of the expert takes us back to Schon’s point that “complexity, instability, and uncertainty are not removed or resolved by applying specialized knowledge to well-defined tasks” (1983, p. 19). Socrates is an expert in the rhetoric of Athens and yet, in his dealings as an unpaid Sophist, he regularly presents himself as a perplexed thinker; as one who does not have the answer; as one who is struggling to formulate the question.

In bringing Meno into his vagrant school, Socrates is presenting both an initiation experience (there are many textual allusions to religious ceremonies (Guthrie, 1956, p. 123)) and he is modelling, in his carrying forward the argument, the very processes of perplexity and problem-engagement that Meno needs to experience if he is to become a student in Socrates’ philosophy. This modelling has many features in common with views of cognitive apprenticeship put forward by Collins, Brown and Newman (1989, quoted here from Ryan and Quinn, 1994, p. 18):

Modelling – where an expert (for example, the tutor) carries out a task (such as working through a problem) so that students can observe and build a conceptual model of the processes that are required to accomplish the task. An example is Schoenfeld’s (1985) work on the teaching of mathematics to college students. As he works through a mathematics problem, Schoenfeld verbalises his thinking processes as an example of the thinking that underlies expert problem solving, while at the same time focusing student attention on the use and management of specific problem-solving strategies.

In his modelling, Schoenfeld is following in the direct footsteps of Socrates in the Meno, except that, in the case of Socrates, the modelling is done, through Plato, at a double distance: firstly Socrates models the problem of root 2 with a slave while Meno looks on; as we, the readers, receive the modelling, it is at yet a further remove. This distancing allows that the central question, for Socrates and Plato, remains the paradox of knowledge and the attendant perplexity. The aim is not to model a solution to the problem of doubling the square. However, the fact that the slave is able to acquire knowledge through inquiry does allow that perplexity can be gone beyond. Later, in the Meno, Plato, through Socrates, offers a notion of learning that allows us to move forward. (One can speculate that for Socrates, the interest remains in the state of perplexity.)

I shouldn’t like to take my oath on the whole story, but one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act: that is, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don’t know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don’t know we can never discover. (Plato, 1956, p. 139)

Here then is the pragmatic approach more typical of project-driven learning. Setting out with a purpose in mind, we project forward that we might come to know that which we don’t know. Meno’s predicament, and the design student’s predicament (in Schon’s account) are not overcome by this strategy. The initial numbing experience of confronting perplexity does not simply go away; Socrates, as the expert has not become wise in any way that avoids this foundation experience. Each new problem animates, again, the initial problem of the problem and perplexity. Unless this key feature of perplexity is announced and accounted for in the learning situation, then there really is no problem-based learning. This implies a master/novice relationship as the underlying model of problem-based learning.

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Kairosis

Design Scandal – Perplexity

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Abstract

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