“Any Technology Creates its Own Environment”: Progressive Education in Marshall McLuhan’s Electronic Age
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Authors
Tryphonopoulos, Panayiotes
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Marshall McLuhan , The Living and Learning Report (1968) , Mosaic , Progressive Education , Tools of Perception , Media , Technology , Pedagogy , The Electronic Age , 1960's Ontario Education , The Medium is the Message , Communications
Alternative Title
Abstract
Published with much fun-fare, The Living and Learning Report (1968) arrived as an educational panacea for progressive, radical, technologically-savvy pedagogical approaches that would revolutionize and improve the student-focused experience. Besides much enthusiasm, the Report attracted somber criticism, especially for the absence of concrete curriculum directions. Marshall McLuhan made a presentation in support of one of the committee’s major goals: the advancing and expansion of technology within the classroom. In “Education in the Electronic Age” (1967), McLuhan proposed experimental, experiential, collaborative, student-centered, project-based, integrated learning to be achieved through “the training of [students’] perception.” The few references to McLuhan in the Report skim over his pedagogical vision, especially his notions of the “mosaic,” his media ecology and pedagogy, an “educational task,” which could “provide [the] basic tools of perception, but also . . . develop judgment and discrimination with ordinary social experience.” Largely ignored in the Report and by progressive reformers alike, McLuhan’s “mosaic,” his “kit of tools for analysis and perception,” turned out to be a missed opportunity. Rooted in his modernist training at Cambridge (1936-1942), it aims to shift attention from learning and communication approaches grounded in conventional, visually-focused, connected, continuous, static technologies--including those of the linear, alphabetic practice of print--to a genuine transformation of perception grounded in a post-visual, physical, multi-sensory, dynamic, discontinuous experience. A heuristic probe that focuses on textual and perceptual gaps or intervals (“the interval is where the action is”), McLuhan’s mosaic approaches media as sites of the transference of maximal energy across visual and acoustic fissures. Touted as a technophile who prophesized the death of the book, McLuhan’s work constitutes a critique of both technology and curricula, promoting a pedagogy of “exploration,” of experimental learning that blasts the sequential, linear, prescriptive approaches of traditional humanist learning without, nonetheless, rejecting its continued relevance. It turns out that progressive educators and reformers over the past several decades have proposed the kinds of radical changes (from open classrooms and collaborative learning to critical pedagogy and the rejection of conventional canons) contemplated by McLuhan, almost always without being conscious of the impact of his media theory and pedagogy.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.