Thread by @cblack__

Okay, there’s a thing we need to #DISMANTLE.

I just published, “Science / Fiction: Evidence-Based Education, Scientific Racism, and How Learning Styles Became a Myth.”
carolblack.org/science-fictio…

Wait, what? Learning styles? I thought scientists had concluded that believing in learning styles is like believing in Big Foot! Or unicorns!

Well… not exactly.

In fact, researchers at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Hong Kong University, the Keck Graduate Institute, University of Exeter, and other major research institutions very much believe that learning styles exist.

From "The Value of Intellectual Styles," By Li-Fang Zhang, Cambridge University Press, 2017: bit.ly/2yg5X6n

"Cognitive Style as Environmentally Sensitive Individual Differences in Cognition" by Maria Kozhevnikov, Carol Evans, Stephen M. Kosslyn bit.ly/2LmYUvh

So what is going on? Why are people claiming that there's a scientific consensus that learning styles are a myth?

There are a few concerning features to this discourse. One is the derisive, almost bullying tone.

Another is the frequency with which it takes the form of male researchers telling female educators that their views on learning are cognitively childish:

But the most disturbing thing is the way the claim that "learning styles don't exist" morphs directly into a claim about *lower intelligence* in certain children.

What makes this issue so urgent –– and so tragic in its implications if we neglect to seriously address it –– is the way these individual learning differences can function to intensify and amplify the underlying economic and racial inequities in education.

The question, then, is this: is there a scientific reason we should assume every difference is a deficit until proven otherwise?

Or is there a historical reason that difference was framed as deficit from the beginning?

The elephant in the room here is that the reasoning behind the 'scientific' claims of 'evidence-based' education rest on a tautological logic that was historically designed to serve the interests of a ruling class of people:

From "The Measurement of Intelligence," 1916, by Lewis Madison Terman, developer of the first American version of the IQ test.

That's why historian Ibram X. Kendi has argued that the academic "achievement gap" between Black and White students is an *intrinsically racist idea."

Mi'kmaw education professor Dr. Marie Battiste has a term for this tendency for a powerful group to define a narrow set of cognitive traits as superior: she calls it "cognitive imperialism."

Outside the closed circle of Eurocentric education, there are many styles of learning that education researchers would do well to know something about.

People in cultures all over the world believe that direct instruction is in fact the *least* effective approach to learning. And interestingly, artists and scientists all over the world say the same thing.

But the white cognitive scientists who pronounce that LEARNING STYLES DON'T EXIST!!! don't really seem to know anything about this.

Before research began on learning styles, "it was generally assumed by non-Indian researchers that American Indian / Alaska Native children lacked the innate intelligence and ability to succeed in formal school:"

So let's be crystal clear on this: if we abandon the idea that intelligent children learn differently, this is the point that we circle back to.

It's disturbing, but not really surprising, that some of the popular learning styles 'debunkers' have now arrived at a discussion of racial differences in IQ.

It's like they're following a trail of breadcrumbs back home.