Long Live the Transmission Model!
The foundational fact of individual experiential solitude forces us into an emergent inter-cognitive space where we can understand others and be understood by them.
When surveying the last 200 years or so of education thinking, one should find it difficult, I would hope, to identify any robust benefit at all to the widespread adoption of the constructivist perspective to teaching and learning. "Borrowed" and cobbled together across West 120th Street in New York [1]—with little understanding—from early work in psychology and snippets of epistemology, educational constructivism is, today, functionally just a single slogan, "knowledge is actively constructed!" that goes nowhere else.
What great insights about teaching and learning stand on the shoulders of this supposedly giant truth that "knowledge is actively constructed!"? What impressive edifice have the wise builders built on the sturdy rock of "knowledge is actively constructed!"? One may be tempted to think of applications of constructivism as innovations built on the main idea, but these are not advances in understanding; quite the opposite: they are old wine in new wineskins. Others may be tempted to mention Piaget and Vygotsky, but here again, active construction of knowledge was a background assumption of these researchers, not a touchstone from which further deductions were made.
In the end, what has been accomplished by constructivism in deepening our understanding of teaching and learning? "Active knowledge construction (with adult guidance, even)!" is a battle cry, not a serious reckoning with the work of understanding learning and instruction. Born of ressentiment, wildly one-sided in its gaze, and an insult without apology to common sense, educational constructivism, to channel both the words and the anger of the late Christopher Hitchens, "can't be believed by a thinking person."
This, the most central and insistent claim of constructivism [that learning is an active process] seems, as it stands, to be either misleading or untrue. Human beings, and animals in general, certainly do acquire knowledge of their environments by acting upon the world about them (for example by investigating habitats and by eating things); however, they are also acted upon. We do things and have things done to us; we act and we react, and clearly we can learn from both types of experience . . . Why, then, should constructivism emphasise only one pole of human experience? I suggest that this follows from its own reactive origins, as a view of learning which was set up in opposition to . . . traditionalist views of education. [2]
With understanding, though, comes acceptance. Constructivism, while not a serious instructional theory, has always had the noble goal of correcting for the unethical abuses and negative side-effects of the default transmission model of instruction. [3] These include treating instruction as a one-way process of expert-to-novice communication, ignoring feedback, context, and individual (especially idiosyncratic) interpretations of instruction, ignoring affect, motivation, and nonverbal communication like body language and tone, assuming that sender and receiver have a shared understanding, and ignoring biases, emotions, and other psychological factors at work. Most importantly, constructivism sets its face against authority—this is, after all, its raison d'être—and the transmission model is often seen as a stalking horse for creating and maintaining a system of (patriarchal) authority for the few and supine docility for the rest. [4] Nobody puts Baby in the corner . . . quite like the transmission model of learning, apparently.
A significant problem for constructivism's antagonism with the transmission model, insofar as its proponents want to pretend that constructivism is a standalone learning theory, is that the transmission model has always been and continues to be the best foundational model for naturally explaining teaching and learning (among many other things) that we have. It is nice, important work to be watchful against authoritarianism, on any scale; to prevent docility; to be a champion of individual sovereignty. But all of this work belongs inside the transmission model; it cannot possibly be a replacement for it (not a "conceptual revision," as Michael Welbourne writes in The Community of Knowledge):
Autonomy can be reconciled with knowledge on the account I have given. This is not to say there is no tension, but it is not to be resolved by conceptual adjustments; the problems are of an ethical nature, and the idea of treating them by conceptual revision and adaptation is positively dangerous. . . .
Anyone who ventures to tell another that p to that extent assumes the mantle of authority and anyone who believes another to that extent defers to authority. Nothing could be more ordinary. Episodes like this occur all the time. What is important is that these postures can be adopted by anyone and each of us at different times adopts each of them. Sometimes we appear in the role of tellers speaking (so we think) with the authority of knowledge; and sometimes we feature as believers crediting others with the authority to tell us . . . So, the natural climate in which we deal in knowledge is one of mutual respect, mutual give and take. Authoritarianism is liable to set in when, for whatever reason, this mutuality is eroded. It would be particularly silly, however, to seek to avoid this evil by adopting the posture of a cognitive Robinson Crusoe since that simply undermines the mutuality in a different (and catastrophic) way. [5]
Models of Mutuality
A crucial reason that constructivism cannot be a useful model of learning is that, at bottom, it takes no real account of mutuality (it opts instead for the 'cognitive Robinson Crusoe'), whereas, for the transmission model, mutuality is simply built in or an emergent property.
What is this special mutuality, and why is it a necessary component of learning models, you might ask? I'd like to try my hand at answering both of these questions by example, using three models from somewhat different literatures: joint representation (social cognition), the symbolic landscape (linguistics), and the extended mind (philosophy of mind).
Joint Representation - Frith
Fig. 1. Taking account of what others see. In the left panel, both you and the other person can see one dot. In the right panel, you can see two dots, but the other person can see only one dot. This discrepancy slows you down.
Imagine that you are taking part in an experiment originally conducted by Dana Samson and her colleagues (Samson et al., 2010; also see Surtees, Apperly, and Samson, 2016). She shows you a schematic picture of a room (see Fig. 1). On the walls are one or more dots, and you are asked to report how many dots you can see. Easy, right?
Now imagine that another person shown as a schematic figure is looking at the same room but can only see one wall. This person sometimes sees a different number of dots from the ones you can see. Remarkably, when this occurs, you are slowed down in saying how many dots you can see.
In this task, it should not matter to you what the other figure can see. So why do you care? As the experiment shows, you cannot help it. The spontaneous adoption of another person's perspective has also been found with real people sitting at right angles to each other. [6]
The "spontaneous adoption of another person's perspective" is happening, of course, to everyone around, generating an emergent joint-attentional and joint-representational plane, which the author goes on to call "We-Mode."
We-Mode is more than the phenomenal experience of each of the individuals concerned. We use the term to indicate that it allows a type of joint representation, a We-representation, that is well below phenomenal awareness. It is important for the success of joint action, as formulated and studied in the lab of Natalie Sebanz and Günther Knoblich (e.g., Sebanz, Bekkering, and Knoblich, 2006). Through We-representations, group behavior is not simply the sum of individual behaviors . . .
We-Mode throws light on a rather amazing fact: people represent the common space and the objects in the space, overriding their own individual point of view. This comes in handy for groups that are equally affected by their environment. As James (1904) pointed out long ago, if one person blows out a candle, then the room is dark for everyone . . .
When two people are performing an action together, an advantage occurs from taking into account each other's viewpoint. But it seems that we do this even if we are not working together. We do not ignore what another person sees, even when this is disadvantageous—slowing us down, an indication of a truly automatic process. [7]
The benefits of the joint-representational plane—generated by joint attention and different in kind from our private-representational spaces—are hard to overstate. Joint attention, enabling the understanding of others' intentions, is almost certainly necessary for language development [5], for example, and the very existence of automatic joint attention, saddling us with extra cognition (automatic perspective-taking, all the time), compels us to develop coordinating rules and conventions—which we must teach and learn—that allow us to be and work together while avoiding what would certainly be a combinatorial explosion (even among just a tribe of 150 persons) of individually negotiated meanings.
Arbitrary rules that have been agreed upon in advance and have become part of convention for a society are powerful forces for coordinating activities of all kinds. Through conventions, people can coordinate their activity without the need for constant negotiation and explicit agreement. This is because their expectations are aligned so each individual believes that everyone will follow the rules (Gintis, 2010). Conventions can be very arbitrary and local. For example, when riding on an escalator, people in Tokyo stand on the left (passing on the right), while people in Osaka stand on the right. Some time ago, people in Copenhagen entered buses in the front, in Aarhus at the back. Such conventions are themselves examples of the need of people who live together to align with each other. At first, these are conscious and explicit strategies that have to be communicated and then followed. But eventually, they become automatic habits. [7]
At the very bottom of any list of benefits of joint attention—and its product, the joint-representational plane—are 'benefits' that are not benefits at all, at least not in the way we imagine them operating most of the time. Deception, susceptibility to influence (credulity and social bias), and restrictive norms, and punishments for breaking them are all made possible or necessary by joint attention and representation: Once I am oriented, in part, to your field of attention and you to mine, and I can see, in part, how you view me, and you can see, in part, how I view you, and we can both see how others will view us, in part, and so on, adding on both layers of 'views' as well as more persons, we both (all) become capable of managing others' views of us to a greater or lesser extent, capable of misrepresenting ourselves to others (i.e., deception) and at the same time, we become vulnerable to others' attempts at deception. To help mitigate the unique problem of deception, with which joint attention has burdened us, we can agree to strong norms against deception and to harsh social punishments for norm violators. The extra cognitive work required to monitor cues of untrustworthiness and to mete out punishments (and rewards) when necessary pales in comparison to what would be required by the constructivist alternative—each individual personally validating for himself the epistemic legitimacy of every statement they ever heard or read.
The automaticity of joint attention, despite these side-effects, suggests that the trade-off is worth it, that what we gain via joint attention and representation is far more powerful and beneficial than the adverse byproducts engendered by it. Yet the power of joint representation that we have created over ourselves, while seemingly frightening to some, is not absolute. We do not have to obey it. Indeed, it is sometimes better to try and reject or ignore joint representations, and, in doing so, catch a glimpse of how powerful they really are. Novice artists are, for example, constantly reminded to draw what they see rather than to draw what they think they see. That is, they are constantly enjoined to try to ignore joint-representational space and concentrate on their own private-representational perspective (to draw realistic objects):
Fig. 2. A move towards realism: a Byzantine Virgin and Child (left) becomes a humanised image (right) in the hands of Cimabue.
When you start drawing a nose, if you look at the light and the . . . blush, it'll have a shape, and that shape is essentially abstract. Ian Dury, my art teacher, told me, "When you're drawing a nose, for Christ's sake don't draw a nose. Just draw what you see. And after half an hour, you step away, and there will be a nose." If you try and draw a nose, you'll fall flat on your face. It's hard to look at the figures in Byzantine art [above left] without thinking of Dury's advice: those paintings are full of body parts that don't express patterns of shape and light, but rather the idea of what they ought to look like [unlike the image above right, by Cimabue]. [9]
It is worth pointing out here that the mutuality (transmission) models that we explore here, like joint representation, do not erase individual discovery and creativity, the counter-cultural, rebels, iconoclasts. There is an I-Mode alongside the We-Mode in Frith's joint-representation model, for example. None of the models advocate for obeisance to the cultural, to the group, to the traditional. The fact that constructivism is pure advocacy for the individual doesn't mean that those models which are in tension with constructivism are advocacies in the opposite direction.
The Symbolic Landscape - Dor
For Israeli linguist Daniel Dor (drawing on Reddy, 1979), our mutuality can be located on what he calls the symbolic landscape (see Fig. 3). It is here where we translate our fuzzy, analog, private intentions and experiences into a discrete, digital, agreed-upon, and organized code (language). The primary purpose of this code is to teach, or to "instruct the listener's imagination":
The basic idea is quite simple: as speakers whose experiential worlds are different, we have to work together to create a model of the world that we can tentatively agree on and thus use as a channel for instructive communication. We also have to agree on sets of norms for the use of the technology, to make sure that the listener interprets the instructions in a way that is similar enough to that intended by the speaker . . . linguistic communication [is thus] a process of conversion, where speakers translate their experiential intents into formal instructions, which their listeners use to imagine the intended meaning. [10]
Fig. 3. Dor's triadic relationship between the signified and the signifier, the neighborhood, and the experiential cluster.
Let us try the following thought-experiment. Assume a community of four human members, [Venkman, Egon, Ray, and Winston], and assume that they have absolutely no language in common: how they found themselves together we need not know, but now they have to communicate on a regular basis. Let us, then, allow them to begin to construct a new language from scratch.
Suppose that Venkman begins by pointing at a chair and uttering t͡ʃɛɚ. The pointing means: "let this experience be common." It acknowledges the experiential gap [no two humans have the same experiences], and calls upon the others to gather around, concentrate their [joint] attention on that particular object, and make a mental note of the fact that the experience of looking at the object, of identifying the object as a focal point of [joint] attention, was something that was, at that moment, shared by all the others. In uttering t͡ʃɛɚ, Venkman suggests: "in the future, to get the others to imagine an experience of this type, let us say t͡ʃɛɚ." Assume, then, that Egon, Ray, and Winston do indeed look in the right direction, and . . . they associate the sound pattern with the chair itself, not one of its legs, or the upholstery, or the color.
Now they have agreement on what I call the sign's experiential anchor, the specific chair Venkman was pointing at, which is now marked by all four as an experience shared with the others. This, however, is only the beginning. The crucial question now is how the four of them would generalize the meaning of their first sign: what, for each of them, would be other experiences of the same type, experiences for which the signifier t͡ʃɛɚ would be adequately used? (Remember that they cannot talk about it.) The foundational fact of individual experiential variability forces us to the conclusion that they would zoom in on different ideas. . . . [10]
For example, . . . Winston [who understands 'chair' as "anything to sit on"] sees a stool somewhere, and then goes back to tell the others, with a combination of hand waving and the signifier t͡ʃɛɚ, that there is a chair—something used for sitting—for them to pick up.
They go along with him and see the stool. For Venkman [who thinks about 'chair' in the same way Winston does], all this would be natural. Egon [who thinks that 'chair' represents something that looks like the original object of the group's joint attention] and Ray [who is experienced with furniture and sees 'stool' and 'chair' as objects with different functions], however, would probably be confused. Both would think (not for the same reasons): "What is this? This is not a chair" . . .
The first sign of the new language, then already raises the question that will follow our four individuals all the way to their full-fledged language: when does something in the experience of any of the members of the community count as different enough vis-à-vis what has already been established to deserve its own place in the collective model of the world? The question is that of the threshold of demarcation, and it is a social question through and through. . . . For the distinction between the chair and the stool to enter their language, one of the four individuals would have to make a point, to insist, and the others would have to agree. Assume, then, that Ray points at the stool and says stuːl. Doing this, Ray indicates that the experiential extension of the sign chair should somehow be limited, delineated: stools should be excluded. They should be mutually identified as such, and receive their own sign. So, says Ray, "I insist that this new experience which we are now sharing is different from the one we have named t͡ʃɛɚ. In the future, let us refer to experiences of this type by using the signifier stuːl."
It is important to see that Ray does not have to do all this—he or she may very well decide not to—and that the others do not have to agree: . . . the social dynamics that develop within the community determine much of what eventually emerges. If Ray does intervene, and the others do agree, they will now have two signs.
This, then, is the crucial point: following their second round of negotiation, our four individuals would not have just isolated and mutually identified two types of experience from everything they have experienced—they would have also isolated and mutually identified one distinction from the huge set of distinctions that come and go in their experiential lives: stools and chairs are different. The two signs will no longer just be associated in their minds with their experiences. They will be connected to each other, in a way that reflects the short history of their linguistic negotiation. This will be the first semantic connection on the semantic [symbolic] landscape of the emerging language. A first step toward the construction of an entire model of the world of experience, whose signifieds and their semantic relations reflect not the actual properties of the world, nor the experiential world of this individual or the other, but the entire history of mutual-identification in the community. [11]
Dor's private experiencers, along with his symbolic landscape—where discrete, agreed-upon signs are connected to each other by agreed-upon meanings—thus represents a mutuality model that is similar to Frith's. Of course, these two models appear to operate on different content and serve different functional roles, but consider what they have in common (aside from the fact that they are both involved in language transmission).
Both models maintain common-sense distinctions between private minds and the emergent community mind. As mentioned above, there is an "I-Mode" that goes along with "We-Mode," and there is, alongside Dor's symbolic landscape, a landscape of private experience—fuzzy, analogue, and inaccessible to others. Thus, in both models, a transformation is required. In the case of joint attention, one is compelled (but not absolutely forced) to give up one's first-person perspective and adopt a first-person-plural perspective—allowing us to create 'objective' joint representations—and in the case of 'instructing the imagination,' one is compelled (but not absolutely forced) to communicate using a mutually agreed-upon code that only roughly captures one's private intentions and experience.
It is not, of course, a requirement for instructional models to be common-sensical. But, importantly, it is also not a requirement that they be counterintuitive. We would be committing the naturalistic fallacy if we were to assert that these mutuality models are correct because they correspond well with our intuitions, but it is not at all fallacious to merely celebrate their intuitional appeal.
Both models are honest about the negative side-effects of their processes and seek to explain them. We discussed this while investigating joint attention (deception, credulity, restrictive norms), but Dor also explores at great length in his book all the frustrations that accompany his system of instructing the imagination. Here is one example:
Regular speech production (in every language) is infested with errors, pauses, hesitations, and repairs . . . they expose the inherently fragile points in the workings of the technology . . . Hesitations mostly appear when we experience difficulty in translating our experiential intents—holistic, analogue, and private—into the digital forms dictated to us by the protocol. Importantly, when we experience such difficulties, we often have no problems translating our experiential intents into presentational communication: we produce mimetic gestures, such as those of using the telephone, when we can't find the word . . . Clark and Foxtree (2002) . . . show that English speakers use the fillers uh and um to tell their interlocutors that they are taking a pause in order to make a translation decision—uh for short pauses, um for longer ones. The authors show that "uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word." [11]
Again, it is not a requirement for an instructional model to conscientiously lay out all of the negative side-effects that it can explain. It is simply comforting that the two models above do this, because it provides us with some psychological assurance that the models are trying to zero in on reality, warts and all, rather than trying to market a viewpoint, like constructivism.
Both models show up in fairly obvious ways in the real world. That is, we don't have to completely re-theorize human behavior (as constructivism wants to do) to see these models in action. We do not have to strongly want to see them in order for them to appear. You can, for example, easily see 18-month-olds figure out adults' intentions and altruistically assist them. And language use is, of course, commonly observable in the wild. Claiming to see active individual construction of knowledge, however—an early twentieth-century attempt at describing, at a high level, what the brain is doing during learning—is pareidolia.
Consider how hints of our mutuality models—fuzzy, analog, private experiences being transmitted along the discrete, organized, mutually agreed-upon symbolic landscape or joint-representational plane—show up in some interesting places. For example, patient diaries for ICU patients have proven to be valuable tools for people recovering not only from some major physical trauma but also from their often lengthy stays in the ICU, where they may have suffered from nightmares, hallucinations, and paranoia—along with a terrible memory gap:
In the 1970s, nurses [in Denmark] had realised that patients needed to recover from intensive care, as well as in it, and it was they who started keeping patient diaries as a way of helping their patients make sense of their experiences. They came up with a beautifully simple practice: each day, a nurse writes an informal diary entry telling the patient what they have done, what has been done to them, and how they are. . . .
When I ask how he felt when he finally did open that black notebook [patient diary], he pauses. 'I felt . . . overwhelmed,' he eventually submits. The notebook's humble exterior belied its contents. On opening it, Rosen found 'every word a gem, a jewel.'
It affected him in two ways. Firstly, reflecting on its value in filling in the gap in his life story, he points to our fundamental need to organise events: 'We as human beings constantly try to get things into shapes and understand them [on the joint-representational plane] . . . I'm consciously trying to hang onto a moment of huge dissipation, my [private] mind being dissipated and dissolved.' He pauses again, picking out the right metaphor from his store. 'These notes are stepping stones,' he concludes. 'They are rocks in the bog.' [12] [13]
In expressive writing therapy, too, we see some of the same concepts and terminology used as in our mutuality models:
Using language of insight ('now I realize that') or cause ('one consequence was that') in your [expressive] writing is a sign that you've processed your emotions so they will stress you less in the future. On the other hand, writing that just recounts the facts of a trauma, without an acknowledgement of its emotional effects, won't be effective.
The benefits don't only take the form of reduced calls on your doctor and lower consumption of painkillers: your blood pressure may come down, and emotional disclosure writing has been connected to a reduction in the recurrence of heart attacks, as well as better antibody response to vaccination and to Epstein Barr virus . . .
There are undoubtedly multiple factors at play. As we verbally process trauma, we have to name and label our emotions: and this practice, in turn, is known to improve life satisfaction. It is known as the A-to-D emotion theory, in which 'analogue' emotions (non-verbal, woolly, hard to organise, imprecise) are turned into 'digital' (verbal, cognitive, easy-to-organize) chunks . . . The more care we take to identify differences between our negative emotions, the more likely we are to understand them, and act effectively in the future. The same applies if we organise our experiences, and our emotional reactions to them, into a coherent story—easier to do on the page than orally. 'When people write expressively about past trauma, they're placing it in the context of the rest of their lives and they're reducing the impact that it has: it's no longer sitting at the back of your [private] mind, having a subconscious effect . . . You've brought it to the [joint-representational] surface, you've dealt with it, you've made sense of it, now you can move on. [12]
What Mutuality Is and Why It Is Important
It seems to me that, at this point, we can offer up some answers to our questions: what is this mutuality, and why is it a necessary component of learning models?
The kind of mutuality we are after is like joint-representational space. Yet, as Frith reminds us again and again, this is not the same as just "being together." Nor is it the same as "give and take" or collaboration. Joint-representational space creates a common (objective) frame of reference, a joint representation that is the same for everyone.
You can understand some of the subtleties of joint-representational space well if you have ever watched someone try to direct a store clerk to grab an item from among rows of items behind the counter (or a similar experience). From the customer's (private) point of view, it would be easier to just walk behind the counter and grab the item. After all, they can see exactly where it is, and the clerk doesn't seem to have a clue. Indeed, customers may make private-viewpoint statements like "right there" and "I'm looking right at it" (especially if they are angry), exasperatingly trying to avoid the work required in joint attention and representation (it's cognitively simpler to just keep working with "up, to the right a little, no, wrong way"). Eventually, success can be achieved when the customer and clerk use (taught and learned) joint-representational references: "second row from the top, third over."
Joint-representational space allows us to maintain our private perspectives and experiences—they are not run over roughshod by the 'objective' frame of reference—while simultaneously giving us a shared-representational space that empowers us to make these private perspectives somewhat sensical to all the people around who aren't us and can't possibly understand our complex, fuzzy, inner selves.
But as we said, a transformation is required between the two spaces to make all this happen. This is why transmission (transmissio, "sending over or across") is a necessity for any teaching and learning model: precisely because individuals are truly individuals, they cannot be connected directly (without losing their individuality); they require a common space that is necessarily different from the private space (otherwise, again, individuality would be lost) raised up between them and among them, continuously mutually negotiated, through which, fueled by individual contributions, they collectively and 'objectively' represent their world and each other.
As we saw, language is one game we can play through joint-representational space—and recall our apparent flexibility with this space as we play the language game: you can use it to communicate (Dor) but you may also use it as a kind of digital refrigerator (expressive writing) through which you transform your fuzzy, magnetic, private thoughts and experiences, as best you can, into joint-representational shapes, and then scramble them around until those shapes 'make sense,' or 'fit in' in some way, even partially, to your community's joint-representational sense-making (with the assent of you, the individual).
But we can easily replace language in the system. So long as we have true individuals with private experiences, a joint-representational space, and transmissibility, we will have found our necessary mutuality model. If we can discover other models that exploit this mutuality in different ways, perhaps we can bolster our case that it is indispensable.
The Extended Mind - Clark
(1) A person sits in front of a computer screen which displays images of various two-dimensional geometric shapes and is asked to answer questions concerning the potential fit of such shapes into depicted 'sockets.' To assess fit, the person must mentally rotate the shapes to align them with the sockets.
(2) A person sits in front of a similar computer screen, but this time can choose either to physically rotate the image on the screen, by pressing a rotate button, or to mentally rotate the image as before. We can also suppose, not unrealistically, that some speed advantage accrues to the physical rotation operation.
(3) Sometime in the cyberpunk future, a person sits in front of a similar computer screen. This agent, however, has the benefit of a neural implant which can perform the rotation operation as fast as the computer in the previous example. The agent must still choose which internal resource to use (the implant or the good old-fashioned mental rotation), as each resource makes different demands on attention and other concurrent brain activity.
How much cognitiion is present in these cases? We suggest that all three cases are similar.
This is the central example and assertion of the extended mind hypothesis by Andy Clark and David Chalmers—a philosophical position known as externalism. As (3) above shows, it is always at least theoretically possible for us to invent tools that assist with cognition, so criteria such as portability of the tool are no problem for the hypothesis:
Even if one were to make the portability criterion pivotal, active externalism would not be undermined . . . Think of the old image of the engineer with a slide rule hanging from his belt wherever he goes. What if people always carried a pocket calculator, or had them implanted? The real moral of the portability intuition is that for coupled systems to be relevant to the core of cognition, reliable coupling is required. . . . [14]
Intriguingly, our mutuality model does have the properties alluded to here: two different systems, private and joint-representational, coupled via joint attention and transmissibility.
Think back to the tired customer and the clerk in the store. Even though neither is making use of their joint objective frame of reference by uttering or asking for phrases like 'second row from the top' and 'third from the right,' they have not abandoned the mutuality model. Instead, they are playing a different game inside it (a shift in gears in the transmission)—an extended-mind game instead of a fully linguistic one. Thus, the customer says, "Up. Over one. Nope, back. Down one. Down another. Almost." This is nothing if not the customer externalizing the cognitive and cultural operations needed to locate the item onto the 'environment.' And it is especially useful if the linguistic game seems to be mostly unavailable—like when customer and clerk aren't sure they speak the same language. But the 'environment,' onto which extended-mind theorists believe they are extending their minds, is our cultural, 'objective,' joint-representational plane. Like expressive writers using words, grammar, and other linguistic transmissional tools on this plane to 'make sense' of their private experiences, we can also use non-linguistic cultural tools like procedures and algorithms, pocket calculators, slide rules, notebooks, and implants to assist us with cognition. In the context of the idea of the general mutuality model, then, there doesn't appear to be anything fundamentally new in the extended-mind hypothesis—certainly not enough yet to alter our fundamental intuitions that there is an important difference between thinking without tools (privately) and thinking with them.
The Mutuality at the Heart of Transmission
Educational theorists—certainly constructivists—have often treated mutuality in a shallow way or as a desirable add-on rather than as a core structural necessity of instructional theory with internal complexity and energy. Yet, as we have seen through the lenses of joint attention and representation, symbolic landscapes, and extended cognition, the mutuality we have in mind is not merely beneficial—it is foundational. Our human mutuality works through a shared yet flexible joint-representational platform upon which personal and collective experiences are transmitted, dynamically intersect, and co-evolve.
The individual and the communal are both represented in this system as separate realms. No one is forced to hand over their individual sovereignty, cognitive or otherwise, by engaging with objective, cultural, joint-representational space; instead, people often find comfort and insight in conversations with the culture in joint-representational space. They find, in just knowing the language, the potent traces of the sense-making skills of a billion long lost ancestors. On the other hand, people can find this cultural space deeply painful both in its nature and in its effects. The emergent inter-cognitive cultural realm that allowed us to figure out how DNA works also allowed us to 'figure out' how to force human beings into bondage.
To say that "the transmission model is dead" is to misunderstand its enduring power and adaptability (both beautiful and terrifying). It lives because we are transmission machines—all of us, not just learners, are first-class epistemic agents who occupy space, who must act in the real world, and who must endlessly translate the rich but private depths of our subjective experiences into mutually negotiable symbolic landscapes. It thrives because learning and teaching are, fundamentally, acts of conversational bridging: bridging the private and the shared, the intuitive and the codified, the isolated and the communal.
Indeed, the transmission model is not dead. Long live the transmission model!
References and Notes
[1] Mirel, J. (2011). Bridging the 'Widest Street in the World': Reflections on the history of teacher education. American Educator, 35(2), 6–12.
[2] Fox, R. (2001). Constructivism examined. Oxford Review of Education, 27(1), 23-35.
[3] Fisher, J. (2025, April 7). Teachers' Guts. Text Savvy. https://www.textsavvy.org/blog/teachers-guts
[4] Hanley, M. S. (2006). Education: Transmission and Tranformation. Journal of Thought, 41(3), 51–55.
[5] Welbourne, M. (1981). The Community of Knowledge. The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), 31(125), 302–314.
[6] Text and image from Frith, Chris; Frith, Uta. What Makes Us Social? (Jean Nicod Lectures) (p. 71). MIT Press.
[7] Frith, Chris; Frith, Uta. What Makes Us Social? (Jean Nicod Lectures) (p. 71). MIT Press.
[8] Frith, U. (1994), Autism and theory of mind in everyday life. Social Development, 3: 108-124.
[9] Text and image from Allen, Roland. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (p. 454). Biblioasis.
[10] Readers familiar with Engelmann, Siegfried; Carnine, Douglas. Theory of Instruction: Principles and Applications . NIFDI Press. will see this as directly related to Englemann's ideas about faultless communication.
[11] Dor, Daniel, Dr. The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology (Foundations of Human Interaction). Oxford University Press.
[12] Allen, Roland. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Biblioasis.
[13] "Aha!" exclaims the constructivist. "'Human beings constantly try to get things into shapes and understand them' is the core of constructivist thought." "Great," I say. "People's brains work usually. How is that helpful to the analysis?"
[14] Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.
