A Diversity of “Distancing”

Dr. Irving Sigel was a leading developmental psychologist who died in 2006 at the age of 84. I became familiar with his work during graduate school, and had the great privilege of getting to know him personally during the last decade or so of his life. Among an array of contributions, his work helped to illuminate the applications of Piagetian theory for educators and parents (Sigel, 1993; Sigel & Kelly, 1988; Sigel, Kress, & Elias, 2007). If one were to create a motto for the foundational idea of this work it would be construction happens. That is, new input is always processed through the lens of existing frameworks for understanding, an idea that is not only consistent with the Piagetian concept of schema but also with contemporary findings related to learning on a neuronal basis. This is a notion that many of us involved in teacher education try to impress on our students—learners are always adapting existing understandings to account for new input. Construction happens—a learner’s slate is never blank!

To Sigel, schema change results from a process referred to as distancing. In contrast to the connotation of disengagement that this term has in the field of Israel education, here it is meant to convey the notion of moving away from preexisting understandings in order to form more complex representations of a concept or idea. Distancing involves attention to the discrepancy between existing schema and new information. An educator or parent uses distancing strategies to engage the learner in becoming the analyst of her own schema.

[T]he educative process depends on the nature of the discrepancies faced by students, and how adults position children to recognize, reflect on, and respond to them. The key role of an educator is to facilitate the learner’s encounter of that which is discrepant with existing schema. (Sigel et al., 2007, pp. 54–55)

Sigel proposes an array of strategies that can be used. He was particularly interested in early childhood development; his recommendations for fostering schema-development did not discount the complexity of working with this population His book, Educating the Young Thinker (Copple, Sigel, & Saunders, 1979), remains an excellent early childhood resource.

I thought of Sigel while trying find a theme that unites the four insightful and important, yet very different, articles in this issue. The authors use a range of methods, explore different settings of education and, in fact, report research conducted in three different countries. Sigel would have pointed out that describing similarities and describing differences are distancing strategies that fall into his category of comparative inquiry. He would have correctly predicted that my attempts to compare and contrast would leave me with a more elaborated construction of each article and of the issue as a whole!

The diversity of the articles also brought to mind the range of ways in which distancing can manifest in Jewish education, or the variety of modalities by which existing understandings can be called into question. Each article lends additional nuance to our understanding of distancing strategies that can be used, as well as to who can use them (that is, who serves as a Jewish educator).

Question-asking is Sigel’s most fundamental strategy for the promotion of schema growth; teachers along with parents, are the primary vehicles for this. This classic paradigm of educational interaction is the backdrop for Hassenfeld’s exploration of inquiry-based strategies used by day school educators in the teaching of text. Her comparison of teachers in two different contexts—one in an Orthodox school, one in a community school—shows how contextual norms and expectations intersect with the strategies used by each teacher. Sigel might have said that the educators are both using similar strategies (questioning, inquiry-based pedagogy), but because they are doing so in the service of different outcomes, each teacher shapes his work accordingly.

Though they work in what might be considered an informal setting, the volunteer museum educators in Gouws and Wassermann’s study were strongly aware of their roles as facilitators of learner growth; so much so, in fact, that some were concerned about the degree to which they were prepared to address the weighty topic of the Holocaust. While a museum educator serves in a distancing capacity a la Sigel (that is, she draws attention to an artifact or exhibit and uses a variety of strategies to deepen a visitor’s understanding of it), the design of museums also promotes self-guided learning. Many museum-goers have had the experience of fixating on Object A while the tour-guide is leading a discussion of Object B. In this way, museum designers can be seen as using the environment to maximize opportunities for visitors to distance themselves from prior understandings.

Part of the role of the shinshinim (post-high school Israeli volunteer emissaries) studied by Hameiri seems to parallel that of the classroom and museum educators—they plan interactions with learners around a particular topic area, in this case, Israel education. However, the author also highlights the mutual educational impact of the shinshinim and their host families and communities that results from routine, everyday interactions. This latter mode of education can be seen as another instance of distancing through environmental design. That is, the placement of these young Israelis in homes within a community provides natural opportunities for questions to be raised, opening the door to deeper cultural understandings on the part of both the Israelis and their Canadian hosts. This is an approach to Israel education that would be familiar to, say, shlichim (Israeli emissaries) at Jewish summer camps. Not only are the shinshinim available to answer questions, but the nature of cross-cultural interactions are likely to give rise to questions to begin with.

Vaisben’s research focuses on supplementary religious school leaders’ perceived strengths and needs regarding their preparation for their work. Providers of preservice teacher/leader education use a variety of distancing strategies to deepen students’ conceptual understanding of pedagogy and leadership; for example, they ask students to engage with new theories and participate in internships and other simulacra. Counter to expectations, Vaisben found that those who participated in preservice education more recently felt better prepared than those who did so longer ago. I agree with, and, as someone involved in this work, take some pride in, his conjecture that this is due to the ongoing improvement of such programs over time. Another possible explanation is that it takes time and experience to appreciate the complexity of the job and the extent to which more support is needed. My colleagues and I often hear from our graduates that until they spent time in the field they were, like one of the four children at the seder, unsure of how to even ask the right questions. This suggests that professional experience itself can play a role in the distancing process. With more experience, which is also assumedly accompanied by increasing responsibility and complexity, leaders come to understand the limits of their current understandings and the need to expand these.

In summary, Sigel’s theories have explanatory potential in Jewish educational research and practice (Kress & Elias, 2008). These four articles present a variety of ways that Jewish educators can foster the elaboration of existing schema by drawing attention to new and discrepant information. This can be done actively through questioning strategies, environmentally (through design that increases the likelihood of participants’ encountering new information), and may even happen in a passive way as the passage of time makes clear the inadequacy of existing schema.