Michael Edward James Orme: A Brief Intellectual Biography
I shall forgo trying to parse the early years of my father’s life for the seeds of his later intellectual journey. Were I a novelist, I would mention his birth year at the nadir of the Great Depression, his strict and long-absent Anglican minister father, the travels around southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, the childhood friends with improbable if wonderful nicknames such as “Horse and Bunky Phillips”, the metaphorically pregnant story of how his bacchanalian mother and Apollonian father met, and et cetera. The intellectual biography that follows is long enough as it is and all that is a project for another time.
Graduating with BA and Masters from the University of Alberta (UA) in Education, my father moved in 1962–3 with his wife, Jessie Ann and his two young children to Palo Alto, California to pursue an Ph.D. at Stanford, again in Education. While at Stanford he became interested in the “Social learning theory” of Albert Bandura and the effects of ‘modeling’ as a way of teaching. Bandura had kids watch live role models punch a life size Bobo doll whereupon the kids ‘spontaneously’ punched the hell out of the doll. Monkey see: monkey do. In a society then wrestling with the new medium of television, Bandura’s studies showing that videotaped modeling did as well as live modeling were taken as a powerful indictment of TV. The social context in North America included TV shows like Batman, Vietnam war protests, a mass shooting at UTexas, race riots, miniskirts, civil rights work and the violent backlash that ensued. Michael applied Bandura’s work to teaching teachers how to teach by modeling complex teaching behaviors (the use of probing questions) both live and using a cutting-edge technology ‘videotape’. The use of modeling, both live and via videotape, and direct instruction in teaching in Higher education would remain among Micheal’s lifelong interests.
A short time later he landed a job at Harvard and the family drove cross country in a U-Haul. Though working in B.F. Skinner’s lab at Harvard during the peak of Skinner’s fame in the early-mid 60s, and though influenced by behaviourism, Michael also participated in “the cognitive turn” — that is, the later rise of cognitive psychology. Skinner’s legacy is the science and precise control of behaviour -of which learning is a subset. In fact the dogma of Behaviourism is that you can only talk about the visible behaviours and you must leave the ‘black box’ of cognition unexamined, or ‘bracketed’ as they’d say. Skinner’s legacy includes the construction and development of “learning machines”; his famous Skinner boxes where pigeons were trained in various ways with food reinforcers. Humans, his own daughter included, soon followed the hapless pigeons. The story, recounted at BFSkinner.org, goes that watching his daughter’s grade 4 math class on Parents’ Day in 1952, Skinner was disgusted with the inefficiency of one instructor teaching a large class. This led to Skinner’s early garage-built teaching machines, presaging Bill Gates’ work by many years. These early machines presented multiple choice questions with immediate feedback. Despite the rise of cognitive science and neuroscience, the current crop of online learning systems are, despite superficial differences, bells and whistles, surprisingly similar to those early Skinnerian machines, for both good and ill. The irony that my sister Jennifer and I work with (‘for’?) this technology in our Higher education positions is lost on neither of us ;-)
As behaviourism and cognitive science battled for supremacy, Michael’s interests went in a different direction. And, surprisingly, in a move born more of compassion than self-interest, Skinner, during a sailboat ride on his boat, himself suggested that Harvard was not a great place for Michael to stay to pursue his true interests. Though Michael was a pioneer in the use of video in the observation of teaching and learning for Skinner’s department, Michael later became deeply interested in what teachers were doing and (shock) actually thinking as they taught.
This led him to work on some key interests which he investigated for many years in Bloomington at Indiana (IU), The University and Toronto, with Jessie Ann, and with the many graduate students to whom he was a thesis advisor. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Skinner had been at IU in the psych department before coming to Harvard in 1948, while Michael traced the same route in reverse. I have wondered at times if Skinner pulled some strings for Michael at IU. I have also wondered at how easy it is to paint Skinner as some proto-fascist despite my family’s having benefited from his care for a young psychologist from Canada.
(My personal ‘outsider’ take on this is that the legacy of Skinnerian behaviourism depends not on Skinner’s intent, the features of behaviourism per se, nor what people have done with behaviourism, but more upon how it interacted with the historical/cultural environment it evolved within. And that environment might be likened to a large and much-loved bridge. Imagine the Golden Gate bridge for example: the very tension of balanced pull in opposite directions is what gives the structure any integrity or strength at all. The America of the time Michael and his family lived there might be seen as a structure held aloft by the tension between the impulse toward control on the one side and progressivism, pulling just as hard, on the other side. Neither side perhaps appreciating the necessity of the other or able to feel the gratitude that might be its due.)
Michael was keenly interested in what teachers were thinking in the midst of the teaching act, and this was tied to a long standing concern with the dialogic, more precisely, the Socratic, end of teaching. That is, the kinds of questions that teachers could ask students in order to draw out (the Latin root of “educate”) or stimulate higher orders of thinking (cf. Bloom’s Taxonomy). His idea was not that a teacher should ask questions only at one level, either very high or very low, but rather that the kinds of questions (and the resultant kinds of thinking thus stimulated) needed to be constantly varied or changed up.
Variation in question-type is a single example of the wide variety of types of “variation” in teaching that preoccupied him. There should be, he taught, variation in the teaching pace or speed of the lesson and that this should be in a counter-phase or opposite relation to the conceptual pace or complexity of the material. When one is high; the other would be low and both would constantly vary throughout the lesson. While teaching conceptually simple material the teaching pace would be quick and lively and, turning to conceptually complex material, the teaching pace should drop to allow for better understanding and processing. Not only should the teaching and conceptual pace vary through a lesson, but also the kind of stimulus used to present material should likewise vary throughout the lesson. Stimulus variation would entail shifting from listening to reading to writing, solo to pair work, etc. This line of thinking is documented in his “Teaching Strategies Kit” — a slim volume sold at OISE while he was there and collected still in its library at the University of Toronto.
Later in life he developed something that seemed at first glance, a sharp departure from earlier interests: the uses of humour in instruction, which happens to be the title of some published writing and newspaper accounts of his ideas on this topic. The strategic use of humour in education was, for him, a special type of stimulus variation, but also perhaps, a type of conceptual variation strategy depending on the kind of humour used: puns, for example, being of the lowest sort. He advised the use of humour from the very high to the low and earthy, or as close as a teacher could get and continue to draw a monthly pay cheque.
Looking at these interests all together: the thoughts of teachers, the type of questions posed, the types of variation ideally employed and finally the strategic use of humor leads me to the inescapable conclusion that he was not interested in determining cause/effect in cognition, or in teaching and learning, and even less in the kind of control that Skinner held so dear. He was interested in, if it can be reduced to a single word, “engagement”. And, he was smart enough to know that regardless of whether or not teaching is necessary for learning to take place, (it is not), it is crucial that students are engaged, and that variation of all kinds is key to producing that engagement. A final insight and further break from the legacy of behaviourism was his commitment to the idea that engagement is no less crucial to the mental lives of teachers than it is to the lives of their students.
Though out of chronological order, I should mention a surprising paper he published with a long-time friend and colleague, Gary Snider in 1964 called “Autogenic training in the treatment of alcoholism” while they were at the University of Alberta. (Autogenic training resembles a hybrid of Progressive Muscular Relaxation (PMR), Biofeedback and Self-hypnosis). The two standout features of this apparent swerve in the path of his career from a biographical point of view are 1) the prescient concern with alcoholism, modelled, passed genetically, or both from his mother and 2) the use of a technique so reminiscent of Yoga Nidra, meditation (especially MBSR), and other mind-body techniques popularized in the 60s. Autogenic training’s roots however come out of the study of neurophysiology and hypnotism in the Germany of the 1920’s. Perhaps an early intimation that the mind, thought and autonomy are, in fact, important and that even the most stuck “patterns of behaviour” as a behaviourist would call them (e.g. in addiction), can be confronted and even treated by the way we direct and observe our thinking. A bit of anti-behaviourism perhaps, even if never made explicit.
Finally, the very idea of engagement, so crucial to the main arc of his intellectual biography, may have shown up much earlier in a somewhat disguised form when he was trying to convince my mother to elope to Red Deer, Alberta and get married that April in 1960, against the express wishes of her mother. “Well”, he said, “you’ll never be bored!”. Come early November that year, I would join them (You do the math).
“Engagement without the engagement”, you might say.
