NOTE TO MYSELF: I think of Social Oxygen as an introduction for teachers to a sociology of teaching-learning from a learners’ view. This is a view of the systematic description of social phenomena that takes place for people to say that learning lessons has occurred and how learning affects the structure and dynamics of society. This introduction refers to commonalities described by experimental behavioral and social scientists over more than a century of empirical studies.
The goal of Social Oxygen is to describe the minimum number and kinds of social interactions that teachers and others commonly attribute to people learning lessons. These commonalities serve as the core of teaching-learning. Experimental scientists have not documented that learning lessons occurs without this core.
Teaching and learning are social phenomena. Whatever teachers, psychologists, and others theorize about teaching and learning, they infer from observations, management, and measurement of social phenomena. This means studying and relying on biological, humanistic, and psychological views of these phenomena to teach lessons is at least one step removed from social actions people use to learn lessons teachers instruct. This removal does not convey the impact these observations have on how people learn lessons except by inserting other values to fill the breach.
As teaching and learning are fundamentally different social phenomena, teachers need to understand their existence, relationship, and operation from a sociological (interactional) point of view of how their instruction plays a part in learning as well as in maintaining and changing society.
Last Edited: August 6, 2017