Identification of Problems


Problems are the foundation of the learning CCTE is interested in. Here are some of our thoughts on the correct relationship between students and their problems:

  • For many people, learning begins with a problem to solve. If there were no problems to solve, there would be no learning necessary in the first place. Therefore, learning always begins from a problem, consciously or unconsciously. 

  • Learning is a movement that occurs when people go from a state of knowing less to a state of knowing more, or from knowing one thing to knowing another thing, or from knowing nothing at all to knowing something at all. 

    Why are people motivated to go through this transformation? Not just for the sake of doing it, unless they are in an academic setting where the accumulation of abstract knowledge is supposed to be a worthy end in and of itself. An important question to bear in mind is therefore whether or not your problem is actually worthy of attention.

  • Pedagogy is neither the ‘answers’ being delivered to students for them to learn by rote, nor is it the university seminar where students have a long meandering discussion about an abstract or conceptual point. Problems are things that we can do something about, even in a small way, not observations on the state of the world, and we solve them through thought and action, not one or the other. The point about action seems trite, but it’s worth reflecting on closely and critically.

  • We sometimes use the word ‘question’ interchangeably with ‘problem.’ When we begin learning with a problem, the student is able to perceive their world not as fixed or predetermined but as something that's constantly changing, and that they can engage with in theory and practice.

  • When the teacher or facilitator works from real problems, this removes the sense on the students’ part that they are acquiring knowledge for no apparent reason other than to meet the requirements of the school system. Instead it re-attaches the act of learning to its grounds in reality, and keeps it contained to the things that are practically meaningful and useful to living. If students complain that they are not interested in the problems posed, this should be investigated with them, and new problems found. 

  • A radical pedagogy starts from things that the teacher is also uncertain about. Read that twice, and ask yourself if you are sure that you believe it. Have you ever seen any examples of this kind of teaching?

    It is nearly impossible to  teach something that you are sure you know the answer to in a way that genuinely engages with the students’ curiosity. Of course there are certain things that seem to be information that the teacher must deposit - for example the teacher knows how to read and write, the student does not. But in these instances the teacher and student must discover together how the student will wield this new power of being able to read and write, and what value can be attached to it.

    Here are two examples of questions from teachers that genuinely reflect uncertainty that can become shared by students:

    ‘I don’t understand how the school class can develop a sense of class identity, and I want us to work out how it can be done.’  Or … ‘I don’t know how we can share our work fairly within our organisation.’

    In some cases, a teacher might begin a lesson by explaining the things they are unsure about, they can also end a lesson by explaining what they have learned from the class, and give the students an opportunity to do the same. A risk here is that the students might not believe the teacher - this is because they are used to expressions of doubt as being performative rather than genuine when it is done by a teacher.  You would not manage that risk by being more careful or performing the doubt ‘better’. If one cannot sincerely express their own doubts, uncertainties and curiosity—and therefore feel they must pretend to be uncertain or unsure—we question whether they are yet in a position to be teaching anything to anyone at all. Performative doubt is not just an ineffective technique for teaching. It is a more fundamental error of treating students unseriously, which is a serious obstacle to teaching anything. We have not yet worked out exactly how to address this problem of sincerity. We are constantly combatting the old ideologies which take a teacher’s expertise and a student’s ignorance for granted.  But for the time being we operate under the working belief that teachers are students and vice versa and sincerity about this fact, by its very nature, expresses itself clearly and establishes a serious environment where real learning is possible.

    While students can of course be any age (we are students), children and younger people in particular suffer the indignity of performative teaching and unseriousness during education. The importance of treating young people seriously cannot be overstated.

  • The teacher should not be the only person posing problems. The learning should unfold as a process of finding questions and new problems. A good class starts with one set of questions, and ends with a new set of questions that may be more advanced or specific.

In these sections, we describe problem identification as well as we can at this point in time.  We really cannot stress its importance enough. If you get this bit wrong, as a communist, then you can’t even start. We know that we are not necessarily very good at describing what we mean, and within our organisation we sometimes revert to semi-mystical or metaphorical phrases like ‘drilling down’, and we make sporadic attempts to write up the theory more clearly through analysis of Marx’s materialist method and so on. The best thing to do if you are interested in working out your problems is to get in touch with us, and we will set up a meeting to identify your problem with you. We do this all the time with a whole range of organisations, and we enjoy it - we enjoy meeting new people, learning about what problems you are trying to solve, and helping comrades around the world however we can.

Because this part of our library is meant to be a practical companion for the development of pedagogy, before proceeding, you should see if anything we wrote above has been instructive, even if only a little bit. See if you can write down a problem you would like to use as the foundation of your learning.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Is this problem an adequate problem to begin with? Because we are developing a theory and practice of investigating the relationship between pedagogy and revolutionary organization that is suitable for different parts of the world, the kinds of problems we tend to deal with are ones directly related to specific issues and themes that are relevant to political struggle in our own contexts. Let’s look at an example of a problem like this:

“We don’t know, in our organisation, how to make a medium term plan and we tend to neglect the medium term.”

We: who exactly needs to work it out? All the members? The cadre?

Medium term: What is meant by this? How are we to find out what the medium term consists of? What are the characteristics of the medium term.

Plan: How extensive are we talking? What elements of political organsiation do we think need to be planned extensively and which need to be open to fortune?

It turns out having analysed this problem even in a very preliminary manner that there are more foundational questions that need to be asked: who makes decisions about planning, what is the current state of planning and what is the short term, which elements of organisational work are planned, what are the foundational principles and practices of the organisation?

If we already have answers to these questions we can proceed. But if we don’t, we are going to have to be very wary of continuing when we haven’t investigated more foundational problems.

If we determine we can proceed, we can reform the question:

‘The General Membership (according to the democratic processes set out in our constitution) need to work out how to advance our objectives as outlined in our constitution over the course of the next two years, considering the local teaching of members, the support given to international organisations, and the development of generic teaching materials. ’ This is a fitting problem from which to begin.

Now return to the problem you wrote down above. Are there any words or concepts in there that are general in the way that ‘we’ or ‘medium term’ or ‘plan’ was used generally in our writing above? Underline those words. Now, in the space below the first problem, write your problem down again but where the underlined words were used in the first attempt, replace them with more specific descriptions of what you had in mind when you chose the original word. You are attempting to drill down into these generalizations to make them more specific. After you’re done, take a moment to compare the 1st attempt and the 2nd attempt.

You are invited to repeat this entire process a third time, using the 2nd attempt as the new point of departure for underlining generalizations, drilling down into them and re-writing the problem for a 3rd time. See ‘Describe It Again’. You could then repeat it all a 4th time and 5th time, as many times as you’d like until you feel like the problem has been described in suitable detail. You might realize that it’s not so hard to use 5 paragraphs to describe something that was earlier described in 5 words.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 


So the first thing we might say is that problems should be specific to political practice of one’s own time and place. But this only gets us so far.

The next thing you will need to do is develop an exercise around the problem….











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