like for example i’ve noticed in my life that beginners luck is a real phenomenon and pops up constantly. i’ve just now thought of applying the dialectical method (or my own terminally online, meme-addled, haven’t-read-enough-theory imitation of it) to be idea of beginners luck and skill mastery/learning in general
let’s say beginners luck (playing well without understanding why your plays work) exists as a phenomenon due to the dialectical nature of the process by which humans acquire skills and its consequent non-linearity and unpredictability. mastering a game is the process of iteratively refining one’s mental model of how best to play it, coming up with new strategies and tactics, testing them by playing the game, and keeping or rejecting reject strategies and tactics according to whether they succeed or fail.
this is pure thesis - antithesis - synthesis, right? like when you’re totally new to a game you just try what seems natural (thesis). then you reach intermediate level by correcting for mistakes you made as a beginner (antithesis). then you jump to advanced mastery by recognizing which of your first round of corrections helped you and which were overcorrections, and for those overcorrections you revert back to (or at least toward) the way you were doing it when you first started (synthesis).
a good example is in chess. if the best move is one which breaks a common rule of thumb, a beginner might play it not knowing it breaks a rule; an intermediate player won’t play it because they know it breaks the rule of thumb; and an expert will play it because they know this is an appropriate situation in which to break the rule of thumb.
are any of you aware of a book or paper about this dialectical understanding of learning? or am i just rambling nonsensically here?
Yes they have, no I don’t have any citations off the top of my head. Everything is dialectical if you poke around enough. I always figured beginner’s luck comes from that unpredictability that ossifies itself when you figure out the rules but haven’t figured out how to break them yet. If you’re playing chess against a grandmaster they’ll still soundly trounce you because they know what they’re looking for.
There’s no shortcuts to mastering anything. It’s always going to be something of a grind; whether it reveals itself as such or not depends on how motivated you are, what methods you’re using, etc, but ultimately what matters is doing whatever it is you’re doing consistently over a long enough period of time. There’s not really a jump from intermediate competence to mastery - a lot of people give up on whatever it is because it becomes more explicitly grindy at a certain point. You get good at doing something by doing it enough at a level that’s challenging to you without being so difficult to escape your comprehension.
If I do find some writing that addresses this directly I’ll let you know. This is all half remembered social pedagogy and childhood development plus personal experience learning and teaching here.
The most analogous learning theory I’m aware of is Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, although this is more analogous to the relation of practice, theory and praxis.
if the answer to these questions is just to read paulo freire or that i have ai psychosis now, be honest and tell me that rather than humoring my uninformed musings lol
I haven’t really studied learning or education before but this makes a lot of sense to me. But like someone else said, dialectics is a vague enough philosophical model, it seems like it can be applied to so many things.
Dialectics as a concept has existed for thousands of years. So in a way there’s no single “right” way to define it and plenty of ways to claim it’s relevant for learning. Socratic questioning is a dialectical method. What you describe could reasonably be called dialectics.
Marx built off of Hegel’s dialectics, which are notably not well-described by “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”. Hegel’s dialectics are more complex than most, and I don’t feel confident enough in my understanding to try to reduce it lol.
For me personally, dialectics is about the interconnection and dynamicity of everything. A static view of gray just sees its current color, a dialectic view sees the interplay and tension between black and white, their trajectory and transformation into another color.
