Accounting for Teacher Knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide

Educators are experiencing a knowledge crisis and, as a result, they are committing epistemological suicide. The crisis is born out of two different conceptions of teacher knowledge, each containing a limitation that generates fissures within the respective knowledge paradigm. Educators commit epistemic suicide when surveillance technologies, masked as performance-based accountability systems, demand evidence of their knowing. Unable to account for their knowledge, educators fabricate pedagogical and curricular apparitions to be seen as compliant. I discuss how pedagogical fabrications constitute a teacher's subjectivity through the processes of exterritorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing their knowledge. In the end, I argue that any conception of teacher knowledge ought to include overt conceptualizations of power within professionalization attempts. I sketch a politics of meaning as a way to reclaim teacher knowledge.     

Teacher knowledge: The relationship between caring and knowing

While everyone acknowledges the importance of the “caring teacher,” little acknowledgment of caring as an issue exists at the level of educational policymaking. This paper presents teacher and researcher stories which describe a teacher's knowledge in practice and argues for recognition of an epistemological role for caring in teaching. The teacher's narratives describe what she knows from caring and being in relationship with her students - her relational knowing (Hollingsworth et al., 1993, 1994)- and how this knowledge alters her pedagogy and the curriculum that is constructed with each student. Caring for the person (Noddings, 1984, 1992) is revealed as central to what the teacher knows. The findings of this research suggest that for the teacher, the relationship between caring and knowing is complex and involves a constant reflective process. In attempting to situate caring within existing theories for teacher knowledge, Elbaz' (1983) structures are found to be too neat and the boundaries too well defined. A construct of teacher knowledge as relational and dynamic is described. This builds upon Lyons' provisional characterization of the epistemological relationship between students and teachers as nested knowing: “that is, students and teachers are considered to have nested, interacting epistemological perspectives” (1990a, p. 162). In this view, knowledge is not limited to what one person knows, but the intersection where the knowing of two persons in-relation overlap and the consequences for student learning (and teacher development) when one of those persons is a teacher.     

当前基础教育改革的若干认识论问题

文章对当前我国基础教育改革中出现的一些认识论问题进行了反思。文章认为 ,当前的基础教育改革在强调能力目标和态度目标时 ,不能同时忽视知识掌握 ;任何课程知识的选择都应该考虑到学生、社会和知识三个维度 ;教学过程作为一种认识过程应该得到深入认识而不是否定 ;应该重构课程知识的权威性或合法性 ;学生知识创新素质的培养应该考虑到当前人类知识增长方式的转变     

Changing Epistemological Beliefs in Pre-service Teacher Education Students

A teaching programme designed to foster the reflection on and development of more sophisticated epistemological beliefs was implemented with 29 pre-service graduate teacher education students at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. As part of the year-long teaching programme, students were required to reflect in journal entries on the content of an educational psychology unit in relation to their epistemological beliefs. The students engaged in this teaching programme (the research group) were interviewed in relation to their beliefs at the beginning (Time 1) and conclusion (Time 2) of the teaching programme. Students in a comparison group were not encouraged to explicitly reflect on their epistemological beliefs. They were asked to complete written statements about their beliefs about knowing at the beginning (Time 1) and end (Time 2) of the year-long unit. Schommer's (1988, 1990) epistemological beliefs questionnaire was administered to both the comparison and research groups at Time 1 and Time 2. This questionnaire measured beliefs about knowing. The results of both the quantitative and qualitative data analysis indicated that the group of students engaged in the teaching programme experienced more growth in sophisticated epistemological beliefs. The success of the teaching programme has implications for how teacher educators develop learning environments.     

Ways of Knowing,Learning and Making Moral Choices

Abstract

This paper explores the epistemological dimensions in the thinking of adolescent girls. Using two different kinds of data ‐‐ (1) typical constructions of moral conflicts reported by adolescent girls that reveal either a justice or care (response) focus; and (2) girls’ responses to a story completion exercise ‐‐ this paper identifies epistemological perspectives in girls’ thinking that link ideas of self, knowing and morality. An hypothesized model of ‘learner's interests and goals’ and ‘approaches to knowing’ related to these conceptions of self and morality is presented and implications for teaching are discussed.     

Ways of Knowing and Epistemological Beliefs: Combined effect on academic performance

To obtain a more complete understanding of personal epistemology this study examines two epistemic paradigms – ways of knowing (specifically connected knowing and separate knowing) and epistemological beliefs (specifically beliefs about knowledge structure, knowledge stability, learning speed, and learning ability). Participants were 107 college students who completed questionnaires that assessed ways of knowing and epistemological beliefs. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed that men score significantly higher on separate knowing. Path analyses revealed that the effects of ways of knowing on academic performance are mediated by belief in the speed of learning.     

Perspectivism: An Alternative Research Epistemology for the 21st Century Schools

Educational researchers have urged school practitioners to shift from isolated patterns of work to a communal negotiation of meaning in order to overcome problems in an uncertain environment. Nevertheless, researchers, in their inquiry processes, are still bounded within a net of epistemological premises (from objectivism on the one hand to skepticism on the other) that withhold a communal learning of schoolwork at this turbulent time. To overcome this impediment, perspectivism, as an alternative research epistemology, is presented. Perspectivism acknowledges that the nature of any entity is evoked from the relationship it maintains with other entities in the world. This research epistemology increases the burden and responsibility on educational researchers, requiring to negotiate meaning through continuous discursive means in the scientific community.     

Haciendo que hacer - cultivating a Mestiza worldview and academic achievement: Braiding cultural knowledge into educational research,policy, practice

In this article Francisca E Gonzalez shifts the focus from a deficit view of cultural knowledge to an imaginary of the formation of identities and integrity braided with the law, policy, and social formations. In this way, cultural practices cultivate a unique worldview with implications for K-12 educational excellence and academic achievement. Gonzalez situates her research within the national discourse on educational reform so as to direct educational researchers', policy makers', and educators' thinking of young Mexicanas as pensadoras who interrogate the social order, and who give meaning to learning, knowing, and power. She describes a study intended to explore the development of womanhood among young Mexicanas beginning with an explanation of a theoretical lens, a looking prism of critical race feminisms and Latina critical theory interpretive frameworks. Then she explains the study's multimethodological approach of trenzas y mestizaje, the braiding of theory, qualitative research strategies, and a sociopolitical consciousness. The article then details young Mexicana meanings of gendered cultural socialization, educacion, and success as cultural epistemologies and pedagogies, what the young Mexicanas called haciendo que hacer. Gonzalez explains this as the teaching and learning of sociocultural foundations and the cultivation of academic achievement. In closing, Francisca elaborates on how a braiding of different ways of knowing, teaching, and learning brings cultural knowledge to the fore of discourses on human rights, social justice, and educational equity including the formulation of holistic educational policies and practices.     

Positive Ignorance: Unknowing as a Tool for Education and Educational Research

Positive ignorance is the putting in to question of, and sometimes moving on from, the knowledge we think we have, and asking where it might be just or helpful to do so. Drawing primarily on the work of Barbara Johnson, this article shows how the notion of positive ignorance might be offered as a tool in the context of education and educational research. Partly a critical development of Richard Smith's argument in ‘The Virtues of Unknowing’, I attempt to understand ‘unknowing’ as an active rather than passive form of ‘not knowing’, in a manner that challenges some aspects of ‘the virtues of unknowing’ and its concomitant epistemological and ethical positions, not least those tied to Smith's advocacy for what he calls the ‘well‐stocked mind’. Unknowing, in my reading, is not a dispositional acceptance of the desirability of nonknowledge, instead, unknowing is a means of epistemological resistance, especially against that which, often with very real social and political consequences, is presented as self‐evident.     

High school students’ scientific epistemological beliefs,self-efficacy in learning physics and attitudes toward physics: a structural equation model

Background: There are some theoretical evidences that explain the relationships between core beliefs (i.e., epistemological beliefs) and peripheral beliefs (self-efficacy in learning) in the literature. The close relationships of such type of beliefs with attitudes are also discussed by some researchers. Constructing a model that investigates these relationships by considering theoretical and empirical evidences can empower researchers to discuss these relationships more comprehensively.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the relationships among Turkish high school students’ scientific epistemological beliefs, self-efficacy in learning physics and their attitudes toward physics.

Sample: A total of 632 high school students participated in this study; however, 269 female and 229 male (a total of 498) high school students’ data were used.

Design and methods: Three distinct instruments that measure scientific epistemological beliefs, self-efficacy in learning physics and attitudes toward physics were combined into a unique questionnaire form and it was distributed to high school students. To explore the relationships among these variables, structural equation modeling was used.

Results: The results showed that scientific epistemological belief dimensions uncovered by the nature of knowing (source and justification) significantly and positively related to both self-efficacy in learning physics and attitudes toward other important physics dimensions. Additionally, self-efficacy in learning physics significantly and positively predicted attitudes toward multiple physics dimensions (importance, comprehension and requirement). However, epistemological belief dimensions related to the nature of knowledge (certainty and development) did not have significant impact on self-efficacy in learning physics or attitudes toward physics.

Conclusions: This study concludes that there are positive and significant relationships among Turkish high school students’ scientific epistemological beliefs, self-efficacy in learning physics and their attitudes toward physics.     

Where's the Competence in Competence-based Education and Training?

This paper notes the apparent ineffectiveness of the critical response to competence-based education and training (CBET) and suggests that this results from a failure to correctly isolate CBET's unique, identifying features. It is argued that the prevailing tendency to identify CBET with 'competence' is fundamentally mistaken and that the competence approach is more properly characterised in terms of its philosophically naïve methodological strategy. It is suggested that this strategy is based upon untenable assumptions relating to the semantic status of statements of outcome and the epistemological and ontological constructs to which such statements are intended to correspond.     

Exploring the dimensions of personal epistemology in differing classroom contexts: Student interpretations during the first year of college

The study of personal epistemology has typically addressed the theories and beliefs that individuals hold about knowledge and knowing, and the way in which such epistemological perspectives are related to academic learning. This qualitative, exploratory case study focuses on the epistemology of instructional practices as interpreted by students in two versions of introductory-level college chemistry, each with different underlying epistemological assumptions. Classroom observations and interviews of 25 first-year students provide a contextualized perspective on the dimensionality of beliefs as identified in the literature: certainty of knowledge, simplicity of knowledge, source of knowledge, and justification for knowing. This research suggests that students’ perceptions of instructional practices are interpreted through the lens of their epistemological assumptions, but that such perspectives are evolving and instructors may influence them in multiple ways.     

Inquiry-Based Science Education Competencies of Primary School Teachers: A literature study and critical review of the American National Science Education Standards

Inquiry-based science education is an important innovation. Researchers and teachers consider it to be stimulating for pupils’ application of research skills, construction of meaning and acquiring scientific knowledge. However, there is ambiguity as to what competencies are required to teach inquiry-based science. Our purpose is to develop a profile of professional competence, required for effective inquiry-based science teaching in primary schools in the Netherlands. This article reviews literature and compares the outcomes to the American National Science Education Standards (NSES). In so doing, it seeks to answer the following research questions: What elements of competencies required by primary school teachers who teach inquiry-based science are mentioned, discussed and researched in recent literature? To what extent are the American NSES (introduced 15 years ago) consistent with elements of competencies found in recent literature? A comprehensive literature review was conducted using Educational Resources Information Centre and Google Scholar databases. Fifty-seven peer-reviewed scientific journal articles from 2004 to 2011 were found using keyword combinations. Analysis of these articles resulted in the identification and classification of 22 elements of competencies. This outcome was compared to the American NSES, revealing gaps in the standards with respect to a lack of focus on how teachers view science teaching and themselves as teachers. We also found that elements of competencies are connected and poor mastery of one may affect a teacher's mastery of another. Therefore, we propose that standards for the Netherlands should be presented in a non-linear, holistic, competence-based model.     

Worldview Literacy in the Academy and Beyond: Advancing Mutual Understanding in Diverse Societies*

Abstract

Diverse societies face increasing racial tension, social divide, religious illiteracy, and secularism. What role can education play in confronting these challenges? Universities generate scientific knowledge but less so the search for meaning. Worldview studies encompasses both views of life and ways of life. Exploring various worldviews becomes a search for meaning and a journey into knowing self and others. This article seeks to engage multiple partners to develop teaching pedagogies, curricula, and educational tools to enhance greater knowledge, awareness, and understanding of various worldviews.     

Critical thinking as room for subjectification in Education for Sustainable Development

Issues of sustainability are complex and often steeped with ethical and political questions without predefined or general answers. This paper deals with how secondary and upper secondary teachers discuss these complex issues, by analysing their aims for Education for Sustainable Development. With inspiration from discourse theory, their articulations about students as political subjects are analysed. Critical thinking emerged as a nodal point in teachers’ discussions. In this study, critical thinking is articulated as having various qualitative meanings related to different epistemological views. On one hand, critical thinking is articulated to invite room for subjectification; but on the other hand, room for subjectification is challenged when critical thinking is articulated through the educational aims of qualification and socialisation. A consequence of changing epistemological view might be that political and ethical issues take a back seat.     

The influence of causal knowledge on the willingness to change attitude towards climate change: results from an empirical study

ABSTRACT

Climate change is one of the significant global challenges currently facing humanity. Even though its seriousness seems to be common knowledge among the public, the reaction of individuals to it has been slow and uncertain. Many studies assert that simply knowing about climate change is not enough to generate people’s behavioural response. They claim, indeed, that in some cases scientific literacy can even obstruct behavioural response instead. However, recent surveys show a rather poor understanding of climate dynamics and argue that lack of knowledge about causal relationships within climate dynamics can hinder behavioural response, since the individual is not able to understand his/her role as causal agent and therefore doesn’t know how to take proper action. This study starts from the hypothesis that scientific knowledge focused on clarifying climate dynamics can make people understand not only dynamics themselves, but also their interactive relationship with the environment. Teaching materials on climate change based on such considerations were designed and implemented in a course for secondary-school students with the aim of investigating whether this kind of knowledge had an influence on students’ willingness to adopt pro-environmental behaviours. Questionnaires were delivered for testing the effect of the teaching experience on knowledge and behaviour.     

Promoting a participatory convergence in a Spanish context: an inter-university action research project using visual narrative

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the deconstruction of an inter-university action research project that has allowed us to rethink our teaching and research, questioning the social, political and ethical dimensions of the university. Following the pre-assembly proposal to promote participatory convergence, organized within the framework of the 1^st Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy (2017), an action research process was implemented in order to generate systematic inquiry around the current situation of the university and the need to act and rethink our commitment to promoting changes in this context. We have reflected on the meaning of democratization, rethinking the pedagogical relationship with our students and how we critically commit them to promote activism. We generated an environment where we look for the meaning of our practices by means of a visual narrative which has enabled us to weave and identify our own biography and become aware of where we are and why we act in one way or another. We have also focused on the search for the meaning of our actions in relation to the community we belong to and how to deal with the challenges of social justice, encouraging collaboration with other networks in a wider inter-university framework.     

Rethinking science education: Beyond piagetian constructivism toward a sociocultural model of teaching and learning

In the first part of the article I present an epistemological critique of forms of pedagogy founded on Piagetian constructivism. Despite the appeal of the notion that learners construct their understanding, I argue that constructivism is problematic because it ignores the subjectivity of the learner and the socially and historically situated nature of knowing; it denies the essentially collaborative and social nature of meaning making; and it privileges only one form of knowledge, namely, the technical rational. I then present a critique of active learning and student-centered forms of pedagogy. I argue that in our models of teaching we rely on too many unexamined assumptions from developmental psychology and we take for granted the problematic notion that children learn by doing. My central thesis is that constructivism is flawed because of its inability to come to grips with the essential issues of culture, power, and discourse in the classroom. In the concluding section of the article I present a preliminary account of a sociocultural approach to teaching and learning that takes seriously the notion that learning is situated in contexts, that students bring their own subjectivities and cultural perspectives to bear in constructing understanding, that issues of power exist in the classroom that need to be addressed, and that education into scientific ways of knowing requires understanding modes of classroom discourse and enabling students to negotiate these modes effectively so that they may master and critique scientific ways of knowing without, in the process, sacrificing their own personally and culturally constructed ways of knowing.     

Epistemological beliefs and epistemic strategies in self-regulated learning

How do epistemological attitudes and beliefs influence learning from text? We conceptualize epistemological attitudes and beliefs as components of metacognitive knowledge. As such, they serve an important function in regulating the use of epistemic strategies such as knowledge-based validation of information and checking arguments for internal consistency. We report results from two studies that investigated the effects epistemological attitudes and beliefs on the use of epistemic strategies in academic learning and the motivational states that mediate these effects. Study 1 (N = 289) tested a mediation model with epistemological attitudes (separate vs. connected knowing) and textual characteristics as distal predictors, and learning goals (learning factual knowledge vs. developing an own standpoint) as mediator variables. Separate knowing had large indirect effects on the use of epistemic strategies via the goal to develop an own point of view. In addition, learners adapted their learning goals and epistemic strategies depending on objective characteristics and the perceived familiarity of the texts they read. In Study 2 (N = 124), epistemological beliefs concerning the uncertainty of knowledge increased the use of epistemic strategies only when extrinsic study motivation was low. A mediated moderation model established this effect to be mediated by specific epistemic curiosity. These results illuminate the mechanisms of how epistemological attitudes and beliefs affect self-regulated learning. In contrast to other types of learning strategies, the use of epistemic strategies seems to be strongly and consistently linked to epistemological attitudes and beliefs.