http://education.change.org/blog/view/more_on_fighting_bias_in_history_textbooks
Clay,
I come more from the "applied" philosophical side of curriculum planning. It seems many of the comments here touch on but don't explicitly note that students can easily confuse different modes of expression/purposes of activity in developing skills around critique and interpretation.
Students may think they are exerting their opinion when invited to wiki, or they may think they are blogging, mixing their stories with analytical critique in an attempt to express and highlight a point of view. If this is the purpose, collecting a lot of balancing views, then it may be successful instructionally to open their minds about possible interpretations, but it might not help them distinguish between modes of analysis, critique, opinion, etc.
Maybe a bird's-eye review of the different modes of investigating and interpreting human history might be helpful, so students begin to know what types of skills they are developing. There are many types, and many of them are distinct, even apparently contradictory, so THEY (various modes of interpreting and assessing history and the human condition), if learned, end up adding another level of expansion and balance to learning.
Story, especially good fiction, is an excellent way to bring forth a truth about the human condition, but, of course, this does not mean the story empirically happened. Being able to distinguish and understand the importance/value of empirical verification AND other forms/mode of assessing, communicating, and describing human reality in all its facets requires knowing that there are different modes, what they look like, and what their purposes are. John Cheever's fiction is an excellent example. Much of his rich text and illuminating struggle in his writing was generated out of his own closeted bisexuality and the tensions it caused within him between personal desire and social approval.
I found this confusion over what I call "modes of interpretation" (including evaluation) all the time in teaching teachers at a university. Often conversation would veer from "Those are the facts" to "It's my opinion; it can't be right or wrong." To this I typically responded, "Facts come from human interpretation and as such are prone to error and revision" and "If you hold a racist opinion and it restricts how you teach and honor a student of color, from a learning perspective, it IS wrong."
The key here is understanding the fullest range of interactive effects that occur both within and outside of one's own thinking and person. If there is one major practical barrier to developing a vital public intellectualism it is unwitting egoism, the extension of a (necessarily constructed and provisional) "self" on to society and on to eternity.
Anything that can be done to perturb that and challenge students to contrast and create beyond a simple association of self with world will likely be quite beneficial.
Clay,
I come more from the "applied" philosophical side of curriculum planning. It seems many of the comments here touch on but don't explicitly note that students can easily confuse different modes of expression/purposes of activity in developing skills around critique and interpretation.
Students may think they are exerting their opinion when invited to wiki, or they may think they are blogging, mixing their stories with analytical critique in an attempt to express and highlight a point of view. If this is the purpose, collecting a lot of balancing views, then it may be successful instructionally to open their minds about possible interpretations, but it might not help them distinguish between modes of analysis, critique, opinion, etc.
Maybe a bird's-eye review of the different modes of investigating and interpreting human history might be helpful, so students begin to know what types of skills they are developing. There are many types, and many of them are distinct, even apparently contradictory, so THEY (various modes of interpreting and assessing history and the human condition), if learned, end up adding another level of expansion and balance to learning.
Story, especially good fiction, is an excellent way to bring forth a truth about the human condition, but, of course, this does not mean the story empirically happened. Being able to distinguish and understand the importance/value of empirical verification AND other forms/mode of assessing, communicating, and describing human reality in all its facets requires knowing that there are different modes, what they look like, and what their purposes are. John Cheever's fiction is an excellent example. Much of his rich text and illuminating struggle in his writing was generated out of his own closeted bisexuality and the tensions it caused within him between personal desire and social approval.
I found this confusion over what I call "modes of interpretation" (including evaluation) all the time in teaching teachers at a university. Often conversation would veer from "Those are the facts" to "It's my opinion; it can't be right or wrong." To this I typically responded, "Facts come from human interpretation and as such are prone to error and revision" and "If you hold a racist opinion and it restricts how you teach and honor a student of color, from a learning perspective, it IS wrong."
The key here is understanding the fullest range of interactive effects that occur both within and outside of one's own thinking and person. If there is one major practical barrier to developing a vital public intellectualism it is unwitting egoism, the extension of a (necessarily constructed and provisional) "self" on to society and on to eternity.
Anything that can be done to perturb that and challenge students to contrast and create beyond a simple association of self with world will likely be quite beneficial.
The paragraph beginning
ReplyDelete"The key here is spot on and, moreover, its crucial to any restorative redemption of education and Western socioculture itself.
The vital sentence:
"If there is one major practical barrier to developing a vital public intellectual, it is unwitting egoism, the extension of a ...constricted and provisional "self" on to society and eternity."
This, egoism, of course, is also constructed, provisional and DESTRUCTIVE to the development, well-being and functionality of the whole human self beyond the person or brain-body self: family-self community-self, and ecosystem-habitat self-- the relationships that have carried human evolution and perpetuated(sustained) our human species.
To quote from CHapter V.,Part A, "Organisicities: Whole Self and Human Being"
First paragraph
"Contrary to the popular, Western View of human being as an independent, atomistic subject, human being is an organismicity within the organismicities of selflifeworld and Earthlifeworld...There is, inreality, no individual human being, precisely and fully speaking: the individual is only an intergrown physical and mental part of [whole]human being. Individual being cannot exist (live), except momentarily; therefore, it cannot be lone being, except momentarily. There is no independent, autonomous human being. Human mind-body(the person) is merely the 'organ' of human consciousness-- an entity of consciousness that, when naturally conscious(free from transmuaation by artificial socioculture), is aware of itself as only that, and also aware of [whole] human being in which it participates."
This is, by the way, why over half the indigenous Amerindian tribes originally had no word for "I" or "me" in their native tongue.
Yours toward re-naturalizing human education, individuals families, communities and societies,
L.S. Heatherly