Knowledge and Virtue in Teaching and Learning

The Primacy of Dispositions

Hugh Sockett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136580918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The challenge this book addresses is to demonstrate how, in teaching content knowledge, the development of intellectual and moral dispositions as virtues is not merely a good idea, or peripheral to that content, but deeply embedded in the logic of searching for knowledge and truth.

It offers a powerful example of how philosophy of education can be brought to bear on real problems of educational research and practice – pointing the reader to re-envision what it means to educate children (and how we might prepare teachers to take on such a role) by developing the person, instead of simply knowledge and skills. Connected intimately to the practice of teaching and teacher education, the book sets forth an alternative theory of education where the developing person is at the center of education set in a moral space and a political order. To this end, a framework of public and personal knowledge forms the content, to which personal dispositions are integral, not peripheral.

The book's pedagogy is invitational, welcoming its readers as companions in inquiry and thought about the moral aspects of what we teach as knowledge.

PART I

Knowledge, Morality, and Authority in Teaching

Introduction

Chapter 1 begins with a quotation from Mary Belenky and her coauthors (1986) that puts fundamental questions about our knowledge and how we know at the center of our lives and suggests that there lies the core curriculum for children and young adults. Exploring this curriculum can be effectively done in a classroom with an epistemological presence, which means briefly that all the complex questions of knowledge are in play in that environment. The chapter focuses on the broad scope of knowledge—of persons, ourselves, events, and ideas. Its complexity and tenuous character are illustrated through examining four questions for the teacher.

Chapter 2 then provides an overview of what are called public and personal knowledge, within the framework of the individual as seeker after knowledge. Public knowledge is seen within the traditional categories in philosophy: truth, belief, and evidence. Personal knowledge has different categories in this account, namely those of commitment, experience, and identity. In this chapter the character of the epistemological presence emerges in more detail described through (1) belief questions: How do I know what I believe? (2) self-revelation questions: How do I see myself? and (3) search for truth questions: What is truth? What is authority? To whom do I listen? At the end of the school day, the child clambering on the school bus or the undergraduate returning to her dorm should have a mind full of questions about the day’s work, not a mind filled with worry about what time she has tonight to memorize for tomorrow’s test.

Promoting an epistemological presence in a classroom, however, demands that a teacher pay careful attention to his or her authority. Through examples of three teachers and one child, chapter 3 examines the distinctions among contractual, moral, and epistemological authority. These are set against differing conceptions of the teacher: as scholar, as nurturer, as clinician, and as moral professional. Part I thus exposes the questions tackled in much greater philosophical detail in part II.

1

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PRESENCE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING

We do not think of the ordinary person as preoccupied with such difficult and profound questions as: What is truth? What is authority? To whom do I listen? What counts for me as evidence? How do I know what I know? Yet to ask ourselves these questions and to reflect on our answers is more than a truly intellectual exercise, for our basic assumptions about the nature of truth and reality and the origins of knowledge shape the way we see the world and ourselves as participants in it. They affect our definitions of ourselves, the way we interact with others, our public and private personae, our sense of control over life events, our views of teaching and learning, and our conceptions of morality.

(Belenky et al., 1986, p. 3)

Answering these challenging questions is a primary task of this book. First, they connect the intellectual and the moral life—knowledge and virtue. Second, they set both in the context of the individual, the “ordinary person,” demanding that answers to the questions not just be theoretical statements about the nature of knowledge or virtue, but examine how individual human beings are to be understood and understand themselves. Third, as children, too, are ordinary persons, the questions put formidable tasks before their teachers. Indeed, if its wide-ranging questions are important, how do we help children grow up to develop their perceptions of the world and their place in it? How do we help them come to terms with these complex issues of truth, reality, knowledge, and authority? For that matter, how do we handle these matters in our own personal and professional lives? How do we become who we are? Above all, these are questions that should permeate a child’s education alongside or integral to the subject matter being taught. Where these questions rumble around the work in a classroom, that classroom will have an epistemological presence.

Many teachers may not be familiar with problems of knowledge, even though this is central to teacher professionalism. That lack of familiarity has diverse origins, among which are the dominance of the empirical and developmental traditions, the weakness of philosophy of education, and the uncertain quality of teacher education. Americans also tend, in Cornel West’s phrase, to evade philosophy (1989). The terrain of this book may therefore be unfamiliar to teachers and to teacher educators, because it grapples with the problem of the epistemological and the moral, arguing that we need sophisticated understanding not just of “content” or of “method” but of the problems of knowledge that lie at the heart of teaching—specifically, of how knowledge and virtue are profoundly linked in each part of the teaching enterprise. Of course, teachers, like other professionals, “argue that it is impossible to meet heightened societal expectations for their performance in an environment that combines increasing turbulence with increasing regulation of professional activity” (Schön, 1995, p. 7). But they also have not had a thoroughgoing intellectual preparation for teaching.

It is, however, this shift from being technicians to becoming moral professionals that demands understanding the nature and character of knowledge and developing intellectual habits in transactions with children. For, it is inconceivable to think of a “knowledge-less” education, whether we are talking about knowledge of skills, subject disciplines, oneself and other people, or moral agency. Like morality, knowledge is right there, in the classroom, day in day out, in the interchange between teachers and learners. It is crucial, unavoidable, essentially human, and immensely liberating. Gaining knowledge expands the boundaries of one’s ignorance and thereby of oneself, as Plato suggested in his Apology. Of course, there are other critical matters in the presence of knowledge in the classroom, such as how decisions are made about which knowledge is taught and how knowledge is connected to belief, truth, evidence, experience, and oneself as an individual. The place of knowledge in teaching is therefore central, but complex and tenuous. In classrooms, however, there must be what I will describe and illustrate throughout this book as an epistemological presence. Four questions, extracted from those posed by Belenky and colleagues, lie at the heart of problems of knowledge and truth in teaching, and they constitute significant problems for a professional teacher:

• When I teach students the information, am I giving them knowledge?

• How do I teach children that what I teach is true? What counts as “true”?

• How can I aid the understanding and development of children who lack crucial background knowledge?

• How do I cope and how should I handle the issues of my own power in teaching knowledge to children?

Each of these questions is explored in the following four sections.

I. Knowledge and Information: How Do I Know What I Know?

The problems of the predominance of high-stakes testing in one form or another are not often examined through the prism of knowledge—that is, what is internal to the material taught. Look at this example of a Grade 3 history test, a model sample item from a Virginia Standards of Learning policy introduced in 1994.

The Ancient Chinese built the Great Wall mainly to—

a. provide water for their crops

b. honor their emperors

c. protect against invaders

d. teach their building methods to other people.

Treated just as information drawn from a prescribed text, the child answering this multiple-choice question will remember that the correct answer is “c.” No one knows, of course, how many children get the answer right by guessing—in which case, while testers may say a child has the right answer, we don’t know from a test that the child actually knows its content.

But information and guessing aside, what if we treat this as a test of knowledge? The child could claim alternative interpretations—for instance, that if “other people” (“d”) includes other Chinese, then manifestly teaching was a main purpose, of importance equal to “c.” The child might speculate about the accuracy of the phrase “ancient Chinese”—what philosopher Stephen Toulmin would call “a grand political abstraction” (1972). It makes as much sense to say that the Americans built the American interstate highway system: true but empty. Thus a child could reasonably argue that it was Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, not “the Chinese,” who was mainly responsible for building the Great Wall, just as it was President Eisenhower who built the interstate highway system. There is more than one viable answer, but only one is deemed correct: the one the children have been taught. In classrooms with an epistemological presence, children might consider these and other kinds of explanations of why the Wall was built and search for evidence to support their conclusions—even if that evidence was simply supplied by the teacher. Yet, it would be safe to assume that this has not happened: for, as in the construction of many such multiple-choice questions, testers will simply dream up plausible alternatives, not those that actually can be treated as serious alternatives in the intentions of those who built the Wall or that children have examined in studying ancient China.

How significant is this difference between information teaching and knowledge teaching? First, the politician, the tester, and the bureaucrat may happily sacrifice these quibbles for the testing goals they have in mind—namely, to measure teacher and school performance through the facility with which children recall what they have been taught to reproduce. Whether that is intellectually honest or not seems to be another matter. Second, it is the word “mainly” in the Great Wall question that gives the testing game away: it invites judgment. So, in the interests of the child’s knowledge, the test might ask the child to rank these possible answers in order of importance and explain why. Explanations demand not mere recapitulation but getting inside the subject, explaining motives and context, and making judgments about evidence. Having children make grounded judgments and explaining their rationale does not fit with the priorities of simple testing, but it is essential to classrooms with an epistemological presence.

If content is taught as knowledge rather than information, that immediately invites the question “How do I know what I know?” The dominant mode of testing children means that teachers feel obliged to have them learn (i.e., memorize) material that they are then asked in writing to recall. It is wrong to assume that success on a test provides proof that knowledge has been transmitted. The conceptual difference between information and knowledge is simple. Knowing something can be claimed only where an explanation can be given, a judgment can be made, alternatives can be considered and examined, and some kind of evidence provided. Being informed about something does not require any such backing or understanding. Information is just stuff. It can simply be an item committed to memory, and then maybe forgotten, or perhaps misremembered. Of course, information, in terms of the details of given events, incidents, predictions in science, is not to be ignored in classrooms; rather, it must be set within the quest for knowledge and will be treated as such in a classroom with an epistemological presence.

II. Knowledge and Truth: What Counts as True?

Many teachers are very wary of saying that something is true, especially as the word “truth” sparks off all kinds of debate in American public discourse. Some will speak of there being “absolute truth,” usually connected to a religious belief. Others will say that there cannot be any such thing as “truth” (absolute or otherwise) since “truth” is either relative (dependent on one’s own culture or society) or subjective (dependent on how individuals experience the world, so truth is a matter of opinion). (For further discussion of these differences, see part II.)

Especially difficult for teachers, for different kinds of political reasons, is the difficulty in coping with the notion of “absolute” truth. If they have profound religious beliefs and are faced with handling moral issues in the secular context of the school, their integrity as persons may appear threatened. If they have no religious beliefs but work with children of profound fundamentalist beliefs of whatever religion, they may find the integrity of the curriculum threatened, whatever their own position on truth. However, if they reject the notion of absolute truth, and believe truth to be relative, then they are reluctant to impress on children what they see as “their” views of truth. This latter pedagogical position gained notoriety in the values-clarification movement, and that legacy lingers.

As teachers work with knowledge, they will need a view of truth as well, since knowledge and truth are intimately and necessarily connected. Part of the problem is that these harsh dichotomies of absolute or relative, objective or subjective can be traps that force us unnecessarily to extremes of epistemological choice. We know that there are things that are true, in what we can momentarily call an “ordinary” view of truth, such as Belenky’s “ordinary person” would accept. “Ordinary” here means the kind of truth we all use throughout our lives. For we make statements all the time that are “ordinarily” true (the teacher’s late; my friend is sick; the school bus is yellow). Statements of truth can be regarded, for the moment, as assertions that claim knowledge (see chapter 2). Supporting evidence can be very full, uncertain, or unclear; what happened can be in dispute, exemplified most obviously in a criminal trial, where a jury struggles to come to a balanced and fair judgment on batteries of actions and interpretation that have been laid out before them. Teachers need to understand how to handle the concept of truth with children and its closely related concepts, evidence, experience, and meaning.

The controversy about truth often inhibits teachers from using the word, except perhaps when a child blatantly lies. The following two examples indicate that we can teach children things that are true without needing to use terms like “absolute,” “relative,” “objective,” or “subjective,” and both are matters that call for the child’s judgment. If we accept that there are things that are true (in this “ordinary” way), that will open up the way to building a more detailed account of truth and its relationship with knowledge and simultaneously release us from the tyranny of the harsh dichotomy of relative and absolute that traps teachers into confusion about truth. For the search for truth is the hallmark of a classroom with an epistemological presence: truth cannot just be delivered to children as a package of information. One way to further an examination of knowledge and truth is to look at examples of coincidence and proof.

Knowledge and Coincidence

The history of the African American in American history is so central that, from an early age, children need to encounter it. This is often done either through the history of the Civil War or through literature or poetry. But the story told by Alex Haley in Roots is accessible to children at an early age, though they may not be ready to read the whole novel. Anyone who has read the story of Kunta Kinte and his family in this “epic drama of one man’s search for his origins” must be impressed with the power of the narrative legacy handed down from “the old African” to his family on this side of the Atlantic (Haley, 1976). Slavery was not simply inhuman; it was dehumanizing in the strict sense, stripping countless human beings of their personhood and their identity, not least by prohibiting the use of their own given names when they were first sold. The American story originates in the Gambia, where Kunta Kinte of the Mandinka tribe went out one day to collect wood and disappeared—captured, it was assumed, by slave-traders. Down through the family came this story, the stuff of legend, the one link for this family with their African origins, which Alex heard on his grandma’s porch.

To use this story in a classroom opens up several epistemological issues: the verifiability of oral history, at what point fictional or semi-fictional stories constitute history, and whether such stories provide any truth or even certainty. One passage in Roots embodies each of these epistemological factors, for Haley’s search for his roots culminated in his visit to the village of Juffure in the Gambia:

When we got within sight of Juffure, the children who were playing outside gave the alert, and the people came flocking from their huts. It’s a village of only about seventy people. Like most back-country villages, it was still very much as it was two hundred years ago, with its circular mud houses and their conical thatched roofs. Among the people as they gathered was a small man wearing an off-white robe, a pill box hat over an aquiline-featured black face, and about him was an aura of “somebodiness” until I knew he was the man we had come to see and hear….

… After a while, the old man turned, walked briskly through the people, past my three interpreters, and right up to me. His eyes piercing into mine, seeming to feel I should understand his Mandinka, he expressed what they had all decided they felt concerning those unseen millions of us who lived in those places that had been slave ships’ destinations—and the translation came: “We have been told by our forefathers that there are many of us from this place who are in exile in that place called America—and in other places.”

The old man sat down, facing me, as the people hurriedly gathered behind him. Then he began to recite for me the ancestral history of the Kinte clan, as it had been passed down orally across centuries from the forefathers’ time. It was not merely conversational, but more as if a scroll were being read: for the still, silent villagers, it was clearly a formal occasion. The griot would speak, bending forwards from the waist, his body rigid, his neck cords standing out, his words seeming almost physical objects. After a sentence or two, seeming to go limp, he would lean back, listening to an interpreter’s translation. Spilling from the griot’s head came an incredibly complex Kinte clan lineage that reached across many generations: who married whom; who had what children, what children then married whom; then their offspring. It was all just unbelievable. I was struck not only by the profusion

of details, but also by the narrative’s biblical style…. To date things the griot

linked them to events, such as “in the year of the big water...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I. Knowledge, Morality, and Authority in Teaching
• PART II. Virtue and Public Knowledge
• PART III. Virtue and Personal Knowledge
• PART IV. The Virtues of the Teacher
• Appendices
• Further Reading
• References
• Index