Knowing and Learning as Creative Action: A Reexamination of the Epistemological Foundations of Education

A Reexamination of the Epistemological Foundations of Education

A. Stoller

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137465245
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In Knowing and Learning as Creative Action, Aaron Stoller makes the case that contemporary schooling is grounded in a flawed model of knowing, which draws together mistakes in thinking about the nature of the self, of knowledge, and of reality, which are contained in the epistemological proposition: 'S knows that p' (SP). To the contrary, Stoller argues that the German conception of Bildung must replace SP thinking as the guiding metaphor of knowing within educational research and practice. Central to this reconstruction is a theory of creative inquiry which claims that knowledge emerges from embodied, social engagement in the world and therefore knowing is a form of creative action. Stoller constructs a new paradigm of knowing and learning as an emergent process of creative making, the goal of which is the cultivation of what he calls maker's knowledge, which is the capacity for and habit of creative action.

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Bildung and the Hidden “S knows that p”

Abstract: This chapter makes the case that contemporary schooling is grounded in a flawed model of knowing, which draws together mistakes in thinking about the nature of the self, of knowledge, and of reality. This model hinges on a particular view of knowers, knowing, and knowledge expressed logically as “S knows that p” (SP), which is both the paradigmatic model of knowing of analytic epistemology and grounds the larger, technocratic rationality characterizing Modern thought. This chapter begins by describing the philosophical underpinnings of the SP model and then articulates its presence within contemporary educational theory and practice. It then describes the German conception of Bildung and argues that it must replace SP as the guiding paradigm of knowing within educational practice.

Keywords: Bildung; education; epistemology; schooling

Stoller, Aaron. Knowing and Learning as Creative Action: A Reexamination of the Epistemological Foundations of Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137465245.0005.

The hidden “S knows that p”

The SP model is based on what John Dewey called the spectator theory of knowing. This theory argues that knowing is a kind of causal, cognitive act, which takes the form of a viewer or spectator who has the ability to purely “see” a mind-independent object. Here, knowledge-content is embedded in the natural structure of the cosmos. It exists as a thing-in-itself, which is ontologically separated from the cognitive knower. For Dewey, the spectator theory was not located in one philosophical stance or school, but is a generalized approach to knowing which is grounded in a long-standing human impulse to create certainty in the world via true, foundational knowledge. It is shared across all the major Western philosophical schools: the Greeks, Rationalists, Empiricists, Kantians, Realists, Dualists, and Idealists (Dicker, 1976, p. 4). It is also the dominant mode of thinking about knowing and knowledge today.

Dewey argued that the spectator view of knowing begins in our precarious position as self-reflective organisms living in an unstable universe. We are born into a world of hazards and are driven to seek security (Dewey, 1929/1984d, p. 3). Dewey called this security-seeking impulse the quest for certainty, arguing that it compels us toward whatever is stable and foundational in the midst of the chaos and instability which constitute our lived reality.

The quest for certainty gives rise to what Dewey called the two-tiered universe, which is the view that the universe must be divided between a material, changeable tier (the unstable) and an immaterial, unchangeable tier (the stable), which is the realm of foundational truth. According to Dewey (1929/1984d), “philosophy in its classic form became a species of apologetic justification for belief in an ultimate reality in which the values which should regulate life and control conduct are securely enstated” (p. 23). This impulse is not located strictly within the realm of philosophy, but exists wherever there is a search for and belief in the immutable over the experimental: be that religious fundamentalism, philosophical foundationalism, or scientific realism.

This basic dualism (foundational/changeable) results in a larger paradigm of dualistic thinking in the West, including natural/supernatural, body/mind, self/other, value/fact, subjective/objective, etc . . . . It is also the philosophical ground for the belief that there exists an ontological separation between knowers (“S”) and knowns (“p”). Dewey labeled this separation, which is central to SP thinking, the philosophical fallacy. It occurs whenever one holds the view that the outcomes of inquiry (objects, things known) exist prior to and apart from processes of doing or making. Dewey (1929/1984d) argued that the two-tiered view of the universe gave rise to the strange notion that “the office of knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they arise” (p.17). The philosophical fallacy occurs when created meanings are imagined to have existed prior to inquiry: to have been discovered or taken by an inquirer rather than made as a process of creative construction. SP thinking, with its commitment to the two-tiered universe, assumes that inquiry is a form of classifying that which already exists in the universe, rather than actively and creatively constructing dimensions of a synthetic, process-relational whole for distinctly human purposes.

SP thinking and the fragmentation of learning

SP thinking grounds and directs the rationality of Modern schooling, serving as its primary organizing principle. It is SP thinking which fragments knowledge into discreet categories, separating subject matter from lived experience, facts from values, and emotion from cognition. Perhaps its most dangerous effect is that it fragments a holistic, unified process of synthetic inquiry into arbitrary, pre-determined analytic units (i.e. subject-matter) which often bear no direct relationship to one another or to the interests of learners. In doing so, it mistakes the originating purpose of knowledge creation—emergent problem solving—for the reified results of past inquiries. Most dangerously, SP thinking is committed to the idea that knowledge precedes action and therefore the goal of schooling is to fill students with that information deemed useful to prepare them for imagined, future use. This kind of fragmentation of the process of inquiry is so ubiquitous in contemporary schooling it is nearly impossible to think otherwise.

SP thinking gives way to what Henry Giroux (1997) claims is a culture of Positivism in education. Here, educational theory and practices promote a:

form of positivist rationality in which it is assumed that: (1) The natural sciences provide the “deductive-nomological” model of explanation for the concepts and techniques proper for social science. (2) Social science ought to aim at the discovery of lawlike propositions about human behavior which are empirically testable. (3) Social science modes of inquiry can and ought to be objective. (4) The relationship between theory and practice in the social science domain is primarily a technical one, i.e., social science knowledge can be used to predict how a course of action can be best realized. (5) Social science procedures of verification and falsification must rely upon scientific techniques and “hard data,” which lead to results that are value free and intersubjectively applicable. (p. 18)

Because knowledge is viewed as a calcified object, discreet from any individual, it becomes a commodity which is cognitively exchanged, objectively measured, and cashed out through its economic use-value.

SP thinking is borne out, for example, in the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Postsecondary Education determination that all colleges and universities must maintain “standards requisite for its graduates to gain admission to other reputable institutions of higher learning or to achieve credentials for professional practice” (2013). Here the goal of education is purely utilitarian and reducible to credentialing. Further, it articulates the “goal of accreditation” as ensuring “that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality.” The concepts of acceptable levels and quality remain undefined. In both instances, students are assumed to be generic consumers of a kind of knowledge-product.

In order to gain accreditation, colleges and universities must be approved by bodies such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) whose mission “is the improvement of education in the South through accreditation.” The SACS (2010) process:

provides an assessment of an institution’s effectiveness in fulfillment of its mission, it’s compliance with the requirements of its accrediting association, and its continuing efforts to enhance the quality of student learning and its programs and services. Based on reasoned judgment, the process stimulates evaluation and improvement, while providing a means of continuing accountability to constituents and the public. (p. 2)

Left undefined are the following important terms: effectiveness, enhance, quality, learning, reasoned judgment, improvement, constituents. SACS (2010) requires all institutions engage in “ongoing, integrated, institution-wide research-based planning and evaluation processes” (p. 16). Again research-based is left undefined, though it is not a difficult leap to claim that accreditation and accountability processes emerge from the specter of SP thinking and are reducible to quantitative metrics.

Similarly, within pedagogical environments, SP thinking creates space for the conduit metaphor where it is imagined that “psychic entities (e.g., ideas, schemata, and scripts) are conducted from one talking head to another by means of physical symbols and sounds” (Garrison, 1995, p. 727). Teachers, students, and administrators begin to view knowledge as a collection of factoids that are dispensed from expert to novice, in the same way that “S” knows that “p.” Here, schooling becomes “a type of input–output system, [which most often] is reduced to and serves an economic production function” (Olssen and Peters, 2005, p. 324). As Heather McEwan (2000) argued, this approach, which views the teacher as a guide through the landscape of information, dominates curriculum theory and is informed by strands within epistemology, psychology, and recapitulation theory:

What is the source of this metaphor? It is, I think, related to the idea of mind as a representational system. . . . [T]he temptation is to extend this problematical view of mind: first, by conceiving of a map of the mind; secondly, by embracing the idea of the map as a functional entity that can be applied as a blueprint for the development of other minds. (p. 261)

In this model, the learner becomes a consumer of context-free and objective factoids, and emphasis is placed on the ability of the learner to reproduce those factoids as the sole marker of educational success. Paulo Freire (1970/2000) labeled this as the banking model of education, arguing that:

education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only so far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits . . . .in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge . . . . (p. 72)

The SP model is not only incorrect in its thinking about teaching and learning, but also—and more importantly—actually harms students who are alienated from their own creative capacities (i.e. dehumanized) in the very process of schooling.

Bildung and transformation

In this section, I will present the German notion of Bildung as an alternative to the SP model as the guiding paradigm of education. The former draws together, rather than separates, the communities in which we inhabit, what we know of the world, and our very selves as acts of construction. In particular, it shifts the center of gravity in education from being organized around objective facts to which learners serve as containers and, instead, elevates the unique and continual reconstruction that the self undergoes as part of the process of education as the guiding force of education. Here, education is an act of doing or making, which is ultimately transformational of both the self and the world.

Defining Bildung

The concept of Bildung is difficult to conceptualize in English, partially owing to the fact that the term loosely translates into “education,” which gives a mistaken impression that the German and American concepts are equivalent. Øivind Varkoy (2010) notes this distance in saying that “the fact that the German term Bildung has no direct counterpart in English has certain consequences for international educational discourse” (p. 86). Those consequences stem from the fact that Bildung is a more complex and robust term than the SP view of education in the United States. The concept of Bildung is better conceptualized via the English term enculturation.

Bildung originates from the German Bild meaning “form” or “image.” Broadly speaking, Bildung means to form an individual and make them into a human being. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/2004) defines Bildung as “the properly human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities” (p. 9).

A distinction must be made with the American conception of personhood and that which is embedded in the notion of Bildung. A traditional American view of the individual is built on a Cartesian ontology, which views the mind as the res cognitans or a “thinking thing” and the essence of the self. Here, the self is understood to be static, unchanging at its core, and essential. It is also complete prior to interacting within culture, rather than being formed by culture, as implied in the American image of the “self made” person.

To the contrary, according to Bildung, persons are not born as cultural individuals, but are born into a culture and must work to become cultural and social, where becoming cultural and social means not only to appreciate the culture, but also to be able to read the culture, act on the culture, and make decisions from within an informed cultural framework. Most importantly, it means to see one’s existence as intertwined with that culture and to understand that culture in the context of other cultures. Here the self is an emergent property of culture, rather than the other way around.

Rather than education viewed as the quantitative increase of facts or skills (an additive property), in Bildung it is an ongoing process of both personal and cultural maturation through reconstruction (a reconstructive, hermeneutic capacity). Jim Good and Jim Garrison (2010) write that it is “a harmonization of the individual’s mind and heart and a unification of society evidence this maturation. Harmonization of the self is achieved through a wide variety of experiences that challenge the individual’s accepted beliefs . . .” (p. 53). Bildung stands at the intersection of teaching and learning, the cultivation of the individual, as well as the process of knowledge creation. Bildung disrupts a view of education which holds that knowledge is an object which is statically preserved and cognitively transmitted. Instead, it begins with the idea that knowledge is interdependent with and generated out of unique human contexts and experiences.

The goal of knowing in the American sense is self-reliance, which is often framed as economic agency or cultural dominance where the self is set in contrast to culture. In Bildung the cultivation of knowledge has no goal outside itself, but is simply the process of more education. Knowledge transforms the individual and the larger community in an ongoing, ever-present dialogical motion. As a result, in Bildung, knowledge does not free the individual from the world, but opens the individual to the world, as they understand their interdependence with it and ability to become co-creators within it. As Gert Biesta (2003) argues:

the modern conception of Bildung articulates an educational ideal that, through the Enlightenment, has gained a political significance in that it has become intimately connected with an emerging civil society and with a specific conception of the ideal citizen in such a society . . . The process of Bildung is itself understood in terms of a relationship that goes beyond the present and the particular. It is a relationship, in other words, with something that is general. (p. 64)

The American view of education aims at self-actualization, which is a teleological concept built on a Cartesian ontology. Its goal is arriving at a kind of foundational, certain self. Bildung aims at the continuous emergence of self-in-society. It is focused on unending and unpredictable becoming.

Bildung strives toward a universal, but this is not a transcendental, ultimate foundation. It is instead the ability to distance oneself from the immediate, to think critically and creatively, as well as develop the capacity for empathy. Gadamer (1960/2004) argues that the nature of the transformation which occurs through Bildung reaches toward the un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Bildung and the Hidden S knows that p
• 2  Bildung Reconstructed
• 3  Knowing and Learning as Creative Action
• 4  Emergent Pedagogy
• References
• Index