Boyte, Democracy and the Struggle Against Positivism in the Age of the Smart Machine

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Boyte, Democracy and the Struggle Against
Positivism in the Age of the Smart Machine

• Positivism structures our research, our
  disciplines, our teaching, and our institutions
  long after it has been discredited
  intellectually.... Positivism structures patterns
  of evaluation, assessment, and outcome measures,
  sustaining patterns of one-way service delivery
  and the conceptualization of poor and powerless
  groups as needy "clients," not competent
  citizens. It infuses government funding patterns
  for "interventions" to fix social problems. It
  shapes the institutions of the market, the media,
  health care, and political life. Professionals
  imagine themselves outside a shared reality with
  their fellow citizens, who are seen as
  "customers," or "clients," objects to be
  manipulated or remediated.

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Palmer, Community, Conflict and Ways of Knowing

• ...the way we know has powerful implications
  for the way we live...every epistemology tends to
  become an ethic, and. . .every way of knowing
  tends to become a way of living....The mode of
  knowing that dominates higher education I call
  objectivism....It is an ethic of competitive
  individualism, in the midst of a world fragmented
  and made exploitable by that very mode of
  knowing....We make objects of each other and the
  world to be manipulated for our own private ends
  ....it's a trained schizophrenia

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Clinchy, "On Critical Thinking and Connected
Knowing"

• Connected knowers are not dispassionate,
  unbiased observers. They deliberately bias
  themselves in favor of what they are examining.
  They try to get inside it and form an intimate
  attachment to it. The heart of connected knowing
  is imaginative attachment...I am arguing against
  an unnecessarily constricted view of thinking as
  analytic, detached, divorced from feeling.

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Circle of Higher Education Civic Engagement
Initiatives
Economic Development
Shared Resources
Extension Services
Faculty Outreach
Student Volunteerism
Civic Awareness Deliberative Dialogue
Internships Practice
Service-Learning
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THE SCHOLARSHIP OF ENGAGEMENT
I am convinced thatthe academy must become a
more vigorous partner in the search for answers
to our most pressing social, civic, economic, and
moral problems, and must reaffirm its historic
commitment to what I call the scholarship of
engagement. The scholarship of engagement means
connecting the rich resources of the university
to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical
problemsCampuses would be viewed by both
students and professors not as isolated islands,
but as staging grounds for action. The
scholarship of engagement also means creating a
special climate in which the academic and civic
cultures communicate more continuously and
creatively with each other. Ernest Boyer (1996),
The Journal of Public Service and Outreach
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THE SCHOLARSHIP OF ENGAGEMENTESSENTIAL
CHARACTERISTICS

• capable of assessment/standards of excellence
• addressing multiple audiences disciplinary
  public
• adding to knowledge base (involving expanding
  expertise)
• grounded in partnerships between academy and
  public
• of direct value
• of more than proprietary value

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IDENTIFYING THE SCHOLARSHIP OF ENGAGEMENT

• TEACHING Community Service vs.
  Service-Learning
• RESEARCH Scholarship of Discipline vs.
  Scholarship of Discipline Public Good
• SERVICE General Citizenship vs. Professional
  Outreach

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Civil Society

• To envision a democratic civic entity that
  empowers citizens to rule themselves is then
  necessarily to move beyond the two-celled model
  of government versus private sector we have come
  to rely on.Civil society, or civic space,
  occupies the middle ground between the two. It
  is not where we vote and it is not where we buy
  and sell it is where we talk with neighbors
  about a crossing guarda benefit for our
  community school Barber, Jihad vs.
  McWorld

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Gene Rice, Making a Place for the New American
Scholar
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Forms of Public Engagement
Personal Contact Direct Service
Problem-solving Projects
Research
With (Participatory Action Research)
For (Commissioned by Community)
About (Community as Focus)
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Practical Rationality

• Civic democracy demands the ability to think
  in terms of complex balances rather than the
  maximization of effectiveness as measured by a
  single objective.The critical step in this
  direction lies in the rehabilitation of nonformal
  modes of rationality which do not screen out the
  practical, the moral, and historical standpoint
  of both the subject and the object of knowledge.
  That means the rediscovery and expansion of the
  idea of practical rationality.
• Sullivan, Work and Integrity

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Unstructured Problems

• An unfortunate feature of much education
  today, as well as the assessment of educational
  progress, is its overwhelming emphasis on
  well-structured problems. It is easier to teach
  the facts and only the facts, and then to test on
  these facts. Facts lend themselves to
  well-structured problems with a clear,
  correct solution.The strategies that work in
  solving well-structured problems, however, often
  do not work particularly well, or at all, for
  ill-structured problems.
• Sternberg, Successful Intelligence

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The Four Quadrants of Service-Learning Program
Design
Student-Centered Structured Learning
Common Good Focus
Academic Expertise Focus
Service-Learning
Community-Centered Unstructured Learning
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Next-Century Learning

• today, people worldwide need a whole series
  of new competenciesbut I doubt such abilities
  can be taught solely in the classroom, or be
  developed solely by teachers. Higher order
  thinking and problem-solving skills grow out of
  direct experiencethey require more than a
  classroom activity. They develop through active
  involvement and real-life experiences in
  workplaces and the community. Abbott, The
  Search for Next-Century Learning

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• Political equality citizenship equalizes
  people who are otherwise unequal in their
  capacities, and the universalization of
  citizenship therefore has to be accompanied not
  only by formal training in the civic arts but by
  measures designed to assure the broadest
  distribution of economic and political
  responsibility Lasch, Revolt of the Elites

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CIVIC COMPETENCIES

• Eloquent listening
• Non-abrasive argumentation
• Suspending judgment
• Building consensus
• Organizing for action

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Meritocracy vs. Democracy

• the most important choice a democratic
  society has to make whether to raise the general
  level of competence, energy, and devotion
  virtue, as it was called in an older political
  tradition or merely to promote a broader
  recruitment of elites.
• Lasch, Revolt of the Elites