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Pragmatism

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Title: Pragmatism


1
Pragmatism
2
Action -gt -gt -gt Destiny
  • Sow an action, reap a habit.
  • Sow a habit, reap a character.
  • Sow a character, reap a destiny.
  • William James

3
(1) Role of Experience
  • Primacy of experience
  • Participation in (not using) language, history,
    world
  • Situated contextual historical
  • Linking of fact/value
  • Knowledge is constructed

4
Experience and Learning
  • Tree figures School and Society

5
Ordinary Experience
  • The paradox is that Dewey achieved this
    viability, not by having written for the future,
    but rather by writing out of his own present
    experience. His attitude of affection for
    ordinary experience remained a lifelong
    characteristic of his work. He believed that
    ordinary experience is seeded with surprise and
    possibilities for enhancement if we but allow it
    to bathe over us in its own terms. The key here
    is to avoid derision and the seduction of
    condescension to the seemingly obvious. In my
    judgement, the central text in Dewey is found
    late in his work, in Experience and Education.
  • John McDermott, p. x

6
Experience
  • We always live at the time we live and not at
    some other time and only by extracting at each
    present time the full meaning of each present
    experience are we prepared for doing the same
    thing in the future. p. 51
  • Intentional teaching gt danger of separating
    experience school acquisition
  • Dewey, Experience Education, 1916, p. 9

7
Paul Valéry
  • It is more useful to speak of what one has
    experienced than to pretend to a knowledge that
    is entirely impersonal, an observation without an
    observer. In fact, there is no theory that is not
    a fragment, carefully prepared, of some
    autobiography. I do not pretend to be teaching
    you anything at all. I will say nothing that you
    do not already know...

8
(2) Context/Purpose
  • Earl Kelley Car on road / outside window
  • Adelbert Ames
  • Rotating trapezoid
  • Mis-scaled room
  • Ihde Necker cube

9
Causation
  • The notion that disease-causing agents and
    therapeutic agents are things-in-themselves is
    often ascribed to Pasteur, and it is therefore
    salutary to remember Pasteurs death-bed words
    Bernard is right the pathogen is nothing the
    terrain is everything.
  • Oliver Sacks, Awakenings, p. 228

10
Lewis Thomas Disease Theories
  • Evil spirits witch doctors
  • Bad humours leeches
  • Germs antibiotics
  • Off-center throw pots, health food

11
Abstraction vs. Generalization
  • It is a mistake to equate abstract with
    general. Only the concrete permits a general
    understanding of systemic interconnectedness
  • Yrjo Engstrom, Learning by Expanding

12
(3) Social Construction
  • Social embedding
  • Importance of community
  • Special meanings
  • Recognition of difference
  • Shift power relations

13
Discourse Community Formulations
  • Bakhtin speech genres
  • Peirce community of inquirers
  • Dewey community/education/social life
  • Bloomfield shared linguistic rules
  • Labov shared norms
  • Hymes shared rules use patterns
  • Fish interpretive community
  • Swales discourse community

14
Dewey Community
  • Interpersonal over cognitive
  • Occasions to identify with others point of view
    Democracy and Education, p. 84
  • Occasions to share differences Public and Its
    Problems, 155

15
Kuhn
  • T. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions,
    1970 to understand scientific thought we must
    understand scientific communities scientific
    knowledge changes, not as our understanding of
    the world changes, but as scientists organize and
    reorganize relations among themselves

16
Feyerabend
  • relations change as a consequence of changes in
    economic and social relations in larger
    communities
  • P. Feyerabend, Against Method

17
Rorty
  • to understand any kind of knowledge we must
    understand "the social justification of belief",
    i.e., how knowledge is established and maintained
    in the "normal discourse" of communities of
    knowledgeable peers
  • R. Rorty, Philosophy and the mirror of nature,
    1979

18
Bruffee
  • A writer's language originates with the community
    to which he or she belongs. We use language
    primarily to join communities we do not yet
    belong to and to cement our membership in
    communities we already belong to
  • K. Bruffee, "Social construction, language,
    and the authority of knowledge . . .", 1986, p.
    784

19
Interpretive Communities
  • "interpretive communities" are the source of our
    thought and of the "meanings" we produce through
    the use and manipulation of symbolic structures
    also source of what we regard as our very selves
  • S. Fish, Is there a text in this class? The
    authority of interpretive communities, 1980

20
(4) Construction Process
  • Perspectivity (no understanding w/o
    presupposition)
  • Part-whole-part movement
  • Dialectic process (no end point to understanding)
  • Knowing v. Knowledge

21
Thinking
  • Occurrence of a difficulty
  • Definition of the difficulty
  • Occurrence of a suggested explanation or possible
    solution
  • Rational elaboration of an idea
  • Corroboration of an idea and formation of a
    concluding belief
  • Dewey, How We Think

22
Deweys Feminism
  • By rejecting foundationalism, Dewey opens the
    door to legitimizing claims for other forms of
    knowledge and other ways of knowing... His views
    of a progressive society as one that counts
    individual variation as precious His theory
    of knowledge is one that encourages respect for
    differences such that we recognize that the goal
    of unified, static knowledge is illegitimate.
  • Jeanne Connel

23
Transmission Model of Theory Formation
24
Social Construction Model of Theory Formation
25
Constructivism as philosophical position
  • Ihde Necker cube
  • Hacking, p. 81 in Lynch Woolgar
  • All systems leak E.Sapir
  • Anyone who invents a concept takes leave of
    reality M.de Unamuno

26
Constructivism as a method for inquiry
  • Critique of null hypothesis testing
  • Generalization as rhetorical step
  • Control group is the group you dont control J.
    Zacharias
  • Ecological invalidity as an axiom of cognitive
    psychology Cole, Hood, McDermott
  • Formalization critique

27
Meaning Making
  • EQ 8 Plato v Wittgenstein
  • Black History Show
  • Fish community gt interpretation gt
    author/reader/text
  • Koestler Beyond Reductionism
  • Rorty
  • John Berger

28
Vygotsky
  • Activity precedes learning
  • Development as a product of education
  • Personal invention / social convention
  • Cultural mediation
  • Material and symbolic cultural tools

29
Similarities in Piaget Vygotsky
  • Importance of intersubjectivity in social
    interaction
  • Point of departure for social influence child's
    understanding
  • Cooperation in cognitive activity

30
Piaget versus Vygotsky
31
Reader Response
  • Construction of meaning
  • How communication fails and how it is possible
  • Our view of "text"
  • Broaden from comprehension to interpretation
  • Feminist perspectives on reading and writing
  • Relate theory practice
  • Relations between language power

32
Pedagogical Implications
  • Rethink assessment
  • Examine the canon / the curriculum
  • Full range of cultural literatures perspectives
  • Nurturing versus training
  • Understand own knowledge interpretations
  • Richer view of language
  • Incorporate aesthetics
  • Support role of community
  • Value the individual response
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