Week One
Thoughts on the articles:
1) We Americans give ourselves far too much credit, we aren't a democracy (NCSS, 2016). There's only been one in the history of global civilization, that of Classical Athens (Brown, 1989), and it lasted for only a couple centuries. The USA is a representative republic and was founded on the gentrified ideal that only men of property and decent standing should have a proper voice in the running of the republic. It took over a half century and the populist ambitions of Andrew Jackson to ultimately expand upon the scope of our concept of broader inclusion (all white males, with or without property) but even then, we've only been of the belief we elect representatives to vote on our behalf instead of Ancient Athenian norms of large swaths of the demos (ancient Greek concept of the city-state & citizen) being present to directly vote on issues directly and also draw straws at random to represent certain higher offices. I think it's essential we stop fictionalizing our history to secondary students and implement the ideas NCSS calls for in regards to greater global scope by being far more academically rigorous in our application of political terms and definitions.
2) While inquiry based learning sounds very intriguing and Wolpert-Gawron (2016) make an exciting and emotional appeal for its use in the classroom, where are the citations to back up their claims that "releasing authority engages students"? If this could be backed up through citing a representative quantitative research inquiry study, it would really resonate and show a much more thoroughly structured series of arguments that the authors seem to lack by leaving far too many of their assertions uncited and open-ended. While their intentions are noble and seem rather sincere, their argument lacks the intellectual rigor necessary to really give their argument the force it could have with the proper time taken to cite data favorable to their viewpoint.
3) Scheurman (1998) lays out a very interesting overview of the philosophical diversity within concepts of what knowledge constitutes and how it is transmitted. My original contribution to the argument regarding this article would be to follow up the concept of behaviorist belief that knowledge exists outside of people and independently of them by reminding the class how Platonic the essence of the concept is and how heavily influenced it is by Plato's notion of another realm of "ideas" that exist beyond the physical world. Behaviorist ideals of education owe much to neo-Platonism that became the basis for much of European notions of education during the Middle Ages and especially after the work of Thomas Aquinas, who attempts to reconcile Christian ideology with Neo-Platonic thought.
I really enjoyed the article and thought it gave a wonderful summary of four approaches to how teachers and students share and balance power in learning environments and will be something I go back to and refer to often as a principle concept for understanding the versatility and different approaches to social studies pedagogy.
1) We Americans give ourselves far too much credit, we aren't a democracy (NCSS, 2016). There's only been one in the history of global civilization, that of Classical Athens (Brown, 1989), and it lasted for only a couple centuries. The USA is a representative republic and was founded on the gentrified ideal that only men of property and decent standing should have a proper voice in the running of the republic. It took over a half century and the populist ambitions of Andrew Jackson to ultimately expand upon the scope of our concept of broader inclusion (all white males, with or without property) but even then, we've only been of the belief we elect representatives to vote on our behalf instead of Ancient Athenian norms of large swaths of the demos (ancient Greek concept of the city-state & citizen) being present to directly vote on issues directly and also draw straws at random to represent certain higher offices. I think it's essential we stop fictionalizing our history to secondary students and implement the ideas NCSS calls for in regards to greater global scope by being far more academically rigorous in our application of political terms and definitions.
2) While inquiry based learning sounds very intriguing and Wolpert-Gawron (2016) make an exciting and emotional appeal for its use in the classroom, where are the citations to back up their claims that "releasing authority engages students"? If this could be backed up through citing a representative quantitative research inquiry study, it would really resonate and show a much more thoroughly structured series of arguments that the authors seem to lack by leaving far too many of their assertions uncited and open-ended. While their intentions are noble and seem rather sincere, their argument lacks the intellectual rigor necessary to really give their argument the force it could have with the proper time taken to cite data favorable to their viewpoint.
3) Scheurman (1998) lays out a very interesting overview of the philosophical diversity within concepts of what knowledge constitutes and how it is transmitted. My original contribution to the argument regarding this article would be to follow up the concept of behaviorist belief that knowledge exists outside of people and independently of them by reminding the class how Platonic the essence of the concept is and how heavily influenced it is by Plato's notion of another realm of "ideas" that exist beyond the physical world. Behaviorist ideals of education owe much to neo-Platonism that became the basis for much of European notions of education during the Middle Ages and especially after the work of Thomas Aquinas, who attempts to reconcile Christian ideology with Neo-Platonic thought.
I really enjoyed the article and thought it gave a wonderful summary of four approaches to how teachers and students share and balance power in learning environments and will be something I go back to and refer to often as a principle concept for understanding the versatility and different approaches to social studies pedagogy.
Comments
Post a Comment