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7 Toward a Transformational Theory of Teaching Lynda Stone University of Hawaii, Manoa In an elegant little volume introducing epistemology to undergraduates, W. V. Quine and J. S. Ulian describe knowledge as a web of belief.1 Beliefs are tied together by a network of experience, cause, and justification. Some are easily changed through observation , some are almost impossible to change. These clusters contain explicit beliefs as well as strings of implicit beliefs that undergird them. Change of belief structures occur through attention to clusters of them and the bringing to bear of evidence. If we want to reform teaching, says Gary Fenster-macher, we must work directly with beliefs about the meaning of the concept “teaching.”2 Beliefs necessarily connect ideas from research to new forms of practice and they include ideas of its purpose, passion, and logic. I want to begin construction of a new web of belief about teaching, to change how we think about it. To do this we need to uncover its belief structure. For instance, we need to make clear assumptions that tie theories of teaching and learning to understandings about cultural context and ethical implications. The present project looks not at beliefs about context or morality but at another significant foundation, inherent epistemological underpinnings. These require change if we believe the feminist assertion that one epistemology has defined how all persons come to understand the world. Traditionally, men have known, known in ways that are masculine, ways that are aspects of the world that comprise male experience. To consider gender bias as merely a political and ethical problem is to leave out the most significant element in its understanding, its epistemological character. The process of change, I believe, must be transformational. To see what this means, we must consider (1) theories of education, (2) an epistemological perspective, (3) a gender analysis, and (4) implications for transformation. Theories of Education Beliefs about teaching are encapsulated within theories of education. In a recent commentary , Kieran Egan proposes that two fundamental views underly all educational theories: 127 128 / Lynda Stone the first he identifies as Platonic and the second as Rousseauean.3 Egan writes that, for Platonists, attention is on the end of education. This end has always had something to do with objective forms, ideas, or essences that are there for our knowing. In practice , this is teaching for objectivity, for “accumulation and internalization of disciplines and their logics.”4 Acquiring knowledge means coming to understand the accumulated wisdom of the ages, systematized as abstract concepts of the disciplines. While seen by Rousseau as a complement to the first theory, the second has nevertheless had a distinct and often conflicting theoretical history. Within it, education is a process of facilitating the development of natural dispositions; here disciplinary knowledge must be made to conform to subjective experience. Even though Egan does not do so, for the sake of the present investigation, let me label the Platonic theory “objectivist,” and that from Rousseau , “subjectivist.” I turn now to two examples.5 Both are well-intentioned, articulated, and argued. Each one, I believe, is avowedly objective or subjective. The objective model comes out of the writings of Margret Buchmann, Robert Floden, and John Schwille. For them, “education is taken to imply learning that recognizes students’ rationality and enlarges the realm of their understanding.”6 Inherent is a particular definition and aim of rationality, one they take from Hegel:7 The end of reason . . . is to banish natural simplicity . . . in which mind is absorbed. . . . The final purpose of education . . . is the hard struggle against pure subjectivity of feeling and . . . of inclination.8 Education is subjective when it is founded on sense perception and direct claims of knowing . In a process touted as down-to-earth and commonsensical, students learn primarily by living and doing. Cognitive and educational dangers are present: Immediate claims of knowing mask “anticipatory theories” with which all beliefs are impregnated9 and further keep commonsense impervious to theoretical influence. What occurs in subjective education is a process where new information is fit merely to sometimes erroneous, old ideas—ideas then believed dogmatically.10 Social and political consequences result. Limiting experience, leading to stunted imagination, in the larger sense leads to persons who rely on harmful egocentric and sociocentric patterns of thought and action.11 The opposite of subjective education is education for objectivity. Out of it comes meaningful, intellectual understanding. Like Egan’s Platonic model, it emphasizes learning the concepts of the disciplines. This is valued particularly...

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