Please share any questions raised by this book and any other thoughts you have. While I hope you learned a lot about pragmatism, I am particularly interested in how the book served to get you thinking about the nature of knowledge, what there is to know and how all of this relates to educational research.
Amy Jefferson: Education is always changing, so it makes sense that educational research should not be viewed as fixed. I had never considered looking at science that way as well, but it makes sense. My understanding is that educational research is important because it provides ideas for ways to go about solving problems. However, educational research does not create a one set solution per problem. ER provides possible solutions for the educator to choose from, leaving it up to the teacher to find the best fit based on the context of the problem. My interpretation of Dewey’s view of pragmatism and the nature of knowledge is that everything is always changing. Every interaction you have tweaks your perception of the world a bit, so be open to changing your way of thinking, learning and inquiring or you’ll be stuck in the past and never moving forward.
ReplyDeleteMitchell Waters - Through reading this book, I learned that pragmatism as a theoretical foundation might be one of the most useful for educational research. Since people and culture are always changing, education is always changing. Because of this, it is going to be very difficult if not impossible to get close to any objective Truths (with a capital T) when it comes to education. Even though we obtaining objective Truths through Educational Research might be far-fetched, we might be able to find some truths through educational research (with an emphasis on lower case letters). Educational research might boil down to problem solving and helping teachers remove barriers to good education for their students and that is a huge deal. While we might be limited on what we can achieve through educational research, that is certainly not to say that we still cannot achieve a great deal.
ReplyDeleteAlison Dossick-
ReplyDeleteNature of knowledge:
I enjoyed reconnecting with Dewey’s pragmatism which seems to me a very relatable and “down to Earth” philosophy. While not remaining in one’s head like Idealism, this philosophy acknowledges that we create our own knowledge which is based on our past experiences. These experiences influence our present state of mind and frame our reactions. Using these past experiences to “construct” or guide future responses to stimuli and being cognizant of this influence allows a self-awareness that is beneficial for personal progress.
I took philosophy as an undergrad at Virginia Tech’s College of Arts and Science. It may have been professor bias in teaching, but Dewey resonated with me at that time as a Biology major. This was followed by further examination when earning my M.Ed. I enjoyed applying his views of there not being one answer for most questions when human interactions or transactions are involved. Having spent a majority of my childhood in New Hampshire-Vermont’s conservative cousin-helped to construct my affinity for pragmatism as well. My father is a get’er done, buck-up, kind of scientist. He doesn’t waste time with “useless” things much like Dewey’s desire to focus on useful philosophy. My dad’s knowledge was constructed by researching reactions to certain stimuli and coupling those findings with prior knowledge thus creating a deeper understanding of both stimulus and response. He would use this when showing me various bugs in the back yard and encourage me to make my own observations of them so I could create my own knowledge of the backyard ecosystem. To say I was born and raised a Deweyan is probably not far off the mark.
What there is to know
We create our own knowledge by combining our past experiences with new stimuli which in turn creates fleeting knowledge that will be further influenced by others’ responses to current stimuli. The more stimuli we experience (past interactions) the greater our ability to create meaningful responses, developing knowledge. Teachers with many years of experience have a breadth knowledge that facilitates the ease they have in mitigating classroom issues. They are able to quickly analyze classroom situations based on past experiences and have created knowledge on ways to one could best handle them. It is important to point out that there is no one right way to teach. The best teaches have years of “tricks” to employ depending on the make up each class. The ability to adapt ones’ teaching is one trait of master teachers and probably one that can only be researched empirically.
How it relates to educational research While maintaining a desire to have useful philosophies, understanding that transactionalism will not lead to hard and fast rules in education can be difficult to reconcile. Regarding every situation as a result of many individuals’ previous interactions coupled with the dynamics of interactions necessitates the acceptance of no one way to answer questions of knowledge. There are too many variables to create one answer on how to educate children. Children’s experiences both inside and outside of school are beyond a teacher or researcher’s control. While generalizations may be made like “screaming at children will not get them to comply,” more specific rules, like this fabulous new spelling program will teach every kid how to read and spell cannot be made. Educational researchers must be humble in their approaches and desired and touted outcomes of researcher. Knowing that one will not “know” everything at the end of a research problem is important and will help us frame our research and the way we present it.
Questions:
How do educational researchers discern when results are able to be more broadly applied?
How can we tease out useful research results rather than results that are packaged in such a way that we are mislead like Ruby Payne?
How can we as researchers combat the false claims of educational products?
Biesta and Burbules mention that educational science is found in the mind of educators. I take this to mean that educational science is ever changing and it is up to the educators to use their intellectual judgement when trying to mimic the outcomes of previous research within their educational situation. Therefore, how are we truly able to guide practioners to use education research with a pragmatic lens (using intellectual judgement)?
ReplyDeletePragmatism seems to offer an apologetic stance toward the systematic issues within education by exploring a multiple perspective viewpoint but it doesn’t feel actionable. Therefore, how can pragmatism be used to resist the social and structural institutions of education?
Kori Nicolai: The book expresses the functionalism of research, especially in education. I am starting to focus on motivation literature and the colorblindness in it. The pragmatist idea that one research finding may not translate exactly to another situation is the same idea that is the basis for the issue of colorblindness in research. If research is done with white, middle class samples researchers should be cognizant that the findings may not translate to a diverse population. Another pragmatic idea is that the outcome of research is only as good as it is applicable in different situation. What if the theory and methodology is fundamentally flawed?
ReplyDeleteLauren Cabrera:
ReplyDeleteThe last chapter to me was the most impactful. It provided context and purpose that helped me ground pragmatism as a philosophy. Now I have a better idea, and agree that the nature of knowledge is fluid. It changes with the context of what is going on around and to the subject. This also implies that knowledge is not universal, it is specific to the individual. This means as educators and education researchers, it is important to focus on teaching and finding best methods of allowing students to construct their own knowledge. We can’t rely too heavily on making educational environments so uniform that it forces all students through one way of finding out knowledge with a capital “k” that happened to be determined by someone that doesn’t interact with that population of students. My questions largely stem from the practice of using pragmatism to inform the practice (with the back of researching) to each subject in secondary school. The basis of a liberal arts education, taking all of these different subjects, is to provide broad exposure to many topics, to create a common body of knowledge in which society collectively understand. This seems opposite to pragmatism. Does this mean we have to assume that a collective population will have similar enough experiences naturally that we can develop common knowledge? Or will we all just become too fragmented that we can’t develop a sense of intellectual community? Are there subjects or topics that pragmatism isn’t the most practical choice? Does a pragmatic way of thinking lead to different pedagogical styles?
Tosha Yingling:
ReplyDeletePragmatism has a certain appeal to me but I do wonder if the idea of knowledge as something that’s always temporal doesn’t make a good excuse to not interrogate certain social hegemonies; like we talked about in class, we have constructed things like race and held onto these constructions despite their lack of scientific evidence, but we have since melded a society from the material and non-abstracted affects of such categorizing. I wonder what it looks like materially to actually use pragmatism in educational research without getting caught up in the discursive loops that often distract us from practice. Why haven’t we already used pragmatism to rethink where our values lie in education as Pearson and SOLs create traps for teachers defined by capitalist obedient racism rather than critical and creative democratic reimagining. Teaching feminist ideas in higher education means that, when I force my kids to read something violent and illuminating (this week, it was Hortense Spillers), our discussion always hits on the question “why didn’t we learn this sooner?” I guess I take issue with Dewey presenting pragmatism as the “non-epistemology” because I don’t believe you can fully grasp at the material legacies of biased knowledge without first acknowledging this. I like that the authors remind us that ed research is something that “can’t be perfected,” because it does push us to stop theorizing and do the work, but I fear that can also be an excuse for sitting back and falling silent when the task of reimagining what knowledge is, how it functions, and how we disseminate it is a quite a large task, carving out temporal utopias, while others write/rest.
Amy T: The pragmatism book really got me thinking about my own beliefs about the origin of knowledge and how we go about acquiring knowledge. The book was complimented by my adult learning and development class where I learned about humanism, behaviorism, cognitivism, etc. Pragmatism would be placed in the constructivist lens. Reading about Pragmatism gave me the ability to dive deeper into this lens as I am really interested in how adults learn. This information is very foundational.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to educational research and within pragmatism, I appreciate the freedom to be able study and learn about anything within your own context and through your own methods. I also appreciate that if scholars are freely conducting this research, then there is a lot out there to learn about through their experiences (is that allowed in pragmatism??) This definitely makes me think that educational research may not be as strict and limiting as maybe I thought before. I took quantitative research methods last semester and it just seemed really mathematical and calculated. I started to rethink what I was doing in a PhD program since I couldn’t imagine conducting research in this way. Reading about these different lenses through these two classes has helped me to open my mind about educational research.
Elizabeth Severson-Irby:
ReplyDeletePragmatism gives us a different way of looking at educational research. Instead of looking to educational research to solve problems, we should look at it as helping us understand them in order to generate new questions to ask. For example, if we figured out how to teach people how to read (meaning that there was one, or several methods, that worked for everyone no matter what) then we would no longer need to do research in regards to reading; we could essentially move on to the next problem to be “solved.” The more research we do, the more knowledge we generate, and the better we can understand the world around us.
Pragmatism also seems to view this generating of knowledge from a pure perspective. By that I mean that we are generating and gaining knowledge to better ourselves and our world, not to fall in line with some prescripted set of standards set by the powers that be (institutions, corporations, policy makers, etc.). However, the pragmatic way of gaining knowledge doesn’t seem to mesh with the current dependence on standardized testing as a measure of “knowledge.” How can we transform this system from one that views knowledge (and worth) as numbers on a page? Is the current way of using quantitative data to measure success in line with pragmatism? Can the two exist together?
Jonathan Staylor:
ReplyDeleteI feel that pragmatism can lead to strides in educational research. As an educational researcher, I will need to be aware of transactions that are meaningful to me and determine best practices based on need within my discipline. I also understand that your knowledge is based on your meaningful constructions of objects. This can vary from person to person. Whatever you are trying to know as an educational researcher will need to be based on transactional interactions within your discipline. Contextual nature of knowledge can also affect the transactions within the environment. As an educational researcher, it is important to consider all methods of inquiry and factor in contextual variables within the knowledge. For me, I feel that rural school counselors need to consider the contextual and cultural nature of their relationships with their students. This would allow for meaningful therapeutic relationships to take place.
Jia
ReplyDeleteDewey’s pragmatism has great implications for educational research. The one which made me think a lot, but it might differ with Biesta’s (p. 110), is the relationship between researcher and practitioner, practitioner and student. While doing educational research, the researcher should focus on the practitioner’s needs, making research valuable on producing practical use for teachers. Practitioners are responsible to convert the research knowledge into classroom actions to provide students with a great learning experience.
Education is “constituted and reconstituted through communication and collaboration” as stated in chapter 5 of Becker’s book. This line in the chapter resonates with me. As the authors point out, education is a social construct, so there must be more cohesion between the education society of researchers and practitioners to navigate the constant and inevitable change(s). Education research can’t exist without practitioners, so more regard is required for the practitioners’ role in research, not just as a source for participants or data, but also as a community to which ed researchers are accountable. Trust is established through consistent communication, giving and receiving information. This chapter more than any affirms “effective communicator” as a role and responsibility of the education researcher as we discussed last week in class. Through more intentional and structured opportunities for educators to participate in research projects and with more effective communication of findings, ed research can be accountable to, without pandering to practice. The chapter states the need for reflective education researchers but they must also be reflexive and responsive to the discipline overall.
ReplyDeleteCatina
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ReplyDeleteMaking the transition from teacher to researcher, I really enjoyed reading Dewey's pragmatism in relationship to educational research. It allowed me to start thinking of my own point and purpose of my research ideas as well as evaluating research. I liked that he acknowledged that both educational research and educational practice are practices in their own right, and they must inform each other. Their relationship is that of cooperation and coordination (p. 108). It also acknowledges that we cannot obtain an ultimate Truth and answer to our research questions and that educational research is very challenging to generalize. I am also taking an evaluation course where we look at evaluating programs through different paradigms. We acknowledge pragmatism within the use branch of evaluation. Pragmatism was developed in response to post positivism because results weren't being used. It seems that qualitative research has become a more respected form of research to include and inform research on for instance, teacher's opinions and points of view on things that you could not obtain through qualitative data. Practice is helping to inform research. My question is then, how can we make research more translatable to those in the practice?
ReplyDeleteEven though I struggled with a lot of the “chicken or egg” conversations and different ways of using vocabulary in Dewey’s pragmatism, I do feel a certain sense of validation in some of my approaches to my work as well as educational research. In chapter five, Biesta and Burbules state that educational research and educational practice “both are practices in their own right, with different possibilities and different limitations, and each must inform the other” (p. 108). This, along with many other points in the book, gives weight to the importance of experience in the field of education- including the more “research-heavy” disciplines within education. I’m still unclear as to what would be considered “useful” educational research within the pragmatic paradigm. I believe that any research is useful regardless of whether or not it is considered generalizable- at the end of the day, it still provides information about an experience and that is knowledge gained. Does my belief apply within this paradigm?
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading this book and getting a thorough overview of pragmatism in education. It appears that pragmatism functions as sort of a meta-theory, and a took box from which to apply educational knowledge. Pragmatism appears to be set the stage for educational researchers to center their minds and their temporal needs as the primary way of inoculating knowledge and exploring the needs for education. Naturally, this sets the stage for a beautiful flexibility, as the it centers the educator and their mind, and their interpretation of a problem. I think pragmatism's future struggle lies in all theories that are founded on a true enlightenment, perspective on centering the human (in this case the educator), as the best determinant of discerning knowledge. How do we prevent every educator from falling into the trap of, my way is best, because I'm being pragmatic?
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DeleteKristian -
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed learning about pragmatism as I feel as if it really lined up with professional goals of using research as a driver for tangible change on college campuses. I also found pragmatism's ideas of intersubjectivity and the transactional nature of research to be very forward thinking and these concepts help to make sense of general thoughts and feelings I had in my towards research. I liked that research/educational science was framed in being in the minds of the educator/practitioner because this sentiment really stands with my desire to demystify research at the practitioner level as practitioners engage in inquiry and scientific research all the time at their jobs, it's just being framed differently.
Pragmatism is an approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application. This book wa very helpful in explaining Dewey's conceptualization of many terms that are thought of differently today. I find the pragmatism blurs the lines between notions that are thought of as distinctive. It represents how everything in our universe is working simultaneously and it is inaccurate to believe a phenomenon occurs without other forces present. Knowledge is not only human thoughts or actions, but is the interplay of the human with it's factual environment. This helps me recognize that research is useful and helpful, but that there is no way to complete understand the world as it is. It is interesting that research can learn about an event occurring at a specific point in time, but it is just crucial to recognize that there will always be error in this data and that the human funds of knowledge will never be a completely accurate description of any particular phenomenon.
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