My Answers to the Wk4 Guiding Questions

Guiding Questions for Week4: Dall'Alba:

/*Last week we explored the role of epistemology in thinking about the aims and process of education. This week we're going to read a "contemporary" take on education philosophy that critiques an overemphasis on epistemology (theory of knowledge) and an artificial separation of "mind" from "body".

Q1: What is the basis of Dall'Alba's critique on current views of education? (what is her argument?)

Q2:What alternative framework does she put forth?

Q3:What might it look like to design an education based on this alternative framework? */

Me: we are human beings facing multiple possibilities. We become what we are by pressing ahead into one of them. According to Dewey, education should open doors and give connections to students' growth. However, only opening doors is not enough. That is, we teach students lots of knowledge and skills, which will give them lots of possibilities. Then, how to choose one possibility. If the education helps the students to make this choice by claiming that(though some programs do not explicitly address this): we are a engineering/medical/law programs, so you will be an engineer/doctor/lawyer. That's dangerous. This leaves all the integration work to the students themselves. The students have their own stands, but maybe unclear(not clear about what kind of people they want to be, but they have some belief deep in their heart, education should help them to develop that belief, and to make it clear), education should help them to form and shape their own stands of what kind of people they want to become, help them go through the struggle of becoming, and tell them the ambiguities are not conflicts to be solved.

Q3: What might it look like to design an education based on this alternative framework?

I finally realize that what philosophers do is not create theories of education(or teaching, learning, like that); instead, they have analyzed theories and arguments--sometimes enhancing previous arguments, sometimes raising powerful objections that lead to the revision of abandonment of theories and lines of arguments(Noddings). In other words, philosophers of education answer "what is education?", but they do not usually answer "what education should do?"--they do not answer questions about pedagogical details.

Dall'Alba mainly gives the framework (Q2, this is a conceptualism), and do not obviously answers what the education will look like based on this framework(Q3), but she does give some clues about that and also should be in some of her previous work she cites as references in this articles.

The Education based on Ontological dimension simply looks like that students are offered a bunch of activities in line with their future professions, and during the activities, students learn knowledge. Wow, this looks like Schon's "knowing-in-action"!!! Probably, this sounds ridiculous,my feeling based on my super-shallow philosophical knowledge is that, Schon says "knowing-in-action" is another aspect of epistemology, but Dall'Alba says this belongs to ontology aspect.

Reference:

Dall’Alba, G. (2009). Learning Professional Ways of Being: Ambiguities of Becoming. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41(1), 34-45.

Schon, D. A. (1995). 'Knowing-in-action: the new scholarship requires a new epistemology'. Change, 27(6), 26–34.