Authenticity and Constructivism in Education

This paper examines the concept of authenticity and its relevance in education, from a philosophical perspective. Under the heading of educational authenticity (EA), I critique Fred Newmann’s views on authentic pedagogy and intellectual work. I argue against the notion that authentic engagement is usefully analyzed in terms of a relationship between school work and: “real” work. I also seek to clarify the increasingly problematic concept of constructivism, arguing that there are two distinct constructivist theses, only one of which deserves serious attention. I explain that the correspondence view of authenticity pays insufficient attention to the reality that the presence of “real world” connections does not guarantee that teaching and learning will be truly authentic. As a bridge to a philosophically acceptable understanding of authenticity, I reflect on John Dewey, who famously strove to base his views on education on the experience of the child, while rejecting that such experience requires validation from the “real” world. And Jean Jacques Rousseau offers several clues as to how the search for an authentic self might proceed beyond the Romanticist vision of an inner essence. These include the idea of the self as constructed inter-subjectively, which I capture by the term “one among others” and which, in turn, reveals persons as dialogically engaged in working out who they are and what they stand for (an idea found in the work of Charles Taylor). There is a clear affinity here with the imperative proposed by Newmann. I embrace the idea that the cultivation of dialogue should be a key priority in classrooms, because dialogue drives each individual to seek meaning in the context of seeing her/himself as one among others. I highlight the role of the classroom community of inquiry as an environment which has the dual function of cultivating disciplined inquiry and facilitating the kind of personal development that can, most properly, be termed “authentic”.

The Foundation of an Interpretative Sociology: A Critical Review of the Attempts of George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz

George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz proposed foundations for an interpretative sociology from opposite standpoints. Mead accepted the objective meaning structure a priori. His problem became therefore the explanation of the individuality and creativity of human actors in his social behavioristic approach. In contrast, Schutz started from the subjective consciousness of an isolated actor as a result of a phenomenological reduction. He was concerned with the problem of explaining the possibility of this isolated actor’s perceiving other actors in their existence, their concreteness, and the motives for their behavior. I treat these two approaches and their associated problems as equally relevant. My evaluation is based on their success in solving their specific problems. The aim is to decide which of the two approaches provides the more adequate foundation for an interpretative sociology.

Language,Behaviour, and Empathy. G.H. Mead’s and W.V.O. Quine’s Naturalized Theories of Meaning

ABSTRACT

The paper compares Mead’s and Quine’s behaviouristic theories of meaning and language, focusing in particular on Mead’s notion of sympathy and Quine’s notion of empathy. On the one hand, Quine seems to resort to an explanation similar to Mead’s notion of sympathy, referring to ‘empathy’ in order to justify the human ability to project ourselves into the witness’s position; on the other hand, Quine’s reference to the notion of empathy paves the way to a more insightful comparison between Mead’s behaviourism and an explanation of the emergence of the linguistic from pre-linguistic communication based on empathic identification processes. However, Mead is less ambiguous than Quine in his use of the notion of sympathy finds a fecund parallel in the current neuroscientific and neuro-phenomenological hypothesis on ‘empathy’. The article contends that the ambiguity in Quine’s account of empathy is due to the exigency of trying to elucidate the link between the rules of language in a cultural context and the natural, that is ‘instinctive’, basis of the process of learning a language. This is the reason why his epistemological behaviourism is particularly close to the non-reductionist naturalism of Mead. The working hypothesis proposed in the conclusion deals with the core notions of ‘gesture’ and ‘behaviour’.     

H. Richard Niebuhr's Reading of George Herbert Mead: Correcting,Completing, and Looking Ahead

In this essay, I reconstruct H. Richard Niebuhr's interpretation of George Herbert Mead's account of the social constitution of the self. Specifically, I correct Niebuhr's interpretation, because it mischaracterizes Mead's understanding of social constitution as more dialogical than ecological. I also argue that Niebuhr's interpretation needs completing because it fails to engage one of Mead's more significant notions, the I/me distinction within the self. By reconstructing Niebuhr's account of faith and responsibility as theologically self‐constitutive through Mead's I/me distinction, I demonstrate Niebuhr's deep yet unacknowledged agreement with Mead: the self is constituted by its participation in multiple communities, but responds to them creatively by enduring the moral perplexity of competing communal claims. I conclude by initiating a constructive account of conscience that follows from this agreement. Conscience is more ecological than dialogical because it regards our creative participation in multiple ecologies of social roles oriented by patterns of responsive relations.     

Justice as the Practice of Non-Coercive Action: A Study of John Dewey and Classical Daoism

In this essay, I will argue for an understanding of justice that is grounded in our imperfect world by drawing upon the works of John Dewey and the Classical Daoist philosophers. It will require a reconstructed understanding of persons as a field/continuum of interrelations and an updated understanding of human action and agency. This understanding of justice takes the form of non-coercive action, interaction that respects the particularity of each lived situation. The practice culminates in an ability to respond to the environment considered to be ziran (自然) or ‘self-so’ by the Daoist Philosophers. As described in the Dao De Jing, it is the cultivation of the ‘Three Jewels of the Dao’, the most central of them being compassion making, this practice of justice as non-coercive action also understandable as the practice of compassion as described by the Classical Daoist philosophers.     

Influence and development: Two basic paradigms of education

The article discusses two basic paradigms of western educational theory, namely the concept of influence and the concept of development. Two historical contextes are analyzed, John Locke's theory of human learning and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of natural development. Both theories are rejected in favour of a position beyond influence and development. This position of a theory of education (Erziehung) is marked with the term moral communication.An earlier and slightly different version of this article was presented to the International Symposion The Crisis of Schools (Corsendonck/Belgium, March 1992). It was translated from the german original by Annette Roeder. The final draft is my own.     

Agency and the Other: On the intersubjective roots of self-identity

The essay argues that a systematic reconstruction of the intersubjective grounds of self-consciousness and self-identity will yield a complex non-reductive notion of agency. Core features of human agency include intentional causality, conscious understanding thereof, as well as the capacity to distinguish self-caused from externally caused phenomena. By analyzing how self-consciousness emerges from intersubjective perspective-taking and dialogue, a socially embedded and symbolically mediated notion of self-identity—one which is able to preserve the core features of human agency—becomes viable. G.H. Mead’s work serves as heuristic framework to articulate the extent to which the Other’s irreducible agency is constitutive of the self’s capacity to establish an identity, now understood as a socially situated narrative self-interpreting process. Self-identity reveals to be an essential open yet not fragmented dynamic, a socially situated yet agent-driven phenomenon, and ethically indebted to the Other as providing the essential gift of selfhood.     

New Voices for Expressive Pragmatism: Bridging the Divide between Pragmatism and Perfectionism

This article explores the theme of moral rationality by examining two distinct philosophical approaches, those of perfectionism and pragmatism broadly construed. It does this by comparing Cora Diamond's reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals with an imaginary reading of the same novel tuned to a moral sensibility closer to Deweyan pragmatism. By comparing a real account with an imaginary one, the article intends to press Diamond's perfectionist understanding of problematic moral experience into confrontation with a pragmatist account of the same phenomenon. This reading becomes the starting point for a broader confrontation between two larger philosophical conceptions: perfectionism and pragmatism. By this comparison, the article means to extend a dialogue begun more than a century ago, showing in particular that integrating both perspectives within a common moral epistemology provides new insights into our understanding of moral experience. The general claim is that their differences notwithstanding, perfectionism and pragmatism share a common moral sensibility, although they part ways on some decisive issues that the article makes explicit.     

Moral Philosophers as Ethical Engineers: Limits of Moral Philosophy and a Pragmatist Alternative

Ever since Kant, moral philosophers have been more or less animated by the mission of discovering inescapable law‐like rules that would provide a binding justification for morality. Recently, however, many have started to question (a) whether this is possible and (b) what, after all, this project could achieve. An alternative vision of the task of moral philosophy starts from the pragmatist idea that philosophizing begins and ends in human experiencing. It leads to a view where morality is seen as a “social technology” that aims to make living together possible, and strengthens people's capability to live a good life within a society. The role of moral philosophy is, accordingly, to develop our moral tools further. Moral philosophers become ethical engineers who use their expertise in ethical topics to criticize existing “moral technology” and construct new concepts, tools, and theories that better answer the current challenges for living a good life.     

Signs and the process of interpretation: sign as an object and as a process

Historically the words representation and symbol have had overlapping meanings, meanings that usually disregard the role played by the interpreter. Peirce’s theory of signs accounts for these meanings and also for the role of the interpreter. His theory draws attention to the static and dynamic nature of signs. Sign interpretation can be viewed as a continuous dynamic and evolving process. The static and dynamic nature of signs helps us understand the teaching–learning activity as a process of interpretation on the part of teacher and students. The paper attempts to explain the classroom interpretation process on the part of the actors involved using the Peircean theory of signs.     

Preference for modes of dispute resolution as a function of process and decision control

Research on procedural justice has suggested that the distribution of control among participants can be used to classify dispute-resolution procedures and may be an important determinant of preference for such procedures. This experiment demonstrates that control can be meaningfully divided into two components: control over the presentation of evidence and control over the final decision. The experiment placed subjects (law students and undergraduates) in a situation of conflict and varied two between-subjects factors: (1) Role, whether subjects expected to role-play third parties (law students) or litigants (undergraduates), and (2) Orientation, whether individuals focused on equity claims (appeals to a norm of fairness) or legal claims (appeals to a strict, legal interpretation of events). As a control, a third-party neutral-orientation condition was included. In addition, subjects were presented with four dispute-resolution procedures which varied in third-party control over the presentation of evidence (Process Control) and third-party control over the final decision (Decision Control) as within-subjects factors. Results revealed that both litigants and third parties preferred high rather than low third-party decision control. Litigants with an equity orientation preferred low third-party control over the presentation of evidence, particularly when third parties had high rather than low decision control. Third parties and litigants with a legal orientation preferred low rather than high third-party process control only when there was high third-party decision control. Litigant preferences were more affected by variation in process control than variation in decision control while third-party preferences were more affected by variation in decision control than in process control. As a check on external validity, military judges given a neutral orientation were asked to evaluate and express preferences for the four dispute-resolution procedures. Their results were not detectably different from those of the law students who role-played third parties in the main portion of the study.     

Children's metacognition: Exploring relations among knowledge,process, and motivational variables

Following a metamemory pretest, 60 first and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) were divided into three treatment groups which received task-specific strategy instructions appropriate for three memory problems, general metacognitive information about subordinate and superordinate processing, or both strategy and metacognitive training. Maintenance and generalization versions of the memory tasks were given, followed by an attributional assessment of children's perceptions of the causes for specific success and failure outcomes. Post-training scores on the memory tasks showed that strategy training was highly successful. Metacognitive training appeared to have no effect on the metameory or strategy scores with one exception: metamemory and strategy use on the generalization task were significantly correlated only for children who received both metacognitive and strategy training. Apparently, children who were initially high in metamemory skills profited more from the comprehensive training package, using new metacognitive insights to aid the generalization of acquired strategies to the transfer tasks. Among strategy-trained children those who attributed success to effort were both more strategic and higher in metamemory than those who attributed task outcomes to noncontrollable factors such as ability or task characteristics. Results were discussed in terms of the interactive nature of knowledge, process, and motivational variables as determinants of strategy transfer.     

B. F. Skinner and G. H. Mead: on biological science and social science.

Skinner's contributions to psychology provide a unique bridge between psychology conceptualized as a biological science and psychology conceptualized as a social science. Skinner focused on behavior as a naturally occurring biological phenomenon of interest in its own right, functionally related to surrounding events and, in particular (like phylogenesis), subject to selection by its consequences. This essentially biological orientation was further enhanced by Skinner's emphasis on the empirical foundations provided by laboratory-based experimental analyses of behavior, often with nonhuman subjects. Skinner's theoretical writings, however, also have affinity with the traditions of constructionist social science. The verbal behavior of humans is said to be subject, like other behavior, to functional analyses in terms of its environment, in this case its social context. Verbal behavior in turn makes it possible for us to relate to private events, a process that ultimately allows for the development of consciousness, which is thus said to be a social product. Such ideas make contact with aspects of G. H. Mead's social behaviorism and, perhaps of more contemporary impact in psychology, L. Vygotsky's general genetic law of cultural development. Failure to articulate both the biological and the social science aspects of Skinner's theoretical approach to psychology does a disservice to his unique contribution to a discipline that remains fragmented between two intellectual traditions.     

Early education as community intervention: Assisting an ethnic minority to be ready for school

An early education program designed for an ethnic minority of Native Hawaiians implemented at the community rather than the individual child level of intervention is described. The program development effort is theory driven and provides an opportunity to investigate the application of neo-Vygotskian theory to an applied community educational problem. Though not specifically derived from the work of O'Donnell, Tharp, and Wilson (1993), the project reported here shares a common intellectual heritage. This paper demonstrates the parallels between the early education program developed for Hawaiian children and the applicability of the theory presented in the work of O'Donnell et al. Portions of this research were supported by Grant #40212121 and Grant #MCJ495051 from the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health and Resource Management, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded to the Center of Development of Early Education, Kamehameha School, Honolulu, Hawaii 96817, and to the Early Intervention Research Institute, Center for Persons with Disabilities, Utah State University, respectively.     

Contemplative dialogue as the basis for a transdisciplinary attitude: Ecoliteracy toward an education for human sustainability

Our EcoDialogue Center is an educational space for human sustainability within the University of Veracruz. We propose that creating sustainable knowledge requires re-thinking how we conceive ourselves as human beings. This requires paying attention to what we call “the quality of being,” which means caring about and attending to the physical–emotional–mental–spiritual as the foundation of education. This way we can create a space where we can dialogue contemplatively where all dimensions of our lives interact; the physical, the emotional, the communitarian, the social politic, the planetarium, and the spiritual being act with social–environmental responsibility.     

Generalized others and imaginary audiences: A neo-Meadian approach to adolescent egocentrism

Piaget’s conception of adolescent egocentrism, as interpreted and extended by Elkind (1967) is discussed, and research that has related Elkind’s egocentric ideations of personal fable and imaginary audience to age and intellectual development is considered. Alternative theories of adolescent egocentrism and its decentration are examined, and a neo-Meadian framework is discussed that understands the imaginary audience ideation of adolescents as a possibly functional, highly variable response to the complex task of coordinating individual and social perspectives as part of the adolescent’s search for identity.     

Observer states and traits and the imitative process: A test of a new formulation

In three studies the formulation was tested that characteristics of the observer have an effect on imitation only in situations which provide little information concerning appropriate or expected behaviors. In Experiment I, female college students of high, medium, and low need for social approval underwent either a high or low arousal manipulation. Subjects observed a videotaped model who engaged in a size judgment task. For half the subjects the model received verbal reward (high information); for the other half the model received no feedback (low information). Subsequently, the model and subject responded alternately in the task during which no feedback was given. Neither need for social approval nor manipulated arousal was found to be systematically related to imitation in either information condition. However, the hypothesized relationships were found when subjects' arousal or anxiety levels were determined by self ratings. These results were replicated in a second, similar experiment. In a third experiment, which involved an improved arousal manipulation, the hypothesized relationships were confirmed.     

Face memory and hemispheric preference: Emotionality and extraversion

Subjects made arousing or nonarousing judgments about photographs of strangers, then had an unannounced recognition test over the photographs. Emotional orienting tasks led to better retention than nonemotional tasks. Assuming emotionality is predominantly a right-hemisphere activity, then this result is consistent with other research showing a right-hemisphere advantage in processing faces. This difference was most clear for subjects with a right-hemisphere cognitive style. Extraversion had no effect on face recognition, nor did a subject's cognitive style seem to be associated with extraversion or neuroticism scores.