The Role of Knowledge in Education: Cultural Literacy or Transformative Pedagogy?

1. Cultural Literacy or Transformative Pedagogy? - Knowledge and its inferential articulationJan Derry

2. Core Knowledge or Transformative Pedagogy? • ‘all human communities are founded upon specific shared information…[and the] transmission of specific information’ • ‘the basic goal of education in a human community is acculturation’ (Hirsch, 1987, Cultural Literacy: What every American needs to know)

3. ‘knowledge…handed down by unimpeachable Authority …or…mined and purified, once upon a time, by men (mostly) who were much cleverer than both the students and the teacher, usually in places called universities’ (Claxton, 2008)

4. What epistemological presuppositions? The education of the symbolic analyst: We are now part of the ‘knowledge age’ where ‘data . . . will be available . . . at the touch of a computer key’ (Reich, 1992). ‘Consider first the capacity for abstraction. The real world is nothing but a vast jumble of noises, shapes, colours, smells and textures - essentially meaningless until the human mind imposes some order on them.’ (Reich, 1992)

5. Knowledge as a provisional human construction • ‘…psychologists checked to see if …attitudes to “knowledge” influenced how they went about learning Newton’s Laws of Motion. Somewhat to their surprise, they found that the students who saw knowledge as a provisional, human construction, constantly open to question and change, showed a deeper and more accurate understanding of Newton than did their peers who believed that Science was Eternal Truth’.(Claxton, 2008)

6. But the interpretation of results in terms of the students’ perspective on knowledge as ‘a provisional, human construction’ fails to attend to the detail of what students are, in fact, accessing. • The contrast of ‘certain’ and ‘provisional’ neglects the structure and form of the knowledge domain (its normative constraints) and as a result is insufficiently fine-grained.

7. Students’ orientation to what they study is crucially important. If they have come to think of knowledge only as direct and simple representation of the world they will not develop their concepts in a way that allows them to fully grasp what they study. But if students are led to believe that all knowledge needs to be continually challenged something is lacking.

8. Is lack of provisionality really the problem? • ‘conceptual understanding in physics is the product of a gradual, complex process that takes a lot of time to accomplish’ (Stathopoulou and Vosnaidou, 2007) Two positions: • knowledge ‘is made up by people’ modified by ‘the empirical’ • the structure of thought is understood as connected to the conditions in which it emerges?

9. What’s the problem? Unchangeable knowledge or lack of awareness of normative constraints A failure to appreciate fully, and to take account of, the normative constraints that knowledge relies upon – i.e. that the meaning of any one concept is determined by its connection with other concepts - leads to an inaccurate target of criticism.

10. Crook (2002) compared psychology students’ collaborations around traditional vs computer-based notes • Traditional notes: incompleteness of the personal record - opportunity to question and challenge, justify claims, to open up a referential device to work on uncertainty. • Computer-based notes: ‘perhaps it seemed less appropriate to work at collectively remembering an event that seemed to be already represented before them in comprehensive and official form’.

11. Vygotsky on Concepts The nature of things is disclosed not in direct contemplation of one single object or another, but in connections and relations that are manifested in movement and development of the object, and these connect it to the rest of reality.

12. An example- the concept ‘Gene’ • no one clear concept of a gene; the gene concept undergoes transformation as it is deployed in research. • The conflation of gene understood in terms of preformationism and gene understood in terms of genesis lead to loss of their productive power. In each case, the meaning of the concept ‘gene’ is constituted by the particular system of connections of which it is part. (Moss, 2003)

13. ‘the term ‘gene’ figures in two distinct explanatory games in molecular biology. Each of these two sets of inferences motivated by the gene concept is legitimate in its appropriate context, but conflating them leads to fallacious inferences and an inappropriate version of genetic determinism’ (Brigandt, 2010)

14. The internal connection of things is disclosed with the help of thinking in concepts, for to develop a concept of some object means to disclose a series of connections and relations of the object with the rest of reality, to include it in a complex system of phenomena in a system of judgementsin which the concept is disclosed. (Vygotsky, 1998)

15. Knowledge as unimpeachable authority If we think that ‘the process of generalising is a direct abstraction of traits, then we will inevitably come to the conclusion that thinking abstractly is removed from reality’ (Vygotsky, 1998)

16. Freedom and Second Nature Contemporary philosophy shifts attention from what it is assumed that we share with animals, to what it is that is distinctive about human beings - our responsiveness to reasons what John McDowell calls ‘a good gloss on one notion of freedom’.

17. Taking up a stance in the Space of Reasons ‘What is the knower able to do that . . . the thermostat cannot? …they may respond differentially to just the same range of stimuli…The knower has the practical know-how to situate that response in a network of inferential relations—to tell what follows from something being . . . cold, what would be evidence for it, what would be incompatible with it, and so on’ (Brandom, 2000, p. 162).

18. How are our beliefs answerable to the world? • “How can experience, standing in judgment over, say, a belief, return a verdict sufficiently favourable for the belief to count as knowledge?” (‘the tribunal of experience’) • Experience must and yet cannot stand in judgement of our thinking (antinomy)

19. So where is experience located? • If experience made up of impressions: impingements of the world on our sensory capacities - • then not connected by relations of one thing being warranted by another. So if experience is made up of impressions it can’t serve as a tribunal (McDowell, J., 1994, Mind and World)

20. Experience as already Conceptual ‘The relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on, in receptivity…it is not that they are exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity’ (McDowell, 1994) Humans inhabit not simply nature but second nature which is already infused with meaning as a result of the practices and modifications of nature through which it has been brought about.

21. Move Concepts into Nature • to include the mind in nature does not entail a reductive naturalism. The apparent dichotomy assumed between the natural and the normative or between nature and reason allows us to think of the content of experience as something separate from reason. • ‘[e]xperiences have their content by virtue of the fact that conceptual capacities are operative in them’ (McDowell)

22. It’s the division between reason and nature that allows Claxton and others critics to place emphasis on us as makers of meaning, rather than as responsive to reasons. A part of the picture is missing – the normative constraints that we institute in order to bind ourselves rather than be determined by brute nature.

23. Responsiveness to Reasons • Thought can bear on empirical reality only because to be a thinker at all is to be at home in the space of reasons. • A normative context is necessary for the idea of being in touch with the world at all, whether knowledgeably or not. (McDowell, 1994) • Human beings are…born mere animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity.

24. resists the idea that nature excludes what is distinctively human and instead insists that human second nature is part of nature • Shifting focus to second nature gives priority to the development of our cognitive capacities by initiation into language and tradition • We are brought into ‘a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what’, and they thereby acquire ‘the capacity to think and act’

25. Constraint by norms basis of freedom • It is our capacity to be responsive to reasons and not simply caused to respond that allows our actions to be constrained by norms (that we have ‘collectively’ put in place) rather than by unmediated nature. • ‘The laws of nature do not bind us by obligation, but only by compulsion. The institution of authority is human work; we bind ourselves with norms’ (Brandom, 1994)

26. Norms instituted collectively fund objectivity via ongoing articulation • Through our activities (and processes of Recognition) we distinguish correct and incorrect ways of taking the world. • As a student develops their understanding of a concept, the network of inferential relations constituting their concept changes. This involves changes in what is entailed by and what follows from the particular endorsements the learner applies.

27. Brandom on concepts to have conceptual content is just for it [a concept] to play a role in the inferential game of making claims and giving and asking for reasons. To grasp or understand such a concept is to have practical mastery over the inferences it is involved in—to know, in the practical sense of being able to distinguish, what follows from the applicability of a concept, and what it follows from. (Brandom, 1994)

28. Concept development The meaning of a concept, rather than being fixed by reference, is fleshed out by the inferential connections that constitute it. As these connections change, so the meanings of concepts alter. We can see the process by which knowledge itself develops as one of inferential articulation (Rouse, 2011). This opens the way to a more fine-grained account of pedagogic practice and of what is involved in knowledge.

29. Knowledge as Social Articulation The primary phenomenon to understand … is not the content, justification, and truth of beliefs but instead the opening and sustaining of a “space of reasons” in which there could be conceptually articulated meaning and justification at all…This “space of reasons” is an ongoing pattern of interaction among ourselves and with our partially shared surroundings. (Rouse, 2015)

30. Significance of the Social Articulation of Knowledge for Teaching and Learning • Instead of restricting how we think of conceptual content to its representational aspect, conceptual content is understood in terms of its conceptual role (Brandom, 1994). • Guidance with respect to the normative constraints within disciplines is essential if learners are to draw upon the resources already established by generations before them and to develop dispositions rather than simply become ‘specialists’ in inert, so called, ‘knowledge’.