Running head: REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS

Reflective Analysis on Ways of Knowing

Erin Peters

Ways of Knowing

Spring 2005

When I first entered the Ways of Knowing class I had two disconnected views of the world. In my academic life, I was definitely a rational thinker that depended on empirical evidence for arguments. In a religious, metaphysical sense, I saw how things interacted as systems and how our individual actions could influence the larger community. I had not incorporated these ways of thinking and thought of them as different realms, depending on the role I was taking on. Before I took this class, I did not see how logical and systemic ways of thinking were two ends of the same spectrum.

In my studies and profession as a teacher, I used my rational, linear perspective and required that every argument be backed up by empirical evidence. When other teachers would make claims about activities that “worked” for them, I would question their claim until they provided some evidence to back up what they said. When academic arguments were built, I wanted to follow the logic behind them and test them against what I knew to be true. If there was any dissonance, I would pick apart arguments to find the weak links between their steps. When there was no cognitive dissonance between the argument and my experience, I accepted it as knowledge providing there was evidence to support it.

My metaphysical side was rarely accessed in classes and in my position as a teacher. I thought that the interconnectedness of things and beings was reserved for religious purposes. Even thought I felt the connections strongly, I rarely tried to use this way of knowing in an academic sense because there was no check for this way of understanding. I felt it was not rigorous as rationalism was, so this way of knowing was relegated to my spiritual realm only.

Ever since I was a child, I had a strong sense that I constructed my knowing. I knew that when teachers told me facts, that I would check them against my experience. If I didn’t have any experience in subjects at school, I sought out comparable experiences. I didn’t have any language to describe my learning process until I took education courses, but I understood that I wasn’t an empty vessel to be filled by facts. I was always checking what I heard against what I experienced.

I think the biggest influence on my rational way of knowing was my home situation when I was a child. I was a refugee from Northern Ireland and came to America with my grandparents when I was three. They passed away when I was in second grade and I lived in several foster homes until I graduated high school. Since I didn’t really have a consistent family structure to depend on for a strong intellectual foundation, I looked to school processes to structure my way of knowing. School was a consistency for me, and I looked to its culture for guidance.

Logical ways of thinking were dominant in grade school, junior high and high school. I tended to excel in math and science, where algorithms were prominent. I could easily listen to the teacher tell me how to solve a problem, take another problem and apply it using the algorithm as guidance. This method was useful to me. It was direct, sequential, and no-nonsense. I saw literature and history as a luxury, rather than a core subject. I felt that telling stories, especially fictional ones, was trivial. Besides to me, nature as a mechanism was the most interesting thing in the world. People could make up fanciful stories, but they paled in comparison to the truths found in nature.

My metaphysical way of thinking was developed through interactions with my grandmother, who was originally from Kyoto, Japan. My grandmother was Zen Buddhist, but my grandfather thought her religion was nonsense and forbade any talk of it in his house. I didn’t know it at the time, but my grandmother was teaching me the underlying principles of Buddhism in our everyday conversations. For example, she would talk about the law of cause and effect when we planted flowers in the window box and connected planting flowers to the interactions that surround it. As I got older, I started to understand that she wasn’t allowed to teach me these things in the presence of my grandfather and began to relish the secretiveness of the topics we shared. Because I had to keep this type of knowing in hiding, it probably contributed to my separation of the logical way I thought in public and the systemic way I thought in private.

My study of electrical engineering and in physics as an undergraduate reinforced my logical side of thinking. The majority of learning focused on applying algorithms to solve discrete problems. As an engineering and science student, I was rewarded when I could follow preexisting sequential steps that formed the algorithms. I was taught that there was only one answer to a problem, although there may be more than one path to get there. As I became more specialized as an engineer, I found that I narrowed the ways I thought. After a few years in engineering, I decided that I was losing the ability to think in different ways and went into teaching to become more creative.

My experiences in my graduate degrees in educational psychology and social foundations of education created a great deal of cognitive dissonance with my sequential thinking. As I wrote papers, I depended heavily on linear explanations of evidence instead of creative thinking. I still found it difficult to engage my systemic thinking in the academic world and preferred to be logical. Due to the broad nature of social foundations of education, it was increasingly difficult to accomplish the thinking required for the assignments and for the comprehensive exam unless I loosened my tight grip on linear thinking. I worked toward seeing trends and relationships across a broad spectrum rather than searching for smaller, more directly explainable phenomena. I hadn’t integrated my logical with my systemic thinking but was more able to access each one equally depending on the circumstance.

The assignments in my doctoral classes have helped me to weave together my logical, analytical side with my systemic, chaotic side. The type of thinking required in Educational Leadership helped me to link logic with systems more clearly. I began to see how choices of an individual can influence a system. My Ways of Knowing class, however, was instrumental in weaving my different styles more closely together. The mixture of readings aided in revealing the perspective that both ways of knowing are valid and can be used simultaneously. When we read Descartes, it evoked my rational, logical side and I could see how this way of knowing was successful, which was closely aligned to my academic way of thinking. Kuhn made me expand my thinking because prior to reading this book I thought that science just built upon itself in a linear fashion. Kuhn, along with the discussions in class, made me realize that science wasn’t entirely linear, and I could remain faithful to science while still keeping an open mind. Belenky et al.’s Women’s Ways of Knowing was the turning point to a more complete integration of my logical and systemic ways of knowing. I was able to see how these women structured their research categories logically, but was also able to see that there was a system that orchestrated the hierarchy of the categories. I was able to fully integrate logic within a system to create original ideas.

As a practitioner, I am better able to see organizational systems around my classroom and within my classroom because my learning in this class. School systems often validate one way of knowing, logical, while ignoring or condemning others. Students bring different prior ways of knowing to the classroom and some students’ ways of knowing are validated and some are not through the ways schools expect students to learn. I have come to recognize that I excelled as a student in public school because I embraced a logical way of knowing at the time. Had I embraced a systemic way of knowing instead, I would have had an entirely different experience in public school. I need to respect the various ways of knowing that my students bring to my classroom and try to bypass the negative aspects of the tendency of school systems to reward linear, logical thinkers. Another layer of confusion about the educational system has been lifted for me.

As a researcher, I see that qualitative research methods need more public validation than quantitative research methods. This class has influenced me to question and react to the governmental documents that are published, instead of taking them at face value. I have also gained a wider view of the public conversations researchers have via academic arguments presented in professional journals. I appreciate the tolerance for different ways of knowing in open forums and hope someday to contribute new ideas to these forums.

My current way of knowing is a foundation of constructivism fed by logical channels, creative channels, systemic channels, and narrative channels. I am no longer constrained by understanding only logical arguments, but can see value in other narrative ways of knowing. I have more sources of information to contribute to help with my cognitive flow. I see the validity in incorporating context into problems rather than trying to minimize context for the sake of logic and generalizing. I also seek more complex problems rather than simple ones, as I had previously. I have learned that I was forcing out a whole realm of knowledge by relegating my systemic way of knowing into my spiritual world only. Now that I am confidently incorporating this way of knowing into my academic world, I feel that I have only scratched the surface of understanding the world around me. I am acting on this realization by seeking out books that influenced other people and reading them. I am also going back to some of the books I read in my Masters’ degree and rereading them with a new eye.

I am validated personally by learning how to bring my systemic way of knowing to a scholarly place in my life. I felt that it was a valid way of knowing, but was never able to utilize this way of knowing for academic purposes. Now that I have witnessed that important ideas are often more complicated than a linear series of events, I can attempt to answer complicated questions with confidence. Professionally, I feel slightly embarrassed that I didn’t know ten year ago what I know now. I would have been a much more effective teacher if I had understood the complexity of knowing when I first began teaching and am striving to incorporate systemic thinking into my students’ understanding. Although developmentally, eighth grade students may not be ready for chaos theory, they can understand how one event may lead to a change in a larger community. When I first began to take teacher certification courses, I excitedly anticipated my work as a teacher because I felt I would improve the quality of life for some people. I have been a teacher for 14 years and have had a respectable career. Now that I am embarking on becoming a scholar, I feel the same anticipation that I did when I wanted to become a teacher. Being exposed to various ways of knowing and their rationale, I feel that in the future I can make a contribution to educational scholarship, and I eagerly work toward that goal.