EDUC 800 Ways of Knowing

Paper on Way of Knowing: Classroom-Based Action-Oriented Inquiry 

When this class began, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I felt like I knew nothing about philosophy. I didn’t even know what ways of knowing consisted of. I never considered myself a ‘connoisseur’ of philosophy, so how could I become a ‘critic’? (According to Eisner, “one can be a great connoisseur without being a critic, but one cannot be a critic without some level of connoisseurship.”) The objectives of the course included describing, comparing, and contrasting ways of knowing from different perspectives such as the Cartesian, the positivist, the narrative, and the empiricist approaches.

When we were prompted the first day of class to describe our ways of knowing, I described my way of knowing as mostly experiential. I thought that if I were able to prove something logically, I could accept it as a truth. I believed that I was a non-conformist, and didn’t easily accept what others told me. Rather, I wanted to find out for myself – even if it meant finding out the hard way. But…I soon realized that what I thought was my way of knowing was not completely accurate. I was indeed influenced by other people, and it didn’t always consist of direct experience.

Before the experiences from the readings and the reflections, I would have called myself more of a positivist empiricist coupled with the Cartesian philosophies (if I had known what these definitions were before the class). Although I now don’t disagree that I come to know through experiences with the senses and using the scientific method, I have realized that my way of coming to know relies more heavily on the narrative than I initially realized.

The three philosophers that most resonated with me:

Bruner contends that since culture and meaning cannot be separated, knowing and communication cannot be separated either. We have lexicons, but not contexticons. Bruner helped me come to the realization that culture truly does provide the tools for organizing and understanding the world in communicable ways.

Kuhn describes that the education of a social scientist consists of: reading original sources, being made aware of the variety of problems that the members of his future group have attempted to solve and the outcomes of their efforts, analyzing competing solutions and evaluating them, and understanding and choosing between existing paradigms. This seems to be exactly what we are expected to do as scholars in Communities of Practice.

Lyons and LaBoskey seek an alternative method of teacher assessment that can capture the complexities and messiness of the teaching profession. They argue that the standard way of assessing cannot capture the complete picture of teaching. Rather, they call for the narrative way of knowing. The text argues that the narrative is a natural cognitive process of creating a way to make sense of what we see around us. Teaching lends itself to this way of knowing because teaching is so personal and yet practiced by so many.