Truth And Knowledge In Curriculum Making

Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Making, addresses issues in curriculum and instruction, such as the lack of Black teachers, minority representation, and mentorship. The book arose from a serial interpretation of five published narrative inquiries that pinpointed complexities lived in a teacher knowledge community at T.P. Yaeger Middle School, a campus located in the fourth largest urban center in America. The inquiry initially resulted in a documentary-style presentation at an educational conference using performance narrative inquiry as an arts-based method to recount the research. In Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Making, the process of researchers turned actors is unraveled by looking at the lived experiences and identifying the embodied knowledge of teachers in different content areas including Physical Education, Music, Teaching English as a Second Language, Mathematics, and Reading. The authors use parallel stories, counter stories, story constellations, musical narrative inquiry, performance narrative inquiry and other narrative means of sense-making as they examine how they may relate to those stories. Ethical research dilemmas, including the how and why behind each author’s choice to burrow into difficult topics such as race, gender and conflict resolution are revealed. By unpacking the hidden curriculum, examining value creation and by revealing isolated relational experiences of participants and researchers, Truth and Knowledge in Curriculum Making instantiates and outlines how truth and knowledge may be formed in educational settings through intertwining narrative inquiry, teacher knowledge and aesthetic ways of knowing.

This book, first published in 1987, examines the notion of truth and then discusses knowledge and the way in which much of our knowledge revises or rejects the common-sense we start from. The author argues that our knowledge is not as secure as some would like to think and that there are important limits to the possibility for explanation. He shows how values permeate our ordinary thinking and argues against the objectivity of these values, showing the practical consequences of this argument for teaching in schools. This stimulating approach to a fundamental educational issue does not require previous experience of formal philosophy and will be useful to both education students and teachers in schools.

This book revolves around curriculum making, reciprocal learning, and the best-loved self. It draws on extensive school-based studies conducted with teachers in the United States, China, and Canada, and weaves in experiences from other cross-national projects, keynote addresses, archival research, and editorial work. The elucidation of the ‘best-loved self’ drives home the point that teachers are more than the subject matter they teach: they are students’ role models and allies. Curriculum making and reciprocal learning relationships enrich teachers’ and students’ being and becoming as they live curriculum alongside one another—with the goal of more satisfying lives held firmly in view.

In the 1960s educational philosophers showed enormous interest in the nature of knowledge and the curriculum. This work responds to the need to reinstate conceptual problems of truth, knowledge and the curriculum on the agenda for debate.

"This book presents practical conversations with philosophical and theoretical concerns regarding the use of digital technologies in the educational process, challenging the assumption that information accessibility is synonymous with learning"--

This collection aims to explore different conceptions of epistemological inquiry and their influence on pedagogy and the curricular content of primary and secondary education. It is arguable that curriculum policy makers have continued to subscribe to a foundationalist paradigm of rational educational planning. This is, however, considered largely untenable by educational philosophers in light of the impact of 'postmodern' philsophical critiques on the notions of objectivity, truth and authority in our claims for knowledge. This volume fills a major gap in the current literature of educational philosophy by calling for the establishment of a coherent route between rational foundationalism and intellectually promiscuous postmodernism in order to address the point and purpose of contemporary education.

The design of school curriculums involves deep thought about the nature of knowledge and its value to learners and society. It is a serious responsibility that raises a number of questions. What is knowledge for? What knowledge is important for children to learn? How do we decide what knowledge matters in each school subject? And how far should the knowledge we teach in school be related to academic disciplinary knowledge? These and many other questions are taken up in What Should Schools Teach? The blurring of distinctions between pedagogy and curriculum, and between experience and knowledge, has served up a confusing message for teachers about the part that each plays in the education of children. Schools teach through subjects, but there is little consensus about what constitutes a subject and what they are for. This book aims to dispel confusion through a robust rationale for what schools should teach that offers key understanding to teachers of the relationship between knowledge (what to teach) and their own pedagogy (how to teach), and how both need to be informed by values of intellectual freedom and autonomy. This second edition includes new chapters on Chemistry, Drama, Music and Religious Education, and an updated chapter on Biology. A revised introduction reflects on emerging discourse around decolonizing the curriculum, and on the relationship between the knowledge that children encounter at school and in their homes.

This book is an argument for reflexivity in the act of teaching, which means to acknowledge that intention guides the act of teaching. Teaching must create attention towards processes of collectivity in the classroom. Today, teaching is both acts of expressing knowledge and acts of securing justice to all students through a mediation of knowledge. Teaching therefore expresses both knowledge with reference to school subjects, and justice according to the distribution of this knowledge. The authors argue for teaching as the driver of education. To pay attention to teaching is to pay attention to that which is inside the system of education. To consider education as a mediation of knowledge between generations, places teaching as an act of performing the content of education, in a class in a school. The complexity of these processes is easily overlooked when education is used as a means in competitive economies. The approach taken in this text is that deliberations about teaching must be based on historicity. The support for this argument builds on a reading of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. The book addresses teaching as an integral part of the learning process. In education today, everything seems to be concentrated around learning, as if teaching no longer takes place. Teachers and teacher educators need a language to discuss and understand teaching, both as personal and institutional actions. A Ricoeurian approach to a discussion on teaching as a reflexive and institutional practice, provides a timely approach to important questions related to teaching in our day and age.