Class notes, S S15

Teachers,

Thanks for the moments of brilliance (truly), insight and thoughtfulness.  You helped me make sense of the ideas.  Below is a brief synpopted version of our discussion.  Please comment, if you need to share, or add if I have not done justify to the depth of meaning you experienced.

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Plato, "Allegory of the Cave"

Why does the prisoner, now able to see reality, willingly go back into the cave?

• "pity" - compassion, empathy, mercy, 'provoked' to go back
• relationships/others - they are his people; no one else to share knowledge with?
• progress to stay out; retreat to return?

How does the prisoner get freed in the first place?

• liberated by another; 'compelled' to leave (dragging and screaming)
• can we free ourselves?
• difficulty of seeing/experiencing another's perspective
• difficulty of sharing your your perspective to those not interested in experiencing it

By 'freed,' what could we mean?

• to see/experience something new, or in a new way
• to experience the broader, fuller, more 'real'
• to change; to become someone new
• the ability to choose to experience differently - can we?  Do we always need be liberated against our will?

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Teacher Inquiry is driven on certain factors:

• the social and cultural contexts in which teaching unfolds
• giving voice/form to the rich diversity of experience (of both the learner and, especially, the teacher)
• "... detailed, meaning-inflected and locally specific understandings that a certain kind of ethnographic understanding brings forward" (from UnderstandingSociety, on Clifford Geetz)
• psychological dimension of experience (What does it mean to have had the experience?)
• as a narrative process, it means telling your story

Teacher Inquiry will call upon several foundational understandings:

• Ethnography- learning to understand a different culture, becoming part of a new community; learning to negotiate objective, subjective and normative worlds with students;
  Who are these people?  How do they think?  What does it mean for me to become one of them?
  emic/otic perspectives (insider/outsider); what meaning the experience has for the (other) in addition to your meaning; Value Claims; metic: voice on an outsider to a culture; otic: perspective of an outsider trying to represent natives; emic: perspective of natives to a culture
• Phenomenology - the reflective process, bringing language to your experiences, becoming aware of the biases and filters that shape understanding, paying attention to your experiences
  What is this phenomenon?  How does my perspective determine what I experience of it?
• Epistemology - a theory of language and the systems by which we make meaning; questions of participants; How do I know I know what I know?

'theory of mind'  - how we struggle to make sense of another person's decisions or actions; what we intuit about what they are thinking and experiencing that would cause them to act in a certain way; we have a tendency to impose our thinking onto their experience and evaluate them accordingly; "we literally theorize about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior"

How to avoid 'epistemic closure' - Inquiry stance on your practice, your ideas and beliefs, the meanings you bring to an encounter with others; no assumptions; questioning our premises

making the invisible visible (Spindler, 1963)

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for Monday, S17, please bring in an object of importance to you. Others will handle it, so be circumspect about its value and another's reaction to it.