Foundational Beliefs
Recently, a mentor of mine has been dealing with a professional dilemma. One of her books will receive a somewhat negative review in our guild's main peer-reviewed U.S. journal, and the journal is giving her a chance to respond to the review. While the reviewer had a few positive things to say about her book, he disagreed with two of the foundational assumptions on which she bases the book: one pedagogical and one theological. This is how she describes these two foundational assumptions in her blog:
First, that learning is a collaborative process that must involve student
engagement; and second, that media culture might be a context in which God is
revealing Godself.
The reviewer believes that learning is more of an instrumental process that centers on the transfer of content and that media culture is not a context in which God might reveal Godself.
The issue this situation raises for me is how we can have constructive dialogue with those who do not share our most important foundational assumptions or beliefs about the world. For instance, through the reading, teaching, and research I have done, as well as through my personal experiences as a student, I have come to agree wholeheartedly with my mentor that learning is a collaborative process that must involve student engagement. But I also recognize that someone else, who has also done reading, teaching, and research, and who has his or her own wealth of experiences, may just as wholeheartedly disagree with me. How can I talk with this person who disagrees with me about pedagogy, education, and epistemology when our foundational beliefs differ so markedly? I use "beliefs" here intentionally, because after all of the reading, and teaching, and research has been done, at bottom, aren't we called to stake a claim, a belief, about the truth of the matter, knowing full well we do not have all of the facts and never will?
Maybe another way of putting the dilemma is as a question between being committed to beliefs while remaining open to change. I have strong opinions about education and I care deeply about doing education well, and so I have made commitments to particular ways of teaching that I believe are in the best interests of students. Yet, I know that by virtue of seeing only from my position I necessarily have blind spots and biases. What sort of conversational stance does it take to both try to convince my conversation partner of my own wisdom and to remain open to what that partner can teach me?
First, that learning is a collaborative process that must involve student
engagement; and second, that media culture might be a context in which God is
revealing Godself.
The reviewer believes that learning is more of an instrumental process that centers on the transfer of content and that media culture is not a context in which God might reveal Godself.
The issue this situation raises for me is how we can have constructive dialogue with those who do not share our most important foundational assumptions or beliefs about the world. For instance, through the reading, teaching, and research I have done, as well as through my personal experiences as a student, I have come to agree wholeheartedly with my mentor that learning is a collaborative process that must involve student engagement. But I also recognize that someone else, who has also done reading, teaching, and research, and who has his or her own wealth of experiences, may just as wholeheartedly disagree with me. How can I talk with this person who disagrees with me about pedagogy, education, and epistemology when our foundational beliefs differ so markedly? I use "beliefs" here intentionally, because after all of the reading, and teaching, and research has been done, at bottom, aren't we called to stake a claim, a belief, about the truth of the matter, knowing full well we do not have all of the facts and never will?
Maybe another way of putting the dilemma is as a question between being committed to beliefs while remaining open to change. I have strong opinions about education and I care deeply about doing education well, and so I have made commitments to particular ways of teaching that I believe are in the best interests of students. Yet, I know that by virtue of seeing only from my position I necessarily have blind spots and biases. What sort of conversational stance does it take to both try to convince my conversation partner of my own wisdom and to remain open to what that partner can teach me?
posted by Claire Bischoff at 4:04 AM
1 Comments:
These are such good questions! And so much at the heart of religious education, too, because faith generally brings with it a set of foundational beliefs that are held with intensity. I don't have answers, but I do have hunches, and some of them have to do with how stories and poetry work -- describing something so fully that you can be "taken outside of oneself" into an experience, and be changed by it. I suspect post-modern epistemologies are a piece of this puzzle, as are the emotional abilities that Kegan & Lahey foster in their book "How the way we talk can change the way we work." But in any case, YES, these are such important challenges for us to embrace!
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