Educational technology, High school final essays of English

Download Educational technology and more High school final essays English in PDF only on Docsity! Name: GREATH P. CADONDON Year & Sec.: BSE—- MATHEMATICS ASSIGNMENT IN Ed TC 4 THE TEACHING PROFESSION 1. Research on different Philosophies of Education. Seven are given find out more. Reconstructionism/Critical Theory Theodore Brameld (1904-1987) was the founder of social Reconstructionism, in reaction against the realities of World War II. Social Reconstructionism is a philosophy that emphasizes the addressing of social questions and a quest to create a better society and worldwide democracy. Reconstructionist educators focus on a curriculum that highlights social reform as the aim of education. In view of Paulo Freire (1921-1997) a Brazilian, whose experiences living in poverty led him to champion education and literacy as the vehicle for social change, humans must learn to resist oppression and not become its victims, nor oppress others. To do so requires dialog and critical consciousness, the development of awareness to overcome domination and oppression. Rather than “teaching as banking," in which the educator deposits information into students’ heads, Freire saw teaching and learning as a process of inquiry in which the child must invent and reinvent the world. For social Reconstructionist and critical theorists, curriculum focuses on student experience and taking social action on real problems, such as violence, hunger, international terrorism, inflation, and inequality. Strategies for dealing with controversial issues (particularly in social studies and literature), inquiry, dialogue, and multiple perspectives are the focus. Idealism Plato, father of Idealism, espoused this view about 400 years BC, in his famous book, The Republic. He believed that there are two worlds. The first is the spiritual or mental world, which is eternal, permanent, orderly, regular, and universal. There is also the world of appearance, the world experienced through sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound that is changing imperfect, and disorderly. This division is often referred to as the duality of mind and body. Idealism is a philosophical approach that has as its central tenet that ideas are the only true reality, the only thing worth knowing. In a search for truth, beauty, and justice that is enduring and everlasting; the focus is on conscious reasoning in the mind. In idealism, the aim of education is to discover and develop each individual's abilities and full moral excellence in order to better serve society. The curricular emphasis is subject matter of mind: literature, history, philosophy, and religion. Teaching methods focus on handling ideas through lecture, discussion, and Socratic dialogue (a method of teaching that uses questioning to help students discover and clarify knowledge). Character is developed through imitating examples and heroes. ¢ Realism Aristotle, a student of Plato who broke with his mentor's idealist philosophy, is called the father of both Realism and the scientific method. In this metaphysical view, the aim is to understand objective reality through "the diligent and unsparing scrutiny of all observable data. He believed that to understand an object, its ultimate form had to be understood, which does not change. For example, a rose exists whether or not a person is aware of it. A rose can exist in the mind without being physically present, but ultimately, the rose shares properties with all other roses and flowers (its form), although one rose may be red and another peach colored. Realists believe that reality exists independent of the human mind. The ultimate reality is the world of physical objects. The focus is on the body/objects. Truth is objective-what can be observed. The Realist curriculum emphasizes the subject matter of the physical world, particularly science and mathematics. The teacher organizes and presents content systematically within a discipline, demonstrating use of criteria in making decisions. Teaching methods focus on mastery of facts and basic skills through demonstration and recitation. Students must also demonstrate the ability to think critically and scientifically, using observation and experimentation. Curriculum should be scientifically approached, standardized, and distinct-discipline based. Character is developed through training in the rules of conduct. ¢ Pragmatism (Experientialism) John Dewey (1859-1952) applied pragmatist philosophy in his progressive approaches. He believed that learners must adapt to each other and to their environment. Schools should emphasize the subject matter of social experience. All learning is dependent on the context of place, time, and circumstance. Different cultural and ethnic groups learn to work cooperatively and contribute to a democratic society. The ultimate purpose is the creation of a new social order. Character development is based on making group decisions in light of consequences. Pragmatism is derived from the teaching of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839- 1914), who believed that thought must produce action, rather than linger in the mind and lead to indecisiveness. In this late 19th century American philosophy, the focus is on the reality of experience. Unlike the Realists and Rationalists, Pragmatists believe that reality is constantly changing and that we learn best through applying our experiences and thoughts to problems, as they arise. For pragmatists, only those things that are experienced or observed are real. There is no absolute and unchanging truth, but rather, truth is what works. d) Simultaneously, as people learn to associate sounds with objects or symbols, they are also forming and displaying memories. Those memories are learned associations that can also be unlearned when they are no longer needed or used very frequently. When someone needs to relearn a memory, they can do so by experiencing the same pairings or similar pairings to what they initially did. Some of Watson's most influential and well-known work is his study of emotions. He was particularly interested in studying the way that emotions could be learned. He believed that emotions were merely physical responses. He also believed that rage, fear, and love were all unlearned at birth. Watson said that rage is a natural response to being constrained or forced to do something they would prefer not to. He believed love was an automatic response to pleasant sensations, whereas love towards people is conditioned because of frequent associations with those pleasant associations. William Bagley and Essentialism William Chandler Bagley (March 15, 1874 — July 1, 1946) was an American educator and editor. A critic of pragmatism and progressive education, he advocated educational "essentialism." Bagley published chiefly on the topics of teacher education, curriculum, philosophy of education, and educational psychology. His experience as teacher and administrator of public schools laid a strong practical foundation for his theoretical formulations regarding improvement in public education. Bagley promoted a core of traditional subjects as essential to a good education, the goal of which is the development of good citizens who will be useful to society. He believed this education should be available to all, and opposed the use of standardized tests that were biased against minority groups. At a time when schools were moving toward progressive education, Bagley's views of the importance of maintaining the authority of the teacher and principal of the school, emphasizing the importance of obedience by students to such authority, provided a strong contrast to the egalitarian views of the progressives. He regarded education as the method of passing on the knowledge of a society to the next generation. However, his view was limited to academic knowledge, rather ignoring the complex of cultural beliefs and behaviors that are commonly accepted by all members of a society, and the important role of parents in transmitting this to their children. Jean Paul Sartre and Existentialism The philosophical career of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) focuses, in its first phase, upon the construction of a philosophy of existence known as existentialism. Sartre's early works are characterized by a development of classic phenomenology, but his reflection diverges from Husserl’s on methodology, the conception of the self, and an interest in ethics. These points of divergence are the cornerstones of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, whose purpose is to understand human existence rather than the world as such. Adopting and adapting the methods of phenomenology, Sartre sets out to develop an ontological account of what it is to be human. The main features of this ontology are the groundlessness and radical freedom which characterize the human condition. These are contrasted with the unproblematic being of the world of things. Sartre’s substantial literary output adds dramatic expression to the always unstable co- existence of facts and freedom in an indifferent world. Sartre’s ontology is explained in his philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, where he defines two types of reality which lie beyond our conscious experience: the being of the object of consciousness and that of consciousness itself. The object of consciousness exists as "in-itself," that is, in an independent and non-relational way. However, consciousness is always consciousness “of something,” so it is defined in relation to something else, and it is not possible to grasp it within a conscious experience: it exists as "for-itself." An essential feature of consciousness is its negative power, by which we can experience "nothingness." This power is also at work within the self, where it creates an intrinsic lack of self-identity. So the unity of the self is understood as a task for the for-itself rather than as a given. In order to ground itself, the self needs projects, this can be viewed as aspects of an individual’s fundamental project and motivated by a desire for “being” lying within the individual’s consciousness. The source of this project is a spontaneous original choice that depends on the individual's freedom. However, self’s choice may lead to a project of self-deception such as bad faith, where one’s own real nature as for-itself is discarded to adopt that of the in-itself. Our only way to escape self-deception is authenticity, that is, choosing in a way which reveals the existence of the for-itself as both factual and transcendent. For Sartre, my proper exercise of freedom creates values that any other human being placed in my situation could experience; therefore each authentic project expresses a universal dimension in the singularity of a human life. Robert Hutchins and Perennialism Robert M. Hutchins has been deemed one of Americans most highly esteemed and most well-known educators. He was born on January 17, 1899, in Brooklyn, New York. Hutchins was educated at Oberlin College in Ohio, before serving in the military during World War I. He later completed his education at Yale University, graduating in 1921 and earning a law degree in 1925. From 1927 to 1929, he was the Dean of the Yale Law School. By the age of 30, Robert M. Hutchins became the President of the University of Chicago. He remained at the university until 1951, and served as Chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1951. Hutchins then went on to become the director (1951) and President (1954) of The Fund for the Republic. He served as Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1943 until his death on May 14, 1977. As a prominent American educator, Hutchins himself credits the Yale Law School with beginning his formal education. Yale’s curriculum introduced his to the study of the arts. While serving as president of the University of Chicago, Hutchins claimed, at the age of thirty two, my education began in earnest. The fore mentioned statement was in reference to a remark made by Hutchins colleague and mentor, Mortimer J. Alder. Alder suggested that a university presidents reading spans the scope of the telephone book. Alder proposed that unless Hutchins preferred being an uneducated man, he had better to something drastic. Therefore, he moved to progress his education and came to find, The liberal arts are the arts of freedom. To be free a man must understand the tradition in which he lives. A great book is one which yields up through the liberal arts a clear and important understanding of our tradition. An education which consisted of the liberal arts as understood through great books and of great books understood through the liberal arts...It must follow that if we want to educate our students for freedom, we must educate them in the liberal arts and in the great books. It was there at the University of Chicago where something drastic began. Robert Hutchins has been credited with some of the 20th century’s boldest and most influential educational reform. Hutchins believed in order to educate students for freedom, that they must be educated in the liberal arts. This belief gave way to the Chicago College Plan which consisted of a strict liberal arts curriculum at the University of Chicago. He viewed the liberal arts as indispensable for preparing for life. To Hutchins, teaching everyone to think, and to think well, was the ultimate in democratic education. Robert Hutchins played a great role in philosophy of education. His educational reform helped to define perennialism. For it was Hutchins, the ultimate perennialist and idealist, who said, Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge as truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence, education should be everywhere the same. Jurgen Habermas, Hans Georg Gadamer and Linguistic Philosophy Hans-Georg Gadamer (February 11, 1900 — March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). In this work, Gadamer developed his theory of philosophical hermeneutics, which argued that all human understanding involves interpretation and that such interpretation is itself historically conditioned by particular cultures and languages. For this reason, dialogue and openness to others are essential to any living philosophy. Gadamer put this theory into practice in his public debates with Jtirgen Habermas (1929- ) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics emphasized the humanities over science and so he was critical of a modern scientific view of the human being that reduced one’s knowledge of the world and human beings to an objective or methodical knowledge. Influenced by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Gadamer came to view truth as not an objective statement about facts but rather as an event or disclosure that happens in language, which itself is historically conditioned; according to Gadamer, not by trying to transcend or rise above one’s historical context, culture, and tradition but by becoming more self-aware of one’s context, culture, and tradition. Gadamer's position would be able to be better appreciated, if we could see a profound paradox in it: That if one is humbly aware of how finite and limited one's own horizon is, one can find it to continually grow in the fusion of horizons, thus being able to grasp the truth better, even "rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other."[4] This, in spite of its no explicit reference to God, seems to be akin to what Martin Buber calls the "I-Thou" relation, where partners of dialogue can have a glimpse into God. Truth and Method was published twice in English, and the revised edition is now considered authoritative. The German-language edition of Gadamer's Collected Works includes a volume in which Gadamer elaborates his argument and discusses the critical response to the book. Finally, Gadamer's essay on Paul Celan (entitled "Who Am I and Who Are You?") is considered by many— including Heidegger and Gadamer himself—as a "second volume" or continuation of the argument in Truth and Method. Jiirgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Moreover, he has figured prominently in Germany as a_ public intellectual, commenting on controversial issues of the day in German newspapers such as Die Zeit. However, if one looks back over his corpus of work, one can discern two broad lines of enduring interest, one having to do with the political domain, the other with issues of rationality, communication, and knowledge. Habermas took a_ linguistic-communicative turn in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981; The Theory of Communicative Action). Drawing on the work of analytic (Anglo-American) philosophers (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin), Continental philosophers (Horkheimer, Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alfred Schutz, and Gyérgy Lukacs), pragmatists (Peirce and G.H. Mead), and sociologists (Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann), he argued that human interaction in one of its fundamental forms is “communicative” rather than “strategic” in nature, insofar as it is aimed at mutual understanding and agreement rather than at the achievement of the self-interested goals of individuals. Such understanding and agreement, however, are possible only to the extent that the communicative interaction in which individuals take part resists all forms of nonrational coercion. The notion of an “ideal communication community” functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the “unforced force” of the better argument—i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence—and all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding. Although the ideal communication community is never perfectly realized (which is why Habermas appeals to it as a regulative or critical ideal rather than as a concrete historical community), the projected horizon of unconstrained communicative action within it can serve as a model of free and open public discussion within liberal- democratic societies. Likewise, this type of regulative and critical ideal can serve as a justification of deliberative liberal-democratic political institutions, because it is only within such institutions that unconstrained communicative action is possible. Liberal democracy is not a guarantee that communicative rationality will flourish, however. Indeed, in modern capitalist societies, social institutions that ideally should be communicative in character—e.g., family, politics, and education—have come to embody a merely “strategic” rationality, according to Habermas. Such institutions are increasingly overrun by economic and bureaucratic forces that are guided not by an ideal of mutual understanding but rather by principles of administrative power and economic efficiency. Habermas’s findings carried wide-ranging normative implications. In Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (1983; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action), he elaborated a general theory of “discourse ethics,” or “communicative ethics,” which concerns the ethical presuppositions of ideal communication that would have to be invoked in an ideal communication community. In a series of lectures published as Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Habermas defended from postmodern criticism the Enlightenment ideal of normative rationality and specifically the ideal that unconstrained communication is guided by reasons that can be rejected or redeemed by speakers and hearers as true, right, or sincere. Habermas was criticized by both the postmodern left and the neoconservative right for his trust in the power of rational discussion to resolve major domestic and international conflicts. While some critics found his normative critical theory—as applied to areas such as education, morality, and law—to be dangerously Eurocentric, others decried its utopian, radically democratic, or left-liberal character. He was criticized by Marxists and by feminist and race theorists for abandoning socialism or for allegedly giving up on vigorous criticism of social injustice and oppression. For some representatives of antiglobalization social movements, even Habermas’s left-leaning political liberalism and deliberative democratic reformism were inadequate to address the cultural, political, and economic distortions evident in existing democratic institutions. Habermas responded to critics at both ends of the political spectrum by developing a more robust communicative theory of democracy, law, and constitutions in Faktizitét und Geltung (1992; Between Facts and Norms), Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (1996; The Inclusion of the Other), and Die postnationale Konstellation (1998; The Postnational Constitution). In Zeit der Ubergange (2001; Time of Transitions), he offered global democratic alternatives to wars that employ terrorism as well as to the “war on terrorism.”