Normally, school students learn academic subjects in classrooms, but it is best practice to, now‐and‐again, take them on trips. Often, it is then that they come face‐to‐face with ‘the real thing’, an historical artefact. This paper seeks the knowledge acquired in seeing such an artefact. If knowledge means propositional knowledge, we land on the horns of a dilemma, in which the artefact seems to be both crucial and yet incidental. On the one hand, it seems to be the labels, the resources in the exhibition, the guides, not the artefact, that give students knowledge. Yet, the learning experience is valued because of the artefact, not these things. This poses the question: can students gain knowledge from artefacts? I argue, drawing on R.G. Collingwood's characterisation of historical knowledge as mediated, inferential and requiring imagination, and on Heidegger's understanding of ‘things’, that the debate can be moved beyond bald propositional knowledge of the kind that motivates the original dilemma. Students gain historical knowledge from artefacts because students can reflectively think, and work to re‐enact in their minds the world of the artefact. As Aldridge suggests, the student is transformed by this: she does not simply learn the facts, but starts to become an historian.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by John Wiley & Sons in Journal of Philosophy of Education on 18 November 2016, available online at doi: 10.1111/1467-9752.12166 Manuscript under embargo. Embargo period end date: 20 March 2018What is it that makes a student???s answer correct or incorrect in Religious Studies? In practice, the standards of correctness in the RS classroom are generally applied with relative ease by teachers and students. Nevertheless, they are problematic. We shall argue that correctness does not come from either the students or the teacher believing that what has been said is true. This raises the question: what is correctness, if it does not come down to truth? We propose, and examine, three rival solutions, each of which, to an extent, rationalises a fairly natural response to the problem. The first, the elliptical approach, says that correct contributions have some tacit content: they are elliptical for true sentences about beliefs (e.g. a sentence of the form ???Christians believe that??????). The second, the imaginative approach, seeks to replace appeals to truth and belief with an appeal to imagination, treating RS as a ???game of make-believe??? in which teachers and students imaginatively engage with certain worldviews. The third, the institutional approach, locates the root of correctness in the practices of the RS institution, which include making endorsements of some judgements and not others. We show that the first of our proposed approaches encounters a number of significant objections. We find the second of our proposed approaches to be better, but the third is the most attractive, providing a direct, intuitive and comprehensive route through the problem of correctness
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