If the challenges of teaching and learning do not amount to simple empirical questions about effective pedagogical strategies but are instead complex “wicked problems” that may be impossible to solve, where does that leave the practice of backward design? Drawing on the intellectual history of instructional design, I argue that the use of learning objectives, in particular, may not meet the comprehensive challenges of educational development today. Rather than rehashing perennial critiques that learning objectives overly instrumentalize the educational process or are not sufficiently student-centered, I ask what is missed by focusing on what students will know and be able to do by the end of a course. Especially in times of tragedy or crisis, the forward-looking nature of goals and objectives can obscure the importance of learning to be in the present moment and to recognize what is already known. I conclude by suggesting that a pedagogy of non-striving is able to bring intentionality to the time students and teachers spend together without relying on an explicit enumeration of aims.
This chapter explores the limitations of measuring teaching quality through observation of “observable behaviors” and argues for a more holistic approach to educational development that focuses on the richness of pedagogical qualities.
Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster confronts its reader with an intellectual adventure. In this article, Michael McCreary interrogates why Rancière might have chosen to share Joseph Jacotot's pedagogical ideas with us and how the method in which he casts them might be internal to their teaching. In the first section, McCreary directs his attention to the end of the book, where Rancière chronicles the ways in which Jacotot's educational vision proved difficult to share with his nineteenth‐century contemporaries — both his critics and his supposed disciples. In the second, he suggests that recent interpretations of The Ignorant Schoolmaster by philosophers of education have, in their turn, tended to miss the adventure of Rancière's text in uncannily similar ways. In the third and final section, he returns to the question of what we stand to learn from Jacotot's story by considering how Rancière's text teaches us to read it. To do so McCreary looks at the pedagogical role of literary texts within Jacotot's teaching: Jacotot situates reading these texts as an act of “translation” by which one human intelligence makes itself known to another on the basis of their fundamental equality. McCreary concludes by suggesting some potential avenues for verifying the intelligence of The Ignorant Schoolmaster in a way that does not reduce the imaginative process of verification to a standardized pedagogical model.
Descartes may have produced the paradigmatic image of modern philosophy when he donned his winter dressing gown, settled into his favorite armchair by the fire, and began a private meditation by wondering whether the flame in front of him were anything more than a dream. Like most skeptical recitals, the force of Descartes’ method arises through the mobilization of best cases for knowing; that is, through casting doubt on something so certain that one begins to question one’s ability to know anything at all. By impugning precisely those axioms we held most assured, Descartes demonstrates philosophy’s propensity to challenge our most fundamental assumptions, yet he simultaneously leverages the significance of the philosophical enterprise against more everyday or ordinary claims to knowledge, that of course the fire really burns. In doing so, Descartes opens up the possibility that a critic of skepticism will be more inclined to doubt the sanity of philosophical inquiry than to admit that the flame, or the greater external world, may be nothing more than a dream, or the conjuring of an evil demon. So the profundity or inanity of philosophy seems to turn on the whim of human temperament, and in particular, on my reaction to the idea that I may be mistaken about everything I claim to know.
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