Question

Before a practitioner can facilitate transformative learning for adult students, the practitioner must undergo a personal transformation in teaching pedagogy. What does a change in pedagogy mean for the practitioner? Explain

Answer 1

Change in pedagogy mean for the practitioner

A New Pedagogy Requires a New Epistemology

Donald Schon’s writings help to situate changes in pedagogy within a broader framework of changes that begin with shifts in epistemology and extend to shifts in institutional culture. Schon’s most infl uential writings focus on refl ective practice and are grounded in Dewey’s educational thought. He describes a way of knowing and a form of knowledge that are associated with practice and action:

In the domain of practice, we see what John Dewey called inquiry: thought intertwined with action—refl ection in and on action—which proceeds from doubt to the resolution of doubt, to the generation of new doubt. For Dewey, doubt lies not in the mind but in the situation. Inquiry begins with situations that are problematic—that are confusing, uncertain, or confl icted, and block the free fl ow of action. The inquirer is in, and in transaction with, the problematic situation. He or she must construct the meaning and frame the problem of the situation, thereby setting the stage for problem-solving, which, in combination with changes in the external context, brings a new problematic situation into being.

Here, Schon identifi es practitioner knowledge, or “knowing in action”, which represents a particular way of constructing and using knowledge.

What concerns Schon is that colleges and universities in the United States are dominated by technical rationality—what he called their “institutional epistemology”—which shuns other forms of rationality. “Educational institutions,” he writes, “have epistemologies. They hold conceptions of what counts as legitimate knowledge and how you know what you claim to know” . Further, he explains that

all of us who live in research universities are bound up in technical rationality, regardless of our personal attitudes toward it, because it is built into the institutional arrangements—the formal and informal rules and norms—that govern such processes as the screening of candidates for tenure and promotion. Even liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and other institutions of higher education appear to be subject to the infl uence of technical rationality by a kind of echo effect or by imitation.

For Schon, all the work being done to change higher education by broadening what is viewed as legitimate scholarly work in the academy—particularly the infl uential work of Ernest Boyer in his Scholarship Reconsidered (1990)—raises issues not only of scholarship but fundamentally of epistemology. If faculty were to engage in new forms of scholarship, Schon writes in a essay called “The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology,” then “we cannot avoid questions of epistemology, since the new forms of scholarship . . . challenge the epistemology built into the modern research university . . . if the new scholarship is to mean anything, it must imply a kind of action research with norms of its own, which will confl ict with the norms of technical rationality—the prevailing epistemology built into the research universities”

Schon uses the example of community-based scholarship to make his point. “If community outreach is to be seen as a form of scholarship,” he writes, “then it is the practice of reaching out and providing service to a community that must be seen as raising important issues whose investigation may lead to generalizations of prospective relevance and actionability”. This requires institutional change. “The problem of changing the universities so as to incorporate the new scholarship,” he explains, “must include, then, how to introduce action research as a legitimate and appropriately rigorous way of knowing and generating knowledge.If we are prepared to take [on this task], then we have to deal with what it means to introduce an epistemology of refl ective practice into institutions of higher education dominated by technical rationality”. Schon links issues of scholarship to what he calls “the epistemological, institutional, and political issues it raises within the university.” He further connects questions of scholarship and epistemology to “institutional arrangements—the formal and informal rules and norms of the campus, or the institutional culture.” He argues that “in order to legitimize the new scholarship, higher education institutions will have to learn organizationally to open up the prevailing epistemology so as to foster new forms of refl ective action research”.

Schon’s insights into new forms of scholarship are useful in thinking about new forms of pedagogy. In the same way that a new scholarship requires a new epistemology, a new pedagogy—localized, relational, practice-based, active, collaborative, experiential, and refl ective—requires a new epistemology consistent with changed pedagogical practice. Schon offers a framework that suggests that a shift in how knowledge is constructed (how we know what we know and what is legitimate knowledge in the academy) will lead to a change in how knowledge is organized in the curriculum, then to a change in how the curriculum is delivered through instruction (pedagogy), then to a change in how knowledge is created and shared, and then to a change in the institutional cultures that support change in all these educational dimensions. Each relates to the other, none can be considered in isolation, and all lead to issues of institutional transformation.

Community-based pedagogy raises issues of institutional change that are centered, as the framework suggests, in questions of epistemology. An example of this framework in practice comes from a group of multidisciplinary faculty at a small liberal arts college who were teaching community-based experiential courses. The campus was involved in a strategic planning process, and the faculty determined that the central question that they wanted to discuss was the following: “For the sake of creating new knowledge, what is the intellectual space for complementary epistemologies at X College.” These faculty wanted to legitimize a different kind of epistemology that aligned with their conception of both how knowledge is constructed and how learning occurred in their classes. The “intellectual space” alluded to broader systemic issues at the institution, linking “complementary epistemologies” with interdisciplinarity, community-based teaching and learning, and engaged scholarship, as well as the structures, policies, and cultures of the institution. The situation on this campus is not unlike what is happening on many campuses, where introducing new pedagogies into institutions of higher education, Schon suggests, “means becoming involved in an epistemological battle. It is a battle of snails, proceeding so slowly that you have to look very carefully in order to see it going on. But it is happening nonetheless”

Implications of Changed Pedagogy

Drawing on Schon’s insights, changed pedagogy results from changed epistemology. Understanding the role of students and community partners as co-creators of knowledge and collaborators in the design and delivery of the curriculum coincides with a fundamental shift in understanding how we know what we know, how knowledge is constructed, and what is considered legitimate knowledge within the academy.

Implications for Students

Community-based teaching and learning is grounded in the position that knowledge is socially constructed, and that the lived experience and cultural frameworks that the teacher and learner bring to the educational setting form the basis for the discovery of new knowledge. This position is antithetical to the dominant epistemological position that holds knowledge as being objectifi ed and separate from the knower, in which case the knowledge and experience that the learner brings to the learning environment is of little consequence. In this way, valuing the lived experience and the cultural frameworks that the teacher and learners bring to the educational environment directly challenges the position that all valid knowledge is rational, analytic, and positivist. Rather, this new framework legitimizes knowledge that emerges from experience. Knowledge, according to Mary Walshok, “is something more than highly intellectualized, analytical, and symbolic material. It includes working knowledge, a component of experience, of hands-on practice knowledge”.

Closely related to this epistemological position is the perspective that looks at students as assets to the educational process, challenging the defi cit thinking that accompanies a traditional epistemological perspective. The student’s assets are embraced because the experience and knowledge they contribute to the learning process, and the authority of knowledge that they possess, contribute necessarily to the construction of new knowledge. This is the essence of learner-centered education. The educational value of diversity is enhanced proportionate to the greater ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, gender, and socioeconomic diversity present in the educational setting. This means that a conventional university education.

cannot offer nearly enough on its own to a huge range of students with starting-points, aspirations, and destinations immensely varied but mostly well outside the confi nes of the theoretical discipline . . . [It is necessary] to situate our university courses as far as possible in the context of the students’ experience at work and in the world they come from, go back to, and where they expect to exercise understanding and practical intelligence. To do that means rooting much of our teaching in our own engaged understanding of that world.

From an asset-based perspective, the student is fundamentally a knowledge producer instead of a knowledge consumer, an active participant in the creation of new knowledge. In order to facilitate socially constructed knowledge, an educational design is needed that fosters active participation in teaching and learning—in a Freireian sense, everyone involved is both a teacher and a learner. Instruction, therefore, is designed to be active, collaborative, and engaged rather than passive, rote, and disengaged (in a defi cit model, there is no need to involve the student except as the recipient of knowledge that is “out there” and that needs to be brought, by the instructor at the center of the classroom and in sole possession of authority of knowledge, to the student—typically in a lecture format). The civic corollary to this epistemological position is that education instills active participation in learning and in civic life; students, as knowledge producers, are educated to become active participants in democratic life instead of being spectators to a shallow form of democracy.

Positioning the student as a knowledge producer is associated with the design of educational experiences that reinforce democratic values and experiences. The works of Myles Horton (1998, 2003), Paulo Freire (1970/1994), and bell hooks (1994) take the position that democracy in the process of teaching and learning is shaped by a framework of equality— equality defi ned as the equal respect for the knowledge and experience of all the participants in the learning process. When Myles Horton designed the learning experience at Highlander Folk School in the 1930s, he understood that “one of the best ways of educating people is to give them an experience that embodies what you are trying to teach”. This meant creating a “circle of learners” (de-centering the teacher) with the commitment of all the participants “to respect other people’s ideas”. This kind of educational design for democracy, infl uenced by Dewey and Jane Addams, played itself out in the Citizenship Schools that became a catalyst for action during the civil rights era. Equal respect for the knowledge and experience of everyone involved in learning presupposes a shift in epistemology. Horton explained it this way:

The biggest stumbling block was that all of us at Highlander had academic backgrounds. We thought that the way we had learned and what we had learned could somehow be tailored to the needs of poor people, the working people of Appalachia . . . We still thought our job was to give students information about what we thought would be good for them . . . we saw problems that we thought we had the answers to, rather than seeing the problems and the answers that the people had themselves.

Ordinary citizens from communities in the South came to Highlander with the goal of collectively working toward the solution of a public problem. They each came with a body of knowledge and experience that had relevance to the problem at hand. And they participated in a process of learning from each other and creating new understandings and knowledge to take back to their communities to address social issues. While at Highlander they participated with a certain authority of knowledge that was respected by others. They participated in community-based public problem-solving through a process that afforded equal respect for the knowledge and experience that everyone brought to the educational enterprise. It is this process of democratic knowledge creation that is at the heart of education that integrates pedagogies of engagement with civic engagement.

Horton’s educational approach was consistent with John Dewey’s educational philosophy in that it explicitly linked education and democracy. Dewey wrote that “unless education has some frame of reference it is bound to be aimless, lacking a unifi ed objective. The necessity for a frame of reference must be admitted. There exists in this country such a unifi ed frame. It is called democracy” (1937b). Dewey’s conception of democratic education fi rst broadens the meaning of democracy to encompass widespread, cooperative, participatory experience: “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of co-joint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer to his own action and to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which keep men form perceiving the full import of their activity” (1916/1966). Second, by “associated living, co-joint communicated experience,” Dewey maintains that “the foundation of democracy is faith in the power of pooled and cooperative experience” and “it is the democratic faith that . . . each individual has something to contribute whose value can be assessed only as it enters into the fi nal pooled intelligence constituted by the contributions of all” (1937a). Both democracy and education require wide and diverse participation, and this participation cannot be limited because everyone has something to contribute to education and to the public culture of democracy. Dewey argued forcefully that “the democratic idea itself demands that the thinking and activity proceed cooperatively” (1937a). In democratic education, learning takes place through a process “constituted by the contributions of all.”

For Dewey, “whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes therefore a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for its fi nal effect upon all the interests and activities of a society that is committed to the democratic way of life” (1937a). The result of nondemocratic education—both for engagement in learning and engagement in democracy—is that “absence of participation tends to produce lack of interest and concern on the part of those shut out. The result is a corresponding lack of effective responsibility” (1937a). “What the argument for democracy implies,” Dewey noted, “is that the best way to produce initiative and constructive power is to exercise it”

In his book Democratic Professionalism (2008), Albert Dzur points out that “Dewey’s democratic educators foster cooperation and creative problem solving by structuring learning environments for students to work and deliberate together . . . Dewey’s students learn about democracy by acting democratically; the very structure of their schools gives students a taste for collective self-determination” . According to Dzur, Dewey “directs educators to facilitate cooperative situations in the classroom in which ‘associated thought’ and the democratic habits that go along with it can thrive” and in which students are “initiated into the participatory and deliberative mode of associated living characteristic of a task-sharing democracy”. Dewey was consistent and explicit in his meaning of democracy: it requires wide and diverse participation, drawing on the rich assets of knowledge and experience of individuals that contributes to the public culture of democracy.

A shift from a defi cit-based to an asset-based approach compels a shift from knowledge as the sole possession of the academic expert to something that is shared among all those involved in the learning process. Students, then, share in the authority of knowledge in the classroom and contribute to the learning process. They are not viewed through the dominant defi cit framework, as having little or nothing to contribute to their education; rather, through diverse knowledge and experiences, they help shape the learning that collectively takes place. Similarly, an asset-based approach affects how community partners relate to the educational process.

Implications for Community

Partners Engaged academics in higher education relate to external community partners largely as a function of reconceptualized faculty work—i.e., from that of expert application to collaborative engagement. O’Meara and Rice make this distinction when they assess the developments in engagement in higher education since the publication of Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. Specifically, they maintain that what Boyer called the “Scholarship of  Application” “builds on established academic epistemology, assumes that knowledge is generated in the university or college and then applied to external contexts with knowledge fl owing in one direction, out of the academy.” In contrast, they explain that the Scholarship of Engagement . . . requires going beyond the expert model that often gets in the way of constructive university-community collaboration . . . calls on faculty to move beyond “outreach,” . . . asks scholars to go beyond “service,” with its overtones of noblesse oblige. What it emphasizes is genuine collaboration: that the learning and teaching be multidirectional and the expertise shared. It represents a basic reconceptualization of faculty involvement in communitybased work.

An “expert-centered” framework of engagement (Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009; Saltmarsh & Hartley, in press), often identifi ed as technocratic, scientifi c, or positivist, defi nes the dominant paradigm of engagement in higher education and is grounded in an institutional epistemology of expert knowledge housed in the university and applied externally. “This epistemology,” William Sullivan has noted, “is fi rmly entrenched as the operating system of much of the American university” (2000). There exists, Sullivan writes, an “affi nity of positivist understandings of research for ‘applying’ knowledge to the social world on the model of the way engineers ‘apply’ expert understanding to the problems of structures.” Knowledge produced by credentialed, detached experts is embedded in hierarchies of knowledge generation and knowledge use, creating a division between knowledge producers (in the university) and knowledge consumers (in the community). In the positivist scheme, “researchers ‘produce’ knowledge, which is then ‘applied’ to problems and problematic populations”. Academic expertise, writes Greenwood (2008), focuses on “building theory, being ‘objective,’ writing mainly for each other in a language of their own creation, building professional associations, and staying away from political controversies” . Valued more than community-based knowledge, academic knowledge flows unilaterally, from inside the boundaries of the university outward to its place of need and application in the community.

This expert-centered framework of engagement locates the university at the center of solutions to public problems and educates students through service as proto-experts who will be able to perform civic tasks in communities they work with because they will have the knowledge and credentials to help communities improve. In the expert-centered paradigm, students, in their developing citizen roles, will not be taught the political dimensions of their activities, because questions of power are left out of the context of objectifi ed knowledge production and the way that “service” is provided to communities. Higher education that includes civic engagement activities characterized by the expert-centered paradigm perpetuates a kind of politics that rejects popularly informed decision-making in favor of expert-informed knowledge application. Politics is something to be kept separate from the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge because it is understood in terms of competing partisan positions and opposing ideologies, and thus not only is avoided by academics who perceive such work as “activist scholarship” but is prohibited by federal mandate when communityservice programs are funded through federal agencies. On many campuses what has emerged are remarkably apolitical “civic” engagement efforts.

Expert-driven, hierarchical knowledge generation and dissemination is not only an epistemological position but, as Harry Boyte points out, a political one. Traditional academic epistemology, with its embedded values, methods, and practices, signifi es a “pattern of power” relationships and creates a “technocracy” and a particular politics that is “the core obstacle to higher education’s engagement.” As Boyte asserts, the power and politics of expert academic knowledge is “the largest obstacle in higher education to authentic engagement with communities,” and is “a signifi cant contributor to the general crisis of democracy.” Its core negative functions,” he explains, “are to undermine the standing and to delegitimate the knowledge of those without credentials, degrees, and university training . . . It conceives of people without credentials as needy clients to be rescued or as customers to be manipulated” (2008). In this way of thinking and acting, he notes, genuine reciprocal learning is just not possible.

Community partnerships in the expert-centered framework of engagement do not have an explicit and intentional democratic dimension in which academics share knowledgegenerating tasks with the public and involve community partners as participants in public problem solving. A shift in discourse from “partnerships” and “mutuality” to that of “reciprocity” is grounded in democratic values of sharing previously academic tasks with nonacademics and encouraging the participation of nonacademics in ways that enhance and enable broader engagement and deliberation about major social issues inside and outside the university. A democratic framework seeks the public good with the public—not merely for it—as a means for facilitating a more active and engaged democracy. Reciprocity signals an epistemological shift that values not only expert knowledge that is rational, analytic and positivist, but also a different kind of rationality that is more relational, localized, and contextual and favors mutual deference between laypersons and academics. Knowledge generation is a process of co-creation, breaking down the distinctions between knowledge producers and knowledge consumers. It further implies scholarly work that is conducted by sharing authority and power with those in the community in all aspects of the relationship: defi ning problems, choosing approaches, addressing issues, developing the fi nal products, and participating in assessment. Reciprocity operates to facilitate the involvement of individuals in the community not just as consumers of knowledge and services but as participants in the larger public culture of democracy.

Implications for Teaching and Learning

A “democratic-centered” framework of engagement locates the university within what Ernest Lynton called an “interconnected and interdependent ecosystem of knowledge” (1994), requiring interaction with other knowledge producers outside the university through a multidirectional flow of knowledge and expertise. In an ecosystem of knowledge, Lynton explained, “knowledge does not move from the locus of research to the place of application, from scholar to practitioner, teacher to student, expert to client. It is everywhere fed back, constantly enhanced” (1994). “The design of problem-solving actions through collaborative knowledge construction with the legitimate stakeholders in the problem,” writes Davydd Greenwood, takes place in collaborative arenas for knowledge development in which the professional researcher’s knowledge is combined with the local knowledge of the stakeholders in defi ning the problem to be addressed. Together, they design and implement the actions to be taken on the basis of their shared understanding of the problem. Together, the parties develop plans of action to improve the situation together, and they evaluate the adequacy of what was done.

This interactive and interdependent process of knowledge creation is what Greenwood describes as “a democratizing form of content-specifi c knowledge creation, theorization, analysis, and action design in which the goals are democratically set, learning capacity is shared, and success is collaboratively evaluated”.

In this collaborative framework, students learn cooperative and creative problem-solving within learning environments in which faculty, students, and individuals from the community work and deliberate together. Politics is understood through explicit awareness and experience of patterns of power that are present in the relationship between the university and the community; that is, politics is not reduced to partisanship. In the democraticcentered paradigm, academics are not on the front lines of partisan politics, but, as described by Dzur, they “have sown the seeds of a more deliberative democracy . . . by cultivating norms of equality, collaboration, refl ection, and communication” (2008). Civic engagement in the democratic-centered framework is intentionally political in that all those involved in the learning process learn about democracy by acting democratically.

A developing critique of a unidirectional, applied, expert-centered approach to knowledge generation, teaching, and learning, especially in the social sciences, recognizes that complex social problems can be addressed only if the intended recipients’ motivations and contexts are taken into account. In the expert-centered framework of engagement, “the terms of engagement, the ways of studying the issues, and the ownership of the actions and the intellectual products are not negotiated with the legitimate local stakeholders” (Weerts & Sandmann, 2008). A democratic-centered framework, conversely, “must involve a true partnership, based on both sides bringing their own experience and expertise to the project,” noted Lynton, and “this kind of collaboration requires a substantial change in the prevalent culture of academic institutions” (1995). A democratic-centered framework is premised on the understanding that “the pursuit of knowledge itself demands engagement” and that “a greater number of academics need to defi ne their territory more widely and accept that they share much of it with other knowledge-professionals; engagement with those beyond the ivory tower may greatly enrich their own thinking” (Bjarnason & Coldstream, 2003). A “more inclusive, two-way approach to knowledge fl ow” accompanied by “an epistemological shift . . . from a rational or objectivist worldview to a constructivist worldview” (Weerts & Sandmann, 2008) is marked by movement away from traditional academic knowledge generation (i.e., pure, disciplinary, homogeneous, expert-led, supplydriven, hierarchical, peer-reviewed, and almost exclusively university-based) to engaged knowledge generation (i.e., applied, problem-centered, transdisciplinary, heterogeneous, hybrid, demand-driven, entrepreneurial, and network-embedded) (Gibbons et al., 1994). The implication of this shift for teaching and learning is that it relocates students and community partners as co-producers of knowledge, valuing the knowledge and experience they contribute to the educational process, sharing authority for the process of knowledge generation and pedagogy, and allowing them to practice and experiment with a public culture of democracy as part of the work of higher education.