Tag / Educational Theory

by Michael

Dilemmas as Openings

One of my educational theorists is Jack Mezirow, and he writes about how transformative learning happens after learners have experienced disorienting dilemmas. The first experience of the transformational process, a disorienting dilemma is a moment or series of moments that open a person to change.

For dramatic reasons or simple troubling reasons, things don’t fit. Answers that used to work were called into question by one comment or by an accident or by something being different.

In Mezirow’s educational theory, a dilemma is an opening to learning. It is an opening to freedom as I’m developing my practice of education. Perhaps you can see the dilemma ahead of you as an opening.

Perhaps the closed door is an invitation to see the door differently, to see the other side of the door differently, or to see yourself as you stand differently. Dilemmas can be disorienting, but that disorientation can catalyze parts of you that were asleep, dreams that were forgotten, and futures which were awaiting inspiration.

by Michael

Something I’m Thinking About

Photo Thanks to Tim Swaan

Photo Thanks to Tim Swaan

As I see one semester end (at seminary) and one unit end (in CPE) and one year end (at the church), I’m reading over a book that will likely find its way into one of my theory papers. It’s a book Dr. Scottie May introduced me to in grad school.

Parker Palmer is such a helpful teacher and guide. Here’s a taste about education but that can be said of preaching, speaking, parenting, and any other way of learning/educating:

If you want to understand our controlling conception of knowledge, do not ask for our best epistemological theories. Instead, observe the way we teach and look for the theory of knowledge implicit in those practices. That is the epistemology our students learn–no matter what our best contemporary theories may have to say.

…If this is the case, then as a teacher I can no longer take the easy way out, insisting that I am only responsible for conveying the facts of sociology or theology or whatever the subject may be. Instead, I must take responsibility for my mediator role, for the way my mode of teaching exerts a slow but steady formulative pressure on my students’ sense of self and world. I teach more than a body of knowledge or a set of skills. I teach a mode of relationship between the knower and the known, a way of being in the world. That way, reinforced in course after course, will remain with my students long after the facts have faded from their minds.

(From To Know As We Are Known, pg. 29, 30)