A documentary film about Chinese senior high school students and my thoughts about why a certain educational philosophy ceased to be philosophy

The following link is a documentary film which describes the life of Chinese senior high school students. How they spend the whole senior year struggling to prepare for the college entrance exams, the scores of which will be the only standard to determine whether they could enter college. The website Youku.com is a Chinese website similar with Youtube, the documentary film has fairly good English subtitle, if anybody intrested in this film could just click the link and watch the film, and just ignore other Chinese characters if you couldn't read Chinese^_^

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzQ3NDMyNTI=.html

My high school senior year was almost the same. It touches the miserable memory in my heart. This is why many Chinese students get very high math and science scores, why the higher education system in China produces so many engineers each year, one of the reasons that China becomes the world factory, and also why somebody said the "Made in China" would never turn to "Created in China", because students are educated out of the ability of creativity (Ken Robinson). I am not sure whether it's proper to quote George's word here, but I really agree with what he wrote in the A Brief Philosophical Primer post that "I do not know a single member of the Academy who believes in his/her heart that a university education is not a place for growth and development of the individual as a whole; however, the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour." China has good origin of educational philosophy. Confucius taught his pupils almost the same as Socrates did, using dialogue and taught informally. He also believes that students should be educated according to their capacities and also their own needs and interests. Chinese people regard Confucius as the "Father of Education", some schools even have the sculpture of him to show respect, but no one is really practising or developing his ideas of education. I agree with what George said "the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour", and there are also the reasons of power and monetary corruptions, just like Dall'Alba says "Power differentials often play a key role in influencing the outcome of challenges to established routines and practices", There was no openness and mutual respect during the two thousand years of feudalism in China, so the philosophy of education of Confucius lacks of good development, and has ceased to be philosophy--it's only a history of education now.

P.S.
To be honest, I wasn't sure whether it's good or not to post this documentary film here, because it seems irrelevant to our readings and also because I might still feel unsafe since different "rumors" about the bolg are going on and I haven't got much comments for my previous posts. Now I "deeply understand" the famous Shakespeare quote "to be, or not to be--that is a question." ^_^ "To post, or not to post--that is a question." As a human being, facing these possibilities, I finally decided to post, to speak what I want to say, because we are discussing education in class, everything about education should be relevant, and as educational researcher, we should explore problems of broad appeal(Borrego, 2007), so I kind of feel it's right to push the boundary of this blog to make it further beyond our class readings and the quantity of 8 posts. If we are constrained by the boundary, we are not practising the ideal type of education we are talking and looking for. Actually, another important reason I posted this documentary film here is that Alice said in the first or second class that educational thoughts from other cultures are also welcome(Thank you, Alice!). So the result that I chose to post according to my own belief as a human being, which is also influenced by what Alice, Robin and our cohorts said about this blog (the education I received from this class), is what I would call, "Dall'Alba effect".

Reference:
1. Confucius
2. Socrates
3. George
4. Dall'Alba
5. Maura Borrego, Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Trained Engineers Learning Educational Research Methods, JEE, Aprial 2007
6. Ken Robinson

Fodder for youtube videos

Our YouTube project is motivated by this video.

However, you can make your team's video as involved or simple as you like. Past years have gotten pretty involved; you can do something completely different for them. But in case you want a way to calibrate yourself, here is a list of all our past years' YouTube videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/alicepawley#grid/user/841ECAED68149FD0

Blog interaction guide

Opportunity to:
Engage with colleagues
That the blog space is "different" than our class space
Use blog to help you think (reflect, synthesize, connect to readings, etc.)

Need:
Foundation for trust (recognizing this is a process...this is a start with a little leap of faith)
Safe space to explore ideas and to make mistakes (large and small, even very small)
Being comfortable with less coherent posts (for me to be comfortable, for others to find value)
Ways to connect with other ideas and have a dialogue (need help with "threading" and "tagging")

• Create tags / labels to help people know what you want / need

A place to put struggles and questions
A place for guiding questions
A place for fragmented ideas
Okay to say "I'm not looking for a comment" and "I am looking for a comment"
How to respectfully disagree / challenge people to explore their ideas (encouragement to think differently)

• engage with the ideas and other ideas - speaking to the "third place"
• first show you understand (e.g, restate what you saw), then engage philosophically
• help clarify the part you disagree with 
• put some distance between the post, the responder, the response and the comment

How much "grounding" needs to be in the blog posts?
Is it OK to not blog?  
Freedom to "author" own growth
Questions of audience
How to get email notification of comments - in future blog post :)

What are our purposes for blogging in this class?


What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 1)


What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 2)

about Dall’Alba article

In general, if I understood correctly, Dall’Alba talks about transition & transformation from school to professional level. She reconsidered the process of professional education not just as a collection of “right” knowledge, but as a process of “becoming” a professional. It takes time for a new college graduate to adapt a new culture and an organizational environment where new graduates are going to work. The author discusses this transformation from a “school-boy/girl” to a professional from epistemological and ontological perspective. She said that we need more than knowledge in particular field (gained in school), we need skills –how to become a professional.
Dall’Alba names a few features, which explain when aspiring professionals (after school) become a practicing professionals: “The features include: continuity over time with change in ways of being professionals; possibilities in the ways we can be with constraints on those possibilities; openness in taking up possibilities with resistance to doing so; and
individuals who are becoming professionals with others involved in that process” (p.38).
This article brought to my mind some thoughts about differences between features of novices and experts. It takes time for a novice to become an expert, so, in the same way, talking about Dall’Alba article, it takes time to transform and be accepted by professionals. This transformation is not always easy, and to say the true - it is hard time for many graduates.
Last Spring 2010 semester I took a S. Brophy’s class here at ENE department. He gave as a very interesting article (Jonassen et al., 2006) about attitudes of expert/professional engineers towards their new colleagues (novices after graduation). I think that Dall’Alba is trying to describe the same problem but from the different perspective. Jonassen’s study included more than 100 participants, which were engineers with different background and working experience. The main purpose of this study was to discover how and why the problem-solving in classrooms is different compare to the problem-solving in the real workplace. The problem is that all problems that are solved in the class are well-defined. Students are expected to present the only one “right” decision of the problem. On the other hand, all tasks in the real workplace usually are ill-defined; there is not a “right” decision; for any particular situation many equivalent choices can co-exist. On the other hand - skilled engineers usually refer to the previous experience in problem-solving. But novices –they don’t have this “previous experience” yet. Theoretical and conceptual knowledge are important, but not dominant or prevailing. Often engineers are involved in absolutely-not-engineering activities, like: how to stay inside of the budget, or “how to keep the client happy”, and how to earn money on the project. Many engineers noticed that new graduates have to work 1- 3 years to become “real” engineers.
I had a similar experience in the past. After my MS graduation in Russia (almost fifteen years ago) I worked as an engineer-technologist on the factory, which produced microchips. My first year was very frustrating, I felt like my college knowledge were not connected to the real life and workplace. At the first week of my employment a couple of “old” engineers took me on the floor and showed me equipment and machines, which produced microchips. I had no idea what those engineers are talking about. I felt like I am a newborn, and as a result of my “newborness” some jokes about my “professionalism” were produced by the ‘old’ engineers. (to say the true- it was very unpleasant). It took almost two years to figure out what I have to do and what I was responsible for. Now I understand why it was so difficult: because my college experience to solve well- defined problems was insufficient for ill-defined tasks in the real workplace.
So, for me, the main idea of Dall’Alba article is: professional education has problems and we need to do something about that because the transition from a school to a real working place is not easy for many graduates.

I hope it is enough for today, see all of you in class…………

References:
Jonassen, D.H., Strobel, J. & Lee, C.B. (2006). Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering: Lessons for Engineering Educators. Journal of Engineering Education; Vol. 95 (2) ProQuest Education Journals.

Personal answers and thoughts to guiding questions on Dall’Alba

What is the basis of Dall'Alba's critique on current views of education? (what is her argument?)

Dall’Alba’s argues that currently there is so much focus of epistemology (theory of knowing) and not at all on ontology (theory of being). She argues that ontology is as important as epistemology.
According to Dall’Alba, professional education programs needs to be more than just instilling necessary knowledge and skills when preparing professionals for practice in their respective fields. There needs to be ways to develop and transform aspiring professionals to “ways of being”, which according to Dall’Alba, is to engage young professionals with set of routines, histories and traditions of their chosen respective career to the extent that “they are manifest in the present and relevant for the future”.

What alternative framework does she put forth?
Education as Transforming ways of being.

What might it look like to design an education based on this alternative framework?

Based on reading Dall’Alba, a new design of an education system, I believe, must have following items.

1) Learning through experience – Dall’Alba suggests that teacher trainees “learn to design learning activities and to assess what students have learned. As they do, develop their own knowing and acting…, at the same time extending and elaborating their understanding and embodiment of what it means…” Some forms of learning through your own experience, I believe, is suggested by Dall’Alba. This allows aspiring professional to not only integrate what is known and clarify what is lacking in the current practice, but also allows them to take a step (or steps) towards becoming an experienced professional (transformation taking place by learning through experience).

2) Include interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary subjects into current curriculum – Meeting and learning about other disciplines allows aspiring professionals to expand their horizons, opportunities and possibilities and “potentially enriching the process of becoming”. Dall’Alba strongly suggests in the paper the importance of “interdependent” and “broader social world”, and that individual cannot become a “professional in isolation”. To develop and enrich ontology, I believe, Dall’Alba is suggesting to incorporate subjects from other disciplines into professional subjects.

3) Learn to seize on ambiguity rather than shy away from it – Learn to question the norms and current practices despite the pre-conceptions and challenges from experiences teachers. By doing, aspiring professionals would not only advance the field but develop professional ways of being. This will enable one to look into deeper questions, as suggested by examples illustrated in Dall’Alba, “Addressing or resolving such tensions involves questioning assumptions, not only about what teaching involves, but also about what it means to be a teacher.” This process is developing not only epistemology but ontology of aspiring professionals.

Thoughts on the Dall'Alba Paper

I had a much larger post regarding this article that I was going to make, but it was fairly oblique. I think I've been able to filter it down some to this:

At one point the author states "The process of becoming a professional occurs, then, through continual interaction with other professionals, as well as those outside the professions. It is misleading to attempt to separate the individual from engagement with others in this process of becoming."

I agree with this completely. I also believe that it serves as an excellent argument against what the paper is suggesting - that we "reconfigure professional education as a process of becoming." The process of becoming occurs in large part through the interaction with other *professionals*. The belief that educators are equivalent to a given professional in the same field is foolish. Moreover, even if this were true the educators are fewer in number, and the interactions between student and educator are far less involved than those between professionals.

I think the author summarizes it best for me:
"For instance, in what ways and to what extent is it appropriate to shape another's becoming? Whose knowing, acting and being serve as ‘golden standards’? Questions such as these underpin the design and implementation of professional education programs, whether or not they are explicitly addressed in those programs."

I would argue that questions such as those patently do NOT underpin the design and implementation of any professional education program. Those questions are intimate, personal questions that are decided on an individual basis by individuals based on their interactions with other *professionals*.

Thus, I respectfully disagree with the core argument made in this paper. Schools that emphasize ontology exist already – for instance, the entire Catholic School System. Leave the facts to the schools and the beliefs to the people.

Ambiguities of Becoming - Examples

I really appreciated this week's reading assignment. There were many things about Learning Professional Ways of Being: Ambiguities of becoming that really resignated with me. For some reason, it was relatively easy for me to think of examples that helped me understand some of the point(s) that Dall'Alba was making when she was explaining the "features" of the "ambiguities" associated with becoming. Hopefully, someone who may have wrestled with this article can find a little clarity in the two examples that resounded loudly in my mind while thinking through the content. Finally, if anyone else had a similar experience (that examples came to mind that really brought the content home) feel free to enlighten me.

The example likened to ambiguity of becoming (in general) was that of a child first learning to communicate with words. During the months leading up to the first 'DaDa', the parents (and others) have been talking to the child with words and even in the months immediately leading up to that climactic moment, more than likely, the parents were emphatic with over-enunciating the future-first words - in an attempt to teach the child the mechanics of speaking. Some day, out of the blue, the child struts into the world of communicators (with words) and utters the infamous words, 'DaDa'! From the limited experiences I've had with this, the child is, on some level, startled by everyone's excitement. At that moment, the child doesn't understand what's all the rage - they are just reciting the script that has been so purposefully fed to them for the past few months. What the child doesn't realize is that they are BEING a verbal communicator. In this case, the child does not have the "knowledge and skills" (i.e. spelling, definition, correct pronunciation, phonetics, etc.) associated with what they've done. Many moons later, the child will learn that their first word was actually a derivative of the word "Daddy"; the spelling; the formal definition; that so many other children use the exact same word and have a completely different person in mind, etc. It's not until later in life that the parents begin to improve the child's communication abilities by educating them with grammatical relationships between the word(s) they learn and other words in the language (verbs, plurality of the word, etc). For now the parents are just enjoying the presence of the new initiate "being" a verbal communicator. Even later in life, the child may have spelling quizzes in classes ( demonstrating a mastery of learning other words), take communications courses, maybe someday even pursue a Ph.D. in Linguistics! But even during the time of acquiring this knowledge and these skills, they are still "being" a verbal communicator. Sorry for belaboring this point, but this example really brought home the idea of the relationship between an epistomological approach and an ontological approach to educating and how both of them work well together in the formation of a professional. Of course there are a lot of implicit assumptions in this example, but I hope this helps.

One other example that really helped me understand the Openness with Resistance feature of the "ambiguities of becoming" directly relates to an experience I have had as an ENE student. Engineering Education is a community of scholars to which I aspire to join someday - as a professional. However, at this point in my career, I am just now learning the "ropes" (customs, jargon, culture, etc.) of ENE. Because I am so emersed in this environment and I aspire to be more than a "visitor" someday, I am open to learning whatever I can learn - in an attempt to begin to form connections that will someday lead to my success as a scholar in this community. At the same time, there are things that I am learning that are not easily recieved; I am resistant to some things. One of the clearest examples of this is that in the African-American community (of which I was raised and am a member), calling people in positions of authority by their first name is considered unacceptable. In response to a slip-up of this sort, my aunt would kindly advise me or my cousins to "put a handle on it" - that was her way of saying, please "hook" a title to the front of the name you just said the next time you say it (Ms., Mrs., Dr., etc.). In the ENE culture (at Purdue), it seems as though referring to professors (those in positions of authority) by their first name is strongly recommended by the majority of the faculty. In the African American culture, calling peers/friends/colleagues by their first name is expected. I suppose I'm in a tricky place right now because my professors are both authority-figures and very-soon-to-be colleagues. Of course, in the meantime, I'll take the "route less traveled" (by my fellow cohort members), with the hope that I will find a balance that will weave my upbringing with ENE customs. Until then, I'll be a living paradox!

Education should help students develop their own stands on what they want to become according to their own original deep belief

Dall'Alba's article, to a great extend, answers my question about the origin of many of the ontologica and ethical questions existing in educational programs nowadays. Indeed, the most callenging task of learning professional ways of being is the integration of knowing, acting and being. When the education tries to treat knowing, acting and being as separate entities, this most challenging task is left to the students themselves, so students are confused and struggling. Though they have learned much knowledge and many skills at their specific educational programs, but they are still confused and struggling about what kind of people they will become.

I wrote in a previous post that I agree with Dewey's opinion that education should open doors and developing connections for the students. I gave a personal example in that post that my Electrical Engineering education didn't lead me to be an electrical engineer, but it connected me to Purdue ENE, so it's not a failure of my EE education to not make me as an electrical engineer. However, now I realize my EE education actually only gave me some knowledge and skills, it was myself struggling to integrate what I know and what I want to become. It is the integration of knowing and being which has led me to Purdue ENE.

After re-thinking all that we have read and my own experience, I want to put "what is education" like this. This is probably most about higher education or professional education, although I believe it also has relevance for other forms of education. I will further develop it in my essay:
Every students as human beings, as Heidegger says, faces lots of possibilities or possible ways to be, but the possibilities are not limitless, as Dall'Alba points drawing on Heidegger. They have certain belief or direction deep in their heart which lead them to the choice of a certain educational program, but the belief or direction may not be very clear, and they will still face many possibilities in the programs. Although to bring the possibilties are also the eudcation programs' responsibilities, according to the "opening doors and developing connections" theory of Dewey, it is insufficent to help the students to press ahead into one of the possibilities to become what the unclear deep belief wants them to become. Education should help the students in the process of tranformation by help them make a choice according to their own belief.Iain Thomson interpretes Heidegger' work that "we are 'a being who takes a stand on its beig and is defined by that stand'". Education could play a key role in forming and shaping the stand according to the students' own belief, rather than simply make a choice instead of the students themselves.

For example, students enrolled in electrical engineering programs, they probably just have an interest in how TV set works during their childhood. That may sound naive, but not, that's the most powerful source of motivation--the the deep rooted belief. Then how to develop the original form of belief into the stands the students take on their being become a serious problem which actually is the most difficult task of being. Many educational programs today do not address this. Simply because they are engineering programs, they claim--no matter explicitly or not--that:"Our purpose is to make future engineers". Actually, an engineering major student does not necessarily become an engineer. There are many choices. However,by claiming this, the educational programs actually just make a choice instead of the students themselves, also they give the outcome without any process. The process--the transition period--is left to the students themselves. If the deep belief has conflict with this choice, or what they learn in the classroom has conflicts with what they will use when they become what they want to be, students will be confused and struggling. Some of them may not be able to stick to their own stand and couldn't become what they actually want to be. That will be a more serious failure of the education, rather than an engineering program does not make engineers.

I must first say that I really enjoyed this article, but I like Heidegger. This is a debate that I had been having with students and fellow teachers over last summer. The question was about whether students had become a scholar, and we had all these definitions and various expressions of what scholars are and what they do. The students considered the actions and the results as the proof of them being scholars, but I (and other teachers) argued with them that their checklists only work when there are tasks to be completed or grades. What would happen to them when there were no more tasks or structured results? They would then cease to be scholars, or they just cease to be students? If one's motivation is solely to get a grade or accomplish a task (or graduate medical school, etc.), then I think they are on the most basic level of whatever they wanted to do. They may not yet be the wholeness of what that object is, though. The scholar learns beyond the classroom, often playing role of teacher and student in pursuit of something he or she wants to understand, and the satisfaction is intrinsic. A student may be more dependent on a teacher and is influenced by external motivations. That is the difference between the student and the scholar. (My interpretation of our definitions.) One does, the other is. Superimpose this on doctors, lawyers, carpenters, teachers, etc., and see if you can tell the difference.

We didn't get very far with our students, but our goal was for all of them to become scholars. That required a shift in their paradigm and a taking on of something new while simultaneously giving up something old. It is indeed a process, and one that I feel is intangible and often unrecordable in education as it is in competition for those things deemed priority. There was a misperception that the scholars had the best grades, but that wasn't comprehensively true. There were some scholars who had the lowest grades for a variety of reasons, yet they got less spotlight. How do we encourage and support this BEING when we don't usually reward it? As educators, do we encourage the tension and resistance and have time in our scopes and sequences for BEING to take place?

ontology in the classroom

This weeks reading brought a number of things to mind for me. I tend to be too wordy so I'm going to try to keep to my major points here. Last semester I took a class Sociology of Education, and one thing we talked about in that class was that there is sometimes, at least in the context of the U.S., an overemphasis on the ability of schools to be transformational for a countries population (Bankston III & Calderas 2009). That is, by placing too heavy of burden of things like social mobility and preparation for workplace integration in addition to the normal curriculum, policies can focus too much on schools without recognizing other societal forces are at work (i.e. politics, the economy, and so on). I think this is relevant to our upcoming discussion because the author of the article for this week suggests that training in “being” and “becoming” should be added to professional training education. This is another transformational expectation. While education can and is transformational, the question is how much transformation can we expect from schools? Being is intertwined with the whole world, and of course education has an impact on the possibilities opened, but at the same time we invest more in the transformational potential of education its possible external constraints may limit those possibilities. A practical example merely being budgeting. Some schools may not be able to afford a revamped curriculum that incorporates being. There are many other potential constraints as well. This does not mean such practices cannot be implemented, its just a warning about investing too much in the transformational power of education while ignoring other social forces.

Placing that aside, if such a program were implemented it another threat is posed. Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, makes an interesting point that social programs like social security are not necessarily bad things, that their intention is to help people so they may reach a fuller capacity (Friedman 1977?). The problem Friedman notes is that the programs once designed with a benign intent can and often are confiscated by others who lose touch with its original purpose and exploit that program to garner favor amongst people or toward their own end (for instance using “being” education toward a particular type of “being” that favors them, could be Orwellian or much less sinister in nature, but regardless it loses its original purpose). Training in being could mutate from being a training toward becoming a professional and entering that community toward a being that is somehow favored by people controlling said training. This favored being may not necessarily be straight out of George Orwell novel, but there is potential there for abuse (e.g. professors could train graduate students that their method or theoretical framework is an essential part of 'being' an engineering educator, and that others are not really part of that being). Of course if you take Friedman too far you can use that logic to preclude the creation of any program. I think there is a risk in trying to develop programs that incorporate being into the curriculum directly.

On a more fundamental level, and to this I have little answer because I am not very familiar with Heidegger, I wonder how directed our being is. Is it always a conscious process? Are we always directed, becoming, toward something? Are there times we are not headed in particular directions or is being sometimes unconscious? If it is unconscious or indirect/not always active it becomes exponentially harder to “train” one in being. My overall point here is that I think what the author is talking about is a very complicated process where we are entwined with many people, places and things both locally and on a large scale. We will be regardless, so given some of the other potential problems mentioned here, is being training necessary? Or should that process be left to unfold naturally?

--Corey

A Brief Philosophical Primer

(For those of you who want to watch a video of Martin Heidegger, here is an excellent series on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKhUyU8UQEI).

So this week we have a paper by a member of our community trying to make a call back to an age old discussion of being. I do not know a single member of the Academy who believes in his/her heart that a university education is not a place for growth and development of the individual as a whole; however, the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour.

To use a Welsh expression, Martin Heidegger is a strange duck. When I teach Martin Heidegger to my friends and fellow engineers, I always start off with the statement, "Martin Heidegger is a lot like Bill Clinton, he wants to know what *is* is." More importantly, he is fundamentally concerned with igniting a new fire about the work of Rene Descartes and what he feels are some unaddressed problems with classic and modern philosophy. His primary claim to fame (to the armchair philosopher,) is that he tackles "je pense, donc je suis," in a way that had his peers thinking in different ways. I will expound upon this either in class or maybe in another post, but all of you should know at the very least that Heidegger != Descartes.

Here are some important people/concepts/battles/struggles to understand:

Husserl's Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften. Here Husserl argues that there are four important revolutions in history of thought: Socratic/Platonic arguments based on logos and its subsequent development into scientific thought; the Cartesian revolution; the transcendental revolution of Kant, whereby the only source of necessity is subjectivity and thus follows knowledge; and finally, the phenomenological revolution, which incorporates the form of and content of acts of knowing into a subjective framework.

Descartes vs Husserl. In short, Descartes (who wrote the Discourse on the Method in French, not Latin,) believes that we have method in order to overcome a tendency to accept naive uncertainties (2). Here the method in the Cartesian sense admits that the subjective paints our experiences and reasoning.

Kant vs Husserl. Kant's role in phenomenology is that of the "straw man." We can find evidence of reflections on Kant throughout Husserl's works (3-6). Husserl is concerned with the incorporation of what is now thought of as the dialectic into a discussion of objective validity and complete justification. Whereas Kant considered the metaphysical urges of the human brain to be inseparable from human thinking, thus defining one of the core aspects of his transcendentalism.

Traditional ontology by Nietzsche. Existential Phenomenologists have always had a different view of ontology than classic philosophers. Nietzsche, for instance, challenged Plato's and subsequent philosophers' ideas of the temporal nature of being, that is to say, that being and becoming are in a struggle in classic philosophy and the being part wins. That which is being, akin to the Dæmons of Socrates, is transcendental and outside of lived experience, and Nietzsche believes that classic philosophy involves itself mostly with the psychosis of wo/man to grapple the ideas that traditional philosophy has set up for him/her.

Heidegger and meaning. Meaningfulness strikes a cord with Heidegger (7). One of the primary concepts within his works addresses the human being at the nexus of object and subject, that human being's (or amalgamation's) negotiation of the world, the human being experience and the limits of being experiences through constructs such as negation and death. Ultimately, meaning presents itself to humans and is neither created nor destroyed by humans. That holds since being and what beings are are intertwined throughout the question of existence. Finally, the disclosure of being is not an objective event. Meaning is unfolded (or disclosed or presented) through a neo-classic interpretation of moods and involvement. Thus, Heidegger's work resounds well with the evolution of being/meaning briefly discussed here.


1. Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften
2. Descartes, Discourse on the Method
3. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy
4. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
5. Husserl, Ideen I
6. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen
7. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit

Epistemology and Ontology

After reading the piece this week by Gloria Dall'Alba, I think I have more questions than answers. From my own experience, I tend to agree with her argument that the current process of education - and particularly education for a purpose of learning a profession - is more focused on gaining knowledge than on the process of integrating who we are into the professional we will become.

As I make connections with this thought and how it plays out in engineering education, I have lots of questions to pose and reflect upon. Are ways of being (ontology) context based? That is, is the way of being an engineer different in industry versus academia? Is the way of being an engineer different across disciplines? Or across industries? How is the learning and integration of becoming intertwined with the culture of a profession - or is learning and integration of becomming really assimilation into the culture of a profession? And what does that mean for those whose ways of being do not "fit" into that culture?

I have heard many, many, many engineering students say that working in industry through an internship or co-op experience was very different for them than the academic experience of being in school. I've heard them say that they liked working as an engineer much better than learning in a classroom. I've heard myself use this point to students who are wondering if "engineering" is right for them - working as an engineer is different than your experience in school. I've told them to try being an engineer before you change your major. I wonder then, if what we call formal engineering education is primarily the epistmological portion of becomming an engineer, and intern/co-op experiences (in some ways the apprenticeship model of educaiton) primarily the onotological portion of becomming an engineer? If this truly is an appropriate question to be asking, then we have, as Dall'Alba says, left "the most challenging task of learning professional ways of being......to the students themselves." Have we pushed that part of our educational process out to the companies and industries that hire our students? Does that mean that we accept them as partners in the educational process (which to me implies that this "pushing" was done intentionally, with full recognition of the consequences)? Or does it mean that we have abdicated our responsibilities to our students in teaching them to become an engineer? Have we explicitly decided that it is not for us to decide "whose knowing, acting and being serve as 'golden standards'" in the context of being an engineer and left it to industry (knowing that there is no uniformity, and thus not all students are developed in the same way)?

I could probably go on posing questions about the possible relationships between epistemology and ontology with regard to what we engineers call "hard skills" and "soft skills", and how our primarily epistemological approach to engineering education will likely need to change if we are to educate the "Engineer of 2020" to which the College has committed, but I think those might be ideas for a different post.

“Building Our Classroom”

In one of her post last week, Alice challenged us to think about some of the educational philosophies that have impacted our personal engineering education experience. I would like to take the opportunity to share my first engineering experience that was strongly influenced by the work of Maria Montessori.

First let me take a moment to explain that for the most part, Maria Montessori and John Dewey did not appreciate the others contributions to the field. And Nell Noddings, being a dedicated Deweyan, endorses Dewey’s perspective. But to dismiss Montessori based on the fact that she was not a good philosopher, is to me, missing the point. Maria Montessori did not consider her work in education to be a philosophical experience; she considered her work in education to be an ongoing scientific experiment in education. She was not interested in a theoretical framework, but rather a scientific explanation that would both contribute to our understanding of how children develop and our communities by educating “global citizens” capable of self-control, self-growth as well as community awareness. Considering the fact that history has recorder Maria Montessori as the first woman physician in Italy, her interest and experience in the sciences extend toward using a scientific rather than a philosophical approach to education. The fact that she was somewhat overbearing and dogmatic in her application of her methods is a discussion for another time. While Maria Montessori’s work with Primary and Early Elementary Children is well worked out, she was unable to spend as much time working out the details of her educational program for upper elementary children and adolescents. In fact her ideas on adolescents are only briefly laid out in a short essay she wrote called, “Erdkinder.” Having read some of Montessori’s translated writings, I agree that sometimes she may get caught up in the details or stray off on “mystical” tangents, but her sound advice of “Follow the child,” in the sense that one follows and nurture a child’s natural interest in his prepared surrounding, for me is at the crux of learning. It also echoes of Dewey’s endorsement of experiential education. (I wonder what would have happened if the two of them could have gotten past their biases about the other approach, but that is an essay for another day.) But there is more than just following the child involved, there also at times, has to be an introduction to an enticing idea…

When I was 10, the Montessori school I attended decided to start an upper elementary program. They hired a young man, Jerry, who had recently returned from Bergamot, Italy, one of the premier Montessori training institutes. Jerry decided very quickly into his tenure at the school that the portable building that the school had rented for our program was not going to work out. He decided that with the help of the students, he was going to build a new building for us to use as our classroom. Using some Math Materials that he had created during his time at the Montessori institute, he taught us quadratic equations and essentially as fourth and fifth graders, we had enough math and measuring skills to figure out all of the other information. Now, I know in today’s world, we see projects like this on the DIY channel accomplished in a weekend, but as fourth and fifth graders, we framed a 25’x20’ school house with four walls, a roof, four windows and a door. We were able to get one of the parents of a child at the school to pour an appropriate slab for us, and we planned, budgeted, designed, framed, sided, insulate, roofed, drywalled, and painted the room. It is important to remember that I lived in Arizona, so climate control was not essential, but other than the electricity (which one of the parents provided), we fund raised, built, worked and got the room done. I doubt that it would have survived any hurricanes, but it was a fabulous experience for me. There were 11 children involved, and we all found a niche. Some of us preferred planning, some of us preferred the actual implementation, some of us were better at motivating than doing, and others were better as historians and poets, but all of us were engaged and involved. We also learned a lot about what happens when things don’t work, and why certain projects have to be done before others. I think if you were to go back an interview any of us again, we would all say this was one of our most exciting learning experiences. One of the little girls I used to babysit, daughter attends school there now and the room is still used as a storage area. It’s rewarding to think that something fourth and fifth graders engineered is still standing; though I am sure the dry Arizona weather has helped preserve the structure. My point is that when you engage children in something that matters to them, like physically creating their own learning space, it is easy to see how they become vested in the process. My natural inclination is not toward hammers and saws, but I found that I really enjoyed framing, dry walling, and painting. I have been able to put this knowledge to use throughout my life. I worked at an interior design store in high school and helped design and construct displays. These skills have helped me countless time doing set design and construction in community theatre. However, if I had not had this early exposure to using these skills to create something that was important to me, I might never have tried on this tool belt. On my own, I would never have thought to create or engineer a classroom. But by being in community that had a need, I was provided the opportunity to be a part of a team that designed and built a building, a small one albeit, but a building nonetheless.

While some people who follow Montessori become dogmatic, others have gleaned much of both her and Dewey’s and many other educators belief that children learn through doing, but there is more to this doing than simply experiencing, it is being engaged in a meaningful process, and for most children, seeing the results of their work. Whether we endorse a philosophy of what Noddings calls Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology more frequently referred to as a theory of cognitive development, which is a highly generative theory in my experience, most children under the age of 12 are concrete thinkers. They need to see tangible results of their work. To design a house on paper, or a model is one thing, to walk into a room you built is another. I greatly benefited from having the opportunity to do this. I used to cry when I had a fever, and my mother would make me stay home from school. I loved to be engaged in the work. I loved to be at school. Thanks to Dr. Montessori’s experiment and to some of the people she influenced, I had the opportunity to be a part of engineering my own school…

Is this education?

Thinking about what I am doing in this class, reading Noddings, reading the posts, making notes, and trying to start my essay, I realized that was easier to start with an example of what is education. Understanding this process, the History & Philosophy of Engineering Education process, should help me to figure out what is education about. That is right; starting with concrete things moving through more abstract hypothesis about what is education (is this scaffolding?).

To start looking into our process, I realize we take some key (or engaging) points from the book (or authors). As Xingyu said, she “learn from Noddings’ book that constructivism is an epistemology describing how learning happens” for example.

From those key points and thinkers’ views, we also take part of the discussion, stating what we think, like when Ben assures “I strongly believe that rational thinkers exercise their skills in familiar fields of experiences”. Also when we highlight important or interesting things, as Tatiana wrote: “I agreed with Piaget’s approach that it is impossible to know what is «knowledge» without knowing who «knower» is”.

Even more, we also appropriate some statements or make some connections around those, like Jeremy did when said “I wonder would a similar critique be given today [talking about warrior glorification] - or in any time in history, for that matter. Are traces of things our society glorifies evident in our education system”. We also reflect on how or why those connections and views are important for us, as students “From what I have been taught thus far, this is a problem solving method for technical engineering class”(Benjamin), or as teachers “Do I violate the «freedom» proposition by Existentialists if I advise them to stay away from drugs and cigarette?”(Xingyu).

To make it short, we read, we highlight ideas, we appropriate some, we connect some others… how are we constructing new knowledge?

To “appropriate” the constructivism perspective, I do think we are creating knew knowledge. About how those thinkers’ ideas can change our way of teaching, making us reflect about why is important for us as students, as well as for our students, to understand the learning process. Writing those reflections make us “dialogue” with each other, to have even more thinking inside us… Each day the conversation change, it depends on our mood, on our readings, on if is Thursday (class day) or not. But this “dialogue” is here, permanent for us to come back and reflect and connect again and again… Is our knowledge… our social construction…

Any way, I am now talking about knowledge, what is the connection with education? Does the “construction of new knowledge” implies, for me, education?

Teachers' Role and Teaching Methods-Inspired by Constructivism Theory

I learn from Noddings’ book that constructivism is an epistemology describing how learning happens. The main theme of constructivism is that people generate knowledge actively by their prior experiences and ideas.

Constructivism inspires me that students should play an active role in the learning process to acquire knowledge. Also, teachers should understand the students’ need and use suitable teaching methods. In this point of view, teachers are somewhat like facilitators. They give guidelines and emphasize more on providing learning environments than on teaching the content. For example, instead of just giving lectures that cover the contents of the subject, teachers could raise questions and encourage students to explore the domain, identify problems, and give solutions. I believe students could acquire knowledge more effectively in such self-motivated environments with teachers’ guidance.

Also, according to Jean Piaget, a pioneer of the constructivist theory, different learners construct different knowledge based on their unique internal representations of the world. Students often understand a concept easier if it is presented in a way somehow related to their former experiences in the learning process. This may be one of the reasons why some students grasp knowledge more quickly when they are presented with charts, whereas other students may prefer textual descriptions. Therefore, teacher should recognize the importance of using various teaching methods in class. For example, a math teacher can use different approaches such as graphs and formulas to solve math problems, and a physics teacher can introduce the concept of gravitation by experiments as well as formula derivation. One challenge is that when using different teaching methods, teachers must still manage to cover all the required contents in limited class hours. There should be a balance in between.