Lessons Learned on Teaching and Scholarly Disputation

• In Event: 58.011 - Acquired Wisdom: Lessons Learned by Distinguished Researchers

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This is an autobiographical reflection on professional experience, with emphasis on what I have learned about teaching and scholarly disputation over the past 52 years, since the beginning of my first full time employment as an educator.

Theoretical perspective: Sociology of professions, philosophy of social science, situated cognition, Deweyan pedagogy.

Methods: Autobiography and auto-ethnography.

Data sources: My own experience as a university-based teacher and researcher.

Results and significance: The presentation will focus on two narrative vignettes. The first describes my initial experience in designing learning experiences for others. In this instance it was an after-school informal education program for inner city African-American middle schoolers, titled “Afro-American History in Music,” first taught in the fall of 1964. Logically it made sense to start with examples of music from West Africa before tracing the travel of West African musical style and its evolution within the African Diaspora—through the Caribbean and the rural South to the contemporary urban North. But when the first session began with a projection slide showing the outline map of Africa, and the students literally fell off their chairs in embarassment, it became apparent that the curriculum content was not emotionally neutral, and that to teach this content it was necessary to take into account the feelings and prior knowledge of the learners. Later in my career this insight developed into a notion of “learning as political assent”—learners vote “yes” or “no” on what we try to teach them, granting or witholding assent to learn. The second vignette reports on my learning that scholarly inquiry is not emotionally neutral either—scholars are not simply engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth—readily persuaded by evidence and coldly rational argument. Rather, they are emotionally committed to their own positions and defend them stubbornly—in this instance quantitative research assumptions and data in research on teaching, in contrast to qualitative research assuptions and data. In argumentation over those issues, and with some pointed advice from a senior colleague, I learned that no one, including even myself, is ever 100% right.





References

Erickson, F. (with Bagrodia, R., Cook-Sather, A., Espinoza, M., Jurow, S., Shultz, J. and Spencer, J.). (2007). Students' experience of school curriculum: The everyday circumstances of granting and withholding assent to learn. Chapter 10, pp. 198-218 in Connelly, F. M., Ming, F. H., and Phillion, J. (eds.) The Sage handbook of curriculum and instruction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kaplan, A. (1964). The conduct of inquiry: Methodology for social science. San Francisco: Chandler.
Lakatos, I. and Musgrave, A. (Eds.). (1970). Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge UK: Cambridge U. Press.

Author

• Frederick D. Erickson, University of California - Los Angeles