Distinguishing Between Pragmatic and Intuitive Understandings Within Democratic Classrooms

• In Event: Toward an Ethics of Relationality

Abstract

While people in secular democracies are free to base their personal perspectives on whatever intuitive beliefs they may hold, they also need to be able to collaborate on the construction of collective purposes and understandings in pragmatic terms. For, as pragmatists have demonstrated, in the absence of shared metaphysical commitments, people must rely on the cogent and transparent interpretation of broadly recognizable forms of human experience. Yet the integral contributions of intuitive understandings in all creative intellectual endeavors—and the interpretive diversity to which they lead—also need to be recognized and valued. Having developed this argument, I offer a multitiered pedagogical framework to support the development of distinctively democratic (Author et al, 2019) knowledge construction processes in classrooms.

Author

• Susan Jean Mayer, Critical Exploration Press
  Presenting Author