Browsing by Subject "Epistemology"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Epistemology and prospective content-area teacher candidates: preparing for teaching adolescent literacy.
    (2011-05) Johnson, Christopher William
    Research into student epistemology provides us with descriptions of learners as they encounter academic challenges. Content-area teachers approach the problem of teaching adolescent literacy with particular attitudes toward learning, knowledge, and texts, and these beliefs affect their effectiveness as future literacy teachers. This project investigated content-area pre-service teachers' beliefs about knowledge, learning, and texts, adding to the literature about teacher-candidate epistemology and content-area literacy teaching. The study utilized mixed methods: content-area teacher candidates were surveyed in the first stage of the research study, and a sample of these candidates were interviewed in the second stage of the study. Research findings included the development of a new inventory for learner epistemology measurement. This epistemology of reading inventory offers researchers and educators a measure of learners' beliefs about reading, texts, and comprehension. Study results offer a salient description of teacher candidates' epistemological traits as they approach the problem of teaching content-area reading and literacy to adolescents.
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    Interpreting across the abyss: a hermeneutic exploration of initial literacy development by high school English language learners with limited formal schooling.
    (2010-07) Watson, Jill A.
    The presence of older learners with limited formal literacy and schooling in U.S. high schools constitutes an intense and unique instance of the encounter of contextually oriented oral indigenous culture and the distanciated culture of high literacy and digitacy. Drawing on the work of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and others, I describe the distance between the noetic lifeworlds of orality and literacy as a semiotic abyss across which interpretation is difficult but necessary. The scholarly stance required is one of humility--to fail to engage the alterity of orality with sensitive attunement is an act of continued imperialism, which is morally unacceptable, epistemologically naïve, and ecologically suicidal in cognitive and natural terms. Following Marie Battiste, Enrique Dussel, David G. Smith, and others, this philosophical study locates the phenomenon of initial literacy development by high school English language learners within the history of Western epistemology, colonialism, and globalization, in particular the legacies of Kant's logic of emancipative reason, transformed in school contexts into a logic of sacrificial reason wherein the primitive ways of orality are sacrificed to hyperliteracy in the environment of reified, standardized education in the United States. Illustrative anecdotes, poetry, and assertorial argument are used to evoke instances of the encounter or orality and literacy in school settings. Refuting the primacy of both idealism and positivism in society and education, the study is inspired both topically and methodologically by hermeneutics, the ancient art of interpretation, as a way of articulating the fusion of horizons between severed hyperliteracy and oral ways of knowing in context, so that a conversation regarding the role and instruction of literacy remains unforeclosed and capable of sustaining a common future in which oral and literate noeses are respected. A pedagogy of reciprocity between orality and literacy is proposed as a path to the practical survival of older oral newcomers who must acquire the artificially-toned manners of representational culture, and to the ontic survival of the hypostacized Western self trapped in triumphal determinacy.
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    An investigation of the internal corporate factors of organizational learning and innovation
    (2013-08) Jayanti, Elizabeth Bechtel
    This study answers the question, "What are the dimensions of the organizational learning experience?" from the perspective of 35 members of four leading companies, representing the first such empirical effort. A review of over 1,368 articles revealed that current organizational learning models are based in theory rather than practice, frequently reduce organizational learning to the individual level , and focus on external factors to the neglect of internal factors. While research on organizational learning dates back to work by Cyert and March (1963), fifty years later, empirical answers to the following questions were still lacking: What happens to information as it is processed through the organization? What predictable screening biases are there in an organization? * What is the relation between decisions made by the responsible representatives and the final decision implemented by the organization? *In what systematic ways are decisions elaborated and changed by the organization? (Cyert & March, 1963, p. 21-22). Fifty dominant organizational learning survey instruments were closely reviewed. It was discovered that each instrument was based on theoretical models, rather than real-world organizational data. This meant that it was unknown whether any dimensions of organizational learning had been missed, or if the assumed dimensions were correct. Questions for the interview were drawn from questions that appeared in multiple previous instruments and focused on the organizational rather than individual level. Data was recorded and transcribed verbatim. Scrubbed transcripts were analyzed in Nvivo using a grounded theory approach. This study found no evidence for several assumed dimensions such as decision types , decision proactivity , role clarity , knowledge turnover , and market share . It was determined that the long-standing idea of controlling for industry is not practical. Finally, this study discovered that organizational learning is significantly influenced by company culture , which constitutes a way of being. This culture shapes what actions a company takes in areas of knowledge management , client focus , focus for growth , and engagement . What a company does ultimately influences what a company becomes, through organizational learning .
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    The Living Mind
    (2017-01) Laine, Patrick
    This thesis revisits the question of what kind of thing a mind is, and seeks to show that this question contains an important assumption about the nature of the mental domain, namely, that it is its own domain, or more simply, its own thing. What if, instead of asking what the mind is, and doggedly pursuing an answer that will satisfy us, we inquire into the nature of the mind without a commitment to there being a distinct and discrete explanandum, a delineable entity that awaits our delineation? This thesis follows up on this thought, by exploring an alternative conception of mind that treats it as no thing, but not as nothing. Starting with the idea that minds aren’t clearly bounded realms that contain thoughts and feelings and so forth, but the embodied performances of subjects-persons-organisms (SPOs), this thesis goes on to explore how this reorientation in our understanding of the mental yields a radical, powerful, and explanatorily fruitful approach to solving, or dissolving, thorny philosophical problems, and specifically, problems in epistemology.
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    The Victorian Mind's Eye: Perception as Form in Literature and Science
    (2018-01) Krieg, Katelin
    The Victorians habitually framed knowing as a matter of seeing things clearly, but they were also deeply aware of the limits of human perception. “The Victorian Mind’s Eye” uncovers how aesthetic and scientific thinkers of the period employed literary form to achieve visual and epistemological clarity. Current critical approaches to perception in science and literature tend to reduce literature to a conduit for scientific ideas or treat scientific discovery and technological innovation as the drivers of change in literary form. In this dissertation, I instead argue that for a wide range of Victorian intellectuals, literary forms were not a mere vehicle for scientific knowledge, nor second-order reflections of such knowledge, but were privileged as effective tools for establishing new perceptual modes and changing how readers understood their world. In a series of four case studies that pair Victorians who shaped how we view art with Victorians who changed how we view nature—John Ruskin and Charles Darwin in chapter one, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Clerk Maxwell in two, George Meredith and Karl Pearson in three, and Walter Pater and William James in four—I demonstrate that their disparate projects were driven by the same dilemma: how can we know what we cannot see with our own eyes? Drawing on current trends in philosophy of science that posit an analogy between scientific models and literature, I reframe these writers’ use of literary form as a technology of perception rather than an element of style. Much as Victorians used scientific models to detect new phenomena, writers across the arts and sciences used poetic devices including metaphor, juxtaposition, and aphorism to expand readers’ perceptual capabilities beyond the perspectival limits of the individual observer.