Constructivism in Education

In light of the broad, multidimensional, and contestable nature of constructivism, a central debate concerns the object of construction. What do we mean when we say that a learner is constructing something? Three general categories, with overlaps in between, are: the construction of meaning, the construction of knowledge, and the construction of knowledge claims. To construct meaning is to make sense of something by understanding both its parts and overall message. To construct knowledge is to obtain what philosophers traditionally call “justified true belief.” There are three conditions in this formulation of knowledge: belief, truth, and justification. Beliefs are intentional, meaningful, and representational, directing a person to attain truth and avoid error with respect to the very thing that person accepts. As for the notions of truth and justification, there are three major theories of truth, namely the correspondence theory, coherence theory, and pragmatic theory; and seven main types of justification, namely perception, reason, memory, testimony, faith, introspection, and intuition. Finally, to construct a knowledge claim is to indicate that one thinks that one knows something. The crucial difference between knowledge and a knowledge claim is that the latter has not acquired the status of knowledge. There are two main implications for teaching and learning that arise from an epistemological exploration of the concept of constructivism: First, educators need to be clear about what they want their students to construct, and how the latter should go about doing it. Informed by learner profiles and other contingent factors, educators should encourage their students to construct meanings, knowledge, and knowledge claims, individually and collaboratively, throughout their schooling years. Second, educators need to guard against some common misconceptions on constructivism in the schooling context. Constructivism, contrary to popular belief, is compatible with direct instruction, teacher guidance, structured learning, content learning, traditional assessment, and standardized testing. In sum, there are no pedagogical approaches and assessment modes that are necessarily constructivist or anticonstructivist. A variety of teaching methods, resources, and learning environments should therefore be employed to support students in their constructing process.

Epistemic injustice and epistemic positioning: towards an intersectional political economy

This article introduces the concept of epistemic positioning to theorize the relationship between identity-based epistemic judgements and the reproduction of social inequalities, including those of gender and ethnicity/race, in the academia. Acts of epistemic positioning entail the evaluation of knowledge claims based on the speaker’s stated or inferred identity. These judgements serve to limit the scope of the knowledge claim, making it more likely speakers will be denied recognition or credit. The four types of epistemic positioning – bounding (reducing a knowledge claim to elements of personal identity), domaining (reducing a knowledge claim to discipline or field associated with identity), non-attribution (using the claim without recognizing the author) and appropriation (presenting the claim as one’s own) – are mutually reinforcing. Given the growing importance of visibility and recognition in the context of increasing competition and insecurity in academic employment, these practices play a role in the ability of underrepresented groups to remain in the academic profession.

COVID-19 and Other Prevalent Diseases in Africa: A Pragmatic Approach

The aim of this paper is to propose that the development and legitimization of African knowledge and validation systems on a pragmatic basis, is an efficient and effective means of responding to a myriad of health problems plaguing Africans, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic. Whenever there is a novel disease outbreak, the norm is to wait for the development of scientifically proven vaccines for its treatment. However, the scientific validation of drugs is a rigorous and lengthy process, thereby inappropriate for dealing with health emergencies like the COVID-19 outbreak. The alarming rapidity with which the novel COVID-19 pandemic rages globally and decimates humanity has brought to the fore the need for Africa to look inwards in search of viable and efficient alternative approaches to the pandemic. In this paper, I examine pragmatism as a theoretical framework and relate it to proposed African epistemic and validation frameworks with a particular reference to homegrown orthodox and alternative/complementary medicines. I argue that the validation and approval of any knowledge claim based on pragmatism is a more expeditious mode of attending to COVID-19 and other prevalent diseases in Africa. The application of knowledge that brings practical success in dealing with health challenges in Africa without necessarily following rigid and lengthy scientific validation procedures will go a long way toward improving human conditions and well-being. I conclude that pragmatic considerations should ultimately inform local approval to homegrown African medicines for use in Africa.

The kantian notion of freedom and autonomy of artificial agency

The objective of this paper is to provide critical analysis of the Kantian notion of freedom (especially the problem of the third antinomy and its resolution in the critique of pure reason); its significance in the contemporary debate on free-will and determinism, and the possibility of autonomy of artificial agency in the Kantian paradigm of autonomy. Kant's resolution of the third antinomy by positing the ground in the noumenal self resolves the problem of antinomies; however, it invites an explanatory gap between phenomenality and the noumenal self; even if he has successfully established the compatibility of natural causality and non-natural causality through his transcendental argument. This paper is also devoted to establishing the plausibility of the knowledge claim that Kantian reduction of phenomenality has served half of the purpose of the AI scientists on the possibility of Artificial Autonomous Agency.

Epistemic injustice and epistemic positioning: towards an intersectional political economy

While access to higher education continues to expand, the participation of women and ethnic minority scholars in the academic profession remains low. This paper theorizes the relationship between identity- based epistemic judgments and the reproduction of social inequalities in the academia. It conceptualizes these judgments as acts of epistemic positioning, which entail the evaluation of knowledge claims based on the speaker’s stated or inferred identity. These judgments serve to limit the scope of the knowledge claim, making it more likely speakers will be denied recognition or credit. The paper introduces four kinds of epistemic positioning: bounding, domaining, non-attribution, and appropriation. Given the growing importance of visibility and recognition in the context of increasing competition and insecurity in academic employment, these practices play a role in the ability of underrepresented groups to remain in the academia. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for conceptualizing and addressing the relationship between social inequalities and recognition, to build towards an intersectional political economy of knowledge production.

Argument Strategies and Linguistic Realizations of the Discussion Sections in Local, National, and International Journal Articles in English Education by Indonesian Authors: How do they differ and/or Resemble?

The quality of argument in the discussion section determines the quality of a journal article because in this section authors must argue convincingly so that readers may accept and use their new knowledge claim. This study aims to determine the differences in argument strategies and linguistic realizations in the discussion sections of unaccredited local, accredited national, and reputable international journals in English by Indonesian writers in the field of Language Teaching. The research method used was descriptive qualitative and quantitative research methods (mixed-method) in analyzing differences in argument styles and linguistic features of the discussion sections of the journal articles. Sixty articles were analyzed using the genre-based text analysis method following Swales (1990) and Dudley Evan (1994). The results show that the argument strategies of articles in local, national, and international journals have important differences. The main differences are the discussion sections in the international journals are much longer in word count and use much more references than the local and national journals do. Also, unlike international journal articles, the majority of local journals use an incomplete argument strategy while national journal articles use a semicomplete argument strategy. Yet another difference is that international journal authors tend to use non-integral citations more frequently while local and national journal authors prefer using integral citation types. The similarity among the three journal articles is that the majority of the authors tend to use present tense and past tense in their discussion section rather than present perfect tense and future tense. Keywords: argument strategy, Research article, comparative rhetorical study

Intercultural Education: Bring Together Pluralism and Diversity

Large-scale migrations have forced the creation of new scenarios where the sense of absolute freedom clashes with the search for an ideal community. This situation poses problems related to identity, diversity, the ‘discovery of the other’ and, therefore, to identifying forms that allow to bring together more and more multi-cultural populations (Benahbib 2002). The aim of this paper is to reflect on the need to consider the educational process as ‘methodical socialization’ which corresponds to the need for any society to secure the bases of its conditions of existence and of its durability (Filloux 1993). For these reasons the education processes must be based on format with high coefficients of self-reflection, convergence, trans-culturalism. Education, as a social fact, must adapt to change and new alphabets, to overcome the binomial between time to learn / time to work and must insist on creativity and innovation, since everyday life is and it will be increasingly governed by knowledge and, particularly, by the spendable knowledge, a typical feature of complex, cosmopolitan and ‘high knowledge claim’ societies. Keywords: coexistence, education, inter-culturalism, trans-culturalism, socialization

Scientific Certitude

I’ve been both fascinated and distressed by the arguments raging over how best to respond to the covid-19 pandemic. In particular, I’ve been struck by the way people claim scientific authority for their confident assurances of what needs to be done. And I’m especially intrigued by the scorn they often lavish on those who hold differing views on what science is telling us. The heat generated by the resulting debates is strikingly similar to the heat generated by debates over the science connected with human-caused climate change. And in both cases, the disputants too often presuppose indefensibly naïve views about scientific authority and certitude, apparently unaware that even the allegedly most obvious logical truths lack the certainty attributed to scientific authority in these debates. As a rule, I dislike re-circulating my Editorials, but I think it’s time to resurrect one (modestly tweaked) from a few years ago, addressing precisely this issue (Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 379–386, 2017). …………………………………… “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” --Oscar Wilde I’ve often noticed how debates within the SSE community sometimes parallel debates in the political arena, perhaps especially with respect to the passion they elicit and the intolerance and condescension sometimes lavished on members of the “opposition.” Occasionally, of course, the debates in the SSE are nearly indistinguishable from those in the political arena—say, over the evidence for human-caused climate change. But what I find most striking is how the passion, intolerance, etc.—perhaps most often displayed by those defending whatever the “received” view happens to be—betrays either a surprising ignorance or else a seemingly convenient lapse of memory, one that probably wouldn’t appear in less emotionally-charged contexts. What impassioned partisans tend to ignore or forget concerns (a) the tentative nature of both scientific pronouncements and knowledge claims generally (including matters ostensibly much more secure than those under debate), as well as (b) the extensive network of assumptions on which every knowledge claim rests. So I’d like to offer what I hope will be a perspective-enhancer, concerning how even our allegedly most secure and fundamental pieces of a priori knowledge are themselves open to reasonable debate. A widespread, but naïve, view of logic is that no rational person could doubt its elementary laws. But that bit of popular “wisdom” is demonstrably false. And if that’s the case, then so much the worse for the degree of certitude we can expect in more controversial arenas. Let me illustrate with a few examples.[1] [1] I’m indebted to Aune, 1970 for much of what follows.

The Variability of Know(s)-that Judgments

The usage evidence—various scenarios that realistically depict where and when we attribute knowledge to ourselves and others—shows that all the alternatives (epistemic contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism, knowledge relativism) to intellectual invariantism fail. They fail for several reasons: When cases are compared, speaker-hearers tend to retract one or the other conflicting knowledge claim; the intuitions elicited by various cases don’t consistently satisfy any particular position; the situations under which speaker-hearers retract knowledge claims under pressure seem to support an invariantist position. Nevertheless, no standard invariantist position seems supported by the usage data because speaker-hearers do seem to shift because of differences either in the interests of the agents to whom knowledge is attributed, for example, oneself, or because of other apparently non-epistemic reasons. Attempts to use pragmatic tools, such as implicatures, to handle the apparent shifts in knowledge standards are shown to fail as well.

THE NOTHINGNESS OF THE GETTIER PROBLEM

This work, “The Nothingness” of the Gettier Problem is an attempt to deconstruct the popularly held view that a fourth condition may be necessary for the Traditional Account of Knowledge otherwise known as JTB. Plato, it was who championed the traditional account of knowledge as justified Belief in response to the agitation of the skeptics notably Georgias and Protagoras. This tripartite account held sway until Edmund Gettier Challenged the position with his article “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Since this challenge, scholars have tried to solve what has become known as the Gettier Problem by trying to fashion out a fourth condition to JTB. This work argues that the celebrated Gettier counter-examples in the challenge of the tripartite account is a "nothingness". The traditional account is rather fundamental in knowledge claim, hence any new vista in form of additional information on JTB should not invalidate it. The textual analysis was adopted as a method for this research.