Sunday, 9 September 2018

Philosophy and Learning Relations


INTRODUCTION
A philosophy of teaching is exactly like pohnpei397 explains.  It is the map you follow when teaching your students.  As a middle school, high school, prison system, and college teacher over my career, I would like to give you some examples that would explain further for a beginning teacher.  The key part for you of pohnpei's answer is the very last sentence which says that a teaching philosophy "allows teachers to know where they are...
A philosophy of teaching is exactly like pohnpei397 explains.  It is the map you follow when teaching your students.  As a middle school, high school, prison system, and college teacher over my career, I would like to give you some examples that would explain further for a beginning teacher.  The key part for you of pohnpei's answer is the very last sentence which says that a teaching philosophy "allows teachers to know where they are trying to go and how they plan to get there."  As a beginning teacher, I had no true idea what that really meant in practical terms.  To be specific, let's say that you are an English teacher who has to teach eighth graders how to write complex sentences when they are now writing in only simple and compound sentences.  Your philosophy tells you to take them from where they are, in simple and compound sentences, and figure out a plan to get them to write complex sentences and why they want to learn this as it makes their writing more grown up. Let's say your plan has to include something for visual learners, physical learners, readers etc.  For physical and visual learners, you can put two students in the front of the room (choose carefully), have them stand separately to demonstrate the I in one independent clause.  Then have them hold hands to demonstrate the conjunction which holds compound sentences together or break the hand hold to demonstrate that they are still independent sentences.  Then, have them hold hands, but push on the knee of one of them to show the students that without the one independent sentence to lean on, the dependent clause with the bent knee would fall as it needs the support of the independent clause.   You will need to clarify coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.  Give them a rhyme to memorize the coordinating as the subordinating list is too long. Construct several as a class to show them the patterns D,I or ID so that they understand the flexibility of complex. Then put them in groups to construct one complex sentence together and present it to the class.  The class can then decide if it is correct or not.  Make them vote individually after 2 or 3 so that you can see who does not understand.  Then have them write three sentences of their own to trade among their small group.  Have them choose the best sentence in their groups and present again, but to the next group.  Then in each assignment after this, require one complex sentence which they must underline and label D,I or ID.  For those who need a reference sheet, provide one which shows sentence patterns.  Now, can you see that you need a map and a plan for how to teach students every one of the goals you have for them?  You need to use your philosophy of teaching as to how to treat students, how to teach every kind of learner, the plan to teach the objective you have, and to make students use the information you have taught them so that you know you have reached your goal.  I hope this helps you understand more completely with the examples provided.
THE RELEVANCE OF PHYLOSOPHY AND CLASSROOM TEACHER
Philosophy of education has very little practical value for beginner teachers. The best way to learn to teach is to actually do it. When you’re face to face with your first class of students, the only philosophy I’d advise is contained in the following five principles:
  1. You’re the leader. Whatever happens in your classroom is your responsibility.
  2. Do your best to love your students. All of them.
  3. Be passionate about what you teach. If you’re not, you’re wasting everyone’s time, including your own.
  4. Always remember that you’re there to serve your students, not vice-versa.
  5. Your students will teach you all sorts of things that will affect your identity and influence the way you teach, but you can only ever be their teacher.
As you gain experience, you’ll develop your own philosophy of education, and it will serve you much better than the theories and ideas of other educators, past and present.
To be a good teacher means you need to not only know the content you are teaching, but also how to teach it to your audience most effectively. For too many teachers, they teach the way they were taught, or the way someone told them to. This can help you get by, but it is important to understand why you teach in a certain way. It is important to know that not all people learn the same way.
It is also really important to understand these philosophies so you can create your own, that drives all that you do. You need to be able to articulate why you do something one way instead of another. You also need to be able to recognise when your philosophy doesn't work in a situation so you can modify your approach with a sound reason for doing so, not just because it was easy.
Philosophy of education was always presented poorly in my experience, without actually explaining why it is important to know. Once it has context, it is quite fascinating and you will begin to see how things are continually recycled in education.
Gone are the days of the Classical and the Bildung ideal. What remains now are kids that grow up to be fast tweeters who’s main purpose is to get as many likes as possible on FB and as many followers as possible on Twitter and Instagram. All the while sending Snaps of every detail of their life into the world wide web in which they are caught as helpless insects.
The reality is: philosophy has no real saying in education because it has failed as a whole.
In short: philosophy can help YOU personally as a person and a teacher to get a broader understanding of your area of expertise but don’t expect it to give you a proper philosophy of education that you can implement.
Schools are organized and run by a logic of economy, just like any other organisation. Economical thinking and philosophical thinking don’t go too well together…
To have some idea of the philosophy of education gives you a chance to know what you are doing in a classroom.
Without a philosophy you are likely to be blown off course by the day to day situations. A student comes in late, slams tbe door, sits on top of their desk and throws their bag on the floor.
It is annoying. Do you berate them? They have upset your lesson flow.
Turns out that their mother is on dialysis, the student has to get two younger siblings ready for school and then get to school themselves having not had time for breakfast.
Without a philosophy of why you are in that classroom with that student you are very likely to make life more difficult for them and for yourself.
As it happened I visited that student's mother in hospital when the student was with her. We chatted. The student learned that I understood. Communication improved, educational outcomes improved. A win all round.
As a teacher, one way or the other you have to ask and answer questions,such as, “What should be taught and how should it be taught’, what is the pedagogic relationship and it is always helpful to have some understanding of the historical changes in teaching theory and practice. So, yes, in so far as the philosophy of education considers these matter I think it must be of use.
Theoretical framework and philosophy about education are useful for informing the teacher how to prepare as a content expert and to tailor their presentation as a proficient educator with sufficient awareness to navigate what is happening within the student, and between the student and the subject matter and facilitator. Philosophy of education is necessary for instructors because what, why, how, when, where, who and for what purpose instruction is used as an instrument for making ethical-moral decisions for regulating ourselves, and the positive or adverse consequences to our neighbors (regarding the 100-year vision for society, family, and culture). Although a teacher may refine their philosophy of education overtime, it is important that a new teacher is prepared to view the domain and discipline of professional education beyond their personal world experience. Therefore, certification of teachers is necessary to include philosophy of education. Thinking about what has worked and not worked for the past 3500 years in the history of education is significant for examining our duty of care, level of accountability, and role-modeling as educators that is necessary when influencing the next generation of responsible citizens.
Education is a very serious responsibility, i.e., the “ability to respond” to the needs of a person in context of a civilization for the purpose of enabling that person in their season of life and within their given mental, emotional and physical capabilities, to become a responsible and productive citizen in the community. An instructor/facilitator’s skills to apply various venues, styles, and techniques enable the student to demonstrate proficiency of knowledge, skills, and attitudes (abilities) (KSAs) and complete objectives that require various forms of transactional and transformational leadership awareness that is necessary to map-out what is happening, why it is happening, and to what extent is “learning” “development” progressing within the capabilities of that particular student. (By definition PhD students are abnormal).
The human condition is measured in context to socio-cultural factors. Development of humans requires pre-requisite readiness levels to demonstrate KSAs for an accumulative purpose with an end-in-mind. It is important for the instructor to observe if the student is processing as an INTJ or an E, or S? Because the instructional style influences his/her word selection and use of examples to make the subject relevant for the learner. For example, is the student able to recall and construct abstract frames of thought to apply in practical (concrete) modalities of learning? To what extent does the student need active Cognitive Mediation, experiential anchor points, repetition and reinforcement exercises, and auditory-visual-kinesthetic signals to apply the concepts and precepts to grasp and comprehend a particular domain, such as math, music, physics, chemistry, medicine, law, history, literature, or scuba diving?
Students are harmed by exploitive teachers with attributes of narcissistic, bully, power-control character deficiencies. The tax-payer entrusts teachers to demonstrate suitable, professional, licensed, certified skills, to lead and encourage the thoughts and learning experiences of students. Each of us can recall a teacher that helped a difficult subject make sense and enjoyable to learn, as well as those teachers who made an enjoyable subject a miserable torture to endure being in the room under their tyrannical incompetence. Telling someone what to do, is not teaching them… In contrast, going full-circle in the learning process in which the student becomes proficient at teaching someone else the lesson then is considered completing a teaching task. An example of this significant influence in education is evident in the Judge Kavanaugh Senate Confirmation hearing this week on WETA and C-Span.
I have observed K-12 teachers, PhD supervisors, and attending physicians instructing medical residents in hospital situated learning, who are terrible teachers. I respond to this inquiry from the perspective of PhD research of comparative education, policy borrowing, and acquisition of best-practice situated learning profiles in 33 countries. Since 1979, I have facilitated, instructed, mentored, tutored, and coached students from elementary, middle, high school, college, military and agency levels in classrooms, labs, fieldwork, and seminars.
Ideally a student teacher should have a philosophy of education - that they can then empirically test while they are student teaching. Nothing can cut the rug out from under your personal philosophy of education faster than a room full of high energy kids and the mundane realities of mass education
Containing ten chapters, the book focuses on ten key philosophical concepts, namely knowledge, -mentioned concepts in relation to teaching and learning – emphasising “blank slate” notion of human capabilities. Pragmatism believes that we should select the ideas, actions, and consequences with the most desirable outcome, as well as Laxmi Vidyapeeth-Place To Learn, Place To Grow learning from previous experiences to achieve desirable consequences. John Dewey’s Experimentalism brought the scientific method of inductive reasoning to the educational spherehow action can be engendered within philosophy of education. practical reasoning, productive action, education, free speech, craft or art, deliberative engagement, love and friendship, cosmopolitanism, and potentiality (the way things could be as supposed to the way they are).
A.    RELEVANCE OF PHILOSOPHY TO HIS LEARNER
Alex Kierkegaard: 248. That no one apart from philosophers is really capable of understanding philosophy can be seen by considering how they teach it at the universities. Being unable to sort out what is right from wrong, they simply teach everything. Now imagine how things would fare with any of the sciences if they followed the same prescription, and the state of modern philosophy — and the public's utter disdain and ridicule of it — should not be that hard to understand and sympathize with.
846. People ask "what has philosophy accomplished" as if their whole society isn't predicated on innoculating unwitting idiots with primitive philosophical axioms. We were feral before philosophy. All science is merely applied epistemology.
573. Every important problem in philosophy can be solved in a couple of sentences. It is the details that require more space. To be sure, the details too are important, but, philosophically at least, only to the extent that they make the brief solutions more understandable to those who, without them, would not be able to understand them. Apart from that, the details are also important to the scientists, since all the sciences have always begun as "details" taken by them from philosophical texts, and then carefully tested and greatly expanded on (regardless of the fact that no scientist would ever admit, or even realize this. It is in the nature of the scientist to have a limited view of the knowledge-forming process, including of the history, and even more of the prehistory, of his own science, and of course ultimately, and to an even greater extent, of science itself.)
745. Explain why you can — and should — learn about physics and evolution from people other than Newton and Einstein and Darwin, but you can't learn about Heraclitean or Nietzschean philosophy from people other than Heraclitus or Nietzsche. Because scientific theories are relatively simple, and can be grasped by many, some of whom will be better at explaining them than those who were better at devising them — their creators — which latter, precisely because they were so good at devising them, will probably not be the best in the world at also explaining them.
 All of this goes out the window with philosophical theories, however, since these are so broad and simultaneously deep — they are so complex — that they can only be fully grasped by their creators and those above them — i.e. other, better philosophers than them, if such people even exist at all, which they often don't. It is therefore utter folly to expect anyone else — let alone mere scholars and popularizers — to be able to properly explain these theories, since they can't even grasp them — let alone explain them better than the people who created them; which is why subhumans expect precisely that.
774. If you say, as Julian Barbour does in his great book The End of Time, that "time doesn't exist, it's merely an illusion", you might as well say "I don't exist, I am merely an illusion", as Baudrillard did indeed end up saying ("I am my own simulacrum"), since as Hermann Minkowski pointed out while elaborating Einstein's conception of spacetime, "Nobody has ever noticed a place except at a time, or a time except at a place". By killing time, in other words, you simultaneously kill all "places", including your very own: i.e. your own perspective on things, which you created precisely by creating your very own personal spacetime frame, whose uniqueness implies that 1) It will fundamentally diverge from everyone else's spacetime frames, and 2) When added to all the others will amount to zero because at the level of the universe all these divergencies (which you abstracted by subtracting their relative values from the sum of all of them in the first place) cancel each other out — leading those who believe that a model of the world is the same thing as the world — the scientists, one of whom is Julian Barbour — to conclude that the universe doesn't exist, and therefore nothing inside it either, neither time nor space — or Baudrillard and Julian Barbour.
 We are still therefore waiting for someone to write "The End of Julian Barbour", which is to say the book that explains to us that Julian Barbour "doesn't exist", because he is "merely an illusion". The question is whether Julian Barbour himself will agree with that book when he reads it. And that's where John Bell comes in, with his acutely psychological observation that "It is always interesting to find that solipsists, when they have children, have life insurance". Barbour admits that he has it. Did Baudrillard also have any, or did he trust that the simulacra of his wife and children would do just fine without the simulacrum of the simulated policy's simulated money, and save himself the simulacrum of the expense of simulating buying it?
 In short, don't hold your breath waiting for scientists or second-rate philosophers to understand how thought works; just chill out and wait for this book's final chapter instead. It won't be long now, we are nearly there already.
547. Baudrillard is my nihilistic counterpart (bemoaning reversibility as rendering all our efforts pointless, instead of glorifying it as an essential and ingenious mechanism of an astonishingly well-designed and world-encompassing game), as Schopenhauer was Nietzsche's (lambasting the will as something reprehensible that's worthy of being "negated", instead of celebrating it as the most spiritual manifestation and justification of existence). And in both cases the healthy philosophy follows closely on the heels of the nihilistic one (indeed, was inspired partly by it) within a margin of a mere couple of decades. I am convinced that this is no coincidence.
778. Macbeth's famous line that life is "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" is often used by pessimists and the half-educated as a standard beneath which to fight their wretched fight. And Macbeth isn't wrong, if by "life" you assume he's talking about the universe. The whole universe doesn't signify anything because there's no one outside of it for whom to signify something, but parts of the universe signify everything to various lifeforms, and it's only because the universe as a whole signifies nothing that it can signify everything to everyone inside of it — even to those who pretend that, to them, nothing does (and what that signifies to them is that they are cool, intelligent people who have figured out stuff that others haven't. Hence they become content with their lot, and turn their attention to projecting this contentment outwards via means of verbiage that's meant to glorify their relative passivity by demeaning the activity of others.)
782. What does the concept universe mean? It means "everything", which is as much to say that it means nothing, since it is precisely by distinguishing something from the "everything" that we create concepts and their associated names in the first place. The highest concept therefore finally proves itself to simultaneously be the lowest, the emptiest concept of all, the anti-concept even, that can be deployed at its wielder's whim to detroy all others — a weapon of mass destruction of such vast complexity and terrifying efficacy (nukes are mere toys in comparison) that the only one who has so far managed to figure out how to use it is me.
556. Socrates was really the last, and the greatest, of the sophists (which is why he became the most well-known and respected of them), for he was the one who took the very last step needed to achieve the ultimate proficiency and excellence in the philosophy of life expounded on and propagated by them: to really believe his own lies and sophistries.
392. Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." But no life is "unexamined". It's just that the capacity for examination varies from person to person, something which Socrates was too superficial to take into account. Those he thought led an "unexamined" life were simply bad at examination (and consequently led dull lives which were not even worth examining). "The unexamined life is not worth examining", would be the correct thing to say, then — and that's precisely why it isn't.
665. Socrates, like all pseudo- and semi-intellectuals, was proud of himself when he had identified a contradiction in his interlocutor's arguments. But in a universe of flux the real intellectual feat is not to discover contradictions, but to resolve them.

B. RELEVANCE OF PHILOSOPHY TO SOCIETY
Kind of perfect relevance if you mean simply “philosophy” and not “the study of philosophy.” Philosophy is the collection of beliefs behind our actions as individuals and our collectives like “society.”
This is true whether you mean by this last term, human society or all the many societies through time and space on Earth referred to by this general term.
As to the academic or simply directed study of philosophy, there are different ways to consider its relevance. One would be to consider the output of individual, professional philosophers or their departments or their entire field. Not just the philosophical papers/books and their worth, which is a subjective matter to some degree, but the effect on others that they were written. In other words, it is important to the degree these ideas affect the philosophies of individuals and collectives of individuals.
People, like the founders of the USA had to consider, in an organized and directed way, the basis by which a new kind of national society might be formed. This is an example of ‘doing’ philosophy. But beyond this, the study of philosophy considers such matters as what philosophies do ‘we’ and others live (whether laid out by those who hold them or not) and what outcomes they have produced.
Philosophy matters to the extent that what we do as humans both individually and collectively matter. It clearly matters to us. Whether it matters in any larger sense is not settled and therefore the basis by which one will have ‘a philosophy.’ The matter of oil’s toxicity is matter of science. Whether we will continue to poison ourselves with it will be determined by our society’s (or our societies’) philosophies that determine our collective and personal choices on matters such as transportation and production.
We are all philosophers to the extent there are consistent bases by which we make choices in life and of course...leaders are essentially philosophers for whatever it is they lead.
What is the relevance of ANYTHING in society? What is the relevance of society? Does relevance exist? Do any of these questions matter? Does ANYTHING matter?
Sorry, but those questions actually are important. Really think about them. Do you have an answer? Well it is wrong. Or is it right? Exactly my point. Philosophy teaches us just how little we know, how arrogant we are despite our lack of knowledge, how often our ignorance causes our own downfall, and how to amend or avoid these human faults.


REFERENCE
Students' Britannica India (2000), Volume 4, Encyclopædia Britannica, ISBN 978-0852297605, p.
316
Hiltebeitel, Alf (2007), Hinduism. In: Joseph Kitagawa, "The Religious Traditions of Asia:
Religion, History, and Culture", Routledge
Randall Collins (2009). he Sociology of Philosophies. Harvard University Press. pp. 184–85.
Ganeri, Jonardon; The Lost Age of Reason Philosophy In Early ModernIndia 1450–1700, Oxford
U. press.
Garfield (Editor), Edelglass (Editor); The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, Anglophone
philosophy in Colonial India.
Garfield (Editor), Edelglass (Editor); The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, Chinese
philosophy.
Ebrey, Patricia (2010). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge University Press. p. 42.
Bruce B. Janz, Philosophy in an African Place (2009), pp. 74–79, Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books,

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