Prespared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Connecting from last time…

PED 3102 in a nutshell“Because schools have the

potential to be much better places, for both teachers and students, we regard it as very important for everyone involved with education to understand the way in which our schools are organized and operated so that they can ask questions about, and propose changes to, current practices.”

- Jon Young & Benjamin Levin, Understanding Canadian Schools, Reader p.10

Prespared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Focault’s Epistemological Conundrum

“People know what they do;

they frequently know why they do what they do;

but what they don’t know is what they do [their doing] does.”-Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Dreyfus & Rabinow (Eds.), p. 187

The point of critical understanding

In PED 3102 we continuously urge you to first surface and then examine your existing assumptions, beliefs, and values about schools and schooling so that you will not simply reproduce what now exists.

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Culture and Final Vocabularies

“[A]ll vocabularies, even those which contain the words which we take most seriously, the ones most essential to our self-descriptions – are human creations, tools for the creation of such other human artifacts as poems, utopian societies, scientific theories, and future generations.”

-Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 53

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

“final vocabularies”

“All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives…They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person’s “final vocabulary.”

- Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 73

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

-Alan W. Watts, Psychotherapy East and West

“When we are talking about the

order and structure of the world, we are talking about the order of our

grids.”

GRIDS = FINAL VOCABULARIES

Seeing beyond our grids

Learning to problematize our final vocabularies through the cultivation of the ironic sensibility.

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

“I shall define an ‘ironist’ as someone who fulfills

three conditions:(1) She has radical and continuing doubts

about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

(2) She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;

(3) Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. “

- Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 73-5

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Irony and Agency

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

“[T]he fact that Newton's vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle's does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian. The world does not speak. Only we do.”-Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 6

The Aim of Irony:Conversation Over

Certainty

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Michael Oakeshottfrom Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays

“In conversation, ’facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another . . .

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Conversation & Diversity

“Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure . . . . Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.” (pp. 177-179; emphasis added)

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Knowledge and Community

(neither narcissism nor subjugation)

“[T]here is a middle way between reliance on a God-surrogate and on one’s individual preferences – namely, reliance on the common sense of the community to which one belongs.”-Richard Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching,” p. 527

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

“[It] does not greatly matter what the core curriculum is as long as there is one – as long as each community defines itself by adopting one…What matters is that there be some things they all have read and can do, some common subject of conversation…To pick a core curriculum is, therefore, to pick a community – or, better, to decide what sort of community one would like to see come into being.”- Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching,” pp. 527 & 532-3

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Three Questions:

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

1. What are the implications of Rorty’s valorization of curriculum as a conversation disciplined and enriched by community?2. If we take Rorty seriously, what would change in our current schooling practices? What might remain the same? Why?3. How might our approaches to knowing self, other, and world change?