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Abstract
The paper takes off from the debate of Paul Hirst and Wilfred Carr on the position of philosophy of education, whether it could rightly be seen as a practical discipline or it is exclusively theoretical. While taking precautions on a hasty submission, the paper first examined some conceptions on the nature of theory and arrived at a definition of theory as a body of knowledge that is foundational and fulfils the function of describing, explaining and stipulating certain issues or problems. This makes theory comparable to practice, which is overt demonstration of what is known to serve a desired purpose. Practical activity was viewed from deliberate and non-deliberate perspectives and the submission was made that in either way, the practical rests on theoretical foundations. The paper also examined methods of theorising and observed that all the traditional methods of knowledge acquisition hold for theorising. The paper concludes on the submission that philosophy of education in its content and method is theoretical but must form a link with practicalities to be relevant to life.
... He pointed out that if the teacher moves from a problem towards a solution, the students will be in the dark until the last moment. Ayeni (2007) reported that problem-solving approach is used to identify particular issues and raises questions on them, hypothesizing possibilities and seeking evidence to establish facts in educational research. ...
This study investigated the effects of problem-solving method of teaching on secondary school students achievement and retention in Social Studies. The study adopted the quasi-experimental, pre-test, post-test, control group design. The sample for the study consisted of 240 Junior Secondary School Class II students randomly selected from six secondary schools in Ekiti State, Nigeria. The instrument used for the study is the Social Studies Achievement Test (SSAT) designed and validated by the researcher. Section A of the instrument consisted of the bio-data of the respondents while section B was made up of 40 multiple-choice items designed to measure the students achievement and retention in Social Studies. Four hypotheses were raised and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The data were analyzed using t-test and ANCOVA statistical tools. The results showed that there is a significant difference between the achievement mean scores of students in the experimental and control groups. There is a significant difference between the pre-test mean scores and achievement mean scores of students in the experimental and control groups. There is a significant difference between the retention mean scores of students in the experimental and control groups. There is a significant difference between the achievement mean scores and the retention mean scores of students in the experimental and control groups. It was discovered in the study that problem-solving method is more effective than conventional lecture method in improving students achievement in Social Studies. It was therefore recommended that teachers should be innovative in handling their lessons by relating them to the day-to-day life of students in such a way that the students will be challenged to put the lessons to practice as much as possible. Government should also emphasize the use of problem-solving method to teach Social Studies in secondary schools.
The starting point for this article is Polanyi's insight that learning involves the personal participation of the knower in taking possession of knowledge, and that this process ‘takes place within a flow of passion’. Somekh pays tribute to Elliott's role in her own intellectual development, as her tutor while she was still a teacher, and later as her colleague. The article focuses on the contribution of the articles published in Educational Action Research, during its first 10 years, under the title of ‘Theoretical Resources’. The contested nature of this title is discussed and illuminated through an exploration of Elliott's writing about teachers' knowledge and the role of both theory and practice in theory generation. Somekh argues for the importance of intellectual engagement with ideas and theories through passionate participation within a ‘personalised and contextualised reality’ – she sees this process as akin to Elliott's notion of action research as a process which ‘problematises the ideas of theorists’.
This symposium begins with a critique by Paul Hirst of Wilfred Carr's ‘Philosophy and Education’(Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2004, 38.1), where Carr argues that philosophy of education should be concerned with ‘practical philosophy’ rather than ‘theoretical philosophy’. Hirst argues that the philosophy of education is best understood as a distinctive area of academic philosophy, in which the exercise of theoretical reason contributes critically to the development of rational educational practices and their discourse. While he acknowledges that these practices and their discourse must of their nature be directly developed in the exercise of practical reason, or phronesis, the notion of ‘practical philosophy’ is rejected as ultimately incoherent and illusory. In his reply to Hirst's critique, Carr identifies three central claims in Hirst's argument and takes issue with each of these. He reaffirms the need to draw upon the resources afforded by the Aristotelian tradition of practical philosophy in order to identify inadequacies in our present understanding of how philosophy is related to education. He suggests that it is only through bringing their own ‘prejudices’ into critical confrontation with this tradition that philosophers of education will be able to assess whether practical philosophy is incoherent and illusory, as Hirst claims, or whether it is indispensable to the future development of their discipline. In a rejoinder to Carr, Hirst, defends the claim that philosophy of education is a social practice concerned with developing justifiable propositional accounts of the conceptual relations, justificatory procedures and presuppositions of educational practices. He rejects the argument that this ‘theoretical philosophy’ approach must be replaced by that of a new ‘practical philosophy’.
When Paul Hirst and Wilfred Carr squared up to each other a few years ago on the issue of the role of philosophical theory in educational practice, it became clear that theory itself had become a troubled term. The very fact that Wilfred Carr could argue for the end of educational theory recalls Paul Feyerabend's fiery argument for the end of theory in natural science and simply deepened the attack that had already appeared in Carr and Kemmis's book, Becoming Critical (1986). In response, Hirst insisted that theory, and particularly the philosophical theory of education, should be defined as a discrete area of study in itself, governed and structured by the axioms of logic. In this way, he argued, the philosophy of education would be no different from philosophy in general (at least in its analytic formulation). Carr, on the other hand, preferred to consider educational theory as a flexible event that took its shape from the landscape explored, and hence precisely not the kind of study that Hirst supported, but one based in action research and reflective practitioner experience. This debate is as yet unresolved. In this piece I begin by making several remarks about the current context for raising the question Hirst and Carr address, and I go on to consider other possible understandings of theoria in a Greek sense before developing this idea through a reading of Aristotle. I eventually conclude that each of the protagonists in the debate has taken a step too far.
The aim of this paper is to examine the role of methodology in action research. It begins by showing how, as a form of inquiry concerned with the development of practice, action research is nothing other than a modern 20th century manifestation of the pre-modern tradition of practical philosophy. It then draws in Gadamer's powerful vindication of the contemporary relevance of practical philosophy in order to show how, by embracing the idea of ‘methodology’, action research functions to sustain a distorted understanding of what practice is. The paper concludes by outlining a non-methodological view of action research whose chief task is to promote the kind of historical self-consciousness that the development of practice presupposes and requires.
Aquí el autor trata el concepto de filosofía educativa considerándola como filosofía política y social; estas, como parte de la filosofía formal modificada. Aborda también los temas de: valores y conocimiento; teorías educativas contemporáneas y la lógica y el análisis.
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