Dictionary of useful terms

All from Wikipedia 25-Feb-09, need to check against source doc/references, but a decent start


Post-modernism
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions." (from wikipedia 25-Feb-09, need to check against source doc)

Constructivist - Constructivism and education

(from wikipedia 25-Feb-09, need to check against source docs)

Main article: Constructivism (learning theory)
Joe L. Kincheloe has published numerous social and educational books on critical constructivism (2001, 2005, 2008), a version of constructivist epistemology that places emphasis on the exaggerated influence of political and cultural power in the construction of knowledge, consciousness, and views of reality. In the contemporary mediated electronic era, Kincheloe argues, dominant modes of power have never exerted such influence on human affairs. Coming from a critical pedagogical perspective, Kincheloe argues that understanding a critical constructivist epistemology is central to becoming an educated person and to the institution of just social change.
Kincheloe's characteristics of critical constructivism:

• Knowledge is socially constructed: World and information co-construct one another
• Consciousness is a social construction
• Political struggles: Power plays an exaggerated role in the production of knowledge and consciousness
• The necessity of understanding consciousness—even though it does not lend itself to traditional reductionistic modes of measurability
• The importance of uniting logic and emotion in the process of knowledge and producing knowledge
• The inseparability of the knower and the known
• The centrality of the perspectives of oppressed peoples—the value of the insights of those who have suffered as the result of existing social arrangements
• The existence of multiple realities: Making sense of a world far more complex that we originally imagined
• Becoming humble knowledge workers: Understanding our location in the tangled web of reality
• Standpoint epistemology: Locating ourselves in the web of reality, we are better equipped to produce our own knowledges
• Constructing practical knowledge for critical social action
• Complexity: Overcoming reductionism
• Knowledge is always entrenched in a larger process
• The centrality of interpretation: Critical hermeneutics
• The new frontier of classroom knowledge: Personal experiences intersecting with pluriversal information
• Constructing new ways of being human: Critical ontology

Humanist
Educational humanism (from wikipedia 25-Feb-09, need to check against source docs)

Humanism, as a current in education, began to dominate U.S. school systems in the 17th century. It held that the studies that develop human intellect are those that make humans "most truly human". The practical basis for this was faculty psychology, or the belief in distinct intellectual faculties, such as the analytical, the mathematical, the linguistic, etc. Strengthening one faculty was believed to benefit other faculties as well (transfer of training). A key player in the late 19th-century educational humanism was U.S. Commissioner of Education W.T. Harris, whose "Five Windows of the Soul" (mathematics, geography, history, grammar, and literature/art) were believed especially appropriate for "development of the faculties". Educational humanists believe that "the best studies, for the best kids" are "the best studies" for all kids.[citation needed] While humanism as an educational current was widely supplanted in the United States by the innovations of the early 20th century, it still holds out in some preparatory schools and some high school disciplines (especially in literature).[citation needed]

Behaviourist (from wikipedia 25-Feb-09, need to check against source docs)

Behaviorism or Behaviourism, also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior) is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors.[1] The school of psychology maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.[2] Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).[3]

Cognitivism (from wikipedia 25-Feb-09, need to check against source docs)

Cognitivism has two major components, one methodological, the other theoretical. Methodologically, cognitivism adopts a positivist approach and the belief that psychology can be (in principle) fully explained by the use of experiment, measurement and the scientific method.[citation needed] This is also largely a reductionist goal, with the belief that individual components of mental function (the 'cognitive architecture') can be identified and meaningfully understood.[citation needed] The second is the belief that cognition consists of discrete, internal mental states (representations or symbols) whose manipulation can be described in terms of rules or algorithms.[citation needed]
Cognitivism became the dominant force in psychology in the late-20th century, replacing behaviorism as the most popular paradigm for understanding mental function. Cognitive psychology is not a wholesale refutation of behaviorism, but rather an expansion that accepts that mental states exist. This was due to the increasing criticism towards the end of the 1950s of behaviorist models. One of the most notable criticisms was Chomsky's argument that language could not be acquired purely through conditioning, and must be at least partly explained by the existence of internal mental states.
The main issues that interest cognitive psychologists are the inner mechanisms of human thought and the processes of knowing. Cognitive psychologists have attempted to throw light on the alleged mental structures that stand in a causal relationship to our physical actions.




Epistemology (from wikipedia 25-Feb-09, need to check against source docs)
or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge.[1] It addresses the questions:

• What is knowledge?
• How is knowledge acquired?
• What do people know?
• How do we know what we know?

Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims.
The term was introduced into English by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808–1864).[2]