Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemTeachers & curriculum : personal mythopoesis and the practical in pedagogy(University of Melbourne, 1996)This study explores the dynamic between the person of the teacher and work with curriculum. The person is taken to be constituted in narratives. I have, accordingly, utilised a language of myth in order to speak of personhood. Myth is the collective or individual operation of imagination whereby experience is able to be intensely owned. It is this operation of mind that I relate to the ways in which curriculum might be experienced. At issue in this process is the capacity of the person of the teacher to illuminate curriculum material, or to make curriculum a living experience for students. Though my focus is imaginational and mythic, I seek to show - through an intimate study of the inner worlds of six teachers at one school site - that it is at this impalpable level lhat 'the practical' in pedagogy becomes most significant as a curriculum consideration. By linking the subtle work of imagination to the 'practical intelligence' access is gained to the significance and meaning of personal agency and, in particular, the nature of critique in teacher work with curriculum. This introduces to the familiar theory/practice dichotomy that pervades curriculum thinking, and which tends to disempower the teacher voice, a new and incommensurable perspective. The practical emphasis, by being linked to the personal imaginational work of teachers, breaks out of an encapsulation within the classroom and the profession. Knowledge, represented in microcosm in the curriculum, is shown, via this reconceptualisation of the practical, in its living dimensionality. The imperatives of this living aspect of curriculum experience, identified in source, process, operation, and direction, stand against the different imperatives of instrumental conceptions of curriculum.
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ItemTeachers & curriculum: personal mythopoesis and the practical in pedagogy( 1996)This study explores the dynamic between the person of the teacher and work with curriculum. The person is taken to be constituted in narratives. I have, accordingly, utilised a language of myth in order to speak of personhood. Myth is the collective or individual operation of imagination whereby experience is able to be intensely owned. It is this operation of mind that I relate to the ways in which curriculum might be experienced. At issue in this process is the capacity of the person of the teacher to illuminate curriculum material, or to make curriculum a living experience for students. Though my focus is imaginational and mythic, I seek to show - through an intimate study of the inner worlds of six teachers at one school site - that it is at this impalpable level that 'the practical' in pedagogy becomes most significant as a curriculum consideration. By linking the subtle work of imagination to the 'practical intelligence' access is gained to the significance and meaning of personal agency and, in particular, the nature of critique in teacher work with curriculum. This introduces to the familiar theory/practice dichotomy that pervades curriculum thinking, and which tends to disempower the teacher voice, a new and incommensurable perspective. The practical emphasis, by being linked to the personal imaginational work of teachers, breaks out of an encapsulation within the classroom and the profession. Knowledge, represented in microcosm in the curriculum, is shown, via this reconceptualisation of the practical, in its living dimensionality. The imperatives of this living aspect of curriculum experience, identified in source, process, operation, and direction, stand against the different imperatives of instrumental conceptions of curriculum.
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ItemA criticism of Paul Hirst's forms of knowledge( 1980)This thesis is not so much a confrontation of the arguments advanced by Paul Hirst, as an endeavour to show that his position, within its own terms, fails to afford genuine plausibility to the "forms of knowledge"; indeed, to show that this could not be done, that his arguments cannot be made. The failure to render the "forms" plausible is examined at two levels; the level of Hirst's expressions and the level of, for want of a better term, his vision. In Part 1 the case is made that despite all fair appearance, the Hirst thesis is in crucial ways not intelligible. In Part 2 it is argued that Hirst's conception of the "forms of knowledge" is fatally contradictory. Part 3 returns from this study of disharmony to the problem of knowledge and human freedom which is the whole concern of the liberal education Hirst has sought to re-proclaim. In it his idea of freedom is examined and rejected. It is rejected without any resort to a "metaphysical" basis such as he would scorn. Keeping, instead, strictly to description of language, the possibility of an understanding of knowledge and freedom is offered which - in the end - can only be conceived of if that which "metaphysics" stands for is not legislated out of relevance. Within his own terms then, this thesis finds not only central disharmonies in Hirst's "forms of knowledge" but also reason to affirm the premises he rejects.