Empirical Philosophical Investigations in Education and Embodied Experience

157 Pages·2018·1.75 MB·English

by  Joacim Andersson

THE CULTURAL AND SOCIAL
FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION
Series Editor: A.G. Rud
EMPIRICAL
PHILOSOPHICAL
INVESTIGATIONS IN
EDUCATION AND
EMBODIED
EXPERIENCE
Joacim Andersson,
Jim Garrison, and
Leif Östman
The Cultural and Social Foundations of Education
Series Editor
A. G. Rud
College of Education
Washington State University
Pullman, WA, USA
The Palgrave Pivot series on the Cultural and Social Foundations of
Education seeks to understand educational practices around the world
through the interpretive lenses provided by the disciplines of philosophy,
history, sociology, politics, and cultural studies. This series focuses on the
following major themes: democracy and social justice, ethics, sustainability
education, technology, and the imagination. It publishes the best current
thinking on those topics, as well as reconsideration of historical figures and
major thinkers in education.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14443
Joacim Andersson • Jim Garrison
Leif Östman
Empirical
Philosophical
Investigations
in Education and
Embodied Experience
Joacim Andersson Jim Garrison
School of Health Sciences Learning Sciences & Tech
Örebro University Virginia Tech
Örebro, Sweden Blacksburg, VA, USA
Leif Östman
Teacher Education
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
The Cultural and Social Foundations of Education
ISBN 978-3-319-74608-1 ISBN 978-3-319-74609-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74609-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935182
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P
reface
The social sciences dominate discourse within the field of education. The
field of social sciences dislocates disciplines such as philosophy to the hin-
terlands of humanities along with religion, history, literary studies, and the
arts. At the center reside the STEM subjects of science, technology, engi-
neering, and mathematics, or increasingly STEMH, where the “H” stands
for health, not humanities. Similarly, quantitative and qualitative methods
dominate educational research, with philosophy sometimes assigned the
role of examining the “foundations” of the social sciences or maybe being
the source of ethical concerns perhaps with some rare mention of
aesthetics.
This work brings philosophy to the heartland of empirical educational
research. It does so by emphasizing the primacy of social practice in the
philosophies of John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. We will
draw on Dewey to emphasize the embodiment of these practices. In doing
so, we oppose some of the most deeply entrenched prejudices not only of
education and educational research, but also of modernity, including most
of modern philosophy.
First and foremost, this work challenges the assumption that philosoph-
ical concepts and insights cannot directly guide empirical educational
research. Further, by developing a philosophically informed research
method, we will show why it is nonsense to separate the humanities from
the sciences. We also wish to overcome the false fragmentation of culture
into the sciences, aesthetics, and ethics. Within the primacy of human
practice, including educational practice, these can only serve as useful dis-
tinctions that we must not allow to harden into cultural diremptions.
v
vi PREFACE
Finally, we seek to rescue philosophy itself from the false turn it took in
early modernity when it abandoned the love of wisdom for an exclusive
infatuation with epistemology. We believe that if we had a rich theory of
embodied learning, we might not need epistemology as traditionally prac-
ticed. Education and educational research itself has become so beholding
to the modern enchantment with epistemology that it can only look at
learning through a disembodied epistemological lens.
Chapter 1, “Dewey, Wittgenstein, and the Primacy of Practice,” exam-
ines the intersection between the philosophy of John Dewey and the later
Wittgenstein by exploring their emphasis on primacy of practice. This
chapter accentuates the primacy of practice in comprehending the acquisi-
tion of sociolinguistic meaning (e.g., forms of life, language-games, mean-
ing as use, etc.), the rejection of private language, antifoundationalism,
contextualism, and antirepresentationalism. Taken together, these ideas
provide what we call a first-person perspective that renders the products
and the processes of learning plainly visible to nuanced methodological
observation. Chapter 1 develops this perspective primarily in terms of the
later Wittgenstein. W. V. O. Quine (1969), Richard Rorty (1979), and
Stephen Toulmin (LW 4: vii–xxii) help establish the similarity between
Wittgenstein and Dewey. This chapter provides the philosophical theoreti-
cal framework for the method of practical epistemological analysis (PEA)
that we introduce in Chap. 3.
In Chap. 2, “Distributed Minds and Meanings in a World Without a
Within: Embodiment and Creative Expression,” we exposit ideas found
in Dewey that were either underdeveloped or unexplored by Wittgenstein.
These ideas include the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, creative
action, aesthetically expressive meaning, embodiment, embodied mean-
ing, and how minds and meaning distribute wherever they occur
throughout a world without withins. We introduce William James’s
“radical empiricism,” a version of which Dewey explicitly embraces (See
MW 3: 158ff.). This chapter also appeals to the work of the sociologist
Hans Joas’s (1996) conception of “the body schema” as well as the work
of Mark Johnson (2007). Both Joas and Johnson rely heavily on Dewey
in developing their own ideas. We will also depend on Chris Shilling’s
(2008, 2012) “body pedagogics” along with Dewey and James to better
understand the learning of “body techniques” (Mauss 1973). These
ideas, along with some aspects of Deweyan transactionalism, provide the
philosophical framework for constructing two analytical models. The
first, the situated epistemic relations model (SER model) introduced in
PREFAC E vii
Chap. 3, is used to identify how learners form SERs during acts of bodily
transposition. The second, the situated artistic relations model (SAR
model) introduced in Chap. 4, is used to identify how learners form
SARs during acts of creative artistic expression.
Chapter 3, “A Method and Model for Studying the Learning of Body
Techniques: Analyzing Bodily Transposition in Dinghy Sailing,” intro-
duces the empirical method of PEA used to study a learner’s coordination
of experiences in a specific context. In the work that first introduced PEA,
Per-Olof Wickman and Leif Östman (2002a, b) relied primarily on the
philosophy of Wittgenstein, although they regularly mentioned Dewey in
developing their empirical research method. This method has been widely
used in the years since its introduction (see Östman 2010; Andersson
2014; Andersson and Maivorsdotter 2016, among dozens more).
Establishing a closer connection between Wittgenstein and Dewey in
Chap. 2 allows us to further refine this method. Here, the first-person
perspective is presented in terms of Dewey’s transactionalism that is used
to provide a primarily transactional understanding of PEA.
After presenting the empirical analytical method of PEA, we present the
analytical model of SER that allows us to empirically study the acquisition
of SERs using SER variables and SER indicators. This model also provides
a transactional interpretation. The SER model provides descriptions and
explanations regarding learning processes and products from the data col-
lected using PEA. If a researcher’s theoretical framework, analytical method,
and the analytical model used to create explanations, prediction, control
learning, and such are the same, they will tend to just confirm each other.
The perfect alignment of theory, method, and model may easily lead to
confirmation bias wherein one finds only what they are looking for. That is
why we separate the PEA method from the SER model. The PEA method
and the SER model are highly situational and context sensitive. They pro-
vide in situ analysis and explanation of a learner’s sociolinguistic embodied
practices as a way of inferring learning directly in context from the learner’s
manifestly observable actions. This chapter employs the SER model and
the PEA method to empirically investigate learning the body technique of
tacking (i.e., sailing upwind) as a mobility practice.
Chapter 4, “A Method and Model for Studying the Learning of Artistic
Techniques: Analyzing Sculptural Expression in School Sloyd,” draws on
Dewey’s thinking about the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, creative
action, aesthetic appreciation, and especially the creation of artistically
expressive meanings discussed in Chap. 2. There we extend the SER model
viii PREFACE
by developing a second model that is also separate from the PEA method
that allows us to empirically study situated artistic expression and aesthetic
appreciation of SARs. The SAR model provides descriptions and explana-
tions regarding learning artistic processes of self-expression along with
learning appreciation of aesthetic products during the process. Like the
SER model, the SAR model along with SAR variables and SAR indicators
is highly situational and context sensitive. As with the SER model, the PEA
method provided data to the SAR model to facilitate in situ analysis and
explanation of a learner’s sociolinguistic embodied artistic-aesthetic prac-
tice such that the researcher can reasonably infer learning directly from the
learner’s palpably observable actions. Sloyd is a system of handicraft-
oriented education; it is a compulsory subject in Swedish and Norwegian
schools for students from around 9 to 15 years of age. This chapter employs
the SAR model and the PEA method to analyze Sloyd as an embodied
production practice enabling explorations of learning as it goes from an
instrumental learning of a body technique to an artistic expression through
a body technique.
Örebro, Sweden Joacim Andersson
Blacksburg, VA, USA Jim Garrison
Uppsala, Sweden Leif Östman
BiBliograPhy
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Andersson, J., & Maivorsdotter, N. (2016). The ‘body pedagogics’ of an elite
footballer’s career path – Analysing Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography. Physical
Education and Sport Pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2016.12
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Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Johnson, M. (2007). The meaning of the body: Aesthetics of human understanding.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.
Östman, L. (2010). ESD and discursivity: Transactional analyses of moral meaning
making and companion meanings. Environmental Education Research, 16(1),
75–93.
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Quine, W. V. (1969). Ontological relativity. In W. V. Quine (Ed.), Ontological
relativity and other essays (pp. 26–68). New York: Columbia University Press.
Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton
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Shilling, C. (2008). Changing bodies. London: Sage.
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