Carol Lloyd Rozansky

Teacher Education

American Educational Research Association (AERA)

Some of the sessions I attended examined relationships between critical understandings and interactions with the world within an ethical framework (critical thinking) and the relationships between these and one’s actions with the world (active learning).

With the globalization of economies, the United States has been and continues to be enmeshed in the ethics of the marketplace. This encourages people to look out for themselves without critically engaging with the world. A critique of living in the world rather than with the world is framed within an ethics of humanism. It reminds us that we, as educators, are not neutral. Rather, education is political in that it must be committed to overcoming injustices.

One way to encourage active learning that considers alternative ways of examining and interacting with the world is through the arts (literature, visual art, etc.). The arts or other critical examinations of one’s own actions and the actions of others can be useful because they encourage people to break their routines and to imagine what is possible. The new possibilities must be ethical in that they must break down obstacles that prevent people from throwing off their oppressors.

These perspectives reject scientific positivism. Note that they do not reject science – not at all. Science is encouraged. Science contributes to our understandings so that we can question with new information and new ways of examining what our senses notice. But science should not be used to determine “truth.”

A related important concept is that “the word,” i.e., the ideas learned, need to be viewed as “liberating praxis.” In other words, we learn (and we teach so that our students learn) to use apply our new understandings to what we see in the world. The “word” (new ideas) helps to peel back the layers of what is visible on the surface. Then we can act with the world from a more knowledgeable and critical perspective.

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