Bryant Griffith – författare

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical step-by-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions.The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students’ perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings.

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical step-by-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions.The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students’ perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings.

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical step-by-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions.The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students' perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings.

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical step-by-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions.The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students' perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings.

Curriculum has become the new wonder word for our times. Even more, curriculum has become a concept, and an idea. This book provides a speculum mentis, a map of the mind, of modern curriculum theory to help trace the interactions between various forms of thought as they play out in contemporary schooling. This book is also about how the weaving of various forms of thought provides an umbrella of understanding about the nature of curriculum and perhaps a glimpse of human understanding.One of the presuppositions of this book is that there are often, and perhaps almost always, multiple strands of ideas at work simultaneously. In the modern world when they come together they form a coherent set of theories which can be called a paradigm. In the de-centered world that this book suggests the history of ideas then might be best described as being a bit like our own mind. We often have divergent opinions about who we are, what we want to do and so on. One of the central concepts in contemporary education, reflection, is an attempt to help us override that tendency, to become more pragmatic by focusing and getting on with the job. This might work in the world of formal education where one can coerce students to be more goal oriented for short periods of time by testing them, but in reality that doesn't happen to most of us a lot of the time.To illustrate this point strands such as the development of theoretical physics in the early part of the twentieth century, a discussion of the part which philosophical thinking plays in the development of curriculum, particularly in a post modern sense, a recasting of narrative knowledge and a focus on mavericks learners, are discussed.To live in this modern- post modern world requires reflective thought about the question of what form connectedness will take. In this case the small narratives of the thinkers who have experienced the tension between the modern and post modern world as they variously grappled with their inabilities to construct a unified theory are examined. It is suggested that this failure is a primary illustration of the grand narratives initial collapse. Further, it is suggested that the smaller stories of men and women working to paper over the cracks in the proceeding decades represent the foundations of a metaphor for the human condition as it in fact is not as it has been constructed.Bryant Griffith is currently a Professor in the College of Education at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi. He has also been on the faculty of the University of Calgary in Canada and has taught in various public school settings. Dr Griffith has published widely in the areas of curriculum theory and the philosophy of education.

The craft of teaching and learning is like playing in a symphony orchestra; every instrument has a voice and every voice is integral to the whole. The arts, history, anthropology, and philosophy and their forged discourses offer us a series of cautionary tales about the multiplicity of ways we can see and understand our world, ways we often ignore in the classroom. In the case of epistemology, and pedagogy in particular, we have hinged our understanding on a binary of opposites engaged in a dialectic dance and a type of discourse constructed to describe and explain it. The art and act of teaching in this as-if world necessitates teachers to be public intellectuals; intellectual symbols who represent something more than just subject-knowledge expertise but serve as conduits between the discourses of our world.Established genres and discourses are exclusionary. The vast migration of people and ideas is producing a new set of presuppositions. The manner in which we decode other discourses and fuse them into meanings, both personal and shared, is the root of both teaching and learning, giving us a window into the way that each form of thought is connected, both historically and experientially. Look around you, your school is becoming the United Nations, but it's not so united. Don't aim for truth, aim for understanding. Today's students construct and deconstruct in a multitude of ways on an as-needed, just-in-time basis. Since ideas of difference are often nudged but unacknowledged, we are in danger of becoming pedagogical dinosaurs, not heeding change until it is too late.Teaching and learning are construction zones, so get out your hard hat. These constructions are possibilities that need to be discussed and negotiated, allowing us to sidestep the traps of grand narratives and a hierarchy of discplinarity and research methodology. Our possibilities need to be forged on an anvil of diversity. These are the spaces, the interstices, where our voices become innovative and our silence offers a safe harbor. Spaces to listen, collaborate, and craft cautionary tales about our lives and the possibilities for a shared future.

In this the sixth book of a series of exploratory and cautionary tales, Griffith revisits the sites of reflective knowledge and practical experiences that have been our historical presuppositions, and which are now in the process of flux and change. As in his previous books, historical discourse, what we know and can know about the past, is used as the baseline for understanding. This is an ongoing process, where ideas are considered, used to interact with other ideas, and then, among communities of learners, are incorporated, supplanted, or rejected. This is more than a dialectical process because it is based in human action. In education, broadly speaking, we have taught and have learned that this was a linear, rational path that could be mapped, but in today''s fragmented, decentered world of difference we can no longer be certain that our presuppositions hold or apply. Using the analogy of shifting strands, this book provides a way of coming to understand, rather than a way of knowing. It suggests that our emerging paradigm will be grounded in presuppositions that are relative to person, place, and time and that certainty may be illusive. The role of introducing ideas like these in a mass capitalist democracy such as ours is a staggering challenge, and it is one that has fallen to educators whether they wish it or not. Shifting Strands challenges both teachers and learners to take up the torch and run with it. This can be accomplished by thinking in a way that is both historical and philosophical; one that understands that learning occurs when we understand where our learners are situated in terms of place and thought. Thinking and knowing about the world is relative to who you are and your ability to thinking in a critical and reflexive way. This is only the first part of the challenge. The second, and no less important, task is for you to realize the power of our polymodal world. Increasingly, we rely on social networks in our decision-making and retreat fromthe more difficult process of negotiation and interaction, but it is this process that schooling must explore and practice.Our world is paradoxical. There are few, if any, certainties and the trip to understanding our reasons for believing and acting as we do is one with many different routes. It is an exciting time, full of possibility and open to the maverick in you, and open to your creative spirit.Come along for the ride.

This book explores the complexity of communication and understanding as a possible asset in formal education rather than a problem that needs to be “fixed”. The authors examine the question and experience as pedagogical tools, challenging readers to play the critic and ask hard questions, beginning with: Why do the ideas discussed within the book matter? The digital information age with expanding ways of thinking, being, communicating, and learning complicates public education. So, what happens as diverse narratives collide in schools? To answer this question, the authors of this book delve into conflicting assumptions within the framework of complexity sciences and education in an attempt to explore space beyond positivist/anti-positivist debates. This involves examining the role of cultural and aesthetic narratives and cautionary tales as means of acknowledging possibilities in human experiences in education. These possibilities can facilitate praxis, as theory, research, and teaching become reflective practices, and as thinking about education broadens to include diverse methods of understanding and presenting complex phenomena.