Baxter Magolda 1999

Baxter Magolda, Marcia B. (1999) Creating Contexts for Learning and Self Authorship: Constructive-Developmental Pedagogy; Nashville; Vanderbilt University Press.

The world of educators and the world of students are worlds apart...

Faculty can think in sophisticated ways - they understand that knowledge can be ambiguous and can change. Authority, too, can be questioned. Facts can be tentative

Students believe that there is a right/wrong answer and that when something is published, it is a fact, carved in stone. Professors have the right answer.

Helping students shift from thinking knowledge is certain to believing it is uncertain

Constructive-developmental view of learning incorporates 2 major concepts (pg 6):

1. students construct knowledge by organizing and making meaning of their experiences (Piaget)
   
2. this construction takes place in the context of their evolving assumptions about knowledge itself and their role in creating it. (Perry - how this evolves through adult life)

These 2 concepts are central to the teaching-learning process: No longer sufficient to know what our student understand, but we must know the way they understand it.

Meet them where they are...process

Understand where students are in terms of their own meaning-making and lead them to more complex ways of knowing

1. This books overarching purpose - to promote self-authorship = way of making meaning of the world and oneself - linked to students' epistemological development

This development is intimately linked to existing knowledge - it cannot happen without faculty involvement...

So...faculty demonstrate the process through which knowledge is constructed in the discipline - Faculty create opportunities for students to practice the process...Faculty DO NOT encourage students to practice without regard for existing research. (*pg 8)

Formal bodies of knowledge, standard usage, and the teacher's academic background all belong in the critical classroom - with the idea that knowledge is not presented as doctrine to be absorbed w/out question - taking a critical approach to existing bodies of knwoledge, and a abalanced multi-cultural perspective - students own themes are alued

In this process students adn faculty re-invent thru problem-posing their rel'p to each other to learning and authority to education, to expertise - to knowledge and power