Class Last Week --> This Week's Readings

CLASS LAST WEEK

In class, we applied Baxter Magolda’s epistemological reflection model to the academic classroom perspective. We talked about what students at different stages of development would prefer regarding teaching and learning styles. –I had a flashback to some of my undergraduate classes. I remember how I was in a psychology stats class in my sophomore or junior year. I aced the exams, but was appalled that we had homework assignments. I remember thinking to myself, “Homework is for high schoolers! I am a college student and I write papers and do projects!” Unfortunately for me, homework was required as part of the grading rubric and even though I aced all the exams, I ended up with a B in the class solely because I didn’t do my homework.

I particularly enjoyed our discussion about critical thinking – as skill acquisition vs. development as well as the way it’s defined. Critical thinking do seem to be buzz words (especially in education) and people often mean different things when they use the term. When I read Kitchener and King’s reflective judgment model, they discussed reflective judgment in relation to epistemology and critical thinking. As I read, I remember thinking that I had assumptions about what “critical thinking” was – I had just assumed there was an epistemological component to critical thinking.

Discussions like these are important. When doing research it’s always important to provide the operational definitions of your research. (Have you ever seen a debate where two people are arguing about something where each has defined the central topic of debate differently and they end up arguing about the definition and not the topic?) Anyhow, main point is that it’s important to understand that different concepts are defined differently by different people - so make sure to define them in your own research and when others use these terms, ask them to give you their operational definition as well.

THIS WEEK'S READINGS

This week’s readings were on moral development. The article in our reader was about the “just community” set up at Simmons College. I think experiences like these are great ways to provide lessons in moral development for students.

My college was pretty “open” regarding policies (in the dorms as well as in general) and we had an honor code and an honor system that (I think) helped to promote moral development as well. Now, I don’t think you can just go into a college and say, “Here is our honor code!” and have it work – it’s not that simple. It needs to be respected and upheld by those in the community. We were given so much leeway due to the honor code (self-scheduled finals without proctors was one of the best things - you could go and pick up your exam almost whenever you wanted to during finals period and take your final in almost any academic classroom and return it when you’re done). I think the flexibility of the rules on campus helped students to make their own decisions and learn their own lessons.

Another great thing about the honor code is that depending on the situation you were in and depending how you looked at your problem, no matter what you did, you would be in violation of the honor code as behaving responsibly can take on different meanings!

Our text readings were on Kohlberg and Gilligan’s theories of moral development. Here’s the gist of it:
Kohlberg came up with a 6-stage theory of moral development based predominantly on ideals of justice and was from a very autonomous perspective. Gilligan criticized Kohlberg’s theory as she saw it as androcentric and lacking a female voice. Gilligan’s model is based on the ethic of care from a more interdependent perspective. I think both perspectives are important to have in mind, regardless of who you’re working with and that perhaps these different perspectives of morality complement each other more than they conflict.

I particularly liked the discussion of the criticisms of Gilligan’s work because it touches a bit on the differences in feminist perspectives (which Baxter Magolda mentioned briefly in her book as well). When I was in high school, I had assumed there was one meaning of “feminist” but – as with everything else – I learned of the differences within the larger community.