C. James

Many teachers do not conform to the views of teaching espoused by professors of education. Yet these teachers are often judged as outstanding by colleagues, students, parents, and administrators. This thoughtful, timely book is a qualitative inquiry that addresses this contradiction. It focuses on two outstanding high school teachers, Laura and Jim, who were observed and interviewed by Kagan over a five month period. Two education professors who teach methods courses in corresponding fields (English, social studies) were also interviewed. Kagan juxtaposes the two entirely different views of teaching that emerged from her observations and examines the functional value of each. This book then is ultimately about the politics of teaching: the power to define 'good' teaching and determine how novices will be prepared for the classroom. Laura and Jim represent a silent underground of practitioners who have lost the right to legislate their own profession. This is their story.

Some materialists argue that we can eliminate mental entities such as sensations because, like electrons, they are theoretical entities postulated as parts of scientific explanations, but, unlike electrons, they are unnecessary for such explanations. As Quine says, any explanatory role of mental entities can be played by "correlative physiological states and events instead." But sensations are not postulated theoretical entities. This is shown by proposing definitions of the related terms, 'observation term,' and 'theoretical term,' and then classifying the term 'sensation.' The result is that although 'sensation' is a theoretical term, it is also a reporting term because it is used to refer to phenomena we are aware of. Consequently sensations are not postulated and cannot be eliminated merely because they are unnecessary for explanation.

Open peer commentary on the article “Studying Conceptual Change in Classrooms: Using Association Rule Mining to Detect Changes in Students’ Explanations of the Effects of Urban Planning and Social Policy” by Arthur Hjorth & Uri Wilensky.: What could be more important than exploring how students construct knowledge? The authors have taken a major step in using constructionist tools to analyze how students change their concepts after interacting with a multiagent model in a course on urban design. I will address what I consider to be several missed opportunities in their presentation.

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructionism and De-Constructionism: Opposite yet Complementary Pedagogies” by Jean M. Griffin.: Reading Griffin’s clearly written article has led me to think about some questions that I would like to address particularly to members of the constructionist community. Constructionists have never sufficiently outlined a proper theory of learning; they have failed to document and report on their successes and failures in the classroom, thus making evaluation of their project difficult, and they sometimes seem unwilling to learn across disciplinary boundaries.

One of the major philosophical problems in physical sciences is what criteria should determine how scientific theories are selected and justified in practice and whether, in describing observable physical phenomena, such theories are effectively constrained to be unique. This book studies the example of a particular theory, the S-matrix theory. The S-matrix program was initiated by Heisenberg to deal with difficulties encountered in quantum field theories in describing particular phenomena. Since then, each theory has at different times been favored as the explanation of observed phenomena. Certainly the S-matrix theory was adequate, feasible and fertile. However, the quantum field theory interpretation is now widely accepted and the study of alternative theories is all but abandoned. By examining the philosophy which influenced the turns in this story, the author explains how an adequate and viable theory fell out of favor and concludes with a critique of different methodologies in the history of science.