Daring to be dumb in educational practice and scholarship

Like some of my other posts, I decided to leave this post title without a clarifying subheading. It refers to a suggestion made by Brad Heckman, an educator and specialist in conflict resolution with a background in international peacemaking who now leads an organization that provides conflict mediation training for police working in urban communities. …

Silence in education and ed research: taking off the crusader’s cape

I'm reading a book entitled "Perspectives on Silence," an oldie-but-goodie text on the various constructions, interpretations, and meanings of silence from various disciplinary perspectives. I'm very interested in this topic as it relates to my work on how research involving asymmetries of power influence the construction of knowledge, particularly in interviewing and survey-based data collection. Explorations of …

The goal of research and the (re)prioritization of questions

According to different perspectives from the natural and social sciences, research is aimed at exploring unknown intellectual territories, explaining, and developing and understanding of ideas and phenomena, and constructing new knowledge. It occurred to me recently that Paulo Freire along with Lev Vygotsky and other theorists (who argued that valid knowledge did not appear in …