In her thoughtful and innovative new book, Marcia B. Baxter Magolda
writes of "bridging the worlds between educator and students."
There is perhaps no task more fundamental to effective teaching and
learning. All too often a distinct gap develops or cannot be
overcome between instructor and student, one that leaves each
struggling to understand the other's position. The professional
quest for principles of structure and process that can help close
this divide is both evolving and unending.
This book is intended to help college faculty create conditions
in which students learn to construct knowledge in their disciplines
and achieve self-authorship. A significant, and often overlooked,
dimension mediating learning and self-authorship centers on
learners' ways of knowing, or their assumptions about the nature,
limits, and certainty of knowledge. A learner who assumes that all
knowledge is certain expects to hear answers from an authority
figure; in contrast, a learner who views knowledge as relative
expects to explore multiple viewpoints. By taking a
constructive-developmental approach, Baxter Magolda demonstrates
how students' ability to construct knowledge is intertwined with
the development of their assumptions about knowledge itself and
their role in creating it. She shows how the structure of
constructive-developmental teaching hinges on three principles:
validating students' ability to know, situating learning in
students' experience, and defining learning as teachers and
students mutually constructing meaning.
Unlike most of the literature on the subject, this book takes
abstract pedagogical principles and translates them into practical
methods. By observing four semester-length college courses in
mathematics, zoology, human development, and education and
intensively interviewing students and their instructors, Baxter
Magolda provides much-needed, concrete principles that will lead to
valuable improvements in the classroom environment. With an
enhanced level of understanding of the teaching-learning
relationship, professors will be able to teach better, and students
will be able to learn better, thus preparing them to meet the
demands inherent in adulthood and preparing them to take an active
role in creating a better society.
Those actively involved in higher education, whether college
faculty or students in graduate programs, as well as anyone focused
on education in general will find much of interest in this
book.
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