All entries for Sunday 06 January 2008

More on PhD

I’m doing a PhD in education – and two years in realised I hadn;t actually done anything specifically about education in the work I’d been doing. It’s a five year programme – so there’s time to address it – the only problem was that I realised this in the middle of my upgrade …

So I got my head round constructivism and behaviourism and situativism and all the other stuff – well “head round” is an exaggeration – I found a brief glossary and read that (it’s the LADIE taxonomy – very useful). I’ve also read a paper on metaphors of learning – acquisisiton and participation. And I’ve just come across something on Freudan and Lacanian analysis of learning.

Why this has helped is that it’s all enabled me to realise – I’m just not really very interested,

I mean, the papers are all very readable, and there’s some insights in there that could be useful – but it’s really not something I want to get bogged down into – actually understanding how people learn or what the competing theories are. I just want to know what they do and maybe how to make it better. The whole idea of postulating what happens in people;s brains when they do it just seems unnecessary – and too difficult to really determine anyway.

Superficial? Maybe – but it makes doing the literature review a lot easier – if anything mentions psychology I can just put it away and move on to the next thing.

Any other educationalists really go along with this – or am I letting the side down in a big way here?

: 06 Jan 2008 00:56 |  Tags: PhD |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem