Samples and summary of faculty scholarly activities - St. John Fisher ...

Epistemology and diversity and social justice education?
Michelle Erklenz-Watts, Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, James Wood
St. John Fisher College
Rochester, New York
Draft Submitted June 2008
Query Contact Information: Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner
kfasching-varner@sjfc.edu
585-309-6160
Pre-Reading Note: This chapter was written as a trio of thoughts, representing three
faculty members who vary in age, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Throughout the chapter
the voice of the piece is affected by the author who was primarily responsible for the
section. In the editing process time was spent milling each section back and forth between
authors to work toward a coherent narrative. For the later part of the piece, where each
author explores her or his own practice, we highlight the author who is writing. Given the
nature of our topic and our desire to really problematize what we “know” we decided not
to remove the track changes feature so that as the reader you can see some of the struggle
we were engaged in relative to how we framed our work. To that extent we have provided
you insight through the later third into our editing process, and included for your reading
our “comments” to each other. We want to be clear from the outset that we do not provide
definitive answers, and like our own process, we invite questions and wanted to model a bit
of our questioning process for you.
Educational practice, that is the theorizing of educational philosophies, pedagogical
understandings and acts, and the teaching of such philosophies, understandings and acts
inherently relies on a variety of paradigmatic orientations that guide the beliefs and actions of
any particular pedagogue. The teaching profession often finds that serious pedagogical
conversations seem to focus intently on methodologies rather than on the complete paradigmatic
approach where methodologies become informed. Given that paradigmatic constructions rely on
systems of knowing, also known as epistemologies, an understanding of the role of epistemology
should be understood before an educator attempts teaching social justice and diversity courses,
and for our purposes as authors here, proceeding with the chapter. Jones (1972) notes the variety
of understandings of what epistemology means relative to research and the praxis of education
including the terms cognitive maps, ethos, forms of life, ultimate cosmology, world hypothesis,