Studying for comps and reviewing EPPL 604: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Education.  We looked at the perceptions and attitudes of those who work in arts or aesthetics disciplines.  Here’s the quote from the first page:

“Teaching may be compared to selling commodities.  No one can sell unless someone buys.  We should ridicule a merchant who said that he had sold a great many goods although no one had bought any.  But perhaps there are teachers who think they have done a good day’s teaching irrespective of what pupils have learned.”  John Dewey

Seems reasonable until you start to consider more operationalized definitions:  what should students learn in the first place?  And what’s the best way to determine if they’ve learned it?  If there were standard answers to these, graduate school would be a lot shorter and this course would not be necessary.  Instead, there are multiple answers to those questions and this course helps provide a window into those various explanations.