Wow.  You have a lot of interesting responses.  I spent over 15 years as a scientist before I started my teaching career.  I spent several years in R&D before continuing in environmental remediation.  My experience with education may be different than someone who graduated from college with a teaching degree.  As a teacher, I facilitate the learning of content, but I also facilitate how to learn, retain and decode information.  

I spend less than 12 minutes talking to the "whole class" in one class period.  I may give 3 minutes of instructions, 2 minutes of time management reminders, and several minutes of clarification if I notice multiple students with the same misconceptions about content. Do students have choices?  Yes they have choice, as to how they will learn content.  I do NOT view education as teaching how I want to teach but instead I see it as providing the means for others to learn.  Education should be about the learner.  

I provide access to digital data, traditional data (textbooks and hard copies of notes), and laboratory investigations.  Hands-on student centered learning occurs everyday in the classroom.  Students learn independently, in groups, and one-on-one with a student partner.  I do not spend time lecturing about a subject, notes are found within the investigations, stations, and partner learning initiatives.  

We also spend time focusing our learning on how to decode information.  Everyone learns in a different way and everyone's education experience is individualized...due to the inherent nature of the learner.  Providing the means for individualized learning is sometimes viewed as differentiation, however, differentiation is typically providing the same content at different levels of scaffolding.

 In order for the student to achieve individualized education the student needs to be allowed access to multiple ways of learning all content, in this case, the teacher becomes a valuable resource in the classroom. 

The term "content" is a broad term and depending on how you pronounce it students can be just as content with learning about nothing.  So am I a teacher of everything (content) or a teacher of happiness (content)? 

A good teacher has no limit to content as concepts are interrelated.the idea of content or subject matter is to control the level of what is learnt and within appropriate discipline and age-range and time,.No subject matter cannot stand alone ,so to enhance understanding,an effective teacher can borrow ideas from other content /subject/or discipline.As a matter of fact all discipline are interrelated.Mathematics is related to english. even addtion is related to multiplication..

A Mind without content: is this possible? 

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-014-9306-8?sa_campaign=email%2Fevent%2FarticleAuthor%2FonlineFirst 

Content is what is taught but can be seen merely as the vehicle to other changes such as attitudinal, thinking strategies etc

There will always be content. I think what we could teach skills- and let the students pick the content that they feels embodies those skills. I know that much of the content that was pushed on me by my teachers was what they were passionate about. I see the passion in young students, and I wish we could foster and nourish that passion. If a student wants their entire career to focus on trucks, trains, or unicorns- then they should be able to do that. All essential skills can be taught in the lens of subject. Skills like reading, writing, logic, arithmetic, analysis, communication, relationship skills, etc. can be taught using any content. 

I think a reference to Bloom's taxonomy  might help resolve this question. Bloom suggests three domains of learning: cognitive, psycho-motor and affective. I suggest that while the cognitive should normally relate to the subject matter, the other two domains might include  learning  that do not necessarily focus on the subject matter.

@Domenico - mind without content - a nice phrase.

But - you say - there is no knowing except about something.  I suspect this misses the main point about teaching.  We positivists are inclined to think that knowing is about an external world, objective and beyond us - as if 'know thyself' was irrelevant.  

Surely teaching is not about providing objective knowledge.  It is about shaping the student's capacity to address her/his experience and thus world.

This is about method.  As a by-product of imbibing positivism we have become too quick to forget that the academics' stock in trade is not knowledge, but method.

On this I warmly recommend a lovely little book:

http://www.amazon.com/Trivium-21c-Preparing-People-Lessons/dp/178135054X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418590322&sr=8-1&keywords=Trivium+21&pebp=1418590323355

JC,

i think we are kind of agreed, but suspect that our nomenclature might differ. When you say:

'Surely teaching is not about providing objective knowledge. It is about shaping the student's capacity to address her/his experience and thus world.'

i argue that the real import of learning as is implied in this statement lies within the realm of affective learning. It is learning beyond content and indeed learning to  understand and if need be, change our attitude towards and understanding of the world.

I am trying to point to the academics' true claim - not to know more, but to have a method of creating knowledge.

It was always the case, but doubly so since Google, that non-academics could and often did know more about something than the academics.

What students need from us is intellectual method, not nuggets of knowledge.

See Robinson's little book.  Good value and a handy size too.

@ JC Spender

Aren't methods contents too?

@Gordon Ade-ojo.

Psychomotor and affective domains: aren't they kind of contents too, within a taxonomy? And I have a question: How do you teach affectivity?

By teaching content, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, we can build affect and perhaps, a 'metaknowledge'.

This is doubly interesting when applied to teacher training. In Britain, one of the Quality Standards is linked to subject knowledge. That is, not only does the teacher have to be able to steer pupils in the correct direction to research, but the teachers themselves also need a certain level of subject knowledge. 

When we used to teach didactically, we definitely needed more subject knowledge; but in today's information-laden world the pupils should be given the opportunities to explore and engage in knowledge. It becomes the teachers' job to 'teach' the skills to enable this independence. Content becomes simply facts that anyone can acquire...  

@ Domenico - if content and method are the same then neither term matters.  And what stands outside them?  The point may not be obvious, but it is to do with the meaning of words - and thus with the term teacher.

@Mark - I always wonder what on earth 'meta-knowledge' is supposed to mean.  I'm baffled.  Knowledge, as epistemologists know, is either a representation of a reality beyond us - the positivist notion - or a self-referencing term which defines its own boundaries (and is somewhat like a faith).  I cannot fit the term meta-knowledge into either epistemology.

When I reflect back to my science teaching back in 1960 I realize that I was just like a "parts" man in an auto supply store.  All I taught were parts:  the parts of the plant, the parts of the microscope, the parts of the cell, the parts of etc. etc.  I knew NO better since the science classes that I had take all had the same emphasis with the exception of one.  A couple of years into my career I took a biochemistry class.  The professor began his first lecture with a statement:  "Seventy to ninety percent of what I am about to teach you is WRONG.  The problem is I don't know which 70-90 percent that is."  That was my introduction to the tentative nature of the science knowledge.  It forced me to change what I knew about science;  it initiated a change in what and how I taught science!

JC I give you my own definition of metaknowledge. Word meaning is knowledge about knowledge, so I read that as either the knowledge of how students come to understand knowledge - a basis for critical thinking, or the framework within which knowledge is retained and used. Perhaps as we get older, metaknowledge COULD mean wisdom. We realise that as we know more, we question our knowledge and assumptions more as well.

As the term "meta-knowledge" emerged in the research language I interpreted it within my simplistic understanding of the nature of science and epistemology. As each brain works to tie various concepts (e.g. natural selection) into larger conceptual schemes (e.g. evolution) small facts are increasingly lost.  There are fewer and fewer direct ties to an idiosyncratic plane of experience or personal reality.  Nonetheless as one learns new "things" the brain works to incorporate those experiences into some existing structure.  Neurologically this means it must access the stored chemical elements representing the multiple conceptual schemes stored somewhere in the brain tissue.  The process and product of the effort is what I have operationally considered to be "meta-knowledge."

@ Mark & David - well, we are agreed there is a question.  On answers who knows.  Perhaps teh point is that there are questions we can ask that have no reliable answers - and so it turns out our knowledge is limited by definition as well as in practice.  I have been struggling to develop an epistemology for business for years.  One result is that I cannot get much out of 'knowledge about knowledge' beyond saying that is epistemology.  Though epistemology does not set itself up as a definition of knowledge.   Positivism short cuts this by equating knowledge with scientific theory, thus denying the human contribution - is a very odd notion, of course.  But there we are.

Any interesting point.

Yes, content is a key thing, however other issues related to the context and other supportive tools are also important.

Hello Domenico,

When I hear the words content, subject matter, or discipline I think of how the brain works. How it stores information, creates new knowledge's, and how new concepts are formed. We as a species categories things, put things in their place, in order to make order. Epistemological theories of behaviorism, constructivism, and cognitivism claim this is how learning takes place, new knowledge gained, and concept formation. In this sense the actual brain itself is what makes "a content". As an example: I say the word church, in a split second the brain flashes a picture which includes, the ABC's of church. From belief, architecture, dresses, and the people, ect BANG all in a second.

But if I am not mistaken Domenico, I think you're asking a deeper question. One such as given X is it possible to teach Y. Meaning given the way our brain works, as described above can we teach anything other than content? Now that is an interesting question. In other words can we teach only through the imaginary? More specifically can we teach in the element of where Plato's forms reside? My answer is YES only we are doing a poor job of it.

Consider, in teacher education colleges all over the world pre-service teachers are pounded with the term "teaching for social justice". I have been a guest lecturer for five years at colleges all over the south western United States and when I ask; What is teaching for/toward/in honor of/ social justice what does that mean? Or what is social justice? Last what is a just person? I asked a political science class once; what it politics? Political science students just as pre-service students and their professors look at me eyes squint, head tilts a little, and the look we as teachers know in second come over students faces, "God don't call on me" look ( it could also be man this dude is crazy) but I think the former.

So as we think about and discuss the question Domenico asks if your answer yes we can only teach content ask why? This is also why teaching to core standards and the basics is 180 degrees the wrong approach.

From the imaginary

Douglas

In one word, my reply to Domenico is: NONSENSE. 

No subject is ethically, socially, morally, chronically, spiritually, psychologically, linguistically, medically, pharmeceutically, economically, empirically, or practically independent.

I'm inclined in Kevin's direction.  Knowledge is a human artifact, it would not exist in Nature without us.  We get into a frightful muddle about it.  But one effect is obvious, none of it is independent.  Plus, since none of us can achieve a God's Eye view (see Rorty and Searle on this) and none of us is able to be completely rational (bounded rationality is the term even though we do not know what it means) ALL of human knowledge is ethically, socially, and so on 'impacted'.

Dear Domenico,

It sure would appear to be as Kevin and JC state, but is there an argument to made that the the need to have a conditional is conditioned? I am thinking about the human imagination, or the mind. In this sense are we not liminting both potentials?

For example, someone comes up on something unseen before, is that independent? I would also think that infinity is independent. The first view of randum and formless paint and colors and in a 2d cube. Until someone defined it to be abstract art I would contend it was independent.

I believe what I am pointing out is if we believe all things are "all ready" contained in a domain then teaching becomes solely just an expression of what has been memorized, and learning is just that memorizing. I think this is false, limiting, and harmful to both teacher and learning.

I argue that wonderment, imagination, and expression are independent by definition. If not the so to is freedom, thinking, potential, and love are all dependent and determinism wins.

Douglas 

@Douglas

We are getting towards our assumptions energizing the discussion about knowledge.  One either posits a domain outside the known or not.  The Platonic position is that everything that can be known is there "all ready" - which I think I am using in the way you did - but is 'veiled' from our full knowing.  Philosophy is the labor of unveiling.

I sense you and I agree this denies the human imagination - a bottomless well from which we bring 'things' into the light - an unveiling too, but NOT from what is there "all ready" in the sense of 'already' or 'ready-to-hand'.  But rather from a quasi-infinite domain of possibilities - quasi-infinite because the domain is bounded by the nature of the human mind.  

I am alarmed when people state or imply 'things', warranted by 'that is how the brain works' - oh really?  One thing is for sure, we shall not ever escape the bubble of our own way of knowing into the many different ways of knowing that would be necessary to have a full understanding of the 'way things are'.

Sp perhaps the difference between what we know we know and what we might know cannot ever reach everything knowable, but might nonetheless indicate some things that we can imagine.  Is what is imagined known?  I think it makes the discussion nonsensical (inchoate) to say 'yes' to this.  Perhaps there is a shadow of Wittgenstein's thoughts about 'private language' here.  What is imagined is surely not known by us until it is statable and communicable in some public language.

Which separation gives teaching two dimensions - (a) content that can be communicated without calling on the listener's imagination, but also (b) a method to exercise the listener's imagination.  Dewey's feeling was that the student's imagination could only be exercised from footings of what that student already knew - thus the teacher had to help identify the student's known before pressing her/him to learn by (1) exercising imagination and (2) drawing the resulting fresh material into her/his corpus of 'known'.

In this explanation the key is the fragmentary nature of what is known.  If everything known was coherent, as it might be if the scientific method generated 'truth', then there would be no possibility of Kuhnian 'anomalies' - cracks, breaks, inconsistencies, etc.  For me, no anomalies means no learning.  So I see teaching as (i) communicating to the point at which students begin to sense anomalies, then (ii) helping students exercise their imagination on the anomalies, and (iii) helping them bring what they imagine into the discussion.  This is the Socratic phase of debating others in order to find out what you really think for, as they say, if you really want to learn 'teach'.  So the cycle goes the teacher provokes the students and then they provoke the teacher.

@JC Spender 

I agree with most of what you're saying. One question, though: Is imagination an entity? 

Well, who knows how to answer that?  For me the notion of MY imagination - since I cannot know anything whatsoever about YOURS, a consequence of our total, utter inability to know as a another person might (no matter how capable we might be of Smithian empathy or sympathy) - presupposes our mind's acceptance of absence, of a vast unknown that is conjured into possibility by our sense of knowing something.  A sort of "Is that all there is?" response to knowing something.

Now is that capability an entity?  Depends what you want the words to mean.  For me, no.  I see entity on the 'known' side of the line between knowing and imagining.

But others might think - or know - different.

Well said JC. I always say imagination is the relationship between the known and the unknown. Imagination comes to life because we can project from forwards or backwards? From what we already know to what we do not. Hence, although it has a somewhat physical starting point, it ends up in the non physical realm.

@JC, Gordon, and Domenico,

Let me begin by conseeding that imagination as Gordon states "From what we already know to what we do not. Hence, although it has a somewhat physical starting point, it ends up in the non physical realm" I in fact agree. The point however is the social world is not the physical world therefore by denying the imagination we deny the fact that there can be knowledge of the social world. It is this point I am claiming. Social justice is not the physical world, IT HAS physical consequences YES. Justice is not in the physicial domain and YES it has physical consequences but it does not exist in the physical domain. Same as social contracts, race, gender, culture, ect. All are not of the physical but are in the physical world. 

I would agree JC with your sense that by taking the position under discussion I must admit I am, unwilling to not only give up knowledge being derived from the imagination but give an inch on its validity as to being Episteme, hence my arguments. I also am unwilling to give up the social sciences as creating Episteme. In the discussion on knowledge you reference to; the idea of Episteme and Doxa came up. Namely the idea of degrees of "justification" needed to reach a level of justification to become a justified belief in truth hence; knowledge. (I need to respond to).

In the social world there is no "laws" such as E=mc2 or Pythagorean's theorem. The social world is the world of abstraction, metaphor, language, ideas, concepts, and imagination. These cannot be measured in the same manor as gravitational pull on planets orbiting a sun. These have to be inferred, use inductive logic which the scientific method does as well.

In the end, I am willing to argue that that the human mind may not be infinite but the container we have so far limited it into is not at all the minds potential. Quantum physics is an example, so to math with zero, empty sets, quarks, and theoretical physics all then become philosophy. This position I find unnerving to say the least.

You are right JC, I am unwilling to concede the imagination as a sourse of knowledge and I am unwilling to frame it as Doxa. I also believe the arguments forth comming may just sway some minds.

Douglas

@Douglas

Not sure I follow all of what you mean - but I suspect you share a faith with hard-line positivists, i.e. that it is possible for us to know and state a Truth.  

I am an ex-engineer, brought up to think of science as THE reliable method for distinguishing opinion (doxa) from truth (episteme).  I say ex- because I have long abandoned this notion of knowledge and hence the promise of teaching in ways that are as independent as possible from the teacher.

I do not find my abandonment of positivism depressing.  Actually I find it immensely liberating and I look back at my early beliefs as a period of hiding in someone else's cave.

It is all about language.  It is enlightening to go back to Giambattista Vico and his concern with language.  Not only with regard to what we can know but more precisely to what we can say.  Language is a social construction therefore as flawed as we are - there can be no Truth in it.  Rather it is the cumbersome and imperfect means through which we pontificate, puff ourselves up, and disagree - but also learn to collaborate.  So I see the Holy Grail of Truth (science-style) displaced by a holy grail (small caps for modest aspirations) of useful inter-personal collaboration towards socially productive ends.

But, as in the Garden, language, as a vessel of what we know, also draws our attention to what we do not - and this makes us (a) anxious, disturbing whatever natural equanimity we might have as we sit self-reflecting cross-legged or quietly contemplating Nature, (b) filled with doubt/s, up to Descartes's level of utterly destructive 'radical doubt', and (c) perhaps most unfortunately, making ourselves open to being persuaded by others who may well not have our best interests at heart.  If only we had a touchstone of Truth we could resist these tempters.  If only ...

But alas, we do not, and so must rely on our own judgment - or accept that inasmuch as we lulled ourselves into believing that we can control Fate through the exercise of our knowledge, we brought it all on ourselves.

I do not find this depressing.  To the contrary, the point is surely to see how we might deal with our anxieties through dialogue with others - even as this exposes us to greater dangers that refusing to listen, for we are social animals, there is little unique to us.

Knowledge is no more than an allusion to this process and, to the extent that we think we know something, an expression of our hope that dialogue is better than silence. Hence my earlier postings about teaching focusing on method rather than content, for with good and workable method we may better guard ourselves against the dangers of dialogue with others whose minds we can never enter and whose motives we can never know.

@JC,

In this case I must say my meaning was not made clear at all. I am not a positivist at all.In fact I am in many ways a person who argues from the same position as you. 

This notion of objective knowledge may be true in the physical or natural world but in the social "the method" cannot be used as a "truth" meter fro several reasons. The least of which is the social world is not governed by "natural laws" such as E=mc2 or displacement forces such as wind shere.

The social wolrd is abstraction, are the issues debated by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Cave of Alagory, within the Garden of the imagination. Yes, JC. in the end knowledge can be both "truth" as being argued on another thread but knowledge is also subjective in the sense of what is chosen as knowledge. This is the point I am trying to make and defend.

Is knowledge not used really knowledge? Or is the theory of social reproduction, social capitial, instutionalism, any less a "knowledge" that 2+2=4. I say no. I also say that to think in such a way as 2+2=4 is knowledge but education as an oppresive tool is Doxa is insulting. It limits the potentional of new paradigms, new avenues of science, and new epistemolgies.

I aslo agree with you this stance is not depressing, it is freeing, liberating, and creative. It allows for the continuged dialogue concerning what is justice to continue, inclusion, and equity also.

I hope I have made my point clear now.

All coments are welcome,

Douglas 

@Douglas,

The notion that the social sciences are unlike the physical sciences, which you allude to, goes back (in the European tradition) to Vico and our inability to enter God's Mind - as I said previously.

But alas Vico http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico is still in the shadow of Newton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton.  While his principal target was Descartes, he rails against the methods which were then emerging and now dominate what we call 'science' - hence Vico's "New Science'.

But he did not wish to go so far as to debunk the physical science, merely the proposal that the 'scientific method' could be extended to what he called the 'civic sphere'.

But the scientific sphere too stands on language - scientific and rational OK, but language nonetheless.  Thus it is within what we have created and therefore cannot be Truth or a Representation of Reality.

Which leads on to appreciating that the language of science is no more than a rhetorical practice, albeit one we treat uncritically - and we should not.

e.g.:

Cartwright, Nancy. (1983). How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gross, Alan G. (1990). The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Prelli, Lawrence J. (1989). A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press.

The bottom line is that all knowledge is the prisoner of language, and it is language to which we and our students should pay attention.  Regrettably we have all been taught to ignore the limits to language, especially how we must make assumptions before we can say anything, and how those assumptions blank out so much of what should be noted and then considered.  This is where 'deconstruction' has a critical role.

Positivism's popularity is based, in part, on the false clarity it provides by hiding so much of the complexity of our understanding when truth is denied us.

Note that Vico was a rhetorician who appreciated language's functions included (a) being a vessel for knowledge and also (b) the apparatus we use to persuade each other of truth or falsity.  Of course the limitations of language mean that in the end it is not possible to separate these functions - which takes us back to method.

Students deserve to be informed about language's strengths but also about its weaknesses and to get some schooling in how to navigate the resulting confusion.

@Douglas R. Daugherty  

Do I understand that E=mc2 is truth? I would argue that truth is a matter of believing (religion is about truth) and not of knowledge (science is about knowledge). And it doesn’t matter if it is social knowledge or physical knowledge. The difference is in the qualitative side: social, physical. 

@Domenico,

Yeah!  To which we can add Thomas Aquinas's 'trick' - to say that we can only 'do science' on what we already believe.  The trick transformed Europe.

@Domenico, I am understanding you to mean truth=belief. Knowledge is emperical and therefore cannot be "truth". So knowledge is E=mc2 and truth is ones subject belief in an afterlife?

If I am understanding your latest post correctly then the answer to your original question would be no. But I beleive there to be a yes! 

@JC I am in agreement with the limination of "current languages" being limited. I would ask however, if you agree with this statement.

All language is metaphorical? In this sense is language as limiting as we think? 

If this is, as I beleive it to be true, metaphores have and are always changing hence the potenitiality for.......?

Douglas

My opinion is backed by decades of research showing that it is freedom and choice, along with music, that most affects both the self-esteem needed to make learning possible and fun and also the ability to think critically. In this paradigm, children are miracles to enjoy rather than blank slates on which to write. In my design by teams formulation, assessment becomes self-evident and only growing as a person is considered important and valid learning, while the teacher becomes a member of the crew and only a navigator while each student takes the helm and steers their own way to learn what they are interested in, not what we as teachers might believe is more valuable. Only in a free society, where teachers are allowed and encouraged to teach as they wish and what they wish to, are grades only empty specimens to be discarded in favor of the cooperative learning that will save a planet and a people from certain extinction if we continue in the way we are going. If the cells in a human body begin to fight each other the body dies. Why can't we realize that a similar manifestation is affecting the planetary body?

Wow.  You have a lot of interesting responses.  I spent over 15 years as a scientist before I started my teaching career.  I spent several years in R&D before continuing in environmental remediation.  My experience with education may be different than someone who graduated from college with a teaching degree.  As a teacher, I facilitate the learning of content, but I also facilitate how to learn, retain and decode information.  

I spend less than 12 minutes talking to the "whole class" in one class period.  I may give 3 minutes of instructions, 2 minutes of time management reminders, and several minutes of clarification if I notice multiple students with the same misconceptions about content. Do students have choices?  Yes they have choice, as to how they will learn content.  I do NOT view education as teaching how I want to teach but instead I see it as providing the means for others to learn.  Education should be about the learner.  

I provide access to digital data, traditional data (textbooks and hard copies of notes), and laboratory investigations.  Hands-on student centered learning occurs everyday in the classroom.  Students learn independently, in groups, and one-on-one with a student partner.  I do not spend time lecturing about a subject, notes are found within the investigations, stations, and partner learning initiatives.  

We also spend time focusing our learning on how to decode information.  Everyone learns in a different way and everyone's education experience is individualized...due to the inherent nature of the learner.  Providing the means for individualized learning is sometimes viewed as differentiation, however, differentiation is typically providing the same content at different levels of scaffolding.

 In order for the student to achieve individualized education the student needs to be allowed access to multiple ways of learning all content, in this case, the teacher becomes a valuable resource in the classroom. 

The term "content" is a broad term and depending on how you pronounce it students can be just as content with learning about nothing.  So am I a teacher of everything (content) or a teacher of happiness (content)? 

Stacy, well said, on topic, and using real words.  To answer your question I would say you are a content teacher of content guiding your content students to discover the content they need.  I mean that seriously, not tongue-in-cheek.

@Stacy Holland.

I’m sure you are doing a great job, that you are a good teacher. The following is just to push the debate forward.

I suggest that content is the subject matter that is taught or intended to be taught. I’m not sure that the students learn “misconceptions” and that the content is necessarily about “conceptions” or scientific knowledge. I’m not sure that students learn only content too. Content is not necessarily or only what is learned or developed by students. “How to learn, retain and decode information” is content. What is not content is what the students do and the actions they develop. Without action no content would exist and then could not be learned. And the development of action is not limited to the “how to learn”. Action is at the same time corporeal, mental, cognitive, intentional, personal, and so on. Intentionality which is a property of action for instance cannot be taught, but we can help the students to develop their actions. Well, let’s make it short for the moment: action is the motor of development.

Students do learn misconceptions...I see it all the time.  I teach the lunar cycle, "phases of the Moon" and I have students who think the following:

1,  The Moon changes size (grows and shrinks)

2,  The Moon is "New" during a New Moon phases (I am unsure what happens to the old Moon, but evidently there are a LOT of New Moons orbiting the Earth)

3,  The Moon does not rotate because we always see the same side of the Moon.

These misconceptions exist because of the language of the teacher, not due to the mental "aboutness" of the students cognitive abilities.  While teaching Moon phases some teachers tell students that "the Moon is growing by waxing during the phases between the New Moon to the Full Moon phase"   Although I know the teacher doesn't really mean that the size of the Moon is changing some students believe it word for word.  If we do not  assess the students' understanding of the concept then 4 years later (in the state I teach in) when I expand upon the phases of the Moon I have to reteach what they should already know.  Did the teacher set out to create the misconceptions?  Probably not, but the responsibility of presenting content in a scientific language can be taught.  Had the teacher used words that correctly represented the relationship between the Earth, Sun, and Moon they could have avoided or reduced the percentage of students with misconceptions.

You mention Intentionality, are you referring to the medieval term that is vaguely characterized as the phenomena of "aboutness"?  Intentionality has nothing to do with intent or intentions.  If you are referencing Brentano...he was referring to the sense in which an object of a mental state is "in" the mind. (please see Tim Crane "Intentionality" 1998  and Dermot Moran "Brentano's Thesis" 2000)

As for action, you define it as including "corporeal, mental, congnitive, intentional, personal, and so on".  Does this mean you subscribe to Stoicism?  Therefore, referring back to your original post, are you asking if I teach morality within the classroom?  Or do you further the discussion to point out that misconceptions are not taught but exist "in" the mind per learner?

Let me give you a breakdown of whom I teach every day:

First period: 23 students; 3 behavioral IEP; 4 SPED; 2 ESOL students

2nd Period: 20 students; 15 gifted/talented, 5 pre/AP

3rd Period: 8 SPED

4th Period: 20 students; 4 behavioral IEP; 1 SPED; 2 ESOL

5th Period: 17 students; 2 ESOL; 2 SPED

6th Period: 20 pre/AP

@Stacy Holland. 

I was not criticizing you.  

My theoretical frame is Enaction. Intentionality is used within this frame.

The problem with "misconceptions" is not that it is something that might be learned or taught. It has to do with evolving learning. Piaget did some studies about the moon as understood by kids of different ages and he could follow their levels of understanding without the idea of misconceptions. Younger kids were saying things like: the moon is intentionally following me; the Moon can follow many people at the same time, even when they are going in opposite directions; the Moon must enlighten us, it is her duty; and so on. Piaget found out that, within the logical level of these kids, they were not wrong. They were wrong only if their responses were compared to adult rational thinking or scientific thinking. So what I’m trying to say is that the understanding of “misconceptions” is a matter of one’s theoretical frame. And within your “theoretical frame” (I don’t know exactly which it is), you are right to use the concept of misconceptions. And I’m right not to use it.

Very cordially.  

I didn't think you were criticizing me.  I was asking a clarifying question...about the intentionality and Stocism that I read within your post.  It seems to me that you chose those words within the context of your post for a reason.  You did, to use it within your theoretical frame of Enaction.  Sure, theoretically I cannot claim to know how the individual students' autonomy of experience (in this case, we can call it scientific reasoning) influences their age appropriate understanding.  But just because I say it's an apple...doesn't make it an apple.  As a teacher in a classroom with secondary students an apple has to be the same for everyone. 

@Stacy Holland 

As a teacher in a classroom with secondary students an apple has to be the same for everyone. Why? And is it possible? At least not during the process of learning. Though I understand your point. 

I don't know much about Stocism. Intentionality for me refers to the idea that action has a target, or a goal, or an objectif, or an intention, and so on. Acting is "intending"... English is my third language, so I'm not sure of the vocabulary to be used. 

I think there is a truth/fact dichotomy in teaching any subject matter.

For example, we take it for granted now that it is a social benefit that women vote. But when this topic was debated 120 odd years ago, not all women favored giving women the right to vote.

Queen Victoria herself, arguably the most powerful person on the planet, when asked what she thought of women getting the right to vote asked:

"Whatever would they do with it?"

Many women said it would simply make them another special-interest group and over-burden them with a social responsibility they were better able to handle privately and as non-partisans.

So what do we teach here? Do we teach that it is debatable that women should have the vote? Do we teach that there might be an argument that they should not have it?

Teaching involves not just FACTS but our attitudes toward those facts. Which often change over time.

A few years back I wrote a manuscript that I titled Teaching Children How To Think.

It was not subject matter oriented, it was THINKING oriented.

My idea being that thinking is like riding a bicycle, you learn to do it by doing it.

So I filled the book up with all sorts of questions divided under headings like: ART, LAW, FRIENDSHIP, etc.

The method I proposed was that parents approach these questions lightly and for the purpose of having fun.

When the family was all together, maybe at dinner time, they go around the table asking a question from the book.

Each child should try to answer, and passing from youngest to oldest, even mom and dad are expected to take a crack at the question.

There were no "right" answers and no answers provided in the back of the book.

They were all just concepts that everyone was supposed to ponder and address.

They included questions like:

-What is Art

-What is not Art

-Is a chef an artist? (why/why not)

-What is friendship

-What type of events in history are worthy of being remembered

-Why are some things crimes and other things not crimes

-Are the people in the world better off being divided into separate countries or should we all join together to be one big country

I shopped it around and no one was interested.