Republication of: Philosophy Rediscovered: Exploring the Connections Between Teaching Philosophies,Educational Philosophies,and Philosophy

What is real?

Metaphysics examines the nature of ultimate reality. It offers views on the causes of events in the universe (cosmology), the nature of human beings (anthropology), the nature of divinity (theology), and the meaning of existence (ontology). For example, questions such as “Does order exist in the universe, or do humans create it?” “Who am I?” and “What am I?” (McKenna, 1995) are metaphysical ones. Is the world absolute and permanent, abstract and spiritual, or subjective and changing?

A key learning goal in management education is to help students understand the perceptually based and constructed nature of “reality.” Thus, our views of metaphysics (along with those of textbook writers and curriculum committee members) will necessarily shape the content and methods of our teaching. We may convey that reality is objectively real or subjective and socially constructed; both views represent a metaphysical stance. If we convey the view that reality is subjective, we are enacting a metaphysics that is consistent with the educational philosophies of pragmatism, existentialism, and critical theory; in contrast, this view is at odds with the metaphysics of realism and idealism, which portray reality in more objective terms. We will discuss connections with educational philosophies in more detail later in this article.

Our view of human nature, which is a metaphysical belief, shapes our view of education. Do we believe human nature has been constant throughout time and that proper knowledge is therefore timeless, or do we believe that human nature and basic problems change over time? Do we believe that people are inherently good and altruistic, or operating primarily from self-interest?

The dilemma of free choice versus causality is also a metaphysical question commonly addressed in discussions of agency versus structure (McKenna, 1995). This idea might show up in our course design, for example, in the amount of order and structure teachers provide for a class and their expectations that students conform to the structure. It could show up in the causal explanations and solutions we offer about the business and social issues we discuss in class, for example, if we believe problems are caused more by social structures or individual agency. It could also affect our explanations of self-assessment instruments our students take, such as Rotter’s (1966) Locus of Control scale.

How do I know what I know?

The second philosophical concept is epistemology, which literally means a theory or explanation of knowledge. It focuses on the origin, structure, and validity of knowledge (McKenna, 1995) or how we know what we know. Information can come from others such as parents and teachers or from personal sources such as reason and sensory experience. A seminal work by Hessong and Weeks (1991) suggests there are five ways of knowing: (a) by revelation from God; (b) by authority from an expert; (c) by the individual’s reasoning; (d) by the individual’s sensory perception; and (e) by the individual’s intuition. Note that epistemology is the most well-known term, and some writers use it to represent both metaphysical and epistemological ideas.

Epistemological questions influence our teaching methods in critical ways. For example, do we teach scientific methods or use Holy texts to find knowledge? Do we encourage or discourage the use of intuition? What are our beliefs about the validity of knowledge from external authorities versus knowledge from the individual? The choices we make about our assignments, tests, and course design are epistemological statements. For example, research articles are based on a rational-analytic, positivist epistemology; case analyses demonstrate a greater tolerance for ambiguity and multiple sources of data; and personal reflection work which encourages the use of “I” honors an individualized epistemology. Multiple choice tests suggest there is one right answer, often the one put forth by the textbook or the teacher. Writing assignments which require application to a student’s personal life imply that knowledge is more contextual and subjective. The use of teams and class discussion suggests that other people are a valid source of knowledge.

One place teachers demonstrate their epistemological beliefs is in the standards of evidence they require on research assignments. Some teachers specifically require students to reference only academic articles, whereas others allow trade publications, Web searches, or the use of community-generated documents such as Wikipedia. Critics argue that Wikipedia does not count as “expert” knowledge; because content can be edited by anyone with Internet access, it lacks the formal peer review process in which recognized academic “experts” serve as gatekeepers to publication, protecting the dissemination of fallacies. They further argue that the process of open access devalues the notion of expertise itself (Read, 2006). This is an epistemolog-ical debate on the validity of sources of knowledge.

What are worthy as the right criteria for judgment?

The third philosophical concept is axiology, which addresses the nature of value, covering both ethics and aesthetics. The term is derived from the Greek word for “worthy,” and this branch focuses on how we evaluate choices. The major ethical frameworks covered in axiology are probably familiar to most management educators because they are often included in textbook sections on ethics. They are utilitarian ethics, justice ethics, virtue ethics, and care ethics. The first three frames assume rationality, universal criteria, and autonomy of the individual. In contrast, the ethic of care is contextual, nonuniversal, and relational.

Our values can appear in the content materials of the course, such as the selection of cases and reading materials. Our views on morality, values, and right action, including whether and how these concepts should be taught, will shape our approach to teaching. In the classroom, we may be uncomfortable with explicitly addressing values issues, believing our role is to present only “the facts” and allow students to create their own moral code. We may alternatively believe in offering more information and assistance in creating ethical students. Indeed, business schools are under increasing scrutiny to explicitly address the ethical training of our students.

The literature on academic service learning provides an example of an axiological debate in management education. Some scholars such as Godfrey (1999) believe service learning is a moral project addressing social justice which helps “the private sector maintain the moral authority to set the social agenda” (p. 376), and it should be explicitly presented as such to students. Others such as Kenworthy-U’Ren (1999) advocate an “exposure-and-understanding” approach that explicitly avoids the social justice framing and allows students to reach their own value positions on service, social justice, and the role of business in society. Their debate is not about whether values should be discussed explicitly; after all, both are presenting strongly held values-based positions. Rather, we suggest they are presenting contrasting value systems which reflect their personal teaching philosophies. Because their debate has been published, other management educators can reflect on and gain insight into their own values position on service learning. This example illustrates a major community benefit of making elements of one’s teaching philosophy public and open for discussion.

Values also appear in aesthetics, which studies sensory experience and feelings aroused by these experiences. Steve Taylor (personal communication, July 18, 2006) discusses the relation to aesthetics in teaching when he writes:

It is always an aesthetic choice for a teacher as to what they really value—is good critical thinking beautiful? Is being the sage on the stage and having the students applaud at the end of your lecture beautiful? Or is it the sublime experience of having a student realize something important about themselves that does it for you? These are fundamentally values that are aesthetic differences.

Teachers who value aesthetics encourage learning through a variety of sensual experiences, using techniques that evoke different visual, auditory, and affective experiences rather than traditional teaching methods. For example, they may incorporate art and drawing, music, and performances of skits and plays to evoke learning through sensual experiences.

The three conceptual areas from philosophy presented here are challenging because they are highly abstract. Thinking about these and determining one’s own stance on these questions can be difficult and is likely an ongoing developmental journey that occurs over the course of one’s career. Additional resources to spur this development are available in the education literature, which contains the established philosophies of education. How have others answered these questions over time? The traditional philosophies offer frameworks demonstrating different “answers” to the abstract metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological questions. We discuss these educational philosophies in the next section.

Shared Educational Philosophies

The literature on teaching philosophies suggests that they are eminently personal, a reflection of the individual teacher’s identity. However, the literature overlooks the importance of shared foundations: The building blocks for these personal statements are drawn from the lexicon of basic educational philosophies, which are shared among the community of teachers. Teaching philosophies are rarely discussed in our daily practice, so this “sharing” occurs implicitly. When we do discuss them, there is a tendency to resort to a convenient shorthand or set of buzzwords, as if everyone knows what “a student centered community of learners” means and shares the same definition. Yet meanings can vary widely among individual teachers.

The culture of teaching practice has become, paradoxically, both more diverse and more shared. Awareness of diverse teaching and learning methods is increasing as schools focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning (Boyer, 1990), and an increasing number of pedagogy publications are available to disseminate teaching knowledge. Challenges to a traditional lecture model or “sage on a stage” paradigm are widespread (e.g., The Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference) and have fundamentally altered the culture surrounding innovative and effective teaching. But as approaches to teaching have become more diverse, it seems the language underpinning and sustaining them has struggled to maintain its shared communal meaning. Furthermore, normative beliefs about teaching methods vary across disciplines (Donald, 1995; Murray & Renaud, 1995). Terms from the lexicon may be invoked without an understanding of their relationship to traditional educational philosophies and the connections with and among other terms in that lexicon. Thus, the details that come from deeper familiarity with the philosophy may be forgotten over time.

To illustrate how terms become disconnected from their historical context, consider the idea of “Teaching the Whole Person” which was the theme of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference in 2005. In the present era, the term “whole person” begs the question: “whole” as opposed to what? Looking at the history of this concept reveals an interesting controversy in educational philosophy regarding the goals of education. The whole person concept is derived from the whole child movement and the rise of progressivism, which occurred after 1918. In that year, the National Education Association issued an influential bulletin titled Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education outlining the goals of education. It focused on “complete living” and life adjustment and offered a wide interpretation of children’s needs in education, including rational thinking and the understanding of science, health, family life, ethics, the rights and duties of democratic citizenry, and wise consumer behavior and use of leisure. It advocated social, psychological, vocational, moral, and civic goals for education, in addition to traditional cognitive ones (Ornstein & Levine, 1997, p. 424).

This philosophical position does not sound all that controversial in today’s world, but at the time it was a statement against the prevailing ideology. Whole child was developed as a response and reaction to the “mental discipline” approach, which dominated American education from the late 1800s. The mental discipline approach argues that the mind is strengthened through mental activities. Traditional subjects such as Latin, Greek, math, and physics were valued for their cultivation of the intellect. The more difficult the subject was to learn, the more valuable it was as exercise for the mind. This approach created a curriculum hierarchy focused on academics and college preparation, but the social and psychological concerns of the learner were largely ignored (Ornstein & Levine, 1997). This example illustrates how a phrase such as “Teaching the Whole Person” has a specific historical meaning. Understanding its context allows us to be better informed about its contemporary usage.

In a similar way to this “whole person” example, establishing connections between one’s personal teaching philosophy and traditional educational philosophies builds an understanding of the ancestry and lineage of one’s beliefs which we believe contributes to personal development. To explore the larger context of educational philosophies, we offer a brief overview of five major educational philosophies using the elements of philosophy presented earlier in this article (see Table 1). In chronological order, the philosophies are idealism, realism, pragmatism, existentialism, and critical theory. As used here, philosophies refer to “complete bodies of thought that present a world-view of which education is a part” (Ornstein & Levine, 1997, p. 383). They provide the foundation or “roots” for different educational theories.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Elements of Philosophies of Education.

Philosophy	Metaphysics	Epistemology	Axiology
Idealism	Reality is spiritual or mental and unchanging	Knowing is the rethinking of latent ideas	Values are absolute and eternal
Realism	Reality is objective, fixed, and is composed of matter and form	Knowing consists of sensation and abstraction	Values are absolute and eternal based on natural law
Pragmatism	Reality is the interaction of an individual with environment or experience; always changing	Knowing results from experience and use of scientific method	Values are situational or relative
Existentialism	Reality is subjective	Knowing is to make personal choices	Values should be freely chosen
Critical theory	Reality is politically, socially, and economically constructed	Knowing comes from critical analysis of conflicts in society	Values are constructed in terms of power

Credit: Ornstein, Alan C. and Daniel U. Levine, Foundations of Education, Sixth Edition. Copyright 1997 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Used with permission.

These descriptions are brief, offering broad classifications that emphasize distinctions between these philosophies and deemphasize the interconnect-edness inherent in these ideas. Although we have covered the major schools, there are others we have not covered such as phenomenological, hermeneu-tic, interpretive, and postmodern philosophies. We encourage readers to pursue a more extensive review of those educational philosophies that interest them. We recommend texts dedicated to teaching philosophies such as Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish (2003) or McKenna (1995).

Implications for Teacher Development and Management Education

We believe that the “philosophy” part of teaching philosophies demands more attention. Our review of the pure philosophy terms of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology establishes the philosophical roots of teaching philosophies and offers a conceptual framework to think about philosophical ideas as they apply to teaching. Our review of the classic educational philosophies illustrates how these elements have been combined at different times to result in very different beliefs about and approaches to teaching. These educational philosophies and concepts also provide the shared but often implicit teaching lexicon.

Developing teaching philosophies grounded in philosophy and educational philosophies offers a number of benefits to our teaching practice, our personal development, and the community of management education. At the most practical level, being mindful of our values in our teaching practice can guide our decision making in course design and in coping with inevitable teaching dilemmas. Choices about assignments and projects, testing, and classroom dynamics should ideally be consistent with elements of one’s teaching philosophy. Philosophical views, examined or not, will come into play as teachers cope with cases of academic dishonesty, imploding student teams, critical classroom incidents, and negative feedback on their teaching.

As teachers embark on the kind of study and reflection of their teaching philosophy that we propose in this article, they may find areas where their classroom practice is inconsistent with their espoused philosophy. When this occurs, teachers can explore this inconsistency to determine whether it is their philosophy or their classroom practice that should be revised. Addressing such inconsistencies allows the teaching philosophy statement to serve as foundation for ongoing development.

Revisiting one’s teaching philosophy statement regularly then becomes a tool to create and maintain a clear and authentic identity as a teacher. Authenticity in teaching requires self-awareness, awareness of others, relationships with learners, awareness of context, and a critically reflective approach to practice (Cranton & Carusetta, 2004). The development of a teaching philosophy grounded in traditional philosophy and educational philosophy contributes to value clarification, personal awareness, and contextual understanding. It provides the ability to “critically question that which is right for us from the [teaching] literature, develop our own personal style, and thereby communicate with students in a genuine way” (Cranton & Carusetta, 2004, p. 6). Being personally centered as a teacher helps us remain present to the emergent learning in each classroom, creating “being moments” in which students and teachers are mutually responsible for learning outcomes (Ramsey & Fitzgibbons, 2005).

Although we have used the term teaching philosophy in keeping with common semantics of the field, we acknowledge that this terminology overlooks a key constituency in the teaching endeavor, the learners. The philosophy teachers enact in the classroom is integrally connected to the students’ beliefs and behaviors. This is especially true for teachers who adopt a socially constructed view of metaphysics (such as pragmatists, existentialists, and critical theorists). Because their worldview says that reality is created in social interactions, these teachers are likely to see themselves as co-learners with their students. Even for teachers holding more objective metaphysical views, the beliefs and attitudes of their students are likely to influence a teacher’s teaching philosophy. For example, students who see themselves as customers and the teaching encounter as a service transaction are likely to bring different attitudes about learning than students who see themselves as junior partners (Ferris, 2002). Thus a more accurate description of the teaching philosophy concept would be the term “teaching/learning philosophy.” Future studies should explore how students’ deeply held beliefs about the teaching/learning encounter interact with teachers’ views of the same encounter.

At a community level, more thoughtful teaching philosophies can contribute to our larger mission in higher education in general and business education in particular. First, being aware of the heritage of one’s ideas reinforces the connection to the shared values of the teaching community that crosses all disciplinary boundaries. Second, as business education has come under increasing criticism for promoting an amoral stance (Donaldson, 2002; Ghoshal, 2005; Giacalone, 2004), having a well-grounded teaching philosophy is consistent with the project to make values more visible in our teaching. The content of the specific values we teach may vary widely, as illustrated in our earlier example about the debate in academic service learning between Godfrey and Kenworthy-U’Ren.

Our argument is one for the importance of the reflection process, and of making one’s teaching philosophy public. In sharing and discussing our philosophy statements publicly, they become focal documents that link the individual to the professional community and the goals of the institution. They create a basis not only for accountability (Hutchings, 1996) but also for the development and support of institutional values. When each faculty member makes his or her teaching philosophy statement available for public discussion, it becomes possible to examine common ground and differences in philosophy across faculty in a department, college, or across institutions. These discussions must be held with safety, respect, and an attitude of open inquiry as opposed to a critical attitude that seeks to convert others to a “preferred” or “more enlightened” philosophy. Because one’s teaching philosophy is such a core element of one’s identity as a teacher, direct criticism of one’s teaching philosophy is akin to a direct assault on the self and will shut down any kind of learning dialogue. Still with careful framing, a shared discussion of personal teaching philosophies can help build community within our departments and universities.