Changing the Way We Think in English Education: A Conversation in the Universal Barbershop

Abstract

This essay extends Robert Yagelskiߣs discuss sustainability; in teacher education by examining how the processes of Cartesian-Newtonian thinking limit the ability of both standards reformers and English educators to think in genuinely new ways and to conceive of real change. The essay includes a discussion of how standards reform since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 has been based on arguments and ways of thinking similar to reform measures in the early twentieth century. The essay also discusses four areas of professional practice toward which English teacher educators might look for guidance in initiating real change. One key point of reference is the work of David Bohm, a physicist and philosopher of science, whose critique of scientific thinking represents a unique way of understanding how to understand and reconfigure approaches to educational reform in the twenty-first century.