Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research

Abstract

y address this afternoon is partly the story of a personal odyssey and partly a confessional. It has three parts. The odyssey, the first part, relates to the journey I have taken to try to understand the development of mind and the forms through which its contents are made public. How my ideas about these matters evolved is a story I want to tell. The confessional, the second part, refers to the dilemmas, uncertainties, and conundrums that the ideas that I embrace have caused me. This presidential address is more about quandaries than certitudes. I intend to display my quandaries. My hope is that at least some of what puzzles me will intrigue you. Indeed, I hope it intrigues you enough to want to join me. Finally, in the third part, I want to say what I think the ideas I have explored might mean for the future of educational research, both how it is pursued and how it is presented. As some of you know, when I was in my 20s, I was a teacher of art and, before that, a painter. I moved from painting to teaching because I discovered that the children with whom I worked, economically disenfranchised African Americans living on Chicago's West Side, became more important to me than the crafting of images; for some reason I came to believe then, as I believe now, that the process of image-making could help children discover a part of themselves that mostly resides beneath their consciousness. Art was a way of displaying to the children and adolescents with whom I worked dimensions of themselves that I desperately wanted them to discover. It was my interest in children and my need to clarify my vague convictions about the educational potential of art that led me to the University of Chicago and to an initiation into the social sciences, which were at that time the style of intellectual life that defined doctoral study. The Department of Education at Chicago, while steeped in the social sciences, was also intellectually open, and I was given enough slack not only to sustain, but to pursue, my interest in the arts. While no one on the faculty worked in arts education or knew much about it, my intellectual mentors-John Goodlad, Phil Jackson, Joseph Schwab, Ben Bloom, and Bruno Bettelheim-provided support and encouragement. Later I found additional support in the work of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, Rudolf Arnheim, Michael Polanyi, John Dewey, and Nelson Goodman. My encounter with the social sciences at Chicago and my long-standing engagement in art, both as a painter and a teacher of art, forced me to confront the tension between my desire to understand and cultivate what is individual and distinctive and my wish to grasp what is patterned and regular.' My effort to resolve this tension and my interest in the cognitive character of the arts have been a career-long journey. This journey has been guided by a variety of beliefs.