Meeting Reflections.
I’m starting to get more of a sense of the thesis now and how it is that realism connects with education. Basically I’m of the position that the reality of objects transcends our subjectivity. Our subjectivity certainly contextualizes things for us and makes them meaningful in relation to a problem. But I feel that subjectivity alone seems to limit our ability to really ‘know’ or understand our situation as human beings because it directly limits what we can know to the extent, limits or boundaries of our experience.
I think that using Social Constructionism alone, in the classroom, as a means of understanding the ‘processes’ at work is a case of too much human agency with too little consideration given to underlying structures. ‘Too much human agency’ (i.e. placing people at the final centre of things) could, perhaps, be argued as being consistent with a common sense approach to the classroom and to life; and this can be beneficial - and I won’t deny that. However whilst I am willing to concede, in line with common sense, that people do get the ends or rewards that they work for (i.e. what they ‘deserve’); it is a very different thing to say that the relationship between ‘effort and reward’ is the only variable at work in a, for example, classroom. This is not that there can ever be - and indeed this relationship is not the total nature of the world.
