McCrory, Catherine;
(2023)
Can Inferentialism help to re-vision existing modes of thinking about historical knowledge building?
Doctoral thesis (Ed.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Distinctions - curriculum and pedagogy; propositional and procedural knowledge; facts and reasoning – frame thinking and discussion in education. The terms ‘substantive’ and ‘disciplinary’ (or first and second order) are often used within history education to distinguish knowledge about the past from knowledge about how we investigate and structure our thinking about the past. What is being separated by such couplets, how, and with what effect, deserves attention. While distinctions are helpful, once established, educators can fail to probe the basis and nature of the proposed separation and this intellectual complacency can bring detrimental consequences for teaching and learning. Teachers are ill-equipped without these couplets, but the central argument here is that they are also ill-equipped if these couplets are only understood as interdependent, complementary or indivisible. We impoverish teaching and learning without adequate appreciation of how these couplets only become distinguishable analytically and in retrospective commentary. Knowledge types in history education, are not separate in the act of knowing but in the description of the act and this insight matters to teaching and learning. This thesis explores how existing commentary about knowledge leaves educators vulnerable to the possibility of misconstruing knowledge distinctions. Inferentialism, a philosophical account of how words mean anything at all, developed by Robert Brandom (1994, 2000), is used to explore how analytical distinctions breed confusion if we fail to heed how what something is, differs from our descriptions of it. I argue that an Inferentialist account of conceptual knowledge enables us to discuss confusions arising from our analytical distinctions, and to see why this matters.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ed.D |
| Title: | Can Inferentialism help to re-vision existing modes of thinking about historical knowledge building? |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2023. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Keywords: | Inferentialism, History, Education |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179499 |
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