| Chapter 1: | Initial Thoughts |
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that symbolic knowledge concepts structured in specific ways affect knowledge instruction and acquisition. By applying his theorizations, I link them to certain dispositions of the learner’s mind which motivate critical thinking, such as intellectual independence, open-mindedness, wholeheartedness, and responsibility (Oxman-Michelli, 1992; Paul, 1988). These intellectual qualities broadly conceptualize the disposition known as the “critical spirit.”
The goal was to compare the pedagogic practices of two schools, comparing pupils’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for learning. Extrinsic motivations are associated with a learner’s perception of knowledge as relational to some kind of external reward (i.e., money, a job), whereas intrinsic motivations are associated with a learner’s attractions to the intellectual task itself (i.e., intellectual curiosity) (Whitehead, 1984). By making this comparison, I locate how aspects of students’ critical thinking are affected by the ways knowledge is organized in schools through external business power relations. Whereas some studies have tried to locate how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are relational to a student’s home background (i.e., his or her social class), I am interested in the school’s background (i.e., its academic mission) and its pedagogical effects on pupils’ intellectual qualities. Thus, the three theoretical conceptions I empirically explored are
- 1. Education knowledge codes,
- 2. Ideological and typological conceptions of power, and
- 3. Pupil critical thinking.
To discover how business-education social relations affect pupil critical thinking and the sociointellectual environment of schools, I employed a multimethod approach. This approach is applied to certain theoretical alignments where necessary, combined with the appropriate methods for data collection as needed to explore the logic of my argument.
I agree with Karl Popper (1983) that a “scientific method does not exist” (p. 5) in the sense that no single method can solve issues of rival