Originally posted as a M.Ed. course journal assignment, February, 2005
I’m glad we have a chance to reflect on Baxter Magolda’s stages_of_knowing_model.
Interestingly, when I read her chapter on teaching to the four levels, I was thinking strictly in terms of my students – when I looked at the journal questions, I was actually surprised to find the first one is “how would you classify yourself as a learner today?” I suppose that given the objective of the journal, I shouldn’t have been surprised!
In terms of Baxter Magolda’s framework, I can see a definite progression in my own learning over the years – and in reflecting on those years, I can even pinpoint a couple of specific instances where I realized that a particular teacher had become a peer, and how incredible that felt! I can also now understand a little better my resentment when, just last year, a friend introduced me to her husband, a university professor, whose style of conversation was more like an interrogation – there was a palpable professorial tone, which I immediately resented. I am a colleague, buddy, not a first-year student! (I could probably go on for ages about my relationship with my Dad, who seems to think I will always be a teenager, stuck in the Absolute phase forever, but there’s only so much therapeutic reflection I should inflict upon you!)
In my second year of university, I took my second philosophy course, because I had absolutely loved my first one. The second one was taught by a different professor. In the very first class, she said something that immediately made me raise my hand – I wanted to question what she had said, to better understand her point. Her response was that “we’d talk about that later on” in the semester. I dropped the course. Continue reading “Different Ways of Knowing”