People don’t just march upward

Learning doesn’t just affect what you know; it can transform how you understand the nature of knowing. Many of the teachers were aware of the work that William Perry and a group of psychologists at Wellesley College have done to understand the intellectual development of undergraduates. Both Perry and Blythe McVicker Clinchy and her colleagues have suggested four broad categories through which students can even- tually travel, each one with its concept of what it means to learn.

At the most elementary level, students think that learning is simply a matter of checking with the experts, getting the “right answers,” then memorizing them.15 Clinchy called these people “received knowers.” “Truth, for the received knower,” she argued, is external. “She can ingest it, but she cannot evaluate it or create it for her- self.

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The received knowers are the students who sit there, pencils poised, ready to write down every word the teacher says.”They expect education to operate on what Paulo Freire has dubbed the “banking model,” in which teachers deposit the correct answers into students’ heads.

Eventually, many students find out that experts disagree. As a result, they come to believe—in the second developmental stage— that all knowledge is a matter of opinion. These “subjective know- ers” use feelings to make judgments: To them, “an idea is right if it feels right,” as Clinchy puts it. It is all a matter of opinion. If they receive low grades, students at this level will often say of the teacher, “she didn’t like my opinion.” A few students eventually become “procedural knowers”: they learn to “play the game” of the discipline. They recognize that it has criteria for making judgments and they learn how to use those standards in writing their papers. We usually recognize them as our sharpest students. Such “knowing” does not, however, influence how they think outside of class.

They simply give the teacher what she wants without much sustained or substantial influence on the way they think, act, or feel. Only at the highest level (what Perry calls “Commitment”) do students become independent, critical, and creative thinkers, valu- ing the ideas and ways of thinking to which they are exposed and consciously and consistently trying to use them. They become aware of their own thinking and learn to correct it as they go. Clinchy and her colleagues found two types of knowers at the highest levels: “separate knowers” like to detach themselves from an idea, remaining objective, even skeptical, and always willing to argue about it. In contrast, “connected knowers” look at the merits of other people’s ideas instead of trying to shoot them down. They are not “dispassionate, unbiased observers,” the Wellesley study concluded. “They deliberately bias themselves in favor of the thing they are examining.”

According to this scheme, people don’t just march upward; they move back and forth between levels and can operate on more than one developmental stage at a time. In their major they might rise to the level of procedural knowing; in other fields, they might remain received or subjective knowers. We might hear them demand “right answers” they can memorize, or watch them fail to make the dis- tinctions our disciplines encourage and, therefore, think that all views are equally valid.

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