From Cognition to Being

In this book, McHenry challenges the still-regnant paradigm of knowledge acquisition as the end and means of schooling, supplanting it with an inquiry into what knowledge is. Tracing the development of the idea of knowledge from its roots in Descartes and Locke through the ontological turn in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Buber,  he provides an alternative rationale and vocabulary for a practice of schooling that engages teachers with students in being-together-and-inventing.  Philosophically centered though accessibly written, with examples from the author’s personal experiences with his own child and his students, the book engages the reader in inquiry rather than argument, leaving her not with a list of tips and prescriptions, but with a capacity for encounter with the actual persons in her classroom

From Cognition to Being

In this book, McHenry challenges the still-regnant paradigm of knowledge acquisition as the end and means of schooling, supplanting it with an inquiry into what knowledge is. Tracing the development of the idea of knowledge from its roots in Descartes and Locke through the ontological turn in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Buber, he provides an alternative rationale and vocabulary for a practice of schooling that engages teachers with students in being-together-and-inventing. Philosophically centered though accessibly written, with examples from the author's personal experiences with his own child and his students, the book engages the reader in inquiry rather than argument, leaving her not with a list of tips and prescriptions, but with a capacity for encounter with the actual persons in her classroom.For Henry Dustin McHenry and Laura Covington McHenr

What Is Knowing, and How Do We Know?

We continue with another small story about the way my child talks. He had been playing outside with his “nanny,” a third-year law student who had been coming over three days a week to help my wife after the birth of our second child. When I overheard a bit of their banter, Andrea was saying “Why do you get to change your mind so often?” I guess Dustin had been re-making the rules to some game they had been playing, whenever it suited his interests at the moment to have different rules—not a f..

6. Languaging as sharing

When will the action of thinking endure, include, and refer to the presence of the living man facing us? When will the dialectic of thought become dialogic, an unsentimental, unrelaxed dialogue in the strict terms of thought with the man present at the moment?—M. BuberA living human being cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some secondhand, finalizing cognitive process.—M. Bakhtin We have now re-invented language as languaging, and we have begun to investigate how languaging and Bei..

From Cognition to Being : Prolegomena for Teachers

In this book, McHenry challenges the still-regnant paradigm of knowledge acquisition as the end and means of schooling, supplanting it with an inquiry into what knowledge is. Tracing the development of the idea of knowledge from its roots in Descartes and Locke through the ontological turn in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Buber, he provides an alternative rationale and vocabulary for a practice of schooling that engages teachers with students in being-together-and-inventing. Philosophically centered though accessibly written, with examples from the author's personal experiences with his own child and his students, the book engages the reader in inquiry rather than argument, leaving her not with a list of tips and prescriptions, but with a capacity for encounter with the actual persons in her classroom

3. Lockean certainty

...when things exist, they are what they are, this or that, absolutely or relatively, not by will or arbitrary command, but by the necessity of their own nature.—John LockeI have no doubt that our discoveries are “objective,” simply because the styles of reasoning that we employ determine what counts as objectivity. My worry is that the very candidates for truth or falsehood have no existence independent of the styles of reasoning that settle what it is to be true or false in their domain.—Ia..

From Cognition to Being

In this book, McHenry challenges the still-regnant paradigm of knowledge acquisition as the end and means of schooling, supplanting it with an inquiry into what knowledge is. Tracing the development of the idea of knowledge from its roots in Descartes and Locke through the ontological turn in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Buber,  he provides an alternative rationale and vocabulary for a practice of schooling that engages teachers with students in being-together-and-inventing.  Philosophically centered though accessibly written, with examples from the author’s personal experiences with his own child and his students, the book engages the reader in inquiry rather than argument, leaving her not with a list of tips and prescriptions, but with a capacity for encounter with the actual persons in her classroom

1. Our picture of language

Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein... said “the sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!—Steven HawkingI conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly..

2. Cartesian doubt

What we call common sense—the body of widely accepted truths—is... a collection of dead metaphors. Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses—to cause tingles—has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage. After the scales are rubbed off a butterfly’s wing, you have transparency, but not beauty—formal structure without sensuous content. Once the freshness wears off the metaphor, you have plain, literal, transparent language—the sort of language which is ..

What Is Saying, and How Do We Be?

We are progressively leaving behind, now, the algorithmic model of teaching as instruction, and moving toward what I hesitate to call a model at all, for fear that it will induce imitation instead of invention—that is, more algorithmic teaching, more instruction. Though there is no need for inventing in algorithmic teaching, there is no room for it, either. But in our best moments together in a classroom students discover, because of the environment for being together that we have created, me..