Andrews University

School of Education

FINAL PAPER: EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND LEADERSHIP

In Partial Fulfillment of requirements for the Course

LEAD 636 Issues in Leadership Foundations

by

Beth Marchant

April 2011
Introduction

In reflecting on my view of the world, I have found that God, my family, my friends,

my teachers, and my experiences have all made me who I am. I have been shaped by these

factors through education and learning. When I was born, I began to learn about my world: I

needed something and started to cry and someone came. I knew how to find nourishment

from my mother’s breast. I came to know the faces of my parents. I learned that when they

smiled, they were happy. I knew which voices were my parents’. Piaget explained that

“sensorimotor intelligence rests mainly on actions, on movements and perceptions

without language, but these actions are coordinated in a relatively stable way”

(Marlowe & Canestrari, 2006). There was no one teaching me any of these things except

my parents who were consistent in coming when needed, etc. Through the very experiences

of the infant, things begin to make some sort of sense, one building upon another. He or she

learns which voices are important, i.e., parents, and later learns to discern emotions from

those important voices. The worldview begins to be formed . . .

As a leader, it is critical to be aware of the fact that each and every person has a

worldview and that they are all different. Also, it is critical to remember that I have a specific

worldview and that organizations also have a particular orientation to the world. By keeping

all of this in mind when interacting with others and with institutions, I will be a more

effective leader through meeting the needs of others while being able to accomplish whatever

objectives we may be trying to achieve.

The purpose of this paper will be to fulfill Leadership Program Competency 1a:

Leadership functions within the context of multiple perspectives and understands how

their individual worldview influences practice. To do this I will explore my education,

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then I will explore the development of my worldview and finally I will tie the theory and

practice of my learnings in LEAD 636 together through reflection on both.

Education – constructivism vs. essentialism

My informal learning in my memory began with my parents in a very natural

constructivist way: alphabetizing my pharmacist-father’s prescription slips once a month

with my mom on the basement carpet, learning basic mathematics and strategy playing cards

with my grandmother, counting poker chips to put in the pot in a friendly penny ante game

with family, playing a few golf shots with my grandmother, measuring ingredients to bake

cookies with my mom, collecting rock samples with my dad for his school project, taking

phone reservations and running the snack bar at my parents’ resort, becoming an authority on

where the best fishing spots were – the list goes on and on. Through constructivist activities,

I learned much more than just facts and procedures: I also learned how to communicate

appropriately with people of all ages, how to speak on the phone, how to work cooperatively

on projects that were too big for just one person, how to lose graciously, and how to accept a

compliment. Dr. Wernher von Braun (Von Braun & Powell-Willhite, 2007), considered the

father of rocket science, summed up the importance of education when he said, “All one can

really leave one’s children is what’s inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not

earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.”

One place in which there is much debate is when dealing with novice learners. The

question is whether or not novice learners have enough background knowledge to build on to

allow them to participate in pure discovery, in which there is no guide - the student explores

whatever he or she wants to and then constructs his or her own meaning about that topic.

Mayer (2004) reviewed the literature and found that fifty years of empirical data do not

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support using the constructivist teaching technique of pure discovery; in those situations

requiring discovery, he argues for the use of guided discovery instead. My formal education

was quite dry by comparison even to guided discovery. I attended public schools that had

good teachers and offered what would be considered a good education from kindergarten

through my master’s degree. Through the essentialist approach, I learned how to memorize

facts, how to respect the authority of the teacher, how to follow procedures and how to walk

in a straight line. Unlike my constructivist learning, which was constructed in such a was as

to change as new evidence came to light, some of what I learned in my formal education has

turned out to be inconsistent or outright incorrect when held up against life in the world

outside of the classroom.

Anytime I am in a situation in which I am tasked with teaching or training others, I

intentionally start with the end and then develop activities or questions which I can ask to

stimulate the participants or students to think. There is a process called “Understanding By

Design” (McTighe & Wiggins, 1999) that was created to help teachers design curriculum in

this way. While I have not taken any of their workshops or worked specifically with just their

materials, my reading of their work leads me to believe that this is an effective way to make

sure that whatever material (facts, procedures, etc.) needs to be covered gets covered while

allowing the learner to construct that knowledge in the broadest range of possible ways given

the environment of the learning. When I taught about oceans in earth science, most of my

students had never seen an ocean. Ideally, I would have organized an extended field trip to an

ocean and then studied it first hand. As I was not able to organize such a trip, I asked them

about the largest body of water they had ever seen. Generally, everyone had seen Lake

Michigan, so I used this as a point of reference when we talked about oceans. In this way, the

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students had a mental image of a large body of water, some idea of what big waves were like

and could extrapolate from that to generate the concept of an ocean.

Sire and Worldview

In the reading for LEAD 636, I have been challenged to struggle with seven questions

posed by Sire (Sire, 2004). These questions forced me to define and redefine my beliefs

about the world and my place in it. By defining these things, I can now begin to better

understand my worldview - how, when, where and with whom I interact in the world.

I believe that the universe is genuinely a good place. The universe itself did not just

appear - it has been forming and evolving for some 13.7 billion years (deGrasse Tyson, Liu,

& Irion, 2000) What started out as pure energy has been changed into mass and energy,

where the mass is the galaxies, stars, planets, and even us. I believe that God created it in just

that way - the Big Bang is the mechanism through which God did so (Komatsu 2009). If the

universe ends in a Big Crunch or the Big Freeze, as theoretically predicted (deGrasse Tyson

et al., 2000), then one of two things is possible: 1) God wants it to happen, or 2) God has put

things into motion at the time of creation that will eventually lead to the end of the universe

in that way. God is the only one who has the creativity and playfulness to have created the

universe this way – as a puzzle for us to figure out and try to understand.

I also believe that people are inherently good. However, they may choose to do things

that are damaging to others or to their environment. My angle is always to find the good in

people and focus on that. This is not always easy, especially when dealing with people who

are bent on being destructive, such as when I taught high school students who did not have

any motivation to be in school.

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 The world is inhabited by humans who were granted free will by God to make

decisions as they choose. This leads to the hope and expectation that people will learn to

make good moral and ethical decisions through their churches, synagogues, mosques,

schools, families, communities, etc. Some people don’t learn those things and others have

learned them yet choose to do something else that is not beneficial to society. If humans were

preprogrammed to follow a sequence of steps to carry out their lives, they would be nothing

but mere automatons. For better or worse, life would be exceedingly boring. We are a part of

the world, and it is a part of us. There is no way to separate the two. Our actions as humans

make a difference, however small, in the world just as the actions of others make a difference

in the world as we see it.

Human beings are created in the likeness and image of God (Genesis 1:26-28).

However, I do not believe that God is in the likeness and image of a human. We are too

limited for God to be like us. The best I can come up with for an explanation of who God is

is to imagine the best parts of all of the humans who have come before me and all of the good

of those who are yet to come – essentially an infinite number – the sum of the best of all of

those people might start to describe who God is. How we came about is of little consequence

to me. I could have been created from Adam’s rib (Genesis 2:20-24), from the clay as God

blew life into it (Genesis 2:7) or as descended from a line of apes. It is the fact that God is the

one who made humans different from all other beings on earth that matters to me. God gave

us those parts that love, have compassion, show empathy, care about others, think creatively,

and generate new ideas and ways of viewing the world. Again, I believe that only God could

have created the human being to be such a complex organism. We are a true product of

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extreme creativity. As with the universe itself, God has given us a puzzle to explore and

understand.

At death, people go to heaven to be with God. But then, one might reasonably ask,

what does that mean. I believe that means that we get to enjoy life without the complications

that make the world a difficult place to maneuver in at times.

I do wonder if all people go to heaven - even those who have committed atrocious

acts against other humans or society as a whole. Does their time on earth living in the pain

that must be the cause of such horrible acts serve as their hell? I don’t know how one would

draw the line at who would go to heaven and who wouldn’t. (Of course, God is infinitely

wiser than me, so maybe there is an easy line to draw.) Here are a few musings:

 If a person lived his life in perfect accord with God’s will from birth to death,

then the judgment line is easy – heaven.

 If a person lived her life in perfect accord with God’s will from birth until a few

moments before death, when she stole food from her neighbor to feed her children

before being hit by a bus, the judgment line is now very foggy.

 If a person is not baptized at any age and dies as an adult, what happens? Is

baptism a requirement from God to go to heaven or an extra added by humans?

 If a person is raised as an atheist lives her life in perfect accord with God’s will,

does she go to heaven?

 If a person murders someone because he or she doesn’t like the other one, does

that mean automatic banishment from heaven? What if the person asks God for

forgiveness – is that enough?

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Blaise Pascal (Hájek 2008) pondered this in a statistical way called Pascal’s Wager based on

whether or not God exists and whether or not one lives a moral life as seen in Table 1.

Table 1. Pascal's Wager

God Exists God Does Not Exist

Moral life Heaven Well-lived life
Immoral life Hell Nothing lost or gained

Statistically, the odds are three out of four in the favor of living a moral life as the other

alternative can lead to infinite unhappiness in Hell. I do not have an answer for who goes to

heaven or how they get there or even where or what it is. But I live in hope that it is a place

where there is no stress, no fear and there is perfect justice and peace and that I get to enjoy

it.

God gives us the free will to make decisions for ourselves (Joshua 24:15) and (John

7:17). Finally, our body came with an intricate brain that can comprehend, create and grow.

This combination leads us to learn and know. It also has baffled most, if not all, philosophers.

Kant (Stevenson & Haberman, 2004) struggled with the idea that humans could not be both

under the influence of Supreme Reason and have free will at the same time. If we didn’t learn

as we grew, we would be shortchanging the gifts we have been given as humans. Knowing is

a sum of what our senses impart to our brains and our brains process that information into

more rational explanations than what one piece of data may carry alone.

In terms of epistemology, Freed (2011) provides a model of knowing that includes the

human existing in community with others. Knowing comes from many sources including the

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senses, revelation, intuition, authority and reason. Each community of people exists in the

world where language, theories and methods help to shape that community. Since I rely

almost exclusively on my senses and reason for the construction of knowledge, revelation

and intuition are things that I often overlook when I am seeking knowledge or working with

others for whom I am charged to help construct knowledge. Freed’s model suggests that we

also come to know through authority, which is more prominent in some cultures than others.

One downfall of relying only on authority is studied by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers

(Gladwell, 2008). He looks at the prominence of airliner crashes in some countries compared

to other countries. In the end, it came down to how the other members of the flight crew

responded in the cockpit during a flight when things were not normal. He found that

crewmembers in two of the countries he studied, South Korea and Columbia, were held back

from reporting or were underreporting significant events to the captain. Once this occurred,

there was often a chain of events that followed that included more failed communications

resulting in the crash of the airplane.

Right and wrong are determinations created by humans to allow them to live

together in community. Every culture and society has its own set of norms for right and

wrong. While it is considered right for me to wear jeans or shorts and a t-shirt in the

United States of America, there are many countries where my clothing choices would be

considered wrong as I was showing too much skin as a woman. While religions provide

us with many lists and contexts of such norms, they are often interpreted by humans to

make them fit into what people want to be considered right or wrong.

The same is true of children who have come from cases of extreme abuse. They

develop coping strategies that are seen as deviant behavior in our society: the pain of

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cutting into their skin is better than having no feeling at all, fighting back is better than

being abused again, shouting obscenities in an effort to turn the attention to someone

else is better than being the focus of attention leading to further abuse, dissociating is

better than facing the reality of abuse, etc. In a previous job, my work was to help these

children and adolescents learn that when the abuse has been stopped, and they are no

longer even in the presence of the abuser, they do not have to continue with those

coping strategies. It takes years to undo the damage the abuse has done to the child in

terms of the ability to take part in caring relationships, in terms of academic learning, in

terms of the ability to care for oneself, etc. But as von Glasersfeld (1995, p. 4) says, the

constructed models "are viable if they prove adequate in the contexts in which they

were created." (1995, p. 7) What is viable at one time may not always be viable at

another time, even for the same person.

Human history can have many functions. I find history to be about lessons to be

learned. What worked and what did not work in the past. Society should continue with things

that worked through the centuries and millennia and discard what has not worked so well.

There is no more need to repeat the mistakes of the past any more than it is necessary to

recreate things that have been resolved or solved in the past. Why recreate the wheel, when it

has already been discovered?

Worldview, education, knowledge and leadership

Knight (Knight, 2006) refers to education as directed learning and learning as un-

directed or inadvertent learning. He also conceives of education as a subset of learning.

Finally, learning is a life-long process that can occur at any time and any place. I see my own

learning occurring in the context of this broader learning. I learn something new all of the

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time. Reading Knight has put many terms that I knew into the context of philosophy. My

view of what education should be is a place where people are challenged to learn more on a

quest to understand a subject or concept. I have found that when I am interested in a subject

and set out to learn more about it, I expend more energy than I ever have in any course. I

have a foundation in education, so to learn about a particular educational idea, I talk to

people, read books and on-line material and talk to more people. The hardest part is finding

people who care enough about my latest idea to engage in discussion with me.

I was attracted to the Andrews University Leadership program precisely because I

like to learn through discovering new things and becoming a better person. I also like the on-

line format where I can learn at my own pace (at some level) and on my own time. I

particularly like to learn with an expert(s) walking along with me to guide me when I become

lost or so confused I can't figure out what to do next or to just throw out something he or she

has just learned. Sometimes, it only takes a quick, "Have you tried this?" to get me back on

track. The only downside of this program being mostly on-line is that it is hard for those

experts - classmates and instructors - to know when I am stuck unless I can articulate it. They

are not a part of my day-to-day experience where they can see, intuit, or otherwise suspect

that I am stuck.

In science education, and especially in physics education, the term guided inquiry-

based learning and teaching has become the norm. In this context, the teacher serves as a

facilitator of the learning, asking probing questions such as, "How do you know that?" thus

challenging and helping to form a student's ideas about a topic. Ideally, the teacher sets up

the investigation by posing a question that will lead to students finding an answer about the

topic at hand. While this is quite a ways from constructivism, it is even further away from a

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straight lecture, notes, problems-in-the-book approach that many have used in the past. Also,

the teacher often learns alongside the students as the students ask questions that are new to

the teacher. Hmelo-Silver et al. (2007) cite a large study on the effectiveness of inquiry-based

science for middle school students, as demonstrated by their performance on high-stakes

standardized tests. The improvement was 13% and 14% for the first and second cohorts of

students, respectively. This study also found that inquiry-based teaching methods greatly

reduced the achievement gap for African-American students. One place in which there is

much debate is when dealing with novice learners. The question is whether or not novice

learners have enough background knowledge to build on to allow them to participate in pure

discovery, in which there is no guide - the student explores whatever he or she wants to and

then constructs his or her own meaning about that topic. Mayer (2004) reviewed the literature

and found that fifty years of empirical data do not support using the constructivist teaching

technique of pure discovery; as noted earlier in this paper, in those situations requiring

discovery, he argues for the use of guided discovery instead.

With guided inquiry-based instruction, the guide helps to prepare the students for and

determine the appropriateness of the next step in learning. The idea of guided inquiry-based

instruction goes at least back to the 1960’s.

Bruner (1966) states that a theory of instruction should address four major aspects:
(1) predisposition towards learning, (2) the ways in which a body of knowledge can
be structured so that it can be most readily grasped by the learner, (3) the most
effective sequences in which to present material, and (4) the nature and pacing of
rewards and punishments. Good methods for structuring knowledge should result in
simplifying, generating new propositions, and increasing the manipulation of
information. (Kearsly, 2011.)

Occupationally, I have gone through many of the various educational theories as I

have had many positions. My first was as a youth minister. I was definitely influenced by

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progressivism with a little behaviorism thrown in for good measure. I allowed the young

people to explore their faith in ways that were safe and within the boundaries of the Roman

Catholic Church. I was far more focused on faith than on the details of religion since the

youth were still in Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes (the equivalent of Sunday

School classes) and confirmation classes through their junior year in high school. I did have

many disagreements with the Director of Religious Education as I tried to explain that

memorizing a bunch of facts would not make good Catholics. In retrospect, I may have been

wrong as the same philosophy of teaching is in place today, 25 years later.

Next, I worked in a residential treatment facility for "emotionally troubled" youth -

kids who had failed placements in multiple foster homes and other facilities. I was a direct

care worker. This was definitely run as a behaviorism model. There were "natural"

consequences - positive and negative - for everything, from making your bed to brushing

your teeth to helping clean up after snack.

Eventually, I ended up teaching. I did everything to follow progressivism, but kept

getting called back to essentialism by other teachers saying, "Your class is too loud!”,

"You're not a social worker!” etc. It was frustrating and challenging and a lot of fun -

especially as kids who were predicted to drop out of school requested my classes.

Finally, working at the University of Notre Dame in the QuarkNet program, gave me

an opportunity to view many of the theories of education that we have studied in practice.

QuarkNet is an education and outreach program designed by high energy particle physicists

to teach high school physics teachers about particle physics in the hopes that the teachers

would pass that learning on to their students, who could be the next generation of graduate

students working on the large particle physics experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider

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at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Schein (1985) laid out the idea of a worldview for

organizations. The agreement between Sire and Schein is great. Both talk about the nature of

reality, what is true, the organization of the world around us, what the role and nature of

humans is, what is right and wrong and how that is determined, the right ways to relate to

others and the definition of truth and facts and time and space. The only real difference

between Sire and Schein is that Schein doesn't delve into the ideas of death or the reasons

that we know anything.

Looking at the organizational worldview of QuarkNet, it was initially assumed that

the QuarkNet program was filling a niche, which it has in the world of high school physics

teachers and the possibility of bringing along new college physics students to work on

particle physics experiments originally ten years in the future. Once the assumption was

made that the niche was filled, the new assumption was made that there was no more room

for growth, which has led to the stagnation of the program.

QuarkNet is organized to work with particle physicists and high school physics

teachers, so concepts of time and space are very well defined scientifically and understood by

most. Truth is discovered through scientific experimentation. I ran into some problems with

the main manager of the program when I wanted to introduce some of the tenets of Learning

Communities (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001) and (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008) to the 52

separate groups that we have in place at universities across the country. She didn’t see the

benefit of such an approach as there was little scientific evidence that it was of value – I did

provide the latest and most comprehensive information on the research that had been done;

however, social science research is not the same as the hard numbers one can generate with

science. The PhD physicists were the experts, so their linguistic and behavioral rules

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prevailed. Many of the physicists, however, did realize that there was much to be learned

about teaching from the teachers.

Humans took on a diminished role in this program, especially the five staff teachers,

of which I was one. We were neutral but to be used as the program manager saw fit.

Anything that we learned was not real or important until one of three things happened: 1) a

particular staff member, always the same one, came up with the same idea on his own, 2) the

“external” evaluator came up with the same idea or endorsed this one, or 3) the program

manager heard from the physicists that this was required to keep going forward.

Unfortunately, four out of five members of the staff were not valued as contributors to the

program. The “right” thing to do was to toe the line, which was an assumed line that most of

us knew. We often crossed the line when we saw a need that wasn’t being met – especially

when it involved a teacher or group of students. This always led to arguments and

denigration of the staff as humans. Play had its place somewhere else. It couldn’t be mixed

with work, although it could be mixed with travel for work. If people were having a good

time and laughing, it was nixed immediately. We had fun anyway, mostly because if we had

not, none of us would have survived the terrible working conditions.

The “right” way to relate to one another was to compete for attention and always be

right, including defending even a discarded idea to the last, and to follow the unspoken

guidelines of what was appropriate and what was not. It was a bit of a minefield as the

program manager held the above view and the other Principal Investigators were physicists

who did not worry about what was right and did not try to force our behavior into an

undefined box. The physicists’ goals were about getting the job done, while working

individually or together as necessary across global boundaries and having fun while doing it.

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 As a leader, I always try to help others learn new things because I love to learn. As I

interact with people, I explain how something works or answer questions with some new

interesting piece of knowledge that I have found out. For example, I found myself explaining

what a nuclear meltdown would mean in the context of the Japanese reactors to a group of

non-scientists, which was musing over the consequences of the recent earthquake and

tsunami in Japan. Sometimes, people are not interested in the details for a variety of reasons,

so I limit what I say in those cases. I try to help people understand "why" I am asking them to

do something or why I am doing it a certain way. I don't generally impose my way of doing

something a certain way, I just explain why I do it that way - unless there is some external

reason for doing things the way I am, i.e., laws, rules, required procedures.

Conclusion

I continue to come to know new things and new knowledge. I do it mostly through a

constructivist approach. When I am interested in or intrigued by something, I learn as much

as I can about it (based on how much time or the resources I have) and then build my new

knowledge in conjunction with my past knowledge. I may have to change some of my past

knowledge to gain the new knowledge.

My worldview has changed over the years since infanthood as I gained new

knowledge. I know that until my beliefs were challenged, my Roman Catholic upbringing led

me to specific answers to questions about death, purgatory, heaven and hell. Once I had to

define what I meant, I changed my worldview. This occurred over an initial period of a

couple of years and then in broader ways it has occurred my whole life. I am still open to

what will happen to me when I die. I am not at all unsettled about not knowing the answer,

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however. My worldview can be related most closely to Existential Theism, although that

does not fit exactly right either.

Most of all, in terms of leadership, I must remember that other people have a

worldview, whether or not they are aware of it. Helping others to identify their worldviews is

one way a leader can create a cohesive team. However, at a minimum, by respecting others’

worldviews and remembering that I also have my own specific worldview, I can work

together with others and organizations much more harmoniously.

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 References

deGrasse Tyson, N., Liu, C., & Irion, R. (2000). One universe: At home in the cosmos.
Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press.

DuFour, R., DuFour, R.B., & Eaker, R.E. (2008). Revisiting professional learning
communities at work : new insights for improving schools. Bloomington: Solution
Tree.

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers : the story of success (Large type large print ed.). New York,
NY: Little, Brown and Co.

Knight, G.R. (2006). Philosophy & education : an introduction in Christian perspective

(4th ed.). Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press.

Marlowe, B.A., & Canestrari, A.S. (2006). Educational psychology in context: Readings for
future teachers. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

McLaughlin, M.W., & Talbert, J.E. (2001). Professional communities and the work of high
school teaching. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G.P. (1999). Understanding by design handbook. Alexandria, Va.:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Sire, J.W. (2004). Naming the elephant : worldview as a concept. Downers Grove, Ill.:
InterVarsity Press.

Stevenson, L.F., & Haberman, D.L. (2004). Ten theories of human nature (4th ed.). New
York: Oxford University Press.

Von Braun, W., & Powell-Willhite, I.E. (2007). The voice of Dr. Wernher Von Braun: An
anthology. Burlington, Ont.: Apogee Books.

von Glasersfeld, E. (1995). A constructivist approach to teaching. Constructivism in

education. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
von Glasersfeld, E. (1995). A constructivist approach to teaching. In L. Steffe & J. Gale
(Eds.). (1995). Constructivism in education, (pp.3-16). New Jersey: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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Hmelo-Silver, C.E., Duncan, R. G., & Chinn, C.A. (2007). Scaffolding and Achievement in
Problem-Based and Inquiry Learning: A Response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark
(2006). Educational Psychologist, 42(2), 99–107.Hmelo-Silver, C.E., Duncan, R. G.,
& Chinn, C.A. (2007). Scaffolding and Achievement in Problem-Based and Inquiry
Learning: A Response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006). Educational
Psychologist, 42(2), 99–107.

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