When I think about my personal epistemology and how I come to know what I know and how my beliefs are formed I often think of the age old philosophical question of the tree falling in the forest. "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" If knowledge exists and we don’t discover it, does it still not exist? In AD 157 physicians first noticed that the heart was responsible for pumping blood and speculated how this process worked, but it was not until the early 1600s that William Harvey was able to fully describe this process after experimentation (Friedland 2009). Was the knowledge of the human heart pumping blood to the other organ there just waiting to be discovered before William Harvey started his experiments? Therefore, doesn’t knowledge exist independently of human interactions? Not always.
Much of the knowledge in the social world is constructed and doesn’t exist independently of us creating it. If we were to study a person’s life we should acknowledge that a person is not a human being separated from his society, but who he/she is and his reactions to different activities are dependent on his culture. Culture as a man-made construct is consciously and …show more content…
It would not be justifiable to simply produce data on how many migrant families achieved a level of education and draw conclusions. We would need to interact with these migrant families to find out the type of educational cultures they are accustomed to in their native provinces and how the educational cultures of schools in the cities impact their learning and home-school relationships. I would also consider how the social construct of class pays a role in the educational culture of these migrant families in
Much of the knowledge in the social world is constructed and doesn’t exist independently of us creating it. If we were to study a person’s life we should acknowledge that a person is not a human being separated from his society, but who he/she is and his reactions to different activities are dependent on his culture. Culture as a man-made construct is consciously and …show more content…
It would not be justifiable to simply produce data on how many migrant families achieved a level of education and draw conclusions. We would need to interact with these migrant families to find out the type of educational cultures they are accustomed to in their native provinces and how the educational cultures of schools in the cities impact their learning and home-school relationships. I would also consider how the social construct of class pays a role in the educational culture of these migrant families in