Progress in teaching Sociology: From cognitive skills to hermeneutics and phronesis

Abstract

The University of Cape Town's academic development and social science foundation course initiatives have been strongly based on the propagation of cognitive skills. That is a considerable advance on the kind of sink-or-swim and authoritarian styles many academics followed in earlier times. However, the cognitive approach is overly rationalistic. and follows a fast disappearing epistemology of the social sciences. As an alternative, the humanist approach has the advantage that it recognizes that learning is an affective, holistic activity and engages closely with students on an individual basis. But in practice humanist approaches are often still quite rationalist, instrumentalist in their pursuit of cognitive skills, and very trusting of an individual's self-knowledge.Work by Flyvbjerg, Rorty and Gadamer propose Aristotle's notion of phronesis, or practical wisdom, as a new basis for the social sciences. In this view, the social sciences are founded on a dialogical (rather than foundational) epistemology, on an embracement of values, commitment and advocacy (rather than impartiality), on engagement in contextual public contemporary debate (rather than universal, absolute truth), and on rhetorical (rather than exclusively logical) argument. In Gadamer's hands. engagement with the social sciences represents further a process of difficult and troubling self-formation and self-transformation. This article attempts to spell out in quite practical terms the implications of each of the three major pedagogical steps -sink-or-swim. cognitive skills, humanism and hermeneutics -and to consider the benefits and difficulties that come with each. Deducing pedagogical practice from philosophical hermeneutics is difficult both because that practical step is not often done in any rigorous way, and because Gadamer, himself, separates hermeneutics from pedagogy .. . . the artwork transports us not to another world but to our own. However, the fact that we do indeed need to be transported to our own world, that our world is cognisable only in recognition and repetition suggests that we are no more present to our own world than to any other .... To come into our very own requires an excursion into the alien that is also a return to ourselves because our identity is not a given but a task. not the unity of a self-presence but a reunion with the past. When we interpret the artwork. we interpret ourselves; and as the work comes to be in interpretation, so we come to be also. Weinsheimer, (1985:115) 287 Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at

Practical Wisdom Reasoning through Deliberative Pedagogy

“…Recognizing practical wisdom, popular in the pedagogy literature, provides an opportunity for educators to discuss a type of knowledge and capacity that is rarely recognized in higher education (Breier, 2009;Eisner, 2002;Graaff, 2004;Gustavsson, 2007;Kristjánsson, 2005;Lawrence & Bezette-Flores, 2019;Noel, 1999;Saugstad, 2005). In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle located practical wisdom in the realm of invention and defined it as "a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man" (2009, p. 5).…”

The challenge of the social sciences: The impact of Sociology among first year students

“…2. Those with a discerning eye will have sensed the spirit of Hans-Georg Gadamer floating over many parts of this article (See Graaff 2004;Graaff, Reed and Shay 2004).…”