In the wake of Ernest Boyer’s work in the 1990s on scholarship in the academy, the scholarship of
teaching and learning has grown from a small cottage industry of interested faculty members into a
thriving industry embedded in the administrative structure of higher education.^1 Centers for
teaching and learning have sprouted on many campuses, offering teaching support, mentoring, and
workshops to professors, especially for new faculties. They frequently draw upon scholars and
scholarship trends that originate in faculties of education. This appears to be reasonable enough:
who better to turn to for teaching advice than to curriculum and pedagogy experts who teach our
public school teachers and sometimes serve as education policy advisors to governments?
Yet, the infusion into universities of education theories popular in the K-12 world should raise
questions, particularly for the discipline of political science.^2 Faculties of education have weathered
criticism in the past for their overreliance upon education theories that can be traced to the influ-
ential work of John Dewey.^3 In Canada, these criticisms along with the battle over progressive
reforms in public schools go back at least to the early 1950s. Critics lament the effect these theories
will have on political culture, tying the discussion of instructional method to worries about potential
regime changes. Indeed, there is some basis for this concern. Dewey was clear that his educational
reforms were intended to advance a particular model of democracy: egalitarian, historicist, prag-
matist, and progressive. The intention now, at least as far as some influential reformers are con-
cerned, is to push the changes that have swept through the public school systems into universities
and colleges.^4 And while Dewey’s theories, which university faculties are being encouraged to
adopt, are sometimes presented in a glossier package called twenty-first-century education, their
intellectual parentage is still evident.
Political science can trace its origins to another educational pioneer, Socrates, who employed a
method of learning with only superficial similarities to twenty-first-century education phrases like
inquiry-based learning or even student directed learning (SDL). The Socratic method, at least as
exemplified in Plato’sRepublic, differs from Dewey’s prescriptions in terms of what it tells us about
knowledge, political life, and democracy. If the assumption of university centers of teaching and
learning–and the university administrators who support them–is that teaching methods have little
bearing on what is being taught to students, this would be inconsistent with how both John Dewey
and Socrates regarded the matter. Both were clear: pedagogy presumes prior epistemological and
metaphysical commitments, and the character of those commitments entail radically different
consequences for both individuals and society. Therefore, political scientists ought to guard against
surrendering its authority with respect to teaching and learning, and not be too quick to outsource
this“expertise”to those who are not deeply familiar with the Socratic method or abandon the
Socratic method for something that merely resembles it. The Socratic method is not simply a
technique that can be abstracted from its original context and applied anywhere we would like.
Political scientists above all should be cautious about jumping on the SoTL (scholarship of teaching
and learning) bandwagon insofar as it entails having to embrace twenty-first-century education
pedagogy.
frankie
(Frankie)
#1