John Lowell ED790

Epistemological Stance
Cunningham and Fitzgerald are writing for the wrong audience. If their intention is to show the researching and educational world how wordy and methodical they can be in conveying research, they have succeeded. However, I the spent first 18 pages reading their explanation of the topic and how they would organize it only to find the last 3-4 pages of value and meaning. Epistemology, as they define, is the process or organization of knowledge and how we gain it. They then apply this to the world of reading and reading research. They justify that an epistemological approach to reading research can allow educators to better understand their own assumptions and presuppositions about reading. They then broke epistemology into five clusters for evaluation on seven critical issues about knowledge and applied this to reading. Two theoretical views of the reading process are then considered: Rumelhart's interactive view, and Rosenblatt's transactional view. On the surface I agree much more with Rosenblatt's transactional view of reading. The text and reader are not separate, but interact together to make meaning and truth. According to Rosenblatt's transactional view, "absolute truth is impossible, ...there can be warranted assertions, or alternative truths, with some more acceptable than others" (pg#54). It's a contextualist view about knowledge and reading, but I believe this through experience. As a reader, I engage in a manifested conversation with the text and author. This is why some readings "speak" to me and others do not. Two writers making the same argument about the same topic can engage me

differently. I personally read best when I bring my background knowledge, assumptions, and personal beliefs to the table. The context is already set and I can have a dialogue with the writer as I make meaning out of words and sentence structures. Rosenblatt's transactional view lends itself to my own epistemological stances, but there is more involved in constructing it. Towards the end of Cunningham and Fiztgerald's article, they use Rosenblatt and Rumelhart's varying views on reading and make them applicable for the educator. As an educator you can see your instructional positions as either interactive or transactional. Using their table 3 on pg# 56, I see myself as a transactional instructor. I'm always stating purpose and clarifying a stance. I constantly gauge students' responses and progress over time. In this way, I see my teaching instruction as the way an audience reacts to a performance. Sometimes class is like a rock concert, other times its like amateur comedy hour at the local pub. Either way, students respond to me and my instruction the way I respond to a writer and their words. Although rather esoteric, Cunningham and Fitzgerald's article on epistemology allows us educators to deeply consider how we see our reading and instructional processes work in the classroom. My epistemological stance is that........ wait a minute! I'm not going sound so esoteric and wordy. My understanding of knowledge is based on the idea that writers, readers, teachers, and students all interact together to make meaning. There is a "transaction" that happens between each. This is how we gain knowledge, make meaning, and identify truths. To argue against this is to say that each

component of the process is completely independent of each other and that the context of learning makes no difference. Everything we do to understand the world, from potty training to college courses, is dialectic and a work in progress.