The Absolute Knower in Freshman Composition

Yesterday I spent the day with my husband at Lost Lakes in Fresno County. He was fishing while I was busy reading the first two chapters of Marcia B. Baxter Magolda's Knowing and Reasoning in College: Gender-Related Patterns in Students' Intellectual Development. I am reading this book as part of CSU Fullterton's certificate program in postsecondary reading.

I was interested in what Magolda evidenced about Perry' four ways of knowing and the gender-related patterns she found in them: Absolute Knowing, Transitional Knowing, Independent Knowing and Contextual Knowing. But I am mostly interested in the thought that the majority of my freshman students are in the stage (? right word?) of Absolute Knowing. This stage compares easily with Paulo Freier's "banking" method. Students believe that instructors possess all the knowledge and their role as students is to sit and listen/take notes. As if the instructor was making a deposit of knowledge into their brains so that they could spend it during a "fill-in-the-blank" test with the goal of earning their grade. In this stage students believe that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. Thus, I can see how students would view their failure as the fault of the instructor. "The instructor didn't tell me the correct answer."

But having thought about this Absolute Knowing stage, I'm worried because English composition they way I teach it requires more a Independent Knowing status, which skips over the next stage of Transitional Knowing. According to Magolda, the student in the Transitional Knowing stage accepts that some knowledge is uncertain and that simply recording knowledge no longer works. The student in the Independent Knowing shifts to understand that knowledge is mostly uncertain and begins to create his or her own perspective as well as being able to listen to the perspectives of others.

In my freshman composition class I use Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say I Say. In this brief book, Graff and Birkenstein introduce the thought that there are different perspectives on topics and each of them is plausible. I'm thinking this forces an independent knowing onto a absolute knower. I realize that the shift has to be forced--well, no. It has to be set up well for the student to enter. I'm wondering if my own method of delivery is not transitioned enough.

Maybe I need to start with where most of them are: absolute knowing and then devise a way to help them to move to transitional knowing where some knowledge is uncertain before expecting them to realize that most knowledge depends on a perspective. So, maybe I need to start with what students have to say about a topic. What students have to say about a certain fairy tale first, before I have them read/listen to what an expert has to say.

I'll continue to think about how to help my absolute knowing freshman students make a successful transition to transitional knowing before expecting them to be in the stage of independent knowing.