Demythologizing Teaching and Learning in Education: Towards a Research Agenda

Abstract

Myths occupy an enduringly powerful position in teaching and learning objectives, in activities and in outcomes in contemporary education. Myths also generate a range of responses from education researchers: some researchers seek to challenge and transform persistent myths associated with disempowering stereotypes; some focus on interrogating myths understood as popular mis/conceptions about teaching and learning; and some researchers conceptualize teaching and learning as sets of powerful narratives and stories that evoke timely or timeless messages about current educational practice that need to be comprehended. Finally, myths can be productive learning tools in themselves, as they create (and sometimes recreate) narratives that are neatly wrapped around culturally based messages and ‘truths’. The following chapters interrogate assumptions upon which teaching in a variety of contexts is based, drawing together a rich array of perspectives and methodologies. Some chapters are based on scrupulous empirical research and others on the critically alert interpretation of theory. The chapters take up the idea of a ‘myth’ in different ways. Of course in any rationalist sense, anything ‘mythical’ is ‘untrue’, but arguably something mythic also crosses into areas of faith and belief. In some chapters, the authors argue that there is critical scrutiny of faith which is sometimes misplaced, in aspects of practice and scholarship and also in technology.