Book Review: Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education by Daniel D. Pratt and Associates. Kreiger Publishing Company, Malabar, Florida. 1998, 289 pages, $32.50 Cloth, ISBN 0-89464-937-X. Reviewed by David L. Dollar. Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education is a carefully written, well-researched analysis of five major philosophical and practical orientations to teaching. This book is intended for teachers of adults, whether they are teaching in formal or informal settings. It will also prove useful for those who wish to explore the deeper structures that define teaching. This challenging, affirming, and stimulating book draws equally from theoretical analysis and empirical research. It offers an indepth examination of the intentions and beliefs that give direction and justification to teaching and to how and what teachers think about teaching. Daniel D. Pratt both authors and edits this respectful, honest, and provocative account of teaching practices and philosophies. Pratt is on the faculty in the Department of Educational Studies at The University of British Columbia, Canada. From the Yukon to Arizona, and from Seattle to Shanghai, Pratt has been exploring what teaching means for over two decades. Pratt studied 253 adult educators in his attempt to understand what teaching means across vastly different settings. These teachers were asked questions about teaching, learning, motivation, the goals of education, and the influence of context on their teaching. Their responses reveal five qualitatively different perspectives, or points of view, on teaching adults that form the conceptual backbone of the book. These five perspectives on teaching are as follows: (a) Transmission-Effective Delivery of Content; (b) Apprenticeship-Modeling Ways of Being; (c) Developmental-Cultivating Ways of Thinking; (d) Nurturing-Facilitating Self Efficacy; and (e) Social Reform-Seeking a Better Society. Pratt strengthens this book by presenting these five perspectives dif ferently than any earlier literature on this topic has presented them. First, the perspectives are derived from several years of teaching and research in five different countries (Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States). Thus, they are empirically derived from practitioners rather than scholars' intuitive knowledge. Second, the perspectives are portrayed in both theoretical and practical terms. They are examined and analyzed as a cluster of actions, intentions, and beliefs and described in contexts of actual practice. Finally, this book presents the five perspectives as legitimate views of teaching, subject to variations only in the quality of implementation and not in the nature of their underlying values. Consequently, the perspectives are presented as legitimate forms of commitment to teaching with corresponding ways of thinking, acting, and believing about the instruction of adults. Presenting these five perspectives not as methods of teaching, but as unique constellations of actions, intentions, and beliefs, provokes critical reflection on issues of evaluation and quality while also respecting diversity within adult and higher education. Pratt divides the book into three sections. Section I provides an introduction and overview of a general model of teaching. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".