Pedagogy of Charity

I've been thinking about philosophical issues in pedagogy for the past few months, but I've remained silent on the issue in my blog until now. In particular, I have been thinking about how to implement Davidson's principle of charity in the classroom. Here's my best stab at it for the moment.

Typical classroom practices, such as multiple-choice exams, activities that demand rote memorization, or summary over analysis, promote a pedagogy of severity. These exercises seem to treat students as error prone, incoherent, and irrational. An instructor uses these exercises with an expectation that students will fail. We see this in the way instructors write exams. A consequence of this pedagogy of severity is that interlocutors will not wish to communicate in a classroom environment. Discussion is stifled for fear of being humiliated in front of the classroom.

Charitable interpretation is a necessary precondition for understanding between interlocutors. Charity forces us to optimize agreement if we wish to understand others. Charity doesn't require everything a speaker says as true, but it does presume that false beliefs can be reconciled only against a background of widespread agreement. If we value a continuation of dialogue in the classroom, then we require a pedagogy that values and promotes the idea that others - especially students in the classroom - are rational beings with mostly true, consistent, and coherent beliefs. Thus, counteracting the harm of a pedagogy of severity requires a pedagogy of charity.