The field of educational technology was built on the positivist, modernist search for a best medium towards universal communication and the teaching of predetermined behavior and thinking patterns. Once, this medium was thought to be motion pictures, then television, then programmed instruction, and today it is hoped that it will be instructional…

This digest provides a historical review of some current literary theories and practices which developed from contemporary philosophy. Structuralism, associated with Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss, with a seemingly scientific view of language and culture posited a systemic "center" that organized and sustained an entire…

Postmodernism, which has been characterized as an outgrowth of or reaction to modernism, is more a form of questioning and a perspective than a theory or set of ideas. Although postmodernism resists definition, the following appear to be among its generally agreed-upon characteristics: questioning of all claims to absolute, universal truth;…

These key features overlap, criss-cross, and reoccur in discussions about postmodernism: plurality of perspectives, antiessentialism, antifoundationalism, antiscientism, and end of metaphysics and ideology. Other characterizations focus on the discrediting of modernism's grand narrative, the positivist assumption that objectivity is the only…

This ERIC digest explores aspects of post-modernism in art and art education. The adoption of post-modern attitudes by art educators must result in the generation of different, but no less difficult questions about the nature of formal education. Support for this argument comes from recent art education publications supplemented by relevant, but…

The purpose of this monograph is to serve as a primer for practitioners on the foundational theories of adult learning. It begins with an explanation two lenses through which learning theory is viewed: behaviorism and constructivism. The next section defines andragogy and delineates Knowles's five assumptions about adult learners. This is followed…

A somatic approach to education implies education that trusts individuals to learn from and listen to the information they are receiving from the interaction of self with the environment. Somatic or embodied knowing is experiential knowledge that involves senses, perceptions, and mind-body action and reaction. Western culture has been dominated by…

Directed at practitioners in adult and career education, this document defines qualitative research, compares qualitative research to quantitative research, describes the "war" between proponents of each kind of research, describes how to assess qualitative research, and explains how to choose and use qualitative techniques. Pitfalls of…