I just want to say that I really like Freud. One of the reasons I like him so much is because I feel like he explains why fathers should be - and in my opinion are -the most important person in a child's life. It makes me get a nice feeling inside since it validates my work. :)
BUT... I really like Bandura too!! Are we going to get to a point in the quarter where we can think about these ideas in conjunction with one another? There are so many parallels that I can see, but yet so many intricate differences that really are the essence of what these men are getting at with their ideas. How can we, or simply can we, use these ideas together in order to think about our work, our position in education (both as students and teachers), and how can we use them to guide our decisions? Since my writing assignment is how to apply what we're learning to my class, I guess that's why I am interested in how it all fits together :)
I see Bandura and Freud, as looking at the same thing from different perspectives; that is, they are different ways of looking at the same thing. For example, I am pretty short (5 feet). My fiance is 6 feet. if I could put on a pair of stilts and be his height, things would just look a little bit differently (and the ground seems significantly farther away)But everything else is the same. Another example just came to me. I would liken a behavior approach to a very simple description (i.e. the sky is blue). But Freud offers a much deeper description of the same thing (i.e. a more complex description of the color, how the sky came to be blue, etc)
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting because the behaviorists and the psychoanaltics are always at each other's throats. For Freud what is most important is what you can't see because it gives you such a window in to human behavior you couldn't otherwise find. The behaviorists say what you can't see might be there but you can never really know it for sure. This means that people can use it to manipulate you, and claim expertise to gain power and get you to engage in behaviors for their own benefit. Yesterday I was talking about phobias with my undergraduate class. One of the girls has a severe phobia of birds which effects her life. I told her that the behaviorist would say you can only understand that phobia based on bheaviors and how you can change that behavior based on proactive activities with other behaviors - moving from talk, to vicarious to actual experiences with birds. Freud would say, well obviously you aren't afraid of bird, there must be something else there. Let's look at what that might be. Even if you are able to relearn your behavior with birds you will just transfer what the phobia means to something else. Behaviorists will say yes, that might be true, but you can never know what that phobia is based on because it is not something you can see.
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