Epistemology and Modalities

     Epistemology is one of those things that philosophy nerds love. It's a bigger word than necessary to describe what said philosophy nerds call the debate about what knowledge really is.  These guys try to explain what it really means to "know" something and how people go about "knowing" things.  They are really just obsessed with the word know. There are two particular types of epistemologies described by Hinchey in his article "Rethinking What We Know." Sound like a philosophy nerd title? That's because it is.  Positivist epistemology figures that knowledge is out there waiting to be found.  To a positivist, knowledge is factual information that can be verified.  Thus, positivists are all about science and the scientific process. We all know that science is way cooler than philosophy, so we can empathize with positivists a little bit.  A positivist teacher should be an expert in her field, and pass her amazing quality and quantity of knowledge along to her student. The other type of epistemologist is a constructivist.  Unlike the positivist, the constructivist is pure philosophy nerd.  A constructivist does not believe knowledge is something one can have.  A constructivist thinks that knowledge is more about the meaning assigned to facts.  They believe knowledge is about having a deeper understanding of the material and having the ability to logically think through problems to come to rational conclusions based on said deep understanding.  Constructivists basically believe that being a philosopher is knowlegde.  This is why we hate them.  A constructivist teacher will attempt to design experiences that will allow their students to develop their own understanding of the information being stuffed into their head.  Unfortunately, I must confess that I am a constructivist. This is probably me just compensating for the fact that I am horrible at memorizing information, and in order to make myself not feel like an idiot I tell myself that I am smart because I can think through things and use the small amount of knowledge I have to come to some pretty cool conclusions. And for that reason, I think that students should be taught using the consructivist learning epistemology, because it makes it easier to remember the plethora of information we are bombarded with by our instructors and our professors, yet actually have to learn (unlike our other classes) because we want to be legit pilots.
     When it comes to the concept of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, we don't have to get so angry.  This is because the concept actually makes sense. I know I personally am absolutely not an auditory learner.  I probably learn best with the kinesthetic modality. An important thing for us to realize is that people do not store information as a visual or auditory memory. People normally store information in terms of meaning. Thus, when teaching, no matter what modality a student learns best with, it is important to make sure the student has grasped the meaning of this information.  Some students are just more likely to grasp meaning from one modality than any of the others.  For this reason, though, it is more important to teach a particular subject on that subject's best modality, because the mind uses different representations to store different types of information.  It is important to display the information in it's most practical modality so that a student can most easily store the information.