Hunting Assumptions

The aim of this section is to encourage you to identify and challenge some of your own assumptions about teaching and learning.

Individual assumptions and consensus

There are many techniques and strategies that as teachers we tend to take for granted as good practice. Stephen Brookfield, who has written considerably on reflection in learning and teaching, has coined the phrase ‘hunting assumptions’ to show that, when subjected to critical scrutiny, some of this taken-for-granted-ness starts to break down. When we look more closely, what we saw as teaching axioms can come to look more like unquestioningly adopted, unexamined assumptions.

When there is a large body of such taken-for-granted assumptions, what emerges is a general teaching consensus, whose evolution is not unlike the evolution of our personal teaching schemata—an amalgam of beliefs, values, knowledge and assumptions, functioning at a societal level at a given point in time, rather than at the level of the solitary individual. There will, ipso facto, be a significant overlap between this general consensus and the beliefs of an individual taught and teaching in that cultural setting.

Brookfield is not saying that these assumptions about good teaching are necessarily wrong, just that although they tend to be unquestioningly accepted, they are not necessarily axiomatically right, or right for everyone, or right every time.

His technique is to take a ‘common-sense assumption’ and provide one or more perfectly plausible alternative interpretations, thus undermining the taken-for-granted-ness of the assumption. This will be illustrated in following sections.

Brookfield, S.D. (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.