Does Your Teaching Encourage Epistemological Pluralism?

Turkle and Papert’s paper on epistemological pluralisms is one of my favorite by Seymour (which I talked about here).  This is the first paper I’ve read about how to encourage them.

I remember a math teacher I once had. He would ask students to go up to the board and explain how they solved the problem. But he wouldn’t stop there. He would then ask if someone else had a different way of solving the problem and allow the different approaches to be shared with the class. This validated that there were multiple ways a problem can be solved, and that it was not enough to know just one way… It also meant no one remained in doubt about whether their (different) approach was “incorrect” (there was room to clear up misconceptions, for example). It’s not as deep as epistemology, but it’s a start. A start to plurality of the “how”, but we should consider maybe also the plurality of the “what” and “why” (because which questions we choose to pursue for learning and why they matter to us are deep ontological and epistemological questions).

Source: Does Your Teaching Encourage Epistemological Pluralism? – ProfHacker – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education