Praxis in Pedagogy: Theory, Action, Doing, Refection

Aristotle's Praxis "Pedagogy" Process in Education: Theoria (THINKING ), Poiesis (MAKING), and Praxis (ACTION/DOING)! 

Using the Praxis Process requires involving all stakeholders in the ongoing communication of ideas, theories, tasks, structures, and institutions to be transformed. Praxis requires cogent communication that is entwined with reflection, cyclical review, and reciprocity.  The praxis process seeks to find the best practices that benefit and liberate the neglected, marginalized, and or "left behind."

Like action researchers, those who engage in praxis-oriented research involve the community or group under study in the research process. ... Praxis-based researchis a long process that involves establishing mutually beneficial relationships between the researcher and members of the community of study.  methods.sagepub.com

Theoria (Thinking): The word theoria is a cyclical form of critical thinking, it is the foundation for Socratic inquiry, to look deeper, or to seek or see a truth, virtue, or knowledge. Adroit knowing is a mind's eye way of seeing, a sort of intellectual seeing.

Inquiry, Questioning. and Thinking: audit, inspect, examine, survey, go through, scrutinize, check, probe, vet, investigate, inquire into, assess, verify, appraise, evaluate, review, analyze, study; WHY, WHAT, and HOW!

Audit Process

The following is a list of steps that comprise a cost-benefit analysis of ideas or theories.

• Define clear goals, objectives, competencies measures, and or desired outcomes of critical learning procedures, activities, pedagogical reform theories, or new educational systems being considered for adoption. 
• List alternative ideas, projects, systems, theories, programs.
• List all stakeholders.
• Select clear benefit measures,  and measure all cost/benefit elements.
• Predict all possible outcomes negative and positive, examine the cost, the amount of time, real wages, buy-in, and the measurable benefits over the relevant time period.
• Convert all "possible costs" and "possible benefits" into a common language and value.
• Apply a value for the negative reciprocity over time.
• Calculate net present value of project options.
• Perform sensitivity analysis. +1 to -1 correlation 
• Adopt the recommended choice based on real value and reforms that have a strong statistical correlation.

Poiesis (Making): Poiesis  is "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before, a kind of making/creating, developing new knowledge, skills, virtues, or a poiesis."

Demiurge (Makers/Creators): With teacher-students and students-teachers developing and co-creating learning activities with real-world applications that are hands-on. These real-world tasks encourage active learning and active into (skilled educated worker) a craftsman, artisan, producer, and or a creator of ideas, knowledge, and skills.

Martin Heidegger refers to poiesis as a 'bringing-forth' (physis as emergence), using this term in its widest sense. He explained poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger's example of a threshold occasion: a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another. (These examples may also be understood as the unfolding of a thing out of itself, as being discloses or gathers from nothing [thus nothing is thought also as being]). Additional example: The night gathers at the close of day. 


Dreyfus and Dorrance Kelly urge each person to become a sort of “craftsman” whose responsibility it is to refine their faculty for poiesis in order to achieve existential meaning in their lives and to reconcile their bodies with whatever transcendence there is to be had in life itself: “The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.”

Praxis in education starts with critical thinking about problems within pedagogical institutions and or educational systems. New actions, structures, systems, ideas and or theories that may solve the problems are always being analyzed. Comprises, review, further reflections, action,  and reexamination of the efficacy of actions are key parts to praxis. Praxis can be viewed as an ongoing progression of cognitive and physical actions:

1. Taking the action
2. Considering the impacts of the action
3. Analysing the results of the action by reflecting upon it
4. Altering and revising conceptions and planning following reflection
5. Implementing these plans in further actions

This creates a cycle which can be viewed in terms of educational settings, learners and educational facilitators.