教材選擇的知識判準

As the Nine-year Coherent Compulsory Curriculum Project is put into practice, each teacher's role as a key selector of teaching materials will be more and more evident and their need for a sound epistemological perspective in various teaching practices will become stronger as well. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the dialectical relationship between a teacher's epistemological perspectives and his exercises of selecting teaching materials. To serve this purpose, the author firstly conducts an analysis of concepts closely related to our general concept of knowledge to make clear the need for establishing knowledge criteria in education. Secondly, mainstream knowledge justification theories are critically reviewed to put knowledge criteria adopted by different truth theories into perspective. Lastly, the validity of using knowledge criteria as standard for selecting teaching materials is tested. One finding is that knowledge criteria based on mainstream truth theories takes propositional knowledge as the only valid form of knowledge. This pro-science stand not only reflects an incomplete reasoning, it also makes scientific progress less likely. A balanced knowledge perspective, which takes both propositional knowledge and imaginative thinking into consideration, is what is recommended for the teachers' task of selecting the most appropriate teaching materials.