Scholar Academic Ideology

Aims: End goal is to extend the knowledge to new students – acculturating them in to the
discipline and into the thought process thereby extending the traditions
Not seen as a person but as a mind that can be shaped and taught to think based on
Child: the disciplines. Seen as sponges – minds waiting to be filled. Students considered
immature unlearned members of the discipline
SAs don’t subscribe to one generalizable learning theory. They believe teachers
Learning: transmit and students receive; also, they believe each discipline dictates how it
should be taught and learned
Teachers seen as mini-scholars who should be able to transmit the knowledge of the
Teaching: discipline to the student. Teachers are mediators of the curricula. They use Didactic
discussion, supervised practice, and Socratic discussions to transmit information
from the disciplines
SAs desire people understand their world based on the knowledge gleaned from the
Knowledge: disciplines. They believe the disciplines are the source of knowledge needed to
develop curricula
SAs use summative evaluation to gauge how well students understand the
Evaluation: knowledge transmitted; formative evaluation to judge the effectiveness of the
various lessons in the curricula
Scholar Academic Ideology and TEKS align in several ways. Academically both subscribe to any

learning theory that allows students to receive the information. Both SA and TEKS believe the

content/discipline teacher is the expert and should be able to transmit the information in such a way

that students begin to master the tenets of the content/discipline.

Another way they are aligned is in the view of the child. The child is expected to be a learner – a

mind to be shaped by learning the various ideas of the discipline. TEKS uses phrases “to know, to

understand, to analyze” which are all ways the child’s mind is expected to interact with the incoming

knowledge from each discipline.

I think even the aim of TEKS and SA is in alignment. They both seek to acculturate new minds into

a traditional way of thinking. Teachers tend to teach the information the same way seeking the same

kind of information they utilized when they were learning the discipline.

Both SA, TEKS, and Texas Accountability Rating system believe in objective evaluations that rank

students, teachers, schools, districts, and even the curricula. They support high stakes testing and
believe such testing should be used for grading, promotion, and school graduation. Their belief in

ranking schools is to provide opportunities for competition that creates growth between school

districts. Finally, they support rankings to better allow them to compare schools and or districts, so

the state can take over if improvement is not consistently made.