What are beliefs? What is knowledge?

My study is on teacher beliefs about values education. In my naive understanding of the universe, I thought that beliefs and knowledge are easily distinguishable - where beliefs are merely one's personal opinions about a thing based on one's life experiences and knowledge comprises facts about a thing that we learn (i.e. knowledge being something on the outside of us that we understand and internalise, and beliefs being something on the inside of us that come about as we interact with the universe). But my assumptions have been challenged. A whole new world has opened up before me with our class discussions on ontology and epistemology.

I started to ask "so what is the nature of the "thing" that i want to study - teacher beliefs?" Where do beliefs come from? What are they? And how does one study them? How does one surface them for study? How does one know what one knows? How does one believe what one believes? Is there such a thing as knowledge? Or is all knowledge belief?

And then there were all the -isms that i had to grapple with: Positivism, Constructivism, Empiricism, Rationalism, Socio-cultural Constructivism, etc. So which -ism is relevant when studying beliefs? What are my beliefs about knowledge? What are my beliefs about beliefs? How do other people distinguish beliefs and knowledge?

And then there is the complexity surrounding values education. What are values? Are values beliefs or knowledge? How does one study beliefs about values education? As more and more questions popped into my head, i started to feel like the frog in the pot of water on the stove that was slowly being boiled to death.

But re-reading Robbie Case's paper on the three views of knowledge helped me come to some understanding of the difference between empiricism, rationalism and socio-culturalism, and some clarity on what the different perspectives are on learning - which I think is about making sense of the universe we live in and manifests as knowledge/beliefs.

I am also watching myself as i learn these new concepts/ways of thinking/perspectives. How am i learning it? How am I making the connections?

I continue to ruminate. (Now that too is a process of learning?)

Testing

This is my 1st post.