There is more to teaching than introducing a subject matter, or giving an answer to a quest, and there is more to learning than incorporating an expert's views in a domain. To learn is to develop one's own ways of doing and thinking through personal experience, and in transactions with people and things. To teach is to provide occasions— for oneself and others—to grow, or augment potential from within. Teaching, in other words, is about designing the encounters and the spaces that foster genuine exploration, expression, and exchange of intriguing ideas and feelings, on safe ground. Learning-rich settings come in many shades, and no one fits all. One "hidden dimension" that drives all pedagogic transactions is the quality of the dialogue between mentor and learner. This dialogue can be direct or mediated, it can be verbal or embedded in the artefacts meant to mediate the transaction, or "objects-tothink-with". I draw from my experience as a clinician— in the Piagetian sense— to rethink the act of teaching as a mutual design inquiry. I focus on the art of listening, mediating, and negotiating the multiple voices, perspectives, and agendas, as well as the mutual hopes and expectations that inform any form of pedagogic intervention. I show that in every teacher lays a clinician and a designer.
[1]
E. Ackermann,et al.
From De-contextualized to Situated Knowledge: Revisiting Piaget's Water-Level Experiment
,
1990
.
[2]
D. Laplane.
Thought and language.
,
1992,
Behavioural neurology.
[3]
Annette Karmiloff-Smith,et al.
Micro- and Macrodevelopmental Changes in Language Acquisition and Other Representational Systems
,
1979,
Cogn. Sci..
[4]
Michael J. Reddy.
Metaphor and Thought: The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language
,
1993
.
[5]
Seymour Papert,et al.
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas
,
1981
.
[6]
Louis P. Thorpe,et al.
Problems and methods.
,
1956
.
[7]
J. Dewey.
How we think : a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process
,
1934
.
[8]
J. Piaget,et al.
The Child's Conception of the World
,
1971
.
[9]
Christopher Alexander.
Notes on the Synthesis of Form
,
1964
.
[10]
Donald A. Schön.
The Theory of Inquiry: Dewey's Legacy to Education
,
1992
.
[11]
Gordon Pask,et al.
CONVERSATIONAL TECHNIQUES IN THE STUDY AND PRACTICE OF EDUCATION
,
1976
.