Learning Theories for Teachers

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Learning Theories for Teachers

• Morris B. Bigge Samuel Shermis
• Chapter 7
• How does Bruners Cognitive-Interactionist,
  Narrative-Centered Cultural Psychology Treat
  Learning and Teaching

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Introduction

• J.W. Bruner may be identified as a contemporary
  cognitive interactionist learning and
  developmental psychologist.
• Bruner emphasized the role of cultural and
  narrative experiences in learning

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What is the Purpose of Education for Bruner?

• Most learning in most settings is sharing of the
  culture
• The major emphasis in education should be placed
  upon student skills in handling things, and
  performing symbolic operations, particularly as
  they relate to the technologies that make them so
  powerful in their human, this is, cultural
  experience.

4
How does Bruner View Human Motivation?

• An individual is best viewed as neither a
  mystical active self nor a passive recipient of
  information
• Knowledge should serve the learning of values by
  giving students a sense of the alternative ways
  in which one can succeed or fail in the
  expression of values
• Teachers should strive for golden mean in
  student motivation, somewhere between apathy and
  wild excitement.

5
What is Folk Psychology?

• Folk psychology involves knowledge of a system by
  which people organize their experiences in,
  knowledge about, and transactions with the social
  world.
• Folk psychology makes meaning, as contrasted with
  information processing and computing, the central
  concern of a psychology that is an essential
  basis of both personal meaning and cultural
  cohesion.

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What Is a Self?

• A Self is a transactional relationship between a
  speaker and an Other that is not directly
  observable.
• A Self can be understood as a product of the
  situations within which it operates, the swarm of
  its participations.
• For Bruner, people are transactional selves.

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How Is Learning a Cognitive-Interactionist Process

• Learning is involved in three almost
  simultaneous processes
• Acquisition of new information
• Transformation of knowledge
• Check of the pertinence and adequacy of
  knowledge.
• New information may either be a refinement of
  previous knowledge or be of such nature that it
  runs counter to a persons previous information

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How Is Learning a Cognitive-Interactionist
Process cont.,

• In transformation of knowledge, one manipulates
  knowledge to make it fit new tasks
• Instrumental conceptualism
• Ones knowledge of the world is based on ones
  constructed models of reality.
• Such models are first adopted from ones culture,
  then adapted to ones individual use.

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How Is Learning a Cognitive-Interactionist
Process cont.

• Three Modes of Representation
• The enactive mode of representation is highly
  manipulative in character.
• An Iconic mode of representation is based upon
  internal imager.
• Symbolic mode of representation is based upon an
  abstract, arbitrary, and more flexible system of
  thought.

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How Is Learning a Cognitive-Interactionist
Process cont.

• The way that a person develops their modes of
  representation depends on three conditions
• The supply of amplifiers, such as skills, images,
  and conceptions that his or her culture has in
  stock
• The nature of the life that is led by the
  individual
• The extent to which the person in incited to
  explore the sources of concordance or discordance
  among the three modes of representation or knowing

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How Do Models of the World Contribute to Learning?

• Models enable persons to predict, interpolate,
  and extrapolate further knowledge.
• Models are insightful expectancies

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How is Learning a Narrative-Centered Process

• Requires
• A means for emphasizing human action be directed
  toward goals controlled by agents
• A sequential order be established and maintained
• A sensitivity to what is canonical and what is
  noncanonical in human interaction
• Something approximating a narrators perspective.

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How is Learning a Narrative-Centered Process

• Schools should
• Encourage students to discover the value and
  amendability of their own guesses.
• Be the development of students confidence in the
  solvability of problems
• Foster students self-propulsion
• Develop economy in the use of mind.
• Development of intellectual honesty

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What is Bruners Theory of Instruction?

• What is the nature of persons as learners?
• What is the nature and structure of knowledge
  developed for optimal, insightful comprehension?
• What is the nature of the knowlede-getting
  process structured for optimal insightful
  comprehension?

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What is Bruners Theory of Instruction? Cont.

• What optimal experiences predispose learners to
  learn?
• How are success and failure and reward and
  punishment involved in learning?
• What are optimal sequences of presentation of
  materials to be learned?
• What procedures stimulate thought in a school
  setting?

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