James Paul Gee writes about two views of thinking in What Video Games have to Teach us about
Learning and Literacy.
“In the traditional view,” he writes, “concepts are like
general definitions in the mind (like definitions for words in dictionaries).
In the traditional view, the mind thinking through stored “facts” and grand
generalization that are like statements in logic.”
Though I suspect most teachers who teach using a
lecture/assessment model haven’t really considered how people think, possibly
have never developed a view to base their teaching theory on, lecturing as the
primary means of teaching is based on this model, depends on this model to be
effective. The hope is that somehow all we have to do is transfer information
from one brain to another using (passive) oral communication. (Students of
Freire will recognize this as the “banking model” of education.)
Gee goes on to write, “In the view I am developing here, the
mind things and acts on the basis of something like stored images (simulations)
of experience, images that are completely interlinked with each other (thereby
attaining some generality) but that are always adapted to new experience in
ways that keep them tied to the ground of embodied experience and action in the
world” (91).
While it’s clear that Gee’s definition perfectly fits the
experience of a video game, it’s not as clear how we might take full advantage
of this view of thinking and conceptualizing the world in the classroom. We can
provide bits and pieces—guided group work, service learning, discussion boards—each
of these is a strategy to engage students actively, to draw on or even create
experiences that, through adapting to these new experiences, students actively
learn.
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