Essential Readings for this Course

The following chapters from New Learning:

• Chapter 2. Life in Schools
• Chapter 6. The Nature of Learning (Start here - the principle ideas for this course.)
• Chapter 7. Knowledge and Learning
• Chapter 8. Pedagogy and Curriculum

Post-Covid Thoughts

• After the COVID-19 Crisis: Why Higher Education May (and Perhaps Should) Never be the Same
• Schools after COVID-19: Seven Steps Towards a Learning Revolution

Behaviorism and Conditioned Response

‘Behaviorism’ is a school of thought within the discipline of psychology that was founded in the first half of the 20th century. Most famous amongst its initiators were John B. Watson, Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner. They argued that the only thing we can know with any degree of certainty in the science of psychology is what we can see in the form of observable behaviours.

Here is a, sample some of it for yourself, in original words or videos:

• Pavlov's notion of 'conditioned reflex'.
• Watson on the practical importance of studying behavior, rather than consciousness.
• Skinner's behaviorist psychology.

Notions of Innate Intelligence

In the behaviorists’ view, not everybody’s capacities for behaviour modification are the same. Some people, they argue, are naturally more intelligent than others. They are able to learn more from their experiences – to pick up on the stimuli, respond more intelligently and learn better from positive and negative reinforcement. Such differences in intelligence they attribute to differences in innate mental capacity between one individual and the next. Some people will never be very smart, no matter how much knowledge we try to give them, because their natural stimulus-response mechanisms don’t work so well.

Going right to the source:

• Binet's intelligence test
• Goddard on IQ
• Yerkes' Army Intelligence tests
• Chomksy on IQ and inequality

Comment: Respond to one of the notions introduced by foundational exponents of educational psychology? What do you make of Skinner's comments about free will? What is the role of the teacher in the behaviorist scheme? Nature or Nurture? What are the dangers and uses of intelligence tests? (Respond to others in the discussion by typing @ in the comment box, and selecting their name.)

Essential Reading

Following are some (mostly recent or upcoming) scholarly publications by Cope and Kalantzis. We'd like you to read at least two of them to get a broader sense of our thinking. Please join the New Learning community in CGScholar for updates as we publish new work!

• On Cyber-Social Learning: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence in Education
• Generative AI: Implications and Applications for Education
• Platformed Learning: Reshaping Education in the Era of Learning Management Systems
• Pedagogies for Digital Learning: From Transpositional Grammar to the Literacies of Education
• A Little History of e-Learning: Finding New Ways to Learn in the PLATO Computer Education System, 1959-1976
• A Metalanguage for Learning: Rebalancing the Cognitive with the Socio-Material
• The Changing Dynamics of Online Education: Five Theses on the Future of Learning
• The Digital Learner: Towards a Reflexive Pedagogy
• Assessment and Pedagogy in the Era of Machine-Mediated Learning

Make comment: Read two of these articles. Analyze the selected articles and write at least 200 words that focuses on a theme addressed in these readings. Please select articles you have not read or reviewed in another course. Be clear about which of the two articles (or more) that you have read. Comment on at least one or two other people's comments.

Constructivism

Jean Piaget was a leading exponent of a theory of brain developmentalism that is often called "constructivism." Children’s mental capacities grow through four major stages: from sensorimotor or pre-language, to pre-operational language and thought, to concrete operations or logical thought and multiple perspectives and, finally, by mid-adolescence, to the formal or propositional operations embodied in abstract reasoning. These stages occur at certain ages, before which learners are not ready to learn certain things. Learning occurs through processes of assimilation, in which you make the things you experience in the material or social world fi t into your existing mental framework, and through accommodation in which your mental world takes shape in response to the things you experience.

• Piaget on child development
• Pinker on the "language instinct"

Neuroscience

Research into the workings of the human brain began to make headway during the 20th century. There is still a lot that we don’t understand about the brain but, thanks to the research disciplines that are today called "cognitive science" and "neuroscience," we are beginning to understand more.

For a sampling of recent thinking in the field of neuroscience, see:

• Davidson on Brain Basics
• Bransford, Brown and Cocking on Brains and Learning

Comment: Adress one of the issues raised in this update, for instance, to what extent do you think cognitive development and language are "natural?" What are the potential strengths and weaknesses of neuroscience as an approach to the understanding of learning? What is insightful about the concept of constuctivism? What are the possible limits of the concept? For example, it is argued at times that constructivism assumes overly rigid developmental stages, or focuses too much on the individual mind, neglecting the social nature of knowledge and learning.

The Social Construction of Knowledge

A social-cognitivist approach to the question of learning attempts to balance social and cultural factors with the potentialities of the brain. Social cognitivists want to develop a fuller account of the "nurture" side of the nature-plus-nurture mix. Of course, theorists on both sides of the nature-nurture debate agree that an enormous amount is learned in a social context by means of the processes of socialization. The main point of disagreement is the mix – how much learning is social, and how much is biologically based.

Here also are some of the key thinkers and ideas:

• A key foundational theorist is Lev Vygotsky, who explores the role of language acquisition in learning.
• The importance of socialization is highlighted in some bizarre cases of children who grew up for a time outside of human society.
• Another measure of what is specific to human learning is the extent and limits of animal learning.
• Historian David Christian speaks of the uniqueness of human culture.
• Terrence Deacon and Merlin Donald use cross-disciplinary approaches to explore the nature of human consciousness.

Distributed Cognition

In the social-cognitivist view, nature provides humans with a range of "affordances." Nature does not provide a blueprint, but a series of potentialities that are filled to a substantial degree by the socio-cultural cognition that is our cultural inheritance. Being external to the individual brain, this is necessarily acquired through learning. This is how nurture allows us to fi ll out the potentialities provided by our human-physiological nature.

Key ideas supporting this view are:

• Distributed Cognition
• Situated Cognition

Communities of Practice

If cognition is social, then the most powerful learning is collective rather than individual. Education exercises an individual’s capacity to learn in and with the people and the knowledge resources that are around them. "Situated learning" and "community of practice" are keys to this conception of learning. Education is not an individualised, psychological-cognitive thing. Rather it is a set of relationships with others in a knowledge or learning community.

For some key ideas about communities of practice, see:

• Lave and Wenger on Situated Learning
• Wenger on Communities of Practice

Because thinking and learning are so social, cultural differences play an important role.

• Marika and Christie provide an example in Yolngu ways of knowing and learning
• Howard Gardner analyzes multiple intelligences, in contrast to older, monolithic notions of intelligence

Comment: Address and issue raised in this update. For instance, what do we mean by the social mind'? In what ways is thinking 'inside your head' also social thinking? How do community and culture shape learning? How does this expand the scope of learning beyond the individual mind? What is collective intelligence? What are the processes and benefits of collaborative learning?

Comment: How do social and emotional conditions affect learning? (This, of course, is just as much the case for higher education, workplace learning, or informal learning in communities and personal life.)

Comment: Denice Hood offers one example of application of educational psychology to counselling in college. What kinds of supplementary supports do learners need? What are the purposes, methods and roles of counselling psychologists as they address the needs of learners?

Comment: Educational psychology is concerned with the dynamics of learning. In his contribution to this course, George Reese analyzes by way of example the notion of "productive struggle." How can educational psychology help us to understand the processes of learning?

Comment: What are the institutional uses to which quantitative psychology can be put? What do you consider to be its strengths and limitations?

This course includes peer-reviewed projects as a part of the course requirements. These projects must be fully completed for course credit. Refer to your course community and the course syllabus for specific timelines.