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alesnick's picture

metaphors for education

I appreciate this interesting connection between the "outputs" of a machine and the diagnosis of a child.  As my colleague Alison Cook-Sather has written about (see, for example, "Movements of Mind: The Matrix, Metaphors, and Re-imagining Education -- I can send you a pdf if you like), educators and schools have used (consciously or not) a wide range of metaphors for teaching -- from producing students like products in a factory, or printouts from a computer, to tending them like plants and flowers, to treating and curing them like the sick and wounded . . . and more.  So . . . I do think it's dehumanizing (de-creaturifying, as well) to regard/theorize/describe/interact with children as if their being, or even just what they need in/from school, is fully knowable.  Rather than try to diagnose and then treat/cure the learner, what about a model of ongoing learning of the learner, not to complete it, but to be engaged with it, and with processes (via curriculum not only adjunct "testing") that help the learner teach you him- or herself? 

My question about the brain as a universal Turing machine is how does the UTM account for the unconscious and also for change over time? 

 

 

 

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