Phase Four:
It is recognized that the brain/student (and teacher) function simultaneously and interdependently in two modes. One is an unconscious explorer/learner/creator who interacts directly with the world. The second is a conscious explorer/learner/creator who experiences/creates stories about/reflects on the information it gets from the unconscious and in turn both influences the unconscious and acts on the world through it. The educational need is to faciliate both unconscious and conscious processing and, most particularly, the ability to productively exchange information between the two systems. This in turn depends strongly on effective social interactions, not only between teachers and students but among students and between students and teachers and the world at large.
To achieve this, classrooms need to be organized not only to facilitate unconscious learning but also to encourage story telling as well as the continuing process of using stories to generate new observations and observations to generate new stories. Teachers need to model the entire set of activities, to create an environment of open-ended, transactional inquiry.
Education is as much about helping people enhance their ability to make their own sense of the world as it is about conveying existing understandings. In fact, the latter should be regarded as relevant precisely to the extent it serves the purpose of maximizing the capability of all individuals to continually create and revise their own unique understandings.
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