I must be insane

Here I am, four days away from having to hand in the last assignment of my masters course, with the assignment hopeless unfinished, and I’m writing here. WTF. However, what I am learning is stimulating thinking that needs to go down before I can write the other stuff, and Kelly is watching TV.

The following train of thought has been realigned so it can be comprehensible. Let’s skip back a few years to the dawn of life. On the horizon of my thinking for the past couple of weeks has been this thought regarding chaos moving towards self organizing complexity. Or, why do beings move from simplicity to complexity. I’m guessing it has to do with a concept from economy, the competition for finite resources. More complex beings are able to acquire resources to the detriment of simple beings. I’m no evolutionary biologist, so I will not make a detailed list of life’s achievements, but I am thinking that life grew in complexity and at one time reached the age of the dinosaurs, large and well adapted creatures with small brains. However when conditions changed, they could not, which brings the development of intelligence into the evolutionary fray. As Tomasello (1999) notes, homo sapiens develop an adaptation that allows them to bypass the biological transmission of learning to a cultural transmission through language, which speeds up evolution to the extent that it can now be measure in historical time, rather than evolutionary time. A necessary part of this equation is that humans have a desire to derive meaning, to seek understanding, to solve problems. It is this urge that drives the language acquisition process, when adult or peers, try to communicate with babies, they attempt to understand, and in the process acquire language. It can account for other aspects of life. I will now show how this relates to education.

I have been studying a bit of instructional design theory and most theorist agree that learning is enhanced when students are given problems and the teacher assists them in working through the problems to the solution which is the goal of the learning environment that the teacher has envisaged. This requires an epistemological change in the conventional view of education as the transmission of knowledge, to one where students construct knowledge. This process is also evident in story telling, where the protagonist is given some problem and must solve the problem. It can also be seen in many of the arts. I wonder how it relates to spirituality, where one tries to see how each of life’s circumstances is an opportunity to learn. Is religion then a way to focus our attention to what needs to be learned, or does it support that leaning, or negate it?

So for the assignment, maybe I can change the focus of the learning activity. Instead of reading one book, and trying to study that in depth (although, that could be the focus of later excursions into literacy, for bigger literacy events) students could be reading smaller real-life literacy events, extracting the information from that to solve some problem. This could be done (for the beginning levels) for two reasons, one, that the students should be involved in real-life problem solving, two, because emergent literacy should be about the diversity of literacy events that they see around them, and that is how they can use “real” transformed literacy to develop literacy skills, that they can then transfere to the classical, canonical texts that constitute the back to basic approach. Third, the approach to use classical literacy events should combine text and images, however, this may increase cognitive load too much.

So in the end it did help with the assignment, though it is more massed than a paper napkin that fell into the moshpit of a Ramones concert. Will need to fix it for the assignment, and maybe here one day.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.