Teaching, Learning, Technology & Reflection

Table 1: Mechanisms of Community Formation in Philosophy for Children Group solidarity through dialogical inquiry The primacy of activity and reflection The articulation of disagreements and the quest for understanding Fostering cognitive skills (e.g., assumption finding, generalization, exemplification) through dialogical practice. Learning to employ cognitive tools (e.g., reasons, criteria, concepts, algorithms, rules, principles Joining together in cooperative reasoning (e.g., building on each other’s ideas, offering counterexamples or alternative hypotheses, etc.) Internalization of the overt cognitive behavior of the community (e.g., introjecting the ways in which classmates correct one another until each becomes systematically self-corrective)—‘intrapsychical reproduction of the interpsychical’ (Vygotsky) Becoming increasingly sensitive to meaningful nuance of contextual differences Group collectively groping its way along, following the argument where it leads (Lipman,

...symbolic interactionists were among the first in the social science community to join issue with postmodernism... interactionists have rejected the subject-object dualism , spectator's theory of knowledge , and correspondence theory of truth , opting instead for the subject-object relativity , participant observation , and perspectival approach to truth . (p. 303) emphasis on the marginal, local, everyday, heterogenous, and indeterminate (p. 304) self-identity, seen as socially constructed, emergent, and plural (p. 304) Unmistakable though it is, the affinity between interactionism and postmodernism is highly selective.   Source: Modernity, Postmodernism, and Pragmatist Inquiry: An Introduction by Dmitri N. Shalin (1993). Symbolic Interaction, 16(4):303-332

 Register thus accounts for the probabilistic relationship between particular situation-types and the meaning choices most likely to be realized in the texts that are constructed in relation to them. However, it does not account for the sequential organization of those meanings as a text that enacts a particular, culturally recognizable type of activity in that situation. For this, the concept of genre is more appropriate.(p. 9) Source: Wells, Gordon (1999) Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge University. URL: http://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/31334/sample/9780521631334wsn01.pdf

John Medina's great new book entitled "brain rules" ECS or Emotionally Competent Stimuli, a.k.a., "the hook". A hook is a relevant story or anecdote designed to stimulate emotion such as fear, happiness, laughter, or incredulity. The hook can be used to summarize the last key concept or to introduce the next module, but most importantly, it "touches" your audience. from TGI Newsletter 44