10.22.06
Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Chapters 1 and 2.
Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Chapters 1 and 2.
The first chapter introduced Bruner’s theory on how education should be reformed and the things we should focus on in educating students. He had four themes he wished to explore: “structure, readiness, intuition, and interest”. The second chapter focused on the idea of structure. He anchored the section with four points. These were: students must understand fundamentals to understand a subject well, details are better remembered when they are put in a preexisting structure, understanding fundamentals in a subject can lead to transfer of knowledge or skills to another subject, ideas should be taught and built on to get students from “elementary” knowledge to “advanced” knowledge. Interesting. My first official exposure to Bruner. My first impression is that these chapters generally made sense. He also acknowledged that pragmatically this approach requires a balance between new discovery-based techniques and the old techniques where students are told something and then forced to test it. Knowing what I know about the memory system (in an information processing way) focusing on structure makes absolute sense. It’s difficult if not impossible to connect ideas to anything if there isn’t an underlying structure to ground them.
