Monday, November 28, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
The Taos Institute
(on the possibilities)
(educational curriculum)
[bead thread on curriculum reform]
Communication from
Gary Berg-Cross à [251]
Note in response of Gary’s note
I thank you for your note, and agree that development theories are important to mathematics education, in fact to educational theory in general.
In framing my response, there are two directions. The first is to indicate, as all developmental theory does, that learning is assisted if there is natural experience that can be associated and used to ground the learning. One can learn things that are not correct and believe that they are in fact correct. One has correctly learned things that are incorrect. But it helps when direct experience can be used to re-enforce a teaching.
Second, it is possible that immunological theory demonstrates that the intelligence in our system can be fooled into believing that learning cannot occur. This is the conjectured phenomenon of Acquired Learning Disability (ALD). The notion and theoretical grounding to ALD I have made up and published at least partially at:
But you are very correct, in my mind, that participatory learning and Socratic methods are important to a future educational system. In some cases, groups are beginning to try to place constructionist theory into pedagogy. I would like to hear more.