Start with What the Student Knows or with What the Student Can Imagine?

Abstract

It almost universally accepted among educators that the best way to present new material to students to connect it to they already know. Mr. Egan questions this principle and suggests that students' imaginations might offer a much more fertile point for learning. IT IS COMMONLY argued that one of the securest findings of educational research that new information, to be best understood, must be attached to knowledge the student already has. Formulations of this finding have been various, but it has been a staple of educational thinking from the time of John Dewey -- and before him of Herbert Spencer -- to the recently published National Research Council monograph How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice.1 I wish to suggest that the common principle of starting where the student is may be both inadequate and restrictive in ways not often discussed. In its place, I suggest we might sensibly adopt a second principle of asking the student can imagine. We can pose this question at any point in the learning process as a point for further inquiry. To show the long influence of the first principle, consider its early articulation in the work of Herbert Spencer and its use John Dewey and others in shaping the curriculum -- in particular in giving a foundation for the social studies curriculum. Spencer argued that children's early and simple experience had to form the basis for all future learning and that there must be a regular and orderly progression from already familiar to slightly less familiar -- an expansion by slow degrees to impressions most nearly allied.2 This principle believed nearly every teacher and professor of education I have encountered. Most people assume that it so obviously true that even to question it suggests a degree of nuttiness. The education reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged teachers to rethink their ways of presenting new material to students in their particular disciplines in accordance with this principle. Thus elementary mathematics would begin from the experience that children had with fruit or with games such as marbles, and language studies would begin with the forms of expression with which children would already be familiar, rather than with a topic like abstract grammar. But subjects such as mathematics and language were still not fully articulated with the meaningful daily interactions of children with their local environments -- what the student What was further proposed was a new, central curriculum area -- the social studies. This was to be a subject that would begin with the material of children's everyday experience -- with themselves and their families and with their neighborhoods and communities. Gradually, student learning would expand from this meaningful core of personal experience to less familiar knowledge, until, in the end, the whole universe of knowledge could be understood as an expansion from was most vivid and meaningful to the child. The social studies curriculum was designed to tie all the knowledge being learned in other curriculum areas to the child's experience. So we must start with most profoundly known the student and build new knowledge on that basis. David Ausubel declared, If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: The most important single factor influencing learning the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.3 Apart from this slightly odd way of putting Spencer's principle, I think there are four reasons why we might be wary of accepting it. * First, if this a fundamental principle of human learning, there no way the process can begin. * Second, if novelty a problem for human learners, reducing the amount of the novelty doesn't solve the problem. And if we can manage some novelty, why can't we manage more? …