“We teach a subject not to produce little libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think … for himself, to consider matters as a historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge–getting. Knowing is a process, not a product. (Bruner)
Transmit conventional ideas but encourage students to make the leap to the imaginable. (Bruner)
“We must not teach present fact, but to open up questions”
(Bruner)
“Knowledge is not a storehouse. You already “know” most of what you “learn” in science and mathematics. “Learning” is, most often, figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you currently think.”
(Bruner)
“that more is required to justify beliefs than merely sharing them with others. That “more” is the machinery of justification for one’s beliefs, the canons of scientific and philosophical reasoning. Knowledge, after all, is justified belief. (Bruner)
The humanoid mind/brain complex does not simply ‘grow up’ biologically according to a genetically predestined timetable but, rather, is opportunistic to nurturing in a human-like environment
(Bruner)
’Learning’ is, most often, figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you currently think. There are many ways of doing that. Some are more intuitive; others are formally derivational. But they all depend on knowing something “structural” about what you are contemplating-how to put it together. Knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it. It permits you to go beyond it.
(Bruner)
The teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer… . If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible.
(Bruner)
the idea that in teaching a subject you begin with an “intuitive” account that is well within the reach of a student, and then circle back later with as many more recyclings as are necessary, to a more formal or highly structured account, until the learner has mastered the subject in its “full generative power.
(Bruner)
“…learners help each other learn, each according to her abilities. And this, of course, need not exclude the presence of somebody serving in the role of teacher. It simply implies that the teacher does not play that role as a monopoly, that learners ‘scaffold’ for each other as well. The antithesis is the ‘transmission’ model … (Bruner)
…I was struck by the fact that successful efforts to teach highly structured bodies of knowledge like mathematics, physical sciences, and even the field of history often took the form of metaphoric spiral in which at some simple level a set of ideas or operations were introduced in a rather intuitive way and, once mastered in that spirit, were then revisited and reconstrued in a more formal or operational way, then connected with other knowledge. The mastery at this stage then being carried one step higher to a new level of formal or operational rigor and to a broader level of abstraction and comprehensiveness. The end stage of this process was eventual mastery of the connexity and structure of a large body of knowledge… (Bruner)
Culture shapes the mind, it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of ourselves and our powers.
(Bruner)
Finding a place in the world … is ultimately an act of imagination.”[63] “The home, workplace, and social (friendship) circles have different values and beliefs, which complicates the individual’s ability to subsist within one culture. Therefore, people should be encouraged to identify and understand their perceptions of culture and go “beyond the cultural ways to innovate … to create … “Each must be his own artist, his own scientist, his own historian, his own navigator. (Bruner)
there is a reciprocal relation between education and the other major institutional activities of a culture: communication, economics, politics, family life, and so on… education is not a free-standing institution, not an island, but part of the continent. (Bruner)
“If school is an entry into the culture and not just a preparation for it, then we must constantly reassess what school does to the young student’s conception of his own powers (his sense of agency) and his sensed chances of being able to cope with the world both in school and after (his self-esteem). In many democratic cultures, I think, we have become so preoccupied with the more formal criteria of ‘performance’ and with the bureaucratic demands of education as an institution that we have neglected this personal side of education.
(Bruner)
“What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise. (Bruner)
If I had it all to do over again, and if I knew
how, I would put my energies into reexamining how the schools express the agenda of the society and how that agenda is formulated and how that is translated by the schools. That, it seems to me, would be the properly subversive way to proceed. (Bruner)
“Any system of education, any theory of pedagogy, any ‘grand national policy’ that diminishes the school’s role in nurturing a pupils’ selfesteem fails at one of its primary functions. (Bruner)
“Ideally, school is supposed to provide a setting where our performance has fewer esteem-threatening consequences
than in the ‘real world’ presumably in the interest of encouraging the learner to “try things out. (Bruner)
human beings forever suffer conflicts of interests, with attendant grudges, factions, coalitions, and shifting alliances.”[83] But he insists, “There must obviously be some consensus to ensure the achievement of civility.”[84] To achieve consensus cultures have “interpretative procedures for adjudicating the different construals of reality that are inevitable in any diverse society.
(Bruner)
“In human beings, with their astonishing narrative gift, one of the principal forms of peacekeeping is the human gift for presentating, dramatizing, and explicating the mitigating circumstances surrounding conflict-threatening breaches in the ordinariness of life. The object of the narrative is not to reconcile, not to legitimize, not to even excuse, but to rather explicate…To be in a viable culture is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even though the stories may not represent a consensus.
(Bruner)