The grounded theory of children

Descrizione

To teach all students according to today’s standards, teachers need to understand subject matter, so they can help students create useful cognitive maps, relate one idea to another, and address misconceptions, but over all to generate and create new visions of knowing and new values of experience. Teachers need to see how ideas connect across fields and to everyday life. This kind of understanding provides a foundation for pedagogical content knowledge that enables teachers to make ideas accessible to others (Shulman, 1987).
Developing Shulman’s theoretical framework, and analising the benefits connected with application of the Grounded Theory in education and curriculum research, the author focalises the paradox of teaching practice in the classroom. In fact, the problem related with the reflection on the teacher training bear from a double  eaning of the curriculum idea. There’s a sort of fluctuation between the idea of a curriculum based on the trace of specific disciplinary contents (as the traditional ‘program’) or have to be intended as a planned whole of scholastic activities (contents, aims, methods, resources and assessments) oriented towards the achievement of declared formative profiles . Each teacher has a unique, personal, theory of his  way to teach.  And each teacher contribute to develop, in mind of pupils, a particular vision of knowing’s critic and increase. So for I. Lakatos (1987), what we think of as a ‘theory’ may actually be a succession of slightly different theories and experimental techniques developed over time, that share some common idea, or what Lakatos called their ‘hard core’. Lakatos called such changing collections ‘Research Programmes’. According Lakatos’s perspective, a progressive research programme of teaching is marked by its growth, along with the discovery of stunning novel facts, development of new experimental techniques, more precise predictions; and  a degenerating research program of teaching is marked by lack of growth, or growth of the protective belt that does not lead to novel facts.
Finally, the main hypothesis on which is based this work concerns with the homology between how knowledge is structured and how we form our own talents. Contrary to what Piaget framed, the author asserts that people creating knowledge and people making science have developed their own talents. So, there is a space where knowledge and learning can potentially be unified, where they can exchange: the Ancients used to call this space inventio. The inventio is the mechanism that controls critics and the increase of knowledge, while the methodus controls the transmission of knowledge. The main principle to which very few teachers refer asserts that knowledge must be taught in order to exist. It follows that if council class teachers witnessed the inventive texture of knowledge, there would be more exchanges between different knowledge. This means to found a grounded theory of teaching.

ISBN: 9788882328399