Harvard Educational Review

  1. Spring 1997 Issue »

    Cognition, Complexity, and Teacher Education

    Brent Davis, Dennis J. Sumara
    Drawing on recent developments in complexity theory, ecology, and hermeneutics, Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara present an "enactivist" model of cognition and contrast it to popular notions of what it means to learn and think that pervade formal education. They illustrate their model by drawing from their experiences during a year-long study in a small, inner-city elementary school. According to this model, cognition does not occur in individual minds or brains, but in the possibility for shared action. An enactivist theory of cognition, the authors suggest, requires teachers and teacher educators to reconceive the practice of teaching by blurring the lines between knower and known, teacher and student, school and community.

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    Spring 1997 Issue

    Abstracts

    A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization
    Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar
    Accountability and School Performance
    Implications from Restructuring Schools
    Fred M. Newmann, M. Bruce King, Mark Rigdon
    What's the Use of Theory?
    Gary Thomas
    Cognition, Complexity, and Teacher Education
    Brent Davis, Dennis J. Sumara
    Sex and the Teacher
    Should We Come Out in Class?
    Didi Khayatt

    Book Notes

    Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools
    Edited by Jacqueline Jordan Irvine and Michèle Foster

    The Jobless Future
    By Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio

    Learning as a Way of Being
    By Peter B. Vaill

    The Other Angels
    By Patricia L. Walsh

    Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students
    By Donna Y. Ford

    The Timetables of Women's History
    By Karen Greenspan

    Migrancy, Culture, Identity
    By Iain Chambers

    Pushing Boundaries
    By Olga A. Vasquez, Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, and Sheila M. Shannon

    Focus Group Interviews in Education and Psychology
    By Sharon Vaughn, Jeanne Shay, and Jane Sinagub

    The New Second Generation
    Edited by Alejandro Portes

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