Children's thinking about learning and teaching

SCHEUER, NORA

Medford

Conferencia; Autumn conferences on education; 2014

Departmento de Educación, Tufts University

You are invited to attend a presentation by Nora Scheuer (Universidad Nacional del Comahue and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina) Tuesday October 14 6:30-8 pm, 2nd floor conference room, Paige Hall, Medford Campus, Tufts University. Edith Ackermann (MIT) will be providing comments at the end of the presentation. By means of cultural learning, children come to widen, refine, and change their ways of participating in their culture. As children learn specific contents that are relevant for different communities of practice, they also generate and develop conceptions regarding how and why such knowledge is learned and taught. These conceptions are personal, situated, and evolving productions. There is a twofold interest in getting to know learners` conceptions of specific learning processes: a) educational, since these conceptions operate implicitly on learning, by affecting the goals learners set for themselves, the actions they put into practice, the sources of help they turn to, and even their assessment of achievements and difficulties; b) anthropological, because conceptions provide first-hand information about values, uses, practices, and episodes that form particular cultures of learning. In the context of a long-standing collaboration between researchers in Spain and Argentina, we have explored through individual in-depth interviews how hundreds of learners in different developmental and educational stages conceive of learning in different areas of knowledge. In this talk I will present and illustrate different ways of exploring these conceptions as first-person perspectives, the main conceptions we have identified, and their variations according to development, gender, areas of knowledge, and contexts of learning. I will focus on children, approaching more advanced learners and teachers in a complementary way. Nora Scheuer is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research of Argentina (CONICET), at Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Bariloche, Patagonia. She is also Co-Editor in Chief for the research journal Infancia y Aprendizaje/Journal for the Study of Education and Development. Her main areas of interest are children's cognitive development in the fields of number, drawing, and writing, as well as regards their ways of conceiving of learning in those fields. Nora Scheuer earned her Doctorate in Psychology from University of Geneva (studying children?s appropriation of the base 10 numerical system), received her BA in educational psychology in Buenos Aires, and carried out a research apprenticeship in Italy studying young children?s emerging explaining competence (Trieste University) and kindergarten students? early text composition strategies (La Sapienza di Roma University). Edith K. Ackermann is an Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Aix-Marseille 1, France. Currently a Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Siena, Department of Communication, she teaches graduate students, conducts research, and consults for companies, institutions, and organizations interested in the intersections between learning, teaching, design, and digital technologies. Previously, Edith was a Senior Research Scientist at MERL - Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, Cambridge, MA; an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media laboratory, in Cambridge, MA; and a Scientific Collaborator at the Centre International d'Epistémologie Génétique, under the direction of Jean Piaget, Geneva. She started her career as a Junior Faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Edith received a Doctor of Developmental Psychology [cum laude]; two Master's degrees in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Psychology; and a Bachelor of Experimental Psychology degree, all from the University of Geneva, Switzerland.