Title: Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach
Author: Kieran Egan
Year: 1986
Country: United States of America
Description: Egan argues that some of our assumptions about children’s thought and learning – namely that they cannot handle abstraction and that learning must always start with the familiar and progress to the unknown – are inaccurate or oversimplified. Children are very good at understanding fantasy, which requires them to make sense of big abstract concepts such as Good Versus Evil, and to connect new, unfamiliar information to these abstractions. By using storytelling, rather than the current “assembly line” model for education, the curriculum could become both more memorable and more engaging for students.
Important Questions
Important Quotes
“The key to…rehumanizing [math:] for children is to tie the computational tasks back to the human intentions, hopes, fears, etc. that generated them in the first place. If children can see a particular mathematical computation not simply as a dehumanized skill to be mastered but rather as a particular solution to a particular human hope, intention, fear, or whatever, then we can embed the skill in a context that is meaningful” (p. 77).
“Our science program will be about the human adventure that began in magic and myth and gradually, through individuals’ courage, ingenuity, hopes, and so on, became science. It is a human activity concerned with what works, regardless of what people think, believe, or hope for. It begins, however, in people’s hopes, beliefs, and fears, and makes sense when seen in terms of human intentions. Only very late in its development does it become disinterested inquiry” (p. 97).
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