Title: Concepts, Concept Learning, and Design Education
Abstract: The cyclical nature of tends in educational thinking makes the present moment fairly propitious for renewed emphasis on concepts in design. Those who have been observing educational tendencies over the past two decades have probably noticed resemblances between certain aspects of the contemporary scene and that brief period in the early 1960s when Jerome Bruner's little book. The process of design education set everyone to thinking about cognitive development. In connection with this there was a great deal of talk about teaching basic principles and concepts. I recall the time well. I was just beginning to teach design and was stimulated to ask what teaching its basic concept and ideas might mean. I immediately became steeped in the philosophy of design, for I quickly discovered that a definition of design is a function of its working assumption and methodological principles. Walter Abell's discussion of the critical traditions of design and the attributes of art and causal factors associated with each tradition did much to clarify matters of me, as did the general philosophical preoccupation at the time with the concept of explanation. By the mid-sixties, however, the educational climate had changed. So-called affective, open informal or alternative education was upstaging more cognitive approaches to learning. It was not, of course, an exclusive trend, for all the while the Piaget industry was expanding apace and the discussion of cognitive processes continued to be carried on in learned books and journals. The wheel has continued to turn and now the rage is for so-called basic education. The present emphasis on the basics echoes the early sixties primarily in its demand for results and for a semblance of orderliness. The “basics” of today, however, are not the basic concepts and structures of disciplines so much as certain minimal skills involved in reading writing and arithmetic. The accent on minimal competency explains why the rhetoric “excellence” of the earlier period has not been revived. I am told that even the Council for Basic education is not altogether happy with the back-to-basics movement. Still everything considered there is probably somewhat less resistance to the notion of concept learning today than there has been in some time.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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