Actual Minds, Possible Worlds by Jerome Bruner； How does teaching influence learning?

Jerome Bruner - How does teaching influence learning?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aljvAuXqhds

Published on Oct 9, 2014

Jerome S. Bruner, had just turned 99 less than a week before this video was filmed He was born Oct. 1, 1915, New York, N.Y., He is an American psychologist and educator whose work on perception, learning, memory, and other aspects of cognition in young children has, along with the related work of Jean Piaget, influenced the American educational system.Bruner’s father, a watch manufacturer, died when Bruner was 12 years old. Bruner studied at Duke University in Durham, N.C. (B.A., 1937), and then at Harvard University, where he received a doctorate in psychology in 1941. After serving as an expert on psychological warfare for the U.S. Army in France during World War II, Bruner returned to Harvard in 1945, becoming professor of psychology there (1952). From 1960 to 1972 he also directed the university’s Center for Cognitive Studies. He left Harvard to become professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford (1972–80). He then became concurrently a professor at the New School for Social Research, New York City, and a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University.

Bruner’s studies helped to introduce Piaget’s concept of developmental stages of cognition into the classroom. His much-translated book The Process of Education (1960) was a powerful stimulus to the curriculum-reform movement of the period. In it he argued that any subject can be taught to any child at any stage of development, if it is presented in the proper manner. According to Bruner, all children have natural curiosity and a desire to become competent at various learning tasks; when a task as presented to them is too difficult, however, they become bored. A teacher must, therefore, present schoolwork at a level so as to challenge the child’s current developmental stage. Bruner also studied perception in children, concluding that children’s individual values significantly affect their perceptions.

Bruner published extensively. Major works include Mandate from the People (1944), A Study of Thinking (1956, with Jacqueline J. Goodnow and George A. Austin), On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (1962), Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966), Processes of Cognitive Growth: Infancy (1968), The Relevance of Education (1971), Communication as Language (1982), Child’s Talk (1983), Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986), Acts of Meaning (1990), The Culture of Education (1996), Minding the Law (2000), and Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2003).

source Encyclopedia Britannica

• Category

  • Education

2009
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures)
by Jerome Bruner (Author)

Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

Jerome Bruner

In this characteristically graceful and provocative book, Jerome Bruner, one of the principal architects of the cognitive revolution, sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of mind. According to Professor Bruner, cognitive science has set its sights too narrowly on the logical, systematic aspects of mental life--those thought processes we use to solve puzzles, test hypotheses, and advance explanations. There is obviously another side to the mind--a side devoted to the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful. This is the side of the mind that leads to good stories, gripping drama, primitive myths and rituals, and plausible historical accounts. Bruner calls it the "narrative mode," and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.
Drawing on recent work in literary theory, linguistics, and symbolic anthropology, as well as cognitive and developmental psychology Professor Bruner examines the mental acts that enter into the imaginative creation of possible worlds, and he shows how the activity of imaginary world making undergirds human science, literature, and philosophy, as well as everyday thinking, and even our sense of self.
Over twenty years ago, Jerome Bruner first sketched his ideas about the mind's other side in his justly admired book On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds can be read as a sequel to this earlier work, but it is a sequel that goes well beyond its predecessor by providing rich examples of just how the mind's narrative mode can be successfully studied. The collective force of these examples points the way toward a more humane and subtle approach to the investigation of how the mind works.

Acts of Meaning

.	from Intro Pages:
	"Piaget is inconceivable without Kant, Vygotsky with- out Hegel and Marx, and the once towering bastion of "learn- ing theory" was constructed on foundations laid by John"

from Back Matter:

"then concludes by restor- ing the original problematic state. Closure would then be a restatement of some dynamic, perhaps spiralling cycle of trans- formation"

1.	on Page 3:
	"... 1 Approaching the Literary Czeslaw Milosz begins his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1981-82, with a comment that is both emblem and warning: ... ... This is not a good sign, even if it may be explained both by the brilliance of their authors and by their zeal in assimilating scientific ..."

2.

on Page 23:

"... James's sense, contains gaps, or where there is a difficult distance between the two. A good case in point is Eliot's lines I should have been a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent sea." Jerome Bruner is University Professor at New York University and the author of many books, including Acts of Meaning; On Knowing; The Process of Education; and Toward a Theory of Instruction (all published by Harvard). Read More by Jerome Bruner: The Culture of Education Toward a Theory of Instruction On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, Second Edition Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture The Process of Education, Revised Edition Minding the Law The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life