INSTRUCTIONISM

Within each reading, I find something - often a number of things - related to current practices and conditions in the college where I teach. At the very beginning (the first page of the introduction) of The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006), the five bullet points clearly articulated a particular approach to teaching and learning which is - at least in my experience -far too prevalent. I suspect many teachers with whom I work would agree fully with those five points, and believe that the core component of their job is indeed to transmit facts and procedures to their students.


The source of this belief is likely not only was this the approach to teaching and learning they themselves experienced as students, but also because it is an "applied arts and technology" college.  Instructionism may have had some relevance when the college was founded (nearly 50 years ago), but that approach is at the very least stale-dated.  "Instructionism prepared students for the industrialized economy of the early twentieth century" but this is the early twenty-first century and we now have a "knowledge society" (Sawyer, 2006). 


A big question I now have - in the face of this - is what place my research interests might have. I am fascinated with video games and what studying them might tell us about teaching and learning. If you have not already read James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy, I highly recommend it. But how palatable might ideas such as found in Gee's book be to faculty who have not necessarily come to terms with such entities as Google, Wikipedia, and more: the accessibility of information knowledge. What do I need t consider to make my own work palatable?


REFERENCES


Gee, J. P. (2007) What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sawyer, R.K. (2006). The New Science of Learning. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.