Abstract
This chapter examines how we might receive Bruner’s legacy (and Dewey’s before him) and keep its spirit to improve our schools. I will briefly discuss Kieran Egan’s theory of imaginative education and his proposal called “Learning in Depth” (LiD) as an example of how we might improve our schools along the line of Bruner’s thought.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the oldest expressions of this view may be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile, when he declared that he intended to write about education of human beings, not that of people becoming lawyers or priests, etc. (p. 41).
- 2.
On the other hand, some educators such as Nel Noddings criticize Bruner for conceiving of what’s essential for human beings only in terms of “academic adequacy”, overlooking the fact that the building of human relations (what she calls “caring relations”) with others is much more essential to everyone (Noddings 1992, p. xii; also, pp. 1, 28, 42, 150, 162).
- 3.
Bruner says, on the one hand, “It never occurred to me to believe in “stages” of development in the Piagetian sense” (Bruner 1983b, p. 154). He, however, converted his “modes of representation” into stages of development; thereby he attempted to overcome the “quietism” of Piaget’s stage theory by using Vygotskian psychology while not discarding Piagetian psychology as a whole (ibid., p. 143).
References
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Takaya, K. (2013). Improving Our Schools. In: Jerome Bruner. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6781-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6781-2_5
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