Analogical? What’s this?
Last February, I had an amazing opportunity to have supper with a group of my colleagues and David Warlick. The conversation was incredible. I subscribe to David’s blog, and today’s post, “Two of the Coolest Things I’ve Heard Lately” had some interesting ideas. Some quotes:
“…in Calgary, I got to listen to by Dr. Dennis Sumara, Dean of the School of Education at the University of Calgary. I wrote about his talk in my last blog post, but one of the ideas that he shared that struck me was that the way that we teach and run schools seems to assume that people are logical. He said that instead of logical, we are analogical.”
I’m not quite sure what “analogical” means. I read further.
“…it took me a moment to figure out that he was playing with the word analog and not antilogical.”
Ok…
“…My suggestion was that logic, in instruction, makes the teachers’ and the curriculum developers’ jobs easier. That’s probably an exaggeration, and that’s probably not a bad thing in such conversations. Exaggeration breaks paradigms. The truth is probably that logic also helps us to learn. “This is true because that was true and those were not true.”
“Perhaps it’s where we apply what we’ve learned that the analogical comes in. We need to factor into our learning experiences people’s real-world tendency to make and work with personal connections, so that the learning gets applied, not just reported.”
I like this.
