6 Design of Learning Environments

The chapter on the design of learning environments made excellent use of the analogy that learning was a bridge that takes you from where you are to some destination on the other side. Student's preconcieved ideas about the world need to be taken into consideration as a starting point for learning. Transfer, both positive and negative, inevitably flows from prior knowledge outside the influence of the educator; consequently the educator must take care to determine what the starting point of the bridge.

I once saw a video, I don't remember where, in which an elementary school girl was convinced that light was generated in the eye and bounced off the objects that the person sees. The teacher was unable to convince her otherwise. The interviewer in the video asked her how she "knew" that light came from the eye, rather than from the environment, and she explained that she had seen her cat's eyes shining out of a completely dark room. Once her underlying assumption was understood, it was much easier for the interviewer to convince her that the cat's eye was highly reflective, and that light was produced by the sun and man made light sources.

While the book tends to focus on taking cultural assumptions into consideration for the purpose of determining underlying assumptions, I believe the same results can be obtained by treating people as individuals. It may be true that, as described in the book, Inuit children are taught not to speak out in class, but it can alsoo be true that a middle class student raised in America was subjected to some form of abuse and is therefore reluctant to speak. Treating these students as individuals would serve the same bridge-buildng purpose as considering their culture, without the added risk of stereotyping.