Cel IT™

Exploratory Learning Environments

Pedagogic Principles

Democracy and Education - John Dewey

Dewey's vision of education is not concerned with subordinating education to goals other than what he calls "the educative process".

Education for democracy addresses itself to the evenely distributed interests of the whole. In Dewey's view, education directives that are not integrated with learning tend as a result to be disconnected and "remote", divoced from the means that emphases freedom of the learner.

In such an environment" "instead of suggesting a freer and better balanced activity, it is a limit set to activity. In education, the currency of these externally imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the notion of prepartion for a remote future and for rendering the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish". John Dewey Democracy and Education 1916.

1. Supportive Environments provide contextual situations so that students can engage with the real world and are not restricted by discipline boundaries and which are linked to their prior understanding.

2. Exploration encourages students to initiate and create their own realities and manipulate information and ideas in ways that promote meaning and understanding, and can confidently and coherently communicate ideas, arguments, explanations and

3. Experimentation emphasizes insights, critical thinking -hypotheses to make connections and disclose relationships and meaningfulness - relating new to existing experience

4. Discovery provides opportunities for students to discover apply and transfer understanding themselves to different situation.

5. Imagination, encourages meaningful learning through abstract thinking, reasoning interpretation, analysis organizing and problem-solving.

6. Critical Dialogue as a process that arises out of interaction that enables students to discover other people's viewpoints and in so doing better appreciate their own understanding.

7. Culture as a process of meaning provides opportunities for students to appreciate cultures, create positive relationships and help create own reality with a sense of community.

8. Feedback or assessment promotes reflection and self discovery to encourage students' own construction of reality

9. Cooperative learning through encouraging group activities and sharing discovery learning

10. ICT's supporting communication for co-discovery and information access. Student's answers to questions or problems can be evaluated immediately.

The focal point of The Exploratory Learning Envirnonment (ELE) is the 'contexts' which represent a balanced system of learning, because students become actively engaged in

defining their own problems
generating and evaluating alternatives and
defending their course of action
thus they are constructors of their own knowledge and understanding
enabling them to increase their own market capital and sustainable future

LEARNING ROOMS

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