On June 4, 2019, all members of the CPLC Wicked Track were tasked with developing a personal action plan to answer the following questions over the course of the ensuing two months: What will I need to learn about the course? I will need to determine from CPLC discussions whether and how the TaWP mission …
Author Archives: Michael Davidson
The Hungry Mind and the Educated Mind
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny…” —Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) https://www.americanscientist.org/article/thats-funny One of the common threads Joshua Eyler identified while researching How Humans Learn is curiosity. Most every reader intuitively grasps the meaning of curiosity, but scholars have leveled varying definitions. Eyler cites …
The Scientist as Child
In How Humans Learn (2018), author Joshua Eyler reminds us he’s a medievalist, not an education scholar. Eyler’s book, then, is his distillation of others’ work. He selects and presents research drawn from related disciplines, like evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), psychology (both cognitive and developmental), and neuroscience. One such example comes from psychologist Alison Gopnik. …
No One Wants to Look Bad in Public
To ready myself for teaching the first year seminar (now Tackling a Wicked Problem) a second time, I’m planning to read How Humans Learn (Joshua Eyler, 2018). It’s one of six books recommended by the leaders of the Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community, a group of Plymouth State faculty who committed themselves to advancing certain learning …