Tuesday, August 10, 2010
We had such an interesting lunchtime conversation that Rachel told us that we should post about it on this blog
Reflecting on observations from last Monday's energy theater in E2 (see here and here), Leslie, Sandy and I were talking about different approaches to teaching/facilitating energy theater, over lunch today. I felt like I could see a difference between emphasizing the (physical) content in one case and the (energy theater) representation in the other case. From there, we engaged in a vivid and lengthy conversation about the specifics of content and representation. We were exploring if there is something like content without representation or representation without content. Or even and idea without representation.
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One of the things that drove the discussion was what (I think) was a disagreement between Leslie and I about whether you could have such a thing as representation without content. Benedict proposed the analogy that we could teach somebody the ability to write chinese characters without teaching them what those characters mean. It might take quite a bit of learning to get the characters right, but this would not necessarily develop any understanding of the community-based meaning of those characters. Being able to draw the characters would, however, be a very useful skill if the students later wanted to learn their meaning.
ReplyDeleteThis analogy was brought out to support the idea that it might be worthwhile guiding the teachers to learn the rules of the energy project game without emphasizing the physics content. We claimed that it was reasonable to imagine knowing how to play the Energy Theater game would be a useful tool for the teachers later on as they learn about energy, even if they didn't have all the details of the energy concepts correct right away.
I think Leslie disagreed though...
Yep, Leslie did disagree.
ReplyDeleteMostly I feel out of my depth here (as a think-then-talker) - I think I would need to look into philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, neuroscience, etc., to get a handle on distinguishing ideas and representations.
But the thing I wanted to flag was an ontology of "idea" as a thing that's poked and prodded and expressed in various ways but has some stable whole. And the idea of "working on representation" as distinct from "working on an idea."