What are pedagogical theories?
The great human drive since the beginning of the species has been aimed at absorbing knowledge, classifying it, instrumentalizing it. Make him a lever to establish dominance over the known universe. The hunt for wisdom is the quintessential activity of Homo Sapiens.
But through the ages, many philosophers, scientists, and abstract thinkers began to concern themselves not only with knowledge itself, but also with our methods, conscious or unconscious, used to integrate it. Herein lies the structuring of the pedagogical theories: in academic reflection on how human beings learn and how one person can encourage another to learn.
In other words, these are models proposed to understand the mechanisms by which knowledge is imparted and knowledge is received. These models can cover a wide range of the usual work specialties of the academic field. This range ranges from psychology, through neuroscience, to sociology, philosophy and pedagogy itself.
Innovative research in each of these fields has an immediate impact with its results on our notion of how teaching is approached. This ends up forming the ideological base on which public and private policies will be built in educational institutions. Cultures are modified in this way and in turn produce new pedagogical theories with the change of the atmosphere of thought, in an infinite symbiosis.
Main pedagogical theories
This wave seeks to fully capture the learning process, without ever achieving it. The human mind is still too mysterious and complex a machine to be reduced to a simple theory. For this reason, we must consider the different proposals made at different historical moments as precise definitions of certain processes, complemented by other definitions of others, in an immense network of theoretical work.
Bearing this in mind, let's review a short list of theories applied to the learning and teaching process. The enumeration ranges from medieval times and times of the Enlightenment, to the beginning of the XNUMXth century and current science. The range can give us an idea of how present the pedagogical discussion has been in human history.
Theoretical Naturalism: Let's Celebrate the Noble Savage
With naturalism we find the closest thing to an educational zero point within the pedagogical field. Developed mainly in the seventeenth century, the naturalistic theory considers that the essence of human nature must be respected and stimulated by the pedagogical process, without iron disciplines or schematic impositions typical of traditional formal education.
Under the motto of man is good by natureRousseau, the naturalistic theorist par excellence, proposed a free teaching format based on the acceptance of children's spontaneity and their primary and direct exploration of the senses. The experiential quality of learning is enhanced over the cold early memorization of Latinisms.
Spontaneous values had to be delicately guided by the teacher, without restricting them, to add them harmoniously with enlightened reason. The disharmony between beneficial instinct and forced social duty was for the philosopher the cause of many social disorders and corruption of the spirit.
Thus, Rousseau presented a schedule in which the student was destined until the age of ten to experience only his own body and the immediate environment through his sensory system, drawing spontaneous, sustained and fair conclusions about the world. Then he was assigned until fifteen to the curious intellectual instruction, where his own initiative was still essential, and then until eighteen to the highest stage of learning, morality and religion.
Although the romantic perspective of naturalism is hardly applicable in the contemporary educational system, its ideas largely permeated our popular wisdom regarding the goodness and innate intelligence of children, heralds of a purity that adults have lost. Attention to the specific individuality of the student and the needs of each age remains a core notion of good teaching.
Disciplinary order: forging a complete individual
If the naturalistic teaching proclaimed the intrinsic wisdom of the individual, whose flame had to be protected from the cold breeze of social pressure, the disciplinary order believed in the hard forging of the person according to the established order and authority.
It can be said that the main motivation of the disciplined pedagogy of the Greco-Roman, medieval and Renaissance tradition was to produce subjects with a perfect internal integration between the virtues of ingenuity, moral rectitude and firm disposition. Learning was not a simple absorption of knowledge but a way of perfecting the spirit, little developed in origin, barely potential in childhood.
Integration was also sought due to the knowledge incorporated by the student. Knowledge such as grammar, logic, music, rhetoric, astronomy, languages, were part of compulsory education from an early age, in the so-called Trivium and Quadrivium of the medieval era. It was about a practically total knowledge of the accumulated knowledge of the time, in an eclectic perspective, not specialized and imposed by imitation and memorization, under the threat of the punitive.
As can be seen, the positive aspect of the disciplinary order lay in the rigor, morality and breadth of learning. The negative aspect was well exploited by naturalists: dogmatism filtered through teaching and the possibility of mistreatment in weak institutions.
Behaviorism: stimulus and response
In behaviorism, perhaps the most mechanistic theory of all pedagogical theories, the infant is a tabula rasa, a blank page without personality predispositions or prior knowledge, continuously directed by external stimuli. It is a theory descended from conditioning experiments with animals, such as Pavlov's famous dogs, later expanded by Skinner.
In retrospect, behaviorism seems like a more sanitized and systematized variant of the old discipline, without any of its holistic or aesthetic concerns. The punitive order has been inserted in the modern era through a conditioned behavior on a passive being by reward and punishment, reward and disapproval.
Despite its importance as a cornerstone of many contemporary educational systems, behaviorism has obvious problems. The student can base her work on obtaining the grade, without any other motivation. The relationship with the teacher can be interested and cold. And since the theory does not contemplate the particularity of the personal character, the reactions will be unpredictable.
Associationism: interconnected learning
Sharing the same tabula rasa as behaviorism, associationism sees teaching as a progressive construction of knowledge on virgin ground. The way to put together our knowledge packages is through the associative interconnection between knowledge, especially between knowledge already acquired and that which is new.
Then, the task of the pedagogue is to make these associations evident, establishing links at each point between subjects to stimulate the minds of the students around directed assimilations. Many critics of associationism have pointed out precisely the too directed aspect of the teaching, not allowing at least some naturalistic individual exploration. Still, Piaget's theory is one that remains popular.
In the following video, Piaget's cognitive theory is explained with drawings.
Gestalt: the power of structure
Gestalt psychology, a German theory that emerged at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, provides a vaster level of complexity than the one we contemplate in the associative order.
Having a name that means configuration, Gestalt deals with examining the mental structures through which the human being filters and incorporates information from reality. The absorption is never complete, because the structure captures only the parts that its lines are capable of integrating.
Taking into account the laws of this prioritization, which captures figures following a criterion that goes from their level of contrast with the background and their frequency to the similarity between them, a more equitable educational theory is established with respect to teacher and student. The teacher acts more humbly as a facilitator of the mental structuring carried out by the student himself, busy with his unique puzzle.
The Gestalt of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka is of great pedagogical efficacy for agile and lucid developing minds. Its expansion across the European continent has been unstoppable since its proposal.
Cognitive theory: mental sequences
Even when it has an objective character typical of the most experimental psychology, cognitive theory is a step further with respect to behaviorism. If this proposal remained only in the physical evidence of the stimulus and the reaction, the cognitive proposes to really immerse oneself in the mental processes that lead to learning.
For example, in common reality scan sequences. Curiosity as the first state, the problem examined, the testing of hypotheses and the choice of one in particular for its plausibility.
Applying this to pedagogy, the cognitive insists on respecting the sequences of mental development of the student. Age determines the type of education received and the curious initiative of the student is essential for teaching. A sort of scientific spin on the old naturalism.
If you have been interested in this article about pedagogical theories, maybe you will like this other dedicated to the Learning by discovery. Follow the link!
