Growing-Together

Abstract

Hands-on activities and project-based learning are at the heart of many school disciplines. Educational psychologists, too, emphasize the need for children and students – especially those with difficulties in reading – to learn through practical work. As a teacher, I had not been different scheduling 70% or more of classroom time to student-centered activities, where data of some sort where collected or students engaged at their own rate in whatever the curriculum outlined in broad terms. Later, however, I was beginning to take a more critical perspective, wondering about how doing something with your hands was to contribute to conceptual understanding, which, by all accounts of the going constructivist narrative, existed in the form of abstract concepts organized in conceptual frameworks. Having been a middle and high school science teacher for a dozen years, I was beginning to ask others and myself pointed questions including: “How does turning the tap on a burette during a titration help high school chemistry students learn about acids and bases generally and about pH specifically?” or “How is turning the burette tab related to writing out a formula such as pH = – log[H₃O]⁺?” Clearly, at their very heart such questions concern the psychophysical (body–mind) problem. Standard educational psychology, concerned with the development of the mental, has not been able to provide any useful theory about the relationship between practical activity and anything that might be denoted as mental or conceptual.