What is a field, a discipline? What does it mean to “learn” something

05/03/2015
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, PhD
Professor & Director, Common Core
University of Hong Kong
What is a field, a discipline?
What does it mean to “learn” something?
Dispositions: Word~Number~Image~Movement
What is expertise?
What capacities do we want our students to enhance?
What kinds of teaching do we most enjoy?
What is a trans-discipline?
General Education?
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05/03/2015
Scientific and
Technological
Literacy
Humanities
Global
China
Dwelling in the Digital
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We are living in a distributed space of immediate
neighborhoods.
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The learning process, which has fallen into the computer, has
left us the incandescent joy of invention.
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Multimedia: Writing, Drawing, Music, Film, Websites
Close reading, viewing, listening
Groups at Play
Field Work + Experiments (on and off campus)
Attending to the Image
Movement and Theater
Ordinary Objects
Using All the Senses
Reflectivity
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05/03/2015
Experimenting, Playing,
Immersing, Defining, ReOrienting, Assessing,
Iterating…
Networking Expertise
Invent Your Language
◦ Plussing (Pixar)
◦ Smallifying (Electronic
Arts)
◦ Crumpling
(Gehry)
…the division of knowledge into snippets called
“disciplines”….A river, for example…but how can we unite these
classifications, dissolve these borders…pack up the
departments in one suitcase and make all the high-level
experts—each of whom thinks they process the exclusive
definition of intelligence—listen to each other?
~Serres
Architecture~Philosophy~Education
How is it possible to develop a new inventive faculty that would
allow the [educator] to use the possibilities of the new
technology without aspiring to uniformity…?
It has it out with the event…it appeals to the other to invent, in
turn, the event, sign, consign or countersign: advanced by an
advance made at the other—and maintenant [education].
~J. Derrida
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05/03/2015
Since code establishes a set of correspondences between two
systems that must be translated into each other, it possesses
the two faces we need for the free circulation of flows…the code
is a singular, living being: the code is a concrete human being.
As an individual who is unique but also generic, who am I?
An indefinite, decipherable, and undecipherable cipher, open
and closed, social and discreet, accessible-inaccessible, public
and private, intimate and secretive…I exist, therefore I am a
code.
~Serres
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