Vee heuristics, concept mapping and learning patterns : merging metacognitive tools and learning processes to improve facilitation of learning with primary children

Abstract

Education is a journey and a very personal experience which may be enlightening for some but “merely an un-engaging rite passage into adulthood” (Pinar ed., 1998, p.135) for others. Rousseau’s writings emphasised the importance of making sense of the world in our own way: “Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking and feeling peculiar to itself: nothing can be more foolish than to seek to substitute our ways for them.” (Rousseau in Boyd’s translation, 1956, pp. 38-39) Nonetheless, the transmission model of education is still prevailing in many schools with children being lost to us. Even if students make it academically, Pinar argues that they “graduate, credentialed but crazed, erudite but fragmented shells of human possibility” (Pinar, ed., 1995, p. 519). In view of this reality, one starts to ask, “How can we help the children experience a journey of education which instills a desire to learn, reflect and act critically? [excerpt]