Reading Plan for LIBR 250

I'm taking Design and Implementation of Instructional Strategies for Information Professionals, and one of our continuing assignments is to do broad reading in educational theory. I'm going to blog my reading notes here.

Taking Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design as my focal point (This is a text I have read and that we are using where I work so it seemed a logical focal point) I set out to read various supporting texts from its bibliography. In the first phase of my reading I wanted to get as close to the foundation of their thought as I could, so I limited myself to works in the bibliography published before 1970. The assumption being that this would be the work of their predecessors upon which their own work would rely and/or respond to.

The first work that I randomly selected was Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing by Jerome S Bruner.

“On Perceptual Readiness” pg. 7-14
This very dense and deeply psychological work begins with a review of scientific and psychological studies of perception. He maintains and defends two theories of perception:
1. Perception involves an act of categorization
2. Perception is somehow a representation of the world and therefore predictive
in varying degrees
While these theories may seem obvious to some, Bruner makes it clear that neither of these two claims can easily be assumed.

I was especially interested in Bruner’s discussion of categorization given its prominence in Library and Information Science. He takes us back to the level of primitive or autochthonous categories such as: motion, causation, intention, identity, equivalence, time and space (very close to Kant’s a priori categories). Though even here there is some question given the phenomenon of synesthesia (one remembers Nabokov’s colors being associated with letters)