Brain teasers: putting up a fight Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Our underlying question echoes many teachers’ concern: how can we motivate today’s students in our increasingly technological era? Considering that the current educational system dates back to the Industrial Revolution, it is wholly unfit to grapple with students’ interests and engagements. There are scholars who liken the educational organisation to an assembly line, according to which pupils are grouped in a class by “date of manufacture”, disregarding all personal traits and constraints that necessarily distinguish all pupils and students alike, be it at Basic Education and Secondary School or at Higher Education. Despite growing discussions and numerous attempts to change systems throughout the world, we are still obsessed with the use of course books (and thus encourage publishers’ manipulative presence in education), with standardising testing, with the distinction between bright/ academic/ high-mark and non-bright/ non-academic/ low-mark students and with a number of unfathomable dichotomies. We seek to discuss a number of inconsistencies we perceive in the Portuguese education system and the manner in which they may hamper an up-to-date educational approach and prevent the dethroning of the prevailing mainstream education paradigm. The current Finnish system, considered to be the best in Europe (if not the world) for various consecutive years, may serve as the role model, stressing out that standardisation does not equal quality no more than frenetic evaluation equals acquisition of knowledge and lifelong skills. Critical thinking (CT) may entail the answer and enable us as teachers to tease students’ brains, as well as ours, bringing in a sense of purpose and the bigger picture to have a saying in the game. But will a selection of classroom strategies and activities that bring about CT suffice if we are confronted with a blind administrative and bureaucratic monster? Can teachers and students alike put up a fight? Can our brains be teased to forward motion?

publication date

  • January 1, 2017