Understandings of the Material World
Does it matter whether or not we consider theory-practice in our work developing lessons or curricula? One way to think about theory-practice is that no practice exists without theory and no theory exists without practice. In other words, one presupposes the other. In the examples featured in Understandings of the Material World, theory of teaching and learning (the Vygotskian Theoretical Learning Approach, VTLA) was used to design and develop practical actions, activities, processes (cultural tools) that lead teaching and learning. Developing ways to create theory from practice and practice from theory can be thought of as both a bottom-up and top down process.
The Understandings of the Material World series of problem spaces for students and teachers to work together was developed for use in teacher preparation courses and is still being used for that purpose. That said, it is meant to be a tool for teaching-learning how to design workshops for formal and non-formal contexts using Vygotskian theoretical learning approaches.
Vygotsky and his colleagues (past and present) have provided one of the best paths to understand development and learning. They rejected the main assertions by didactic methods (e.g., development leads learning) and those of constructivist methods (e.g., learning is development). They asserted that learning can lead development – a radical idea even today – which means our growth is boundless and depends on our teaching-learning experiences not on our DNA (to put it too simply). In the Material World approach to urban environmental consciousness, we develop partially completed units so that new teachers (including future and currently practicing teachers and teacher educators) can explore ways of developing teaching and learning practices that are grounded in theory.
Go to the VTLA for Urban Environmental Consciousness
Go to the VTLA for Building Big Teaching and Learning Guides