advises, leans on Situated Learning (Lave and Wenger), Group Dynamics (Tucker), Collaborative Principle (Grice) and “know-how” i.e. tacit knowledge (Polanyi).
Valerie Wilkinson, Faculty of Informatics, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, JapanValerie A. Wilkinson received her B.A. and M.A in Classics at the University of Hawaii. She first went to Japan in 1980. She chose to get her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Culture, with an emphasis on Medieval Romance, Philosophy, and Allegorical Exegesis. Her rule was to study, to the extent possible, exactly what she chose. Although she was a Medievalist, she made the conscious decision to move into the field of Communication, where living systems and experiential learning are important. While at The Open University of Japan, she worked with distance education and wrote about Gregory Bateson’s “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.”
One line in Bateson’s Mind and Nature (7), “Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality,” confirmed her teaching practice of engineering experiential learning for whole persons in whole systems. Putting her Classical and Medieval base together with a growing fascination with General Systems Theory has given her viable resources, to apply paradoxical wisdom from the ancients to the shifting scene in the STEM educational environment of Faculty of Informatics at Shizuoka University in Hamamatsu, Japan.
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As the presenter, well, I got “here” somehow through a “perfect storm” of complex problems. The main point I hear me saying is that the workshop “flipped” classroom creating poster presentations as “project” is an excellent way to give participants opportunities to solve problems on many levels, in personal development, role development, interpersonal skills, and community – without making those communication competences an explicit part of the class. They are here to get a grip in Electrical/Electronic engineering with a professor in their major field. In answer to the question “Should the Control Group be a run as STANDARD English Class to compare with the Experimental Group?” the answer is a resounding No, because we know for certain that the active and engaged workshop is alive while the lecture is static and “dead.”