One of the fertile minds of 20th century is that of Professor Jarome Bruner.He was born in 1915 and is reowned for his contribution towards the understanding of the development of human cognition.
He was an American psychologist and was influenced and nurtured by Gestalt psychology school of thought which investigates the learning by examination the perspections of the learner.
Children grow intellectually and relate Bruner's rich theory to classroom practice.Bruner's monumental work has been ,like that of Piaget's work ,directed to epistemology to study the development of knowledge.The depth of his investigations and billiance of his theoretical formulations are staggering.
Bruner (1964,1965,1966) emphasises the main purpose of Education is to learn skills and able to apply them in other situations.As supported by Lewton (1974) that, education is the selection of culture. Hence the School curricular should be organised so that children 's mastery of the basic skills and of the subject will make learning more advanced skills and easier.
Bruner's critique(1965) The Process of Education makes use of examples from teaching of scientific and mathematical concepts to illustrate basic principles that are applicable to all areas of teaching and learning.
Four central themes which assumed major roles in Bruner's theory of instructions are:
Theme 1:Learning activities should involve understanding of basic relationships in the structure of subject rather than merely knowing facts and techniques.Thus the ability to affectively relate one aspect of knowledge to another gives children a sense of direction and makes learning more exciting.This understanding of relationships also helps children to remember the material and transfer it to new learning situations .For example teaching of English grammar and parts of speech by teaching children to diagram sentences,or role plays in religious and moral subject.
Theme 2:Readiness for learning ,the concept give instructions in certain subjects and must postponed until the child has reached a certain level of maturity.Instead ,Bruner postulates that the foundations of any disciplines can be taught in a form and manner simple enough to be meaningful even to very young children.
In this regard Bruner and Piaget 's views are in total agreement in the argument that we can teach effectively only so long as we match the subject matter to the students cognitive level.More oftenly than not teachers apply rigid rules by deciding specific /strict chronological ages at which children are capable of learning certain concepts.
Theme 3:Bruner insists that schools place much more emphasis on the development of intuitive thinking. Intuitive thinking results in a hunch or educated guess,which may either be correct or wrong .It involves the ability to arrive at a reasonable but tentative formulations prior to any actual formal analysis.Bruner is not refering to be reliable on mainly guessing but should not be penalised for such responses.
Theme 4:Motivation which Bruner has credence that children can be motivated to learn .If teachers apply a stimulus for children to have the desire to learn and if it is effective ,then children 's desire to learn will be carried out of the classroom to the rest of the world. The best way to stimulate children is to make the material to be learned interesting so that the children will want to learn it. Artificial goals such as units (1,2,3/ A,B,C) or marks have little meaning in this regard and should be discouraged.
Views on the structure of Curricula:The Gestalt concepts of perceptual organisation are also basics to Bruner's tenet.He acknowledges that it is important to understand how a child perceives what he is learning.Thus teachers must structure the lessons so that children can quickly grasp the structure of a subjects(Bruner 1960). Teachers must show children how a subject relates to other subjects in meaniful ways.
Structure is both a product and a process.This is because it includes the subject's fundamental ideas as well as a way of perceiving the logical relationships between those ideas. In this way if it assists of learning and memorisation. We understand more if the material is logically organised ,and remember more if we can see how the various ideas relate to each other. The basic structure of any body of knowledge depends on three related aspects of learning.
The mode of representation,Economy and Power.These aspects ,however ,vary with the nature of the material, the age and the ability of the learner.
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