TEACHER'S DIPLOMA COURSE

TEACHER'S DIPLOMA COURSE
WELCOME TO THE COURSE'
During this module, you will be exploring different concepts such as: learning processes/ acquisition/ education and teaching, among others. Remember, you as a participant in the course, will have to do all the thinking, discussing,
talking and working.
INTRODUCTION:
The process of education is one of the most important and complex of all human endeavors. A popular notion is that education is something carried out by one person, a teacher, standing in front of a class and transmitting information to a group of learners who are all willing and able to absorb it. This view, however, simplifies what is a highly complex process involving an intricate interplay between the learning process itself, the teacher's
intentions and actions, the individual personalities of the learners.~ thei r
culture and background, the learning environment and a host of other variables. The successful educator must be one who understands the complexities of the teaching-learning process and can draw upon this knowledge to act in ways which empower learners both within and beyond the classroom situation.
(The following is an excerpt from Psychology for Language Teachers):
IThe positivist school
Psychology as a discipline of study grew directly out of philosophy. However, many of the pioneers of this fledgling subject in the last decades of the nineteenth century saw the path to acceptance and respectability as lying with the natural sciences. Thus, in seeking to bring scientific rigor to its methods of enquiry, early psychologist abandoned their focus on the human mind in their attempts to understand and predict human behavior. Instead, they sought to find the principles of human learning by investigating the behavior of animals lower down the biological hierarchy of the animal kingdom, under rigorously defined conditions. This led to an adherence to an experimental methodology which is part of a philosophical form of enquiry known as "logical positivism". Basically, this approach begins with the premise that knowledge and facts exist within the real world and can' be discovered by setting up experi.ments in which conditions are carefully controlled and where hypotheses are set up and tested.
It led in turn to the dominance of a view of psychology which could accept only empirical data as evidence that a phenofT\enon was occurring, and which rejected anything which could not be seen and/or measured as unscientific. Thus, for many years the predominant view in Western psychology was that efforts should be concentrated upon trying to understand how organisms lower down the hierarchy learned to perform simple tasks; for example, how rats learned their way through mazes to obtain food. It was assumed that the
lessons learned from this could then be fairly easily- applied to higher-order human learning. The thoughts and feelings of humans were considered to be inaccessible to proper scientific investigation within this paradigm, and, therefore, were not investigated.