Education for Development

Education is an important catalyst that brings about national development and reasoning. The development of any country squarely depends on the sound education policy that has been put in place. A sound education system, however, cannot be seen to yield results unless a well drafted curriculum is drawn and implemented. This particularly scholarly piece of writing looks at the ideas of Jerome Bruner on effective learning and how such ideas can be put to use in a classroom situation for effective learning to take place.

For Bruner a child beginning at infancy develops through three stages namely enactive stage characterised by direct manipulation of objects without any internal representation of the objects, an iconic stage characterised by internal representation of external objects visually as images or icons, and a symbolic stage characterised by symbolic representation of external objects through words, formulas or other symbolic means. According to Bruner, J. (1996) a child goes through each of these three stages when growing up. This means that each time we are presenting new instruction to the students we should present it by going through these three stages. This therefore goes to explain that each time we are teaching we should first present a concept in the inactive stage involving direct manipulation of objects, then we re-introduce the concept in the iconic stage using some form of imagery, and finally we re-introduced the concept symbolical using words or formula or other notation.

Undoubtedly, learning is a very active process in which the student is directly involved in the manipulation of the content in the three modes of representation.