Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Series | Book | Chapter

196976

The attraction of neuropsychological findings in contemporary educational thinking, or feeling, emotion and relationship as blind spots in educational theory

Volker Kraft

pp. 119-129

Abstract

This chapter—mainly referring to the situation in Germany—consists of three parts: In the first section, the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix "neuro-" is ubiquitous today, and, therefore, concepts like "neuropedagogy" or "neurodidactics' seem to be in the mainstream of modern thinking. In the second part of this chapter, the perspective changes from the public discourse to the disciplinary discourse; a brief excursus into developmental psychiatry, neuropsychology and modern psychoanalysis will be used in order to demonstrate how results of neuroscientific research are integrated in their theoretical frameworks. These three disciplines have no difficulty to integrate neuroscientific findings because each of them possesses a systematic core composed of "native concepts". In contrast to them, educational theory has much more integration problems as to be shown in the third part. On the one hand, neuroscientific thinking seems to be able to conquer education rather easily and without great resistance especially in the fields of early childhood education, instruction and learning mainly by simplifying educational processes and by reducing the complexity of the educational task to a mere "relationship problem". On the other hand, this attraction of neuroscience in education could be understood as the reflection of a theoretical deficit in educational theory itself with the significance of affect and emotion not receiving proper attention.

Publication details

Published in:

Smeyers Paul, Depaepe Marc (2013) Educational research: the attraction of psychology. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 119-129

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-5038-8_8

Full citation:

Kraft Volker (2013) „The attraction of neuropsychological findings in contemporary educational thinking, or feeling, emotion and relationship as blind spots in educational theory“, In: P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational research: the attraction of psychology, Dordrecht, Springer, 119–129.