HEA (UK) New to Teaching workshops

New-to-teaching

Starting teaching in higher education can be a challenge whatever your background, age, qualifications or discipline.

What we all have in common is the wish to do the best for our students, to convey our passion for our discipline or profession, and to challenge our students as well as ourselves to become more effective, critical, enquiring and reflective learners.

During 2014-15 the HEA is holding discipline-specific and theme-specific new-to-teaching events as part of the HEA enhancement event series. These sessions will especially benefit those in teaching only roles, e.g. teachers engaged in ad hoc delivery, postgraduate and PhD students involved in teaching, and learning support practitioners.

19 February 2015	New-to-teaching in STEM	London
19 February 2015	New-to-teaching in Computing	London
5 March 2015	New-to-teaching practice and studio-based disciplines	Belfast
25 March 2015	New-to-teaching practice-based learning	Glasgow
21 May 2015	New-to-teaching in the Social Sciences	Leeds
4 June 2015	New-to-teaching in MSOR	London
11 June 2015	New-to-teaching quantitative methods to non-maths students	Nottingham
2 July 2015	New-to-teaching qualitative research methods	Cardiff
2 July 2015	New-to-teaching in laboratory-based subjects	Cardiff

Related links

Reading Lakoff and Johnson

Cover via Amazon

Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson
HarperCollins Publishers (Dec 1, 1999)
Paperback – 624 pages
ISBN-10: 0465056741
ISBN-13: 9780465056743

Having a break from the later book on maths to go back to the basics.

Fundamental assumptions - of the book

• The mind is inherently embodied
• Thought is mostly unconscious
• Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical

First two are immediately not problematical for me - the latter I am not sure about yet - am attached to the three processes of induction, deduction and abduction (metaphor) - so that is the challenging one for me.

Also in the introduction is a paragraph which says that - reason is evolutionary - by which they mean that abstract reasoning is based on lower processes - which I would agree with but they conclude with a statement of a continuum from animal to human - I am confused here - part of me is attracted by theories which do that - ie language development is based on learned conceptual building blocks rather than inherited via a language acquisition device - at the same time I have always been attracted by the Vygotskian notion of the natural and cultural development meaning that there is a break between animal and human through the engagement with society/culture - similar to the Lacanian concept of language as the entry into a different sort of being.