This web page is designed as a place to collect and generate ideas, experiences, and connections useful to developing a partnership between the Titagya program to build preschools and kindergartens in Northern Ghana and the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program, at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, outside of Philadelphia Pennsylvania.  To begin, the partnership is focusing on exploring cross-cultural curriculum development, with a focus on the themes of conflict resolution and the role of creativity, interaction, and play in learning. 

Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education students are invited to post notes and reflections based on field work they are doing with young learners. These will be found in the discussion forum below.

"The quest for eternal life, or at least prolonged youthfulness, has now migrated from the outer fringes of alternative medicine to the halls of Harvard Medical School" ... Quest for a long life gains scientific respect

I wonder if the involved researchers at the Harvard Medical School and elsewhere are paying any attention to the broader implications of related research

Paul Krugman's The Politics of Spite is focused on a small issue (current Republican party practices) but speaks importantly to a much more general one, the use in politics of "scorched-earth tactics."  So too with a recent news article: Another Landlord Worry: Is the Elevator Kosher?  Describing a current controversy about shabbas practices, it quotes a New Yorker as saying “Just because there is one opinion doesn’t mean that it is everyone’s opinion. One of the wonderful things about Judaism is that there are competing opinions about everything.” 

Brain and Inquiry: Praxis III Independent Study

Researcher: Brielle Stark, Bryn Mawr College '12

Research Questions:

• Are open-ended activities engaging to students?
• Do open-ended activities transfer knowledge to students?
• Is there a difference between teacher and student perceptions of open-ended activities?

Goals:

I've been thinking a lot this summer not only about my own story of myself but also about some general ways of thinking about ... selves, interpersonal relations, inquiry, humanity, and our relation to the universe.  Central to all is has been the notion of "looping," a recurrent and infinitely extended process in which existing structures and forms interact with each other and with an underlying persistent randomness to generate new structures and forms.    

I found that Allison's lesson was interesting. I'm not a biology person, so having a lesson that was grounded in my life experiences was a welcolmed change. Since I'm teaching kindergarten this year I will have to mofify the lesson.  In the beginning of the year I will ask them to draw of picture of what they want to do in school. I will then ask them to draw a picture of what scares them about school. I then want them to draw of picture of what they want me to do in school.  I will then ask them to share their pictures in a group and I will walk around discussing their pictures with the kids. Afterwards I will bring them to the floor and with volunteers, create a chart recording children ideas about their pictures. Finally, I will summarize the leasson and chart.