Connections: Investigating Reality

Author: Marion Brady and Howard Brady

"Connections: Investigating Reality" is a free course of study designed primarily for adolescents and older students, working in small, cooperative groups. The program's overarching aim is expanding learner ability to "make sense" of reality, an aim the authors consider essential to the achievement of all other legitimate aims of a good education. This curriculum can be implemented by schools and programs as a prerequisite course which builds the thinking and analysis skills that students need to thrive in later coursework and individual study. The creators are Marion and Howard Brady, long-time educators with deep experience in curriculum theory and teacher education.

Highlights:

Big ideas that shaped Connections - Investigating Reality:

• The future will be more complicated than the present. Old solutions won’t solve new problems.
• To solve problems, you need to make sense of the real world.
• In the real world, everything connects. You’ll need to understand “systems.”
• Because they’re the creators of all sciences and all arts, human societies are the most important systems you can study.
• Making sense of systems requires organized thought. School subjects aren’t very good organizers.
• Thinking about ways to organize thought improves how you do it.
• For sense-making purposes, the real, everyday world is a better “textbook” than textbooks about it.
• Everything you learn should be useful, right here, right now. Writing makes you think. (Keep a journal.)
Dialog makes you think. (Work with others.)
• We’re not going to tell you much. We’re just going to give you a series of things to do and let you teach yourself how to make more sense of systems.

Links:

• Connections (link to free PDF download) - http://www.marionbrady.com/Connections-InvestigatingReality-ACourseofStudy.asp

Reference:
Brady, M. and Brady, H. (2009). Connections: Investigating Reality.

Submitted by Dana Bennis on: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - 4:16 pm

Tags for this entry:
curriculum, critical thinking, systems theory