Beach runs

Moving north in less than a month, I am trying to maximize my beach running by chasing the morning light along Västra stranden. Yesterday, I was even able to squeeze in a lunch run as the waves kept rolling in.

Today, I attended that APT-turned-lecture on cognitive perspectives on education, which I greatly appreciated, with my only reservation being the insistence that learning science is not a “perspective” but rather an entirely inductive enterprise. In fact, claims that something is not theoretical or in any way ideological are often an indication of the exact opposite. Unsurprisingly, it did not take many minutes before someone in the audience took the content as a vindication of their own views on education, emphasizing “hard work” and the importance of homework.

While I prefer to remain on the sidelines of these pedagogical debates, I think it is important that we all recognize our own biases and preferred interpretations. Just as “evidence-based policy-making” often becomes “policy-based evidence-making” in practice, translating cognitive research into educational practice inevitably involves values and priorities of its own.