'The Problems and Possibilities of Applied Systems Thinking’

Schedule

Tue Jul 05 2022 at 05:00 pm to 06:30 pm

Location

University of South Australia City West Campus | Adelaide, SA

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'From Multimodal Analysis to Wisdom-Cultivating Pedagogy: The Problems and Possibilities of Applied Systems Thinking’
About this Event

UniSA Education Futures Visiting Research Fellowship Program supported by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Enterprise, and sponsored by Mem Fox supported by Australian Literacy Educators Association, proudly present a Keynote Lecture by Professor Karen Coats

There is perhaps no more implicit end-goal or hope for education than that it will result in wisdom. As teachers and scholars, we want the knowledge and understanding we impart to our students to lead to something beyond measurable improvements in literacy levels or test scores. In fact, as the people most harmed by coloniality and modernity know in their bones, greater scientific and technical knowledge unaccompanied by social wisdom has given rise to an ever-growing list of seemingly intractable global problems. But can we teach wisdom? Do we even agree with what wisdom means? Romanticist turned psychoanalytic critic turned researcher in the cognitive humanities Mark Bracher proposes that with a capacious definition of wisdom and a set of pedagogical practices that foreground systems thinking, we can in fact cultivate the wisdom needed to solve social problems. His proposals seem attractive and compelling until we put them in conversation with those of Vanessa Machado De Oliveira, who might see them as one more attempt to treat complex predicaments that must be confronted as complicated problems that can be solved. By bringing their diverse perspectives into a conversation about Alexis Deacon's picture book I Am Henry Finch and Kate Samworth's Aviary Wonders Inc. Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual. Renewing the World's Bird Supply Since 2051, we can probe the ways in which the multimodal analysis of complex picture books may offer new insights into how we might reach toward a wisdom-cultivating pedagogy as well as what problems we might face along the way.


Suggested pre-reads (optional of course, as I will summarize the relevant bits in my talk):

Hospicing Modernity, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Bracher, M. Foundations of a Wisdom-Cultivating Pedagogy: Developing Systems Thinking across the University Disciplines. Philosophies 2021, 6, 73.https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies6030073

Biography: Karen Coats is the co-editor of five essay collections and author of three books on literature for young readers, the most recent being The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature, which offers a comprehensive introduction to the history, forms, genres, and theoretical concerns of youth literature. She has also written over 40 journal articles and book chapters on diverse subjects ranging from psychoanalytic theory to alphabet books to cognitive poetics to the development of the neoliberal subject in American children’s books to visual conceptual metaphors. Her work on children’s poetry has been translated into Chinese and Russian, and she has given invited keynote lectures in Sweden, Thailand, Russia, Taiwan, and China as well as here at Cambridge and in the US. Prior to her appointment at Cambridge, she taught at Illinois State University for over twenty years, where she directed or served on the dissertation committees of some thirty doctoral students who now hold academic posts around the world. She is the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and has been a research fellow at two Seminars in Christian Scholarship at Calvin College. She holds a PhD in Human Sciences from George Washington University.


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Where is it happening?

University of South Australia City West Campus, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide, Australia

Event Location & Nearby Stays:

Tickets

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University of South Australia- Education Futures

Host or Publisher University of South Australia- Education Futures

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