Friday, August 3, 2012

Transfer, Transfer, Transfer

"Bear in mind that we all are teachers,
we all are students,
and that to “Transfer
is the process of moving an object, symbol, or idea
from one closed system to another,
when the two systems contain similar aspects or some similar relationship,
yet retaining a similar meaning (Madsen and Madsen, 1998)."

If you move an object such as a cheese grater from the kitchen into the bedroom, you can paint it and create an affordable earring holder. A symbol of the crucifixion has been generalized to represent Christianity. Because you remember memorizing the names of bones by chaining the information, you might transfer that same procedural idea to teach a new song to people and find success by presenting one line at a time and linking the lines together.

The theory concerning transfers of learning originated in behavioralism. A "transfer of practice" occurs whenever past experience informs and influences learning and performance in new and different situations. Slouching over your new guitar at home will later teach your body to sit with poor posture in a guitar class. You might transfer a learned confidence while playing guitar in front of your classmates when later performing publicly at a local coffee shop. Perhaps you observe how performing those different songs affected the audience, and so later choose to sing "What a Wonderful World" rather than "Yesterday" to elevate a patient's mood.

What is learned in one classroom should apply to another. And your life. And your future. Dressed in a suit and tie, Dr. Cliff Madsen grins while stepping through his classroom doorway and says everyday, "Ladies, gentlemen; take out pen and paper. Write a transfer!" Teaching yourself to think critically both in depth and creatively implies the ability to thoroughly understand a single topic and to also adaptively apply that understanding in endless functional purposes and intellectual pursuits. Rather then seeing the world as several distinct textbooks, practice seeing the world as the internet, rich with encyclopedias, video resources, social media and - downloadable textbook PDFs - that inform "vertical" depth with all possible "horizontal" breadth: connections, references, combinations, metaphors, theories, opinions, song lyrics, and so on. Barry Commoner contributes, "Everything is related to everything else." 

Madsen, Charles H. and Madsen, Clifford K. (1998). Teaching / Discipline: A Positive Approach for Educational Development. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, Inc.

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