Jesus, Jerome Bruner, and the Apple Macintosh. Yes, they are connected.
In this short study we will see how Jesus used modern learning theory to school one of his disciples. It should give us a new perspective of how good of a teacher Jesus is. It’s rather amazing.
Let’s begin with Jerome Bruner who will celebrate his 100th birthday in October.
Bruner is interesting. He was Professor of Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at Harvard. He studied how children learned. In 1966, based on his research, Bruner proposed three modes of how knowledge is acquired, stored and used by our brains: Enactive, Iconic, and Symbolic.
The Enactive mode of learning is based on action. Think of muscle memory. Knowledge developed through action and constructed from motor skills. Examples of this would be riding a bicycle, typing, playing the guitar, etc. This is a very powerful learning mode. I learned how to juggle three objects in my high school Physics class. Decades later, even though I don’t practice, I can still pick up three oranges and keep them in the air.
The Iconic mode is imaged based. This is visual memory. Information is stored visually in the form of images, in other words, something that acts as a summarizing image and has meaning for you. Computer Icons are the obvious example for this learning mode. The juggler on the left could be used as an Icon for a juggling game on your computer.
I am old enough to have interfaced with computers using things like punch cards and a command line interface on a VT100 terminal. In those days the computers were large and kept in a digital Holy of Holies (clean room) where only the technical priesthood had access. We had no mouse.
In the late 1970’s while I was attending Stanford one of my friends was working at Xerox Research Park in Palo Alto, California. There, I beheld the Xerox Alto. It was radical. In essence it was a very early personal computer. The researchers at Xerox had keyed into Bruner’s work and enabled both an Enactive learning mode through the use of a mouse, and an Iconic learning mode through the use of the Graphical User Interface. Years later the Apple Macintosh would be released and become the first commercially successful product to incorporate the elements used in the Xerox Alto.
Sorry, I digressed, this was an incredible moment when I saw the future (and it was good).
The Symbolic mode of learning is language-based. Knowledge is stored as words, numbers and concepts. This is a much more conceptual mode. It allows one to think beyond the realm of physical images. Look at the juggler on the right. I have replaced the black balls with symbols. We have moved into the symbolic mode by adding a conceptual dimension to the juggler on the right. We see him as someone who is trying to juggle family, finances and time.
Bruner’s suggestion for learning new material was to progress from the enactive to iconic to symbolic. He was a proponent of using discovery and encouraging the active participation of the student.
In part 2 we look at how Jesus used all three of these learning modes with a doubting Thomas.