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Symbolic Gestalt
Learning in human cognition, behavior and adaptive response rests upon holistic integration of stimuli, knowledge and repertoiries of behavior that can be deemed situationally appropriate to the behavior setting in which such patterning is elicited and observed. This integration requires a holistic pattern recognition that can be said in a technical sense to consist of natural human symbolic cognition, culturally modified, linguistically and behaviorally expressed, and this pattern recognition process underlies all forms of learning and can only be called symbolic gestalt in its overall structure.
The teaching and learning methods and techniques adopted and adapted within the Lewis Education framework are largely based upon modification and extension of symbolic framing methodologies derived from comparative cross-cultural research in the anthropology of knowledge, and further developed in relation to the problem of second-language acquisition in English. The refinement of these methods clearly falls within a Piagetian framework of cognitive development, the framework of the symbolic-behavioral differentiation of the phenomenal, dynamic field, and integrates a Witkin-Goodenough framework of alternative cognitive styles and the problem of relative field dependency as well as a Gardner approach to multi-modal learning channels within the framework of multiple intelligences.
This framework can be bent successfully in two directions--towards meeting the requirements of special educational needs of children who are marginally dysfunctional in education, and those needs of children who are upon the other extreme of exhibiting high intelligence and mental maturity at an early age.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
