Adaptive thinkers For a Pedagogy of complexity

Abstract

Assuming that the main purpose of education is allowing the learner to take charge of the own personal construction of meaning, it will be necessary to move the focus from the results to the psychogenesis of knowledge and of its structures. In this direction, the thoughts on the origin, the development and
the current state of the own structures of meaning, as on the need of a continuous reorganization of the mental models (cognitive flexibility) and of crossing a certain informative unit from different directions (multiple representations of the information), have definitely a fundamental importance.
As a consequence, one of the pedagogical challenges is the teaching of the complexity in a cognitively tractable way and preparing students to be flexibly adaptive thinkers, also through the support of mindtools actuating and facilitating the critical thinking and the attainment of advanced learning goals (such as
the control of complex concepts and the ability of using the acquired knowledge in situations that are different from the initial ones).