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Education for creativity - and survival

A growing crisis in global human systems at all levels calls for a fundamental change in education. The tendency towards unreflective, conditioned, hierarchically-directed learning or decision-making should be replaced by communicative, reflective and insightful interaction, thus promoting individual, creative responses to the multiple needs of humanity. Plain Pair Group Teaching attempts to respond to the specific needs of the classroom while remaining fully attentive to the much wider concerns of a ‘planetary species’.

 

Plain Pair Group Teaching (Plain PGT)

Plain PGT is a practical method of communicative teaching and classroom management, initially developed for Japanese universities, which can be used with equal advantage in the foreign or second language classroom and in content ( immersion / CLIL / bilingual ) teaching. It can also be used to supplement the traditional lecture/tutorial system or school classroom teaching - in any language.

 

Creative discussion

Plain Pair Group Discussion (Plain PGD) is an application of the Plain Pair Group alternation of “home group” and “pair group” discussion which can be used in teacher development and faculty/academic development, in corporate or organisational awareness raising and in informal creative discussion groups.

 

Creativity and insight

The central aspect of creative discussion and Plain Pair Groups is the development of creativity, especially through recognising and giving importance to 'insight' as a means of awakening a capacity for correcting fundamental mistakes in the way we see the world and ourselves.

 

New paradigms of learning

‘Natural language learning’ or ‘language internalisation’, both first and second language, sees the learner as a fully aware, highly efficient and independent learner. ‘Natural learning’ in any area can be better understood through appropriate models as indicated by: ‘learning space’, ‘attentive silence’, ‘awakeness’, ‘light learning’ / ‘heavy learning’ and ‘silence’. This new paradigm draws on the creative insights of an emerging trans-disciplinary ‘world view’, reflecting the dynamic interrelationship among all members of a community and leading to a consciousness of the inherently holistic nature of the physical, social and psychological worlds. This highlights the need to move from a reductionist ‘separation paradigm’ to a new, dynamic, holistic ‘participation paradigm’.

 

Research projects and publications

Starting with a publication in 1993 (and an earlier book on Awareness Training in 1990), development of Plain Pair Group Teaching (Plain PGT) and Plain Pair Group Discussion (Plain PGD) has involved research in three Japanese universities (University of Niigata, University of Tsukuba and Nagoya University of Foreign Studies) and research projects over seven years funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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