Professional Background
I did my doctoral work at The University of Chicago in the interdisciplinary Committee on Human Development. My dissertation was completed in conjunction with the research I was involved in for ten years at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, investigating the developmental outcome of premature infants. I have been teaching psychology at College of DuPage for the last several years, as well as working as a research consultant on the Innovation Incubator, a relatively new program at the college supporting systematic investigation of connections between teaching practices and learning outcomes.
Philosophy of Education
I believe that formal educational programs need to enlist the spontaneous drive that characterizes human adaptation and growth across the lifespan, stimulating students to use their own wealth of experiences to test the explanatory usefulness of academic concepts. I am a psychologist who has always been as interested in the human capacity to feel as to think, and I believe a formal educational curriculum needs to facilitate ongoing learning in both cognitive and affective domains. I believe that the most critical means for accomplishing our educational objectives are to foster dialogue between teachers and students and between students and students.
I am very interested in the work of educators who write about the need to move beyond decomposed and decontextualized curricula organized around (standardized) objective testing. These educators talk about developing authentic assessments as a way of moving towards a thinking curriculum where so-called habits of mind are fostered in our students. Unfortunately, much of the talk these days about becoming a learning college is about "customizing" education, creating what James Traub in an article in The New Yorker (10/10/97) referred to as a "Drive-Thru U." While developing resources for students to "do" school any time and any place is important, I do not think it is what we should mean now by the challenge of building a real learning college.
Perspective on Psychology
I believe psychology can claim a central location on the map of scholarly disciplines, informed by and informing the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. As a discipline, I believe psychology needs to be equally interested in the human being as subject and object, i.e., it must work from both first-person and third-person perspectives. In the objective, third-person terms of natural history, psychology tells us we are members of a unique species, whose evolution of a symbolic capacity has profoundly transformed our biological adaptation. Nevertheless, in current natural science terms, we are just another example of complex, dynamic, self-organizing systems, living on the edge of chaos. Yet as symbol users, our self-organizing efforts produce a unique form of consciousness, self-consciousness. It is our subjective, first-person selves---the characters of our self-consciousness, made and remade with each other by the stories we learn to tell, in the language we learn to speak---who meet head-on both the possibilities and the dangers of our unique biological adaptation.
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Liberal Arts · SRC 1520 · 630-942-2800, x53021
browning@cdnet.cod.edu
Updated 16 Jun 98
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