Book review
As I have started teaching my oldest child’s math course this year, this book became a necessary addition to my study. It was proposed by the school, as consonant with their constructivist philosophy.
Although already a radical constructivist on many levels, from my philosophical affinity to phenomenology and constructivist epistemology, and my deep appreciation of constructivist pedagogy, to my more foundational views that lean towards semantic constructivism, ultrafinitism, and the mathematics and computer science of constructivist logics… still there are spaces where this book was an important contribution to my study.
This book provides many great leads into the study of neuroplasticity, and in many ways it is an antidote to the toxic influence of books like Kevin Mitchell’s Innate. For those of us whose following of the field has mostly focused on the functional and neuroarchitectonic study of neuroplasticity, it was good to get leads into the more holistic pedagogical research that looks at it in real settings of learning.
A brilliant (and integral) part of Dr. Boaler’s work concerns the relationship of pedagogy to structural inequality, and I am so excited to study this more deeply. This book sketches some of the important findings here, but it is clear it is an area ripe with research opportunity and I have no doubt the leads in this book will guide me to many great works in the field.
My only disappointment in the work was towards the end, where I felt that it’s optimism and encouragement shrank from the research and became a little propagandistic and anecdotal. Here, as seems common in the literature on mindfulness and mindset, there were several cases of promotion of positivity to the point that they became avoidance techniques. These instances were brief, and there were senses where they could be seen as attempting to express earnest evaluation, so it does not detract much from my view of the whole work. This is just an area I am acutely aware of the dangers of, and I do wish that works such as these made clearer these concerning tendencies that seem to arise pretty naturally in the metaprogramming literature.
- Goodreads rating – 4.14
- SUMMARY – Nathan