BSU, Belarus
Yaroshevich Andrey Olegovich,
BSU, Belarus
The conception of personality-centered education is an approach which allows to promote cognitive abilities of students.
Forming an individual educational path helps activate the learner’s inner motivation [1] which makes the teaching material personally relevant. This advances a deeper material comprehension and consequently a more long-sustained memory retention.
But personality-centered education requires the teacher to know the student’s personality.
If a group is not large – 4-7 persons – this knowing happens naturally: the teacher knows everybody by name in 2 or 3 classes.
If the group is more numerous, then the teacher will at best know the students by name by the beginning of the term exams, when it is already late to build up an individual educational path.
This issue may be partially solved with the aid of a questionnaire which is implemented by the author of the article within the ATutor system developed by us [2].
But even in this case memorizing of the name – recognition of the student (generation of a neural connection between the student’s name, their person, and a record in a database) happens only within a month.
This process can be speeded up by the user interface conception under the working name given by the author Prosopon Interface which was prompted by the Ancient philosophy.
So, for example, Boethius writes: “The people who each are recognized due to specific lineaments (form) began to be called “person” (faces) by the Romans, and “prosopon” (πρόσωπον) by the Greeks”.
As defined by Boethius, this refers to an outer recognition; “prosopon” is what is recognizable: those specific and qualitatively identified lineaments by which a person can be recognized in a crowd.
Prosopon originally meant "face" or "mask" and derives from the Greek theatre where actors on a stage wore masks to reveal their character and emotional state to the audience.
The opposite to “prosopon” is “hypostasis” (greek: ὑπόστασις) which is the underlying state or underlying substance and is the fundamental reality that supports all else.
This conception is based on the spatial memory, i.e. the person’s capability to memorize the exact spatial arrangement and other orienting points [4,5].
Its essence is the following: the teacher sees a database not as a table but as a photo of the group taken in one of the first classes. Students are in the habit of taking the same seats each time. During a semester the teacher would see the same picture at lectures which would also come into their view upon downloading the database in the form of a photo.
The photo is divided into fragments corresponding to the image of each student. After aiming a cursor at the photo a subscript will appear under it – the student’s full name (and probably some other characteristics, e.g. the operating system on their computer).
After clicking on the picture the student’s personal page will open which contains their questionnaire data obtained with the aid of the ATutor system [2].
By means of such an interface the teacher recognizes each student in the third-fourth class, and not only at the outer level (πρόσωπον) but also a little at the inner level (ὑπόστασις), which gives a possibility to plan the education process based on the individual characteristics of everybody’s personality thereby making this process as comfortable as possible for each student.
A demo version of this system implementation can be found at the following web-sites:
prosopon.yaroshevich.com
prosopon.studentweb.cc
1. Khutorskoy A. V. Methodology of personality-oriented education. How to teach everyone differently?:Teacher's Manual. M.: Vlados-Press, 2005.
2. Yaroshevich A. O. Software complex of personality-centered education support ATutor. ENGINEERING- PEDAGOGICAL EDUCATION: PROBLEMS AND PATHS OF DEVELOPMENT//International research and practice conference. Minsk, May 16–17, 2013. p.69.
http://mrk-bsuir.by/ru/system/files/lib/_2.pdf
3. Boethius. “The Consolation of Philosophy” and other essays. M., 1990, p. 172.
4. https://www.britannica.com/science/spatial-memory.
5. Johnson, E.; Adamo-Villani, N. (2010). "A Study of the Effects of Immersion on Short-term Spatial Memory". Engineering and Technology. 71: 582–587.