Every act of teaching rests on an implicit theory of what a mind is and how it changes. This seminar makes that theory explicit. Students will read, closely and in sequence, a set of foundational and contemporary works spanning constructivist developmental psychology, information-processing models of memory, Cognitive Load Theory, and the fast-growing literature on cognitive offloading and AI-mediated learning. The course treats these bodies of work as a single conversation: classic accounts of how children construct knowledge (Piaget, Vygotsky) meet architectural models of working memory (Baddeley, Sweller) and meet the newest empirical debates about what happens to learning, memory, and self-regulation when thinking can be delegated to an external system.
The seminar is explicitly comparative and historical as well as contemporary: no reading stands alone. Each week pairs a foundational text with one or more contemporary studies that either extend, test, or complicate it. Students leave the course able to trace a direct intellectual line from Piaget's stages to today's debates about generative AI in classrooms, and to evaluate new claims about 'AI and cognition' against a century of prior theory rather than in a vacuum.
- verantwortliche Lehrperson: Irene-Angelica Chounta