Editorial

 

Author: D. Terziivanov, Editor-in-chief of JCM

 

Long time ago the process of teaching (passing on knowledge) and learning (gathering knowledge and skills) has lost its one-way nature, i.e. from a teacher to a learner. The one who is teaching is also being taught, i.e. he/she learns something from the student as a feedback. That concerns the process of adjusting and adapting the educator’s teaching skills, i.e. the ability of providing understandable teaching material, and the process of assessing the optimal amount of the knowledge (information) to be passed on as well. This is of great value in a time when the global information expansion is no longer a phenomenon, but rather a self-accelerating process of daily accumulation of new knowledge. If once Pestalozzi had been able to justify the process of learning and the motivation for education with his famous concept of the four spheres5, today this task is very complicated, although Pestalozzi’s concept remains a starting point. New areas of knowledge have emerged, such as educational psychology and cognitive psychology, which subject in particular is investigation of the process of how the ones who learn, e.g. the students, acquire the passed on knowledge, how they perceive and understand it, how they memorize and rationalize it, and finally, how it is then applied for solving specific problems in practice (real life). (...)