Critical Perspectives on Cognitive Science in Education

Description

This module invites students to critically examine the cultural and contextual assumptions that underpin cognitive science and its application in education. While other modules have explored the mechanisms and strategies that support learning, this one turns the lens outward - asking how learners’ social identities, cultural norms, institutional settings, and lived experiences shape cognition and learning processes. Students will explore critiques of "universal" models of learning and engage with alternative or complementary perspectives, including sociocultural theory, culturally responsive pedagogy, decolonising education, and indigenous knowledge systems. They will examine how factors like language, values, power, race, gender, and epistemology intersect with cognition, and how educational practices informed by cognitive science can either support or marginalise learners depending on how they are implemented. The goal of this module is to foster intellectual humility, critical reflection, and cultural responsiveness in future educators and researchers. It encourages students to not only evaluate what cognitive science explains well, but also to recognise its limitations - and to consider how broader human experiences and contexts might be more fully integrated into how we understand learning.