Learning Paths
“THE
SHERLOCK HOLMES STRATEGY”
MYSTERY
PAINTING – STEP 5
This
is a picture by the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967).
The
title is Conference at night.(*)
It’s
not much to confirm or reject your hypotheses and predictions,
is it? But that’s the evocative power of a work of art …
In
this activity you’ve used what we called the “Sherlock Holmes strategy”
– the ability to build hypotheses and predictions based on
evidence; or, put it in another way, the ability to use one’s own
general knowledge and personal experiences to interpret and make sense
of particular facts and situations. You gradually verify, keep,
reject or adjust your interpretations and predictions on the basis of new
clues which are made available to you. This strategy is based on
inferential and deductive processes, and is closely associated with
methods of scientific investigation.
I
believe that this strategy is of paramount importance in learning – what
do you think? How can this way of thinking and solving problems be
put to use in education and training?
You
can have a look at some more comments of mine about this strategy, and at
some ways it can be activated in learning, by clicking
here
and
…
if
you like, look at other examples of the “Sherlock Holmes strategy”
click
here!
(*)
Oil painting (70.5 x 101.6 cm) -1949 - Roland P. Murdock Collection,
Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas, USA.
Edward Hopper gained an early reputation with his etchings. His realistic paintings of streets and houses, often without figures, have an atmosphere of loneliness and an almost menacing starkness. (The Penguin Concise Columbia Encyclopedia)