Open-Ended, Metacognitive Conception of Classes for the Advancement of Nonconformity and Creative Thought

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Instructional methods incorporating metacognitive or open-ended elements have been gaining popularity, but synergies between the two have rarely been explored. Created with the aspiration to boost students’ knowledge of the knowledge creation process, a conceptually new and structurally open-ended instructional model is proposed here. For that purpose, the squares on Heer’s version of the Bloom taxonomy pyramid were turned into steps on which the class climbed from its base to the top. Each step stepped on opened the content initially hidden from view, but corresponding to cognitive and knowledge dimensions intersecting at it, thus turning the content coverage into an open-ended adventure. Both the students in undergraduate and graduate programs in bioengineering and the faculty peers were in favor of the open-ended model of instruction and, based on distributed online surveys, they preferred it over traditional lecturing. In agreement with the adventurous character of the instructional method, frequent detours and diversions from the straight path of the subject were demonstrated as vehicles for the creative thought. As the students ascended along the learning taxonomy pyramid, the content became less foundational and more in need of discussion, analysis and weighing of pros and cons. At the same time, the students would get increasingly connected with the ideas of broader epistemological and ontological relevance. The intellectual pinnacle of the class was achieved at the peak of the pyramid, where the metacognitive and the creative intersected. There, the students were acquainted with the penultimate learning objective, which is the necessity for a professional to question the premises of one’s profession through one’s professional output, alongside providing practical results therewith.</jats:p>

Paving Way for a Paradigm Shift in Oncology: Curing Cancer by Loving It?

“…The first of the two methods is based on allowing the healthy cells to take on a cancer cell feature, in analogy to the way a person in love adopts the personality traits of the object of his/her affection. This first approach can be said to have been motivated by the path taken on by Yamanaka et al, whose Nobel Prize-awarded research [27] was on converting the phenotype of differentiated cells back to a pluripotent state when the rest of the stem cell research community rushed to find means of differentiating stem cells into specific lineages [28]. Similarly, here, in times when the dominant course of action in the field of genetic engineering for cancer mitigation, the immunotherapeutic efforts notwithstanding, is still to modify the cancer cell by introducing specific therapeutic factors to it-be it by means of extracellular vesicles, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, controlled delivery of chemotherapeutic drugs or other biomolecules to shut down the cell metabolism-the healthy cells adjacent to the cancer cells will be altered in their makeup in such a way that they begin to resemble the latter cells more, not less.…”