Science/Economics paper by Bálint, Ágnes
How to Preserve the Structure Amidst Transformations: A Contribution to Zoltán Paul Dienes’s Psychobiography (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
The Hungarian-born Zoltán Paul Dienes (1916-2014) was a mathematician, a devoted teacher of mathematics, a psychologist studying the learning process and a tireless world-traveler who trained math teachers in almost all European languages. The psychobiographical approach, which ambitions to point out a close interrelationship between life and life work, promises to reveal exciting interrelations between Dienes’s unusual childhood experiences and his future theoretical ideas. As a young child, together with his brother, Dienes was exposed to fundamental changes in terms of place of living (moving all around Europe), in terms of language to speak (Hungarian, German, French, Italian, English), in terms of values to identify with (civilian family, Montessori boarding school, Raymond Duncan’s hippie commune) and in terms of ideology to internalize (atheism, “Duncanism”, Protestantism, Catholicism). The moral of his early life experience was that it is possible to preserve identity amidst the changes. As a mathematician he argued that it is beneficial to transform (“embody”) the abstract mathematical structures into several concrete forms (“multiple embodiment”) for teaching purposes. During the learning process (which means a play activity in his method) the learner can realize the common structure behind the diverse embodiments (through detecting their structural isomorphism) and successfully decodes the exact same abstract mathematical structure, without information loss. I conclude that the idea that abstract structures can be transformed into concrete ones and vice versa, without identity loss, might come form a life experience that one can preserve his identity despite of the successions of contextual changes.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Ágnes Bálint graduated as a teacher of Hungarian and English in 1992 at Janus Pannonius University in Pécs, Hungary. She earned a second MA degree in Psychology (1998). Her PhD dissertation was a psychobiography of a Hungarian writer, László Németh (2005). Ágnes Bálint has been teaching psychology at the University of Pécs for 20 years. Fields of research interest include psychobiography, psychology of learning and cognitive neuroscience. She published two books which couple her psychological interest with devotion to literature. Her forthcoming book comprises the neuroscience-based psychology of learning and teaching.