HUMANISTIC/AFFECTIVE MODEL-APPROACH

I believe that the Hypnagological Method may be fully framed within the Humanist/Affective Model-Approach, for it follows the “tradition” of what we may consider as a “Pedagogy of Discovery,” based on the participant’s spontaneous needs and interests, proclaiming the free expression and the inherent creativity of all human beings. It gives precedence to autonomous discovery and to the importance of the elaboration process started by the participant. This pedagogic “tradition” considerably contrasts the more generalised and older “Pedagogy of Transmission,” based on the idea of frontal transmission of knowledge, presenting each stage as a particular content unit which is previously designed to the letter and programmed. This totally linear type of teaching takes place as the instructor, the expert, gives a lecture, which is passively received by the participant. It also contrasts a second “tradition,” developed in the 1950s, based on a repetitive and exasperating training process – promoted to the level of learning principle – lying in the stimulus-response binomial of conditioning and reinforcement. The instructor – or more adequately stated, the “creator” of the program – analyses different behaviours, whose linked sequences express behaviours which need to be acquired, later posing questions which may provoke their manifestation, matching the participant’s responses with the stimulus of approving or disapproving reinforcements. This is known as the “Pedagogy of Exercise.”