Robert F. Williams is an assistant professor of education — that is, someone who teaches people how to teach — and a cognitive scientist who studies the relationship between what teachers do and how learners construct meaning.
His studies have included, among other things, jokes and clocks. “My master’s thesis used measures of brain electrical activity to explore differences in how the left and right hemispheres comprehend jokes,” Williams explains. “My current work draws from my dissertation research on time-telling instruction. It explores how teacher-talk and gestures guide students in mapping concepts to the clock face as they learn to read the time.”
In July, Williams presented a paper, “Instruction as Guided Conceptualization,” and a poster, “The Image-Schematic Structure of Pointing,” at the second international conference on Language, Culture, and Mind in Paris. He also has a forthcoming chapter on “Gesture as a Conceptual Mapping Tool.”
Back on campus, he is on the faculties of the education department, the major and minor in linguistics, and the minor in cognitive science, teaching such courses as Psychology of Learning, Distributed Cognition, and Educating All Learners. In the Fall Term he supervised six student teachers and co-led a weekly student teaching seminar.
Williams is a member of the President’s Committee on Individualized Learning, which is studying the personal nature of learning at Lawrence — in tutorials and independent studies as well as in larger courses. In that spirit, he recently conducted a tutorial in Assessment in Second Language Learning and advised students doing independent studies in Mood-Dependent Memory Effects, Literacy Acquisition in English Language Learners, and Computational Semantics.
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