Deep Approach
Deep Approach is a way to improve education and make it more meaningful; it targets authentic apprenticeship, deep learning, and identity growth in action.
It is a transdisciplinary way of considering and enacting education, integrating disciplinary contents, interdisciplinary skills within experiential projects that aim at self-actualization and social action.
It is an expression of applied semiotics that shapes human understanding, social contracts, and cross-cultural development for human growth. It is politicized for the cause of the human, the ecology and the earth, and the requirement for a new way of organizing human life.
The instructional model emerged from research on expert language teachers’ practices. It shows that seasoned teachers give a lot of freedom to their students. Learners can build up their own educative projects within thematic units. This paradigm shift demonstrates the incompleteness of previous models, yet it integrates eclectically many aspects of previous methods within a broader and deeper approach. It adds a socioaffective and sociocultural depth to these aspects as well as a greater freedom to adapt the units to the learners’ action.
Shallow teaching places the learner in front of pre‐formatted curricula with extrinsic demands for a specific series of minimal achievements. Fear of failing stimulates extrinsic motivation to get good marks. In contrast, deep learning requires contextualized, holistic experiences in which the identity narrative can expand with new life meanings. The Deep Approach has, for its purpose, to stimulate deep learning. Among the many conceptions of learning, deep learning does emphasizes quality, relevance, and purposefulness rather than rote learning. One way to stimulate deep learning is to free students from surface, linear curricula and to allow them to organize their own projects with an abundance of resources.