Andrew Scott Conning
About Andrew Scott Conning
I've always been fascinated by diverse cultural viewpoints and the challenge of integrating them. This passion has found expression in my managing international education ventures in four countries, learning five languages, developing numerous innovations in linguistic education, and researching the nature and growth of cross-cultural thinking. My dissertation (The Global Mind) examines this question by combining insightful orientations from structural-developmental psychology and other behavioral & philosophical subdisciplines concerned with the relationship between cognition and culture. Its product is the "Internormative Cognition Model”, which maps the development of complex epistemological reasoning about “internormative” issues (issues demanding cooperation among diverse normative communities), in a sequence of progressive structuration from “Conventionalism” to “Contextualism” to “Transcontextualism” to “Universal Paradigms”. This work has inspired Worldviews, a global MA curriculum I'm now incubating. I enjoy tackling complex challenges. As a manager, I've led a team that produced the first online TOEFL diagnostic test, established an experiential education program in Mexico City serving disadvantaged communities, managed the Japan campus of a US college, and led a two-year initiative with the US Embassy and three Japanese ministries that won official status for this campus. As an innovator, I've developed a widely used system for mastering Japanese kanji, invented a modified graphical pattern indexing system for Chinese characters, created a comprehensive tool for learning the Japanese phonetic scripts, and developed a semi-automated writing feedback system serving thousands. I enjoy learning abstract, comprehensive conceptual frameworks, and discovering how different perspectives (whether cultural, political, professional, or disciplinary) fit together within a larger whole. Growing meaning by integrating people, values, and ideas is what drives me.