Think about one particularly successful and one unsuccessful learning experience. Consider what were the conditions that made this experience successful or unsuccessful for you and what this tells you about your own preferred ways to learn.I have been learning how to knit. I have used a combination of YouTube videos, asking questions of peers and more experienced knitters in a supportive group on Facebook, and experimentation. Part of the thing that works for me is feeling like I am in control. If I don't have that it makes me anxious and I clam up. Another thing is freedom from scrutiny; when I have nobody to lose face in front of I am more prepared to take risks. Another thing is that I get the chance to hash out ideas and feel a social bond with other people who share my passion. It is very difficult to have passion for something when the people around you don't value your efforts, so online learning contexts allow me to be "virtually" close to people who share my interests. I like being in my own space, rather than being required to turn up to classes.
I remember trying to learn to breastfeed. It was very stressful because there was so much on the line. Not only did I consider myself responsible for the wellbeing of my child, but my ability to feed my child was tied to one of my precepts of what it was to identify as a "good mother". The anxiety affected my ability to focus on what I was doing and left me feeling frazzled. Not only was I physically unwell, but the assistance I received from experts was not in depth enough. It seems that I learn best when I see diagrams, see something done, hear and converse about it, read written material, and get a chance to experience and "learn through doing". The experts I was learning from didn't have the time to invest in me having a thorough understanding which left me feeling anxious and out of control. They did things FOR me, rather than walking/talking me through things so that I could do them myself which impacted upon my self image as a capable participant in the process.
Based on your experience as a learner, what do you think you will be able to get out of this course? And what ideas do you already have about the future of education?
I am often skeptical when I sign up for "learning" about areas that interest me. I'm nerdy. As I am already interested, I am motivated to learn, but often find I am swamped in wading through material that is not new to me. My hope for this course is that I will be exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking from other people who are also passionate about empowering others and facilitating learning, and that I may also provide unique perspective for others.
My time at school was marred by some foolish concepts about education; not only mine, but those of educators, and society in general. I was continually praised for being "brainy" or "gifted" (it was the 80s, so praise was very much en vogue) and people were so focused on my ability to retain, recall, interrelate and manipulate arbitrary factoids, that my deficits in understanding myself and others, and my inability to prioritise or critically assess my actions, had crippled me and left me ill-equipped to deal with life. My son takes after me and I feel like home educating my children will fit their needs better than mainstream schooling.
My own ideas about the future of education, are formed by my precepts about it. I would like to see a shift away from "teaching to tests" so that learners develop working understandings that help them meet their own goals, a focus away from competitive education, and a move toward critical thinking and information literacy. I would love to see a place where diversity is accepted and encouraged (and resourced). In an ideal world I would love to see a move away from mass schooling and back into mentorship, where the world (and work) of adults is less divorced from the learning of children. I wonder if our society could accommodate children (and adults) learning the skills they need to be healthy and successful adults from healthy successful adults, or to improve their skills from those who are experienced their fields rather than "teaching professionals". I love the idea of community based education, but I fear it would do away with the illusion that social class and income brackets are mobile.
Watching the interview section ("Clare discussing different approaches to learning with Dr Fiona Rodger") of this week's resources, a lot of the material sounded very familiar. I was already used to assessing learning styles, and that in the course of "learning to learn" we normally find the ways that we are comfortable with and tend to favour them. I was reminded again about the trial it is to create a learning environment that juggles the needs and learning habits of groups of people, and also to make learning visible enough to assess so that teachers/learning facilitators are able to plan, and account for progress made by learners.
It was good to revisit the idea that different people have different concepts of what constitutes learning. I have only ever considered “deep learning” to be relevant and of importance to me.. thus the concept of “banking” being treated by people as a valid learning style feels foreign.
I refreshed myself about a few different models of learning by reading through some of the supplementary material. Most of these were very familiar and I felt that, integrated, they gave a fine overview of how learning functions. I had never understood the term Gestalt until now.
The idea of focusing on adult learning as a discipline removed from child learning was a new one to me. I have taught adult learners graphic design, and I had always considered learning to be learning, and have been fairly egalitarian/democratic in my dealings with children. I found the presupposition (in Knowles' Andragogy) that stress caused by lack of self-determination is unique to adult learners, woefully flawed... (so much so that I was moved to write an email to contribute my ideas on it to the website owner, which in turn became an interesting discussion on self-determination and the traditional cultural expectations that a child's will must first be broken so that you can tell them what to do for their own good - and the idea that social change is happening at such a rate that the "wisdom" of previous generations may be inadequate for our children's needs.
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