People • Problems • Strategies • Connections
At this point in the game, I find myself in a curious and rather uneasy state: buzzing with energy like a bad espresso overdose and brimming over with questions, questions, questions.
Only three weeks into formally studying Learning, Design, and Technology principles, every time I come to a new door, it’s wide open. I poke my head in only to find hundreds of other doors. Clearly, there is a lot of exploration ahead!
Having made my way through a predominantly cognitivist K-12 school experience, I thought I had a pretty firm grasp on what learning is and when it occurs. Well, learning happens to you when you listen to your expert teacher and get an A on the test, of course! But then I think back and struggle in vain to remember what those tests were about at all. Instead, my mental bank of school memories is populated by people and problems.
It is on the foundation of connections between people and problems that my nascent learning philosophy is built.
My introduction to the theory of constructivist learning felt like scratching a deep-down itch. Seeing principles of co-constructed social knowledge articulated put words to what I had felt intuitively in my personal experiences. Building on prior knowledge and collaborating with others to solve real-world problems — these practices are enacted constantly in everyday life. Still, the thought of instruction designed to directly address, value, and leverage individuals and their singular perspectives is radical.
I believe that learning only truly occurs when we need it to. Learning might help us to solve a problem in the workplace, or satisfy our model of ourselves as educated people, or serve as a stepping stone to achieving financial stability. Regardless of the problem we seek to solve, people only do work, really meaningfully do work to learn when it matters to them.
With this philosophy of learning, teachers assume a flexible role. As needed, they might continue to serve as subject matter experts of higher-order skills, guiding students with strategies to construct their own knowledge and understanding, or they might move to the sidelines as they shape the conditions and context, but not the content of learning.
A true test of learning might emerge when we’re faced with novel challenges. How we respond — the facts and concepts we choose to apply, the tools we select to arm ourselves with, the people we reach out to for help — these are all visible, tangible measures of our high-level problem solving skills. Technology, then, is only one of the tools we have at our disposal, although one that is perhaps most thrilling in enabling us to find and organize information, create and collaborate on multimodal projects, communicate and connect with communities.
At the outset of this formal exploration of learning, I’m tickled to imagine how this initial, rather barren philosophy will grow with the people I meet and the problems I encounter along my way.
