How We Learn
I enjoy a good laugh, I am in University or College depending on where you are coming from and every day after tending to my daily routine, my roommates and I debrief. We talk about classes, assignments, politics etc. I share the same class with three of them and the same degree program with all of them. We do have a lot in common thus a lot to share. Usually, it ends in a good laugh, sometimes we overseed in time(till as late as 3.00 a.m ) but I enjoy it every time. I have never given much thought about it, but now that I do, I think it stems from our culture.
I grew up in a rural setting and as far as I can remember, in the evening as we wait for food to cook. We would gather at the fireplace, this is where we would debrief on the day's activities and receive updates. Sometimes it’ll just be a good story, a good laugh, eat, go sleep and repeat the same routine. It always ended in us sitting at the fireplace, my grandmother would be weaving and sharing, while young ones like me would be drowsy with sleep or just listening to stories. I guess I and my roommates are not any different. We are carrying with the culture. Anyway, what does this have to do with learning?
Well, I am a fun of Piaget’s constructivism theory of learning. Piaget suggests that the way we learn comes from the experiences we have heard in the past. These experiences are building blocks to the new knowledge we gain. Learning being an active process, we construct knowledge based on our experiences meaning that a person interprets new knowledge based on past experiences and prior knowledge. Reality and knowledge are constructed on an individual’s mind. Reality is subject based on the individual’s knowledge.
Seymour a student of Piaget builds on this concept and comes up with constructionism, his theory expounds more, in that, learning is not the only individual but also context applies. How individuals construct knowledge depends on how they interact with the environment, referred to as the art of learning. How does the individual interact with the world and other human beings and individual’s abilities factor in his/her learning?
Seymour unpacks constructionism as the manner in which we learn. He believes that expressing our inner feelings and ideas are crucial to learning. Learner’s interactions with favourite objects, artefacts and representations create new knowledge or transform existing knowledge depending on the different contexts. It is very interesting to learn, that my interaction with my laptop, or medium articles and the people I talk to, listen to, read about, determines the knowledge that I will gain. I am able to build on existing knowledge or learn new knowledge depending on my personal experience, intelligence(in this case it is not a fixed variable) and my interaction with books, newspapers, where I am and my interaction with the humans around me. It is an iterative process.
Basically Piaget and Seymour, in the words of Edith Ackermann believe that “knowledge and the world are both constructed and constantly reconstructed through personal experience. Each gains existence and form through the construction of the other. Knowledge is not merely a commodity to be transmitted, encoded, retained and re-applied, but a personal experience to be constructed”. However, more people have come to build on their thoughts where someone like Lev Vygotsky, have added how culture and our social interactions contribute to learning and the way we see the world.
For someone who is passionate about education practices and pedagogy, this is something that I hold dear to, the understanding of how we learn because I would like to one day, change a few things about how learning is conducted in the schools I attended.
Back to my story, do you want to know why we spend quite some time with my roommates chatting(sometimes while submitting assignments, eating, listening to music or just chilling)? It is through these interactions that my perception of the world around me is progressively changed and transformed, through the shared personal experiences. Most times it has nothing to do with learning but in the process, we learn. Most importantly, where we come from that is how we learned and spent our evenings.
Share your views. Kindly drop a comment below? What is your view about how we learn?