Philosophy of Learning: Meaning-Making and Telling Your Own Story

19 AprilSpring 2006

Bharat MehraIS 520 (Organization and Representation of Information)

School of Information SciencesUniversity of Tennessee

Meanings, Philosophy of Learning Meanings and Learning Philosophy of learning: How does learning take

place? Inquiry mode of learning Theory and practice Reflective practitioner and action Experiential learning Situated learning Case-study analysis

Meanings and Learning

How do make sense of our experiences in ways that is useful to us and others?

Sense-Making theory suggests that individuals are constantly seeking to make sense of their world in order to achieve their life goals and that in so doing, they are led to engage in constant dialogic relationship with potential sense-making resources (Dervin, 1999).

What does the term “dialogic” mean?

Dialogic implies the enactment of a continual dialogue or ongoing engagement

The actors in a dialogic relationship inform and are continuously informed by each other

Mutual interaction between multiple objects

Dialogic application to language

Ideas contained and communicated through language are dynamic, relational, and engaged in a process of endless re-descriptions of the world

Philosophy of Learning: How Does Learning Take Place?

Learning is a complex mechanism where individuals go through a dynamic process in learning about a particular subject or “becoming informed” (Dervin, 1983, 1999; Krikelas, 1983)

Learning is based on context, realities, and situational dynamics (Schamber et al., 1990)

Learning is dependent on personal meanings that people make in given contexts (Hollnagel and Woods, 1983; Dervin, 1982; Bates, 1989; Ingwersen, 1996)

Learning is an active personal process that involves “fitting information in with what one already knows and extending this knowledge to create new perspectives” (Wilson, 1977)

Cognitive processes involve the recognition of prior experience and education: such constructs that individuals carry in their brains owing to past experiences as knowledge structures (Ingwersen, 1992) and cognitive models that change according to new conceptualizations and experiences (Meadow, 1983)

Philosophy of Learning: How Does Learning Take Place?

Learning involves the “classic triad of thoughts, actions, and feelings central to any constructive process (Kuhlthau, 2004, p. 6)

The basic epistemological assumptions underlying constructivist learning are (Gagnon and Collay, 2001):

knowledge is constructed as an active process that learners are personally engaged in learners construct knowledge and make their own symbolic representations of action knowledge construction is a social process for learners who share meaning-making with others learners theoretically construct knowledge to explain things they don’t fully understand

Piaget’s developmental theory of child learning recognizes that people build cognitive models to understand and respond to the physical environment and their intelligence is shaped by prior experience

and on-going interaction of internal mental structures with the outside world (1990)

Philosophy of Learning: How Does Learning Take Place?

Dewey’s five phases of reflective thinking (suggestion, intellectualization, guiding idea (hypothesis), reasoning, and testing by action) (1933) argues that the whole person (in terms of their thoughts, feelings, and actions) is involved in the on-going process of learning

Dewey’s view of the function of education in terms of allowing the individual to cope with change: “A society which is mobile…with change occurring anywhere must see that its members are educated for personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance of connections they do not perceive” (p. 88)

Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory extends Piaget and Dewey’s philosophical ideas to provide a psychological perspective to the process of learning in terms of five phases (1963): confusion and doubt, mounting confusion and possible threat, tentative hypothesis, testing and assessing, and reconstructing

Bruner’s integrated perspective focuses on schema that Bruner defines as “that integrated, organized representation of past behavior and experience which guides individuals in reconstructing previously encountered material which enables people to go beyond evidence, to fill in gaps, to extrapolate” (1973, p. 5). Bruner’s interpretive task also incorporates feelings, thoughts, and actions and includes the following phases (Bruner, 1986): perception, selection, inference, prediction, and action.

Inquiry Mode of Learning

– Constructivism, problem-solving approach, project-based learning: Inquiry as a learner-centered process

– All learning begins with the learner. What people know and what they want to learn are not just constraints on what can be taught; they are the very foundation for learning

– Dewey's description of the four primary interests of the child are still appropriate starting points:

• the child's instinctive desire to find things out • in conversation, the propensity children have to communicate • in construction, their delight in making things • in their gifts of artistic expression.

Inquiry Mode of Learning

– "For students, this method of learning ends the listen-to-learn paradigm of the classroom and gives them a real and authentic goal challenges to overcome. For the teacher, inquiry-based education ends their paradigm of talking to teach and recasts them in the role of a colleague and mentor engaged in the same quest as the other learners around." (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/DVE/FusionDVE/html/inquiry_based_education.html)

– "Inquiry is an approach to learning that involves a process of exploring the natural or material world, that leads to asking questions and making discoveries in the search for new understandings." (http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/inquirydesc.html)

– Inquiry education is where structure meets fluidity, where we can create opportunities for students to be engaged in active learning based on their own questions.

Theory and Practice

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition which questions the traditional separations of theory and practice. Rather than asking what is true, it asks what is productive for further inquiry and to help the individual in new situations (Dewey, 1938)

You cannot replicate theory in practice and practice in theory; what you can do is build connections between the two to understand experiences better and to make them better

Reflective practice is a way of understanding what Schon (1987) calls knowing-in-action (how theories are developed), reflecting-in-action (the on-going dialogue between reflection and practice in our lives), and professional practice (how professional-client relationships are developed)

Experiential Learning

Experiential education (or "learning by doing") is the process of actively engaging students in an authentic experience that will have benefits and consequences.

Students make discoveries and experiment

with knowledge themselves instead of hearing or reading about the experiences of others

Students also reflect on their experiences, thus developing new skills, new attitudes, and new theories or ways of thinking (Kraft & Sakofs, 1988)

Situated Learning

Situated learning is education that takes place in a setting functionally identical to that where the learning will be applied (Lave & Wenger, 1991: "just in time learning“

Lave & Wenger place the acquisition of knowledge in the context of social relationships – in a Community of Practice. It is not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the world, but that they participate in frameworks that have a social structure

Situated Learning

An approach to learning of technology use that assumes the technology is not set a priori, but comes into being through use. Situated learning is a "new framework for understanding innovation and change. This framework has several key ingredients: It emphasizes contrastive analysis and seeks to explore differences in use. It assumes that the object of study is neither the innovation alone nor its effects, but rather, the realization of the innovation--the innovation-in-use. Finally, it produces hypotheses supported by detailed analyses of actual practices. These hypotheses make possible informed plans for use and change of innovations" (Bruce & Rubin, 1993, p. 215).

Case-Study Analysis (http://college.hmco.com/business/resources/casestudies/students/overview.htm)

– A case study presents a detailed account of one particular setting and describes how it is and analyzes why it is the way that it is

– First, cases provide experiences of learning that people probably have not had the opportunity to experience firsthand.

– In a relatively short period of time, cases provide the chance to appreciate and analyze the problems faced in many different situations and to understand how people tried to respond in those situations

– Cases illustrate what you have learned. The meaning and implication of this information are made clearer when they are applied to case studies. The theory and concepts help reveal what is going on in the situations studied and allow students to evaluate the solutions that specify how they situations adopted to deal with their problems

– Consequently, when you analyze cases, you will be like a detective who, with a set of conceptual tools, probes what happened and what or who was responsible and then marshals the evidence that provides the solution.

– Cases provide the thrill of testing problem-solving abilities in the real world. It is important to remember, after all, that no one knows what the right answer is. All that we can do is to make the best guess.

Case-Study Analysis

– Managers say repeatedly that they are happy if they are right only half the time in solving strategic problems. Management is an uncertain game, and using cases to see how theory can be put into practice is one way of improving your skills of diagnostic investigation

– Case studies provide you with the opportunity to participate in class and to gain experience in presenting your ideas to others. Instructors may sometimes call on students as a group to identify what is going on in a case, and through classroom discussion the issues in and solutions to the case problem will reveal themselves.

– Instructors also may assign an individual, but more commonly a group, to analyze the case before the whole class. The individual or group probably will be responsible for a thirty- to forty-minute presentation of the case to the class. That presentation must cover the issues involved, the problems faced in the situation, and a series of recommendations for resolving the problems. The discussion then will be thrown open to the class, and you will have to defend your ideas.

– If you work in groups to analyze case studies, you also will learn about the group process involved in working as a team. When people work in groups, it is often difficult to schedule time and allocate responsibility for the case analysis. There are always group members who shirk their responsibilities and group members who are so sure of their own ideas that they try to dominate the group's analysis. Most business negotiations take place in groups, however, and it is best if you learn about these problems now.

From Case-Study to Telling Your Own StoryYour own story can have value as a case-study for someone else Document in detail what you do that gives value and provides recognition of your

own experiences

Communicating, reflecting and making sense in the process

Do a SWOT analysis for your own experiences in specific situations and analyze/prioritize what was achieved and why

Do your own profile

For example, the police officer who was also a librarian: he learnt and shared the need to be proactive, achieve small victories, provide clear organizing scheme, need to be creative, patient and persistent

Relationship between the specifics and the general

Still have to retain confidentiality and removing personally identifying information if need be

Think on your feet

Identify one thing from your experiences at SIS that will be helpful in a PL setting. Be specific