Week 3: Allow 60 minutes for this activity
Spend some time reflecting on the types of learning experiences that you have had in the past. Select two contrasting examples from these learning experiences and note down what you learned and how you feel that you learned it, in each case.
Feedback
Look at the words you used in your responses. Notice whether you’ve talked about:
- knowing more
- gaining something
- being able to do something
- participating in new activities or a new group
- having new ideas or finding new possibilities for yourself – feeling differently about something.
You probably used several of these phrasings and, if so, your learning may have been quite varied or rich in significance. Many of your examples may have referred to learning in terms of acquiring knowledge or skills, others may have been about participating – and perhaps others fitted neither category. We have asked you to think about these ideas about participation and acquisition because they demonstrate some common underlying assumptions in a wide range of different learning theories (Sfard, 1998; Elmholdt, 2003), although they do not represent a specific learning theory in themselves. You will read about learning theories in the next section.
