"INSIDEPIDP"

 

Objective

Finally, over forty years ago, Rogers (1969) articulated the very contemporary notion that in this high-speed globalized world what is really crucial for survival is that we all become lifelong learners. He wrote that an educated person is one “who has learned how to learn…how to adapt and change” and realizes “that no knowledge is secure, that only the process of seeking knowledge gives a basis for security.”

Reflective

Somethings connect with you in a special way. These lines made me feel of a similar connection.

‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get out of it’.

Forest Gump

At age twelve I lost my mother and with her I lost my father’s spirit. It was too big a shock for him. Life was never the same again. School had become the best place to be for me. There I could be away from all the troubles. Those were the years when life taught me some hard lessons and for the first time I learnt how to adapt to ‘change’.

With little guidance available for life and living, I had set out for my own journey of learning how to live. I grew up to be a teacher, a wife, a mother, but above all that I grew up to be a lifelong learner. Over the years a lot things changed relationships, roles, expectations and life… But one thing had stayed with me and helped me deal with and live with all tides high or low and that is ‘learning’.

If I think of learning as an abbreviation then the full-form for me would be – ‘Lifelong’ ‘Evolution’ ‘Articulation’ ‘Reflection’ ‘kNowledge’ ‘Introspection’ ‘Negotiation’ ‘Growth’.

We are living in the times of big data. Data and information are growing every second. Knowledge is not a static. It is growing and with it the way we know and see our world is changing. Just like processors in computers are becoming obsolete in no time, similar is the case of education and knowledge.

There was time I was laughed at in my circle of people. They used to ask me ‘when are your studies ending’ and make fun of me. Now I see even those farthest away from learning, realizing and adapting to the reality that learning happens in a continuum and is a lifelong process.

In this scenario as Rogers pointed out four decades ago, the most important skill a person may have is the knowledge and skill of knowing how to learn.

I taught my parents-in-law how to operate smart phones and social media. And they are so proud of it today. They tell everyone how dismayed they were to know about such a big knowledge base and virtual world that existed, that they had never known about.

To operate a software, we need to know the right commands. To drive a car, we need to train ourselves about the rules of the road and driving. Similarly, to be educated and competent in today’s world, we need to learn the ways to stay educated and the only known way is- learning how to learn.

I was one day going to Burnaby and had taken a ‘cab’. The cab driver told me that he was a software engineer for 10 years before he left his profession and decided to be a cab driver. He said that the only reason he left his profession was that the knowledge and skill-sets needed were changing too fast and staying up-to-date was a tough thing to do.

I could not stop thinking about this man and many others like him for a long time. He left the profession of his ‘calling’, as probably he had not learnt how to learn. A question keeps bothering me many-a-times. If our students are not trained for the future, are we heading into a disastrous situation where we would not have enough human capital to carry on basic jobs, let alone the knowledge revolution?

Interpretive

What I like about being human is the capacity to think, reflect and resolve. If there is a problem, we have the power to find out solutions. And the issue of ever growing knowledge and changing skill-sets can be resolved. We just have to shift our focus on how we view education and learning. We need to understand that learning is in itself the biggest tool to survive, live and thrive in the current scenario. Barbara Oakley in her talk on learning how to learn suggested that learning happens when we know how to use the two states of mind - the focused state and the diffused state. She suggested many techniques for effective learning. Her ideas resonated with me and I found an uncanny resemblance in her talk about the two states of mind to what Taylor in her talk had called left brained and right brained thinking.

As educators we have a big responsibility to train our students in not just the content but in such ways that they are not daunted by new content, by the need to upgrade.

I like my decision to be a learner and I am proud that I could learn through varied experiences in my life the key skill in today’s times- the technique of learning.

Decisional

Sam’s short video on flipped learning said what it really means to be a teacher in today’s times. This is how I heard it – “We are preparing our students for jobs that don’t exist yet. We need to train them in a manner that they learn to think, learn to assess information, and are able to process it in meaningful ways. We don’t need to train students for a specific job but give those skills and the ability to think and to problem solve, so that they can deal with whatever they end up doing”.

Each one of us needs to understand the importance of this skill and learn how to learn. Lifelong learning is not a choice, it is a necessity. Whether we realize it or not, we are all lifelong learners and thus learning how to learn can just train us, to do effectively, what we all do, all our lives- learn.

References

Forrest Gump. [date unknown]. The internet movie database. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109830/quotes?item=qt0373655

Good (2012, September 28). Teaching for tomorrow. Flipped Learning. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a7NbUIr_iQ

Merriam, S.B. and Bierema, L.L. (2013). Adult learning: Linking theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Wiley

Oakley, B. (2014, August 5) Learning how to learn [Video file] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O96fE1E-rf8

Taylor, J.B. (2008, February 27). My stroke of insight. [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight?language=en