Philosophy of Learning
How does learning take place? In order for me to head down this road, I need to briefly point out what I believe learning to be. Of all the articles I read, Slavich helps me articulate my understanding of what learning is when he describes transformational teaching. He would argue that transformational teaching is any form of teaching (particularly active experiential learning) that sharpens a learner’s mastery of something, so much so that it impacts all other areas of their life (2012, p.596). As a result of reading his article, I would define learning as the ability to improve or build upon one’s current and accumulative knowledge.
Based upon this definition, I would say that learning takes place in many forms and on many levels. I learned pretty quickly as a child not to touch my grandfather’s coffee mug, as the heat of the freshly poured hot coffee in his ceramic mug quickly transferred to my little fingers upon touching it. It took just one time for me to learn that you grab the mug by the handle, and not by the mug. Pain, unfortunately, is quite the teacher. Thankfully, it is not the only one. Learning empowers the individual to take
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I tend to describe things with stories and illustrations. She tends to describe things with concrete, quantifiable examples and data. Who would be the better teacher? Which of us is going to help someone else learn our story the best? To be honest, it truly depends on the experiences and knowledge of the person listening to us. Ferman explains that the transference of experiences or knowledge to another is hard to influence (2013, p. 24). Therefore, the best teachers are those who are able to interact with the learner on multiple levels of understanding and experience and provide tools and descriptors to help connect the learners’ own knowledge and experiences to create something