So, the question of the day is; how does this learning correlate with other people’s education theories. To answer this question, not only do I need to look into other educational theories, but I really need to make sense of my experience. Without making sense of my experience, the comparison between it and other theories will be completely meaningless.
My journey started 13 episodes ago where I decided that I wanted to learn to knit. This was a dramatic change from what I originally planning; minuet to win it challenges. My idea to switch was sparked by the realization that these challenges are completely useless. I would rather learn something that will actually have some use in my life, rather than something that just seems like a lot of fun.
So I started to knit. I had some knitting experience in the past, in second year I decided that this would be a good skill to know, so I decided to go out, buy the proper stuff, and learn to knit; I quickly gave up on this due to frustration.
This assignment was different; it focused me on a task and ensured that I actually stick with it until I learn something. I feel that I learned a lot during this experience, not only about knitting, but about myself. I learned that if I stick with something during a time where I don’t feel like sticking with it, it can be very rewarding at the end. I learned that I need to stick with things sometimes, even though I don’t like it. I learned, although a lame learning, that if you stick with something, you can learn almost anything.
You see, knitting isn’t natural to me. I have big fingers, and a brain that likes to day dream when doing boring things, therefore knitting and I didn’t really mix that well. But now that I have had some sufficient learning, I don’t lose focus; I concentrate on what I am doing. This experience has been very wholesome to me. It’s a skill that brings me back to roots and grounds me; I really like that. Overall, this experience has been changing for me, and I will be discussing how below.
How Will This Affect the Way I Teach?
I have been involved in outdoor education for the past 7 years of my life; everything from program maintenance staff to the OE Director, this has been a love of mine and a life track that I seem to be staying on. Needless to say, because of my experience doing this, I often lose touch with what it feels like to be a participant, what it feels like to be unsure and what it feels like to have little confidence in something. I have a high degree of confidence in myself, but during this experience, I didn’t when it came to knitting. This was humbling.
It has seemed in the past few years of working with participants in an outdoor setting, I have gotten myself in a system where I treat everyone the same, everyone comes in, I facilitate and they leave. This experience has taught me that everyone is different and I need to make sure that I always teat people with the idea that this may be new, scary and stressful, even if I think they are being ridicules. This experience has been completely humbling and has made me fully understand what it is like to be learning something new once again.
Connections to Other Theories
My experience has connected to other theories discuss in the sourcebook; each theory that I will be discussing below has connections that I also experienced during my learning.
Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was the person who I connected with the most during this experience for two reasons; she was my presentation topic, and she had great theories that I felt connected with me. Marias theory is all about putting people in the proper environment for learning, the use of proper sized equipment , and that people learn at their own pace. These theories became relevant in my learning because at the beginning of this assignment, I was always putting myself in an environment where I wasn’t learning, i.e. in front of the TV, at the study or socializing with friends. Once I removed myself from those environments and sat in my room, listening to good music, my learning increased exponentially. Secondly, in regards to proper equipment, when I first started knitting at the beginning of this experience, I was using needles that were really thin, once I had a lesson from a friend, she lent me her thicker needles and everything became a lot easier. This was because I was using the right size equipment for the job.
Eleanor Duckworth
“Rather than being expected to provide a certain answer, the students reveal their own understanding through their responses. This does not mean that the teacher's own curricular goals are pushed aside”
I thought a lot about this while I was doing this learning assignment. It was not the physical actions where I was doing most of my learning, but it was during the reflection where I made connections and actualized what I was doing. Duckworth summarized it fantastically where she says that it’s in the response of the student where learning takes place, rather than being told it. That is exactly what the reflections did to me for this assignment. It gave me an opportunity to learn on my own and make sense of my experiences.
Juliette Gordon Low
Although I did this reading fairly late in the semester, Low really hit home with me. She had a horrible life, where she suffered through many hardships, but she still managed to achieve a lot with her life and leave her impact of the world. When doing this reading and listening to Joshua Gammon present on her, I asked myself, why did she wait so long to complete her life’s work. To me, the answer was, there is a time and a place for everything. Sometimes, life has restrictions and holdbacks, and one cannot complete their goals until they work through it. This has sort of been my story this semester. Because I am leaving for Iqaluit, Nunavut in 5 days, I have had a lot of work to do and a lot of assignments that needed to be finished ahead of time. This was my hold back. Although I did knit during the entire semester, most of my learning has happened very recently, I feel that this is because I have moved and finished a lot of different things that were holding be back, and without those things in my life, I could finally learn and experience something different when reflecting on knitting.
