Learning and Action

Before reading chapters five and six I looked at our schedule and noted the title of our next blog. Learning and Action; I started reading thinking that the words would come together and be easy to find and easy to think about. Silly me! I also thought that Gee would simply state the obvious that students learn from doing, not only from reading or listening. Students need to be active learners, whatever that means.

A few pages into chapter five I still thought that my assumption of Gee stating the obvious was true. On page 119 he says; " Learners cannot do much with lots of overt information that a teacher has explicitly told them outside the context of immersion in actual practice." To summarize students need to hear the lecture, read the books and be active in the learning through touching and experiencing a science experiment, right?

I was sort of right, I mean it is obvious that a student is not going to do well in a class where they do read and listen but are given no guidance in the hands on lab that they are actively participating in, will they?

So I kept reading about Lara Croft and trying to picture scenes that I think I have seen from the Angelina Jolie movies, when suddenly I get what Gee is saying! Transfer and Beyond...

Just like a good player can get to higher levels and make more achievements to ultimately win the game, a good student can grow and become smarter by applying the things they have learned before to new tasks and challenges within their curriculum. How does a student do this? They have to transfer prior knowledge and then get creative. This is active learning because the student is actually helping themselves by reaching back in their old memory files and applying an obscure fact from the past to something that is relevant to the present.

I plan on becoming a teacher, and I can only think of a handful of times where I know that I transferred knowledge obtained in one class and used it to be successful in another. My biggest challenge and a new goal is going to be figuring out a way to encourage and incite creativity in my students, no matter what age they are, so that they can be active learners.