What Does This Mean to You? or Do You Want Me Teaching Your Children?

Had my first class in the new program last night. This wasn't a topic, but going in I wanted to gather my thoughts in anticipation of questions like, What is your philosophy of education? or What is your personal leadership style? It seems the one underlying theory that has made the most sense to me across all my fields of study--whether education, social theory and social justice, or the nature of information and knowledge--is a Constructivist Epistemology. I don't know that I want to completely bore you with too many details, but the Wikipedia link actually presents a decent explanation. A few key points from it:

Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed", because it does not necessarily reflect any external "transcendent" realities; it is contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience.

It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender are socially constructed.

Categories of knowledge and reality are actively created by social relationships and interactions.

Social constructivism thus emphasizes the importance of culture and context in understanding what is happening in society and constructing knowledge based on this understanding.

Knowledge is thus a product of humans and is socially and culturally constructed.

Knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject.

According to the social constructivist approach, instructors have to adapt to the role of facilitators and not teachers. Where a teacher gives a didactic lecture which covers the subject matter, a facilitator helps the learner to get to his or her own understanding of the content. In the former scenario the learner plays a passive role and in the latter scenario the learner plays an active role in the learning process. The emphasis thus turns away from the instructor and the content, and towards the learner.

The learning experience is both subjective and objective and requires that the instructor’s culture, values and background become an essential part of the interplay between learners and tasks in the shaping of meaning. Learners compare their version of the truth with that of the instructor and fellow learners in order to get to a new, socially tested version of truth.

I guess what it all comes down to is I believe learning is a process. To truly understand something, a person has to experience it, discover it for him or herself, make sense of it in terms of what he or she already knows, and internalize it. He or she has to take ownership of the knowledge and make it his or her own. Someone can describe "hot" to you, but you'll never really know what they mean until you stick your hand on the stovetop burner. Then you "know." We try to understand new things in relation to what we already know, so our context--everything we've already learned--shapes the way we perceive reality; our perception of information and the way we come to understand it "creates" the knowledge that comes out of it. To facilitate learning, then, you have to create an environment that leads to learning experiences, that allows the process of encountering new information and making meaning of it to take place. You can guide that process and have goals in mind, but have to understand that it ultimately depends upon the student.