Future Learner: A Dedication to Lifelong Learning After Completing My Master's Degree
It is time to rest. I have worked on my master’s degree for the last three years while at the same time moving to a new school and taking summer courses at Columbia Teacher’s College. It has been a productive and transformational three-year period. However, sometimes it is necessary to stop and reflect in order to see where we are, to get our bearings, and to ponder what’s next. As we begin to rest and step back from the work we have done, we begin to see connections, we synthesize the disparate elements into a more meaningful whole. This synthesis is our bearings: our place where we are now. So as I end my master’s degree, I pause and seek a place for a new beginning.
Yes, rest, wouldn’t that be nice. My wife, on the other hand, reminds me that it might be a better idea to begin a second master’s degree. I’m in the habit of working on graduate coursework, so I might as well continue and not slack off. There is truth to that as well. I have developed a strong facility with the online format of graduate coursework. I enjoy it.
Through the experience of the online master’s program I have come to a few realizations about online learning that have surprised me. First, I have realized that online learning is not a paradigm shift. In other words, online learning is not something new and revolutionary. I very quickly adapted to the online master’s coursework because it was so familiar. It really is just the traditional education paradigm mapped onto a new format. Of course, this makes sense because the courses are created by professors who are using what they know and simply delivering it in a new way. It is like building highways over old horse trails. What is revolutionary about online learning is not the content, but the removal of location as a variable. I have completed my Michigan State University degree while living in Taipei, Austin, New York, as well as a few other places. This nomadic, dynamic feature of digital learning is manifest in many aspects of our lives newly digitized. We shop, bank, chat, bid, sell, learn, and teach from any location in range of wifi.
With us tucked over our laptops in coffee shops, airports, or the kitchen table, this digital way of being seems isolating. We stare at screens and the world around us disappears. But in the online graduate program, a very real and meaningful community opened up and became my place of collaboration and communication. I originally applied to the program because I felt a sense of professional isolation while teaching in Taiwan, and the courses, groups, partnerships, and mentorships of the program provided a very real and needed community for my professional growth. The benefit to this community is that it was structured and focused on rigorous, professional explorations in literacy and technology.
That rigor obviously contrasts with the other online communities we create on Facebook or other social media. There is a varying degree of structure, focus, and professionalism in online communities. As I’ve explored over the years, there are digital communities that revolve around multifarious topics. I brew beer and regularly consult online forums that have ranks of brewmasters ready to lend their guidance and advice. Of course, seeking medical information online is indicative of the problems that can occur when seeking a community or advice online. A stomachache leads to cancer if you read to many threads or follow the wrong link. So there is the problem of trusting unverifiable authority. But, like with reading online medical advice, we learn to edit, censor, think critically about, and synthesize information to lead us to specific understandings of our needs and situations.
Being a digital creator rather than merely a consumer has led me to a conclusion about motivation and learning. I learn digital tools when I have a clear purpose and enthusiasm. I learned Photoshop because I wanted to make posters for my band to advertise our performances. I learned iMovie and Final Cut Pro because I wanted to edit movies that I shot either with friends or at school with students. I learned to blog because I wanted a more efficient way to communicate with students and teachers about homework. I learned to create websites because I wanted a digital repository to use as a portfolio to share my work with peers, parents, and prospective employers. I like the term digital tools because that is what all these machines, programs, and gadgets are: tools. I don’t need to learn a tool if I don’t have a job to do. And when I do have a job to do, learning to use the tool comes quickly and intuitively. If not, seeking advice often revolves around specific questions about getting the tools to do what I want them to. Working with students, I think defining the purpose is prerequisite to using any digital tool. Fortunately, students are curious and enthusiastic about using new digital tools, so technology has an inherent lure for students.
As I continue as a learner it is vital that I maintain a professional network or community to grow in. This community could manifest itself in the relationships with my fellow teachers, the literacy coordinator, and IT coordinator at my school. We have book clubs around professional topics such as conferring with readers and digital tool workshops. Our school will also be working as a site in conjunction with Lucy Calkins Reading and Writing Institute at Columbia Teacher’s College, so that will bring about a significant community to grow in. So, the community of learners that has existed online for the last three years will be replaced by a more location-based community of professionals. But again, I see little difference between the two beyond the issues of format and location.
Through the literacy courses I have concentrated on in my master’s coursework, I have developed a deeper understanding of inquiry-based pedagogy that supports a constructivist view of making meaning. Through reading Dewey, Vygotsky, and others, and through experimenting and observing in my classroom I see that students construct meaning together in a community through questioning, testing ideas, and coming to consensus. This has been true throughout my graduate work as well. In the course discussions I develop an understanding and meaning through the interaction beyond where I originated. I often tell my students that twenty four brains will come up with ideas beyond that of one brain, but it is also the idea that we listen to and synthesize the ideas of others into our own meaning making.
This is the direction that I wantto continue learning toward: how to create learning experiences that foster meaning making through collaboration and discussion. Furthermore, I think that it is crucial that students develop metacognition about how they develop meaning through interaction with others and with texts, and how meaning is continually growing and transforming through these interactions. As I have experimented within my graduate course, I want to use digital tools to create constructivist experiences of meaning making. For example, I created a website to try and tackle the mundane lessons of comma usage. I posted a series of sentences that all used commas in the same way and asked students to post comments to explain what they thought the comma was used for. They could extend on others’ comments, disagree with others, or present a new idea. Within the series of comments, the students would clearly develop and demonstrate an understanding of how the comma was used. The following day, they would synthesize the comments into a “rule” for that particular comma usage and create example sentences of their own. There was no need for a grammar book, just refereeing by the teacher, and the understanding grew from analysis, collaboration, and synthesis among the students. This was all documented on the website and could be referred to by the students throughout the year. This is the type of digital experience that I want to learn to replicate in a variety of ways in which the online environment becomes both a site of collaboration and synthesis as well as a record of thought that can be later referenced.
As a teacher I must remain a learner and learners must have questions that they enthusiastically seek the answers to. So to continue as a learning teacher, I have to carefully formulate the questions and continually seek answers to them. These answers may change and grow, and some answers may be abandoned. In order to find answers I must have a community through which I can dialog around the answers and construct meaning. This community can be the authors I read, the community of teachers and students I work with, or peers and professors in online or traditional courses. At this point in my life as a learning teacher, as I rest and reflect, I see the following as the questions I want to search for meaning around:
- How do we create engaging, authentic learning experiences that allow students to construct meaning through inquiry, dialog, collaboration, and critical thinking?
- How does one create the optimal structure for inquiry-based lessons so that students develop habits of mind that foster inquiry-based learning?
- What is the efficacy of using digital tools in creating these experiences?
- How will digital learning transform into something beyond the paradigm of traditional learning mapped onto a digital template?
One challenge I have had as a Mandarin learner and this led to me slowing my progress down considerably is that I am frustrated by the difficulty of the language and this has dampened my enthusiasm. I’ve been in Taiwan for seven years, and I would have expected to be much more proficient by now. So critical to any learning experience is to establish a purpose and to foment enthusiasm. Fortunately, as my master’s study concludes, time opens up for me, I have developed stronger listening comprehension in Mandarin, and I sense a renewed interest in taking on the study. As an adult learner, I will need to create learning experiences that will optimize my growth as a language learner. Adopting this view of Mandarin study as a pedagogical experiment will help foster the enthusiasm and curiosity to press forward. I am in a very supportive environment of learners and teachers in my home, school, and community, so this should be a great next step in my journey as a learner.
Or maybe I should just start another master’s degree….
