Week 2

What is Learning? What is Knowing? What is Understanding?

These seem like simple questions with simple answers but when one takes a deeper dive into what they are really asking, the answer is anything but simple. The students in the class were divided into six breakout rooms to create a visual on Jamboard to come to some type of conclusion. 

What is Learning?

I was in Group 2. For the sake of speed, we decided to add stickies to our board so that we could discuss and sort each. At first, I was surprised that my group did not share the same ideas for their responses. There was a certain amount of sorting and shuffling before we came to an agreement. 

Sfard said that researchers see learning as a constant evolution, or a life-long learning. I certainly agree but I think it is more than that. Learning is the road to independence both financially, in thought, and in independence. In my experience, the more I have learned, the more I want to learn.  Like Socrates (well, not exactly because he is Socrates), but I agree with his sentiment: I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. Sfard says that from the AM point of view, learning is the acquisition of something but from the PM point of view, it is becoming a participant. I say life is not black/white, either/or.

What is Knowing?

On page 4 of her article, Sfard asks, "How can we want to acquire a knowledge of something that is not yet known to us?" (Sfard, 1998). She goes on to say that this has been a paradox that has concerned philosophers for a long time. She doesn't appear to consider that people's need for knowledge grows with their life experiences. I learned to shop with grocery store fliers in the 1980s because my first husband was out of work, I had a complicated pregnancy, and ended up with a premature child. I learned to use only food that was on sale or in my home to make appetizing meals for my young family. Now, many people order in prepared groceries or Uber in food so that they don't need to learn to cook this way. Times change and with it, the need for specific types of knowledge. It would be interesting to survey the Principles of Learning class to see their methods of learning about foods for themselves/their families to answer the question, What knowledge do they need to procure meals?  

Sfard says, from the AM point of view, knowing is property or possession, or a commodity that can be traded for gain.  From the PM point of view, knowing is belonging, participating, and communicating.

What is Understanding?

It isn't until page 7 in the article that Sfard (1998), mentions understanding. For all of her talk about learning and knowing (or knowledge), the concept of understanding seems almost like an afterthought. On that page, in the second paragraph, she has a rather complex sentence that I find, ironically, difficult to understand. She says: "Whenever we try to comprehend a change, the perceptual, bodily roots of all our thinking compel us to look for structure-imposing invariants and to talk in terms of objects and abstracted properties." What I think she is saying is that when faced with change, we look for similarities to our old way of doing. If that is the case, Sfard underestimates the capacity of educators to move beyond what they are doing and to think in new ways about understanding.

There are certainly many times during my career when I was faced with implementing a very different pedagogy than that to which I was accustomed, and did so successfully. Throughout my education career (a synopsis of which you can see below), I reflected and modified my practice, always trying to better reach those who were harder to serve; to really understand them and how they could best be taught. The staff at my school showed the same amount of flexibility and enthusiasm to make their teaching more effective. To the best of my recollection, there was no mindless uptake of new ideas. Rather, each new way of doing was examined in staff meetings and judged on its own merits. Some new methodology was embraced and implemented. Those were not treated as add-ons, but really modified our teaching. Others were tried and discarded as not viable for the children in our classes.

Simply put, understanding is the ability to comprehend what is presented. It is the ability to deconstruct and reconstruct a concept and to examine it from multiple perspectives. I smile as I write this because one of the most notable things I learned in Week 2 was that there are multiple ways to describe learning, knowledge, and understanding so I stand to be corrected in my thinking if the reader of this site can prove their definitions to be better or more apt than mine.