Learner When Asked Why an Individual Wishes

¶ … Learner When asked why an individual wishes to attend college, quite often the expected response is 'to get a better job.' Perhaps in response to this phenomena, the second section of Orientation to College: A Reader on Becoming an Educated Person, a selection of essays assembled by Elizabeth Steltenpohl, Sharon Villines, and Jane Shipton, is entitled "Developing as a Learner." In this section, the editors address one of the most important and often unacknowledged processes a student must proceed through when facing the challenging transition from high school to college.

In addition to adapting to a different way of life, students must also adapt to a different method of learning. This second section of text, entitled 'Developing as a Learner' is divided into three sections, all authored by different and prominent leaders from different facets of educated life. In the section entitled "Thinking and Learning: Learning Systematically from Everyday Experience," Robert M. Smith stresses the fact that the division individuals often make between school and life is often an artificial one.

One must be learning constantly over the course of one's life, not simply in the classroom. One should apply the lessons learned in daily life to life in the classroom, and life in the classroom to what one sees outside. The last essay of this part of the section of part two, "Changing Concepts of Learning" by Graham Gibbs expands upon this notion.

The essay suggests that received conceptions of education are being challenged within the classroom, and must be challenged by individual students who wish their education to be relevant to a changing workplace and personal sphere. The essays addressing the real world/college world distinction all stress that college is a unique institution, yet one whose values and experiences on all levels will stay with one for the rest of one's life.

College also does not stand apart from life; rather the experiences one has in college are informed by life outside. More focused on the actual facets of learned life in the classroom, in his essay "Exploring Learner's Assumptions," Stephen D. Brookfield inspires individuals reading his work to question the assumptions they bring to the classroom. In a slight departure from Smith's analysis, Brookfield is more interested in how the assumptions of one's daily existence can inhibit broadmindedness and an open attitude towards instructors intent on questioning received assumptions in college.

Brookfield is more interested in college's unique quality, and of the advantages one can gain from standing outside, temporarily, upon the workforce and received assumptions. College can give a student the privilege of being reflective, for a brief time. "Developmental Foundations of Critical Thinking," by Joanne Gainen Kurfiss and "Learning to Make Reflective Judgments -- Patricia M. King, also stress this.

Perhaps the most important thing one learns in college is, as one subset of the essays in this section states, is "learning how to learn." Self-knowledge here is critical, as "Your Preferred Learning Style" by Arthur W. Chickering and Nancy K. Schlossberg and "Competence in Self- Directed Learning" by Malcolm S Knowles, as well as "Exploring Self-Directedness in Learning," by Stephen D. Brookfield. Attaining self-knowledge of the best way one can learn and retain information is crucial in college.

Unlike in high school, one's learning is dependent upon one's own impetus and will, rather than simply received passively. A relatively short span of time is spent in the classroom compared to high school, but this does not mean that one is spending less time being educated, only that one forced to take more responsibility for one's education. Am I am an aural, visual, or kinesthetic learner, or a combination of all three? One must ask oneself these questions to gain the maximum benefit from the college experience.

In "Learning Collaboratively -- Robert M. Smith. Collaborative Learning," by Kenneth A. Bruffee" and in "Peak Learning: The Flow State" by Ronald Gross, this second section is concluded by dealing with a few issues not dealt with in previous essays. Some of these issues relate to the increased emphasis on group work in colleges today and the ways that one may achieve a 'peak' state of learning, rather like an athlete engages.