I've been wondering lately why I'm having such a hard time getting back into the rhythms of student life. I was always an excellent student, but here I feel less motivated. I'm doing my homework, but it doesn't seem to have the relevance or importance it did back when I was an undergraduate student. My thesis topic (ever elusive but always on my mind) inspires me, and I know, for me, my thesis is serious. Everything else, sort of feels ancillary
We had an interesting lecture the other day, on three types of learning: knowledge acquisition, participation, and knowledge creation. Knowledge acquisition is traditional classroom learning: an "expert" with knowledge passes that knowledge on to someone without knowledge. In it's most basic form, it's seen as a banking system of education-knowledge is "deposited" into your mind by the one who possesses it. You are passive, receiving knowledge.
Participation is, as its name implies, more participatory in nature. It's a social method of learning. As you work alongside an "expert, you learn through doing, observation, experimentation, and failure.
Knowledge creation goes a step beyond that. You improvise and create new ideas based on your knowledge and experience.
These don't have to be a continuum of learning, taken in order. However, each level has an increasing amount of intellectual challenge involved. Lately, I've been feeling a disconnect between what I'm doing here in class and what I want to do later in life, and as I listened to this lecture, I realized why.
For the past 7 years, I've mostly been learning at the participation and knowledge creation levels. Knowledge acquisition has usually been in response to a real life problem. And now I'm back in school. I've become unaccustomed to learning and problem solving separated from real world problems. When my former "stimulus" for learning was "we don't have a reading curriculum" and the outcome was a 60 page organized manual with reading and writing ideas written in my second language, suddenly, "read a scholarly article and write a summary and critique of the methodology" or even, "compare one facet of 2 different school systems in 6-8 pages" just doesn't seem as critical.
Here's to hoping that while I feel disconnected from the "real world" and real world problems, I'll be able to see how my time here will help me be more effective in meeting some of those problems when I leave the ivory tower of academia.
