Documentation:World Cafe/Learning
Context for Conversation
Discussion 1:
How does learning happen? For you? For your students?
- Learning is embodied in personal experience
- Students and instructors need to find a mutual understanding of life situations
- Habits build on each other
- Exploration/experience and reflection are ways for both students and instructors to learn
- Students need experiments and explanations
- Student learning is inhibited by lack of professor/student "connection" and lack of "accessible" learning at school (textbooks vs experience)
Discussion 2
How do we support personally significant learning in today's academic culture?
Results
Personal Significance:
- Learning and retention linked to application
- Learning linked to personal goals and accomplishments
- Motivation: subjects students want to learn about
- Instructors who share why the content might be valuable to students
Academic Climate:
- Instructors who are excited about teaching and learning
- How do we measure personal significance? Do we need to? Do we value personally significant learning?
- Develop a personal learning contract
- More teaching with less results focused
- Institutional investments in student's- from a provincial level
- Syllabus development with students and custom designed programs.
- Lack of venues for personal goal development
- Peer review changing