Four weeks into class and this is my first post. Makes me wonder, how contemporary my own adaptability skills are.

Coming from the school of gears, chalkboards and machines; which churns out mechanical engineers, how am I to eloquently place my opinions out into the void?

What have I learnt?
Am I augmenting my learning or am I still stuck on the unlearning curve for this class? My first blog seeks to be a reflection.

Traditionally a teacher is the pedagogue and a teacher centric educational transaction is ‘pedagogy’. Most adults (and this holds true right from the day of Graduation) acquire a developmental trait of earnestly believing that ‘they know the best’. They take it upon themselves to draw and demarcate the boundaries of learning for their young ones. They seek to direct teaching or learning based upon their experiences with the concept.This results in repetition of the same content through the similar methods of learning that the teachers themselves have undergone. As a result, the subject matter itself takes precedence over the learning.

Thermodynamically speaking ( abiding by the mechie status quo), one spends too much time and effort on characterizing the process based solely on kinematics (ie. the effect of change of state) rather than dynamics (the path followed during the change ). Thus, the learner is subjected to a higher degree of entropy, without having any clue as to how s/he attained it. Had similar an approach be followed at the particle level for understanding matter, there would be no possible way to explain life-forms on the planet.

Teaching – learning like any other discipline is essentially evolving and metamorphosing and hence any process that discourages newer thoughts is engineered for decay. The main beneficiary of this null-transaction is the learner, who more often than not, has nothing to say (or do, or blog…) in the proceedings.

There is no scope for addition, alteration, modification, tailoring or customization of the content or the processes to individual variations and attributes. Such a process may work for worker-ants but is woefully inadequate and certainly inappropriate for the ‘globezens’.

A student-centered approach encourages the child to ask questions.The ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘why’ and most importantly ‘why not’ are the basic building blocks of learning, which is subdued and sacrificed at the alter of teacher-centricity.

In the middle-ages questioning was not hugely encouraged.
Indoctrination was practiced and knowledge and certainly questioning was considered to be ‘forth with dangers of subversion and radical thoughts’.
‘What if someone starts seeing the earth as something but flat?’ What if somebody starts questioning the rotations of the planets??, What if anybody gets up and gets quizzical about the almighty HIMSELF???

For every Galileo and Copernicus was at least a thousand who were not allowed to query.
Some of us who may still labor under the misconception that such suppressions do not occur any longer, have to just walk into the classrooms of many schools in almost any district of any city of any country on the face of this planet, and learn the truth.

Changes are the grammar of existence, the language of life and therefore the harbingers of such changes, the developing young minds have to be unshackled and set free to unabridged knowledge and untamed exploration, to inquire, seek and search independently, with just a little help and guidance from the adults, not dictates.

The adults should also never abandon their rights to question faiths, seek answers, challenge dogmas and evaluate beliefs.

Only then will there be a lifelong learning.

And with this, I let off my first blog post onto the mother ship, hoping that as I evolve as a blogger, I shall unlearn my own reservations and biases and learn about a  whole new way to voice myself and hence to contemporize myself as a 21st century learner as well as evolve as a ‘learnee’…