5 Myths About Learning in College: Myth 2
The joyful expression on my student’s face as he displays his sustainable house project speaks volumes.
This is the second of the 5 myths I share with my students in a handout on the first day of class. I preface my class with these myths to explain why I teach very differently from what they may be used to.
Myth 2: College learning is all about learning facts, and all you need to learn facts is lectures and textbooks.
Lectures and textbooks can be useful aids to learning, but they are only part of the story of what makes a knowledgeable person, able to both reason and act in the world. We all know people who are “book smart” and people who are not, but are good at doing things. Ideally, an excellent education helps learners to strengthen both their “know what” and their “know how,” because both are necessary to a good life, and to being “the change you want to see in the world.” For me, “education for action” is the watchword. Knowing things, like the names and dates of the US President—just for the sake of knowing them—can be fun, and help your team to triumph on Trivia Night, but being able to take this knowledge and draw upon it to understand the world today and what changes might and might not be desirable makes this knowledge into fodder for effective action.
It’s certainly possible to learn from textbooks and lectures, and many people do, but if that were all it took we’d have a much better-educated citizenry. Part of the role of the teacher is to motivate, to spark inquiry, to give feedback, and to coach a student to see how a particular subject connects to their goals and aspirations. And the best classrooms become a community of inquiry, asking not just what the facts are about a particular topic, but how those facts help to inform action.
In my teaching, I have found that bringing physical materials into the classroom can enrich learning and propel students from a passive lecture-and-textbook mode into active learning, which we know is much more effective. Educators today accept a “constructivist” view of how students learn: learners work from their existing knowledge to construct new understandings by assimilating new information and habits of mind. When students think with things in my classroom, they are constructing both literally and metaphorically (a “constructionist” approach, which brings constructivism into the physical realm). When they respond with a Lego assembly or a pipecleaner structure to a prompt like “imagine the ideal seating for a learning environment,” they are synthesizing, not just analyzing. They are engaged, too, in a miniature version of project-based and problem-based learning, which are shown to be among the most effective ways of educating for action.
There is value in lectures and textbooks, for sure, but to think that they are a complete answer to the deep and abiding challenges of education is a myth.
To counter this myth, I offer the following proposition: