Share a story about your best learning experience (could be a formal course or something more personal). Why did you enjoy it?

I think a constructivist approach to learning is more appropriate. Just as the learning of new vocabulary words is enhanced by exposure and subsequent interaction with those words in context (as opposed to learning their meanings from a dictionary), likewise it is essential that content knowledge be embedded in the situation in which it is used. Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) suggest that situations actually co-produce knowledge (along with cognition) through activity. Every action is viewed as “an interpretation of the current situation based on an entire history of previous interactions” (Clancey, 1986). Just as shades of meanings of given words are constantly changing a learner’s “current” understanding of a word, so too will concepts continually evolve with each new use.

I’ll share my experience of learning Japanese once here. Once I learned the basic Japanese pentagram, I needed to rely on it to know the words and memorize them, much like learning the 26 letters of the alphabet when learning English. After understanding the basic word composition, and the basic sentence composition, our learning can be applied to the life pattern. For example, many words have different meanings in different contexts, and we need to know that the content knowledge we learn must be embedded in the context in which it is used. By using situational patterns we can more easily understand the meaning of the word and will have a deeper impression to remember the word.

reference:

Clancey, W. J. (1986). Review of Winograd and Flores’ understanding computers and cognition: A favorable interpretation. (STAN-CS-87-1173) Palo Alto, CA: Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.