My Experience at Truman

by Liza Mendenhall

Spring 1998

In this paper, I cited three different experiences in my career at Truman State University to show how I have learned to be aware of my learning, making connections and understanding the process I go through rather than just being a robot who does well on multiple choice. These examples were learning the language of ethics, learning to analyze literature, and being able to make grammar personally meaningful. I also explained the learning environments that allowed this kind of learning to take place.

  I am lazy as an academic learner and if I can get by with not internalizing the information, I will. This is a self-limiting myth that I have about academic learning. It has haunted me throughout my academic career. Myths, according to Harri-Augustein and Thomas (1985), are beliefs, whether positive or negative, that an individual has about learning. Believing that there is always a "right answer" is another example of a myth that I had about learning in high school. During high school, I was most often a robot, learning things in lists and always seeking out the "right" answer (Harri-Augustein and Thomas, 1985, p. 46). Most of what I did was regurgitate information. Coming to college, there has been quite a bit of class work that has involved the same thing. However, in several classes, learning environments have been formulated in which I had to be responsible for my own learning. Rather than just being task-oriented, I had to learn how to learn, how to think for myself apart from teacher evaluation (Harri-Augustein & Thomas, 1985, p. 47).

  Great expectations from the professors always played a part in my move toward higher level thinking skills. These special professors knew the value of not evaluating the students at every step or spoon-feeding right answers. Giving guidelines and presenting a way of thinking rather than multiple choice answers was what helped me, as a learner, take charge of my own learning on a new level (Glasser, 1986, p. 23). Harri-Augustein and Thomas (1985) talked about the teacher’s role in a learning conversation. By helping a student reflect on his or her learning, pointing out directions to explore, a teacher can facilitate higher understanding of the material for a student. With too little guidance, a student will not reach his or her potential, as the list of tips for the midterm suggests, "When would you ever take the time and the effort to examine these issues in writing if you didn’t have to?" (Martin). Too much guidance hinders personal meaning because a learner does not figure things out on his or her own. With the right guidance, learners are able to make the information personally meaningful. According to Harri-Augustein and Thomas (1985),

Learning requires that learners construct or reconstruct aspects of their reality so

that meaning is attributed to new areas of experience or new meanings are

attributed to old areas of experience. It also requires that the learner...acts on the

basis of this new reality, trying out and exhibiting new or changed behaviors (p 60).

In this way, my experience at this University has fulfilled its mission statement. My classes have helped to "ignite [my] curiosity about the natural and social universe and then aid [me] in developing the skills and personal resources to channel knowledge into productive, satisfying activity" (Mission Statement, 1997).

  The first experience I would like to examine that fulfilled that vision for me is Christian Ethics my second semester freshman year. Though it seemed as though I should be somewhat familiar with Christian Ethics, being a Christian, this class was filled with very difficult vocabulary and logic that was based on history and doctrine with which I was not familiar. The reading was extremely thick and the material was difficult for me, the freshman that had gotten A’s in high school by knowing the "right" answers.

  I learned the logic and language of Christian Ethics in a rote way of learning. I used the TOTE system of learning, which stands for the sequence: test, operate, test, exit. I modeled the language and writing style of the teacher and the authors of the text, then compared my work with theirs. If it did not match satisfactorily, I would have to decide how to change it and carry that out. Then I would test it again to see if it needed improvement. This was a continual process because after each observation, I had to modify my own response to match theirs more closely. (Harri-Augustein, 1985). I had to work for myself because the professor expected me to already understand something I had never been exposed to. I was only able to poorly reproduce similar material, but I was involved in self-evaluation because this involved a way of thinking that did not come easily to me. Harri-Augustein and Thomas (1985), say that information must be significant, relevant, and viable for a learner to make it personal (p. 53). I was unable to make personal meaning out of the material because it was not applicable to my life at that point.

  My sophomore year, I had a class called Introduction to the Short Story. In this class, again, the learning environment was one that encouraged self-organized learning. The professor set up an environment where the students were only allowed to talk to one another. Talking directly to the professor during a discussion was forbidden. This gave us definite responsibility to know what we were talking about and implicitly communicated that our opinions and ways of seeing the literature were just as important as the way the professor saw it.

  Learning conversations took place in that class. The professor asked thought-provoking questions that drew out the information we had learned through our personal conversations with the literature. Through this process, I learned to listen to the texts and be more sensitive to what they had to say. For example, in a story called Paul’s Case by Willa Cather, there was a scene that involved a hotel ballroom, with sights and sounds of affluence. Linen table cloths, champagne, and men and women dressed in extravagant clothes meant something special for the main character, Paul, a poor boy with only a father to raise him. He was sort of deranged and this scene was the only place where he felt free. In this class, I learned that by picking up on subtlety, I can understand what the authors are feeling and thinking. Through conversations with the other learners in the class, each having their own experience of the literature, I came to better understand where I was coming from. It helped me to make connections to the literature from my past experience, both with other literature and with life.

  This was my first real experience with an English major class and it really helped me to grow in my understanding the process of learning about literature. William Glasser states that we all have desires and places in which we are comfortable. The way he described these is that we each have a picture album in our heads, with pictures of what we find meaningful. I had begun to form a picture of myself by the end of that class as an English major because I felt "a sense of the joys and uses of creative and critical thought" (Mission Statement, 1997).

  The last is an experience I had last semester in my Modern Grammar class. In the class, we went over grammatical rules and different ways to put words together. We discussed at length the different language used in different situations and with different audiences. This was a very concrete learning experience because I was able to look at my everyday experience with language, something I was very familiar with, in a different way.

  Some of what the class discussed, I had already learned earlier in school. At the earlier point, however, the grammatical rules had no significance in my life whatsoever. Therefore it was not a valuable learning experience for me. Being taught again what I had only learned in a rote manner as rules, I was able to attach meaning to the discussion of participles, semicolons, and double negatives. I was able to see how people talk in different situations and why they do so.

  At the end of the semester, I wrote a ten page paper examining the grammar of the apostle Paul of the New Testament. I analyzed texts that were written to three different audiences and used my knowledge of grammatical rules (that had once been irrelevant) to comprehend the differences in the apostle’s tone and language usage. Not only had I attached personal meaning to grammatical rules, I was able to demonstrate that knowledge in a concrete way. I have come to find out that that is what college is all about--being required to apply what we learn (Harri-Augustein, 1985, p. 60) to real life situations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Glasser, W. (1986). Control theory in the classroom. New York: Harper and Row.

Harri-Augustein, S. & Thomas, L. (1985). Self-organized learning: Foundations of a conversational science for psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Von Oech, R. (1986). Kick in the seat of the pants. New York: Harper and Row.