I remember many days spent zoning out of a class through all of my k-12 education focusing on anything but what the teacher was rambling about in the front of the class. I’d sit there on the end of a row pretending I was listening, or flat out read a book that was way more mentally stimulating. This is how our current education system works. Students sit, are “taught” information that they question if they’ll ever use, cram memorize for tests and quizzes, until they emerge on top with a diploma at the end of it all. But if the classes were engaging and kept students motivated to learn, students wouldn’t be focused on the destination of that diploma to get them through one more powerpoint presentation. No, they would be on a journey and picking up so much information that they actually find necessary.
I really relate to the idea of learning by necessity. I do that every day. I have to eat, I need to learn how to cook. My tire blows, I need to learn how to change it. Adults learn something because they “have a reason to learn it.” So why isn’t the rest of the education system like that? Similar to a topic we’ve discussed both in class and a video titled “Future Learning Mini Documentary- GOOD,” it discussed how a person starts a video game having no idea how to play it, and they play until they inevitably fail. But then they don’t just stop. They try again, learning how to overcome this obstacle and continue. It creates a persistence and a motivation to keep learning and how to become a master at that game. It’s learning by necessity. The person cannot beat the area until they learn how to master the skill. Directing our focus more at the university level, this is a place where learning by necessity is prime. And I find an interdisciplinary approach is a great way to create this option.
If I was creating a university system, I would set up a system that had “disciplines” but not in the way you would think. Classes would be organized by buildings of related subjects similarly to how they are here except there aren’t degree programs in just one field. Students come in with a plan in mind of what they want to do and get to see what each building offers. Then they would build together their degree in a similar fashion to how we do here for our IDS majors. This creates a system that gives all students the opportunity to learn what they want. There is a sense of structure as the locations have one area of study in one building. If I want to look at biology to help explain psychological disorders I could take classes that would allow me to learn what I need to for biology and how to understand the mind and different disorders. The professors are all geared towards helping students create their own discoveries rather than just learning what has already been taught.
On the subject of students making their own discoveries, what’s the point of making a discovery if you’re just handing it in to a teacher? I have found using domains in the classroom to be a phenomenal system that can allow students to produce their findings and it gives the students a place that is their own. When they get to the school, all the new students would be set in a class similar to a first year seminar except much better as it would be a place where they would learn about open pedagogy, how to build a PLN, and create a domain for themselves that would be the center of their education for the rest of their time at this school (and hopefully after.) They would update it throughout their entire college career and, when they come to the last semester, rather than a large capstone project, they can sit down and go through everything they’ve discovered and written about and it’s all in one place that they’ve been building for 4 or however many years. And then the can have an intellectual conversation with their professors on all of these topics and prepare them to continue making discoveries that they can then continue to put out in the world via their domain. As previously mentioned, they would also be building a PLN so they can actually learn how to share their discoveries with professionals in their field and get information from people beyond their professors.
I think that students would be better served in a system like this because they can really focus in on what they want to learn and it makes them think differently than the current school system has set them up to think. It allows students to be motivated in their education and really learning what they want and need to learn to do what they want to do in life. If the higher education system worked like this, I think we would have a world full of people who think a little more outside the box and can collaborate better between “fields,” because the world out there is constantly changing and we as thinkers in this age of technology have to learn to evolve and adapt to the world so we can spread education and make new discoveries. I don’t think you have to be a professional to discover something new, you just have to look at the world a little different, maybe through an interdisciplinary lens.
To view the video I talked about at the beginning: here's the link! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC_T9ePzANg