Hi Everyone!!!

A little bit about myself: I am an only child. Born and raised in Silver City. Named after my parents, Michael and Joy. I got my undergrad degrees in Spanish and Latin American Studies. Now, I am currently working towards my masters in Teaching International Languages and a minor in Linguistics. I studied abroad for an academic year in Costa Rica and it changed my life. Since then, I’ve been doing basically everything I can do to go back. Super excited for this course and to get to know all of you better!!

 

The passage that I chose to analyze in the second paragraph of the text. The reason why I like this section of the reading is because it caught my attention immediately. Personally, until reading this text, I have never thought about learning in such an abstract way. To me, when I think of learning I think of the typical classroom setting with a teacher and student. What Wenger is trying to get his readers to realize is that learning is so much more that what occurs inside school. In order to know more about the theory of learning, we must first alter our preexisting notions and ideas of what it actually means to learn. For these reasons, I chose this passage. I think the paragraph does a great job of piquing the readers’ attention and encouraging them to change their assumptions about learning. I think the entire world of education could dramatically transform for the better if this notion of learning was emphasized and focused on.

So, what if we adopted a different perspective, one that placed learning in the context of our lived experience of participation in the world? What if we assumed that learning is as much a part of our human nature as eating or sleeping, that it is both life-sustaining and inevitable, and that – given a chance – we are quite good at it? And what it; in addition, we assumed that learning is, in its essence, a fundamentally social phenomenon, reflecting our own deeply social nature as human beings capable of knowing? What kind of understanding would such a perspective yield on how learning takes place and on what is required to support it? In this book, I will try to develop such a perspective.