Learning through doing

Hello Everyone,

My name is Elizabeth Flores, I am an English Education major. Since I was a very young girl I’ve known that I wanted to be a teacher. I learned English as a second language who migrated a lot because of this I struggled to learn English. It wasn’t community college that I began to acquired English and still to this day I continue to work on becoming proficient in English. I’ve been working as a tutor for the California Mini-Corps program for the past four years. I’ve had the opportunity to work with students from K-12, I work in the class room alongside the teacher and provide supplemental support for students, especially for those who are English learners. For the past two summers I have had the opportunity to be an outdoor camp instructor and teach science and math to 4^th to 9^th grade students who are English learners. I also have had the opportunity to shadow the vice principal position and work with college students. Because of this opportunity is that I was interested in this class to experience working in the classroom or tutoring college students. My career aspiration is to become a Middle school teacher (ideally 6^th grade), and teach English Language Development (ELD) classes as well as English Language Arts (ELA).

“Insofar as “understanding” is something a person does in his or her head, it ultimately involves the mental representations of individuals. Understanding is seen to rise out the mental operations of a subject on objective structures. Lave and Wenger reject this view of understanding insofar as they locate learning not in the acquisition of structure, but in the increased access of learning to participating roles in expert performances (Hanks, 17).”

The questions which this passage raises are; is understanding the same idea, concept, or notion as learning? Does understanding begin as a mental process and then become something individuals can apply? Is understanding something we do individually or something that we do as a group? What is the difference between understanding and learning? Lave and Wenger theory is that learning is something that happens when a person has the access to participate in a role. Were people learn by doing rather than by reading a book or a manual which list the steps of how to do something. It is not until you physically do the action of the manual book that you learn and understand what the book is saying. But then this raises the question of how children understand abstract concepts they never seen or done and are capable of producing an end product. To me understanding is when I am capable of questioning what is going on, what I read, or what I am being told. When I am able to picture what is it that I need to do or what others need to do. While learning is being able to process a new concept, ideas anything that might be new to me. Once I have learned something then I can understand it by applying it on something. Just because I don’t apply what I earned doesn’t mean I don’t understand it or does it? What I think Lave and Wenger are arguing is that people learn more through experiences rather than studying a book. Before you become a teacher you need to learn teaching strategies and become proficient in what you want to teach. But it’s not until you are in the classroom that you learn and understand what it is to be a teacher.