children that could not read English, the Internet’s default language, taught themselves how to use the Web to obtain information through their interactions with each other and the computer.
“I agree with what Mitra surmised from his experiment—learning is emergent, which is another word for self-organizing,” remarks Owen. Like Freire, Owen likens traditional education to the “banking” method of learning, whereby the teacher passes information to students that become dependent on someone else rather than learning how to think on their own. Suzanne Daigle, a Sarasota, Florida- based consultant with a Canadian multidisciplinary consulting fi rm, explains how the OST learning environment changed her life: “My personal transformation began in 2009. Even though I was a leader in my corporate career, I doubted myself and often believed that what others had to say was more signifi cant and interesting than what I could express.” Now she says she has shed her people-pleasing tendencies and former attempts to control other people’s agendas and discovered the freedom
and courage of her own voice. “As an OST facilitator, my life work now occurs in the moments I am collaboratively learning and listening for opportunities to enter into meaningful conversations that can lead to actions,” says Daigle. “I invite others to do the same.”
Co-Learning In a compulsory two-year Theory of Learning class for an International Baccalaureate degree at California’s Granadas Hill Charter High School, math and science educator Anais Arteaga helps students apply two major elements of transformative learning: self-refl ection to critique one’s own assumptions and discourse through which they question or validate their judgments. She focuses on the roles that perception, language, reason and emotion play in a student’s learning and decision-making abilities. “Questions and lively discussions are the basis of the class,” Arteaga says. “We begin with a question and explore
what we know, how we know it and any conclusions drawn from the process.” Using a democratic
model in which the teacher welcomes critical discussion, Arteaga and her students have mutually discovered that knowledge is not static, but has a history and changes over time. “When we fi rst started the class, it was challenging to accept that in many situations there is no right or wrong, just relativity and a matter of perception. We don’t really know anything for certain,” she remarks.
Worldview Explorations Katia Petersen, Ph.D., is the executive director of education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), headquartered in Petaluma, California. She co-developed the tools, practices and 22 lessons in the pioneering organization’s Worldview Explorations (WE) project. Founded on 40 years of IONS research, WE engages everyone in age-appropriate ways in refl ecting upon long-held assumptions and how beliefs create the lens they see through, ultimately
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