Confidence and independence

Learning should make you feel more confident, but confidence and independence are not necessarily signs of deeper learning. Being able to do things on your own is important, but being isolated as a learner can cut you off from new ideas, more complex understandings, and important relationships. How you respond when confronted with an obstacle or difficulty will depend on how confident and independent you are, but also how you are able to adapt and rely on others’ support. Learning should push the boundaries of what you can easily do by yourself; this requires uncertainty and dependence, including working collaboratively with others.

Skills and strategies

In learning theory, skills often mean unconscious or knee-jerk processes that are so deeply ingrained in your mental habits that you don’t think about them. You use skills all the time but rarely think about them. Strategies, on the other hand, are tools for accomplishing a task that you draw upon consciously in specific situations for a specific reason. Not all strategies will work for you, and you don’t have every learning or writing skill that exists. The work of this class is testing out different strategies to see which work best for you, as well as noticing the skills you have and those you want to develop. It is our job (you and your instructor’s) to notice patterns and struggles you encounter in your investigation of skills and strategies, and the LR helps us do that over time.

Knowledge and understanding

There are many types of knowledge, ranging from experiential to experimental and theoretical. In more concrete terms, this dimension of learning is the “stuff” that you learned in this course. What do you know now about rhetoric, food, literacy, research, and conversation that you did not know before? What do you understand now that was confusing (or invisible) before?

Use of prior and emerging experience

All learners enter an educational setting with unique prior experiences that inform their thinking and interactions. A crucial but often unrecognized dimension of learning is the capacity to make use of prior experience as well as emerging experience in new situations. What have you already done that helps you succeed in this course? How are you using your emerging experiences in this course to build skills, deepen your understanding, and develop as a writer?

Reflection

The LR requires regular and thoughtful reflection. This means stepping back from the work of reading, research, and writing and asking yourself “How is this going? What is working for me? What is not working? What am I thinking?” There is a good deal of evidence that links this ability, which educational researchers call metacognition, with learners’ ability to transfer skills to new contexts—for example, other writing and research you will do in the future. Reflection means thinking about your thinking, thinking about your actions, and thinking about your dispositions towards learning (emotions, habits, inclinations).

Creativity, originality, imagination

“The things you learn without joy you will forget easily” – Arja-Sisko Holappa

Learning can (and should) inspire creativity and innovation. This dimension of the LR encourages students to experiment and try out new things, even if the final result of the work may not succeed as the student may hope. Writing is also a personal, human, and individual act; it is a way of sharing your thinking and the inner-workings of your mind with another human. Your writing should feel and sound like “you” in some way, and you have the opportunity to explore what that “you” sounds like in this course. Creativity also means connecting what you know in other contexts with the work of this course, making imaginative links between content and ideas.