On Knowing and Learning

This morning I had the fantastic opportunity to participate in a virtual class discussion as a student of the professional Master’s in arts, Dance Pedagogy and Technique with my professors and classmates from Middlesex University.  I was terribly nervous as I sought to prepare notes on the topic for discussion: Knowing and Learning.  From the literature I had gathered I had divided my conceptual understanding of both terms in two columns in a scrap piece of paper.  Knowing a topic or subject was defined by some authors as exposure to and a superficial approach to the subject at hand, while learning was a higher level of cognitive exploration that results in the student taking ownership of the content and learns and constructs an understanding unique to his own mind.  Literature from the neuroscientific perspective, goes as far as to describe learning as resulting in a physical change in the mind of the student: new synapsis would form in the mind for information to be stored, and then and only then can we say that a student is learning.  After this broad literature search of mine and with my chart in hand, I joined our class discussion.

Since this was y first class, I was very nervous.  I feared that my findings might not be the correct focus of my university or of the Dance Pedagogy and Technique programme in itself.  I discovered though after more than an hour of healthy and intense discussion that the aim of our work is to do precisely this, to give meaning drawing from our professional practice and our research to such complex concepts as are knowing and learning.  From my classmates a lovely concept of knowing as a fluid and changing process emerged.  Each classmate shared philosophical approaches and the grand experience of discovering our students´ process of knowledge acquisition.  From the discussion I broadened my analysis from my personal professional practice, as this has been only my initial stages of analysis, to focus beyond that and direct my attention to the evolution that my students are experimenting in front of my eyes.  I felt it was an excellent start of my Sunday morning, as I now gathered greater insight after sharing in such lively and passionate discussion.