Understanding how students learn in order to be more effective educators

All I want to say is thank goodness for Jane Fried!

I just read her book titled Of Education, Fishbowls, and Rabbit Holes-Rethinking Teaching and Liberal Education for an Interconnected World. Don’t let the long title deter you from this compact gem at just 100 pages. I am thankful for Jane Fried because she has discovered what my personal experience and the science of learning indicate is the truth about how real and deep learning occurs and, most importantly, she is determined to help the rest of us understand it.

Though the book would be a resource for all in higher education, she spoke directly to student affairs professionals in 1995 when she and associates edited the ground-breaking book Shifting Paradigms in Student Affairs, Culture, Context, Teaching, and Learning. Prominent among purposes of the book was to emphasize that student development was part of the mission of colleges and universities, and student affairs practitioners were educators.

Fried located the concepts of the educative role of student development and student affairs in the different and interrelated cultures encountered in higher education in the United States and, indeed, the world. These different cultures were being aggregated under the term diversity in U.S. higher education and the best approach to seeing diversity as a resource rather than a problem was to see with new lenses or shift paradigms about learning. This paradigm shift is relevant today as students are creating their own laboratories for learning through their activism.

In Shifting Paradigms, Fried suggests that educators understand and accept the fact that sometimes the “student is the expert and the student affairs professional learns a great deal.” (112) She also points out that the role of the student affairs professional becomes one of understanding that students are learning from their experiences and the role of the professional is to help students reflect on that experience. (213) Those who desire to truly educate will need to help students reflect from the perspective that “cultural experience, historical experience and personal experience” all matter. (230)

As an original thought leader and contributing author of Learning Reconsidered-A Campus-wide Focus on the Student Experience, published by NASPA and ACPA in 2004, Fried championed the idea of the interconnectedness of learning where all of the processes and relationships a student encounters must be recognized as learning sites that students could use to make meaning of their lives. Therefore, each site must see itself as part of the learning community. In other words, learning occurs both inside and outside of the classroom.

I keep her 2012 book titled Transformative Learning through Engagement-Student Affairs Practice as Experiential Pedagogy close at hand for quotes for my various essays and speeches. It is rich with information about the psychology and biology of learning, and it reinforces what I think is the major take-away from Learning Reconsidered, mentioned above, and Learning Reconsidered 2, published in 2006: The most important factor is that transformative learning always occurs in the active context of students’ lives.

The most recent book speaks to faculty directly about their assumptions based on how they were taught and learned and how their world view influences how they see students and how they teach. By another name, Jane Fried is still working to help educators understand that there has to be a paradigm shift. She makes concrete recommendations about how faculty who teach undergraduates can do so more effectively. True to how we learn, throughout the book, she asks the reader to stop reading to do some exercises and reflections in order to move beyond learning “about” teaching effectively and to begin to understand how learning occurs through their own experience and reflection.

I will continue to read whatever Fried writes because it takes a while to unlearn what and how we have been taught and to shift our perspective in how we see the world.

Thank you, Jane, for continuing to move classroom faculty and student affairs professionals toward understanding how students learn in order to be more effective educators.

References

Fried, J., & Associates. (1995). Shifting paradigms in student affairs: Culture, context, teaching and learning. Alexandria, VA: American College Personnel Association; Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Fried, J. (2012). Transformative learning through engagement: Student Affairs practice as experiential pedagogy. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Fried, J. (2016). Of Education, Fishbowls, and Rabbit Holes-Rethinking Teaching and Liberal Education for an Interconnected World. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Keeling, R. (Ed.) (2004). Learning Reconsidered-A campus-wide focus on the student experience. Washington, DC: American College Personnel Association and National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.