#VoxPopuli | Learning in Interesting Times
by Katrina Isabelle P. Dela Rama
At first, the phrase “may you live in interesting times” seems to be a blessing. Who wouldn’t want to have an interesting life like a story protagonist? In reality, the phrase is a Chinese curse, popularized by Robert Kennedy during a speech he made in Cape Town in June of 1966. Quoting him, “Like it or not we live in interesting times.” To me, interesting is an understatement of the year 2020. Ever since the year started, there’s been one crisis after another and everyone is struggling to keep up. Even as we go into the new year, the Pisay system still struggles with creating an online learning environment that would maximize students’ learning while also taking care of their mental health. This is where relevant learning can come in.
During high school and elementary, we learn everything. From the simplest topics, such as basic grammar, to the more complex topics such as polynomial equations. When discussing the latter, you may hear a familiar complaint from the students. “What is the use of this topic? It’s not like we’ll ever get to use it in real life.” Why study something that isn’t relevant to us? This is where relevant learning becomes something important.
Learning is considered relevant to a student if it has personal or life relevance. A topic is personally relevant when it applies to a student’s aspirations, interests, or personal experiences. On the other hand, a topic is considered relevant to life if it is related to current issues in real-life issues, problems, and context. When studying a topic that has relevance to the student, they may become more motivated and more engaged in the lessons. During times like these, any extra scrap of motivation would be extremely helpful.
As a student, I find myself struggling with a lack of motivation to do anything and I believe that incorporating relevant learning into the curriculum could help with students’ slowly diminishing motivation. While rereading some modules over the weekend, I found some modules that mentioned current events and developments in COVID-19 research and told the students how scientific advances in the Industrial Revolution built are now being used to create a vaccine. It’s the clearest thing I can remember from all the second quarter modules because I had recently read through a lot of articles about the COVID-19 vaccine. Attaching a new topic to something already known makes it easier for it to be retained for future use. Relevant learning makes topics interesting and worth learning. In a pandemic that’s being encouraged to grow by poor discipline and poor governing, there are a lot of chances to incorporate recent events into lectures.
Personal relevance is a little bit harder to foster in distance learning. If a teacher were to run into their student at the grocery store these days, I’m not sure if they’d recognize each other, much less be able to create enough of a connection with the student to make a lecture personal. The pandemic also took away the opportunity for shared personal experiences that could be brought into lessons such as educational field trips and festival activities. Relevance in terms of personal experience is difficult to incorporate because in a time where we only see each other’s profile pictures and read their messages in the chatbox, we share little of our lives. However, a possible way to make something relevant in a personal way is to mention a topic’s applications in the real world. We won’t always know what a student’s dream job, but adding a segment that explains how it is used by living professionals could go a long way in piquing a student’s interest and make them motivated to learn more.
Making learning relevant could make education more human.
Relevance turns studying into learning. It’s an old joke between me and my elementary friends that studying is short for “student dying”, which is an appropriate way to summarize the difference between studying and learning. Studying is a chore to do, something we have to force ourselves to finish, while learning is something completely different. Learning is something fueled by curiosity, something that we enjoy doing and want to keep doing. Learning for the sake of gaining more knowledge and satisfying our curiosity instead of simply for grades is what makes education human.
Making education human in a world crisis is difficult. Everyone is struggling to adjust to the ‘new normal’ that still hasn’t become normal. Education is supposed to be equal, but in these circumstances, equality in learning is hard to achieve. In this pandemic, we now learn in different environments that may hinder someone’s learning, such as a student’s access to WiFi or a very loud dog. Because of different circumstances, education should be focusing on learning instead of a student’s output by making education as accessible and easy to understand as possible.
Out of the 4 different styles of learning, reading and writing learners are the only ones whose learning style is currently being catered to. Anyone else with a different learning style is left in the dust. Other than the modules given, it would also be preferable to include video resources or a recording of the weekly check-in/lecture that can help students with auditory and visual learning styles understand the topic more. Additionally, relevant learning can be applied to show situations or experiments where kinesthetic learners have the chance to apply what they have just learned.
We live in an interesting time where each interaction with a different person is dangerous. In a society where social interaction had been an integral part of everyday life, previously established systems and institutions should keep their minds open to suggestions and take each one seriously. Education is incredibly important in life, but a student shouldn’t be made to feel less by a system that assumes everyone is the same. Those with power should remember that people who are learning are simply human.
