Introduction
This document provides structured information about thinking, learning, and understanding. It is written for the MiNDWORKS project team as a basis for character development, episode structure, scripts, interfaces, casting, performance decisions, and other creative and editorial elements.
Fundamentally, our approach to learning, thinking and understanding is based upon the diagram and explanations below.
BELIEFS
KNOWLEDGE
UNDERSTANDING
WISDOM
Both beliefs and knowledge may be curiously reasonable, unreasonable, rational and fantastic. Both may result from observation, social structure, family background, local culture, religion, formal and informal education, experimentation, research, conversation, imagination or from other sources.
In our world view, understanding results from the forgin of knowledge and beliefs. All three are dynamic, constantly changing as life changes, new relationships are explored, and new information is gathered and processed. Perhaps this is why every question is associated with so many possible answers.
Wisdom, or any other higher-level rendition of learning, thinking, and/or understanding, may be impermanent. Still, some people in some situations seem to possess greater wisdom than others. Wisely, these people do not take themselves too seriously.
This document should be used in conjunction with Curriculum 2.0, which describes the five-year curriculum plan, and Characters 2.0, which details the characters and personalities that will represent a wide range of adult learning and thinking behaviors.
PREFACE: CHILDREN & ADULTS
With more than fifty million students in the U.S. education system, a high degree of standardization may be the only reasonable approach. Students are broadly encouraged to “think for themselves,” but the reality is uniform curriculum, core standards, and abundant efforts to so that all schools provide a certain minimum level of service.
At the same time, colleges and universities are deeply engaged in their long-time philosophical question of purpose. On the one hand, many of the one-third of Americans who graduate with a college degree enjoy steady employment, increased lifetime revenue, happier marriages, better health and longevity. On the other, higher education may be only one factor in this group’s success. Either way, every college student is required to make decisions about life goals, and about mustering the necessary resources to achieve those goals. In short, college students begin to take charge of their own learning.
For the other 2/3 of U.S. adults, those who do not complete college, the road is often rougher. Working without the benefits associated with a formal structure, often with limited options, survival often demands a narrow focus.
Most adults do not participate in a long-term formal learning program. Apart from the few years devoted to advanced degrees and specialized business curriculum, most adults do precisely what schools had hoped we would do: we think for ourselves.
In short, adult learning is not uniform. It does not adhere to standards (except in the case of specific professional or amateur certifications). It does not rely upon core standards, universal approaches to learning, nor a certain minimum level of service provided by schools or schoolteachers.
In short, adults are individual learners. That’s probably the big difference between learning for children and learning for adults. We’re on our own.
Of course, adult learning carries one more complexity: it occurs over a very long period of time. For children and teenagers, school lasts fifteen or twenty years. For adults, learning takes place over fifty, sixty, seventy, even eighty years. Understanding is dynamic: imagine what we knew and believed in 1955, sixty years ago.
CONTENTS
1 - DIFFERENCES AMONG ADULT LEARNERS - Various ladders, scales and categorizations that attempt to organize the diversity of human learning. Some are well-known. All are theories.
2 - LEARNING COMPONENTS - Perhaps a dozen pieces and parts of the learning process. These include attention, memory, emotions, self-control, logic and reason, rules and correct answers.
3 - HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW? - A collection of observations re: sources of knowledge and beliefs.
4 - HOW CHILDREN (AND OTHERS) THINK, LEARN & UNDERSTAND - Several very useful pages summarize UNESCO’s understanding of how children’s minds grow. Much of it applies to adults, too.
5 - LEARNING BASED UPON STORYTELLING & IMAGINATION - This less-studied area of learning seems to parallel our own thinking. The academic breakdown is helpful because it offers structure.
6 - THE GOOD LIFE, THE EXAMINED LIFE, THE OPEN MIND - The connections between ancient philosophies and contemporary positive psychology are closely aligned with our own goals.
7 - EIGHT NEURAL PILLARS OF WISDOM - If our goal is transforming knowledge and beliefs into understanding, and understanding into wisdom, it’s helpful to envision what wisdom might be.
8 - SUMMARY OF LEARNING DOMAINS - A three-page rundown of familiar learning concepts, organized in three groups: cognitive, emotional, and competencies.