Summary

Reality-Learning™ is an innovative educational approach that integrates authentic, real-world experiences into learning curricula to prepare individuals for the dynamic and complex modern marketplace.

Abstract

Reality-Learning™ is an educational paradigm shift emphasizing the importance of authentic experiences in learning. It is particularly relevant for human resource development and management education in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. This approach is characterized by its constructive, social, real, active, and cooperative nature, aiming to transform perceptions and behaviors by engaging learners with actual socio-economic and psychographic environments. It is grounded in experiential learning theory, combining self-directed learning, reflective practice, and real-life experiences to create a profound understanding of concepts in their true context. The process is fundamentally social, involving co-construction of knowledge within a community, and is centered around the idea of 'sensemaking' – where learning is an ongoing, retrospective, and social activity that shapes cognitive development and prepares individuals to drive and empower change actions.

Opinions

The traditional classroom-based curriculum is deemed insufficient for the modern VUCA marketplace, necessitating a shift towards Reality-Learning™.
Managers must adapt to increasing responsibility, autonomy, risk, and uncertainty by engaging with real-world turbulence and the human element of business.
Reality-Learning™ is seen as a unique variant of experiential learning that specifically focuses on altering the perception of reality and achieving sustainable behavioral change.
Effective learning is described as an active process where students articulate their learning goals, monitor progress, and engage with real-world problems to experience meaningful learning.
The approach emphasizes the importance of cooperative learning, mirroring the collaborative nature of real-world problem-solving and knowledge construction.
It is argued that experience alone does not constitute learning; it must be accompanied by reflection and sensemaking to derive meaning and understanding.
The sensemaking process is inherently social and is influenced by interactions with others, shaping the construction of knowledge and the creation of new realities.
Reality-Learning™ is linked to the development of situation-specific competencies, which are considered more valuable than generalized learning in certain contexts.
The curriculum aims to integrate workplace and academic experiences for a transformative impact on the learner's life, beyond just academic or career preparation.

Change your Life with Reality-Learning™

Embrace Reality-Learning for Life

People developers and human resource management leaders are challenged to ensure that organizational change and transformation are at the core of any program that prepares human talents for the VUCA marketplace characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. There is a great urgency to incorporate reality into corporate training programs as well as schools and universities curricula.

The reality of rapid globalization demands embracing and engaging turbulent change as a critical component of the managerial task as managers face increasing “responsibility, autonomy, risk, and uncertainty” and who must work in the turbulent but humane environment “of real human beings”.

What is Reality-Learning?

Reality-learning refers to a learning experience that exposes students to authentic, real-world experiences for a classroom-based curriculum. It is a unique variant of experiential learning that focuses on changing the perception of reality. It deploys a constructivist, andragogical approach to bring about actual changes in behavior made sustainable by the perceptions of a fresh social reality.

Reality-learning comprises of the following characteristics:

· Constructive

Learning results from reflecting on the experience of activity as well as the circumferential and environmental observations, and attempting to interpret them in order to create meaning and make sense of the learning experience.

· Social

Effective learning is social action-oriented. When students actively try to achieve a learning goal they have articulated, they would think and learn more. Articulating their own learning goals and monitoring their progress are critical components for experiencing meaningful learning.

· Real

Ideas and thinking depend on the contexts in which they occur in order to have meaning. Merely presenting facts as in case study and simulation that are stripped from their contextual variables separate knowledge from reality. Learning is impactful, better understood, and more likely to change behaviors that are better aligned to new situations when it occurs by engaging emotionally with real-life problems in all their natural peculiarities and complexities.

· Active

Students are engaged with the actual socio-economic and psychographic environment of the world of business. They conduct open-ended interviews, design and conduct surveys to collect real data, organise and analyse to discover the relevant information within the data, and map the effects of their evaluation for a feasible Blue Strategy.

· Cooperative

In the real world, we live, work and learn in communities, naturally seeking ideas and assistance from each other, and negotiating problems and how to solve them. In this context, students learn by discovering the numerous ways to view the world and a variety of possible solutions to most issues. Reality-learning, therefore, requires teams, conversations, and group experiences.

The goal of Reality-Learning is to “achieve a deep understanding of ideas, knowledge, and skills in authentic real-world contexts to prepare and embolden readiness to drive and empower change actions”.

Reality-Learning Fundamentals

Reality-learning is based on sound learning theory that places learning in an authentic and realistic context by linking the workplace and academia. Grounded in adult learning (andragogy) theories, it combines self-directed learning, reflective practice and integrates school and potential work-life experiences with life transformational impact.

The fundamental essence of reality education is experiential learning. Reality-learning is a form of experiential education where learning occurs through a cycle of action and reflection. It combines real-life experience with learning objectives as the project activities drive the social construction of a more relevant reality through a “sensemaking” process.

The learner is an active participant in the sense-making process, working on rather than simply responding to inputs from the reality space of his outside world. The sense-making process occurs naturally in the social context and is located in the interaction between the person and the social environment.

Learning is fundamentally a social activity. People construct their knowledge, not merely from direct personal experience, but also from being told by others and by being shaped through social experience and interaction. The construction of knowledge is therefore not effected in social isolation but is co-constructivist in essence within the reality of the social and cultural space.

Experience by itself is not learning. Learning requires reflections and “making sense” in relation to some referents. The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is constructed through an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs. Sensemaking has been defined as “how people make sense out of their experience in the world”. What is most important about any event or phenomenon is not what happened, but what it means.

Experience is the key active element in the learning process. Learning is essentially the determination of meaning out of an experiential encounter with real situations. The meaning derived would be the result of the interplay between what the person brings to the experiential situation and what actually happens there. The person works on every new experience to “make sense” of it. He uses the knowledge or meaning derived from previous experience to work on the new experience so as to make sense of it.

We make sense of life around us, particularly new experiences after we have participated in activities. Then, through discussion with others and subsequent explanations, we construct the meanings for our experiences. Sensemaking is however not synonymous with interpretation because sensemaking also implies the creation of “new” realities.

Learning is essentially a “sensemaking” process.

The interplay of thinking, learning, and development, in its socio-historical context, shapes the student’s cognition and cognitive development. The body of knowledge on learning generally affirms that one learns best through one’s own activity; that sensory experience is basic to learning; and that effective learning is holistic, interdisciplinary, and specific.

Cognition is part and parcel of the process of thinking. According to Resnick (1987), there are key distinctions between thinking practices in school classroom settings and those in the everyday world: individual cognition in school vs. shared cognition outside; pure mentation in school vs. tool manipulation outside; and generalized learning in school vs. situation-specific competencies outside.

The following sensemaking elements explain how we obtain conscious reality-learning as “to know what I think when I see what I say”:

1. Identity: About who I am as indicated by the discovery of how, what I think, and why.

2. Retrospect: To learn what I think, I look back over what I said earlier.

3. Enactment: To create the “object” to be seen and inspected when I say or do something.

4. Social: Knowing what I say, single out, and conclude are determined by who socialized me and how I was socialized, as well as by the classmates and teachers who audit the conclusions I reach.

5. Ongoing: As the activity is spread across time, I compete for attention with other ongoing projects, which means my interests may evolve or change during the period.

6. Extracted cues: The “what” information that I reach out for and report as the content of my grasping of the social reality is only a small portion of the utterance that becomes salient because of context and personal dispositions.

7. Plausibility: Discovering that I need to know enough about what I think to get on with my projects, but no more, which means sufficiency and plausibility, will and must take precedence over accuracy.

Sensemaking involves everything from creativity, comprehension, curiosity, mental modeling, explanation, and situational awareness in a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections in order to anticipate the nature and direction of their consequences so as to pro-act or react effectively.

Sensemaking defines the hyphen in Reality-Learning. A Reality-Learning curriculum seeks to bring authentic reality into the training program and into any classroom context.

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