Your Handy Personal Guide to Reality-Learning™
A Summary Reader for Better Living
Education is that powerful weapon to change the world decisively and make it a better place for all.
“It’s not enough for a man to be good, he must be good for something.” (John Dewey, 1938) And the thing he must be good for is to contribute to the community, to the social order, and to the lives of others in some meaningful way. The entire purpose of education is “to nurture individuals to discover their full power and potential”, he added. Earlier, Eleanor Roosevelt (1930) had argued that the full power and potential of individuals is best demonstrated in good citizenship
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.
As Associate Professor, I am acutely mindful that I cannot expect my students to learn by telling them what to know. My job was to facilitate and empower their learning by challenging thinking and re-configure mindsets so as to break through the glass ceilings and firewalls that retard their learning, unlearning, and relearning processes. And this demands that I bring the real world into the classroom through this proprietary Reality- Learning™ pedagogy.
Many years later, one of my students, now one of the youngest ever senior managers of a large global IT company, attributed to me his “best career advice”: To “always do something new”.
He said in an interview that the advice had:
“…. equipped me a mindset to continually sustain a learning environment throughout my professional life. It has also helped me maintain an entrepreneurial spirit in order to rise to new challenges. Moreover, ‘doing something new’ and getting out of my comfort zone regularly has ensured that I am seldom bored or I am not stagnated with my work”.
The importance of early youth immersion in the reality of life cannot be emphasized enough. Early hands-on awareness and realism awakening can inculcate in teens and youths the essential value of service contributions in their development of a balanced and wholesome lifestyle.
The important life lesson in Reality-Learning™ is that the abundant life is developed through sharing, not accumulation or hoarding; and that true happiness, like true love, is found only through contributing to the enhancement of happiness and love in other people.
The Complete Reality-Learning™ Reader
SELECTED REFERENCES
Bickford, D. J., & Van Vleck, J. (1997). Reflections on artful teaching. Journal of Management Education, 21(4), 448–472.
Bruner, J. (1975). Beyond the information given. New York: Basic Books.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier.
Duffy, M. (1995). Sensemaking in classroom conversations. In I. Maso et al (Eds.), Openness in research: The tension between self and other (pp. 119–132). Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum.
Hammer, M. (1997). The soul of the new organization. In F. Hesselbein, M. Goldsmith, & R. Beckhard (Eds.), The organization of the future (pp. 25–31). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Kirkpatrick, D.L. (1994). Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Resnick, L. (1987). Education and learning to think. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. Mind in society. (1978). (M. Cole, translated.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, (2005). Blue Ocean Strategy, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Weick, K. E. (1993). “The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.
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