Openness in Education: Learning is Sharing

I’ve been going through the course Introduction to Openness in Education and will be posting responses here.

The first activity asked us to reflect on a moment where we learned something we really valued and change the language from ‘learning’ to ‘sharing’ as learning is fundamentally sharing.

For me, one of the most engaging learning experiences I had was senior year in high school when I took a philosophy and ethics course. Our instructor shared his insights into various ethical theories and philosophies and then provided every class member the opportunity to share examples and ask questions to get clarification. The instructor also shared his own perspective via our discussions. When something was unclear, he would share additional resources to help us explore more.

The cycle of sharing as a result had not only single iterations between instructor and student, but extensive networks of sharing between students and student-instructor. 

As a result of the discussions, our shared ideas transformed each person’s thinking. I’m sure the instructor also found new ideas, examples and questions from what students shared. It was also one of the first times for me that what my fellow students shared was equally valid and respected as those things that a teacher shared.