Educational Foundations: Meaning in the Process

March 2nd, 2009 by Sean P
This entry is part of a series, Educational Foundations»

While academics are a primary focus of education, nothing will matter in a longitudinal learning sense for the student unless that which is studied is meaningful to the student.  Self-efficacy towards learning is a result of the student finding/assigning meaning in what they are studying.  When self-efficacy (personal belief that a goal can be reached) is lacking, it is most likely due to motivation lacking and/or a student not finding personal meaning in the process.

To increase meaning in the learning process, the process itself must be able to be customized in some way to the student learner.  This was accomplished in past ages through the learning process being a mentorship, rather than a formalized system.  In modernity, education became more codified into “universal fit” systems, whereby the ability to custom fit a system to a learner decreased substantially as each revision passed.

In our contemporary environment (postmodernity), education has fallen fully into codified, universal fit systems of modernity, and despite past attempts to “track” students, even that effort has become more difficult as the medium requirements have increased in quantity.  In postmodernity, we should be more adept to recognize the contextuality of the differences and uniqueness existing among students.  That should lead us to develop ways whereby customization occurs, because the system is decentralized in such a way that the participants in the system can move throughout the system due to its inherent flexibility.

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