Reality-Learning - The Better Way to Learn

According to IBM, the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours. Nanotechnology knowledge is said to be doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. On average, human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. Up till 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every 100 years ie every century.  By 1945, knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today, different types of increasingly complex knowledge have different rates of growth.

The knowledge revolution makes the imperative for real-time learning ever more urgent for corporate training, as well as in schools and Universities.  It necessitates a “Reality-Learning” Approach to Human Resource Development (HRD) to empower better and more effective engagement of the permanently turbulent global change out there.  

Reality-Learning is a form of experiential education where learning occurs through a cycle of action and reflection in the learners. “Sensemaking” defines the hyphen in reality-learning. Reality-Learning seeks to bring reality into any training room.

Globalisation has fueled change in every human sphere towards the end of the 20th century. Engaging rapid change effectively has become more critical for 21st century managers who face increasing “responsibility, autonomy, risk, and uncertainty” and who must work in the turbulent but humane environment “of real human beings”.  Human talent developers and educators are challenged to ensure that organizational change and transformation is at the core of any curriculum that seeks to prepare learners for the world. The rapid pace of globalisation in an increasingly ‘smaller’ world underscores a greater urgency to incorporate reality into the curriculum of corporate training, schools and universities.

The impact of Reality-Learning fosters self-directed learning with reflective practice to optimise transformative learning by embracing real-time, real-work learning experiences that are grounded in adult learning theories. 

What is Reality-Learning?

Reality-learning refers to a learning experience that exposes learners to authentic, real world experiences. 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 the following characteristics:

 ·   Constructive.  

Learning results from reflecting on the experience of an 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 learners 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. 

Learners are engaged with the actual socio-economic and psychographic environment of the ever-changing 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 in accordance with a selected relevant sense-making frame.

·   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, learners 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 working definition of Reality-Learning is “achieving deep understanding of ideas, knowledge and skills in authentic real-world contexts to embolden and empower learners for the real world”. 

Scientific Basis of Reality-Learning

The framework of 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 integrate school and potential work life experiences with life transformational impact.  

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

Learning is fundamentally a social activity involving making sense of actual events and situations.  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 therefore does not happen in social isolation, but is co-constructivist in essence within the reality of the social and cultural space. 

Sensemaking is simply “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.

Every 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 happens daily in the social context; in the interaction between the person and the social environment. 

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.  

Experience is the key element in the human 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 happens in its socio-historical context, to shape the learner’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 a training room or school classroom settings and those in the everyday world: individual cognition in artificial training vs. shared cognition outside; pure mentation in classrooms vs. tool manipulation outside; and generalized learning vs. situation-specific competencies outside.

The following sensemaking elements combined to obtain conscious Reality-Learning in the learner as he/she embarks on the learning adventure “to know what I think when I see what I say”:

1. Identity: About who I am as indicated by 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, singling out and concluding are determined by who socialized me and how I was socialized, as well as by the fellow learners and learning facilitators who audit the conclusions I reach.

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

6. Extracted cues: The “what” information that I reach out for and reported 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 defines the hyphen in Reality-Learning.  In essence, the Reality-Learning approach brings the authentic reality into the training room.

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.