Prosperity Horizons Educational News

10 Keys To Designing A Personal Lifelong Learning Process
By Catherine Franz
 

A Lifelong Learning Plan is a conscious, continuous engagement in acquiring, assimilating and applying knowledge and skills in the context of authentic, self-directed growth and challenge. It is rare for individuals to take this initiative. Most people operate on a "what they need now" plan and typically attend educational institutions for their training.

Lifelong Learning is a philosophy of approaching learning as an integral, inseparable part of our life’s activities. Here are ten guidelines to help you formulate your own personalized Lifelong Learning Process.

1. Commit to approach learning as a lifelong journey. Choose to keep it alive throughout your lifetime. You don't need to attend formal educational institutions for this process. In fact, you can learn more in small, consistent spurts than you can in a classroom, if you set up your plan correctly.

2. Maximize your resources. With lifelong learning, there isn't a structure like you had in school, so it’s easy to ignore and procrastinate. If you allow this, eventually the "you snooze, you lose" theory will catch up with you. A prime example is how changes in the national economy have hit the IT industry these last few years. The companies that priorities learning are still in the game, whereas their competitors who focused on "what we need now" are out of business. Create a system and plan that works and can last a lifetime. Keep learning journals for each topic.

3. Maximize your environments. Identify and create settings that support and inspire you both inside and outside your home. How does the library spark your learning? How about the mall, the park, or even McDonalds! Explore different environments and label each one (e.g., "inspiring," "relaxing," "great for concentration.") What supplies help you keeping your energy up? Do you need quiet for some learning and busy environments for others?

4. Know how you learn. To learn effectively, know how you learn. How do you take in information, process, and retain it? There isn't one best way. Tie everything into a learning purpose and vision. When and how often does your mind need a break? Do you have reading spurts? How do you retain the information -- by reading aloud, notes, summarizing in memory, or sharing with others?

5. Tap into the power of your mind. Your mind’s power is evident in everything you do. Analytical, critical and creative thinking enables the mind to process, store, and create all the facts and ideas it encounters. By practicing different types and ways of thinking, you keep your mind strong and flexible. Consider it "going to the gym" for your mind! (Talking about how the mind works is the subject of a huge tome, not a Top 10!)

6. Harness the power of words and ideas. Words, when joined, form ideas, and are tools with enormous energy. Whether writing a memo, letter, e-mail, article, or journal entry, make each an opportunity to fulfill a learning goal. Each is a chance to work toward improving and using words to construct understandable ideas. Learn to express ideas in writing. This will evolve into clearer thinking. Keep an idea journal by theme or topic.

7. Absorb, retain, and demonstrate knowledge. What do you do with the facts, opinions, and stories that you accumulate daily? Listening helps absorption and memory skills, which enables retention. Listen to a teleclass or book on tape, then write your own version and master what you learned by moving it into the long-term memory. Listening can be compared to using a camera. First, you view the image and focus listening). Next, you snap the picture (remembering). Finally, you print the image (demonstrate knowledge). Mastering knowledge means being able to apply it in other situations.

8. Value diversity. The greater part of our day involves interacting with others. Experiencing other people's communication styles, learning methods, and the roles played in groups and teams help us to grow, prosper, open our minds and develop new perceptions. Dealing with conflict, criticism, and any points of vulnerability strengthens our ability to use any situation as an opportunity to learn.

9. Take exceptionally good care of yourself. Physical and mental health affects learning. Examine these aspects and set up contingencies within your plan to identify and work through all health challenges as soon as they appear.

10. Map your course. Maximize time, energy and focus by defining a yearly learning theme. Subdivide into monthly topics with time commitments. (Example: Ten years ago, I defined a learning goal of three new computer steps in no more than 15-minutes per day. It has compounded and saved time and money ever since.) Minimize distractions by learning to "table the other topics." Create a "next year "folder to contain those great ideas and set up a review month of tabled topics to decide how to use them in the following year.
 

Catherine Franz, a Certified Professional Marketing & Writing Coach, specializes in product development, Internet writing and marketing, nonfiction, training. Newsletters and articles available at: http://www.abundancecenter.com  blog: http://abundance.blogs.com 

Imagine That! Defining An Imaginal Education
By Leigh Melander, Ph.D.
 

Education is failing in this country. By saying this, I know that I join the ranks of the self-appointed Cassandra’s who hurl our hands up to our foreheads and sing the doom of a nation. But it’s true.

And most of the wailers miss the point. Underlying the political agendas, funding battles, culture wars, and the simultaneous disrespect for and outrageous expectations of teachers, there is a much deeper failure.

Think of a moment in your life when you were completely caught up in learning something. In that moment, learning wasn’t about facts, tests or grades, succeeding or failing. Instead, it was an all-consuming, joyful burst of energy and pleasure at finally discovering something. Of understanding something. To borrow from Shakespeare, it was an instance of god-like apprehension, comprehension of our place as partners in a creative universe.

How often have you had a moment like that in your educational process? If you’re like most people, pretty rarely. Somewhere along the line, education became a consumerist contest of amassing skills and factoids and spewing them back to the world like game show geeks. But when we become glorified databases, we lose the analytical abilities that keep us from being engulfed by systems (be they political, religious, societal, or media) without bothering to ask if they should exist at all. We have all of the pieces out of the puzzle box and arrayed on the table, but we don’t have a picture to follow.

And that’s what we’re missing: the picture. The image. The imagining. Our failure is a failure of imagination, both in what we teach and how we teach it, but also, far more importantly, a failure to understand that education is ultimately about imagination itself.

When we become imaginal learners, we move beyond passive collectors of information into creators. We find the enchantment, the poetics of learning, and we can imagine entire universes into being. Learning becomes a spiraling generative process that invites us to continue to learn and to shape ourselves and our worlds.

So what would an imaginal education look like? Part of its beauty, and admittedly, its complexity, is that there isn’t one answer. It is an invitation for each learner to understand herself and the world around her as a classroom. It is about inviting wonder to be your partner, and continually asking “why” and “how” and “what if” about everything and everyone that crosses your path.

Since it is so vast, let me try to sketch out an example from a very small, prosaic beginning point: the number 32. I have a painful memory of standing in a classroom with flashing cards and spots before my eyes, trying to spit out multiplication tables. But in spite of that (mostly because I count on my fingers), I know that eight times four is thirty-two.

In an imaginal learning context, the flash cards are gone. The walls of the classroom are gone, replaced by a hillside on a quiet night where the stars seem made for counting, and infinity has a tangible and richly mythic presence. So I lie on my back, and imagine a life for the number 32. A combination of eight (a sideways symbol of infinity) and four (of the four elements) make up the sinuous and stable combination of thirty-two. I imagine its colors, its own suggestion of infinity when turned sideways – like three mountains and the beginnings of a fourth.

And then I begin to count. Eight constellations, each of four stars. Sixteen pairings of two. I remember the stories of the constellations. I make up poems with four stanzas of eight lines each, and drum out rhythms in 4/4 and 2/4 time. And then I explore 32 as a leaping point into other thoughts, other disciplines, awareness of myself and those around me. For example, in the Buddhist tradition, there are 32 body parts. How many can I count? And what lies underneath a philosophy that identifies the body this way? Or, I look to language. Balagtás Tagalog, one of the indigenous languages of the Philippines that is being replaced by a state sanctioned combination of Filipino and English, has 32 letters. What letters would I add to the English alphabet? And can I understand the despair of losing my language and the identity that goes with it?

As philosopher and mathematician Gaston Bachelard writes, imagination is “a voyage into the infinite.” Education is the most powerful when its goal isn’t overtly focused on what it will achieve for us, but instead when it is an open process that seduces us into searching for what we’ve not been able yet to see. It helps us not only to fit the puzzle pieces together, but to turn the pieces into the image that we have created.

In that voyage, we become infinite ourselves. And education stops being a metaphorical key to a brand new refrigerator and dining set that you vie for because you want to be a good consumer, but instead truly becomes something that is good for the entirety of the soul.

Leigh Melander, Ph.D. is the Head Fomenter and Frivolateur of the Imaginal Institute, a company dedicated to helping people bring their ideas to life. She is a writer, performing artist, and creativity consultant, and has a doctorate in cultural mythology and psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Visit the Imaginal Institute website at http://www.imaginalinstitute.com .