Psychology (social constructivist view of learning or Constructivist view of learning) - Essay Example

Part I: Learning To Drive Is My Goal I am already in my early 20’s and I still do not have a license. Aside from being lazy to apply for one, I still do not know how to drive. My husband drives and I want to learn too! I am challenging myself. By the end of this project I aim to advance from a mere passenger to driving in the driver’s seat. I envision myself driving around town with my hair down and enjoying my new-found freedom and confidence that driving a car could give me. My husband knows how to drive both a manually-driven car and an automatic car. Due to this, I have challenged myself that I should learn how to drive too. Aside from my husband who has patiently taught me for a number of years, I am also going to enroll in a driving school just near our village. My husband already gave up teaching me how to drive. However, because of my persistence, I have been able to persuade him to teach me again. It’s not an easy type of learning. Driving a car has been a great challenge for me because I have somewhat developed a phobia. To date, I already had 2 car crashes. The first one was on the street, almost 6 years ago. The bus bumped the fender of my car. The second crash was just in our garage in the city when I was supposed to park the car outside. I crashed into a wall, smashing the headlights and the bumper. The repair amounted to thousands. After that, I stopped learning how to drive. Aside from my own crash incidents, I had also been a witness to countless crash accidents in my whole lifetime. No wonder I had developed this phobia against driving. My husband who is Ph. D. student is often busy with his studies. He only found time to teach me during weekends. I decided too that I would enroll in a driving school because I needed the kind of teaching they offer. Compared to my husband, I would take my lessons in a driving school seriously. I would look up to my instructor as my mentor and not just anybody I could laugh and talk with. I think it would help having a stern and strict teacher. It wasn’t easy for me. On the first day, I was already expected to take the wheel. I was so nervous! I never had the courage to conquer my fear of driving, especially on a busy street! I was sweaty, my palms were sweaty and my whole body was shaking. I kept screaming and panicking. I was so uncomfortable behind the steering wheel. My driving instructor told me to park the car. He drove all the way back to the driving school. He began the whole lecture again. It felt like I wasn’t learning a thing! Every time I was to take the wheel, I would scream, panic and sweat. I wasn’t brave enough to conquer the big streets. I also jumbled up when it came to traffic signs. The big trucks and buses scared me. I wanted to end everything. I wanted to give up. My husband who also wanted to give up on teaching me decided that he would try his best to help me conquer my phobia. It wasn’t a basic driving class anymore. I was scared of driving and that was what made it more difficult. I was losing hope that I would ever learn to drive! Days before my sessions ended in the driving school, my instructor gave me a pep talk. It seemed like a talk by a father figure rather than just any ordinary driving school mentor. He asked me if I really wanted to drive. I said “yes”. When I answered on the affirmative, he told me to then prove it. I confessed that I didn’t know how to start. I was scared of the streets, the other cars and the people crossing the streets. He just told me to relax. I went home after that and took my old journals where I wrote every single detail about my life. I read about the crashes, the things that scared me, and the incidents that led to losing my self-esteem because of my driving. I wanted that to change. I visualized everything on my mind. What I wanted. What I wished for. It was good. I wrote everything on a notebook - my goals, the things I envisioned, getting a license. I erased the words of my cousins who were teasing me that I will never know how to drive in my head. I discarded the thoughts of hesitation that were keeping me from fully giving my all towards my learning a new skill. For the first time since the start of my driving sessions in the driving school, I woke up the next day looking forward to my session and feeling relaxed. On my way to meet my driving instructor, I grabbed a book about driving and road safety. I read the book and learned a lot from it. When it was time for me to take the wheel, I inhaled deeply and discarded the negative thoughts in my mind. Of course, there were still shrieks of panic and I wasn’t able turn when the traffic light changed to green because I accidentally turned off the engine of the car. I also wasn’t able to get the parking right but it was okay since I was already positive and relaxed. My body wasn’t shaking anymore, my palms weren’t sweaty and I was looking normal. I failed my first driving test, but because of persistence and hard work, I was able to graduate in my driving school when I passed my second driving test. I had an unforgettable experience one time in my university where I had to pick up something at my friend’s dormitory. It was my first time to try my newly learned skills in driving. It was also my first time to drive without any companion! I had not mastered the perfect turn and the parking yet and it was so difficult than I actually thought. When I got to my friend’s dormitory, the driver told me to transfer the car since parking space was at the back and not at the front where I parked. I panicked again. I didn’t know how to maneuver the car and the engine died. A jeep nearby was beeping his horn to let me know that I was blocking the way. I ended up driving all alone in a new place I wasn’t familiar with because I just kept on going and going. I didn’t know how to move backward. I was using an automatic car and things just weren’t beginning to look right. I thought I mastered the skill but realized I was not really great at it. Fortunately, I was able to maneuver the car towards the right direction, picked up the documents I needed and nearly bumped into another car on my way out. After that incident, I stayed away from driving again. I do not remember when or what happened that made me take the wheel again. My family’s motivation perhaps? Or I think it was one of my self-improvement tasks and new year’s resolution. I accepted the fact that in order for me to learn how to drive really well, I had to practice everyday, devote time to reading about it and learning the skill. At first, I didn’t want people to ride with me. The thought of it with me driving the car scared me because I never had the kind of confidence I have now. I felt that the more I was uncomfortable with my driving, the more likely I was going to bump into another car, hurting my passengers. Music helped. I felt more relaxed when soothing music was played on the player. My family got tired of listening to my music over and over again and they kidded that they were getting sick of it. I asked them, “Soothing music or silence? No one is allowed to talk.” Since they couldn’t stand the silence, they chose the soothing music instead. It took me a long time to get used to driving without the soothing music. Eventually, I developed some other driving habits and outgrew driving with soothing music on. Later on when I gained more confidence and mastered some of the learning, I was able to drive around the city safely. I was confident and I was able to drive people around. It was a wonderful idea to learn the skill because it gave me back my self-esteem and took away my phobia. It’s a good feeling. I was able to control myself and my irrational fears. This simple experience in learning how to drive made me learn a lot of things about myself. I began to be a more refined person and my behavior indeed changed. I got to know how my emotions worked. Everything paid off actually. Setting a goal and being motivated to realize it is really fulfilling!. It may be difficult and challenging at first, but the lessons I learned and the motivation that kept me going for the gold are the best prizes I have won in this learning experience. Part 2: My Learning Experience In View Of Socio-Constructivist Theories On hindsight, I can analyze my learning experience in terms of the Socio-constructivist theories. Salomon and Perkins’(1998) article on individual and social aspects of learning helped me understand the entire learning process I have undergone in this project. In the active mediation of individual learning, my driving instructor and husband were both my facilitating agents and I was the primary learner. They gave me the directions and I was expected to learn them and apply them in my hands-on driving experience. The knowledge they imparted were within my zone of proximal development, which Vygotsky has conceptualized. It means that my external social processes become internalized to my cognitive capacity, thereby raising my own cognitive performance to one I could not have reached on my own. In application, the fact that I always looked to my husband as being an able driver during the time that I had yet to learn to drive puts me in a situation where ZPD is apparent. His mentoring (external social process) has exposed me to the possibilities of driving (internalization to my cognitive capacity) and raised the notch of my cognitive ability with regards to driving, and it might not have happened if it were not for him. My participatory knowledge construction came in the form of my own attempts behind the steering wheel. The knowledge I was able to internalize was now being called upon to be applied, and I bravely tried my best to recall it while I drove. I was continuously learning through my concrete experience and the “scaffolding” set up by way of my mentors’ verbal prompts. I came up with my own scaffolding support to help me deal with my fear of driving. The books I read about driving, my journal entries, my positive visualization exercises and positive thinking techniques helped me build up the courage to take the wheel. Later on, I found out that soothing music also served as my scaffolding. Eventually, when I finally learned the skills necessary to drive with confidence, I let go of all the scaffolding, like getting rid of crutches, so I could walk on my own. Applying the theories from the article of Bonk and Cunningham (1998), I personally picked out the initial barrier to my learning how to drive were due to motivational and affective factors. Although I possessed an intrinsic motivation to learn, and exerted enough effort to bring me to the actual learning environment, my motivation to learn was greatly affected by my emotional state, which was paralysis by fear of getting into a car accident. My initial fears and phobia were borne out of traumatic experiences in the past that I have internalized. The fact that I was able to participate in some of the traumatic experiences made me learn that driving is a scary thing to learn. This was remedied by some Cognitive and Social Constructivistic Teaching Practices and Principles applied to my learning process. The fears that disabled me were all in my mind, so I had to work on that with visualization techniques. I also managed my misconceptions by negating remembered criticisms of my cousins that I will never learn how to drive and convincing myself that they are mistaken, and I am fully capable of learning to drive. The talk I had with my driving instructor also helped in easing me out of my negativity. We probed into the source of my initial failure to learn to drive and unearthed authentic problems. Our social dialogue and elaboration of the problematic situation gave rise to his challenging me to prove my stand that I wanted to drive. Add to that, my husband unfailing support. This challenged me to conquer my fear and go for it! It was collaborative learning at work. Speaking of collaborative learning, I refer to Bonks and Cunningham again to view learning. Their description of learning as information processing was reflected in my understanding of the mechanics of driving a car as learned from the lectures of my instructors and my readings. Their description of learning as experiential growth and pattern recognition was shown in my struggle to confront my paralyzing fears by applying positive strategies to dispel them whenever they crept up the surface to threaten my confidence. Their description of learning as a socio-cultural dialogic activity was seen in my mentor’s adjustment to my situation and the effects of my past experiences on my abilities. Our efficient communication of information facilitated the realization of my learning goals. Having learned the skill I have always wanted to learn enabled me to self-regulate my learning. I come up with strategies to hone the skill and adjust the pace of my learning according to my current ability and emotional state. When I was faced with a real problem of not being able to park well on my first time driving on my own, I exhibited a tendency to regress to a panicky state. Being pressured by other drivers to move my car, I had to heighten all my cognitive and emotional faculties to deal with the situation. The experience made me feel disappointed that I have not learned the driving skill enough that I stayed away from driving for some time. However, my intrinsic motivation to drive was strong enough for me to take it up again. To sum it up, my learning how to drive can be attributed to both my individual learning and social learning from my mentors. I made efforts in setting my goal and motivating myself to learn, took the initiative to convince my husband to teach me again and to enroll in a driving school. I also strived to learn more by reading books on driving and coming up with a scaffolding support to help me learn. Of course, my success would not have been complete without my social learning from my mentors. My husband egged me on to reach my goal, and my driving instructor was patient enough to guide me through the process. Because of these factors, I was able to construct my own learning strategies that eventually made me succeed in my goal. Read More