The first people’s principle of learning demonstrates the most important aspects that me as a student strives to do, not just in science but in all my classes. In my opinion these principles create a learning environment that make you engage, and take learning to a different level of creativity and real life experiences and memories that help create who you are when you are learning. Bellow is a picture of all the First People’s Principles of Learning.
Bellow is a video about the principles of learning. It gives us a background of the principles and shows a bit of the lifestyle of the First Nations. We watched this video in class, and I felt like it helped me understand the principles clearer.
Now I’m going to talk about three specific principles that I believe are the most important.
1. Learning involves recognizing the consequences of ones actions.
To me, this is the most important lesson you can learn while learning. In order to really learn and take away a lesson not just in school work but in life, you have to be able to accept when you are wrong and take responsibility for the mistakes you make. It is a principal that many people in our generation ignore, and they try and hide their mistakes and their actions, and then will blame it on someone else. This principal is important because you learn from your action and without taking responsibility you won’t be able to learn from it.
2. Learning involves patience and time
I chose to talk about this principal because it is one of the less obvious but just as important aspects to learning. Most people my age would shrug this principal to the side, as they try and rush through things, and never put all their effort into learning. To be able to learn to the best of your ability, you have to put in the time in order to accomplish skills, and with time comes patience. You have to wait and know that in the end you will have a positive outcome if you take your time and have patience. Mastery isn’t getting something done, its about discovering what you are capable of, and that takes time and patience to accomplish it.
3. Learning requires exploration of ones identity.
Lastly, this principle has probably the deepest meaning. It explains how school and life is not meant for learning something and then forgetting it, or just taking it lightly. Its about finding more out about who you are while learning. Everybody has their strengths and their weakness, but its how we use them that makes us who we are and how we learn. Everyone has the drive to succeed, and everyone wants to do well but you have to take in the knowledge and use it in your life, and discover who you are other wise you haven’t really succeeded. Another important thing is learning life lessons. An important one is generosity. It costs but in the end it is worth it.
What this lesson taught us about is human needs. Every human needs to know that they are significant, that they have power, that they can succeed and can have good morals. You need encouragement. The people are all about empowering our generation, to make us as successful as we can.
These principles of learning have a lot to do with two of the projects we have done this semester, The Student Spaceflight Experiment Program, and Engineering Brightness.
In the SSEP Project, we got to design an experiment and then create a proposal about it, as the chosen experiment got sent up on a spacecraft and we would get to have our experiment in space. That was related to these principles as it required time and patience. My group and I spent many hours working and editing on our proposal, making it to the best of our abilities. We really had to put in the time to make it good, and we had to have patience as it wasn’t an easy process. It also is a part of that learning involves roles and responsibilities. In this project we all got assigned different roles and responsibilities for each part of the project. We all had to complete certain parts of the work, and we all had a lot of responsibilities. An example for this would be our proposal. We all assigned ourselves certain pieces to write about; there were many different sections and we all took one. Then we worked on the editing, and we divided it into grammar editing, and then science editing.
Next I will talk about our Engineering Brightness project. This is still fairly recent and we are still currently working on it. In this project, we are learning about the light poverty in the Dominican Republic. We are trying to make lights and fund raise to help support the light poverty communities. The first principle that relates is learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational. In this project we have to be very reflective on our work. We have to reflect the good and the bad and everything that is happening. We have to experiment and try new things, as we have to push ourselves outside our box to really make the needed difference. We also have to create relations with other people in order to make this successful. We have connected with people from the Dominican, as well as others in the community all to help us learn and support our cause.
Principles of learning picture: http://homma.sd38.bc.ca/news?page=1
Clock picture: https://clipartfest.com/categories/view/Y2xvY2sgY2xpcGFydCBmcmVl/clock-clipart-free.html
Strength and Weakness picture: https://u.osu.edu/loomeedoo/2015/11/14/professional-strengths-and-weaknesses-reflection/
Great work here, Janna. You have effectively outlined the First People’s Principles of Learning while giving concrete reflections and examples on how you used them in Connections-based Learning. I love how you reflected on the First Peoples Principles of consequences, patience, and identity exploration and your thoughts on their importance. It’s awesome that you included the learning that took place as you connected with students from New Brunswick and the Dominican Republic. I also appreciate how you shared about your microgravity experiment and how this related to the Principles. Great work citing the outside sources you used.