This week, as part of a project I’m undertaking in instructional design, I was challenged to describe three personal learning experiences across different stages of my learning journey.

I learned to read in primary school. I was taught by my Grade 1 teacher. She taught us the sounds of letters in the alphabet and then we had to read by making the sounds and forming them into words. We were learning to read so that we could learn many other things.

In high school one of the best teachers I ever had started the year by telling us (a group of very ordinary learners) all that we already knew the answers and that his job was simply to ask us the right questions. I think it was his belief in us that encouraged us to achieve outstanding results by the end of the year. That lesson has stayed with me.

At uni, I studied law and learned a lot of other things!. We were taught by lecturers and tutors, but much of our learning was self-directed through research, discussion and debate. We were learning the theory, content. and practice of law. We were also learning about its culture and ideology – although ideology was never openly discussed. I learned about that later as a post-graduate student! We were learning so that we could practise law in the real world.

Now, I am about to embark on a course of learning in a post-professional setting about climate science.  The course is being taught as a MOOC with an emphasis on the social and collaborative aspects of learning. I’m not much of a scientist, but I’m wanting to understand it better and to overcome fear and prejudice about it because it seems to me that fear and prejudice are often major impediments to learning.