Student-Centered Learning Environments

Author: Joel Liechty

Typically, when we think of a learning environment, we imagine the classroom. If we paused and asked you to broaded that definition for theological education, we might also include the church where a pastor works. And this would be movement in the right direction.

The reality is that the environment for learning is more expansive than we ever imagined. It encompasses the entirety of a student's life. This is the true learning environment. As people, we are constantly learning, influenced by a myriad of factors: classes, books, videos, the internet, faculty, supervisors and more. In fact, we are learning from friends, people on the internet we don't even know, articles we read, videos we watch, conversations we have in passing, conflicts at work, interactions with colleagues and more. We are constantly learning and growing, sometimes intentionally through the seminar we attend; at other times, we are learning unintentionally through the media we mindlessly consume or the tragedy that hits us out of nowhere and pushes into a journey of learning how to deal with grief.

This is our true environment for learning.

We might say that what we are learning (integrated knowledge) exists within a broader ecological system. I'm calling this an ecology of knowledge. Knowledge is not an abstract piece of information nor is it simply a subjective experience but rather the interplay of a complex ecosystem. We come to know things through facts (2+2 = 4) but also through things we intuit, common sense we inherit, cultural norms, etc. These all play together to create a system of knowledge that is too complex to boil down to a simple theory or abstract notions of what can be known. Alisdair MacIntyre argues that we do not function from a clear system of rational thinking but rather an amalgamation of fragments that stem and emerge from our cultural traditions and from a smattering of impact from modern philosophical thought (pieces we inherited often in part from various sources). (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 2). Teasing these out or making sense of them in a coherent way is virtually impossible. This is the ecosystem within which we exist.