Abstract
The ability to attain knowledge for implementation within real-world environments is a shift in understanding within many instructional environments. Shifting from competency-based understandings wherein a knowledge base is attained as well as implemented towards a capability-based understanding that emphasizes the conceptual framework of information shift towards higher order knowledge creation within novel situations and environments is essential. Lifelong learning within nuanced understandings of new situations and new experiences is essential. Normally, these novel situations and experiences occur within a real-world community environment wherein the learner is critically analyzing new information and opinions from innumerable engaged people within the community. This style of learning is vital to understand within a competency-based learning environment, as well. Therefore, real-world instructional learning embeds the supporting community engagement at distinctly appropriate and impactful points throughout the instructional process, resulting in outstanding conceptual frameworks with the continuous understanding around cognitive engagement.
TopBackground
A background understanding of the learning and knowledge acquisition process is a viable consideration. This is important not only towards better understanding the frames of theoretical and modeling reference upon which the concept of supporting community engagement within real world instructional learning efforts are based; thus, but also towards highlighting the undergirding instructional thoughts, advantages and impediments that facilitate the learner’s knowledge acquisition and real-world impact, including implementation towards performance improvement and talent development. The primary aspects under consideration are Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Bloom’s cognitive taxonomies that includes Anderson and Krathwohl’s revised cognitive taxonomies, learning theories framed as pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy, Vygotsky’s conceptual frameworks of understanding, Wittgenstein’s social discourse, as well as Wenger-Trayner’s learning in landscapes of practice.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Competency: Originally conceived as a style of learning that is focused upon learning more hands-on or concrete skill sets, although more recent understandings suggest that more abstract information can be implemented through hands-on learning and product-oriented outcomes.
Real-World Learning: The implementation of new information within a viable, natural environment so as to not only support the learner’s conceptual framework of understanding around the information but also towards developing a deeper understanding of the information newly learned and respond to questions around the viability of the newly acquired knowledge or deeper understanding within a space in which the information will be desirable and naturally implemented.
Learning: The process associated with understanding new information and using this information in new and different ways.
Heutagogy: A term related to a style of learning that is self-determined in nature, suggesting a learning who is more advanced in knowledge base and cognitive understanding that allows for self-evaluated and recognized knowledge gaps or areas of interest that desire additional study.
Instruction: The guiding introduction of new information that may successfully lace into prior knowledge, progressive engagement with new information in new and different manners of understanding, towards formative and summative evaluations of understanding and differentiated learning, towards developing a level of competency and associated understanding related to the information under study.
Community: One’s community environment can include innumerable groups of people, from personal communities that include friends and relatives to academic communities that include collegial students or coursework or professors, to professional community members that include co-worker colleagues and administrative supervisors.
Community engagement: This term highlights the level of interaction and support that impacts, encourages and validates a person’s efforts in a positive, negative or progressively developmental manner.