Mike Wesch: How Students Learn

 

What does Mike Wesch believe about how students learn? How does he act on those beliefs?

In his talk, Mike Wesch discusses what learning looks like in his college classroom. He began the talk discussing how there was an overwhelming sense of disconnection in his classroom when he first became teaching college students. The students were passive, bored, and seemed to have an attitude of “needing to get through” rather than truly wanting to be there and wanting to learn.

He noted that students read less than half of what they were assigned, felt like nothing was relevant, paid for class and didn't show up, paid for textbooks and didn't read them, and felt overall like their time was being wasted. He remembers noticing a clear sense of disconnection among his students, and that when he was around other professors, he heard negative perspectives on students. He noted that many professors said “some people just aren’t cut out for school.” He noted how shocking this mentality is, yet how prevalent it is. He noted that when you replace the word “school” with the word “learning,” that argument becomes absurd. I thought it was powerful when he said “learning is a fundamental human trait” and that “learning has been misdefined for us.”

Wesch believes that learning is a fundamental human trait, and everything we do is a process of learning. I think Wesch touches on something so powerful when he says that learning has been misdefined for us, and it is clear that our false definition is what shapes our current education systems. Learning is the most natural thing humans do, and if we could harness this learning in education, we could actually teach students.

Wesch uses George, his son, to discuss what he thinks is the true process of learning. Failure is fun, according to George. He feels connected, he feels courageous, and he takes chances. Wesch applied this to his classroom and revamped his approach to teaching college students. He emphasized to his students that real learning is not about memorizing answers, it's the questions you take out of a learning environment that inspire you, that drive you, that force you to take chances, that help you do what you might never do.

I appreciated his emphasis on questioning, because this is something I believe is fundamental to learning as well. I loved the notion that “questions have taken us down from the trees and to the moon.” I also loved how he combined this approach to questioning with sitting down with a student every lunch time and just talking to them about their lives and who they really were. 

I found it so powerful when he noted that these were the three questions driving students: Who am I? What am I gonna do? Am I gonna make it? I think that these questions are the most important questions we can answer in life, and it is possible to shape our pedagogy to help students answer these questions. 

Wesch also argued that learning is taking chances, putting ourselves on the line to make ourselves uncomfortable, and creating. He used this to discuss the idea that students are heroes of their own journeys, walking through the trials of life, and that all people have this heroic nature. To me, it seems like his talk was about how education is more than learning “how to make a living,” but learning how to “build a life worth living.” 

I loved Wesch’s reflective process he had with his teaching: he was constantly reflecting on how he saw young people, what their stories were, how they showed up in life, and what they needed from school. I think it was clear that Wesch had a fundamental understanding of his "why" (from Simon Sinek). Because Wesch was so clear on his why, he was able to check his actions against his why for every decision. Wesch discussed the idea of scaffolding students up, or pushing them to succeed like they are on a team. I like this because it goes against the individualist nature of our society and education system. I want to adopt this skill more along with pushing to make learning worth it for every student.