Learning and reading about other narratives of college experiences and hearing conclusions drawn from the purpose of the liberal arts provided by writers like Bain and Scheuer helped me in achieving the learning outcome of being able to “describe and reflect on your own learning process”. I demonstrated this is homework #11 in my ePortfolio, “over the course of the semester so far, I have begun to notice my habits within my mindset, my learning, and my belief in myself. I have discovered areas in which I succumb to the fixed mindset, which is pretty much any situation where an understanding of something does not come relatively easy to me. In statistics, I will occasionally get an answer wrong over and over, and I only reluctantly will attempt to improve whatever strategy I am implementing. In this class, when I am getting writer’s block or can’t think of a certain word, I will often just stop and give up or procrastinate. I have discovered similar patterns across all of my courses, and am working to combat them with an attempt at Bain’s “self-efficacy” (Apgar). I was able to learn from Dweck’s ideas about a growth mindset and become more conscious about typical situations in which I am likely to fall into that habit of having a fixed mindset. Now that I am aware of these instances, I can change my strategies to prevent staying fixed, allowing myself to make progress in bettering myself. I clearly demonstrated a recognition of my own strengths and weaknesses in learning in this homework assignment and even used it to segue into an evaluation of Bain’s idea of self-efficacy. Now when I am starting to notice that learning something is not coming very easy to me, I can evaluate the way I am approaching the problem at hand and come up with different ways to look at it to better my understanding. I also recognized my learning habits in homework #18, “it was there where I sat to outline, plan out, and write Project 1 for about five hours all together. I’m a slow writer because I like to thoroughly understand what I’m writing about and be as articulate as I can be” (Apgar). This has always been something that has been true for me but I have actually recognized it until I took the time to acknowledge it in this homework and now I can be more aware about my own habits and can better manage my time accordingly.
Instances in my homework-doing when I was asked to “evaluate information from a variety of sources” happened to be the very ones in which I had a fixed mindset. I did not like the idea of having to connect multiple sources and analyze the similarities and differences and connections because it is a very conceptual task and those take a good bit of focus and deep thinking for me. I first had to do this in homework #4, “as the Core Handbook is the layout for our liberal undergraduate education, it is inclusive of all the qualities that education experts like Scheuer and Ungar advocate for so passionately” (Apgar). I successfully integrated the sources for the homework but was not able to get as deep as I could have gotten due to my fixed mindset. In homework #6, I clearly was able to put my fixed mindset behind me and delve deep into the questions asking me to draw connections between four different texts:
“The University of New England’s curriculum requirement for exploration found in the Core Handbook follows the common theme of the meaning of liberal arts embedded in the writings of Ungar, Scheuer and Bain. The Core states that Exploration courses are courses “which encourage active learning, students acquire knowledge, develop skillful thinking, expand their expressive capabilities, and connect this learning to their broader experience” (CAS 8). This definition of UNE’s unique curriculum requirement falls into place with many of the liberal arts values that are included in Scheuer’s, Ungar’s and Bain’s pieces. Ungar states that “the liberal arts encompass the broadest possible range of disciplines in the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences” (Ungar 3), showing how an eclectic array of courses is part of a liberal education. Scheuer comes to the conclusion that “the liberal arts form such an evolving system, consisting of stable but impermanent fields of inquiry that fuse at some points and fissure at others, adapting to cultural shifts while sharing a common language and assumptions, overlapping knowledge bases, and the core of critical thinking” (Scheuer 3), conveying the well-roundedness of the learning experience provided by a liberal arts curriculum. Bain uses many examples and concluded that, “their broad education helped them to make those choices as they learned to see connections between liberal education and the specialty they would pursue” (Bain 202), showing the importance of drawing connections between all the various subjects we study and explore” (Apgar).
I started by identifying the connection and similarities between the texts and how they relate to the question. I was then identified with the textual evidence from each piece that proves the connections I claimed. It is clear that I intentionally went deeper in answering these questions and wanted to cover all of my bases. I think that this shows a lot of progress in my ability to make connections as well as progress in my mindset.
