Critical Reflection

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Critical reflection on my learning experience:

Why should my particular learning experience be considered meaningful? What are the key conditions that allowed my learning experience to occur?


As I reflect on my childhood days I realize that I was just an autonomous learner making a lot of decisions, mistakes, and discoveries. I would make 'art-work' with just about anything I see around. I used to draw, carve, destroy, model, and remodel. My dad made toys for me, the first set with all good intentions. The ones thereafter came along with threats and sometimes corporal punishment (you may guess why). The toys were made with the use of cardboard and board. They came in all shapes and sizes, as my dad's pastime was mainly carpentry. He would take me along when he was going to work to help with the measurements. My numerical skills developed then because I had to keep a check on just about all the things that belonged to me. You see, I have a lot of brothers and sisters within close age range who at times didn't care one bit about whose toys they use or destroy.  I liked my own stuff so I would keep a record of the color, type and number of toys I had.

Throughout primary school I excelled in arithmetic and art mainly because to me math was just numbers and art was just making a picture of a lost toy.
From preschool to high school I would agree that most of my learning occurred outside of conventional school. At high school I had to discontinue my art classes because of the options that were available in the field of my specialization. So there went my innate potential in art. Mathematics was a core subject then, so every student had to take the subject. Although I didn't do art as a formal subject at high school, mathematics presented me with the opportunity to utilize aspects of art, in that I could use drawings to illustrate ideas or clarify meanings. This was quite useful in geometry and applied mathematics.

The learning experience I had outside of school may be considered very meaningful as it helped me to develop the capacity for inductive and deductive thinking and reasoning, utilize numbers, and visualize objects and spatial dimensions, and be able to learn by doing and interacting with things around. I would say that the key conditions that allowed my learning experience to occur was my home setting, which was rich with objects that I could manipulate and my community which was picturesque, full of nature's gifts: rivers, trees, hills, mountains, and a beautiful savannah. You couldn't escape the urge to capture all this on paper with your interpretation of the visuals.