Learning Together

Some of the most dreadful of clichés express quite basic truths about learning. “ Two heads are better than one.” “It takes a village to raise a child.” “There’s no ‘I’ in team.”... What these oft-repeated axioms tell you is that by sharing your learning experience with others, by building your own knowledge in relation to other people’s wisdom, you will get on faster and better than by working on your own.

Your teachers offer you a great deal, of course, but the other students on your degree or who are going through the same stage of study as you also offer something unique: understanding of what it is like to go through the same learning experience as you. Your peers might well have developed hard-won knowledge about how best to approach a subject you are really struggling with; in turn you might have worked out plenty for yourself that others just haven’t realised. Futhermore, you can help one another hugely simply by acting as a sympathetic audience and “ critical friend”.

It’s for all of these reasons and more that you will often be expected to participate in group tasks and activities, or might set these up yourself. Pages in this section of TASH: