AGC Projects

As educators, our first and most important role is to be facilitators of learning. The answer to the question what learning might be, and by what means it can be facilitated, is a crucial component of every educator's professional expertise. While there are different metaphors, perspectives and concepts that can help illustrate the nature of human learning, at AGCProjects we prefer to treat learning as construction.

In constructivist learning theory, knowledge acquisition is modelled as a building activity: every individual is equipped with basic mental tools and skills to make sense of their world by building mental representations of it. We create knowledge and skills to be able to interact successfully with and within the world we experience. One consequence of this model is that we conceptualize our learners (and ourselves!) as creative builders of our own mental environment. We are not passive receivers of information, data, or content that can somehow be forced into our heads, nor can the products of learning be sufficiently characterized as "habits" that can predictably and reliably be formed and strenghtened by stimuli.

In their entirety, the various knowledge structures and meaning relationships we construct in the course of our lives make us feel at home in our subjective world-experience. Learning a new skill, perspective, language or concept is, in a very profound sense, an effort in upgrading and extending our mental home. But knowledge is not only a structure - it must also be fit for practical use (cp. Hymes 1972: 282).

In fact, our minds will unceremoniously deconstruct any knowledge that is unfit for use (and we often see this in learners, after an exam has been taken!). Taking language learning as an example: The point of learning a new language is not to be able to remember and describe a large number of words and structures, as one can find in grammar books or dictionaries - even if the competence to do this is often used as an indicator that language learning has taken place. The real point is to be able to express oneself in communication, and understand the points others are making - making oneself understood, and being able to interact sucessfully in a new context or country.

It is to this nature of learning and this concept of knowledge and skill that we pay special attention in our work.

This view is very much in opposition to a "copy-and-paste"-view, which envisions educators as distributors of knowledge that is to be "pasted" into the minds students, similar to how data can be pasted onto a hard disk. Instead, it highlights the deeply personal nature of knowledge - it is not only subjective, it is creative. It is something that matters to us because we are the ones who create it in the first place. And we create it not for its own sake, but for real-life purposes.

Brilliant and engaging educators stimulate and foster learners' engagement in a constructive process, guided by transparent and clearly formulated teaching goals. We help them draft, design, build and deploy the tools and implements for learning success - for the classroom, for collaborative work between sessions, or the administrative superstructure.