My Year of Self-Directed Learning
Looking around the room, I could tell there were others who felt just as uncomfortable with the assignment just-described to us by the training facilitator as I did.
It went something along the lines of:
“You have two days to decide with the group of people you just met what you want to achieve (if you even want an outcome), what method you want to use, when to work, where to work, and what questions/topics you want to focus on.”
My brain responded something along the lines of:
“Uh, what?”
To be fair, I was attending a training for non-formal youth workers so I expected it to be a participation-heavy experience, but to be given complete free reign for days at a time felt comparably, if not more, daunting than very specifically laid-out university research paper assignments with a prescribed page length and quota for citations.
My group and I headed off to sort through this unusual assignment. We decided as a group to visit a local museum for inspiration, to take our thoughts for a literal walk in the park, to lay down on the ground with our heads in a circle staring at the ceiling as we shared thoughts on our mutually agreed upon topic.
In the end, we had fleshed out some thoughts on our topic — professional competences for youth workers related to communication and collaboration — but moreso, I got some good experience learning how to learn.
Really, this exercise was just a mini-version of how I’ve spent the last year, as a Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fellow, conducting a self-designed project investigating non-formal youth civic education in Germany and at the EU level. In speaking with former participants, I was told over and over again that a top perk is the extreme flexibility and lack of intense oversight in the program. Sure, you have to attend German language courses, are supposed to work with your self-identified German host organization and attend sporadic foundation events, but all-in-all it is a year of relatively unbridled freedom to learn and experience something new. Freedom to read what you want to read, write what you want to write, discuss topics of interest with people you find interesting, and produce what you want to produce.
What many might think sounds like a dream was, for me, a true challenge.
I am the kind of person who thrives in structure. I like knowing what my goal is and laying out a carefully constructed plan for how to achieve it — preferably with a specific timeline and many checklists included. I feel most effective when I can see a manifestation of my hard work at the end of the day, and, quite honestly, I like feeling good at what I do. All things that run contrary to the self-directed learning experience I embarked on in November 2019.
I have often had to fight these engrained preferences, and I’ve thought often about where they come from in the first place. Certainly, the way we are educated plays a big role.
I remember a middle school teacher who would spent 45 minutes every day making everyone in the class write down in our school-provided organizational workbook (aka “Tiger Books” for the other Darmstadt Middle School Tigers out there) our assignments for the day, word-for-word. She would make us check to make sure the way we filled it out was up to her standards. As a kid who was already a little anal-retentive, this system of organization worked well for me, but who is to say it’s the right technique for everyone? Surely it’s important to demonstrate and explore options, but ultimately it is all of our individual choice on how best to learn.
No wonder it comes as a shock when we are tossed into the working world and often told to “figure it out” regardless of whether we are business entrepreneurs or project managers at an NGO.
I think it would do all of us a great deal of good to rethink some of preconceived notions on how we teach “learning”. Is there a way to help young people explore all the options without prescribing a “best approach”? I think increasing the flexibility and creativity each of us employ in how we find information, take on new tasks and develop new skills would be an asset to ourselves and society.
As my own year or self-directed learning comes to a close, I have some top takeaways that became clear to me during the process.
- You can’t know everything and trying to will just make you feel crazy
I still sometimes get caught up in the idea that I need to consume more content — reading, listening, talking to others — before I’m allowed to have an opinion on a topic. But that’s unrealistic, and at some point it’s just better to take action or put your ideas out there. Even the top experts haven’t read every crumb of content there is out there on their respective fields. I try to remind myself that instead of knowing everything, I know a lot and have a perspective to share that bundles this knowledge with a diverse set of experiences that others don’t have. Which leads me to my second point…
2. What actually counts as an expert anyway?
When I was interviewed for the fellowship, I remember clarifying my main goal of the program as becoming an expert on civic education. Thinking about that now feels silly. I know plenty more than I did upon starting the program, sure. I even have a list of questions from when I started that I look back on now and think “how could I have not known that?!”, but more than anything, the experience has taught me just how much MORE there is to learn. Now, do I know more than the average person about civic learning, particularly from a German/U.S. perspective? Certainly. But the idea that you can reach some kind of “expert status” puts too much emphasis on being a vessel for knowledge and less on the idea of a unique perspective.
3. How to even know what you want to know
Throughout formal education and in most work-fields, we are typically told what we topics we should focus on, so it’s no mystery that upon being given free reign to identify topics of interest, I froze.
I knew I wanted to focus on the German and European systems for civic education, but I left my initial project description quite broad. After realizing what all that broad topic entails, I struggled to get my footing on what specifically I wanted to investigate. I thought a lot about what other people might be interested to know or what might be publishable, but it wasn’t until about halfway through the program that I thought, “what do you find genuinely interesting?”, without worrying about what others might think. That realization set me in a direction that left me energized.
Another great piece of advice I received was to think about the information you’ve tried to find that you haven’t been able to locate, and see what you can do to come up with it yourself. This simple question helped me to hone in on something that I found interesting that might also be useful for others
4. Ask for advice/help
Maybe this is not a groundbreaking idea, but some of us have such a hard time actually putting this into practice. I tend to like to avoid “bothering” people by asking for advice or assistance, but in actuality, people are often flattered to be asked about their expertise. This year, I have spoken with hundreds of experts and practitioners in the field of civic education, many of them based on cold email asks. I am still schocked at how willing people are to speak with me and how gracious they are with their time.
I’ll admit, I am still working on this particular lesson— trying to talk about my ideas or thoughts, instead of internalizing them and trudging through on my own — but I wish I had realized sooner that this can not only help produce better outcomes, but build relationships.
5. Get comfortable being uncomfortable
My motto for the year has been “get comfortable being uncomfortable”. I officially made it my motto after moving into a sublet apartment that coincidentally had a giant poster with the phrase “Es ist großartig hier, außerhalb deiner Komfortzone” (It’s great here, outside your comfort zone) hanging above the bed.
Between learning, while simultaneously working, in a second language, becoming familiar with a new field, navigating a different work culture, dealing with German immigration bureaucracy, and always feeling a bit like an “outsider”, I have never felt quite so cast from my space of comfort.
I am not one to contend that this model of living is essential for growth or the only way to be, but I have learned to try to take things/myself less seriously and that you really can’t control the thoughts or action of others. Mostly, I’ve realized, every level of discomfort you overcome does make the next one easier.
