Laura's EDAC 635 September Summary

635 Environment and Context:  Real Life
Laura’s September Summary
September was spent researching articles, theories, and information on environment and context.  Specifically, the physical, cultural, power, knowledge, and ‘real-life’ environments that help nurture adult learning. While researching my topic, I was astonished by the amount of information to sift through. In fact, I think one of the most challenging parts of the research portion was narrowing it down to get the main ideas from a few theories versus using a little information from multiple theories.
I am fascinated by this topic because so many people do not emphasize the importance of environment and context in learning. For example, my sister just spent her Saturday at a health care conference and was complaining about the uncomfortable chairs and mentioned she had a hard time hearing the presenter. I asked her what she learned and she replied, “I’m not sure. I was just thinking about getting out of the chairs…I couldn’t hear anyway.” Since our group is focusing on the “real-life” element of environment and context, I was equally interested to find out if my sister participated in any collaborative or hands-on activities during her six hour workshop. When she said she hadn’t, I was shocked! I’m exciting to create a program/syllabus that will incorporate ‘real-life’ scenarios that learners can use and apply in their own personal/professional lives.
Our group has been communicating via email and has decided to focus on “real-life” environments for our program investigation. We have each spent time researching different programs focusing on descriptions, main features, and application of key features.  Ultimately, we will have researched several programs and dissected how each can be applied to incorporate into our syllabus.
 I am going to take a deeper look into "Contracts in the classroom- providing undergraduate business students with important 'real life' skills"- Susan M. Denbo for my portion of the project as well as Flip Flippen's "Capturing Hearts: Bringing out the Best in People." Both focus on hands-on situations that can be applied to real-life.