Learning to change

About this free course

This free course provides a sample of level 1 study in Education, Childhood & Youth http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/find/education-childhood-and-youth

This version of the content may include video, images and interactive content that may not be optimised for your device.

You can experience this free course as it was originally designed on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open University: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/learning-change/content-section-0.

There youll also be able to track your progress via your activity record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning.

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Introduction

Being unsure of what you want to do in life (or what you want to study) is not unusual. How to deal with the changes that we want in our lives can be more challenging. You may be unsure about what subject you are interested in or whether you can cope with study at university level. You may be unsure about what path in life to pursue.

This course takes your life as its starting point. It helps you to think about what you can do already. It then uses this to build up your confidence in your abilities. It uses a mixture of personal reflection, case studies (including three real-life case studies) and ideas about how we learn. This combination equips you to move your life forward.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of level 1 study in Education, Childhood & Youth

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• understand the importance of the word skills

• think personally about learning

• understand that valuable and important learning goes on all the time

• appreciate that learning can involve thinking, doing and feeling

• understand more clearly what has been learned and what qualities, knowledge and skills are already there.

1 Introduction

1.1 Welcome

Learning to change is a course for people who are interested in learning about making changes in their lives. We think that you will find the course interesting and that it will give you ideas that are useful for bringing about personal change.

The aims of this section are to:

1. provide you with a clear idea of what the course is about and how it is structured
2. help you understand the importance of the word skills
3. start you thinking about your own learning.

This course is based on the assumption that learning and change are features of all our lives, including those of these three people:

Case Study: Karen

I left school w hen I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications were basically nil. I had no GCSEs. No A levels. I went to secondary modern school and I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I left school. Three pounds ten shillings a week was my wage then. My first job was a filing clerk and I actually realised that I didnt know my alphabet properly, so I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was doing at that time and I admitted I was getting a little bit confused. And he said, Well carry on. Thats a good idea. Oh I would rather have the files in the correct order rather than have them wrong!

Figure 1 Karen

Case Study: Levene

I left school at the age of sixteen with three basic qualifications CSE qualifications, as they were known.

Figure 2 Levene

Case Study: Shehnaz

I left school about sixteen years ago and I left with GCSEs and I was studying A levels which I werent up to because I got married. I was supposed to carry on with my studying but I didnt because my mother-in-law was ill and so I ended up looking after her. And then we moved away and we moved to America for two years. We lived there and so that is why I had to have a break in my studies. And in between that I had my children. And because I was so young I didnt want to leave them and go back to university. So while they were younger I used to child mind at home with them.