also one by which a person develops various abilities and skills in order to
reach personal goals in life.
Process of Learning. Data analysis yielded four main processes all of
which find affinity to the basics of Western learning tradition hinted at in Ba-
con’s passage. First is active engagement, centering around the notion that
learning is a process in which a person needs to be actively involved. This ac-
tive nature of learning emphasizes hands on activities, learning by doing, in-
teraction with people, and participation in other activities both inside and
outside the classroom. A respondent described her model leaner thus: “most
of his learning comes from practicing, for example building things, fixing
things, and changing things through manipulations that involve action, and
trial and error.”
The second process is captured in the idea of thinking, which is what the
mind does and does best. Thinking concerns the whole spectrum of mental
processes that are involved in learning. This spectrum includes multiple levels
and dimensions. Within levels, for example, one could move from lower-
order differentiations of objects to higher-order synthesis of systems or rela-
tions. Within dimensions, for example, one could engage in rigorous deduc-
tive logic or inductive reasoning, or, as a different sort, analytical or critical
reasoning. Still more, one is free to reflect or contemplate on anything of per-
sonal interest. The following are statements respondents made about the im-
portance of thinking involved in learning: “how to think, keeping an open
mind, new perspectives, arguments, and reasoning,” “thinking about things
in different ways,” and “thinking independently.”
Inquiry, the quintessential process underlying Western scientific develop-
ment, is the third kind mentioned by respondents. Also as a central focus of
Bacon’s advocacy, inquiry stresses that learning is also discovering the un-
known and inventing the new. In this process, one seeks to find out about
things in the world through a variety of routine but disciplined activities of re-
search. Key to this process is one’s engagement in challenging existing canons
of thought and claims, finding new problems, searching for creative solutions,
and imagining the unimaginable. Many respondents mentioned the ideas of in-
quiry such as “finding out how things work,” “learning through inquisitive
questions,” and “she openly questions society and why things are the way they
are... to gain many different points of view about things learned.”
Finally, the fourth process, communication, emphasizes the communica-
tive aspect as an integral part of learning. Communication serves both as
learning itself and a form of dissemination of one’s knowledge and discover-
ies. For learning itself, one participates in oral, as well as written forms of so-
cial interactions. In these communications, one not only shares and ex-
changes ideas with others but also discusses, critiques, or argues with others
in order to achieve better understanding of a subject, using reasoning tools
400 LI AND FISCHER