How is “to learn” expressed in your language? In Swedish and Scandinavian languages, there is a reflexive component suggesting activity (att lära sig = “to learn/teach oneself”) that you find also in Russian and Slavic languages, but not in many of the other European languages. By contrast, “to get an education” and also “to obtain knowledge” is – at least in idiomatic Swedish – a curiously passive affair: att få en utbildning, att få kunskap (“få” connotes reception; you “receive and maybe accept” knowledge).
Somehow (or maybe it´s just a function of being old), I get the feeling that some of our students have taken the underlying notion to heart; they expect to lean back and “get” knowledge from their teachers.
A closely related attitude can also be observed among those (few) of our medical students who think that to be a doctor is to sit behind a desk and be revered for having the answers to everything – and if medical school hasn´t “given” them the answers to everything, the school has failed. Some years ago, I heard a similar story from a colleague who taught maths pedagogy to future maths teachers: “Students ask me to skip the maths and instead just tell them what they should tell the children”
To some extent, this depressing attitude to learning might be a left-over from the eras of strict one-way authoritarian pedagogy and/or the related belief that knowledge is static and just a question of learning by rote. The doctor or the expert or the teacher is then just a person who has managed to learn a lot of books and lists by heart.
But somehow, I think that PBLs and other types of flipped classrooms can mitigate this phenomenon. I´m sure that all of us on this course believe in “activities” rather than “passivities” … and in learning by doing, and by participating.
All the same, we have reason to sometimes be worried about the “laid-back” as well as the “authoritarian” students – how much do they actually participate, contribute and learn? How far should we go, as teachers, to coach, support and push them? Is peer pressure within, e.g., online networks, sufficient?
