7 Learning Reflections
How I Learn
I find I learn best through repetition. I can clearly picture all the time I spent with a notebook in front of me, scribbling down Spanish words and their English counterpart until I could correctly use the words even in my sleep. Or when I’d bring up policies that I’d learned about in my American Government class in casual conversation to keep them topical in my mind. Or even when numbers and math formulas floated through my mind as I fell asleep the night before a big test. I’ve always found that keeping my knowledge active helps me remember it, especially when I discuss it with others.
Learning Reflection I: Active Listening
When I spoke with my sister for this active listening assignment, and without knowing that I was practicing active listening, she told me that she was glad that someone was there to truly listen to her while she was having a hard time with her roommates since she felt like she just needed to get her feelings out. Active listening to me is giving someone that opportunity not just to be listened to, but to feel heard. My sister just wanted someone to understand the struggles she was going through while her former friends were ditching her and forcing her to pay the rest of the utility bills which she couldn’t afford. Active listening also isn’t about giving a solution, it’s about being there for someone and giving them the opportunity to think through their situation themselves. I didn’t offer her a solution on how to fix her problems with her roommates, but I told her that I was sorry that she had been going through that and that she can talk to me as much as she wants to help her feel better.
While in this case active listening worked really well for me, it wasn’t always easy. I found myself wanting to break eye contact with the person I was speaking to, and felt my mind wandering away from the conversation. One thing that I learned is that in a conversation, your mind is often preoccupied with how you want to respond when it is finally your turn to speak. However, without being able to respond, my mind was struggling to stay focused, since all I wanted to do was say something back. When I spoke with my roommate as part of the exercise, I found myself wanting to ask clarifying questions to keep the conversation going. My roommate was talking about his trip to Italy, and all the things him and his family got to do. When I did stop myself from responding, though, since my roommate was so passionate about his time there, it was easy to continue the conversation without having to add anything.
Overall, I think practicing active listening was good for me. We often get caught up in our own heads and own ideas, and sometimes ignore what others around us are trying to express. Sometimes when people come to you with their emotions, you want to say something that will make it all better or solve their problem. However, I realized that being able to listen is more important than being able to respond, because sometimes people just need to be heard.
Learning Reflection II: Visual Thinking
Before class, I had used visual thinking strategies before, but I ended up using them in a completely new way with the painting and while exploring the Medical Education Research Facility. I always knew that you should never look at something from only the surface level, since you will miss crucial details that help define the story. When we studied the painting “Anarcha with Dr. J. Marion Sims,” we were told to write what we saw, why we saw that, and then write what else we saw. I initially judged this format, because I thought that I’d surely understand every detail from just one glance. But as I looked through the painting and talked with my classmates about what we saw, I noticed that I was still missing important parts of the story anyway. I had noticed that the woman was being examined, but one of my classmates noticed the time period of when this examination was happening, which is something I didn’t even think of. Just by looking at the painting more than once gave me so much more context about the story, that by the time I learned what was happening, I could connect the story to the image.
During our second practice of visual thinking strategies at the Medical Education Research Facility, I realized that I learned much more about the building by seeing and exploring the building. My initial thoughts about the building were that it is a very professional space, since the building structure was very geometric and used a lot of greys from the angle I was looking at. But as I explored more, I realized that the building visually portrayed a sense of community. When I explored the courtyard, the building’s walls curved inward so that the space felt more open. The sides were colored with blues and greens rather than gray. There was plenty of outdoor seating, and every table had groups of students all eating together. Then, as I entered the building, I discovered more about the building. The art pieces displayed in the hallways all had to do with belonging and community. One specific example was “A Young Liver” by Nolan Redetzke. He carved a sculpture of his friend’s liver after it received trauma, which connected his medical skills and his artistic ones. These pieces helped me learn about the kinds of practices med students focus on, and how much medical study is about community.
Through both of these practices, I learned that visual learning provides context and insight for stories. I never would’ve thought about all that went into to research building if I hadn’t looked at the artwork featured inside. I never would have realized that Dr. J. Marion Sims had been using the women as test subjects if I didn’t study the expressions of the people in the painting. These skills, while seemingly obvious, give you a much better understanding of the world if you actually use them.
Learning Reflection III: What I know about AI
While I haven’t used much AI in my projects, I did learn some things about it. I originally used it in class to help summarize one of my readings. It was the site that turned an abstract of a scientific article into a Doctor Seuss poem. It was interesting at first, since it could summarize the article in a way that was easy for me to understand. However, as I read through, I realized it was only giving me general information about the topic, and not getting into any specifics. The summary was also very repetitive, and couldn’t build off of more than one idea.
Then for my synthesis essay, I used Research Rabbit to help generate more sources that were similar to one that I found useful. I found this more helpful than my first usage of AI, since it made it easier to find arguments for my topic without having to think of keywords. However, after I found one source on Research Rabbit, I ended up just using studies that were cited in other papers I found, since I knew they would be reliable, primary sources without doing the work.
What I mostly learned from using AI is that it can be wonderful resource if only used to uplift your own work rather than expect it to do work for you. For my examples, summarizing an article using AI can help you get a general idea of what its about, but then you as the user need to decide if that summary is useful for your argument, and then you need to go back through and find the original wording. Similarly for Research Rabbit, you first need to find a reliable source, and then you need to sort through the articles it spits out to decide if those are actually helpful. Many people have the idea that AI will replace actual work. While it might someday, at this point in time, it should be used as a tool rather than a replacement for work, since it can’t replace human reasoning skills.
Final: What I learned and how
Something I didn’t know when I started this class is how to understand health issues through the social sciences lens and through the humanities lens. I had mostly learned about health through medical terms, statistics, and sketchy Google searches. However, through this class, I learned how to put the person before the condition. A person is made of the stories they share, the art they create, and the experiences they live through, not their diagnosis. We learned this throughout class in multiple ways, such as looking at artwork in a museum at face value before reading the description or listening to someone’s story fully first before adding your own input. While this idea seems simple, I realized that I often put the label before the person, especially for myself. In relation to my health, I am a disabled person with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. But from a humanities perspective, I am a person who experiences the world differently because of how my body works. This distinction is slight, but it’s an important one to think about since nobody is totally seen just at face value.
