The Essentials of a Problem-Based Learning Experience

I, brought up in an authoritative educational and political system in Taiwan, and habituated in being dominated, was truly a positivist. I deeply believed that “there is a reality out there to be studied, captured, and understood.” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). Such belief had enhanced my blind worship of idealism as truth building in the pursuit of reality. It also had indirectly fostered the belief that learning is the accumulation of those discovered facts and lawful relationships among the objects in the reality, and these representations of the reality are the knowledge that cannot be challenged. Therefore, information transmission was the focus of learning, and being receptive and diligent were the keys to successful learning. Such a learning experience had been an extremely passive and suppressed one. It was not until when I had my graduate studies in the States that I experienced dynamic interactions in classroom, tried to free myself from the fear of being disobedient, and began to ask questions from alternative viewpoints. And, it was then that I started to form my understanding and opinions, and to understand that “human beings do not find or discover knowledge so much as we construct or make it” (Schwandt, 2000).