What’s in your Learning Baggage?

I’ve been referring to the experiences in learning that we carry with us as learning baggage. This can be the red pen on your paper in the first grade or being told you’re stupid because you read slow in the 4th grade. It can be the glowing recommendation from a teacher or the “aha!” moment in a class you were struggling in. It can be the time you practiced over and over and over to perfect that skateboard trick or draw those hands so they didn’t look like AI generated hands.

These experiences can shape (for better or worse) how you experience future learning. Because expectations matter. And past experiences shape future expectations. How you anticipate things to play out impacts motivation and success. 

This is why it’s important to understand learning baggage. Whether it’s your own or your potential learners (learners can be clients, students, employees - anyone that’s going to be learning something from you). 

Knowing what color glasses are tinting your experience, or theirs, can help you make important decisions about choosing learning experiences that are a good fit, working through the baggage and letting stuff go, and designing learning that’s a successful catalyst for change.

What My Bag Looks Like

It’s got some dents, some peeling stickers, some new stickers, the handle fell off and I made and attached a new one. All-in-all well loved and well traveled baggage. I love learning new things. 

If you haven’t read my story about that time I was accused of plagiarizing, go check out my “What Makes a Good Learning Experience” post. That was one particular experience that was negative. But negative experiences aren’t the only ones that color future learning. 

I was in an “Algebra pod” in the 8th grade. 1. Yes, if you know me, you know words are my thang, but I’m actually stronger in math. 2. An algebra pod was me and three other advanced students in the back of my 8th grade math class while the other kids were doing regular 8th grade math. Two of the 3 are medical doctors and the other is a Physician Assistant. I’m the odd duck that couldn’t do body and blood stuff.

That experience felt positive at the time. We had permission to talk because we were just reading, doing problems and helping each other with the answers. It felt easy. We were always done before the class period ended so we also did the homework. We worked our way through the textbook that year. 

Looking back, the teacher was lucky. The 4 of us were self-motivated and mathematically inclined. I didn’t realize at the time that the situation wasn’t great from a teaching standpoint, but it worked because the 4 of us were curious and driven. Not something you can teach, but something you can inspire.

The Impact of that Luggage

The love of learning is what makes my baggage well loved and well traveled. I was fortunate enough to have that love instilled at an early age in a safe space and it propelled me through all the negative bits. Well, that and an angsty teenager that lives inside me that wants to just do the opposite of what everyone says I can and can’t do. 

But some folks don’t have those critical pieces because of their life experiences. For some, the luggage is missing pieces they weren’t able to put back on, they have dents they feel they can’t fix, and wheels that fell off and were never replaced.

My example of my plagiarism “scandal” drove my view of myself as a writer. I never claimed myself as a writer until recently; even as I told my students that they were writers even as they told me they weren’t, even as I published enough to have a 13 page CV, even as I was writing a book that’s now published. 

That lens drove a sense of perfectionism that made my writing fraught with imposter syndrome and perfectionism. I always wrote in groups so others could help make up for my lacking. I didn’t think I couldn’t learn; I just thought I couldn’t articulate it and that defined how I viewed my ability to learn to write. 

Finding out the lens your potential clients or students view the learning experience they’re getting ready to jump into with you can help you prep them for an experience that might not match, which improves success.  

Sorting Through the Baggage

As a learner, understanding what your baggage looks like and why can help you move forward in the face of negative learning experiences. Not everyone gives a shit about making a good learning experience for you. 

When you’re trying to figure out the good, the bad, and the ugly of your previous learning experiences, writing them out and thinking about the trajectory can have a huge impact.

For example, you might start with writing stories that you remember from you formal education, the ones that stand out. You might write down all the things you know how to do and how you got there, or all the failed hobbies. Dig into your past learning a bit to start to identify the experiences that stand out to you.

Then map them onto your current experiences. See if you can follow the threads. This will tell you how your past learning experiences have influenced the learning that came after. Then determine if that influence was positive or negative. Did self-teaching Algebra lead me to be more self-motivated or not ask for help? Did being accused of plagiarism lead me to use that voice more or less? Did both happen? To what extent did it prevent or increase my growth and learning? 

Yeah. That shit’s complex. You might not have answers. But it also means that folks coming to learn from you have learning stories that are just as if not more complicated. Especially if you come from a privileged learning background. 

Preparing for Learner Baggage

If you’re creating a course or training or workshop, and you give a shit about the outcome for the people you’re teaching, then that previous section might have left you in an overwhelmed panic about your learner’s baggage. 

Deep breath. You can’t anticipate the experiences of everyone that comes to you to learn something. Read my posts on taking learner’s needs into account, and learner research to help you prepare as much as possible, but the TLDR is you need to ask. 

Ask your learners to reflect, ask them what they need (remember they might not have been asked before). Take the responses with a giant of salt. Your boundaries and expectations matter too, and it might be a marketing problem, not a course problem.

Repacking for Future Adventures

After the 8th grade, I knew I could learn on my own. That paid off when I got to biology my freshman year of high school. My AP English class had a complex impact of both teaching me that my true voice wasn’t welcome and that I needed to work hard to improve my writing. It made me think it wasn’t easy for me. 

Academic writing still feels tough (even after a 350 page dissertation and multiple publications), but it took me a little while to shake the academic out of my voice when I first started writing for public audiences. 

The piece I’m most proud of that I wrote during my academic time that felt the best to write was an article called Promoting Instructor Agency and Autonomy in Pre-Designed Courses. I was given free reign to make it conversational. It’s the most “me” academic writing has ever allowed me to feel.

So ask yourself the hard questions so you can be your own learning advocate and ask your learners those same questions so you can help them be successful.