A Welcome Message From Valerie Perotti:
What a joy it is to work once again with my remarkable colleagues at Ohio’s outstanding universities! OLN’s invitation to participate in this project comes at an interesting time for me. Emeritus status at OU’s College of Business has meant much more professional freedom to do the things I enjoy most about higher education—consulting, writing, and interacting with colleagues over things that really matter—like learning.
That is why I jumped at the chance to join OLN in this project. It offers a community of common interest where we can share and debate and counsel with one another, a community devoted to learning—the getting and the giving. I will enjoy and appreciate every moment of our time together.
About Valerie:
Valerie Perotti is Emeritus Professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. She received her P.h.D in Organizational Communication (Cognate Area: Management) from Ohio University. Her dissertation was titled Communicative Competence in the Organization: Multiple Methods Toward a Viable Construct. Valerie was previously Distinguished Lecturer at Rochester Institute of Technology College of Business where she taught Managing in the Global Environment at both the graduate and undergraduate course levels.
Valerie Perotti’s Learning Philosophy
Learning is the intellectual and active process of discovering and internalizing new and useful knowledge, skills and abilities. It is a product of student engagement, multiplied by challenging work-- designed, encouraged, monitored and assessed by the learning facilitator(s). Learning facilitators may be professors, mentors or managers, but most certainly must include fellow students or colleagues who interact during the learning process.
Learning is not the product of lectures, textbooks and examinations. While these tools may be necessary in areas where the learner has no experience or prior knowledge, they are very poor substitutes for the engagement that comes of actually “doing” something significant—solving a problem, making a model, building a bridge. My favorite example: do not let the brain surgeon who learned his craft only from textbooks operate on me! I want the one with hands-on experience.
Learning emerges from the learner’s need to solve problems, build personal tools, create understanding through action. The requirement for action breeds “engagement,” and engagement is the key to learning. By engagement, I mean the personal, human involvement of the learner with the challenging material that is to be learned. In the best examples, “Engagement” also characterizes the special relationship between the learner and the facilitator who make the learning journey together.
The role of the learning facilitator (teacher, professor, supervisor, mentor) is:
- To design and build the environment where those stimulating things happen that create learning opportunities relevant to the matter to be learned,
- To foster the learner’s rigorous reflection upon what is happening-- thus both concretizing the learning and building awareness that learning has happened,
- To challenge the learner’s assumptions so as to foster greater learning achievement,
- To join with the learner in reiterating the process so that what has been learned becomes an easily accessed resource in his or her “toolbelt,”
- To validate the learning both for the learner and for the stakeholders through assessment of the achievement of learning outcomes.
The role of the learner is:
- To engage in the process,
- To reflect with increasing sensitivity and insight upon the results of that
process,
- To challenge the process when it is not doing its work,
- To join with the facilitator in reiterating the process,
- To validate the process by applying the learning achieved to new and more challenging experiences.
This is my learning philosophy.
Send Valerie an email
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