How we understand learning
Learning is an individual and collective process of constant reconstruction of the experience; a continuous cycle that expands knowledge and validates competencies where the acquired concepts are resignified and new synergic and integrating structures are added through cognitive, emotional and social processes. At Yuken we conceive learning as a path built by the dialog between investigation, integration of experiences, empathy, reflexivity and emotion.
We believe in learning validation not in teaching. From that idea we generate practices that promote active learning, the capacity to question the current context, the proposal of new challenges and problem solving, the sense of achievement and the valorization of mistakes; as inseparable conditions.
In our educational actions, among children and adults, we organize spaces of interaction where we hope to motivate, promote exploration and investigation, facilitate the integration of new knowledge, enable the mobilization of competencies, and finally generate feedback and improvement.
Among adults, our focus is to mobilize specific competencies for innovation and transversal to other áreas of knowledge that are relevant such as synthesis, to generate changes in the professional and social context, development of innovative projects in those áreas and positively impact people and organizations that we are connected with.
Among kids, our focus is to mobilize competencies in the area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking, and to promote socio-emotional development regarding abilities such as communication, collaboration, empathy, autonomy and civic development.
That’s the reason we created FUNLAB: our space for creative exploration where we invite children to discover, investigate and create solutions to challenges that promote their comprehensive and healthy development. Understanding creativity as the capacity to see and solve problems, we propose a space where the development of imagination and the way of learning and discovering the world is achieved through games.
Learning in the making
Using Constructionism as a process —for building, planning, relating, conceptualizing and then making sense— we face with special efficacy the aspired active learning: the one that integrates us with the environment in an enriching way, mobilizing our competences and giving us the tools to face the learning challenges through the active construction of our knowledge and integration of new concepts.
Team Learning
Sharing learning moments improves the experiences towards discovery. That is the wealth of the diversity that propels our team work where successful processes and results are born and high performance activities, such as innovation, are enabled. The shared sense making experience of multiple perceptions creates a fertile synthesis of information and design.
Learning by playing
Playing games puts our senses in action to connect us freely with the environment, to get a series of experiences and knowledge, establish relations, contrasts and differences; all of them processes that lead us to interact with the world and make sense of our experience to be able to imagine and then to create. In this way, the game becomes one of the most powerful ways to develop intelligence and is the way children and adults actually learn. In our educational interventions we promote safe moments and spaces for experimentation and the creative joy of playing.
Learning with emotions
In the learning process the emotional dimension is deployed with special priority, affecting the performance of the capacity of exploring and adapting to new contexts, the disposition to incorporate new knowledge and value those already assimilated, and thought flexibility. Resilience, frustration tolerance, sense of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty are key abilities to develop.
Learning how to fail
How can we learn to fail? How can we build a path to make experimentation and iteration appreciated concepts? How can we manage frustration tolerance when the results are not what we expected? Building meaningful learning and identifying the best solution using research and experimentation (that promotes failure as a way of learning, by developing prototypes and failure detection and resolution) is a way to move towards the innovation process. At Yuken we understand failure as the result of testing an hypothesis during the development of a project; it requires a methodology, rigor, cognitive flexibility, and emotional endurance.
Learn to think
Every learning process requires reflexive abilities; to make the correct questions until the knowledge is acquired. Continuous and iterative reflection allows us to question the contexts, manage self progression of the learning process, distinguish what is relevant to integrate new knowledge and redefine the way of doing. It implies to get actively and deeply involved in the experienced situation and from there go deeper towards complex problems and promote real transformations.
