The “ASK paradigm” begins with attitude and appetite creation. It is the appetite component that leads to a desire to try to comprehend, or make an extra effort to grasp a subject. It is the trying that leads to skill-building activities. It is these activities, often performed without understanding, that become roots from which grow knowledge. Bringing the fun of play into any “subject,” the creation of curiosity itself is a learnable ‘skill.’ A frame of mind must be learned through experience.
It is this attitude component that leads to the life-changing skill of learning to learn. Lifelong learning, and the openness to change, growth and tolerance, is part of St. Michael’s church mission.
When we think of education, we think of knowledge first…but openness to learn must come first.
ASK is an acronym reminding us that attitude and appetite may very well come before knowledge.1 The KAS Paradigm (Knowledge/Attitude/Skill) was introduced as a model for training design in the 1960’s by Scott Perry of Boston’s Sterling Institute. It entered the culture of industrial training through the American Society of Training & Development, and, slightly modified a KSA, became part of the U.S. Government Human Resource standard background application. It only seems obvious to shuffle the acronym into something more meaningful, eg ASK.
Museums and especially the educational theme parks such as EPCOT put attitude and appetite first. While the exhibitry in museums have a clear objective of delivering knowledge, the over-riding objective is to make education and learning comfortable and pleasant. This is often not possible in the small historic heritage site with its fixed structure and architectural constraints. One must look to the delivery system for additional support, and in turning St.Michael’s church into a community educational activities hub, we are looking to various options:
- “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink….” is the old saw. Similarly, one can dangle a carrot in front of the donkey, but the donkey may not like carrots. One doesn’t learn to like by being told or cajoled. Too often, parents, teachers, and program developers forget this. American pedagogy has recognized the importance of attitude development for well over a century. Maria Montessori’s method came here in the middle 20th century, and John Dewey stressed it in his experimental school in Chicago prior to WWI. But sometimes it takes a simple acronym to change the old “knowledge-first” paradigm. Just ASK! ↩︎