Every new beginning is perhaps born from what came before. Edu 523 requires its students to look back and bring forth some unique experiences that might guide their journey through the course.

My name is Mariam. I graduated from LUMS in 2008 with a major in Economics. I joined an Islamic bank as a Management Trainee and two years later resigned as Credit Analyst for the corporate department.

Alongside my studies at LUMS I also pursued a course in Islamic studies and Arabic, thus learning Arabic Grammar, Syntax; Islamic Jurisprudence; Inheritance Law and Tafsir. I later taught some of these subjects to international students online through Ventrilo, WizIQ and other such programs.

Most recently, I taught Mathematics to fifth graders at LGS and came across various other online-learning programs such as Myimath and ReadingEggs.

I enjoy learning a lot and in that spirit I’ve learnt many skills such as knitting (through videos online), stitching, baking etc. I enjoy poetry and am often caught quoting Faiz and Ghalib in the midst of serious conversations on “low enrollment rates”, “glass ceilings” or just the sheer amount of readings that must be conquered every night after the kids go to sleep…

Session 1

In the first session we mostly traced the history of “Cognition” as a field of scientific research and study. We talked about the shift of paradigm from the “Behaviorist” approach to learning to a “Cognitivist” approach as we had previously studied as part of theories of Instructional Design. However, our discussion mostly revolved around psychology and how this field developed from research in psychology to a full fledged scientific field of Cognitive Psychology. We learnt about William James who refuted claims regarding behaviorism being the only way to track “learning”, along with Chomsky’s rebuttal of language-learning as one that is not entirely well-reflected by rats in a maze!