The Routledge International Handbook of Learning

Peter Jarvis, Mary Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136598555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

As our understanding of learning focuses on the whole person rather than individual aspects of learning, so the process of learning is beginning to be studied from a wide variety of perspectives and disciplines. This handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the contemporary research into learning: it brings together a diverse range of specialities with chapters written by leading scholars throughout the world from a wide variety of different approaches. The International Handbook of Learning captures the complexities of the learning process in seven major parts. Its 54 chapters are sub-divided in seven parts:

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• Learning and the person: senses, cognitions, emotions, personality traits and learning styles

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• Learning across the lifespan

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• Life-wide learning

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• Learning across the disciplines: covering everything from anthropology to neuroscience

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• Meaning systems' interpretation

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• Learning and disability

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• Historical and contemporary learning theorists.

Written by international experts, this book is the first comprehensive multi-disciplinary analysis of learning, packing a diverse collection of research into one accessible volume.

Part 1

Learning and the Person

1

Learning and the Senses

Paul Martin Viv Martin

Introduction

Are you sitting comfortably? No, really, are you sitting comfortably? At this moment are you at all aware of your body and the state of relaxation or tension within its various parts? Are you gripping this book more tightly than is really necessary to hold it up? Is your sitting position such that extra strain is being put on your neck and shoulders in order to hold your head upright? Are you frowning unnecessarily? How do you know any of this?

The information about our bodies and the outside world comes through what we loosely call our senses. It is difficult, however, to separate the working of our senses from our cognitive functioning and interpretations. Early references to the senses appear in the Katha Upanishad, written between 400 and 800 BC. It likens the senses to ‘horses’ that draw the ‘chariot’ of the body, with the mind as ‘reins’ and the ‘charioteer’ as the potentially controlling reason. It describes the purpose of the senses as, ‘this by which we perceive colours and sounds, perfumes and kisses of love; by which alone we attain knowledge; by which verily we can be conscious of anything’ (Mascaro, 1965: 62).

This Upanishad identifies the five senses that Western society sees as the main senses, namely sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. However, these are only the senses of which we are most aware. Barbara Stafford (in Elkins, 2008) sees our consciousness as, ‘borne aloft on an ocean of “automatic life regulators”’, which are estimated to be approximately 90% of our bodies’ sensory systems including balance, temperature regulation, heart rate, breathing, gland secretions, pain, kinaesthetic sense and many others. As well as the core physical senses, there are other senses such as telepathy and extra sensory perception that Sheldrake (2003) calls aspects of ‘the extended mind’, which appear in human experience but which, as yet, have little scientific evidence to support their existence. He has also proposed a hypothesis of ‘Morphic Resonance’ (Sheldrake, 2009), where past forms and behaviours of organisms can affect organisms in the present across time and space.

The Senses

Of the five main senses, Laird (1985) quotes research that found that 75% of adult learning was through sight, followed by 13% for hearing and with touch, smell and taste accounting for the remaining 12%. Humans arguably developed acuity in their senses related to their particular environment, whether it is being ‘street wise’ in a city or understanding the very different signs in the African bush. Although the following section deals with the qualities of the individual senses, it should be noted that the senses seldom work in isolation, but mostly interact to create a holistic sense picture for the brain. For example, in eating, the senses of vision, smell, taste, touch and hearing all contribute to our experience.

Smell

Although, today, the sense of smell is less valued in Western culture than sight, Goleman (1996) says that it is ‘the most ancient root of our emotional life’ and that it was, ‘from the olfactory lobe [in the primitive brain that] the ancient centres for emotion began to evolve, eventually growing large enough to encircle the top of the brainstem’ (Goleman, 1996: 10). As the brain structure grew, the limbic system developed learning and memory, giving mammals greater chances of choice and survival. Finally, humans developed a large neocortex which is the ‘seat of thought’ and which, ‘ … contains the centres that put together and comprehend what the senses perceive’ (Goleman, 1996: 11). He observes that, as the emotions were the root from which the brain grew, it is not surprising that emotions have such sway over thought processes.

Like all the senses, the sense of smell was developed as a way of gathering information about the environment surrounding the living organism. Although humans do not have a particularly well-developed sense of smell compared with many animals, it does have many practical uses. These include: the safety of potential food; the detection of particular trees or plants nearby; the detection of prey, or types of animals in the vicinity; and the detection of potential dangers from lions or other species or from fire. It also plays a large role in the sense of taste and the appreciation of food. Smells can trigger strong memories from the past or create desires (as do the smells of coffee or bread, which are used in many supermarkets to encourage their purchase).

Sight

In Western culture, sight is considered to be the most important of the senses, and the word ‘seeing’ not only implies ocular vision but has also come to represent a deeper sense of understanding. People with reasonable sight, in most cultures of the world, gain the majority of their knowledge of the external world by gathering visual information. With binocular vision, humans have a three-dimensional view of the world that helps them to judge distance, speed, relative speeds and sizes, which in turn helps us navigate past other pedestrians on pavements, across roads and drive safely, as well as hunt wild animals or play football. Although seeing, as Berger observes, ‘establishes our place in the surrounding world’, he notes that we use words to explain our visual understanding, yet that ‘explanation never quite fits the sight’ (Berger, 1972: 7) and is consequently inadequate.

Sight plays a central role in communication through the use of signs and written language which open up access to a vast wealth of information and knowledge via written and diagrammatic languages stored in visual form. It also adds an important dimension to interpersonal communications through the ability to observe body language, which can often show what a person is feeling and be contrary to their spoken words. Cultures across the world and throughout human history have also developed visual languages in a variety of art forms and for a variety of reasons, ranging from prehistoric cave painting, through Renaissance art, to modern conceptual art. For visual artists and their audiences sight also allows dialogue with the visual world to explore and make shared meanings.

As people grow and develop as individuals within a multilayered culture, much of the information they receive about their environment or world stage comes to them from a discipline, cultural group, family, peer group or organisation, all of which have their own constructs, values and philosophical base. This process of socialisation which helps to transmit social norms and which as members of a culture/community we all undergo, helps to structure our thought systems, informs our value systems and predisposes us towards certain ways of seeing, thinking, behaving and understanding.

With the sense of sight, the data-collection and sorting processes of the human brain relating to visual stimuli rely heavily on patterning and pattern recognition, relating new information to existing constructs/patterns or concept maps and evaluating the data against them. Though formed through actual physical experience, visual understanding is also heavily affected by an individual’s existing knowledge, values, beliefs and their societal norms and constructs. These pattern-forming processes of the brain are at a practical level of human activity very beneficial, especially for survival. Our visual perception of the world that we inhabit and through which we move is, over time, codified into a series of constructs or symbols that aid our recognition and help us to live more effectively and safely in it. Moving through a daily landscape, it is useful to recognise objects such as doors, chairs, tables, etc. so that, from a multitude of design possibilities, we have little difficulty and waste little time in their recognition. We become adept at judging the type, speed, direction and distance of cars, a skill upon which our continued survival depends.

The negative side of this pattern/mapping process arises from the way in which the brain filters new information from external sources through its existing visual and mental constructs and accepts or rejects it on the basis of its match with those existing constructs. If the visual construct-forming and -matching process becomes automatic, unconscious and uncritical of itself, it can lead ultimately to the reinforcing of existing beliefs and values and the rejection of anything that does not fit with them visually or otherwise. We may see that an object is a cup, but absorb nothing about its specific nature. Many people think that vision is an unproblematic form of information gathering relating to the external world and have never questioned the extent to which their perceptions of the world have been stereotyped by the brain’s object-identifying process and their inherent socialised beliefs and values.

Hearing

We have the ability to hear sound through our ears, but we are also aware of sound through our sense of touch by means of our ability to feel vibrations. We also communicate by making sounds through our voices as words or song, or by playing instruments, from the basic drum and flutes (found in ancient civilisations), to violins, pianos and electronic synthesisers. Hearing is fundamental to communication through our origination of sound and through our ability to hear and interpret sound, though people who lose their hearing often learn to receive communications through their senses of sight or touch. Although, in Westernised cultures, sound is perhaps mostly related to interpersonal communication through spoken language, it is also important in interpreting our environment, from the direction and speed of a car, to the approach of a dangerous animal through the rustling of grass.

Sound in the form of music can also have a powerful influence on human feelings and behaviour. Greenfield notes how ‘collective chanting, singing and moving in synchrony’, can create a ‘blurring of waking/dreaming boundaries and a heightened emotional salience’ (Greenfield, 2008: 239–40). Such states are about the meaning that they embody, which can range from meditation to support for an extreme religious or political belief. She also cites research that indicates that music can ‘improve attention and aid memory’ and that ‘listening to music can cause neural activation in regions of the brain strongly related to emotional processing’ (Greenfield, 2008: 243).

Taste

Interestingly, the sense of taste is fairly limited and ‘only four kinds of taste can be distinguished, namely sweet, sour, salt and bitter’ with other ‘flavours detected by the olfactory mucous membrane’ (Glenister and Ross, 1974: 297). The sense of taste is mostly related to the identification of types of food and its safety, in tandem with sense of smell. However, it is also involved in sensual enjoyment. The word ‘taste’ is also used to mean quality of choice from the refinement of palate, to art, clothes or interior decor.

Touch

From a simple viewpoint, the sense of touch is how we learn about the nature of objects through interaction with their surfaces and feeling their textures, hardness, softness, etc. Yet the sense of touch is extremely complex, as it is linked through the nervous system to other sensory systems that can detect temperature or react to pain. Touch is also linked to the emotions – disgust at slimy or viscous surfaces, delight at feeling soft sand with your toes, shock at feeling hot or cold sensations.

The development of complex co-ordination skills needed for walking involves sight, balance, muscle control, sense of weight distribution via touch, but also a sense of the surface being traversed. Allied with this is a more internal awareness of breathing, physical states of tension or pain. These functions are normally accepted as part of our day-to-day experience, but processes such as yoga or meditation can heighten awareness of the autonomic nervous system to the conscious state. Many skilled activities, such as carving wood or drawing, need good hand–eye co-ordination and acute sensory motor skills, using a range of senses including sight, touch and balance to control tools and to receive constant feedback from their contact with the material in order to take both reflective and non-reflective action.

‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ is no idle question. Many people lose touch with a sense of how their body feels unless they stub their toes on a stone. Having taught yoga students how to stretch, we find it interesting how many, at first, have little concept or inner feel for the difference between stretching and relaxation of any part of the body. Few, at first, can focus on their right foot whilst being aware of the rest of their body’s position and state. Natural ways of being in our bodies as children are often lost in adulthood, especially in Westernised cultures which increasingly split body and mind.

Experiential Learning

Learning from our embodied experience is a fundamental human (and animal) process. In experiential learning our senses collect much of the data from which we interpret and learn about our surroundings. The pedigree of this approach can be found in the ancient Greek philosophers, where Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great, believed that ‘human curiosity was infinite’ and, contrary to other philosophers such as Plato and Socrates, he ‘placed less reliance on discussion … than on research and inductive logic. In Aristotle’s approach, each inquiry began with the exhaustive compilation of existing evidence, both physical … and written’ (McLeish, 1998: 5). Aristotle founded a Lyceum in Athens in 335 BC based on his methodology – which lasted 860 years, demonstrating that experiential learning was consistently valued. Socrates, like Aristotle, inhabited ‘a world of uncertainty about the truth’ but, instead of being based on physical research, it was one of ‘continual argument’. ‘His method of teaching was one of questioning, of attempting to formulate a definition of something and then trying to test its accuracy by a careful analysis of its meaning’ (Brownhill in Jarvis, 2002: 70). Both these approaches were based around a process of critical thinking that challenged existing knowledge and cultural beliefs and concepts, but in many ways the wordbased Socratic form of establishing knowledge has become more valued than the use of the senses and experience.

Much of our initial learning as small children is informed by our senses. Although the impact of an impaired sense may limit some forms of information, other senses may be heightened to compensate. The dev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Human learning
• Part 1: Learning and the person
• Part 2: Learning across the lifespan
• Part 3: Learning sites
• Part 4: Learning and disability
• Part 5: Learning across the disciplines: human and social sciences
• Part 6: Learning and religious and meaning systems
• Part 7: Geographic cultural systems: broader perspectives
• Index