Supporting Lifelong Learning

Volume I: Perspectives on Learning

Julia Clarke, Ann Hanson, Roger Harrison, Fiona Reeve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781134512577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This Open University Reader examines the practices of learning and teaching which have been developed to support lifelong learning, and the understanding and assumptions which underpin them. The selection of texts trace the widening scope of academic understanding of learning and teaching, and considers the implications for those who develop programmes of learning. It examines in great depth those theories which have had the greatest impact in the field, theories of reflection and learning from experience and theories of situated learning. The implications of these theories ar examined in relation to themes which run across the reader, namely, workplace learning, literacies, and the possibilities offered by information and communication technologies.
The particular focus of this Reader is on the psychological or cognitive phenomena that happen in the minds of individual learners. The readings have been selected to represent a range of experience in different sectors of education from around the globe.

Chapter 1
Learning and adult education
Alan Rogers

Learning theories

It is important to stress the fact that there are many strategies for learning, because some recent writers have suggested that there is only one way in which all learning is done (we shall talk about one or two of these strategies later in this section). We need to be wary of adopting any all-embracing theory of learning that implies exclusivity.

It will be useful to summarise the many different learning theories briefly. They may be divided for simplicity’s sake into three main groups. There are the behaviourist theories, mostly of the stimulus–response variety of differing degrees of complexity. There are the cognitive theories, based on a different view of the nature of knowledge. And there are those theories that have been called humanist; these rely on various analyses of personality and of society.

Before looking at these in more detail, one or two comments need to be made. First, it is tempting to identify the stimulus–response learning theories with the ‘conformist’ view of education and the humanist with the ‘liberation’ view. There is some truth is this in that the humanists often talk in terms of liberation. But his is too simplistic: the divide between these two approaches runs right through all three sets of theories. The behavioural theories range from a simple reinforcement of the desired responses through to an exploration of the many different possible responses; the cognitive theories can talk at one extreme of the discipline of the subject and at the other end of the continuum of open discovery learning; and the humanist theories can describe the importance of role imitation in attitudinal development on the one hand and the freedom of the learning group on the other.

Second, however, there does seem to be a correlation between each of these groups of learning theories and the three main elements in the teaching–learning encounter. Education consists of a dynamic interaction involving three parties – the teacher-planner, the student participant(s), and the subject-matter. Each of the three groups of learning theories tends to exalt the primacy of one of these three elements. Behavioural theories stress the role of the teacher-agent in providing the stimulus and selecting and reinforcing the approved responses; cognitive theories emphasise the content of the material; while the humanist theories (the most complex group) direct attention to the active involvement of the student participant.

Learning theories	Conformist-oriented	(continuum) --------------	Liberation-oriented
Behavioural; teacher-centred	Reinforcement of desired responses	--------------	Exploration of different responses
Cognitive; subject-centred	Discipline of subject	--------------	Discovery learning
Humanist; learner-centred	Imitation of norms	--------------	Group learning

Figure 1.1 Learning theories.

Behaviourist theories

This group of theories suggests that we learn by receiving stimuli from our environment that provoke a response. The teacher can direct this process by selecting the stimuli and by reinforcing the approved responses while discouraging the ‘wrong’ responses. Learning is thus brought about by an association between the desired responses and the reinforcement (rewards and punishments through a complicated system of success and failure indicators).

These theories stress the active role of the teacher-agent. The student-learner is often seen as more passive. Although the learner offers a variety of responses, it is only the teacher who can determine the ‘right’ response and who can reward it appropriately, discouraging the other responses. Feedback, the return from the learner to the teacher, thus stands on its own, separate from and following after the learning process.

The behaviourist theories are based on a view of knowledge that distinguishes sharply between right and wrong. They assume that knowledge is truth and can be known; it is independent of both teacher and learner; it is the same for all learners.

Stimulus–response theories are not seen by their proponents as just applicable to low-level learning. They also apply at more advanced levels. Nor are they confined to skill learning; they form the basis for cognitive and attitudinal learning as well – to the understanding of historical processes and the appreciation of music. Indeed, the general validity of the theory is that it is often seen to underlie most of the other theories of learning. Cognitive theories stress the inherent demands of the subject-matter but they still rely on an assumption that responses are called out by different stimuli. And humanist theories urge that the stimuli arise from our social and life context, that the variety of our responses is dependent on our individual experiences and personalities, and that at an early stage of life we all learn by a system of approvals and disapprovals that indicate whether our social patterns of behaviour are acceptable or not. Stimulus and response form part of almost all theories of learning in some form or other.

Cognitive theories

Since the 1960s, a number of theories have emerged that direct attention to the activity of the learner in processing the response and to the nature of knowledge itself. These form a distinct group.

These theories point to the active engagement of the mind in learning. They stress the processes involved in creating responses, the organisation of perceptions, the development of insights. In order to learn, understanding is necessary. The material must be marshalled step by step and then mastered. The setting of goals is related to each part of the material encountered. Feedback is an essential part of the process of learning, not separate from it.

Although the learner is seen to be active rather than passive, the activity itself is controlled by the inherent structure of knowledge itself. The material that the teacher-agent orders and that the learner seeks to master dominates the process. The words ‘must’ and ‘necessary’ and ‘discipline’, which occur frequently in connection with this view of learning, reveal that teacher and learner are faced by something that is bigger than both of them, something to which they must adapt themselves. The world of knowledge lies outside of themselves.

This group of views is not confined to the acquisition of new knowledge or the development of new understandings. It applies to learning new skills and new attitudes as well.

Both kinds of learning theories, behavioural and cognitive, posit hierarchies of learning: that there are strategies for low-level learning and strategies for higher-level learning. Learning advances as more and more learning takes place; there are higher levels of learning that not all learners attain to.

Bloom, who drew a distinction between learning in the cognitive domain and learning in the affective domain, may be taken as an example of this. He suggests (1965) that the steps to learning in each domain parallel each other. Thus the process of cognitive learning consists of the recall and recognition of knowledge; comprehension, understanding the material, exploring it more actively; the application of the comprehended knowledge, using it in concrete situations; then exploring each new situation by breaking it down into its constituted parts (analysis) and building it up into new concepts (synthesis); and finally evaluation in which the learners come to assess the new knowledge, to judge its value in relation to the realisation of their goals. On the affective side, there is a similar progression: receiving stimuli, paying attention, developing awareness, being willing to receive and eventually using selective attention; then responding willingly, the emergence of a sense of satisfaction with the response; third, valuing the concepts and the process they are engaged in, making an assessment that the activity is worth doing, so that the learners come to express their preferences and eventually their commitment; then conceptualising, making judgements, attaching concepts to each of the values they have identified; and finally organising these values into a system that in the end comes to characterise each individual. He suggests that the steps to learning are the same in all learners. Gagné (1972) too drew up a progression of learning from the simple ‘signal’ learning through stimulus–response to the very complex ‘problem-solving’ learning.

Humanist theories

Such hierarchies however do not seem to characterise many forms of humanist learning theories. These are more recent in origin and are not so coherent as those in the other two groups.

Humanist learning theories spring from an understanding of the major contemporary changes in culture – away from the certainties of empirical science, the relatively simple and universally valid conclusions of objective research, the stability and general applicability of scientific laws, the generally accepted values, the positivism of August Comte and others – into the modern world of living complexity, uncertainty, instability, the uniqueness of individual response and the conflicts of values (Schein, 1972). Humanist learning theories stress once more the active nature of the learner. Indeed, the learner’s actions largely create the learning situation. They emphasise the urges and drives of the personality, movements towards (for example) increased autonomy and competence, the compulsion towards growth and development, the active search for meaning, the fulfilment of goals that individuals set for themselves. They stress the particular social settings within which learning operates. Learning and setting goals for oneself are seen to be natural processes, calling into play the personal learning abilities that the learners have already developed and which they seek to enhance. Learning comes largely from drawing upon all the experience that goes to make up the self and upon the resources of the wider community. Motivation for learning comes from within; and the material on which the learning drive fastens is the whole of life, the cultural and interpersonal relationships that form the social context.

Bloom
Cognitive	Affective
Knowledge	Receiving
Comprehension	Responding
Application	Valuing
Analysis–synthesis	Conceptualising
Evaluation	Organising

Gagné

Signal

Stimulus–response

Chaining

Verbal association

Multiple discrimination

Concept learning

Principle learning

Problem solving

Figure 1.2 Bloom and Gagné: hierarchies of learning.

These views also stress the autonomy of the learners and emphasise that all the other theories talk about ‘controls’, about the learner being controlled by the stimuli, by the teacher, by the subject-matter. The humanist views on the other hand see learning as part of a process of conflict in which the learners are seeking to take control of their own life processes. It is the engagement of the learners with the world around them and with themselves that creates the learning milieu. The material on which they exercise their learning skills is less important than the goals they have set themselves. The role of the teacher is to increase the range of experiences so that the student participants can use these in any way they please to achieve their own desired learning changes.

It will be necessary for us to spe...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING
• CHAPTER 1: LEARNING AND ADULT EDUCATION
• CHAPTER 2: THE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP IN THE FACILITATION OF LEARNING
• CHAPTER 3: FROM TECHNICAL RATIONALITY TO REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
• CHAPTER 4: DECONSTRUCTING DOMESTICATION: WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE AND THE GOALS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
• CHAPTER 5: SELF AND EXPERIENCE IN ADULT LEARNING
• CHAPTER 6: PROMOTING REFLECTION IN PROFESSIONAL COURSES: THE CHALLENGE OF CONTEXT
• CHAPTER 7: LEGITIMATE PERIPHERAL PARTICIPATION IN COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
• CHAPTER 8: LEARNING FROM OTHER PEOPLE AT WORK
• CHAPTER 9: BEYOND THE INSTITUTION OF APPRENTICESHIP: TOWARDS A SOCIAL THEORY OF LEARNING AS THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE
• CHAPTER 10: THE TECHNOLOGY OF LEARNING IN A SOCIAL WORLD
• CHAPTER 11: SUSTAINABLE LITERACIES AND THE ECOLOGY OF LIFELONG LEARNING
• CHAPTER 12: ACADEMIC WRITING IN NEW AND EMERGENT DISCIPLINE AREAS
• CHAPTER 13: PEDAGOGIES FOR LIFELONG LEARNING: BUILDING BRIDGES OR BUILDING WALLS?