Learning and Awareness

Ference Marton, Shirley Booth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136495830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book stems from more than 25 years of systematic research into the experience of learning undertaken by a research team trying to account for the obvious differences between more or less successful instances of learning in educational institutions. The book offers an answer in terms of the discovery of critical differences in the structure of the learner's awareness and critical differences in the meaning of the learner's world. The authors offer a detailed account of the empirical findings that give rise to theoretical insights, and discuss the particular form of qualitative research that has been employed and developed. The form of learning that is the object of study is considered to be the most fundamental form -- namely a change in the learner's way of seeing, experiencing, handling, and understanding aspects of the world. The need for rigorous analysis of learning of specific subject matter, the individual construction of knowledge, and its social and cultural embeddedness -- the defining features of rival approaches into research on learning -- are reconciled from the approach adopted here into an intertwined and whole experience of learning. The learner's experience is always one of learning something, in some way, and in some context; by holding the learner's experience of learning as the focus of study throughout -- and not studying the learning of the content and the acts and the context as separate and distinct focuses -- the content, the act, and the context remain united as constituents of the learner's experience. By empirically revealing critical differences in the ways of experiencing these aspects of learning, and by developing a theoretical framework for the dynamics through which change comes about in the learner's awareness, this book gradually leads the reader to a powerful new view of learning. Equipped with the analytical tools and conceptual apparatus to be found in this book, the reader will be empowered to learn and to assist others to learn by creating environments conducive to the most fundamental form of learning: experiencing aspects of the world in new ways.

1

What Does it Take to Learn?

One thing that people have in common is that they are all different. This disturbing sentence—whether considered conceptually or grammatically—boils down to this: People may be created equal, but they do things differently. There are other ways of putting it—for any one of the things people do, some do it better, others do it worse. To the extent they have learned to do that one thing, they must have learned to do it differently—some better, some worse. Rather, they have learned differently—some better, some worse—to do it. This is the starting point for our book: If one way of doing something can be judged to be better than another way, then some people must have been better at learning to do it—or have learned to do it better—than others.

Now, if we take that as our starting point, can we reasonably hope that by finding out what it takes to learn something we can make people dramatically better at learning it or make them learn it dramatically better? In the rest of this book, argue that it is, and point the way to revealing what it takes to learn the multiplicity of things we are expected to learn.

Inasmuch as we can learn different sorts of things, the notion of “what it takes to learn” has to be expressed in different forms. The question “What does it take to learn to do something?” is one form, “How do we gain knowledge about the world?” is another. The latter is the question we are going to address explicitly in this chapter. An answer would empower people to gain knowledge, as well as deeper knowledge, about the world, and it is to develop just such an answer, and just such an empowerment that is our goal in writing this book.

HOW DO WE GAIN KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE WORLD? A STORY OF PARADOXES

“How do we gain knowledge about the world?” can be seen as the epistemological form of the question “What does it take to learn?” Epistemology has to do with the question of gaining knowledge but also with the question of the truth value of the knowledge gained, as, indeed, does education. We are living in an age of relativism, but a fundamental principle we are assuming in this book is that education has norms—norms of what those undergoing education should be learning, and what the outcomes of their learning should be.

PARADOX THE FIRST: MENO’S PARADOX

We find the most famous formulation of the question “How do we gain knowledge about the world?” in one of Plato’s early dialogues, written in 403 or 402 BC, when the author was in his mid-20s, some 3 or 4 years before Socrates calmly drank the cup of poison administered as punishment for his dangerous ideas (Day, 1994, p. 8). The dialogue was between Socrates and Meno, a young Thessalonian visiting Athens, and started with Meno posing the question: “Can one be taught virtue?” Socrates replied that he did not even know what virtue is, and he argued that neither did Meno. Socrates suggested that they embark upon a search for an answer together, but Meno puts forward an objection that has become known as Meno’s paradox: “How can you search for something when you do not know what it is? You do not know what to look for, and if you were to come across it you would not recognize it as what you are looking for.” Socrates agreed with this objection, and elaborated:

It’s impossible for a person to search either for what he knows or what he doesn’t.… He couldn’t search for what he knows, for he knows it and no one in that condition needs to search; on the other hand he couldn’t search for what he doesn’t know, for he won’t even know what to search for. (Day, 1994, p. 47)

The surprising answer of Plato—or Socrates—to the question “How do we gain knowledge about the world?” is that we cannot gain knowledge about the world. Learning is impossible. The paradox lies in the observation that we certainly do learn!

There is an obvious counterargument to this line of reasoning: Meno’s paradox may be valid as far as searching for knowledge is concerned, but surely we can learn by being told? However, Plato had already ruled out this solution in an earlier dialogue with Protagoras on the grounds that if you do not already know a teacher’s assertion when you are told it, then you cannot decide whether it is true or false. Moreover, it is impossible to choose a teacher who knows, on the same grounds as the impossibility of finding knowledge by oneself (Day, 1994, p. 26).

Plato—again using Socrates as mouthpiece—suggested another solution to the apparent paradox, his theory of recollection, which has it that the human soul is immortal even if the human body is not. The soul is reembodied again and again, going repeatedly from one life to the next. All knowledge is laid down in the soul prior to the series of lives. It is then forgotten by its current vessel but is there to be recollected. Learning is such a recollection. Knowledge thus does not originate from the world or, from the outside, but from the immortal soul or, from within. In the course of his dialogue with Meno, Socrates wished to demonstrate that knowledge is innate and called in a young slave boy who was able to count but was ignorant of geometry. Socrates gave him a geometrical problem: to find the length of a side of a square, the area of which is twice the area of a given square. The boy’s first answer was wrong, but Socrates managed to act as midwife and draw forth the answer by putting questions that repeatedly showed the inherent contradictions in the boy’s way of reasoning. Socrates’ method amounts to breaking the problem down into component parts and prompting answers to each part separately, an instance of his famous midwifing, or maieutic, pedagogical method resembling the teaching strategy that in modern educational research has been called piloting (Johansson, 1975; Lundgren, 1977). By doing so he claimed to have shown that the knowledge necessary to solve the problem was there in the boy’s soul from the beginning, a remnant from some previous embodiment, because the boy did not previously know any geometry.

On hearing what Socrates did we are tempted to rebuff his claim that knowledge comes from within. He did, after all, ask questions, show diagrams, and firmly guide the boy’s thinking. But he did not hand over the answers; the boy had to arrive at them using his powers of reason, and in that sense one could argue that knowledge may indeed be gained from within oneself (Day, 1994, p. 23). This does not imply, however, that Socrates presented strong support for the theory of recollection and that he had solved Meno’s paradox. As White (1994) convincingly showed, the theory of recollection gives rise to a paradox that is a mirror image of Meno’s paradox, which it was supposed to solve. Just as you cannot search for knowledge in the world outside, you cannot recollect knowledge from within. That which is already recollected you do not need to recollect; and that which is not recollected you cannot recollect because you do not know what you are trying to recollect. Indeed, if you were to come upon it, you would not know that it is what you want to recollect.

Thus Plato did not solve the paradox he had formulated. Nor did anyone else (for some fairly recent and less than convincing attempts from the field of education see Bereiter, 1985; Halldén, 1994; Petrie, 1981; Steffe, 1991).

PARADOX AVOIDED: BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY

Some 23 centuries after Plato formulated the paradox of learning—Meno’s paradox—learning became an object of research in psychology. Let us take, for example, the pioneering work of Herman Ebbinghaus. His aim was to study memory in a “pure” form—“pure” in the sense of being free from meaningful associations; but in order to study memory it was necessary for someone to learn the stuff that would have to be remembered later. Ebbinghaus prepared lists of pairs of meaningless syllables, and submitting himself to the task of being his own experimental subject, he learned to answer with one of the syllables in a pair when the other was given. His main interest was to find out the extent to which he would be able to recall the missing syllables after different intervals of time. This study was published in 1885 (Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964) and can be viewed in part as a study of learning, or at least of one form of learning—becoming increasingly able to recall something as a function of practice—but nobody would claim that Ebbinghaus had studied how we gain knowledge about the world.

Ivan Pavlov, the Russian Nobel laureate in Medicine in 1904, discovered and studied quite another form of learning (Pavlov, 1927). An organism has a repertoire of innate reflexes: Certain stimuli trigger off certain responses. A toddler starts at a sudden sharp sound; one’s pupils dilate when a bright light is shone on them; a hungry mammal salivates more when exposed to the smell or sight of food. Concerning such reactions we talk of unconditioned stimuli resulting in unconditioned responses. What Pavlov found was that if another stimulus is repeatedly presented shortly before the unconditioned stimulus, then eventually a reaction very similar to the unconditioned response will be triggered off by this introduced stimulus. For example, a hungry dog salivates more (unconditioned response) when shown food (unconditioned stimulus). If its keeper repeatedly rings a bell before revealing the food, then increased salivation will eventually be brought about by the sound of the bell alone. The sound of the bell is called a conditioned stimulus, and now the salivation is a conditioned response, being brought about, not by natural reflex, but solely by the sound of the bell.

The father of behaviorism, John Watson, applied the same principle in a famous study in which he caused a toddler, Albert, to develop a fear of furry animals (Watson, 1924). When Albert heard a loud noise he reacted naturally with fear: The sound was the unconditioned stimulus that brought about the unconditioned response of fear. Now Watson exposed Albert to a loud noise each time he caught sight of a small furry rabbit: The sight of the rabbit became a conditioned stimulus that triggered off a conditioned response of fear. Albert learned fear of the rabbit, which later become generalized to a fear of any furry animals at all. In our search for illumination, classical conditioning, as this form of learning is called, offers no solution at all, because it has nothing at all to do with gaining knowledge about the world; what it does deal with is the transposition of physiological reactions from the stimuli to which they have a built-in response to stimuli that can acquire a conditioned response. Even if the set of stimuli to which reactions can be conditioned is unlimited, what can be learned through classical conditioning is limited to reactions that naturally appear as reflexes.

The American psychologist Burrhus F. Skinner studied learning in the sense of the extent to which a certain behavior appeared as a function of what had followed that behavior in the past (Skinner, 1953). If we think of some sort of organism with a set of behaviors, then Skinner’s basic principle can be expressed simply enough: A particular behavior is more likely to appear if its appearance is followed by reinforcement, a consequence that is desirable from the organism’s point of view. For example, if you have a hungry rat in a box and each time it presses a lever a pellet of food emerges, the likelihood of the rat pressing the lever again will increase because the food is a desirable consequence. If pressing the lever were to be followed by an adverse consequence, a punishment, such as an electric shock from the floor of the box, the rat would be less likely to press the lever again. Such contingency, or behavior being related to consequence, can be varied endlessly. If we want to eliminate a certain behavior, we can either punish that behavior or reward another incompatible behavior (and we would probably find that the latter is more efficient). The kind of learning Skinner studied is called operant conditioning and deals with how the individual is conditioned by reinforcement and punishment to operate on its environment. Maybe we should not call it a kind of learning, but an aspect of learning, potentially present in each and every instance of learning. Unlike Pavlov’s classical conditioning it is not limited by unconditioned stimulus and response patterns to a finite set of behaviors; it is restricted only by what can be used as reinforcement and punishment.

Operant conditioning can possibly account for the fact that someone is doing something. The behavior in question has been directly or indirectly related to reinforcement in the past, whereas alternative behavior has been related to punishment. But even if it can suggest an explanation for the fact that someone is doing something, it hardly enables us to make sense of what she is doing or how she is doing it without reference to the content (as opposed to the reinforcing or punishing effect) of her previous experiences. We can try to account for the fact that someone is interested in mathematics in terms of her history of reinforcement, but we can understand her ingenious way of solving, say, differential equations only if we happen to know about her previous experience of mathematics (e.g., that she had studied in the former USSR, for instance, where calculus was taught differently than in Scandinavia). To take another example, what sense can we make of an immigrant to Sweden speaking Swedish with a heavy accent? We might be able to account for his willingness to learn and speak Swedish in terms of his history of reinforcement and even punishment. But to understand the nature of his accent and the grammatical errors he is making we would need to know something of the sound structure of his mother tongue, which interferes with his Swedish, and thus yields a characteristic pattern of deviation from Swedish as it is used by native speakers.

Surprising though it may appear, Skinner was not at all sensitive to the distinction between the reinforcing (or punishing) potential of experiences, on the one hand, and the content and structure of experiences on the other. The former has possible implications for whether or not, or to what extent, people do some particular thing, whereas the latter must be taken into account in order to understand how they do what they do. Skinner overgeneralized operant conditioning far beyond the limits of its explanatory power when, for one thing, he sought to account for learning language. He attempted to explain not only that which he possibly could explain but also that which he could not possibly explain.

PARADOX THE SECOND: MENO’S MIRROR

It was largely a result of this overextension that Skinner’s entire research program—not only that which was wrong but also that which was right—was in time rejected by a majority of the scientific community. The most devastating criticism of Skinnerian psychology was delivered by the linguist, Noam Chomsky, in his review of Skinner’s account of how children learn their mother tongue (Chomsky, 1959). His critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957) has a familiar Platonian ring to it. The main argument is that a grammar cannot be derived from data provided by the environment because the data are simply not always adequate; despite the great variation in richness of the linguistic environment they experience, children nevertheless learn their language. Chomsky concluded that the disposition for a universal grammar, of which the different grammars as realized are a subset, must therefore be innate. But, one ventures to ask, how can a particular grammar be carved out of that preformed, innate, universal grammar when the only tools come from the inadequate data supplied by the environment? Just as Plato’s proposed solution to the search for virtue, Chomsky’s proposed solution to the problem of learning language runs into a paradox, which this time can be thought of as the mirror image of Meno’s paradox: How can that which is innate be formed according to local demands?

The fundamental idea of behaviorism is that it is precisely behavior that is the proper subject matter of psychology and related fields. In line with good scientific practice we should stick to that which is observable. This is something that Skinner, Watson, Pavlov, and even Ebbinghaus, whose work predated the behaviorist movement, had in common. With regard to learning it means that change in behavior is studied as a function of practice, contingency of unconditioned and conditioned stimuli, or schedules of reinforcement. Behaviorists studying learning have never encountered Meno’s paradox or its mirror image for the very simple reason that they do not ask themselves the question, “How do we gain knowledge about the world?” In fact, they don’t even think it is a very good question to ask.

PARADOX THE THIRD: INDIVIDUAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

Nevertheless, it was just this question that Jean Piaget devoted his long scientific career to exploring. (His first scientific publication appeared when he was 11 years of age in 1907, and the English translation of his last book was printed only in this decade (Piaget & Garcia, 1991). Piaget has never been considered primarily a student of learning, whether by others or himself. Because his main interest was the development of human knowledge, he labeled his field genetic epistemology. For Piaget’s sake, then, we perhaps should recast the question “How do we gain knowledge about the world?” as “How do we develop knowledge about the world?” But if one is interested in learning as gaining knowledge through experience—as we certainly are—and if one is interested in development as gaining knowledge through experience as well—as we also are—the distinction between the two is rather slight (Marton & Säljö, 1976c).

Piaget was a constructivist. He did not assume that knowledge exists “out there,” ready made, and that we somehow “take it in” from the environment, as the empiricists assumed, nor did he assume that knowledge is fundamentally innate as Plato and Chomsky did. According to Piaget, knowledge is constructed by the individual through her acts, through her interaction with the environment, by means of the complementary adaptive mechanisms of accommodation (in which the individual adjusts to the environment) and assimilation (in which the environment is adjusted to suit the individual). In this process progressively more advanced levels of knowledge evolve.

Several questions arise from this view, one of which concerns the locus of development. What gives development its direction? On what grounds can one level of knowledge be replaced by another, more advanced level of knowledge? How can someone select or choose or adopt a more advanced level while still at a less advanced level? This is exac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 What Does It Take to Learn?
• Chapter 2 Qualitative Differences in Learning
• Chapter 3 The Experience of Learning
• Chapter 4 Revealing Educationally Critical Differences in Our Understanding of the World Around Us
• Chapter 5 The Anatomy of Awareness
• Chapter 6 The Idea of Phenomenography
• Chapter 7 Learning to Experience
• Chapter 8 A Pedagogy of Awareness
• Epilogue
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index