What is Learning?

Learning outcomes – learning styles – learning assessments.  We use the word learning in a lot of different contexts but what exactly is the nature of learning and how can educators work to enhance more effective student learning?

Israel Galindo, Dean of Lifelong Learning at Columbia Theological Seminary, makes the bold assertion that learning is not an outcome of teaching.  (See his blog at http://columbiaconnections.org/2014/07/14/learning-is-not-an-outcome-of-teaching)

Galindo’s point is that while we may equate teaching with learning, the results are not always so closely aligned.  Sometimes what a student learns in a classroom (whether virtual or real time) is not always what the instructor may intend to teach.

Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky are among a group of cognitive psychologists who have been associated with a view of education known as constructivism. A constructivist view suggests that learning is a dynamic activity and occurs in the intersection of new information with the learner’s prior knowledge. Knowledge is ‘constructed.’ It is not delivered, or imparted, or imprinted. Constructivists believe that the reshaping of knowledge occurs best in the context of social interaction with other learners. Some would say that this requires a shift in focus in most school settings from “teaching” to “learning.”

The Fault Line

I’m not a geologist, but the image of an earthquake fault line seems relevant to understanding the shift I’m suggesting from “teaching” to “learning.”  In an earthquake, deep underground something “breaks,” or slips, resulting in two tectonic plates shifting along a fault line, often submerging one plate under another or smashing one plate against another.  The result is felt for miles, sometimes hundreds of miles.  Very few people would choose to build their dream home directly on a fault line, but many people choose to live within the earthquake zone.

I would suggest that those of us who engage in teaching, regardless of whether we teach college students, graduate students, or members of a congregation, are all living on a fault line.  The ground is shifting, and has been shifting under our feet for some time.  Seismologists call these foreshocks; smaller earthquakes that happen in the same vicinity as the larger earthquake that follows. Scientists aren’t always clear that an earthquake is a foreshock until the larger earthquake happens.

Some of the foreshocks that are occurring in higher education are centered around emerging cognitive neuroscientific research on the nature of learning and the brain.  In this series of blogs, we’ll examine the nature of these foreshocks and what major shifts they might suggest for pedagogy and classroom practice.

The largest, main earthquake is called the mainshock. Mainshocks always have aftershocks that follow. These are smaller earthquakes that occur afterwards in the same place as the mainshock. Depending on the size of the mainshock, aftershocks can continue for weeks, months, and even years after the mainshock!  Perhaps the mainshock for those of us who teach is to realize that what we intended to communicate as valuable and important is NOT what our learners perceive as valuable and important and is not what they are retaining or applying.

After the mainshock, the aftershocks continue to resonate and can elicit further anxiety.  If students in X class are not retaining, applying, learning material I believe is valuable and important, is it possible that the same thing is happening in Y and Z classes?  How many years has this been occurring and what is the long-term impact if students who are not able to retain, apply, and learn material in a particular discipline?  Perhaps the bigger aftershock is assessing ourselves and our effectiveness as educators in light of student learning.

Living on the Fault Line

We all live on this fault line – the intersection between the stability of learning environments as we previously knew and understood them and our role in them and the instability of a culture where new information about how human beings learn and remember is emerging daily and a culture where new forms of instruction and ways of receiving information inform our lives and protrude into our educational institutions.  How can we live non-anxiously on this fault line and be faithful, effective educators?

Jerome Bruner’s notion of the active learner may offer us something to hold on to as the ground shakes beneath us.  For Bruner, the learner is an active part of learning who is continually rebuilding his or her brain and mental/cognitive processes as information is received. Learning is enactive (learning by doing), iconic (learning through pictures), and symbolic (learning through words). Learners are innately curious and, when presented with a problem and evidence, will work to reconcile the information and discover a solution.  This is discovery learning and places teachers in the role of guide rather than lecturer. But learning is more than simply solving a problem that a teacher proposes. Learning is highly influenced by the richness of the environment that surrounds the learner and the degree to which learners are engaged in that environment. Our role as intentional instructors is to create a rich, engaging environment so that the naturally curious learner can make independent discoveries and construct new knowledge.

Educators are Artists in Residence

To live on the fault line, we must make a shift in our view of our role and function.  Educators are no longer the primary gatekeepers of knowledge, determining what learners will and will not learn, but we are more like artists in residence, creating a fertile environment and supporting learners’ intellectual discoveries.

To live on the fault line, we must also make a shift in our understanding of the nature of learning.  Good learning pushes the learner into the unknown, the uncomfortable, and thereby requires him or her to lean more on other learners, pulling and nudging learners to new levels of knowing. Indeed this may be where we find ourselves as educators as we learn new ways of teaching and adopt changing pedagogies.  Lev Vygotsky offers us some reassurance as well; learning beckons us forward and upward, fanning the flames of what we do know and enticing us toward what we do not yet know.

The paradigm shift from “teaching” to “learning” is gaining momentum among educators and institutions of higher learning as we seek to understand more about the nature of learning informed by recent neuroscientific research on the brain and on learning and memory.  This shift may upset some long-held boundaries between student and teacher.  We wrestle with what it means to view learning as the active work of the student and the teacher as the leading learner, not passive or inactive, but no longer the sole source of information.  It disrupts standard methods of content delivery, such as lecturing or a continuous, one-way stream of instruction and suggests that mastery of content may no longer be an effective end or purpose of learning.

In the next blog, we’ll explore some pedagogical shifts that promote a greater emphasis on learning and adaptive methods of teaching applicable to seminaries and religious studies classrooms, hopefully offering some places to steady ourselves in the midst of the changing landscape of education.

 

Sticky Learning: How Neuroscience Supports Teaching That’s Remembered  is part of the Seminarium Elements book series. Look for it November 1, 2014.

Order today at fortresspress.com and Amazon.com.

Photo credit: “Lake Elsinore city hall.” Copyright miheco. Licensed for reuse by CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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