Borderland

George Siemens, at the Connectivism Blog wrote a thought-provoking post called Meaning-Making. The questions George is asking about where meaning comes from and how it happens address the magic part of teaching. George is developing a definition of learning – a goal that’s imperative for any of us who envision a future for education that diverges from its current deterministic trajectory.

George mentioned that he is dissatisfied with his effort to define learning as the acquisition of “actionable knowledge” because it doesn’t “appear to completely explain the attempt and focus of learning.” If I understand him correctly, George wants his definition to account for motivation and choice as aspects of learning. I think this is an important question because without understanding the “why” of learning, we are left with a superficial behavioral explanation of how learning occurs. George is on target when he says that we need to develop learning ecologies, rather than courses with defined objectives. I am constantly surprised by my students’ failures to learn what I thought I was teaching them, only to later observe that they had indeed appropriated knowledge from the classroom environment to serve some particular purpose of their own.

Learning is not directly dependent on teaching. I’ve worked with plenty of kids who seem to have learned things that I didn’t intend for them to know. This is very humbling, and gives me pause. I have to remember that I am not the only instructional decision-maker in the classroom. The kids all come with agendas, and have decided whether or not they are going to be receptive to what I propose for them to learn.

What motivates learning?

The motivations of our students are determined by who they are, who they believe they are, and who they see themselves becoming. Learning is not simply a cognitive intellectual process. There is an element of heart and soul that we need to be mindful of, too. I prefer to view learning as a social process because social theories about learning recognize it as more than mere acquisition of information. I would agree that any comprehensive definition of learning must recognize it as a process through which an individual’s ways of acting are changed. But I also think that we should consider the changes that learning brings to our own perceptions of who we are. Learning changes not only what we do, but how we see ourselves as doers. Our identities are transformed in the process. Learning occurs as new situations make new demands and provide new opportunities for development. Learning is an inevitable consequence of participation in a social environment.

A useful construct for understanding what motivates learning can be found in communities of practice. Learning is a social phenomenon in which people develop identities as skilled participants within particular communities of practice. Communities of practice in this sense are groups of people who are mutually engaged in a shared enterprise, and who share a common repertoire of practices and understandings. These communities need not be institutionally organized. Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave developed the concept from ethnographic studies of apprenticeship as a way of explaining the role of participation and identity transformation in social contexts. The concept of communities of practice has powerful implications for the role of identity in classroom learning processes.