Jarvis, P. (2010) Adult Education and Lifelong Learning, Chapter 6
2020 Spring Term, GS course Textbook:
Jarvis, P. (2010) Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice, Routledge.
Chapter 6. Developments in Learning Theory
大意「学習論の今後は老齢学とも連携、全人教育」
1. Learning & action
Fundamental to a great deal of learning is learning by doing – that is, discovery learning, imitating and trial and error. In the book Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Human Learning (Jarvis, 2006) I listed i) behaviourism, ii) social learning and iii) action learning in this category (pp. 119-120)
- Behaviourism is best known from the work of Pavlov (1927) and the stimulus–response theories such as that of Skinner (1951);
- social learning theories include that of Miller & Dollard (1941), who claimed that all behaviour is learned in specific social, historical and cultural contexts. Among the classic social learning theorists is Bandura (1977), who, among other things, observed how children imitated adult behaviour, and more recently Lave and Wenger (1991), who were concerned about how individuals become socialized into organizations through learning from within their social context.
- Action learning was popularized by Revans (1980, 1982), who developed the formula L = P + Q, where L = learning, P = programmed knowledge gained and Q = questioning insights. A
1-1 Early childhood learning
Increasingly it is becoming apparent that it is false to try to separate adult learning from child learning... First of all, it has always been recognized that play is important to child development; it is not just the aimless passing of time with or by children: ‘simply running around without purpose or rules is boring and does not appeal to children’ (Vygotsky, 1978:103).
Vygotsky (1978:93) sees play as enabling children to create imaginary situations in which unrealizable desires can be realized... imagination is a new psychological process that is not present in the initial consciousness of children and it is at the heart of our understanding of play.
1-2 Creativity
Creativity is not necessarily about knowing how or knowing that, but it might be: for instance, good creative artists may have learned all the skills of the artist before they become creative... Joas (1996) uses five metaphors that are most frequently employed about creativity: expression, production, revolution, life, and intelligence & reconstruction. All of these terms capture something of the nature of creativity and all refer to aspects of our doing, but they are not only about doing; they are about being.
We cannot be taught to be creative but we can learn to throw off some of the inhibitions that hinder our creativity. There are social conditions under which creativity is more likely to occur – and that is when the social structures that inhibit (that is, those we learn in our socialization) are lowered so that the social norms of behaviour are weakened. In this instance we enter liminality (Turner, 1969), a point that I (Jarvis, 2008) have discussed quite fully elsewhere...Joas (1996) discusses the idea of creative democracy, and so we see how creativity and play may be linked together in this way.
2. Cognition
What Blakemore and Frith (2005) call implicit learning is what I (Jarvis 1987) called pre-conscious learning; they show that we can learn without awareness.
3. Emotions
Emotions have been divided into primary and secondary ones. The primary ones are those that have been built into us as a result of our evolutionary past – that is, they are hard-wired... While most sense experiences are transferred to the brain via the thalamus, some neurones take a short-cut to the amygdala, and so it receives the sensations milliseconds before the social brain. Thus, our immediate reactions are emotional before they are rational. Goleman (1995:16) regards this as an emotional sentinel that is able to hijack the brain... Goleman's (1995:80) conclusions about the place of emotion in learning are important: ... to the degree to which we are motivated by feelings of enthusiasm and pleasure in what we do – or even by an optimal degree of anxiety – they propel us to accomplishment. It is in this sense that emotional intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them.
4. Experience
Dewey (1938) suggested that we live in a series of episodic experiences and so we learn from these episodes.
5. Ageing
Educational gerontology is, consequently, becoming an increasingly significant area of study... a new profession of learning therapist (Jarvis, 2001a) in order to advise on such learning environments. We will also research the whole issue of becoming confused, because insufficient stimulus is provided for elderly people to learn. Consequently, we should see new developments in situated learning.
While the focus in the past forty years has been third age learning, we are now moving into a situation where we will see developments in learning theory among the very old: fourth age learning.
6. The whole person
When we learn a skill, we also learn knowledge, perhaps acquire confidence, and so on, and so it is important to look at the whole person.
Our identity is not just that we are a teacher but that I am this teacher – the ‘i’ is the unique me that I have learned from early childhood and which is still with me for as long as I exist as an independent human being.
It is only in disjunctural situations that we have to think about our actions... we have to learn how to play our role afresh – but it is still the same ‘I’ who learns it and plays it. But herein is one of the major problems: we are no longer free to play that role in any way we wish since there are two sets of constraints.
1) we have social identities, which means that we will consider how any new role performance will be perceived by our social life-world, and so we will feel constrained to act in accord with the way that we perceive others anticipate that we will act.
2) we have spent a lifetime developing our own personality characteristics and so, even if we could, we are unlikely to produce a different set of personality traits in any new action. Any fresh expression of my role is still recognizable as ‘me’.
...there are a multitude of personality traits and it would be impossible to provide a definitive list... But the whole person is about body as well as mind, and we have to recognize the significance of the body in learning (O'Loughlin, 2006) since all of our experiences begin with a sense experience: we are more than just a ‘cognitive personality’.
Experience And Education (Illustrated Edition) (English Edition)
- 作者:Dewey, John
- 発売日: 2016/08/13
- メディア: Kindle版
