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REDEFINING LEARNING
Examining Your Attitudes About Learning
“HIRE FOR ATTITUDE, TRAIN FOR SKILLS!” This is a familiar slogan to those who work in human resource development. It suggests, of course, that it is easier to change people’s skill levels than their attitudes, but the interesting point of the slogan is the importance placed on attitude. Attitude is important in much that we do, but it is especially important in learning.
The next step in managing your learning is to reexamine some of your ideas about learning. In this chapter you will be encouraged to reframe your definition of learning and develop up-to-date attitudes that will be adequate for the new era.
THE NEW IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING
No More Games
In the new era, learning is a serious matter. Business, government, and not-for-profit organizations are aware of the new importance of learning and are responding. Learning is being recognized as the key resource for continuous improvement and competitive advantage. Some organizations refer to themselves as learning organizations, some have started corporate universities, others are establishing computer-based learning networks, and a few have appointed chief learning officers. A new function in many organizations today is knowledge management.
Learning is no longer just an option; learning has become a way of life, a part of the culture of organizations. In most organizations today, everyone is teaching someone something somewhere. The question is: How fast and well will everyone learn? Learning is no longer a rare activity engaged in by an elite few. Perpetual learning is a necessity for everybody throughout the organization.
The new seriousness about learning in organizations sounds like a good thing, especially if you are ready to participate. Many people, however, have a fairly extensive history of not taking learning seriously. They played the game of getting by, meeting requirements with minimal effort, going through the motions of learning, and hiding and bluffing as necessary. They saw learning as a silly credentials game, a matter of jumping through hoops. They majored in deception and minored in excuses. Were you one of them?
One of the first things to ask yourself as you explore your attitudes about learning is: What was your fundamental attitude about learning? If you carried into adulthood a game-player mentality from your school years, you probably recognize it now as a destructive form of self-deception and a key roadblock to effective learning.
If you are already a serious learner—one who takes responsibility, gets involved, meets deadlines, puts forth effort, and avoids making excuses—you already have the fundamental attitude needed for managing your own learning.
Learning and Change
Beyond Defensive Reasoning
Significant learning usually results in change in performance, capacity, or attitude. If we are not open to change, there is little reason to invest time, energy, and resources in learning. Change is the main product of learning and if we don’t want to change, we probably do not want to learn either.
In a provocative article entitled “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” the internationally known scholar and consultant Chris Argyris (1991)1 notes that many well-educated professionals are not very open to learning new things. The reason, he points out, is that learning involves risk and the potential for failure, and many people have arrived where they are by carefully avoiding both. Successful people often have developed a mindset about learning that Argyris calls defensive reasoning. They “screen out criticism,” want to “put the blame on others,” and are not very open “to examining their own role in the organization.” The learning they are most interested in is the learning that will help them defend their established positions. Thus, learning feeds their process of rationalization. What they need instead, Argyris suggests, is “productive reasoning” that will break this closed loop and enable them to change and grow.
The article by Argyris is especially interesting because it suggests that people who have had the most education and career success may be the least open to what learning has to offer: the opportunity for change. “Smart people” as Argyris calls them, may need to ask themselves honestly whether they are truly open to additional learning and whether they welcome the changes that could occur.
An essential attitude to bring to any situation where learning could occur is openness to change.
LEARNING AND INFORMATION
Getting Beyond Facts
Learning is more than remembering facts. In the Information Age, our relationship to information has changed radically, and this in turn puts us in a new situation as learners. Three factors have had a dramatic effect on our understanding of learning in the Information Age: the explosion in the amount of information, the broadening of access to information, and the revolution in packaging information.
The information explosion hardly needs documentation. Now and then we read figures on how information doubles or triples every few months. In a fascinating critique of this information explosion, David Shenk (1997)2 suggests in Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, that we are all faced now with serious information overload. Whether one perceives the amount of information today to be an advantage or threat, almost everyone agrees there is now a veritable deluge of information.
Equally impressive is the increased access to information. Libraries today provide networks of access through universal online cataloging systems for books and through powerful search mechanisms for articles listed in databases. Today, we can go to a database, enter key words for a topic, and several articles from a wide range of journals appear one after the other. The libraries themselves are also linked and, through the mechanism of interlibrary loan, we can access most of the rapidly expanding store of information quickly and painlessly. The Internet is also important in increasing access to information. Information via the Internet comes through e-mail when people communicate directly with people, through Special Interest Groups (SIGs), through newsgroups or mailgroups, but most importantly through World Wide Web sites. Web pages (home pages) are now being established by companies, government agencies, not-for-profits, and individuals, and these sites often contain valuable, up-to-date information (Barrett, 1997, 34–58).3 Access to this information is relatively easy through a host of Internet search and metasearch mechanisms.
Not only is there more accessible information, it is packaged in new user-friendly formats. Ease and variety in packaging information grows out of the ability to reduce all information, print or visual, moving or still, to digital formats. Because all kinds of data can be stored on computers in easily retrievable forms, information can be arranged and rearranged in different packages, including text, visuals, audio, and links to additional sources of information.
The explosion in the amount of information and easy access to it, combined with new capabilities for packaging it, has created a digital deluge. We now have a virtual Niagara Falls of information at our disposal. Information is a dollar a ton and it is everywhere. The real question is: How do you draw a cup of water out of Niagara Falls, and what do you do with it once you have it?
In spite of the information explosion, many people continue to define learning narrowly as remembering facts. In the previous era, information was scarce; having a lot of it was a virtue, and memory was the key to learning.
Today we often have too much information, out-of-date information, or useless information. Note that information is not the same thing as knowledge. Our big challenge today is turning information into knowledge by developing our skills in locating up-to-date information, validating and criticizing it, determining what it means, deciding what to do with it, and learning how to use it. Information has its place, but learning no longer needs to be preoccupied, almost exclusively as it was in the past, with transmitting and receiving information.
ACTIVE PARTICIPATION
The Plague of Passive Learning
Children the world over learn at an early age to sit in their seats, behave, and listen to the teacher. The lecture method, which originated in the nineteenth-century German university, spread around the world and came to dominate college and much high school instruction. When learning is viewed as remembering facts, the lecture method serves that purpose exquisitely. As the academic disciplines developed through the twentieth century, they provided a huge amount of information. Textbooks grew thicker and teachers felt they had more and more to cover. The more they covered, the less time there was for other methods of instruction. Students learned that their role in this educational process was to chew quietly and regurgitate on command.
Lecturing came to be the dominate paradigm for teaching and learning in the twentieth century. What it spread was a plague of passivity.
This arrangement is completely out of date for the Information Age, but continues in various forms with devastating consequences. What generations of students have really learned is that learning is basically receiving. Psychologists speak of “learned helplessness.” The educational equivalent is “learned passivity.” To some extent we have all learned this passivity from the educational system. We have learned that someone else is in charge of managing our learning.
There have been sharp criticisms of these arrangements for learning.
• Paulo Freire, the famous Brazilian educator exiled from his homeland after a military coup in 1964, called it the banking concept of education, by which “education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” (1987, 58).4
• Rudolph Weingartner, writing in Undergraduate Education, recounts a medieval tale that describes a wondrous device known as the “Funnel of Nuremberg” (Nürnberg Trichter), which has the remarkable quality of being able to pour knowledge into students’ heads while they sleep (1992, 104–5).5
• Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, the authors of Teaching as a Subversive Activity, note how the study of discrete subjects fosters the idea that once you have studied a subject you are immune and need not study it again, which they refer to ironically as the “Vaccination Theory of Education” (1969, 21).6
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get an education by having someone make a deposit in our account, pour it in our ear, or give us an injection? Learning in the new era requires that we cast off the old habit of passivity and take on with renewed vigor the role of active participant.
REFRAMING YOUR DEFINITION OF LEARNING
No One Best Way
For some reason, educators are especially prone to the bandwagon trap. Schools become captives of fads, and organizations buy into quick-fix training solutions. In truth, there is no one best way of learning. There are many ways to learn, not just one. We would like to offer a broad definition of learning:
Learning is that varied set of processes whereby individuals and groups of individuals acquire knowledge or skill, change attitudes, become better informed about something familiar, or discover, inquire about, or become aware of something new.
Learning involves the development of intellectual and emotional capacities—the ability to think, to build skills, to find and solve problems, to be creative, to manage emotions, to change attitudes, to perform, and to learn from experience. In organizational settings, learning usually also involves a change in performance, based on new understanding—a better, faster, smoother, more reasonable way of doing something, or at least an improved capacity for doing so.
In the Information Age, learning is not the accumulation of miscellaneous bits of information, but the subtle set of skills involved in knowing what to do with information. It is the ability to evaluate, synthesize and apply information. The purpose of learning is not just to inform but to transform. The goal is not just to cover material but uncover ideas and feelings. Above all, learning is not a spectator sport!
The following statements are especially useful for describing adult learning in the Information Age, and are presented as corollaries to our basic definition of learning.
• Learning is an ongoing process. Learning has many beginnings but no end. One only becomes relatively better at certain skills and abilities, only relatively more informed, only relatively more sophisticated at intellectual operations.
• Learning has subject-matter content, but the subject is usually the means not the end of learning. Content is not irrelevant, but neither is it the main goal anymore. Content is the vehicle for learning, the medium through which learning occurs.
• Learning is self-motivated. Learning takes place best when the learner wants and needs to learn. Self-motivation puts an end to all the student-teacher-trainer games about “how much am I supposed to do” and “how good is this supposed to be.”
• Learning is aggressively self-directed. Although many people can provide guidance, particularly those who know about learning processes, the learner needs to select, monitor, and pursue vigorously the scope, depth, and type of learning needed.
• Learning is dialogical. Learning takes place through conversation with other people, with books and materials, and with the self. True dialogue involves self-examination by listening to other voices and assimilating, accommodating, and adjusting to what they say.
• Learning involves constructing meaning. Knowledge is produced only when information takes on meaning. The learner needs to be actively involved in constructing personal answers to relevant questions.
• Learning is perceived as useful. Some learning has no direct application and is undertaken to satisfy curiosity or for amusement, but most learning is useful someday, somewhere, sometimes even the next day.
• Learning changes the self. Only those things that truly touch, change, and become absorbed into the self are really learned.
• Learning is used responsibly. Because knowledge is a powerful resource in the new era, the results of learning should be used for constructive purposes.
The attitudes we bring to an opportunity for learning, and the way we define learning, greatly affect what we learn. The paradox is this: Our attitudes are learned from others, but only we can change them. In a sense, we are the product of the experiences we have had, the system in which we have been educated, and the society in which we have lived. In that sense, we are not to blame. Nor are we to blame when everything around us changes. But society has changed, and the new era requires of us new attitudes about learning.
In the Information Age, we need to recognize that learning is a serious business. Learning is not just remembering information. Learning requires active participation. We need to broaden our definition of learning and become adept at several ways of learning. In Part Two you will learn about how to participate effectively in seven ways of learning. This is an essential aspect of managing your own learning.