TOPIC 3: “LEARNING TO LEARN”

3rd iNet Online Conference: 7-13 March 2005

international Networking for educational transformation

THERE’S MORE TO LEARN ABOUT LEARNING

Author: Don Tinkler

Consultant in Education

Melbourne Australia

The concept of learning throughout life emerges as one of the keys to the twenty-first century. … This is not a new insight, since previous reports on education have emphasized the need for people to return to education in order to deal with new situations arising in their personal and working lives. That need is still felt and is even becoming stronger. The only way of satisfying it is for each individual to learn how to learn.

Learning: The treasure Within, (1998) Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century.

Learning is a mental activity; something that engages the mind. We don’t need to go back to Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) and the debate of the last few centuries in attempting to resolve the mind-body problem. Our starting point must be that there is a brain, and it is this fact that is now leading educators to address the importance of the brain in learning. However, there may be too much emphasis on the implications for learning of the reductionist work of the brain scientists in developing technology to deal with physical and medical diagnoses of brain malfunction. Maybe educators have been led astray. Instead of being influenced by the technological advances, perhaps the focus should shift to the importance of the mind in the learning process. I am reminded of a remark of Caine and Caine in their 1991 ASCD publication that “… education has an extraordinary capacity for rebuffing the new and turning back to the tried and true”. When discussing the possible move to assessing teachers on a national basis, they caution (1991:173):

But how can a commission to evaluate educators be effective when the research is only beginning to define what education can and should be?

We can only ask again in 2005, how far has research progressed since then? Kantian notions of absolutes; testing for I.Q. levels; compartmentalization of knowledge; streaming; seeking short-term results of learning; measurement of outcomes without paying heed to quality of inputs; rewards and punishments; summative evaluation strategies that rely so much on the ability to memorize; tertiary entrance rankings; and even Piaget's stages of cognitive growth have acted to restrict learning opportunities.

Brain Science, but what of Mind Science?

For years, I have considered that the answer to problems of learners and learning in schools would be found by a greater emphasis on brain science. In recent times I have come to the conclusion that the solution is more likely to be found by giving greater regard to the mind in learning. What is the mind, you may ask and what is the mind as distinct from the brain?

I have come to accept that the mind is an emergent property of the activity of the brain and the central nervous system. As a consequence, I realize that rather than being involved in “brain science”, I have long been engaged in “mind science” – seeking the fundamental importance of the mind in cognition and meta-cognition (awareness of being aware); and the learning processes in general.

After some years teaching in primary schools in Victoria, Australia, I became attracted to the work of Jean Piaget, ideas that underpinned the Nuffield Junior Science Project in the UK, which was to become a model for the teaching of science in Victorian primary schools. The experience whetted my appetite for more information about learning. I had many years previously, even as a pupil in my first school, formed the conclusion that “teaching” was something “done” to me, whereas “learning” was something I did for myself. I also realised there was an important distinction between “education” and “schooling”. We could characterize some people as well schooled, but rather poorly educated.

It is now generally accepted that the emphasis needs to be shifted from teaching to learning. Rather than asking what must I do to teach, teachers should be asking what must I do that the students will learn – and learn with understanding?

The appetite for a greater understanding about “learning” has driven me to wide reading, study at a teachers college, two universities and a teaching role at a third. The process has led to questioning Kantian notions of absolutes and a priori concepts and Piaget’s 1960s writings concerning cognitive stages, and to the development of some new thinking about knowledge acquisition, curriculum and instructional design.

New Thinking

Basic to the new thinking has been the adoption of a “constructivist” model of knowledge acquisition. Constructivism goes beyond “behaviorism”, a notion that has dominated educational theory and practice for several decades. Behaviorism allows for the observation and reporting of observed behaviour, but cannot offer much in explanation of those observations. Behaviourism overlooks the role that the brain/mind might play in learning and ignores the point that all observed behaviour might be preceded by some brain/mind activity.

Lauren Resnick suggested that we 'need a constructivist theory of instruction ... a theory that places the learner’s active mental construction at the very heart of the instructional exchange'. To quote Resnick (1983):

The human mind has been rediscovered, or at least reaffirmed; reasoning and thought are central objects of scientific study ... It seems evident that a cognitive theory of instruction ought to be emerging alongside our increasingly elaborated theories of cognitive performance and development.

It now appears that behaviorism provides a rather weak basis for an adequate theory of learning.

In essence, constructivist theory suggests that the learner constructs his/her own “world picture” (reality) from individual experience; that is, a limited experience leads to a limited world picture; in contrast, an elaborated experience results in an elaborated world picture. Meaning is given to experiences by the connections that are made with prior experiences.

A report to the Australian government in 1996, Education And Technology Convergence, dealing with the future work of teachers as facilitators of knowledge, suggested eight defining principles for the knowledge economy as: lifelong learning; learner directed learning; learning to learn; contextualised learning; customized learning; transformative learning; collaborative/cooperative learning; and just-in-time learning. To these could be added “anticipatory learning”, that is, teachers should be thinking ahead in time to the needs that are likely to emerge, or be thinking ahead to what the events of the present might mean to the future.

The report was critical of the term “computer literacy” being applied to “competence” with the computer and recommended the use of a new generic, “information literacy”, expanding on “literacy” as applied in the traditional way. Attention was also drawn to a Hierarchy of Learning drawing a distinction between “data”, “information”, “knowledge” and “wisdom” (1996:76):

… data and information are the raw material, value adding will require higher-order thinking skills not only to convert information to knowledge … It will require skills and tools that enable the conversion of knowledge into insight (patterns of interconnected meaning), foresight (emergent patterns shaping the future) and, ultimately, wisdom (a holistic understanding linked to appropriate action).

Mental Abstraction

An approach to constructivism, developed during my university study in the mid 1970s, was through the idea of "mental abstraction". Mental abstraction paid regard to the “mind” in the development of concepts from experiences.

To take an over-simplistic example (unfortunately, unable to provide diagrams): a child’s concept (mental abstraction) of a “cat” depending on her experience with cats would be far different from that of most adults. In an extreme case, we could compare the child’s concept of “cat” with that of a veterinarian who specializes in treating small companion animals or an environmental scientist concerned about the ravages caused by cats on small fauna in the Australian bush. In like manner, the child develops an identity for a tiger, a lion, a dog, a wolf etc. through experience – either first-hand or vicariously. From those identities, the mind generates the abstractions, catness, dogness and, eventually the higher order abstractions like animalness, mammalness, livingness etc.

Even without the "tags" of language being attached to the identities or the categories/ abstractions, the mind is capable of generating a series of higher-level abstractions. However, symbols provided by language generally do play a significant part in this process of mental abstraction.

The more experiences and the richness of the experiences with individual identities, the more elaborated will be the world picture, and the greater will be the information available for constructing or reconstructing categories/ abstractions.

Identities and various-level categories/ abstractions provide the raw material for thinking as the disparate images, ideas, memories and understandings are drawn upon to develop meaning and other aspects that arise from thinking such as drawing inferences, examining options and reaching conclusions.

While our “world picture” is constructed from the sensory input, our “world view” – the way we view the world – is constructed from the input of our senses and influenced and modified by the feelings or emotions such experiences generate.

For example: A bite from a dog is likely to influence the way we will in future view all dogs. An unpleasant later experience may become associated in our minds with something, which earlier we found quite tolerable.

It is from personal world pictures and world-views that mind-sets are established.

The implications for learning and teaching and education in general can be far reaching.

The UNICEF Project: About Learning

Twenty years ago, I had the privilege of working with the UNICEF Committee of Australia, being one of three people given the task of researching and carrying out a feasibility study into the development by UNICEF of a “Teachers’ Kit on Learning About Learning” to be used in Pacific rim countries. A nine-month research study resulted in the drawing up of scenarios for a seven-program futures-focused television series intended for international distribution, simply titled About Learning.

Among other issues, About Learning addressed “the common factors of culture, dealing with what it is to be human, what it is to learn and what this implies for children and adults of all cultures”. One aspect investigated was the claims made for “nature” and “nurture”, asking in particular what might it be in “nurture” that influenced and determined identity, personhood, character and personality?

From the 1981 work of Lumsden and Wilson in their Genes Mind and Culture: The Co-evolutionary Process, we discovered the notion of “culturgens”, a theory of gene-culture coevolution. Lumsden and Wilson had asserted that the linkage between biological and cultural evolution was a logical possibility, the exploration of which had become an increasingly clear major intellectual challenge. Their theory provided the basis for a cultural hand-on, somewhat paralleling the way genes act in determining physical characteristics.

Although not reaching the stage of formal production, the project with a new steering committee continued to exercise the interest of UNICEF for almost a decade. About Learning influenced not only the work of UNICEF, but also that of UNESCO and, for me, led to professional development programs, journal articles, radio talks, academic papers and presentations at international conferences.

In 1984, the time we were given our task, there was surprisingly little that we could derive from research being carried out into “learning”. There was plenty of research about “teaching”, but little about learning per se, so we had to start from virtual scratch. (The project was reported in part in a recent radio talk, Ockhams Razor, Radio National Australia, June 27, 2004.)

Findings of Brain Science Applied by Educators

It was some time after the UNICEF project that educators generally seemed to re-discover the importance of the brain to learning. A major focus for educators appeared to be the reported findings of brain scientists about the architecture of the brain and developments in technology, such as the PET scan, to aid an understanding that would enable advances in medical diagnosis of brain malfunction. The findings drew on the pioneering work of Dr Roger Sperry and his colleagues in the nineteen sixties who at that time were limited to dealing with patients with pathological disorders or pathological brain trauma.

Among the conclusions drawn for education by the “early innovators” were that various sensory capacities such as seeing, hearing, smelling and touching had their separate locations in the brain and that the laterality of the brain (left brain, right brain of the human cortex) determined whether one would excel at mathematics or art or music or at language analysis and problem solving.

More recently, interest in brain science has led to yet new movements in education, which have included “how the brain learns”, “teaching for the brain”, brain-based learning, accelerated learning, and even the teaching strategies derived from the idea of Gardner’s multiple intelligences. However, it should be pointed out that in an address to the 37th Annual Conference of the Orton Dyslexia Society in 1986, Howard Gardner admitted that he had 'decided to call the different kinds of minds intelligences', adding that had he called them talents, ‘people would have said, “Oh, yes, yes, people have many talents,” and then would have just gone about their business ...'

Important contributions to understanding the operations of the brain such as that of Paul MacLean and his three brain theory or “triune brain” each brain corresponding to a different stage of evolution seem to have been largely ignored by education theorists. So too, have the ideas of some scientists that the brain possesses the characteristics of a hologram – that the interconnections of the neural networks mean that the brain operates as one harmonious whole. According to MacLean (Scaruffi 2003: 339), the most primitive or reptilian brain, connects with the autonomic nervous system and is responsible for instinctive behaviour such as self preservation – fight and flight – and aggression; the mid-brain or old mammalian brain provides the centre for emotions and emotional instincts; and the new mammalian brain or neo-cortex – the main brain of primates – is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as reasoning and language. It is asserted that both the mid-brain and the neo-cortex change with learning experiences, an aspect that should be well regarded by education theorists and practitioners.

Genes, Memes, The Mind and Learning

Having completed my nine-months contribution to the About Learning project for UNICEF, I returned to follow my other educational interests, in particular to expanding on constructivist theory, to developing an integrated curriculum chart, based on constructivism, for the seven years of a primary school and to mind science – accepting the mind to be an emergent property of the activity of the brain and the central nervous system.

Two years ago I was introduced to the idea of “memes” and the new science, “memetics”, suggested that would provide “a new view of human nature”. Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of his The Selfish Gene (1976) had proposed a parallel to the gene and coined the term, “meme”. According to Dawkins, writing in 1999, there are two replicators – genes and memes: memes behaving in ways similar to genes, except that they spread from mind to mind. As examples of memes Dawkins gives: “ideas, tunes, scientific theories, religious beliefs, fashions, skills such as new ways of making pots or building arches”. To this list can be added: stories, attitudes, behaviours, myths, interests, abilities, prejudices, mannerisms, fads, formulae and skills.

Daniel Dennett, acknowledged to be the philosophical mentor of all meme theorists posited that our minds and selves are created by the interplay of memes – the human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine (1999), claims that “memes have become the tools with which we think”, that the turning point in our evolutionary history was when humans began to imitate each other. Each mind is but a meme machine, she asserts, invaded by memes. Human action is the product of interaction between genes, memes and the environment.

Examples of memes being transmitted from mind to mind are seen in speech patterns, language and fashions:

Have you noticed an increasing tendency for the young and the not-so-young to end non-question-sentences with a rising inflexion? Do you resonate with new figures of speech: “downsizing”; “behind the eight-ball”; “touch base”; “thinking outside the square”; “lateral damage” or “COOL !” , the standard mark of approval, a generic freely applied by most youngsters. What of young males wearing baseball caps reversed, or young females making fashion statements with bare midriffs? What about the tune that seems to round and round in your head, or the fact that you can pick up a tune from hearing the first bar or two of music on the radio?

Advertising agencies, political figures and so called spin doctors can be said to make meme production an art form – so many of their memes making a successful transmission from mind to mind.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was accepted that the mind of a child entering school represented a tabula rasa or blank slate. The task of teachers was to “write” on that “blank slate” with the wisdom and tradition of generations. Today, we realize that a child brings to school a mind crammed full of ideas about the world, or should we accept these ideas to be “memes”, transmitted from mind to mind by imitation, training or learning?

The publishers of dictionaries go to great lengths to keep up with old words given new meanings and new words being transmitted from mind to mind to mind until they gain acceptance in everyday discourse.

Whether “caught” or “taught” memes may provide the link between learning and culture we were seeking in the UNICEF project some twenty years ago. What might be the wider implications of memes and the new science, memetics, for learning and for teaching?

It may be that both genetic and memetic factors are needed to explain what and who we are; that along with genetic and environmental factors, it is memes that influence our notions of self, personhood, character and personality – that meme transmission between minds contribute personal identity?

It seems that memetics is really about “learning” and from that, about “teaching”.

Memetics seem to link in well with the general ideas of “constructivism” and could present something of a fresh new challenge for education theorists in developing yet more adequate theories of learning.

Don Tinkler, PO Box 172 Park Orchards, Vic 3114, Australia.

Phone: 03 9876 1209

tinkler@hotkey.net.au

Further Reading

Biggs, John B., (Ed) (1991). Teaching for Learning, ACER, Hawthorn,.

Blackmore, Susan, (1999). The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press.

Blakemore, Colin, (1988). The Mind Machine, BBC Books, London.

Botkin J.W. et al, (1979). No Limits To Learning: Bridging the Human Gap,

A Report of The Club of Rome, Pergamon, Oxford.

Brandwein, Paul F. (1977). The Reduction of Complexity: Substance, Structure and Style in Curriculum, International Centre for Educational Advancement, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Bruner, Jerome S, (1973). Beyond the Information Given, George Allen and Unwin, 1973.

Bruner, Jerome S, (1960). The Process of Education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass..

Caine, Renate N., Caine, Geoffrey, (1991). Teaching and the Human Brain: Making Connections, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, Virginia, 1991.

Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. London, Penguin.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. (Revised edition with additional material, 1989.)

Deakin University, Open Campus Program, ETL 821, The Nature of Teaching and Learning (course materials), Deakin University, 1981.

Dewey, John, (1938). Experience and Education, Kappa Delta Pi, Collier Books, New York, Seventh Printing, 1967.

Fogarty, Robin et al, (1995). Multiple Intelligences, A collection, Skylight Publishing Inc., republished by Hawker Brownlow Education, Australia.

Gardner, Howard, (1991). The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Fontana Press, London.

Gardner, Howard, (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books, New York,.

Gilling, Dick, Brightwell, Robin, (1982). The Human Brain, Orbis Publishing, London.

Greenfield, Susan A., (Editor) (1996). The Human Mind Explained, Reader’s Digest, Montreal Sydney.

Kant, Immanuel, Critique Of Pure Reason (Translated by Norman Kemp), Macmillan, London, 1973.

Lumsden, C.J. and Wilson, E.O. (1981). Genes, Mind and Culture, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

O'Brien, Les, Hay, Trevor, Tinkler, Don, “About Learning: A Proposal For a Seven-Program Television Series”, Report to the National Education Committee of UNICEF Australia, Sydney, Australia, November 1984 (Unpublished).

Pearce, Joseph Chilton (1992). Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, Harper San Francisco, 1992.

Pinker, Steven. (2002). The Blank Slate, Penguin Books, London.

Resnick, Lauren (1983). “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Instruction”, in Learning and Motivation in the Classroom, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1983.

Samples, Bob (1976). The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1976.

Scaruffi, Piero. (2003). Thinking About Thought: A Primer on the New Science of Mind, iUniverse, Inc., Lincoln, NE, USA.

Sousa, David A. (1995). How the Brain Learns, National Association of Secondary School Principals, Reston, Virginia.

Technologies for Enhanced Learning, Report of the Victorian Government Working Party on the Use of Technology as a Education and Communications Facility in Schools (Ross Smith Report) Directorate of School Education, Victoria, 1994.

Tinkler et al, (1996). Education and Technology Convergence, NBEET Commissioned Report No 43, Australian Government Printing Service (AGPS), 1996.

Tinkler et al, (1994). Effectiveness and Potential of State-of-the-art Technologies in the Delivery of Higher Education, DEET Higher Education Division, Occasional Papers Series, AGPS.

Tinkler, Don, Ockham’s Razor science broadcasts, Australian Radio National:

“Education as a Futures Enterprise”, August 1987.

“No Limits to Learning”, October 1989.

“Learner Managed Learning”, (recorded, but not put to air), October 1990.

“Information Literacy”, September 1996.

“Genes, Memes, The Mind and Learning”, June 2004.

Tinkler, Don. (1990). Social Education for Australian Primary Schools, The Humanities Core Curriculum (HCC): A "Futures" Perspective, Macro-View, Park Orchards, Australia.

Tinkler, Don E. (1989). The Humanities Core Curriculum (HCC): An Integrated Curriculum in Social Education for Primary Schools (2nd edn), Macro-View, Park Orchards, Australia.

UNESCO, (1998) Learning: The Treasure Within, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty First Century, UNESCO Publishing

Vuyk, Rita. (1981), Overview and Critique of Piaget's Genetic Epistemology 1965 - 1980, Vol.1&2, Academic Press, London.

Vygotsky, Lem Semenovich. (1962). Thought And Language, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press,

Wills, Christopher. (1993). The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness, Basic Books, New York.

Wilber, Ken, (Ed) (1982). The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science, Shambhala, London.

Author: Don Tinkler, Australian Educationist

Freelance researcher/ consultant in education. Former teacher, deputy principal and teacher of university post-graduate educational studies; active as a policy analyst and consultant at state and national levels in Australian education; specialist in learning, teaching, instructional design, and educational use of information technology; interest for 25 years in research and development of a "constructivist" model of knowledge acquisition acknowledging the importance of the human mind in the learning process. Author of an integrated chart curriculum, the Humanities Core Curriculum (1981,1989) and an accompanying teacher handbook, Social Education for Australian Primary Schools: A Futures Perspective, he has consulted widely and presented on his research in journals, on radio and at more than forty national and international conferences.