by John Boehrer, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
In "Bike Riding and the Art of Learning," Robert Kraft (1978) recalls that
his own
mastery of the two-wheeled vehicle resulted from a very focused quest for
quick
transportation to the candy counter at his father's store three blocks
from home. The
learning was halting and painful, but it was also self-directed, tenacious,
and
successful. Reviewing his college studies, he says that what he retained
from them
was not what he was told in class, but the thought he put into writing
his papers, the
product of his own efforts to construct meaning. Kraft goes on to
relate 1) how
reflecting on the connection between self, problem, and learning led him
to recognize
its importance to - and its usual absence from - his college students'
experience, and
2) how he set about introducing it into their work. A similar reorientation
of one's own
teaching is worth considering.
It is common to regard teaching as meaning simply to convey knowledge,
or perhaps
skill. It seems unexceptional to speak of teaching something.
The proposition
becomes more questionable when we start to talk about teaching someone.
As
teachers we face the psychological reality that we cannot actually teach
anybody
anything (Rogers, 1951). By our efforts alone, we cannot simply transfer
knowledge
constructed in our own experience, or relayed by others, to our students
for their
genuine use. Perhaps unsettled by our inability to control the outcome
of the learning
process, however, we habitually act as if it were entirely the teacher's
problem. We
develop an Atlas complex, shouldering the entire burden of teaching and
learning
(Finkel and Monk, 1983). We concern ourselves with the limits of
our own knowledge
and focus attention on our own performance. We subordinate process
to content and
active engagement to coverage. We relegate students to a passive
role, making them
spectators when they need, and would actually prefer, to be gladiators.
But learning is not passive, something that another performs on one,
like surgery. It is
active; one operates on oneself. Learning is personal and purposeful:
we do it to
accomplish something meaningful and important to our individual selves
(Cantor,
1953), anything from getting to the candy store to getting quantum
mechanics. It is a
natural outcome of encountering an obstacle to a goal. The desirability
of achieving
the goal and the possibility of overcoming the obstacle drive the learning
that
addresses the problem. The will to grow in ways we value continually
brings us up
against obstacles, and learning predictably results. In this dynamic
of
self-actualization, the question is not so much what stimulates learning,
as we often
ask in a school setting, but what constrains it.
That we cannot actually teach someone something does not, of course, mean
that he
or she will necessarily learn it alone. The learning may require
exposure to
possibilities, access to information and other resources, a structured
path, guidance
and encouragement, constructive criticism. Schools and teachers can
provide them.
Indeed, at their most effective they provide the very problems that generate
learning
when linked to the students' own needs and interests. The irony of
schooling, though,
is that it often separates students from the experience of striving to
resolve a problem
for an intrinsically meaningful purpose. By focusing on solutions
and answers already
known, it abstracts the process of learning from the individual drive
to overcome
obstacles.
The structures of formal education often divert the natural flow of learning
from the
interaction of self and problem. The problems that prescribed curricula,
and even
elective courses, ask students to work represent others' judgments of what
they need
to learn and lead them to acquire received wisdom instead of earned knowledge.
Besides that, teachers are tempted to take over working the problem and
ask students
simply to learn the result. Gifted lecturers can entertain
their students by enacting the
drama and passion invested in the knowledge. More ordinarily we just
present the dry
results of the scholarship. Either way, we relegate the students
to the galleries. It's
easier to put them there, orderly and quiet, but they belong in the arena.
Excluded,
students accumulate solutions to problems they haven't encountered, answers
to
questions they haven't asked. The problem they are actually working
is passing the
course, getting through school (Brown, et.al., 1989).
Having disconnected students from the primary experience of learning by
working
through their own problems, we may find that a lot of teaching feels
like a daunting
effort to make water flow uphill, and it may escape us that everything
from rivulets to
torrents wait to run naturally the other way. Students who are able
and willing to be
engaged can bring great energy and determination to the task of learning
when the get
access to central, constructive process. If they are asked mainly
to hear and
remember, it is not surprising that they either become restless and distracted,
or they
perform disappointingly when papers and exams require them to do higher
order
thinking. Without engagement in the problem, without some personal
sense of
investment in reaching a solution, the individual is poorly motivated to
withstand the
disturbance that accompanies genuine learning.
Students learn what they care about and remember what they understand.
They may
care because the material is personally relevant and interesting, because
they
encounter it in a challenging and intriguing way, because confronting it
collaboratively
with their peers is rewarding, because working out their own construction
of it is real
and satisfying. Whatever the reason, their caring re-establishes
the connection
between self, problem, and learning. Fortunately, sharing the problem
with them, and
engaging them in working it, can start with something as simple as framing
a lecture
with a question and interrupting it to hear interim answers. More
productively, it can go
on to supplanting some lectures with groups tasks. More elaboratively,
it can extend to
running case discussions or full-scale simulations.
Bringing students into the arena need not imply a total revision of one's
teaching, but it
does involve a shift of emphasis from the exposition of knowledge to the
recasting of
what we know into question to be resolved, issues to be grappled with,
problems to be
worked, mysteries to be unraveled. The shift involves recognizing
the contrast
between knowledge, a commodity that we can imagine being transferred or
conveyed,
and knowing, a living experience that we understand can only belong to
the person
having it. More important than the teacher's delivering the product
of his or her own
learning is the function of "creat[ing] and maintain[ing] an environment
in which
students will learn to work" (O'Hare, 1989).
Effective as this approach is, both students and faculty may resist it.
They need to
confront and conquer the collusion to avoid the effort and the risk that
it entails. There
is a bad bargain that teachers and students can, and often do, make to
the effect of "I
won't ask much of you if you don't ask much of me." This agreement
to accept less
learning for less work on both sides has several sources. To engage
students more
thoroughly requires teachers to become more personally involved, which
produces a
vulnerability they may find uncomfortable (Weimer, 1990). On their
side, genuine
learning implies change and requires students to withstand confusion and
disturbance
(Cantor, 1953). They may also resist the unfamiliar demand for greater
involvement
and higher order thinking when it counters the expectation that previous
schooling has
led them to develop.
Yet experience wears away resistance. The rewards of playing a more
central and
responsible role in working the problem are substantial and apparent in
both the
process and the outcome of learning (Jackson and Prosser, 1989).
Active
engagement in personally involving work that leads to genuine understanding
creates
its own demand, one that a teacher may sometimes find challenging to meet.
Coming
out of the spectator's seat may require overcoming some inertia, but being
the
gladiator, with all the exertion and risk it entails, compares with spectating
as a
three-dimensional reality with a two-dimensional representation.
Learning is, after all,
the students' problem, not because their progress and welfare don't concern
us, but
simply because they alone can actually solve it. The more centrally
we can engage
them in the learning process, the more personally we can involve them in
it, the more
teaching we will be able to do. Recognizing that it is not
our mastery of the material,
but their struggle with it that is the issue, we can remember to keep their
experience at
the center of the process, not our own (Cantor, 1953). We can also
remind ourselves
that we are not simply trying to get them through school, or supply them
with important
knowledge, but to teach them to work the overarching problem, which is
learning itself,
for themselves. The farther they go, the more important it becomes
to involve them in
monitoring and directing their own learning. In the end, we are concerned
not only
about the knowledge they carry away, but even more about the capacity they
take with
them for learning on their own throughout life.
References
Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Duguid, P. "Situated cognition and
the culture of
learning." Educational Researcher, 1989, 18, 1, 32-42.
Cantor, N. The Teaching-Learning Process. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston,
1953.
Finkel, D.L. and Monk, G.S. "Teachers and Learning Groups:
Dissolution of the Atlas
Complex," in C. Bouton and R.Y. Garth, (eds.) Learning In Groups.
San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1983.
Jackson, M.W. and Prosser, M.T. "Less Lecturing, More Learning." Studies
in Higher
Education, 1989, 14, 1.
Kraft, R.G. "Bike Riding and the Art of Learning." Change, 1978, 10, 6.
O'Hare, M. "Teaching Formal Models." Unpublished, 1989.
Rogers, C.R. Client-centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1951.
Weimer, M. Improving College Teaching: Strategies for Developing
Instructional
Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990.