I usually try to write at least one article on an adult education theme once per year, and this time I’ve been motivated to write about a social theory of adult learning. This was largely because I was originally going to talk about this at a training day given by the WEA in June, but never got to give my talk due to poor registration. I didn’t want to give up developing the ideas I had in mind – so decided they would make good fodder for an article. And here it is. I think it’s one of my better pieces, but readers may like to differ 
A full PDF version of this article is available here
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Talking about learning:
What exactly do we mean by the word?
Bob Groves
1st August 2006
“Learning is a way of being in the social world,
not a way of coming to know about it”
(William F. Hanks, in Lave & Wenger1991)
Preface
The following article is an expansion of a talk I was due to give for a Workers’ Educational Association (Northern Region) tutor training day in June 2006. Sadly, the day never did take place and as I didn’t get a chance to discuss this topic in public I felt it important not to ‘lose the theme’. I also feel that now is a good time to substantially expand on some of the concepts in writing that I would have only briefly outlined on the day. Additionally, I have in the past tended to restrain myself from making plain my views on learning theory mainly because they do not necessarily follow the pattern of ‘orthodoxy’ expected of an adult education tutor. Because this has always seemed to be lacking in ethical courage, I have decided to grit my teeth and ‘have it out’. Nevertheless, I must emphasise that what follows are my thoughts only. They do not represent the policy or opinion of any organisation or educational body with which I may be associated. I do hope, however, that what is written below represents a growing body of unspoken theory which has been overshadowed by a dominant ideology strongly linked to instrumentalism and managerialism in adult learning – something I believe is to the great detriment of progress.
In addition, I must apologise at the outset for this account being so very biographical. In order to make some sense of what has been a very ‘organic’ development in my thinking over the past twenty years or so it’s necessary for me to describe developments in context so that linkages and motivations become plain. I do not want to disguise my assertions in academicism; sometimes matters need to take a personal tack so that their importance is not shrugged off as yet another theoretical exercise – albeit that this is, at root, about some very fundamental assumptions in learning theory.
Background
It all started with music. I returned to adult education in 1980 after a long period of unemployment during the Thatcher era. For me this was both therapy and escapism, a way of finding an outlet for a passion amongst other adults which was as far as possible from the pressures of being a ‘job seeker’ (as the euphemism for ‘unemployed’ goes). WEA offered night classes in ‘music appreciation’ and I turned up for one of these expecting to be disappointed and not to stay – a typical victim of the ‘get ‘em trained and get ‘em working’ system of the day. Yet, surprisingly enough, the tutor was approachable and welcomed student opinion, something I had never come across before. My normal experience of education was of something where I was the dumb recipient of another’s knowledge, which I was later expected to regurgitate in some form or other. Within one term though, I was hooked, both as a fan of music night classes and also with regard to the revelatory aspects of WEA learning systems: namely that students were central to whatever happened in class and that there was always a strong cooperative approach. Within two years I was a volunteer with the local WEA Branch, and was leading the music appreciation course group as their unpaid ‘tutor’ in the out-of-term periods (summer months). It didn’t take long for me to realise I could aspire to being paid for doing what I was enjoying voluntarily, and in autumn of 1986 I sought out formal training so that I could become an adult education tutor and hopefully escape from unemployment for good, teaching music history and appreciation.
Taking part in training was as much a revelation as joining the WEA. Here was the ‘other’ side of the educational fence: further education college. Attitudes there were somewhat different from those I had encountered at my WEA classes. Matters were highly structured and formalised. Nevertheless, I had the advantage of WEA voluntary resources to fall back on (and some excellent college teachers), and this helped me feel less threatened by the strenuous nature of the course. It was at this period that I came across a subject area which was to change my views about the world in a radical way: interpersonal communication. Initially this was linked to my considerations about what the communication value of music was: Did music expressly communicate anything in the manner of a language, and if so, how did this operate? Later on this led to more abstract views of communication theory.
Interpersonal Communication
Up to this period I had always held a rigid ‘classical’ view of how human beings communicate. Experience now indicates this is the ‘common sense’ view of the bulk of the population, and very much so of many adult learners. Namely, communication takes the form of:
This is common sense because it is how things appear from the point of view of those taking part. Our own first-person perspective on the world gives us an outlook that seems to plainly indicate a ‘viewer’ looking out into a world from which they are eternally isolated (in terms of actual contact). Since all of us share this common viewpoint (which I would later discover had its counterpart in the philosophy of Cartesian Dualism) it seems fairly obvious that the point of language in all its subtle forms is to bridge this unbridgeable gap, to provide a way of getting our message ‘into the mind’ of the other person (and vice-versa). Our very culture supports this view, with all its narratives of soul-and-psychology leading us inexorably to the conclusion that each of us is an isolated entity frantically trying to get to know what is inside the ‘head’ of other human beings.
That the above view was in error took some getting used to. I started by examining the work of Shannon and Weaver, Sapir and Whorff, and finally David Berlo in order to get a grip on how the language aspects of music might work. Very quickly it became obvious that there could not be a ‘language of music’ based upon the common sense view outlined above. Indeed, it wasn’t possible to have any communication at all with this model, since thought transmission just does not happen. Language itself does not ‘carry’ thought or meaning for that matter, but is a system of signals and symbols which are manipulated by a person within the context of a culture into which the person is born and raised. To know a language system is to know a culture and to share a set of meanings with others who are part and parcel of that culture. Music therefore ‘works’ as a language not because it in itself carries any meaning, but because it has a symbolic sense within specific cultures. Berlo’s viewpoint (famous within communication studies and very influential), is characterised by the following diagram:
Source: here
This is a two-way and simultaneous system consisting of sources (‘me’ or ‘you’) who are encultured within a specific society and have grasped in that process how to manipulate sounds, images, body-postures, text, words, etc. in order to encode a message which is highly situation-dependent (that is, based on the communication skills, knowledge, social system, attitudes etc. of the person doing the manipulation). Messages or signals (to use a more descriptive phrase) are received by the totality of the senses of the recipient/receiver and are decoded according to their corresponding background or upbringing. Errors of understanding occur not (as is commonly thought) because of something lacking in the ability of the communicator to penetrate the ‘barrier’ separating individuals, but because the signalling process has gone awry in some respect. The phrase I learned at the time was ‘meaning is in the person, not in the message’. In effect communicative signals ‘mean nothing’ in the absolute objective sense. They gain meaning by being ‘digested’ by those who experience them. Hence the power of music, poetry, humour and art – without this version of communicational understanding none of these vital aspects of human society would be even possible, let alone so important.
The implications for the educational process seem very obvious. The process of understanding and learning are not about getting some subject ‘into the head’ of the learner (even though this is a phrase I sometimes hear teachers say on occasions) but about creating system of ‘signals’ that provide the best possible means of the learner forming uniform and error-free concepts of his/her own accord. The methodology here is well-known in adult education training: two-way, clear, redundant, consistent and repeated communication systems which make allowances for the backgrounds of the individuals taking part. In retrospect it’s reassuring to note that these were the very aspects of WEA education that had drawn me back into learning in the first place, and they seemed to confirm that the WEA’s traditional approach to learning was (at root) both effective and correct.
Wittgenstein’s revelation
Having finished training I ended up teaching for a number of organisations (including WEA), and having disappointedly discovered that one could not earn a living by music history alone, I also trained to teach computer studies (as it was called then, now ICT), and became the creator of access teacher training for inexperienced adults who (like me) wanted to get into the adult learning world as a practitioner. It was at this stage that I experimentally started a new course for the WEA called ‘Great Thinkers’ in collaboration with three of my trainees. We wanted to do something exciting, new and innovatively collaborative, and came up with the idea of using the lives of famous individuals as a ‘hook’ upon which to hang discussion of fundamental issues concerning the human condition. Freud, Einstein, Darwin and Wittgenstein were the thinkers we attempted during the first run, more out of daring than good sense. We drew a small but enthusiastic crowd and I clearly remember the struggle that I had to try to communicate clearly Wittgenstein’s philosophical concepts. I was not (at that time) au fait with philosophy, but I was quickly hooked by the field as it had so much of a resemblance to the themes I had come across in my communication studies, Wittgenstein particularly, with his dogged pursuit of a problem to its bitter end, became a hero of mine virtually overnight and I spent the next decade reading almost everything I could lay my hands on about his work.
That the late philosophy of Wittgenstein was a revelation is something of an understatement. I still feel to this day that there is a vital message in his work that informs the most fundamental aspects of our concept of ourselves, and consequently of how relate to each other… and how we learn. The latter is strangely ignored by the educational profession, though Wittgenstein himself was a primary school teacher for a short while, a university lecturer for much of his life, and discussed aspects of learning and knowing regularly within the Philosophical Investigations, the book which encapsulates most of his most important ideas. These are almost impossible to explain in full within a few paragraphs, so I shall focus on one vital element: The ‘no ownership theory’.
No ownership
Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘no ownership theory’ (the term is from other writers, not Wittgenstein himself) refers to the philosopher’s attempt to overcome the deep-rooted trap of solipsism that lies at the heart of Cartesian Dualism. Rene Descartes evolved an elaborate discussion of the world as experienced by the individual which rests on the idea of self as being mediated by the senses. That is to say, we know about the world via our senses, which transmit to us our interactions with the ‘outside’ world. The final target of these sensory transmissions could be said to be the Soul (in the traditional Judeo-Christian sense) the Self (in the psychological sense) or the Brain (in the modern physical sense) but in all cases the upshot is the same: our sight, hearing, touch smell and taste give us orientation in the world and form our concept of it – including our place in it. This target is assumed to be the ‘real’ self – all else is but a vehicle for the transmission of experience. Descartes then asserts that it is possible to fool the senses (few would deny this!) which therefore implies the question: how would you know that your senses were not being fooled all the time? A thoroughgoing sceptic would state that it’s impossible to know if ones sense are being permanently fooled, and therefore the substance of reality which is transmitted to the soul/self/brain could be simply an illusion (for a popular contemporary take on this idea, see the film ‘The Matrix’). However, since the act of thinking one’s own thoughts cannot be denied, it seems rational to conclude that (assuming the senses are not to be trusted) then it could be possible that only the Self exists – and all else is simply illusory. This is the trap of solipsism – something that has haunted philosophers with a vengeance since the 17th century.
Wittgenstein’s attack on solipsism takes on the concept of Self at face value. What is the self? Is it simply synonymous with the ‘brain’? Wittgenstein discusses how we talk about ‘having’ and ‘owning’ things and experiences, he analyses the ownership of concepts such as ‘pain’ and comes to the conclusion that ideas such as solipsism are a function of misapplication of language and are based upon the erroneous dualistic view of the human condition. Philosopher Peter Hacker, one the finest of all commentators on Wittgenstein’s work, sums up this idea by saying:
“Wittgenstein held that this conception of understanding involved fundamental confusions. It sends us in search of a mythological inner state or process of understanding from which outward activities flow, and we speculate about what it may be, whether it is conscious or unconscious, mental or neural, accessible to the investigations of theoretical linguists or psychologists” (Hacker 1997)
For Wittgenstein there is no agent of any sort ‘inside’ the human condition. There is no ‘other’ that can be discovered (be it physical or metaphysical) and no mystery of an invisible self that ‘owns’ our experiences or could be fooled by their invalidity. When we see a human being we see them as they truly are – there is nothing hidden for us to divine. But more importantly (and very much more radically!) there is no ‘outright privilege’ given to the individual over their acquaintance with their own experiences:
“... another person can conceal his feeling, dissimulate, pretend, play-act, that often we cannot say what he is thinking or what he intends unless he tells us. But that is not because he is better informed than we. Nor does the fact that all this is possible suggest for one moment that we can never really know what another thinks, feels or sees…
...and it is equally misguided to think that when I reveal my thoughts or feelings to you, I let you inside where hitherto only I saw… What philosophers (and psychologists) call ‘self-consciousness’ is not the consciousness of a self, an immaterial subject of experience which has its seat in the body. It is rather consciousness that such-and-such holds of oneself where ‘oneself’ is the indirect reflexive. Or, more cautiously, it is the capacity to give expression in language to one’s thoughts and feelings, one’s beliefs and purposes” (ibid.)
For many, this will be an unwelcome view. Indeed I have experienced a certain degree of rejection of these arguments from my students (even hostility on occasions) based upon a sense that I am somehow attacking very deeply felt beliefs in personal identity. This is not particularly surprising. Our cultural views of ourselves, reiterated over and over again in literature, the mass media, art and religion have ingrained in us the concept of the inaccessible real self – something that hangs over into our educational processes. Even as science has advanced, the mythology has not gone away. Instead of pursuing the soul or the mind, we now analyse the ‘reality’ of the brain, in the assumption that knowing more about this organ will give us a greater knowledge of ‘who we are’. Hacker again comments:
“Contemporary philosophers, fascinated by science and neuro-physiological discoveries, correctly repudiate the Cartesian conception of the mind as an immaterial substance, But they are prone to conclude, quite wrongly, that the mind must therefore be a material substance, in fact the brain. Hence they embrace brain/body dualism which is as deeply confused as its Cartesian ancestor.” (ibid.)
But is clear to me that pursuing maladapted Cartesianism in any form leads to repeated errors in terms of how we relate to one another, develop ourselves and the society around us. To simply pragmatically compromise with the current fashion would be to deny valid rational experience.
Consequently, from the Wittgenstein point of view it is erroneous for me to say I cannot ‘know what is going on in the heads of my students’. It is quite possible for me to know – if they tell me and if their use of language is such as to make their statements understandable. The fact that they don’t always tell me what they are thinking is not because of of an ‘impenetrable barrier’ which hides the real self (and which needs to be overcome) but a necessity of social existence where keeping ones opinions, assertions, criticisms and desires to oneself is essential to any kind of coherent relationships.
Similarly it is quite clear that I can know if an adult has learned something, since it is possible for me to interact with them and find out (language-wise) what they know and can do. This is not quasi-behaviourism. I am not asserting here that human beings are simply mechanistic and conditionable entities for which the only necessary criterion of learning is their physical activity. What I am asserting (like Wittgenstein) is that my adult students are social individuals, playing the innumerable language-games which are predicated on their form of life as human beings, one of which is the game of education. To understand learning I need to understand these language-games. And it is playing this game well that is, I believe, the true role of adult educators.
Situated Learning
My acquaintance with Wittgenstein was partially developed in my degree dissertation in 1997, entitled ‘I don’t know my way about: An investigation of Epistemological Problems in Competence-based Education and Training’ (Sunderland University), which was later worked up for a much shorter article for the NIACE ‘Adults Learning’ magazine under the same title. This was a critique of the underlying linguistic problems inherent in the NVQ system of assessment, and as such was my first foray into a ‘new’ Wittgensteinian educational theory. Much of what is stated above was already apparent then, though in a much diluted form. After I’d finished the degree I promised myself I would write one formal article per year at least so that I would be motivated to be engaged with learning theory, and simultaneously I ended up working with trainee tutors via the APTT’s (Association of Part-Time Tutors) teacher education programme, so there was plenty of opportunity to discuss concepts of learning. Around this time I came into contact with the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, co-authors of the book ‘Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation’ (published 1991).
Once again this was a watershed for me. Lave and Wenger’s’ book was important not because it was a philosophical text this time, but actually an analysis of learning written from an anthropological standpoint. The authors studied the learning systems of cultures around the world (Central America, Africa) and in varied social situations (the navy, the meat trade, ‘alcoholics anonymous’ groups) and attempted to synthesize a overall concept of what learning meant which suited all these varied contexts. Their conclusion: that learning was a social activity, not a ‘mental’ one and it was predicated on two elements, (1) participation in learning communities of various types and (2) learning is always situated in some context or other. The latter in particular was important because it rejected the concept of completely abstract learning. For Lave especially, learning was always ‘practical’; her earlier book on the learning of mathematics originated the novel idea that there were various ‘kinds’ of maths – for instance maths as used by shoppers doing rapid bill calculation at supermarket checkouts, maths as used by gamblers working out odds, and maths as used academically within the school system, etc. Because the situation of operation was different in each case a different kind of practical mathematical ‘skill’ was used by the practitioner. It therefore followed that maths as taught in schools didn’t always give the best opportunity for learning about number usage in the practical world where contexts required considerable numerical adaptability.
Lave and Wenger’s book on situated learning developed this idea as a generalisation away from maths. It proffered the radical idea that there was no such thing as abstract learning and that even the most seemingly abstruse topic had a social context which determined the language and practices of those doing the learning. It’s interesting to note that this view also dumps the hoary old concept of ‘informal learning’ which has been habitually generated as a catch-all label for all learning that happens outside of formalised educational institutions (and is therefore seen as somewhat negligible, ‘messy’ and lower down the learning-value hierarchy). Since all learning is situated, it therefore follows that those examples of learning which are formal (i.e. learning in colleges or university) are just as socially contextualised as those examples where the adult has learned at work or at home or in some unspecified activity – and therefore both are governed by the same learning rules, and both closely interlinked in their impact upon the learner.
Secondly, Lave and Wenger describe a process of legitimate participation that systematises and drives the learning experience. Adults join learning groups as legitimate participants – legitimacy here being a two-way process by which both the individual and the group-being-joined accept the presence of each other according to a set of linguistic and behavioural rules which are part of the group identity. Participation means what it says: the entrant to a group takes active part in the groups procedures, firstly as a ‘newcomer’ (i.e. peripherally) where they are habituated into the routines and attitudes of the groups, thereafter proceeding over time to become an ‘old-timer’ (Lave’s terminology) who is one of the key figures engaged in mentoring newcomers as they join the group. In any healthy learning group there will therefore always be a degree of group ‘churn; happening, as newcomers join and replace old-timers that have left.
What is vital about Lave and Wenger’s work is that lack of a ‘mentalistic’ aspect. Learning here is seen as a social practice where habit and discourse are the only factors that matter. What determines the efficacy of a learning situation is how well the individual gravitates into the group from its periphery. As William Hanks says in his preface to Lave and Wenger’s book:
“Understanding is seen to arise out of the mental operations of a subject on objective structures. Lave and Wenger reject this view of understanding insofar as they locate learning not in the acquisition of structure, but in the increased access to of learners to participating roles in expert performances…
Learning is a process that takes place in a participation framework, not in an individual mind. This means, among other things, that it is mediated by the differences of perspective among the coparticipants. It is the community, or at least those participating in the learning context, who ‘learn’ under this definition. Learning is, as it were, distributed among coparticipants, not a one-person act” (Lave & Wenger 1991)
This is also a value-free theory; Lave does not try to say that some learning is ‘better’ than others, or that some learning needs a mental/informational aspect to work. Indeed, Lave and Wenger do not even try to say that this process of situational legitimate participation always produces ‘good’, ‘effective’ or ‘useful’ learning – all they do say is ‘this is how it happens’; the good or useful bit has to be determined by external factors such as political or social need and how learning systems are organised and interact with the outside world.
Implications and Conclusions
It seems plain to me that there are many areas of overlap between the communicational, philosophical and anthropological views I encountered above. Wittgenstein’s concept of no-ownership and the theme’s in Lave and Wenger’s work which eschew the mental aspects of learning clearly have much in common. Both seek to take learning out of its habitual metaphysical state and bring it down to earth within the accessible region of social development. Similarly, these chime well with Berlo’s concepts of communication as a foundational human skill that underpins social cohesion. But above all they recognise learning as a social activity that is valued for its own sake rather than for some superior instrumental outcome. In order for learning to be understood by tutors and teachers within this framework it is necessary for attention to wholly direct itself to social interactions. This needs the sensitive direction of practitioners who realise that their presence (in the role of Laveian ‘old-timers’) is as vital a component in the development of learning groups with whom they work as anything they may feel they may ‘give’ about the subject they are ostensibly teaching. Within this framework, less needs to be said about the managerial approach of curricula and progression, and more needs to be done about long-term fostering of learning cultures that naturally attract adults and allow them to develop in an ‘organic’ fashion. The Wittgenstein-Laveian approach requires:
An end to short-termism – learning groups need time to develop
Emphasis of the importance of social contact across groups and in informal situations
Talk about ‘progression’ substituted by the concept of development
Understanding that entrepreneurial economic activity comes from learning which is fostered in an atmosphere of democratic co-operation
Valuing all learning in real (not just pious) terms – especially in its general contribution to a more equitable society
Developing cross-curricula contacts and networks that allow adults to extend their learning experiences beyond formal boundaries
Etc.
Above all I strongly feel that there is a very urgent need for work to be done on stating clearly a social theory of adult learning that will bring together many of the strands I have tried to develop above. From the communicational, philosophical and anthropological viewpoint the same conclusions arise: that our current traditional approach to adult learning works in spite of itself rather than because of itself, and that the reason we constantly fail to reach many adults is because the very theoretical underpinnings of our current system militates against this happening.
Luckily, the Workers’ Educational Association is probably the best vehicle for this sort of development. It’s traditions have been held to scorn and criticism over the past few decades, being seen as old-fashioned, ineffective, favouring the privileged and lacking in economic relevance. Many of those of us who have been part of the WEA for many years have consequently felt we have been through a long period of retreat, fighting what rear-guard actions we could, but increasingly feeling marginalised as our long-held beliefs in social learning have, in effect, been slowly compromised away. There has been little in the way of fundamentally effective responses to managerialist trends throughout the post-compulsory sector; yet without a clear theory of why and how WEA-style education works how could there be?
But now, I believe, is the time to end that retreat and to revalue WEA’s traditions along the lines I have outlined above: it’s democracy and its learning practices taking renewed energy from a social learning theory that could overturn the repetitive predictabilities of the instrumentalist mind-set and replace them with one that will put adult learning back at the centre of British social development. This is clearly possible, if we have the vision and courage to make that first re-assertive step.
Bibliography
HACKER, P. M. S. (1989) Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein Bristol: Thoemmes Press
LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
