Regarding Christopher D. Sessum’s excellent post on Palmer’s The Courage To Teach, I felt a rush of excitement upon reading “the informal nature of learning – that is, learning that happens outside of structured environments, learning that almost appears accidentally, unplanned, that grows wild like the volunteer tomatoes that arise each spring out of my garden” which brings to mind the concept of ‘feral learning’ (Nunan 1996, Lundin 1997, Visser 1996, Bell and Hall 2006), which has become rather a personal obsession of late…
However, what I really love about this post are Sessum’s comments on the nature of learning, particularly with regards the ‘messiness’ of learning and the significance of emotion.
‘We often give emotion and notions of the heart short shrift in education. Emotions and heart are not scientific, logical, or precise; they’re messy, they’re chaotic, they’re complex and difficult to frame systematically (Sounds a lot like the art of learning itself). Yet emotions and heart frame our ability to see, feel, and learn. Emotions are part of what motivate us to take risks as well as avoid certain ideas and conceits.’
Having recently spent some time coding and analysing blog posts in an online CoP (clinical practitioners), it has be fascinating to observe the warmth and emotional support within a geographically dispersed learning community which I’m in no doubt is enhanced by the immediacy (Mehrabian 1969) and online social presence (Garrison and Anderson 2000) of the tutor/mentor. The blog posts were often emotional in nature, injected with warmth, sadness, humour, anger and this level of online intimacy gave the students the confidence to express their insecurities about learning to one another. However, although the level of trust meant that the students felt secure in opening up and sharing their feelings with their peers, the tutor was also constantly encouraging the learners to reflect on their learning and questioned aspects of the practice and profession, fostering their critical thinking skills. There was a real sense of online community, and the extent of immediacy between participants and the tutor generated an atmosphere that was more akin to an everyday tutorial group who tease, support, and collaboratively learn with their peers, openly sharing social and emotional information about themselves and their lives. Although it is difficult to draw a direct and measurable correlation between immediacy and cognitive learning, it is widely accepted that the likelihood of a learner having a successful educational experience is enhanced by the warmth, interest and encouragement of the tutor.
Although I’ve been fairly vocal in my belief in the significance of the interrelationships between emotions, motivation and learning for some time now, I must confess to having been reluctant to ‘air’ my views on many occasions for fear of being stereotyped (i.e. woman discussing feelings). This is probably due to my position as what amounts to being a social scientist that crosses boundaries into computing, acoustics and audio. This is not to say that such within such disciplines factors such as human emotion are ignored (many a time have I sat a psychoacoustic subjective test…), but the messiness of emotion does not sit easily with the empiricism of the ‘hard’ sciences. This is what draws me to Garrison and Anderson’s framework and coding methodology for an online Community of Inquiry.
It is encouraging to find that the importance of emotions is increasingly being discussed by male academics, and together with models/frameworks such as Garrison and Anderson’s CoI I personally am finding it easier to discuss what some would term ‘the soft stuff’ in a way which is more empirically grounded and more acceptable for those who come from a traditionally scientific background.
References:
Mehrabian, A. (1969). Attitudes inferred from non-immediacy of verbal communication.journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6, 294-295.
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical thinking in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 1-14.
Visser, J. http://jvisser-ldi.blogspot.com/2006/02/feral-learning.html
Lundin, R. (1997), 'Human Factors and Interactive Communications Technologies', Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 26 (2)
Nunan, E. (1996), Flexible delivery: What is it and why is it a part of current educational debate? Conference Proceedings of Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia: Different Approaches: Theory and Practice in Higher Education, Perth, Western Australia., Available at: http://www.city.londonmet.ac.uk/deliberations/flex.learning/nunan_conte
Bell, F. and Hall, M. (2006) ‘Communities of Practice’ Online? The case for ‘going Feral’ in Academic Development. ILIA Innovative Learning in Action Issue 5: Learning Technologies in the Curriculum Spring/Summer 2006, available at http://www.edu.salford.ac.uk/docs/ilia_issue5.pdf
Keywords: community of inquiry, community of practice, emotion, feral learning, immediacy, Informal learning, learning, motivation, nature of learning, social presence