What is learning?
Phenomenological musings.
Before I start this week’s post, here’s a question for you - do you know what this is?
It’s going to be a source of considerable learning for me over coming months and I’m very excited about it. More next week, but if you think you know what it is, please leave a comment at the end!
One of the fun things about a project like this is that it is making me think more deeply about what I’m trying to do. One of my recent job appraisals said “Antonia is one of nature's life-long learners: her intellectual curiousity and enthusiasm will I suspect always drive her towards acquiring and improving knowledge”. My love of learning is something I promote about myself. So I have been asking myself lately, what does that mean? If I’m writing about my learning activities, what am I covering? At its most obvious, learning could be consider the acquisition of new knowledge - knowing something today that I didn’t know yesterday. But there’s more to it than that. Learning is also the deepening of existing knowledge/skills. It’s reflecting on everyday experiences to draw something new out of them. If I try and fail and move on, I probably don’t learn much. But if I try, and fail and reflect, that is a learning experience. I’ve done courses where I didn’t strictly speaking learn anything new, but found vocabulary or terminology to cement my own experience
When I was doing my Masters I took a side course from the (well-rated) School of Education at the University of Melbourne. The course focused very much on this philosophical exploration of what learning is. Through it, I learned about the phenomenological school of education. You can read my essay for a more complete explanation, but in essence it sees learning as a combination of Knowing, Doing and Being.
So to look at my learning experiences this week, I’ve participated in:
Knowing-Learning - a Substack article about olive oil and a Rest is History podcast episode about Alfred the Great
Doing-Learning - creating Facebook ads (always a learning experience as Meta Business Suite is so bloody unintuitive!).
Being-Learning - reading letters from candidates for a role I am recruiting to which taught me a lot about how (not) to write a motivation letter. By Being-a-recruiter I learned about recruiting and not just what I need to know for my current role, but also for when I have another role in the recruitment process.
Often a learning experience - or at least one that moves us forward - is a mixture of these categories. When I get to grips with the piece of the machinery at the top of the article, there will be some Knowing-Learning and then some Doing-Learning, and then probably back and forth a few more times. Without the Knowing, the Doing will be pretty frustrating and take much longer. Without the Doing, the Knowing will be a waste of time.
Or to give another example, the latest Highbrow course I’m doing is about speechwriting, and I’ve put it to one side until I have something that I can apply the learning to. Otherwise I know that it won’t sink in properly. Knowing-learning in this case requires Doing (and probably some Being).
The logical extension of this approach is that our learning goes way beyond formalised learning experiences. In fact I’m pretty sure we’ve all been at a session classed as “training” where we haven’t learned a thing. Or on the other side, had a conversation with a friend, or spent time solving a problem that completely opened our eyes to new ideas and experiences.
And by saying that many worthwhile learning experiences combine the different Knowing-Doing-Being approaches, I wouldn’t want you to think that I am adverse to a bit of learning for its own sake. Knowing about the major achievements of Alfred the Great isn’t going to get me my next promotion or improve my crafting skills, but that really doesn’t matter to me all the time. Sometimes new knowledge is its own gift.
Monkey picture by Juan Rumimpunu on Unsplash
Mystery machine picture by me.