Learning Theories
A Plethora of Choices
Learning theories attempt to provide understanding about the “process of adults gaining knowledge and expertise” (Knowles, pg. 174). Most theories fall into one of five broad orientations:
- Behaviorist – change in behavior
- Humanist – a personal act to fulfill development
- Cognitivist – information processing, including insight, memory, perception, and meta-cognition
- Social cognitive – interaction with and observation of others in a social context
- Constructivist – construct meaning from experience
(Merriam, p. 295)
Greg Kearsley has created a wonderful database of learning theories and posted it at http://tip.psychology.org/(Kearsley, 2008).
As I read about these theories, some by scientists or educators whose names we’ve often heard, it seemed to me that each one approached the topic with blinders, examining only a small piece of the puzzle of what it could mean to be a learner. I began to wish somebody would “just give me the answer” … and then I realized there wasn’t one. We don’t have a unified theory of learning because the topic is so complex; complex like humans are complex.
Peter Jarvis
In reading Merriam, I was introduced to Peter Jarvis, a professor of Continuing Education in the UK and expert in adult learning. I read some of his more recent work, and immediately felt a connection to what he proposed. And the primary reason I felt this connection was because he candidly stated,
“If we actually could understand every aspect of the learning process, then we would understand the person in society and we would be able to manipulate people like cogs in the complex machine of society, but we will never be able to do this in its totality – if we could, then we would understand life itself to the full. (Jarvis, p. 199, italics added)
To arrive at that statement, Jarvis outlines elements that he sees as critical to any discussion of learning
- The person-in-the-world
- The person experiencing the world
- Transforming the content of an experience
- Transforming the person experiencing the world
- The changed person in the world
(Jarvis, 2006)
Jarvis combined these elements into a diagram that describes how he believes a learner moves through an experience. When my son Tommy was diagnosed with medulloblastoma (pediatric brain tumors) in 1993, my first thought was “OK, we can take out the tumor, get rid of his headaches, and be done with it.” I quickly learned how naive that thinking was. 
Now, looking at Jarvis’ diagram of how experience transforms a person, I see that within a few short weeks I must have traveled that diagram at least a million times. The emotions, thoughts/reflections, and actions were so tied together that it would have taken an expert de-tangler to sort out any of them. But a few that I remember were making decisions about my older son Christopher (I am a single mom), negotiating a ‘deal’ with my employer for paid-time off (no Family Leave Act in those days), figuring out that reflecting on ”what if” and “if only” was a horrible waste of energy that I needed for Tommy, and deciding that Tommy would never sleep alone at the hospital.
Over the four and a half years that he was ill, I also learned about a disease and its treatments, the side effects, and how to manage them. I learned how to use a laptop at the bedside so I could still work 40 hours a week, to sleep in one of those horrible hospital fold-out chairs, to survive on cafeteria food, and to marvel at the nurses and doctors who were called to work in a field where success is measured in days lived, not lives saved. I heard about this thing called “the Internet” and learned to get information and support from it. As I have said many many many times, it was an education I never expected to get.
That experience continues to shape me eleven years after Tommy’s death. My work in training is a result of the skills I built working on that laptop; my life online is a result of that effort to learn what had stolen my son from me and how I might fight to keep him. It even helped me be a better mom for Christopher as he moved from childhood into manhood. My life as writer and photographer were also shaped when I wrote a book about Tommy, parts of which I have posted on this blog. So, while this is not a very academic defense of Jarvis’ theory, I can attest to its validity. I’m sure we all can.
My theory of Adult Learning
We learn something new every day, but how often do we stop to wonder at the processes that makes it all happen? As neuroscientists discover the mechanics of the brain that support learning, educators work to build theories and strategies that bring those mechanics into our everyday lives.
A quick Google search of “How does the brain work?”produces almost 5 million hits, but I doubt that any neuroscientist would claim to understand all the nuances of how the brain works. The brain keeps our ‘bodily functions’ functioning; receives, stores and processes the data sent in by our five (or six) senses; and gives a physical site for such non-physical things as the mind, the emotions, reason and experience. Wow! The cerebrum, the gray matter, houses the hippocampus and the amygdale, two structures deeply connected to learning. Neuroscientists have known that a certain region of the brain, nicknamed the ‘novelty center’, is connected to both the hippocampus (the learning center) and the amygdale (the emotional processor) (Cell Press, 2006). Bunzeck and Duzel (2006) reported in Neuronthat this novelty center was highly excited when volunteers saw unusual images while undergoing an fMRI scan. The researchers concluded that novelty was a more powerful force for learning when compared to other stimuli such as rareness, negative emotion, or familiarity.
Peter Jarvis and Jack Mezirow and their work in transformative learning have contributed the most to the development of my personal learning theory, as I’ve discussed above. A central theme for Jarvis is that it is the individual who learns, not the educator who teaches (Jarvis, 2006); that it is the whole person made up of the mind and the body and comes to the learning situation with a history (Merriam, p. 101). This individual employs a variety of tools – emotion, thought/reflection, and action – to bring that experience into their worldview (Jarvis, 2006). Mezirow’s pyschocritical approach to transformative learning complements Jarvis. Mezirow describes transformative learning as
the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference (meaning schemes, habits of mind, mindsets) to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotional, capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action (Mezirow, 2008 p. 8 as cited by Merriam, 2007 p 133).
