Over the last few weeks I’ve been involved in several conversations about learning. Throughout them, one thought keeps returning; is learning mostly about the acquisition of facts or the comprehension of stories?
My learning about learning leads me to conclude it’s the latter. Learning happens when we understand facts as the products of perspectives that are rooted in a context. Lose sight of this and learning evaporates.
Here’s an example...
Q: What colour is the earth?
- Ask a farmer and they might reply, “Mostly brown”.
- Ask an astronaut and they might tell you, “Mostly blue”.
- Ask an astronaut while they are off mission and doing their gardening…?
Learning requires facts set in context; a complex juxtaposition of insights about what question is really being asked, by whom, to what purpose, etc. situated alongside who is answering, from what perspective, in what circumstances, and so on.
This makes effective learning more of a contact sport than an abstract exercise.
As we learn from the current crisis - and as we learn in general - these feel like important things to consider...
- How do our approaches to learning reflect the need to comprehend stories and perspectives in context?
- Alternatively, where do they run the risk of confusing the gathering of facts with learning?
Thanks for reading!
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Vladimír Kváča
Thanks, Andy for this.
I feel that good learning of anything shares a lot with learning a language. First, I learn a fact, I learn one word. Then I catch some connection, some rule that is difficult for me to understand at first, I'm not sure that I would explain it correctly to others and I can only use it with instructions in hand. I can speak a phrase or apply a grammatical phenomenon. And when I use it several times, I gain confidence, my own understanding gains the form of my own understanding of rules and connections. And I find some deeper structure. Gradually, I can create my own procedures, thoughts, ideas, that fit the world. I can say sentences that literally no one ever taught me, but that I created based on my knowledge of other sentences. And at first, I can only do it in some thematic areas…
In this sense, for me, things like systems thinking are just another language.
It starts with facts, but has to continue to the comprehension of stories, and to the comprehension of rules of good stories…
Andy Brogan
Thanks Vladimir. That's a good example. I think we are probably in broad agreement here? The new word can be learned in isolation but it's only when you spot the connections, grasp the rules, etc that you can fully understand it in use. That feels similar to what I'm trying to drive at here > that accumulating facts without doing the extra work to reach understanding risks us thinking we understand more than we do. Atomised facts - like single words - lack context and context is key to understanding. Does this sound like agremeent or are you seeing something else that I've missed?