Yes, I had a lot of support from my family. You know, I suppose you could say you take that for granted but, yes, I did have a lot of support from my family. But in terms of feedback and a sounding board ? colleagues for instance over the phone. Your tutor is another example.
Some of the learning theories that have been produced by psychology have tended to underplay the role of other people in our immediate environments. However, other theories have been developed to try to remedy this. Before we start to think about some of these theories, please complete the following activity.
The aim of this activity is to encourage you to think about who you have come into contact with while learning. You should try to focus on examples of your learning where you feel you have gained new skills, knowledge or qualities. For example, you may have learned a new skill when your older sister showed you how to mend a puncture in a tyre. If you have learned to drive a car, you may feel that you have learned a skill (driving a car). You might also feel you have gained knowledge of what a particular road sign means, for example, and certain qualities, such as being a patient and careful driver.
You could use a chart similar to this one:
Figure 19 Chart showing who has been involved in my learningLong descriptionWhen you have completed this chart, answer these questions:
This activity is similar to what you were asked to do in Section 2 as part of your evidence gathering. At this point in the unit, the focus is different. We are asking you to think back over who has been involved with your learning and where this learning took place. The example of learning to drive a car was included above because it can have many implications for how people live their lives and even what jobs they can have. But there are different people who may teach us how to do this. We may have lessons from a qualified driving instructor; we might ask a friend or relative to show us how to do it. Either way, other people have to be involved ? if only because we cannot drive a car alone before passing the driving test. The driving test itself is quite a formal situation. In the UK it is necessary to pass a theory test, as well as showing that you know how to drive a car.
Did your examples show a mixture of informal ways of learning and more formal ways of learning? The informal ways would include those where you involved people without a qualification to teach you what you learned. These informal examples of learning would also be more likely to happen in a variety of situations where learning is not the main purpose. In contrast, formal learning tends to take place when people with special qualifications provide learning at places like schools or colleges whose main business is teaching and learning.
Coombs and Ahmed describe informal learning as:
(Coombs and Ahmed, 1974, p.8)… the lifelong process by which every individual acquires and accumulates knowledge, skills, attitudes and insights from daily experiences and exposure to the environment ? at home, at work, at play: from the example and attitude of families and friends; from travel, reading newspapers and books; or by listening to the radio or viewing films or television. Generally informal education is unorganized, unsystematic and even unintentional at times, yet accounts for the great bulk of any person?s total lifetime learning ? including that of a highly ‘schooled? person.
The nature of informal learning is that it can happen almost anywhere and involve the widest range of people. For example, a huge amount of informal learning goes on at work. As Boud and Middleton have pointed out:
(Boud and Middleton, 2003, p. 201)There is a diverse range of people that we learn from at work, very few of whom are recognised by the employing organisation as people with a role in promoting learning ….
In contrast, formal learning includes the structured, authorised units and workshops that take place in dedicated educational institutions such as schools, universities and training departments. These units and workshops often include assessment, such as exams, and lead to certificates or qualifications. (So studying on Learning to change is actually an example of formal learning.) You will probably find that when you are involved with some formal learning other, more informal, learning takes place. You may find out about other things while studying this unit.
Coombs and Ahmed (1974) suggest that we are continually learning. They also suggest that the distinction between formal and informal learning is not the only difference. They suggest that we sometimes deliberately set out to learn new things. This is referred to as ‘deliberate learning?. In contrast, other learning may be ‘accidental?, occurring as a result of something that has happened to us. For example, if we are burgled, we will learn quite a lot about how the local police force works. Another contrast is between learning alone and learning with other people. A further distinction is between learning that can act to free us or increase our choices (sometimes called ‘liberating?) and learning which has the result of controlling or restricting us (referred to as ‘domesticating?). Each and every experience will be a different mixture of these different aspects ? each will lead to a different form of learning.
Figure 20 Madhur JaffreyLong descriptionMadhur Jaffrey is a good illustration of this. Madhur is a bestselling cookery book writer and television presenter. She has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for services to drama, culture and cuisine, but as a child she never learned to cook. She failed a domestic sciences exam because she could not cook something that used spices often found in Indian food.
Madhur Jaffrey travelled to London at the age of 19 to study drama. As a student, she desperately missed home-cooked food, and wrote letters to her mother back in India asking her how to cook different dishes. Her mother sent her airmail letters, each explaining one recipe at a time. Madhur slowly increased the number of dishes she could cook. Her friends were so impressed with her cooking that they persuaded her to publish her recipes.
Madhur?s formal learning was focused on her drama unit. However, at the same time she was informally learning how to cook. As things turned out, Madhur?s rather unusual style of informal learning was far more important in her life than the formal learning she did on her drama unit. Madhur has been liberated by her learning. This is perhaps a real contrast with many women whose learning about cooking can be viewed as domesticating. Can you see how some aspects of Madhur?s learning can be seen as individual, others as social? Some of her learning seems to have been accidental ? a result of needing to cook for herself in a new country.
Karen seems to show her own combination of deliberate and accidental learning. You may remember her comments from a previous video:
I left school when I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications basically were nil. I had no GCSEs. No A levels. I went to secondary modern school and I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I left school. Three pounds ten shillings a week was my wage then. My first job was a filing clerk and I actually realised that I didn?t know my alphabet properly, so I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was doing at that time and I admitted I was getting a little bit confused. And he said, ‘Well, carry on. That?s a good idea.? Oh ? I would rather have the files in the correct order rather than have them wrong!
To help you see how your learning has involved both formal and informal learning, use the matrix that follows to sort the examples of learning you identified in Activity 33. Feel free to add any more examples that you think of. The matrix has two axes ? informal/formal is the horizontal axis, running left to right, and the vertical axis represents alone/with others, running from top to bottom. This creates four quadrants or boxes:
Try to find an episode of your own learning that fits into each box. We have put one example in each box to get you started. As you complete the matrix, try to recall what each experience was like. Did you enjoy the episode and learn well, or not?
Figure 21 Types of learningLong description
All types of learning have advantages and disadvantages.
Formal learning may have the advantage of offering a structure which can be reassuring to learners. For some people there is nothing worse than being unsure what comes next. Other people find this structure rather stifling and relish the opportunity to explore aspects of a topic in their own way and at their own pace.
It is good to have to have learning opportunities that suit our needs. We may want to get a qualification that a unit of formal learning might bring. At the same point in our lives we may enjoy developing a hobby through informal learning. It is often quite surprising how what we learn informally can help us appreciate aspects of formal learning. The opposite can happen too.
You have been thinking about theories about learning. We hope that you have found these of interest. However, in the context of this unit, you need to ask whether theory can help you think about personal development and change. For this reason, you are asked to do the next activity. This activity asks you to summarise what you think, at this point on the unit, about the possible uses of theory. Remember that so far you have encountered two main sets of ideas in this section. These are:
Spend a few moments summarising your thoughts about these theories. Start by describing their main points.
When you have done this, reflect on (think about) what they might mean to you personally.
The first part of this activity is about your note taking. Note taking is an important aspect of study in general. Equally, writing things down in note form is an important way of gathering evidence. In this unit you have already used a variety of note-taking approaches to gather evidence about your own learning. You might even have used mind mapping for this activity. There are two important aspects about notes. First, they need to be concise. There is little point in just copying most of the material you are basing your notes on. The second aspect is that your notes have to be useful. They have to do what you want them to do. So if you are writing notes in order to write an essay, they are only useful if they help you with your essay. For this activity your notes are the basis for your reflection on the possible usefulness of the theories.
The second part of the activity is more about evaluating whether the ideas you have come across seem relevant to you. Again, there are two aspects to this. The first is whether any of the theories so far help to explain what has happened to you already. This means that it might help when you reflect back over your experience. The second aspect you might like to think about is whether any of the ideas you have read about might help you in future. For example, you might want to think about whether they could help you structure any plans for change.
It is clearly impossible to guess what you think about the theories and ideas you have met so far. It is possible to argue that the psychological learning theories are useful. This springs from the fact that they adopt a basic stance towards learning that suggests we all learn because we all interact with our environment. This means that learning is not just something that ‘clever? people do. This can help place our past learning in context. It can also highlight that some past learning may not have been very useful to us. So it could underline the need for our future plans to include learning that supports our development rather than getting in the way of it.
With the ideas about different contexts of learning, we are getting much closer to the situations in which learning happens. Thinking about the detail of these contexts highlights some important issues. There is the issue of other people being involved in your learning. Sometimes who these other people are, and the role they have, help to establish whether the learning is formal or informal. An awareness of the range of learning contexts seems to be useful in similar ways to the psychological theories. It helps to emphasise that learning goes on in many different contexts and that we are able to respond to many of these contexts. This is really another reminder that we have a basic tendency to learn in whatever social situation we find ourselves. This raises an interesting question. If we are able to learn freely in some situations, what stops us from learning in others?
The next section explores two particular theories. These theories are:
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