Introduction

Perhaps much of what produces conflicting perspectives on learning stems from conflating training with teaching and reacting with understanding. Furthermore, perhaps this conflation reflects an unreasonable dismissal of the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness simply because it is such a difficult, abstract concept to describe, and harder still to quantify. Such a response requires cautious examination to preclude an unwise avoidance of that task which we fear may overwhelm our cognitive ability. I do not believe that abstractness, complexity, or even fluidity within an idea is proof that the idea cannot be confirmed. Rather, through the pursuit, however muddled, of such ideas—of describing them, discussing them, and demonstrating them—we can arrive at a generally robust, shared definition of them. This is a worthy endeavor for anyone interested in the work of conceptualizing or facilitating human learning, an endeavor I seek to make here. I propose that the best approximate definition of learning can only be pieced together using a key word or two each from many theories. I propose that learning is building consciousness (e.g., Friere, 2009; Papert, 1991; Vygotsky, 1979) about socially-motivated (e.g., Bandura, 1971; Kim, 2006; Ryan & Deci, 2000), situative participation in the learner’s world of communities (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Learning’s Six Essentials in Three Parts

#1 We think, therefore I am: Social motivation

Human learning generally only takes place within humans who are, themselves, within the company of other humans (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991; Bandura, 1971; Ryan & Deci, 2000). “Descartes’s famous maxim, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ captures the West’s emphasis on learning as a cognitive process, one that takes place in the brain” (Merriam & Kim, 2006, p. 76). While I agree with thought’s asserted locus, I take issue with Descartes’s confidence that he, or anyone for that matter, can be—let alone think—in absolute isolation. Here we must acknowledge what could be defined as the other half of “I am,” the attempted conceptualization of being human: social connection. One need only consider that, besides taking a human’s life, the second gravest punitive measure inflicted upon captives of the U.S. prison-industrial complex is solitary confinement, inflicted with minimalist grace by a society that inherently recognizes our essential need for human contact to remain human ourselves. On the other side of the world, the African concept of ubuntu, “I am because you are,”  (Hlela, 2019, p. 666) similarly reflects, albeit for an opposing purpose, our intuitive knowledge of our individual being-ness being entirely contingent upon social participation.

It is within us because we are within us

We intuit that our humanization, our human-being, is born and reified by legitimate proximal participation with humanity, itself (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This is because “learning is not merely situated in practice – as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 35). Learning as concrete as tool use and as abstract as cultural values assimilation can and will happen through participation in social practice, and more often than not, the tool and the value are learned simultaneously in such participation. In his description of one community ceremony he observed within a village in South Africa, Hlela (2019) noted,

Participation in the ceremony is voluntary, submerged and embedded in the daily activities of the village … Because of its value as a place of non-formal learning all villagers, young and old, are expected to participate… Importantly, at a community level, it is about individuals coming together for the collective good, … a learning place for all involved… The ceremony becomes a place where collective values are explicitly practiced and implicitly passed on. The main characteristic of learning in all subplaces is embeddedness in different activities: it is hands-on, practical, common practice, embedded, repetitive, value-laden. The ceremony, as a non-formal, educational event, presents different types of learning opportunity such as socialization, incidental learning and self-directed learning. Most importantly, the learning and teaching is a spiritual exercise… Learning therefore does not always have to be a conscious well-structured process of meaning making. The function of the ceremony in the village is the intergenerational and intragenerational passing and maintenance of critical values – the passing on of skills, knowledge and attitudes – and is an educational event in which every member of the village is expected to participate. Participation in the ceremony by community members becomes a place of learning the communal values. (p. 666)

This is because we are social animals, even generated via a social process. In the investigation and discourse of learner motivation, relatedness was found to be of central importance precisely because

“the primary reason people initially perform [the actions prescribed by any social practice] is because the behaviors are prompted, modeled, or valued by significant others to whom they feel (or want to feel) attached or related. This suggests that relatedness, the need to feel belongingess and connectedness with others, is centrally important for internalization.” (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 73)

Being with and observing one another, both physically and via multimedia, acts as both the potentially limitless expanse of, but also in many cases the detrimental limitations to, “the types of behavior that one will repeatedly observe and hence learn most thoroughly” (Bandura, 1971, p. 6) whether said behaviors are themselves based on reasonable, informed decision-making or not.

Because behaviorists are half right–whether we like it or not

Irrefutably, our innate felt need for social belonging sets learners up to be hypersensitive to stimuli registered as indications that said belonging is being nurtured–or threatened. So, yes, when the oldest and reigning gold-standard bearer of psychological and pedagogical theory, behaviorism, claims that learning is when any organism capable of registering a stimulus, responds to it, receives reinforcement, and reflexively records this experience as a means to the end of formulating patterns that support the survival of its species, it is not necessarily wrong. Can any organism be trained toward some behaviors and away from others? Certainly. We need not go so far as the public school classroom for confirmation. Whether we wish to consider dog training, plant training, or the most essential tenets of evolution itself, we are scarcely able to look anywhere without seeing evidence that the consequences of acting upon an object or an object upon its environment are as proliferous as atoms.

#2 Not just in context, from context: Situative participation in the world

Furthermore, learners are influenced not only by the micro-experience of conditioning stimuli, but also by the macro-experience of existing within the larger world. In other words, this is because learning is innate, involuntary, perpetual, situative participation within larger, time- and place-specific sociopolitical contexts (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991). We learn when we learn motivated by social relating, but also, we learn precisely what we learn as a result of the situatedness of said relating. Our worlds teach–when and whether they mean to or not.

The illusion of left unsaid

Children of every race, ethnicity, country of origin, and class throughout the United States have demonstrated a strident internalization of the anti-human aberration of white supremacy, not, by and large, from having had it intentionally indoctrinated into them, but rather from it not being discussed at all while they witness everywhere the marks of its abuse on our society. Yet, learning facilitation rarely includes inviting students to think aloud and in dialogue regarding such ideas as curriculum framing European colonization of the rest of the world as an “‘age of exploration’…to examine conventional interpretations and introduce alternative ones,” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 163).

Ain’t I a participator?

If it did, learners might stand a chance of truly understanding social studies texts because they could explicitly and collaboratively frame them using the social studies they, themselves, have been conducting every single day since entering their society. Grade school students so frequently bemoan the hackney “decontextualized,” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 40) “abstract representations” (p. 33) presented to them as studying history because schools so rarely acknowledge the “learning through legitimate peripheral participation” (p. 40) these same students have already experienced whether there has previously been “any intentional educational form at all” (p. 40). They have learned from their families, friends, communities, the human expressions of multimedia, and their own peripheral participation in the post-Doctrine of Discovery at whatever situative position of social order into which they were advantageously, or unluckily, born. It follows, unfortunately, that we are able to construct understanding of literally anything only up to the limit of what we have previously understood–or misunderstood. Thus any of what we learn is subject to the risk of an exponentially self-fortifying, oft hazardous construction of fantasy. The sole and perfect rectification to this, consciousness-building, can remain detrimentally beyond reach for many learners because it lies beyond the scope of visible observation, beyond the behaviorist’s definition of learning.

Consider, however, who populates the camp of this theory’s prescribers: cognitive behavioral therapy practitioners, behavioral psychologists, Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapists, associate degree-holders below a living wage to actually enact prescribed ABA therapy protocols upon–and against–the wills of learners, circus animal trainers, and, of course, many behaviorist learning theorists who would say that crowd control is the primary requirement of effective learning facilitation. It also enjoys highest regard from those publicly traded companies hocking dubious curriculum to states unsure whether science or history belong in schools but confident that Ten Commandments posters do.

Consider also, how this theory characterizes learners: mindless receptacles within which these patterns of behavior are arbitrarily collected by the individual or intentionally deposited by others, irrespective of will. Learning is explained as these behavior patterns being subsequently housed and eventually fortified through an echo chamber of mutual reinforcement or rendered extinct through extended decrease in reinforcement. Teaching?–that which can be accomplished with dog treats. These theorists in the disciplines of psychology and education have come to regard the theory of behaviorism as the only employable language to describe learning. This is less reasonable than superficial consideration would suggest.

#3 To see, or not to see–that is the question: Consciousness-building

Theatre of the Absurd

If the learning theorist would dare exclude the unseeable, but no less confirmable, reality of learning as conscientization-building, they would consequently hazard two errors, the latter of which also condemns the learner. Firstly, to disregard consciousness from a theoretical perspective is to, with unfortunate irony, invite into its place within the learning theorist’s half-empty, invisible, mental conceptualization of learning, “absurdity,” itself wherein Vygotsky (1979) warned, “once consciousness has been banished from psychology,” they will be “trapped… forevermore” (p. 7). Thus, to avoid this chilling fate, even the most devout behaviorist must bring themself to humbly acknowledge–perhaps only inside the face-saving refuge of their own conscious mind–that learning is, undeniably, consciousness-building (Friere, 2009; Ackerman, 2001;  Vygotsky, 1979). In the spirit of collegiality, the rest of us shall get directly to mumming the word.

Liberty or death

Secondly, and more gravely, all that has been previously laid out comes to bear on the last, most human component of learning: becoming critically aware of how all of one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors have been produced by having been instinctively motivated into whatever participation of whatever social practices take place within the completely arbitrary situative learning environment into which they were born and from which they were subsequently directed hither and thither. This is the point at which learning of social regulations such as those described in Hlela’s (2019) village ceremony observation can, through critically dialogical examination, be renegotiated as learners gain collective consciousness of these regulations. In that example, community participants asked themselves “whether, in their view,” the community’s various situated ceremonial practices “were humanizing or dehumanizing,” (Hlela, 2018, p. 665). Fundamentally, this process of using language to cooperatively build a critical understanding of our contexts and experiences, of our communities and their practices, is precisely what makes humans, humans.

Conclusion

Although learning reflects every philosophy when viewed from a certain angle, the ends of these philosophies span the gamut of human potential: some draw learners’ to the greatest heights of enlightened consciousness, while others deeply and irresistibly subjugate them through a Trojan horse of their own base instincts.  We cannot abandon either hope nor reason, cowed by the complicated nature of defining that which cannot be seen. We know. We know that we know. We prove consciousness whether in our attempt to prove it or even in our attempt to deny it. Human learning is when we bring this consciousness to bear on what we humans are doing, together, in the worlds we create in and through this togetherness. Human learning is the socially situated building of consciousness.  All else is doggy daycare.

References

Ackerman, E. (2001). Piaget’s constructivism, Papert’s constructionism: What’s the difference(this link downloads a file). Future of learning group publication, 5(3), 1-11.

Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1971). Social learning theory (Vol. 1). General Learning Press.

Freire, P. (2009). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 2(2), 163-174. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/266914.

Hlela, Z. (2019). Learning through participation: towards defining adult learning in an African rural context. Community Development Journal 54(4) pp.660-676.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

Piaget J. Genetic epistemology. American Behavioral Science 1970, 13(3), 459-480. doi:10.1177/000276427001300320

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Vygotsky, L. S. (1979). Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior. Russian Social Science Review, 20(4), 47–79.