Educators (and parents) face a problem: our specialty-learning-is something we can’t directly witness. Instead, we have to rely on mental models-metaphors-to make sense of it (Pattison and Thomas 2016). The most common metaphor for learning in the modern, schooled world is acquisition: learning means individually acquiring a set of skills, concepts, and know-how, which one then “masters” or “owns”. This metaphor is so deeply engrained in rhetoric about school and learning that it’s hard to imagine their even could be a different metaphor for learning, but there is.
That is the metaphor of participation. In this view, learning is about becoming a progressively fuller participant in a community, whether a literal one, like a family, or a metaphorical one (see what I did there?), like the community of mathematicians (Lave and Wenger 1991). In this metaphor, the idea of learning as a separate activity is hardly meaningful. Learning is something one does in the course of participating in a community. Moreover, there is no need to test learning; the “test” is how fully you participate in the community.
The difference may seem, well, academic, and it’s easy to poke holes in both metaphors if you take them too literally. Obviously some amount of internal acquisition of skills goes on, even as one is participating in a community, and of course the purpose of acquiring those skills is to facilitate participation in some form of community (family, neighborhood, society, a business, etc). The point, however, is not to decide which one is the perfect description of reality–they are both metaphors, not reality–but to recognize that how we approach the business of learning depends a great deal on which metaphor we choose.
Below is a comparison between these two metaphors and their central implications:
| Acquisition | Participation | |
|---|---|---|
| Learning is primarily a cognitive process | Learning isn't a separate process at all | |
| Learning/knowledge is something that exists outside of context | Learning only exists in a context or community | |
| Learning is a separate activity | Learning is not a separate activity | |
| Learning can be made systematic by breaking it apart into progressive steps | Learning can never be perfectly systematic, because individuals and context always vary | |
| Learning happens because a person engages in learning activities (being taught, practicing isolated skills, etc.) | Learning happens when novices and "old-timers" participate together in a community | |
| It's important to know what a learner has mastered in order to figure out what they should learn next | Measuring mastery doesn't make sense. It can be observed through an individual's degree of participation in a community. | |
| It makes sense to create an explicit setting for learning, such as a classroom, because it is more efficient | One can't learn anything meaningful in an isolated setting like a classroom except how to be a full participant in a classroom. | |
| Learning is easiest when it is led by a specialist in teaching | Anyone can be a teacher to a less experienced community member, though some may be more effective teachers than others. |
So let’s bring this all back down to earth with a few examples. I’m sure you can think of some examples of “pure” acquisition-metaphor learning. The one that comes to mind for me is the classic weekly spelling test. Each week, the children in a class are given a list of words to study, memorize, and then write correctly on a Friday spelling test. If the teacher is skillful, the lists are organized systematically to teach spelling rules, so that one week, students work on the Milk Truck Rule and the next week they work on when to double consonants before a suffix. If the teacher is really skillful, the children may be able to work through the lists at an individualized pace, or even choose some of the words to be relevant to their own interests.
Now let’s consider an entirely different learning context, where the participation-metaphor becomes much more sensible. When I was about 11 years old, I had a chance to build a traditional(ish) Aleut-style sea kayak at school, and then take it out for several days of kayaking and camping. There were six or seven kids in our group of kayak-builders, as well as two “old-timers”, one of our teachers and a friend of the school who led kayaking expeditions in Alaska during the summer. In the course of building the kayaks, they taught us about all the parts of a kayak, how to steam and bend wood for the kayak ribs, how to tie together all the parts, how to cover the whole thing with canvas, how to safely exit an upside down kayak underwater, and a thousand little things like how to use a lighter to seal nylon cord and how to use a staple gun. The project took eight months, and in the entire process, I think there was one “lecture”: a brief explanation at the start of the project about all the parts of a kayak and how a kayak is built.
Moreover, even though we had “old-timers” no one was the absolute expert with all the knowledge: among other things, we all learned together than oak is a terrible choice of wood for kayak ribs. They snap instead of bending. Red cedar on the other hand? Mwah! We didn’t find this out because one person knew in our group knew all the answers in advance. Instead, we learned it through research and trial and error after breaking about ten-thousand oak ribs.
Although you can certainly tell from my descriptions which of these metaphors I prefer, I’m not arguing that we should completely switch our metaphor for all time. In a world where technical, cognitive skills (mind work) are crucial, there are times when systematically breaking down a cognitive skill is very helpful and effective. However, it doesn’t seem to be the way that we have evolved to learn, and for most of us, it is both boring and extremely difficult. Learning through participation seems to be much closer to the way we humans naturally learn, and in my experience, it is much more satisfying, enjoyable, and (frequently) effective.
So why isn’t a participation model of learning more common? Because it doesn’t lend itself to large-scale standardization, efficient instruction, and convenient measurement. When you are trying to design a standardized school system, or even a classroom, meant to teach everyone in the same way, the acquisition model is far more convenient than the participation model.
The problem, however, is that as schooling has become a foundational assumption within our culture, the acquisition model has become synonymous with learning, to the point that we don’t “trust” any form of learning that isn’t explicit, systematic, and measured. And so we fall prey to the “Learning Activity Virus”. Part of my mission with The Montessori Cosmos and Deschooling Ourselves is to help us move toward a participation metaphor of learning, at least part of the time, so that we can trust the many ways that our children are learning that cannot be isolated and measured.
In the comments, please share one time you have learned through participation without any formal syllabus, instruction, or measurement.
Bibliography
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Learning in Doing. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pattison, Harriet, and Alan Thomas. 2016. Rethinking Learning to Read. Shrewsbury: Educational Heretics Press.
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