Positioning healthcare students as interdependent learners
Stephen Billett, Griffith University, Australia
Case ………….
Three changes prompt considerations of re-positioning
higher education students:
i) advances in our understanding about human
learning and development;
ii) the kinds of knowledge and knowing towards
which higher education needs to be directed; and
iii) evolving means of student engagement.
Proposes positioning them as interdependent, rather
than independent learners
Drawing upon history, anthropology and learning
sciences
Progression …..
1. Learning
2. Knowledge and knowing
3. Learner engagement
4. Learner interdependence
1: Learning
As the goals and provisions for supporting learning in higher
education become ever more prescribed, it is timely to
consider what constitutes learning processes and how these
can be promoted.
Helpful to distinguish between learning and development
So, our ontogenetic development is what we bring to the
process of experiencing (and learning) it both shapes and is
shaped by what we experience.
Learning: some premises
Co-occurrence of engaging in everyday acting and learning
Knowledge required to practice occupations is a product of
culture, history and situation
– it needs accessing and engaging with (i.e. inter-psychologically)
Rich learning likely based on the:
– i) kinds of activities and interactions available to students, and
– ii) quality of students’ engagement with them.
Hence, experiences provided in educational and practice settings
are nothing more or less than invitations to change ……..
Students taking up of those invitations is most salient.
Contemporary accounts of learning
Human cognition (and learning) is multi-modal engaging
sensory and neural systems with experiences (Barsalou
2008; 2009)
Experiencing through activities and interactions – activity
structures cognition (Rogoff & Lave 1984) through those
means
Situations shape cognition (Billett 2003) through their
affordances
Simulations (Barsalou 2003) and grounded cognition
(Kosslyn et al 2006) explain these processes
Individuals’ mediation of immediate experience is premised
on pre-mediate experiences (Valsiner 2000)
So, physical and social settings are not neutral and learner
intentionality is important
An interdependence between individuals’ mediation and
mediating physical and social factors , albeit shaped in
personal ways
Likely, it has been ever thus, ….
Across human history, the most common and
sustained mode of learning and innovation is
through practice
Central to humanity and human progress
Similar processes for learning occurred in Europe,
Asia and, likely, elsewhere
Little evidence of direct teaching, even in
educational institutions (e.g. yeshivas, madrassas)
Vast majority of learning seems based on mimesis:
observation and imitation, then practice
These are interdependent processes, not based on
the transmission of knowledge
Whatever the origins of the didactic mode, it has always been a minor mode of
knowledge acquisition in our evolutionary history. In the West, however, the
didactic mode of teaching and learning has come to prevail in our schools to
such an extent that is often taken for granted as the most natural, as was the
most efficacious and efficient way of going about teaching and learning. This
view is held despite the many instances in our own culture of learning through
observation and imitation. (Jordan 1989: 932)
So how do individuals learn outside of intentional didactic processes?
Personally mediated processes
Imitation (mimesis) (Jordan 1989, Tomasello 2004, Gardner
2004, Marchand, 2008) – high level cognitive functions
Apprenticeship learning - active engagement with and
construction of knowledge:
- apprehending - to seize (Webb 1999),
- to steal (Marchand 2008),
- Japanese word for apprentice is minarai: one who learns
by observation;
- unobtrusive process of observation: minarai kyooiku
(Singleton 1989)
Ontogenetic ritualisation (Tomasello 2004) - ward rounds
Importance of learner readiness (Bunn 1999, Singleton 1989)
and assent (Mishler 2004) to engage
2: Knowledge and knowing
Modernity led to the advent of mass education and ‘teaching’
Have learners’ (i.e. students’) sense of self changed from
interdependence to dependence on teaching and taught
processes?
Educational consequences of ‘schooled’ societies
• pre-specifying knowledge to be learnt
• teaching of codified (i.e. declarative) knowledge
• mass forms of teaching predominate
• administration and economies of education privileged
• discourse of ‘schooling’ came to dominate
However, we need to go beyond that discourse ……
Knowledge and knowing in higher education
Declarative knowledge insufficient to account for the knowledge
required for occupations, yet it has become the orthodox focus
for higher education
Discourse of schooling emphasises didactic teaching and deemphasises learning
Not anti-educational or ‘schooling’ or ‘teaching’, just questioning
some orthodoxies arising through modernity
Educational purposes and assessments too often shaped by
administrative imperatives, rather than those for learning.
Key project for higher education: Promoting and engaging
interdependence – with a range of sources and for diverse kinds
of outcomes
3: Means of student engagement
Broadening base of students’ engagement with learning
experiences in educational, practice, social settings and
through text and electronic sources
These might comprise:
Interacting with text, images sounds
Working with others
Studying with others
Being supported by others
Textually and symbolically engaged
Managing engagement (i.e. time jealousy)
Leads to knowing through:
text/symbolic forms – accessing, engaging,
interpersonal processes (e.g. ontogenetic ritualisations)
procedural activities (developing and honing)
observation
simulations
peri-personal space
haptic engagement
auditory and other sensory engagement
4: Learner interdependence
In conclusion, all the above suggests students being
positioned as being interdependent
Independence vs interdependence
Not helpful for tertiary students to engage in the
epistemological adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Engagement with others, teachers, technologies, artefacts
etc requires interdependence
Yet, students may need guidance on how to act and learn
interdependently
Not about improving ‘teaching’, but about teacherly
practices that promote interdependence