Learning Theories Are Like Gumbo– They Include a Little Bit of Everything
Preparing students to be life-long learners and critical thinkers is the principal concept around my teaching philosophy. Like most students, I can give examples of teachers I enjoyed in my experience as a student and I can also give examples of teachers who I thought were terrible.
To provide my students the best opportunity to succeed in achieving their personal goals is not just a classroom objective to me, but as a life goal for them as an individual. To do this, I use the concept of a gumbo. Personal experience plays role in every learner’s ability to learn. The same goes for instructors, and my experience is a gumbo of other instructor’s methods and philosophies that I have encountered as a learner and I apply those with the needs and desires that I see within the students I teach every year.
There is not a one-size fits all approach to learning or teaching. Learning and instruction must be tailored and it much be ever-adapting to changes for each learner and for course content.
During my teacher certification courses almost 20 years ago, the professors and certification program seemed to center a lot of emphasis on Skinner’s (1973) behavior models and Blooms Taxonomy (1956). And these models, especially Bloom’s, were heavily reinforced during my first teaching assignment at West Orange-Stark High School.
I think they both have their place and are solid theories, but they also seem overly rigid and unadapting to changes in contemporary classrooms. Their methods are still included in my teaching methods as blended components of “how” I teach and “why” I instruct students in certain ways.
Creating an absolute philosophy is not possible for me and this is because I will constantly adapt the way I instruct students in order to best prepare them for what comes next in their academic or personal career. I can be specific about what I do, but I cannot be absolute. In any given course, I use multiple methods to reach and connect with my students. The gumbo is not meant to be a hodge-podge of ideas with hope that something sticks – it’s a multi-layered approach meant to cast the widest net of learning styles that my students may be best suited to.
Media Writing 1330 is the lowest level course I teach. It tends to have my largest number of students and students from a variety of majors and degree plans sign up for it either because of a requirement or as an elective. It is a traditional classroom course with supplemental materials on BlackBoard and I also create a class Google Drive for additional materials, rubrics and etc.
For example, I use behaviourist methods of activity and repetition (Hartley 1998) in my Media Writing 1330 course to reinforce writing structure using the Inverted Pyramid method for news stories. Getting students “used” to the concept of lead, the quote paragraph and then transition paragraph until the story is complete takes practice and repetition, especially for students not used to writing beyond a few paragraphs.
The behaviourist method was probably the method most of my own teachers used. It works, but it is basic in it’s approach and it relies on primitive human conditioning and for the very same reason it is successful, it also has a great weakness – it can be boring.
In my undergraduate studies, I was exposed to a lot of Jungian psychology by some professors and a lot of that discourse was about Jung’s concept of self and the unconscious collective. What concept I hung on to that was later applied to my teaching philosophy is better expressed with cognitive theories, especially as related by the principles outlined by Hartley (1998) and also by Bruner (1998).
Again in teaching students basic journalism writing and reporting the structure of process links all the parts of a story together. For example, if students brainstorm for a story idea, the next step is to identify primary sources to interview or research and from there to conduct the interviews or research and then further to construct a story, submit the story and then edit the story for publication. In this approach there are opportunities for the learner to get feedback on their results and the instructor can adapt to influence enhancing areas where the learner may have weakness or lack of success.
The end components of my philosophy are concepts that are the most newly indentified to me having only realized what they were called until the EDLD 5313 course. Social or situational learning models a lot of what occurs in newsrooms and serves as platform for students to personally engage in their learning. It seems to me on the surface to coalesce with COVA model on many levels.
At the University Press we have implemented a Maestro approach to staff instruction that is acted out with the structure of relationships to students to one another on staff. For example, an editor will coach a staff writer on how to post content to our news website. That instruction is based on the relationship of student hierarchy to one another on staff – supervisor to subordinate (Bandura 1977). But also on the relationship of participation and familiarity – students that contribute to the UP become familiar with one another because of the experience and time they share together on a daily basis. They get to know one another whether they want to or not just by being around each other. It is a community and the act of participation is a learning experience (Lave and Wenger 1991). The UP is a learning community by practice and the act of participating becomes knowledge.
The learning community concept is a theory that I plan to continue exploring and ties with the 21st Century learning theory (Jenkins 2009). To me this is a self-evident theory because of the nature of what I teach. A lot of emphasis is placed on student preparing for a career or the workforce in general. My colleagues and I are preparing most of the students we teach for careers in media and communication. There are some very specific skill sets that students need to learn in addition to general learning concepts involving self-perpetuating attitudes about learning and disruption that students need to develop on their own.
The 21st Century theory acts as a reflection for learners to internalize learning. Again, this is where COVA merges for the learner to take choice in owning the life-long attitude to continually learn in an authentic environment.
Authenticity is a self-reinforcing learning component for journalism because students publish their work for public view and it will receive public feedback. I have a colleague that jokes when referencing experiential learning with another colleague by saying, “That works great in practice, but how does it work in theory.”
My learning philosophy meshes with my teaching philosophy in that both should be opportunities for experiential learning.
A concept that I am ingesting in this course section is Siemens Connectivism (2005). I identify several processes that are already present in some of the things I do and I’m evaluating on how to formally include them in what I do. For example, media related careers are in a consistent state of change and evolution and students and teachers have to be prepared and understand that adaptation is essentially a natural course of the professional. It will always change technology and work and learning are often the same thing (Siemens 2005).
I’m also interested in Driscoll’s concept of Interpretivism and how reality is internalized and knowledge is constructed. So I tend to view learning in constructivists concept that Driscoll uses (Driscoll 2000, p. 376).
Learning and teaching, from my perspective, are symbiotic – they can’t be separated because one is necessary for the other to exist. It’s like the recipe for gumbo – your have your roux made from flour and grease, everything else is additive – chicken and sausage or shrimp and crab or fish and crawfish, freshwater or seafood or okra? There are a number of combinations that create a variety of flavors. Gumbo literally means anything and everything – it’s what you have on hand or you could find.
Learning theories work the same way. Educators have a lot of methods on hand and what works with one learner versus another may not and instructors have to adapt just as learners do. It’s an extension of the symbiotic relationship that occurs in any classroom.
References
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York: General Learning Press.
Bloom, B., Englehart, M., Furst, E., Hill, W. and Krathwohl, D. (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain, Longmans Green, New York, 1956
Bruner, J. (1960, 1977) The Process of Education, Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press.
Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1987). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing and mathematics (Technical Report No. 403). BBN Laboratories, Cambridge, MA. Centre for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois. January, 1987.
Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1988). Cognitive apprenticeship.Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 8(1), 2-10.
Driscoll, M. (2000). Psychology of Learning for Instruction. Needham Heights, MA, Allyn & Bacon.
Hartley, J. (1998) Learning and Studying. A research perspective, London: Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Skinner, B. F. (1973) Beyond Freedom and Dignity, London: Penguin.
Siemens, G. (2005) Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/article01.htm. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
Smith, M. K. (1999) ‘The behaviourist orientation to learning’, the encyclopedia of informal education. [http://infed.org/mobi/the-behaviourist-orientation-to-learning/. Retrieved: March 11, 2017].
