re: Doing learning vs. discussing it

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Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Fri, 20 Aug 1999 09:13:13 +1000 (EST) 

Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 09:13:13 +1000 (EST)
From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au>
Subject: re:  Doing learning vs. discussing it

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> Bob Leamnson wrote:
> I believe that if we could just understand "education" as a
> two-body problem, a learner interacting in some way with an
> environment, then we should be able to discuss and analyze the
> learning half independently of the environmental part. The same
> might be said of teaching. Discussing and analyzing teaching is
> certainly not the same as actually doing it. Reductionism in the
> classroom is not at all appropriate, but in the teaching seminar or the
> workshop or the Internet forums, I doubt there is any other
> productive way to proceed.

any form of analysis of learning will not be an analysis of a process
which is truly happening and hence private, or independent of the the ways
in which we understand events. So if learning and teaching is a two-body
problem, the question is: what is the function of an analysis? To tell it
as it is? Or to tell us more things about that 'learner-environment
interaction'???? In the end, our goal is *not* to produce changes in
learner's brain. Rather, it is to affect the proces of that interaction,
or?

This is why the place, the function and hence the process of learning in
the *classroom* need fundamental rethinking. In this sense, we can escape
reductionism if we have a bigger picture of things. It is a common
mistake, at least in second language education, to make truth-statements
about how learning proceeds naturally (of course, we are now all more
scientific than teh science itself) on the basis of the conditions of the
environment which have not been critically examined and taken into
consideration in the first place.

Ania Lian

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