Learning

Over the past few years, there has been a shift in education practices of various actors, aiming to put the learner at the center of the process. In this conception of education, the goal is not to transfer knowledge, but to create an environment and to provide tools that will help the learner own some knowledge.

There is, in that perspective, a change of subject: A student is trained by a trainer, why a learner learns by himself. The process is active - it implies the involvement and empowerment of the learner, considered as capable of reasoning.

It aims to generate understanding rather than providing solutions.

Generate understanding through empathy,…

Adopting an empathic approach of learning may be highly beneficial for both learners and teachers.

By raising awareness of learner and teacher to one another, the learning experience is highly improved as all actors are likely to feel considered and respected. I feel understood, so I am more open to understand others and what they have to say. This in itself can open many of the barriers of communication.

Learners can make better use of all their sources of data (reflection, experience, senses, emotions) and release their full potential of understanding. Short and long term memory is improved, and knowledge is usually better networked (see below) and thus, more easy to reuse.

For teachers, empathy will help focus on the recipients and not one on the message to be delivered. One will be sensitive to emotions, experience, skills, pace of thought, logical paths and possibly adopt tools which will help the individual’s generation of understanding (stories, metaphors, role plays,…). Empathy will help the teacher find the most suitable approach, the right words to facilitate understanding.

The popular expression “winning hearts and minds” has often been used in marketing or warfare contexts. Empathy can help us introduce this holistic approach of human nature into the field of education.

… by experiencing …

You may tell a child that fire is dangerous, it is likely that (s)he will truly learn the lesson when burning her/himself for the first time.

Through experience we receive contextual and applied knowledge. We are not learning abstract lessons, detached from ourselves, but we have a direct and practical relation with knowledge. One may talk for hours about non discrimination and respect of differences, it will probably not be as powerful as facing concrete situations, for example meeting persons from another culture or travelling to another country.

From this observation, we can use various methods to enhance the learner’s empathic approach of knowledge.

Children are often fascinated by experiments. They want to touch, to test materials, to open everything, they try to lie, or to call attention through their cries. Experiments are a primary and very direct way for human beings to assess and recognize a reality. All elements are put at the disposal of the learner, who ultimately draws a conclusion by her/himself.

Stories are also a good way to empathize with the experience of other people. Children love stories as they help them go beyond their own experience, and because they usually contain a meaningful and practical message. Have a look at children books and you will see that authors and parents are teaching through empathy to their children: “Sonia has a little brother”, “Miki break his arm”, “the monster under the bed”,…

Role plays and scenarios are a combination of stories and experiments, providing a specific and relatively controlled framework to experiment a situation. Projections in the future, utopia, fictive situations are a few ways – among many others – to enhance the possibilities of experimentation.

Role plays and scenarios are particularly adapted to socialization learning, and help us better live, communicate or work together. They can also be an occasion to confront theoretical knowledge to a “reality”. For example a common method to teach first aid is to provide general knowledge, and then simulate accidents and complex situations which will engage the learner and give her/him an active ownership of the knowledge.

Experiments do not only generate “practical” understanding - they can help people own highly abstract and theoretical concepts. In this conception, a good demonstration will provide enough clues and examples for a reader to draw a conclusion by her/himself. It works a bit like in the board game called “Taboo®”: to make people guess a word, a player tries to give directions and clues, without ever expressing the idea directly (a list of easy clues and synonymous are forbidden). In the Taboo® game – players have to actively use their network of knowledge (see next paragraph) to understand what word the guesses refer to. When understanding (and not just a word) is generated through similar methods, one can talk of active learning.

Illustrations and metaphors will also help the child visualize and contextualize knowledge, making it more personal and practical. It will also fix the knowledge through associations. Metaphors also help to take distance from the knowledge and reuse, reformulate ideas.

Adding an emotional layer to the above stated tools will also sensibly improve the empathic experience of knowledge. This can be done by using humour (such as funny anecdotes, or surprising metaphors), choosing to link knowledge to the actual environment and interests of the learner, or calling sensitivity to others pain and concerns (for example showing pictures or movies).

Those examples show the importance of the learning environment and settings. Active learning occurs when the learners is receptive to the message, receive the right material and tools, and that their interest is called. I would like to restate here that not only empathy helps us reach our potential of understanding, but by promoting an environment of respect and mutual understanding which makes that one feel understood and included, one is much more open and receptive to others messages.

… and linking knowledge

Active learning is not just about integrating; it’s about processing a variety of information and data provided by our senses, intellect and emotions. It is a personal process.

An effective learning process should consider the systemic nature of human psychology; made up of founding events, existing knowledge, intellectual and emotional dispositions,… Passing knowledge is one thing, but ideally the person who learns should be able to make use of that knowledge. This is possible when knowledge is linked to the existing perception of the world of an individual. This can be done by calling all the learner’s sources of perceptions of the world: memories, knowledge, emotions, sensations …

It may well be that all human beings are different if one takes all those dimensions into consideration. This implies that we may all interpret a “common knowledge” slightly differently, and use it, implement it in a different manner. The tools, techniques and setting may therefore need to be slightly different for each person to pass a message / knowledge. Linking knowledge to other resources of an individual (past understanding, sensations, emotions, thoughts, impressions,…) will facilitate memorization and the practical use of the acquired networked knowledge.

Active learning is facilitated when the individual’s pace of thought, emotional sensitivity (which may be high or low), language, cultural references, values and centre of interest are taken into consideration.

In various countries, road safety campaigns are becoming more “shocking” and personal, showing concretely that family members or friends can be killed or injured by inappropriate behaviors. I remember one TV spot in particular showing a group of young friends coming back from the disco, and having a terrible accident as their seatbelts were not fasten. By showing a situation and people the target audience could identify to, this campaign got a much higher impact than the previous ones.

However this does not mean that all learnings should refer to the existing: it is obviously necessary to bring learners to visit new horizons and “think out of their box”. This explains why stories are a good way to teach to children, as they can transmit not only a lesson, but some impressions and emotions and a new defined and controlled context. I can tell my little niece “don’t climb on the ladder, you will hurt yourself”, an illustrative book showing “little Sara climbing, falling crying, going to see the doctor” will have a much more powerful impact on her.

Networked knowledge improves short and long term memory, creating various ways to access information. Personally I use this characteristic of networked information to memorize figures. I will add as much information as possible: emotions, movement or position, events or people’s birthdates, colors or sounds. This is an extended conception of mnemotechnic methods: one learns better by adding some information, and structuring it. For example to remember the date of the 18th of June, I will think of the majority / age at which I started university (the 18th) and about the start of summer, the cherry season thinking of the test and smell of it, the birth month of my brother,… I would choose those elements as they are rich of sensitive and emotional meaning for me. Emotions are either to be used as an enhancer (to increase motivation or engrave some data more deeply), or to add a dimension to social or individual psychological knowledge.

Networked knowledge is more active, as it is contextualized. This is very easy to understand: learning how to solve equations is not useful if one is not able to recognize when they can be concretely applied. This caused me some serious problems with mathematical teachers who were not able to tell me how we could use what we had been learning…

I will conclude this section by a Taoist proverb:

“To truly learn, one must forget”

A first reading of this proverb could be that in order to learn, one needs to forget all preconceived ideas, not judge and be truly receptive.

A second reading is also interesting: by experiencing knowledge and making it mine, I do not need to remember the source of knowledge. It becomes part of myself. This is what empathy is all about…

World of Empathy © 2009