© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Taking Learning Seriously

Boyer's original formulation is being impressively widened by the new President of the Carnegie Foundation, Lee Shulman, in his paper "Taking Learning Seriously" (1999). The ideas are worth a short recapitulation for those who are unfamiliar with the topic and the pace of its development. Shulman takes the notion of "professing" (and being a professor) as one of taking learning seriously.

Moving beyond behaviorism, he argues for a constructivist concept of learning, a "dual process in which, initially, the inside beliefs and understandings must come out, and only then can something outside get in...Any new learning must connect with what learners already know…..so to take learning seriously, we must take learners seriously" but learning "is most powerful when it become public and communal." (p. 12).

He then describes what he calls the "epidemiology of mislearning" -- a vocabulary unsurprising for a former medical educator, isolating three distinct pathologies: amnesia, fantasia and inertia. Of amnesia (that students forget what they have learned) he argues that "if we take learning seriously, we must take responsibility for the ubiquity of amnesia. We need to re-examine much of what we teach, and how we teach it" (p. 13). Fantasia, unlike amnesia, can be dangerous. "It is that state in which students are absolutely confident that they understand something, but they don't" (p. 13). Such misconceptions become land mines for further learning. The problem is that fantasia is endemic in the student population. Inertia represents "those states of mind where people come to know something but simply can't go beyond the facts, can't synthesize them, think with them, or apply them in another situation" (p. 14).

Regrettably, he continues, people seek solutions to these three problems in nostalgia, the view that if we only went back to traditional ways of doing things, each pathology of mislearning would disappear. Not so. Rather he stresses the principles of activity, reflection, collaboration, and passion, combined with generative content and the creation of powerful learning communities as the basis for instructional design.

The scholarship required is one that renders one's own practice the problem for investigation. For, he claims, there is an unavoidable unpredictability in teaching, as anyone who teaches the same thing to three different classes knows perfectly well. We are therefore not looking for empirically-based generalizations as theory to support practice. Rather, we are looking for the understanding of connections between the character of a discipline and teaching, what Shulman has called the "wisdom of practice." On this view of the scholarship of teaching, we can combat the pathologies, develop a literature we currently lack, and produce powerful pedagogies. Right now "we just don't know what our colleagues have done before or elsewhere have done. We don't even document or analyze our own efforts" (p. 16).

Yet this must only be a beginning. For example, he anticipates work being developed on "the disconnection between intellectual learning and moral or civic learning in higher education" and the "troubling absence of intellectual passion and commitment to ideas within our student populations" (p. 16). His paper concludes with a description of the Foundation's joint initiative with AAHE -- the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL).

Next Section: "The Scholarship of Teaching"

Prevous Section: "Introduction"





Creating a Culture for the Scholarship of Teaching By Hugh Sockett