Learning Styles
Quite a while ago at one of the teaching and learning events universities like to hold (and in my institution we have apparently switched the phrase so that we no longer discuss teaching and learning but instead learning and teaching, in such paradigmatic leaps higher education likes to believe it actually does do something meaningful in the realm of education) I listened to someone explain to me the basics of learning styles. If you’ve been around any of the commentary that parades as research or even best practice in university education it is pretty hard to have missed this stuff, but the argument is that there are different learning styles, and that students (and ourselves) probably privilege one over the others. These ‘styles’ are auditory, kinesthetic, x and x. Let’s be really blunt here. This is a nonsense. The rationale behind it seems to be twofold. One on the one hand we are to use a mix of such styles in our teaching so that all students can get a hook into our content and so understand it. The second is the recognition that we have different ways of learning. Now, why do I think this is rubbish?
Well, in the first case it is pretty plain that we use all of them. Of course that’s the point, but the argument goes that we privilege, or are better learners, if we use our dominant style. However, this argument seems to rely on a very narrow conception of learning since as far as I’ve been able to understand, it largely utilises these ‘styles’ in terms of the receiving of content. That is, if I am an auditory learner then I learn well by listening to things (lectures, podcasts, radio?) and this is what I should emphasise. But surely this is a one sided view of learning where, regardless of which style I am apparently naturally attuned to, it is primarily about the reception of content. For me, that’s not learning. Learning is the ability to recontextualise information into knowledge. Recontextualise means taking something from one side and translating it to the other and through this translating (an essay perhaps) applying an idea, argument or some other device that shifts the information, for the student, out of the realm of information and into knowledge. It is the difference between knowing a fact or a definition, and being able to apply it or use it, possibly to other ends.
Now I imagine the advocates of learning styles methods would say that’s not the case, if you’re an auditory learner then you would also express your learning in this way, which I suppose would mean I’d enjoy tute papers. However, the majority of our forms of assessment do not support this, and even if they did there remains merit in being able to translate your understanding from one domain (style) to another because this ability to translate (for wont of a better term) is the mechanism that demonstrates (so makes identifiable for student and teacher) and supports deep learning, the reconxtextualisation I mentioned earlier. However, there’s a deeper issue I have with this. Quite simply you learn by doing. It really is that simple. You can be an auditory learner, kinesthetic, or whatever, but to learn how to write an essay you actually have to participate and engage in the practice of essay writing. If I want to teach students how to use a video camera they may like to read the manual, listen to explanations, but the learning shifts from a noun to a verb when they actually use the video camera. Writing, in my world, is fundamentally a doing. It is where thinking through and out takes place and is an active to and fro with ideas and the tension of the idea trying to find its own sense in your writing. It is not the reporting of the already known. So in my world writing ‘pushes back’, thought can be intransigent and to learn how to do this, to experience this, requires learners to write. Now, this is largely the same language that someone like Schön uses when he writes about reflective practice and learning in the context of design and music, and he emphasises not only the nature of the epistemic apprenticeship required but also the sorts of meta level questions and reflections that a good teacher (and student) needs to be able to learn by doing. So regardless of what learning style I think I might prefer, learning can only happen, in all cases, via a doing where in this doing something (knowledge, thought, a problem) pushes back. This is what matters as a learner (what do I do when it doesn’t work?).
And an after thought. I like reading, I learn a lot from reading. I learn a lot listening too. I also learn by doing. If I want to do something new on my mountain bike I’ll often try to find an explanation of how to do it, even watch a video, but I can only learn how to do it by getting on my bike and trying to do it. That is the only point at which I can reasonably say I’m learning how to do it. Everything else, the reading and watching, is preparatory to the learning. It helps, yes, but what you’ll notice is that I’ll use multiple sources of information in multiple styles because I want to learn. If I’m interested then I use them all. Same with my students – if they want to know about something they are really interested in then they read, listen, watch, sketch. My second reflective observation. I learn by reading and listening not because I’m unusual, I only pick up on new things, bits that stand out for me. I can read 50 pages and not really have a strong sense of the specifics, largely because I find it boring, pedestrian and stating what I think of as the bleeding obvious, but there will be one or two points in there that are new for me and those stick. Same with a lecture. Same with a documentary. It is not about learning styles but ideas that are worth getting and I seem to be able to grab those regardless of their ‘style’. I suspect I’m not the exception.
