The interaction and acquisition processes

The most basic understanding of how learning takes place, as I see it, is that all learning contains two very different processes, both of which must be active before we can learn anything. For the most part they will also be simultaneous and thus will not be experienced as two separate processes, but they can also take place completely or partially at different times (see section 5.5). The one process is the interaction between the individual and his or her environment which takes place during all our waking hours and which we can be more or less aware of – by which awareness or ‘directedness’ becomes an important element of significance for learning. The second is the psychological processing and acquisition taking place in the individual of the impulses and influences that interaction implies. Acquisition typically has the character of a linkage between the new impulses and influences and the results of relevant earlier learning – by which the result obtains its individual mark.

Up to a point in the 1980s learning research normally only concerned itself with the acquisition process. But from around 1990 important contributions began to appear pointing out that learning is also a social and interactive matter, and, as already mentioned in Chapter 1, some even went as far as to claim that learning can only be understood as a social process. For me, however, it is quite crucial for the understanding that both processes and their mutual interaction are included.

Today several learning researchers – such as British Peter Jarvis (1987; 1992) and American Etienne Wenger (1998) – operate more or less explicitly

with the idea of both an individual and a social level in learning, but their starting point is not in this. However, I shall discuss this here both because it is a very fundamental matter for an adequate understanding of learning and because it provides the possibility for maintaining – as something quite basic – that learning is regulated by two very different sets of conditions. What determines the process of interaction is fundamentally inter-personal and societal in nature and depends on the social and material character of the environment and thus on time and place. Much of the learning taking place in the industrialised countries today would not have been possible a hundred or a thousand years ago. And current learning possibilities are also very different in different countries and within different regions and sub-cultures.

The matters determining the acquisition process are, on the other hand, basically biological in nature. They have come into being through the development process that over millions of years has shaped the human being as a biological species and, especially, the central nervous system and the characteristically large brain with the high forehead which, in crucial ways, have given us some quite special learning possibilities that no other species has.

It is this duality of two sets of possibilities and conditions, each of which is enormously multiple, that fundamentally forms the frame of the almost limitless and never-ending human learning that I will try to uncover in more detail in the book. The first step is a graphic representation of the two processes and their interaction.

In Figure 3.1 the interactive process of learning is depicted as a vertical double arrow between the individual and the environment. As the environ- ment – the outside world – is the general basis on which the whole rests,

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I place it at the bottom in the model, while the learning individual is the specific ‘case’ which I place at the top. In this manner I also constitute the two levels, the environmental level and the individual level, which are part of any learning process.

I then present the acquisition process as yet another double arrow. As this is a process that exclusively takes place on the individual level, I place it horizontally at the ‘top’ of the double arrow that symbolises the interaction process. The duality in the acquisition process consists in this process always including an element of both content and incentive.

The content element concerns what is learned. It is not possible to speak meaningfully about learning without there being a learning content, something or other that is learned. It can be in the nature of knowledge, skills, opinions, understanding, insight, meaning, attitudes, qualifications and/or competence, and other terms can also be used. I return to all of this in Chapter 5. What is decisive here is that learning always has both a subject and an object: there is always someone learning something, and it is the acquisition of this something that is the content element of learning. But acquisition also has an incentive element, which quite fundamentally means that mental energy is needed to carry out a learning process – in fact, a considerable amount of people’s energy consumption, on average 20 per cent, goes on mental processes (Andreasen 2005, p. 60). At any rate something is necessary to set the acquisition process in motion and carry it through: there must be an incentive. This is what in everyday language is called, for example, motivation, emotions and will, and one of the most important results of the learning and brain research of the last decades is that the incentive basis of learning – i.e. the extent to which it is, for instance, fuelled by desire and interest or by necessity or force – is always part of both the learning process and the learning result (for example, Damasio 1994; LeDoux 1996). It is these moving and energy forces that constitute the incentive element of learning.

I have here divided the mental field to which acquisition is related into two broad main categories: content and incentive. I thus cross over the more traditional division of this field into three main categories: the cogni- tive, which concerns cognition; the affective, which concerns the emotions; and the conative, which concerns volition (for example, Hilgard 1980). This has to do with the fact that I find this tripartite division problematic in many ways. On the one hand, the division continues the separating out of bodily and motoric elements, which I have already criticised in Chapter 1. On the other hand, it separates the emotional and volitional and completely overlooks the motivational. In my opinion this distinction between different incentive forces can very well be appropriate in everyday language, but it is difficult to maintain professionally with clear categories and delimitations. I also find the bipartition between the content, the cognitive, the motoric and the rational on the one side, and the incentive, emotional, motivational

and volitional on the other, far more consistent and also in line with modern brain research (e.g. Damasio 1994, 1999).

Just as the vertical double arrow of the figure shows that the individual and the environment are two instances that always form part of the interactive process in an integrated way, the horizontal double arrow shows that in the acquisition process there is always an interaction between content and incentive. But the arrow, in itself, does not show anything about the nature or weighting of the two elements, only that they always contribute in an integrated way. I shall return to this later in the book.