For far too long cognitive scientists and learning theorists have perceived learning as a psychological and behavioral process while the industry has practically iterated time and time again that humans are not rational decision-makers.
I came to HGSE and the Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology with the goal of redefining the curriculum design process. I started as a teacher and a mentor, teaching undergraduate students professional development and organizational behaviors. My focus back then was to teach them how to leverage different learning and organizational theories to explain, predict and incentivize human behaviors, particularly learning behaviors to achieve overall collective performance. The one key takeaway from all those lectures and discussions is that humans are not rational decision-makers from our earliest days.
Before coming to HGSE, my design principles include the three principles: totality, versatility, and contextuality. First, totality means that the Design should consider the comprehensive learning experience, including whatever has the slightest interactions with the students. The experience can be conversations with their infant siblings or the space where students park their bikes to their seats in the classroom. Second, versatility means that the designs must be agile and allow room for teachers and, more importantly, students to modify and adapt to their individual needs. And finally, contextuality takes into account the environment that the individuals, their communities, and the learning differences that they might have in the Design. These practices fall primarily under the cognitive process paradigm (Cross, 1982), and they are dependent on competent leaders making the right call.
After taking LDIT 101 – What learning designers do, I have learned some new themes, which emerged from the class sections and the guest lectures. But under the designer’s eye, the emerging theme is that learning is not a cognitive process but an emotional one. I have never taken a course in psychology, nor have I lived long enough to discuss the science of affection. But as I take Professor Shari Tishman’s advice, I slowly look inwards and look from two different perspectives. I have noticed that emotional experiences have long-lasting effects. They change people for better or for worse, and everyone, in their own way, perceives and behaves very differently when they are emotional. And to make a design sustainable, everyone must have a role to play – designers must go in with a mindset of Design with, not Design for. This paper will discuss the three themes that emerged from my understanding of LDIT 101. For each theme, I will go over some of the design principles and discuss the implications.
Learning design is an affective process
As we are entering the third decade of the 21st century, should we still consider learning rational behavior? What if learning, no matter what learning paradigms it falls under behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, connectivism, or andragogy, is heavily emotional? What if, for the sake of productivity, we forgo certain aspects of designs and instead divert those efforts at delivering an emotional experience that leaves a life-long impact on a learner?
But maybe it is not as radical as it sounds as affective domains of learner taxonomy have always been around (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964). Ask almost any designer and experienced teachers, and they can immediately tell you the hierarchy of the Bloom taxonomy in the cognitive domain from understanding to creating. (Anderson, et al., 2001) But when asked about the affective domain, only a handful of those would know. And it’s not just teachers and curriculum designers. UNESCO, in their 2003-2012 Literacy Decade vision, set in the Dakar Framework for Action (2003), was to focus on math and literacy skills, which are, for the most part, cognitive processes. As a result, the student learned literacy skills without first having a love for their language, and they learned how to do math without being mindful of what problem they would be solving. It was not until five years ago, in 2016 did UNESCO finally realize and revised its 2030 learning vision to include affective learning outcomes (UNESCO, 2016).
Therefore the traditional science of learning persists. Teachers with years of experience, or even without, know for a fact that a cognitively oriented classroom is far more manageable than an emotionally expressive one. The status quo stems from an underlying assumption that focusing on cognitive outcomes would naturally enhance affective ones. Krathwohl et al. denied this assumption and suggested that affective behaviors also need appropriate learning experiences to develop. (Utah State Office of Education, 2006). We spent a lot of time and resources studying human behaviors, hoping to find how people think, learn, and behave the same way. At the same time, there is an overwhelming amount of literature spent on the unusual minds, those who do not conform to normality like Bill Gates, like Mark Zuckerberg. What if the systems we studied and tried so hard to design (and redesign) do not accommodate these minds? It is time that we yield our current understanding and concede to the reality that there is so little that we know about how different people learn, think, and behave. And finally, even if we somehow manage to reverse-engineer and map out how most people learn, can we apply that understanding to seven billion people around the world? Where do we even begin?
The problem with current thinking in education innovation
The first design principle of the IDEO design process is to empathize. We need to investigate the learners’ pain, struggles, and sometimes suffering to understand where we need to be. We must ask why they are feeling such pain instead of jumping into what could make the pain go away, and coming up with the correct answer to the wrong question is just as equally useless (Brown & Barry, 2009). Later in the course, Professor Dede also reiterated that most people came in with a solution instead of investigating the problems (Dede, 2021). This design principle arguably has the most significant impact on imagining my future design work. Instead of diving into all the technical Design of a school, I should first understand what they (teachers, students, and administrators) are going through even before diagnosing the problem. I need to do so not with an open mind, but with an open heart.
“It struck me that while there has been a major improvement in teaching and learning through technological means, the curriculum development process has relatively stayed the same within the physical campus: planning, execution, evaluation and reporting, and repeat. As a result, current work about curriculum innovation has been about disassembling and reassembling pieces of each stage to find the next best fit instead of challenging the fit of the whole process itself to every learner’s needs”. This excerpt came from my statement applying to HGSE, written around this time last year.
When faced with classroom reform practices, mostly introduced by technologists, teachers have mastered the arts of adopting them into their content and skill expertise, and they successfully did so piece-by-piece (Cuban, 2019). Therefore, the traditional grammar of schooling has persisted for decades while industries rose and fell every few years.
I, by no means, suggest that we impose something radical on our Design but offer alternative thinking to the design thinking so-called process, with the highlight on the process. Learning technologists have long been focusing on enhancing learning and teaching, finding the right tech, and an inclusive curriculum. This industrious thinking, focusing on increasing individual performance and, in this case: the best tool to teach and the best strategies to learn, has steered education into industry instead of exploring it from a holistic view.
We can continue spending the next few decades, maybe even a century, looking at how different learners learn, trying to categorize them into different theories and paradigms, and finding appropriate strategies to address those specific needs. But maybe it is time to ditch these theories entirely and accept the fact that we might not get there at all.
In my opinion, the problem lies in the fact that teaching and learning, now, is institutionally centralized. In reality, it grows naturally and organically without the awareness of both science and businesses. The puzzle of what plays the most crucial part in one’s learning experience remained unsolved, which brings me to my following design principle:
The future of learning is decentralized
For far too long, we associate learning with schools, with teachers. With the institutionalization of such a concept, we unknowingly narrowed learning to only occur in specifically designated spaces, be it in a classroom, in-person or virtual. Over time, these designated spaces, initially designed for a focused, accelerated learning experience, trapped the learner mindset. At the beginning of the semester, Professor Mehta told us that it would take us a couple more weeks for our class to switch from working mode or teaching mode to learning mode. What if these processes take place simultaneously? What if the learning mode was never actually off?
Much of my own LDIT experience comes from conversations outside the Monday and Wednesday sections. I learn about the various design perspectives and motivations from Hollywood actresses, civil rights lawyers, American ninja warriors, and physicians. These informal conversations are how I imagine learning taking place moving forward.
We hear a lot of decentralization from the banking, digital space, and most recently, the non-fungible token (NFT). While there are a lot of technological nuances, I do believe that the Design for future learning is decentralized in a few ways.
First, there will be a shift from the mentor-apprentice relationship. Under this paradigm, the best teacher is not the highest level of mastery, but those who has the closest mastery level with the students. By this Design, both the mentor and the mentee excel in their relatable ways of learning. The teach-in paints a clear picture of this point.
Second, decentralization of learning structures and outcomes allows for more learner autonomy, individuation, and interdisciplinary practices. The very flexible Design of LDIT 101 and the LDIT electives, in general, are these in practice. However, I would imagine that future decentralization will not stop at the course level but at weekly modules. Exposing learners to so many different learning concepts across so many areas is where innovation occurs.
References
Anderson, L. W., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., & Wittrock, M. C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, abridged edition. White Plains, NY: Longman.
Brown, T., & Barry, K. (2009). How Design Thinking Transforms Organization and Inspires Innovation. Change by Design.
Cross, N. (1982). Designerly ways of knowing. Design Studies, 3(4) pp. 221–227.
Cuban, L. (2019). Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice. Techno-Optimists Meet School: School Wins, Part 2.
Dede, C. (2021). Effectively Implementing Learning Technologies to Address Global and Local Challenges. Boston, MA: Harvard University.
Krathwohl, D., Bloom, B., & Masia, B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook II: Affective domain. New York: David McKay Co.
UNESCO. (2016). Education 2030: Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action for the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. UNESCO.ORG.
Utah State Office of Education. (2006). Curriculum: Affective domain and learning. Retrieved from http://www.usoe.k12.ut.us/curr/directors/documents/AffectiveDomainofLearningCedarCity.ppt