MEDUC 633: What Did You Learn?

What did you learn? What you are thinking right now as we wrap up this class? What direction will you go/what will you do with this information?

As I mentioned in my first blog post, university teachers might realize from taking a course on learning theory that they don’t actually know all that much about the theory of learning. They might do many of the things various learning theories recommend, especially those in the Humanities because of their connection with humanism. But there was, I quickly discovered, a whole lot that I wasn’t thinking about. And it’s not just me; I took a look at my Department’s learning goals/objectives and some other learning goals from my university, including my own course learning goals, and most of them just have the B for behavior, with the occasional C for conditions. As the chapter from Bierema et al. on critical thinking made clear, theory should lead into practice—and shapes practice. It may be that some recent struggles in higher ed generally are because learning objectives aren’t all that clear or are ordered to a behaviorist model (often in humanist cover) all trying to teach a generation that prioritizes community and so would benefit from approaches in Social Cognitive Theory.

So a major takeaway for me is a shift in my own thinking about my teaching, from what students should/could learn or know (content) to a much greater focus on the how of learning (process). And I plan to use that in my own university classrooms, as one thing I quickly noticed was how much my undergraduate students, usually in the 18-22 age range, share most of the qualities traditionally ascribed to adult learners, particularly the learning environment of a rapid “knowledge economy” and the neoliberal economic order that requires them to think about learning as relevant problem solving (i.e. ordered to getting a job). But because my own content both is and isn’t useful for that, I need to think of ways to deploy some of what I’ve learned about adult learners but for content that might not immediately appear “relevant” to these students.

Next, with all of the new context your have, define what you consider to be an adult learner. What informs your definition?

That gets right at the question of defining What is an adult learner? My own sense is that adult learning is heavily defined by context (see Bierema et al., 2025, p. 11), and while that might seem an obvious truism of all learning, I think adult learning is especially pressured by the conditions of a neoliberal society that turns you into your own little project that assumes all risk, making “economic-rational motivation theory” persuasive to me in many adult learning cases (Bierema et al., 2025, p. 160). Almost all of my own learning as an adult, including in this awesome course, has been shaped by these market conditions. You need to keep upskilling to keep up with the downskilling that economic change does to your existing skillset. The “enjoyable” learning that you do outside of work is often to deal with the stress of work itself. This is what Bierema et al. call “turbulent times” (2025, p. 4) or the “volatility and vulnerability” we all now experience (2025, p. 21). Most of my learning today, even my fun learning projects, feels anxious. Maybe, to adapt W. H. Auden, it’s an age of anxious learning. In a peculiar way this sort of solves the problem of motivation for the adult learner. Most adults who are learning want to be there (“intrinsic motivation,” Bierema et al., 2025, p. 155)—but they are motivated by the presumption that the where and what and how they are learning will fulfill that motivation, which is usually to solve a particular problem.

Finally, learning about all the different perspectives on learning, how do you define learning? Are you behaviorist, constructivist, cognitivist, etc.? A combination? Cite some sources to back up your definition. As a bonus, what theoretical perspective do you think this course was built on? (aside from Absorb, Do, Connect, which is more of a model than a theoretical framework.)

After learning about all the different perspectives, I would definitely be a constructivist/connectivist and would probably largely reject a lot of the elements of the other traditional learning theories.

Humanism seems to me to be too anthropocentric, as it tends to define learning as a human activity when it’s really a cosmic phenomenon, meaning that it emerges in a variety of species and even among inorganic matter if it’s configured into the right arrangements. I also disagree pretty strongly, or maybe at least have questions about, the idea that humans “are free to make choices and determine their behavior” (Bierema et al., 2014, p. 29). In an immediate sense that might be true, but our choices are very much conditioned by context—and some forms of humanism present them as almost Platonically transcendent capacities rather than context-limited possibilities. When used with students who are motivated by economic-rational forces, the humanistic approach to learning doesn’t work all that well. That said, since self-directed learning comes out of humanism—and works fairly well in some college contexts—humanism can inspire later forms of learning that have real value (Bierema et al., 2024, p. 31). So while I like the positive virtues that humanistic learning theory imagines, these can also be too tethered to ideas of the human. And Behaviorism seems to reduce learning to a stimulus-response model—"arranging the environment to bring about desired behavior” (Bierema et al., 2024, p. 26), and I find that less helpful. Cognitivist, for me, would need to be modified by embodied cognition, as it perhaps overly emphasizes abstract cognition, imagining thinking as an epiphenomenal activity, although its inquiry into how memory works is a valuable approach that actually sets up my own preference for a constructivist/connectivist approach. Constructivism aligns with my own sense that learning results from giving meaning to one’s own experience—“constructed by learners as they attempt to make sense of their experience” (Driscoll, 2005, p. 387, cited in Bierema et al., 2014, p. 36)—and that flows into connectivism, which creates knowledge by connecting discrete nodes into larger constellations of knowing. That seems the best aligned with my own sense of learning, shaped as it is by the work of the Frankfurt School or Deleuze and Guattari.   

And I would guess that our class was designed largely with that constructivist/connectivist model in mind! I say this because of the many excellent resources on connectivism in that module and because the course seemed to have a “make meaning from the learning experience” approach.