JISCMail - PRACTITIONER-RESEARCHER Archives

Thanks Dianne for this input which I find very useful and interesting. It raises one question…amongst others… but the main one is – to what extent is learning change?

From: Practitioner-Researcher [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dianne Allen
Sent: 29 January 2011 09:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Social Formation

No Sara, the filter is not suddenly eating your emails, rather something else has been eating my time (and perhaps others' time as well?); and especially the kind of time needed to offer the kind of brief but dense response that is the hallmark of Bob's engagements here.

My next step in responding to this line of exploring the literature of Argyris and Schon was to share some drafting done during the course of developing my thesis (2000-2004). The temptation was to attach the file.

The drafting of 2000-2004 didn't make the thesis because it was 'all too much'. But as I write, in part to find out what I think, and in part to indicate what I have learned and how I am applying that in practice to my presenting problem, some of what is in that file still has value for me and perhaps for others. And the working on that drafting 2000-2004 was part of forming what is my understanding for that thesis work, and for applying Argyris & Schon ideas since.

When I thought better of attaching the whole, I then intended to summarise the material, and flag what was there, and respond with detail if others saw something of particular interest to their line-of-work.

Then the rest of the week took over.

In my drafting work I was exploring what I understood 'learning to change' to be. I drew on three vignettes of my experience, and then extracted questions from them about the particular aspect of learning I was interested in.

Those questions were

The issues can be indicated, in part, by the following questions:

· Is learning possible, if the approach seeking to be learnt is contrary to the person’s values?

What is involved in learning which involves changing patterns that appear to have been laid down early in life and reinforced by experience and mental models?

In the second question, there appear to be at least three elements that may need to be attended to when learning to change:

Patterns laid down early in life
Patterns reinforced by experience
Patterns reinforced by mental models

Then, I turned to the literature of five key scholars, Chris Argyris, Argyris and Schon, Jack Mezirow, Gregory Bateson, Donald Schon and John Heron and built a conceptual framework of 'learning to change' that looked like this:

In my experience, and in the literature, the indications are that such change is difficult, complex, and takes time, and that significant levels of effort and support are required to accomplish such learning. A facilitator working in this area, with adults, needs therefore to appreciate the difficulty, attend to the complexity, and provide the validation that time is required.

The explanatory conceptual understanding supporting these descriptors is as follows:

Learning to change is difficult because it involves learning that a certain level of inquiry, the instrumental level, is not good enough for certain areas of activity, especially the human and social interactivity. The learning that is involved is at another level, so the usual techniques no longer apply, and new, more appropriate techniques need to be learned.
Learning to change is complex because it involves multiple factors: affect, presentation, proposition and practical; emotional, behavioural, cognitive; and learning to change needs to have all of those factors in place in a holistic and congruent way, and may involve change and interactive change in all of those factors.
Learning to change takes time since the learning that a certain level of inquiry, the instrumental level, is not good enough, involves multiple experiences over time, as well as the awareness that things in the human/social realm are not simply determined or determinable. It takes time to set in place each of the change elements of the complexity. It takes time to develop them as a whole and repeatable when the context is appropriate. It takes time to undertake the kind of investigation from scratch that is needed and to design another action if the cues from the context suggest that previous actions are not appropriate.

The significant levels of effort required include:

the cognitive work required for this level of learning
work on all dimensions for whole person learning
work on making conscious those elements of the unconscious that need to be accessed to be reviewed, with a view to considering change, for example assumptions and sets of interactive sets of assumptions that may be part of a world view

The support required to engage in this kind of learning includes:

the support of peer learners - where there is pooling of valid information from experience in the same practice, and engaging in shared challenging of explanatory models for the thinking-action complex
undertaking this learning while in the context of the practice, focused on taking action, and on making changes in actions in the specific live practice context
the support of occasional specific assistance from a facilitator who has particular competencies in the area of affective/ emotional learning and/or imaginal/ presentational learning that is needed to properly support the propositional and the practical aspects of learning to take intentional actions

The change required for an individual will tend to be specific to that individual, so the learning will need to be self-directed, and to be particularised to what that individual actually has identified that they want and need to learn. Learning to change in these areas is not just an individual enterprise, however. It operates most effectively when there is peer engagement in the same sort of learning, even though it might be directed at slightly different emphases in each individual case. The elements of self-assessment, and work with the particular, suggest that engagement in an effective process of inquiry will be a significant part of any learning to change. In this second round of my inquiry I need to now turn to the issue of what is involved in learning to inquire, and especially when the learning that needs to be changed is that which has been developed and/or accepted as the outcome of inquiry. For this kind of learning to change, the process involves stepping up to another level where the inquiry process itself becomes the subject of inquiry and learning.

Finally I revisited the kind of practice I was engaged in: preparing to take an intervention design to a group of professionals to see if what I had could help them move their practice from its present form to something more reflective and collaborative.

One quarter of the drafting was detailing exactly what of Argyris and Schon's work on learning, and its relationship to change, I was attending to.

So here is my best effort today, to show you that you email for/from this list is still working.

If there is something here that touches your line-of-work, and you need more explanation, this might help you identify its relevance, and help me share from mine what is relevant.

Dianne