4 What Do I Learn?
Jennie had expected graduate school to be a lot like her undergraduate program, with courses and their subjects. But almost immediately, Jennie realized that her graduate program had a different character. Jennie didn’t find so many subjects as activities. Jennie’s graduate school curriculum always had her doing things, not just reading and regurgitating things. In a way, Jennie was glad not to have to go through those same motions that she felt like she’d been doing since way back in middle school and high school, and all the way through her undergraduate program. But the different character and pace of things also threw Jennie for a bit of a loop. Jennie soon realized that she had to find a new way of learning because she was now learning different things.
Subjects
How you study and learn depends in part on what you’re learning. You wouldn’t study the same way for an art or physical education class as you would for a social studies or history class, for instance. A formal curriculum organizes learning around courses having subjects. The course names describe the course subjects or content. In middle school, the subjects might be English, social studies, science, mathematics, geography, and history. In high school, the subjects might be Spanish, biology, chemistry, algebra, geometry, and government. In college, the subjects might be anthropology, sociology, calculus, and behavioral and environmental sciences. In medical school, the subjects might be anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology, and genetics. In law school, the subjects might be torts, crimes, contracts, taxation, and immigration, among others. Students recognize the courses as different. Yet they also need different ways of studying for different types of courses.
Substance
A first type of course involves learning substantive knowledge. Substantive knowledge names, defines, and describes things according to their character and purpose. Learning is plainly a lot about substantive knowledge. Learning has to do with making meaning. To make meaning, we first name things. Names draw meaning, purpose, pattern, and category out of a chaotic world. Expect to learn lots of names and the definition, description, and purpose of the things named, having to do with the substance of those things. Look again, for instance, at the first- and second-year medical school courses listed in the prior paragraph. Medical students aren’t generally learning surgical practices in their first year. They must instead first learn the identity and function of the anatomy on which they will soon operate. Likewise, preschoolers and kindergarteners learn the alphabet by naming things, like apple, ball, cat, and dog, not so much by describing actions and procedures like act, bake, cook, and dig. We generally treat substantive knowledge as the foundation of learning, whether it is in fact so or not. To be an effective learner, prepare to absorb a lot of substantive knowledge, involving terms and their meaning. Get good at naming and defining things.
Relationships
We don’t just learn names, though. Stuffing your head full of disorganized names and definitions won’t serve you well enough in a course of instruction. You must also learn the relationships of things to things. Structure, priority, and authority are inherent in the world. A mountain arises out of many molehills, a tree out of many small twigs and larger branches. A mother and father come together to bear and raise children in a family, as the building block for community and society. The world naturally organizes itself into hierarchical patterns. Learning a subject requires recognizing hierarchical relationships within the substantive knowledge. Items are generally either related or unrelated, and then either equivalent, subordinate, or superordinate to one another. We construct this conceptual knowledge into mental maps, organizing our knowledge into schema or frameworks. Learning has a lot to do with connecting new things to old things in the right relationships, getting everything in its place. Learners thus succeed not when simply memorizing names and definitions but more so when being able to move up and down, and in and out, of various connected and disconnected frameworks. Expect to learn lots of relationships.
Structure
Learners must also organize their knowledge frameworks in different structures or ways. Subjects can have different content structures. Some subjects clearly sequence items. One thing always comes before another. To learn the subject adequately, a student must keep things in their proper sequential order. History, for example, arranges itself along a chronology. Get historical events out of order, and you won’t know your history. Other subjects have a clearly hierarchical order, with items above other items or groups of items. In government, for example, federal is generally over state, with federal and state each having co-equal branches of government. Other subjects have items or groups of items that overlap in part, so that to learn the subject one must know the common and discrete parts of various items. In biology, for example, amphibians, reptiles, and fish have common and discrete characteristics. You won’t know biology unless you can identify the common and discrete parts. Other subjects have items grouped in concentric circles, so that one set of items is a subset of another set of items. Birds, for example, come in 23 orders, which further divide into 142 families, which further divide into 2,057 genuses, which further divide into 9,702 species. Learning a subject has a lot to do with choosing the right content structure, whether sequential, hierarchical, overlapping, concentric, or another form.
Procedure
Yet we learn much more than subjects or substance. Indeed, we need to learn much more than subjects. We need to know not just the substance of things but also how those things work out in action or application. We are not just big minds walking around spouting out facts. While knowing things can help, we also have to do things effectively to get on in the world. And so, we need to know both substance and procedure. Substantive knowledge tells us what something is and how it relates to other things, while procedural knowledge tells us what the thing does and how to use it. Knowing things is good, but being able to do things is generally better. Indeed, know-it-alls aren’t much good at all. A know-it-all might be able to tell you everything you’d want to know about butter, flour, sugar, and oil but wouldn’t be able to bake a cake for you. To bake a cake, you need procedural knowledge. Indeed, you need procedural knowledge to do just about anything effective in the world. Value learning procedures every bit as much as you value learning knowledge. Be a doer, not just a knower.
Skills
Learning substance and procedure make a great start. Yet one still must acquire skill to put substance and procedure to use. To know the items to arrange in a procedure is just the beginning of being able to do the procedure well. Knowing how to arrange a mathematical problem, and even knowing the steps for solving it, is a good start. Yet until one practices or rehearses the skill of solving the problem, one has only made a start. Knowing the items to get out for the recipe, and having the recipe in mind or hand, is again a good start. But until one makes a few successful cakes, one hasn’t gained the skill of a baker. Large differences in outcomes exist among a beginner or novice, actor with intermediate or competent skills, actor with advanced or expert skills, and a true master at the craft. Substantive and procedural knowledge are necessities. Skill at bringing substance and procedure together, though, is generally what a program of instruction seeks. And life wants you to become masterful at everything you do. Prepare to learn skills, and highly value skill at what you’re learning.
Ethics
Knowledge and skill, though, don’t tell you the why of things. Knowledge and skill can make you competent, but they won’t tell you why competence should matter in anything. We need moral principles, sound values, and shared commitments or ethics to inspire and guide us in the right application of our knowledge and skills. Your family, neighbors, and employer will all value your knowledge and skills. But they’ll value your sound character even more than your skills and knowledge. You might have the skill to help your neighbor fix his car, but if you steal his wallet out of the car while you’re doing so, you’re not much of a neighbor. You might have the knowledge and skill to make your employer a fortune, but if you don’t have the discipline and ethic to show up for work, you’re not worth the trouble. You might be a great provider for your family, but if you’re also a brute and lout, your family’s better off without you. Prepare to learn the guiding norms, traditions, customs, and values of your subjects. They may be your greatest need and achievement.
Experience
You can benefit from pursuing another form of learning having to do with experience. The world in which we function has endless variables. As much as a program of instruction would hope to address the major variables, no program of instruction can teach the learner everything the learner may need to know. Space flight is an example where the stakes are so high that the instruction must cover exhaustively every conceivable variable, with the astronauts trained to perfection. Yet even there, the space agencies value an astronaut’s flight experience, hesitating to send up nothing but rookies. Experience is a great teacher of what educators or philosophers call tacit knowledge, which involves the ability to subconsciously intuit patterns out of circumstances, without even being able to articulate the basis for that knowledge. Our several senses and our subconscious processes are so much more acute than our explicit reasoning. Thus, seek frequent exposure to relevant experiences in your learning. Value immersion in the subject’s field and its full, embodied context. When you’ve immersed yourself in the field, you’re learning even when you don’t know that you’re learning.
Continuum
You might have noticed from the above description that the full range of knowledge, or whatever you prefer to call the things that a program of instruction attempts to teach, exists along a continuum. The continuum is from the simple and discrete upward toward increasing complexity and interrelationship. Substantive knowledge, indeed mere facts or data, is at the lower end of the continuum. Conceptual knowledge then organizes substantive knowledge. Procedural knowledge then puts conceptual knowledge into use. Skills refine our interpretation and application of substantive, conceptual, and procedural knowledge. Ethics guide and discipline our use of skills toward beneficial ends. And experience enables us to move from novice through competence toward mastery. Learning thus moves us from the simple, indeed the fool who knows little of what the world is, how it operates, and the ends toward which it points, toward mastery of the integrated, complex, and deeply rich and beautiful world of which we are the crown and glory. Consider it a sacred continuum.
Embodiment
While learning may occur along a continuum, with its goal the integration of all phases in a beautiful, sound, and useful embodiment, all phases of learning nonetheless occur at once. The kindergartener must promptly embody and ethically act out even the most-basic knowledge. Likewise, the first-year medical student is already projecting basic knowledge of anatomy into the complex practice of medicine, even if only by image, imagination, and quizzes, tests, and exams. Contrarily, the high schooler on a judicial internship will struggle to recall basic facts of law and government, while the engineering student assigned to design an element of a team project will struggle to recall the basic mathematical formulas learned in the first term. Every act of learning relies on or foreshadows every other stage of learning along the continuum because we are embodied souls, not merely mechanical assemblies or calculating minds. What we learn is ultimately the embodiment of knowledge, not the fact of knowledge. Indeed, in mastery-level learning, the knowledge disappears, leaving only its full embodiment, as the very definition of expertise. Learning is an exquisite and very human thing. What you learn is ultimately how to become more human, fulfilling your image of the divine.
Reflection
What are your favorite subjects to learn, and why? What is your greater knack for learning among either pure facts, relationships of fact to fact, how to follow procedures, or refining skill in procedures? Can you think of a clear example of one subject in which you gradually achieved those stages of learning from substantive knowledge all the way to refined skills in the procedure? Can you think of different knowledge schema or frameworks you have recently constructed? Are those frameworks sequential, hierarchical, overlapping, or concentric? Can you think of a different example of each of those types of frameworks? Can you recall a simple two- or three-step procedure you’ve learned recently? What is the most-complex procedure you’ve learned, with the greatest number of steps? Can you think of an example of a skill that you have learned recently? How did you refine that skill as you learned it? Can you think of a recent example when you learned a custom, tradition, value, commitment, or ethic within a field? Have you had a recent opportunity for experiential learning, when you got to put your learning into use in the field?
Key Points
Programs of instruction organize learning around subjects.
Different subjects have different substantive knowledge to learn.
A learner must organize substantive knowledge into relationships.
The structure of knowledge relationships can differ in framework.
Students must also learn procedures, putting knowledge to work.
Students must also refine their skills at using procedures.
We deploy knowledge and procedures through values and ethics.
Experience is its own teacher of intuitive or tacit knowledge.
Knowledge builds along a continuum from novice toward mastery.
We embody knowledge more so than simply learn and think about it.