Can you change the way you learn?
This is the question posed to me by my Enrol Yourself blogging relay predecessor clémence tanzi.
To my mind, this question breaks down as:
- Can you become conscious of the way you learn?
- If you are conscious of the learning process, can you then do anything to change it?
At first I had a large dose of imposter syndrome (which Clem wrote about here) and stalled. I have not studied this area, I don’t have a qualification in it… I didn’t feel that I had the authority to write publicly about it given I am not an expert.
Or am I … ?
I can bring to mind 3 significant moments in the past few years where my learning style has changed. So I have decided to write about that.
Moment 1 — Leaving employment to be self-employed
What a steep learning curve! No administrative structure, no management, no staff learning budget, no colleagues, no set calendar. Just an ambition, a decreasing financial runway, and a blank piece of paper. No-one to say what I should do, or to validate whether I was doing it correctly or not, or to say when it was done. Very different to my experience of school and employment to date. So I found a mentor to give me advice, and offered my time and help to three others whose work inspired me. (One of whom I eventually joined as a co-founder and we ran The Civic Systems Labtogether for 6 years working to understand and spread new forms of participatory activity to create more equitable neighbourhoods.)
Changes in learning:
- how to feel comfortable learning on the job, while delivering outcomes
- how to design practical ways to test, pilot and develop ideas
- how to hold this level of emergence (more or less!) confidently
Moment 2 — co-founding Trade School London
Trade School is an open learning project, based on barter. Anyone can offer to teach, and request a list of items for pupils to choose to bring for them, in return for their class. I have been to classes on how to make a wormery, sign writing, film editing, book publishing, growing food in the city, ice-cream making, letterpress, cycle maintenance, Danish Christmas cookie baking… The range is endless! I have given back in return fruit, design advice, a favourite recipe, paint, wrapping paper and plant pots.
Changes in learning:
- how to respect that the role of learner and teacher is entirely interchangeable
- how to use barter (or other sharing mechanisms such as food) as a way to create social exchange and form a peer learning group
- how to design frameworks to offer anyone the opportunity to teach, and surface an endless range of classes and depth of expertise
Moment 3 — joining Enrol Yourself, peer learning marathon
I joined Enrol Yourself partly because after years of being self employed, I craved a learning cohort of peers and some external structure again! And for the luxury of the opportunity to learn without it being directly linked to my income. (Turns out that the time pressures of learning and holding down a full time job also isn’t quite the luxurious pace I imagined… PhD anyone??).
Changes in learning:
- how to develop learning design as a skill, largely by seeing how the Enrol Yourself co-founders have designed the structures and processes that we have undertaken as a cohort
- how to prioritise self-care alongside learning and working (yes, this blog post is technically 4 weeks late, but I got it done without pulling an all-nighter or giving myself a hard time)
- how to learn through helping others — sharing skills, resources, contacts and brainpower on other people’s projects, although potentially seen as a less productive way to use limited time if you are very output focused, often creates new trains of thought that impact my own learning question
Conclusions
Based on my experience to date — I think that it IS possible to change the way you learn. But it is ultimately easier with peers and a structure to support you, and a wider system that is designed to enable and recognise new forms of learning.
So the question I pose back, is not whether it is possible to change how you learn as an individual — but how can we collectively and intentionally change the way we learn for the better; what does this mean for how we redefine our concept of lifelong learning; and ultimately how we re-design our future schools and workplaces?
