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Designerly Learning: Powerful Learning
An interview with Gordan Rowland
at the International Society for Systems Science Conference Toronto July 2000
Barbara Vogl
Gordon Rowland, Ph.D. is a fellow of the International Systems
Institute, a group dedicated to developing knowledge systems design
applicable in educational contexts. His research over the past decade
have focused on the nature of design process for which he has been
recognized with a number of awards from international professional
associations.
Barbara:- I've just read your book, A Tripartite Seed, and what struck me is that in all the literature on learning, you are emphasizing a most important type of learning for our times--Designerly Learning. By bringing learning-AND-designing together they become a more powerful process, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That is systemic.
Gordon:- Yes. Learning connotes developing knowledge, in most contexts knowledge of our present world and its history, while designing connotes creating new things that have some sort of practical utility. Combined they imply a more constructive than reproductive act. Most views of learning in our educational systems tend to focus on acquiring skills to address known problems and situations. Designerly learning is more directed to addressing the unknown, to creating new knowledge. In this sense, through designerly learning we create our future selves. In a quite real sense, we create the future.
B:- So where does problem-solving fit into that picture of education?
G:- Harold Nelson (President of the International Society for Systems Sciences) makes a compelling argument that designing and problem solving address different sorts of situations. In problem solving, you assume that a gap between what is and what should be is evident. The decisions you make are evaluated in terms of being right or wrong and there can be an assessment made of the correctness of your solution. In contrast, designing may address a problem or it may take advantage of an opportunity. It may be driven by needs or aspirations or solely on a new idea the designer wishes to pursue. During the process the decisions cannot be tested as right or wrong because they focus on an unknown future. Problem solvers use knowledge to make decisions that may be correct; designers use wisdom to make judgements that have consequences.
B:- That distinction seems crucial in understanding our present educational system. You can devise standardized tests for right or wrong decisions but how can you evaluate wisdom? We teach to what can be quantified.
G:- I agree. The forms of assessment typically used in our schools don't apply well to designerly learning. I think of designerly learning as a cyclical, emergent process with three major elements; experience, reflective processes, and outcomes. We can shape experiences in certain ways, we can encourage reflective processes, and we can examine outcomes. But when those outcomes are framed in the unknown future context, then their quality is poorly judged by comparison against a predetermined and restricted set of standards. If we are saying that continuous learning is terribly important we are setting up our educational system to work entirely against that by using these standardized tests. If you're going to say that what you are worth is based on the accumulation of what's known in the old, that simply doesn't prepare you for the activity of creating the new. It's not to say there aren't activities from the past that are worth knowing but it's totally insufficient for the kind of environments we'll be going out into.
B:- So the combination of the two, really, is greater than the sum of its parts. What strikes me is that designerly learning is not entirely "natural" or instinctive as you say (p.121). "It is rather a power we consciously choose to exercise in making of our life what we wish." That seems to me to be taking responsibility for our own evolution. How do you see the evolutionary process?
G:- I think of it simply as change, transcendence. I think about it as a level of consciousness guiding that change. Candace Pert mentioned yesterday that our DNA structures are so very close to other species. What separates us from them is in terms of consciousness. Her emphasis was on the frontal lobe of the brain. The frontal lobe is allowing the free choice....what to attend to... therefore what action might be appropriate. This is a great leap. So we are suggesting that evolution is not only choosing what to attend to but beyond that, watching ourselves choosing what to attend to and having the control over that process.
B:- It's like second order cybernetics.
G:- Yes. You go back to J Christopher Jones in his book, Design Methods (originally subtitled Seeds to Human Futures) which was and continues to be a big influence on my thinking, where he's talking about the designer as artist or magician, and illustrates this with his picture of the reflective one with a head looking down at a head looking down at another head looking down.
B:- It reminds me of double loop learning....what Gregory Bateson calls deutero learning--reflective learning in which the process is kept open. In the world of public schools and the politics of the view of the creationists toward evolution do you have any ideas as to how evolutionary principles could be described without raising any hackles. If you are talking about evolution as a component of instructional design that is a tricky question.
G:- Yes, I can't even sell it to my colleagues. (laughs) I would guess that you are never going to reach someone who has walled themselves off from their environment to the extent that some fundamentalist do.
B:- What do you mean by being walled off from the environment
G:- I think that they have a very firm boundary as to what's right and wrong. Saying, what I'm not teaching you, those ideas "out there" are morally wrong. But I think they are a small portion of the population. I think there is a great deal of room for the principles of evolution to be brought to a large population. We can talk about where we came from in an evolutionary sense and go back through the generations of humans but it simply doesn't respond to the more basic question of where did matter come from? The questions are never-ending.
B:- So those are the kinds of questions we need to keep alive in young people anyway, isn't it? Otherwise it deadens their ability and desire to learn.
G:- Absolutely. What we seem to have now is an early education system in which questioning is alive. But then there's something in the transition--middle and high school--where instead of responding to students' curiosity and genuine desire to explore and learn, instead of encouraging their questioning, we fill their heads full of answers. By the time they get to college, they view education as "give me answers." If you don't you are somehow derelict. And then combine that with the fact that you, as their teacher, are not judged on learning but rather on instructional process. Even where teaching is on par with research, tenure and promotion are often based on expert instruction, which provides a limited range of answers to an expected set of questions. We're often not doing any more than high school.
B:- It certainly doesn't encourage students to really think. And it doesn't go over very well to be really creative, so why try?
G:- I guess you have to do it because that's what you want to do. You do it in spite of whatever. Is it the case that doing something creative and special is going to get you in trouble? Not necessarily. For example, I'm really excited about starting one of my classes this fall. It's called Performance Technology, a term out of business and industry that basically connotes a holistic look at situations of human performance. I send students out into the world, the airport, the sidewalk, wherever and say sit down and look at what's going on for at least an hour. They ask what's going on here? What are the goals of the people in this setting? How are they accomplishing them? How could I help them accomplish their goals more effectively?
Then in the second stage of the course I have a group of actors come in from the Theatre Arts Department and do a simulation. The classroom is no longer a classroom; it is a company and the actors are the officers and workers. So when my students enter the door they are consultants, and they have to help the company solve their performance problems. We do this for almost a month. We videotape and review what they do. I sometimes insert myself to get them to reflect on actions and consequences, and at the end we have a thorough debriefing for both students and actors to tell what it felt like from both sides. Its wonderful!
In the third stage we work for a not-for-profit group in the community. The class carries out an actual analysis and review of what's going on in a certain area. It's totally real.
B:- So the students are actually consultants?
G:- Yes. The only difference is that they're inexperienced and they're doing it for free. I was at a benefit just last week where I met the new director of an organization we had worked for. He told me that the report from my students was a tremendous appendix for their request for funding, which totally justified what it was they were trying to do. That was so rewarding to hear.
B:- I can imagine that the students loved it.
G:- Very much. I just realized this relates to another topic we've been talking about. In telling others about this course, one of the things I point out is that we engage with the complexity of the world from the start. I don't expect them to understand and use abstractions at the outset. Instead of starting out with the abstract and expecting examples to loop down somehow to the concrete world, we start from concrete experience and gradually loop that up to the abstractions. It's a totally different approach and much more powerful I believe. It's more consistent with how we learn than how we are traditionally taught.
B:- So if you had students who were going into public school education could you adapt that design to how you would prepare them to be change agents in the school system?
G:- I think that the students I just described are, in fact, change agents. That's the nature of the course, and our program in general. Public school education is certainly a different environment, though. In fact, the first client we had for the course about six years ago was a local school district. The students and I were inexperienced and naive in this setting and it proved to be an impossible chore. The environment was so divisive and characterized by such in-fighting that we went back to making minor points about things like how they held their meetings. That might have helped some, but we couldn't address the more basic problems.
B:- Learning from that experience you can see how incredibly difficult it is to be able to bring about basic change.
G:- Absolutely. Although, the students gained a good understanding of how such educational systems work. The course design could be adapted for future educators with that in mind. I've learned much about how to guide the process more effectively since then, also. And that reminds me to mention that my course is successful because I'm able to recruit a very strong graduate student to help me. I can't be there with 20 students in multiple groups throughout the course. The presence of someone guiding them, gaining their respect, not necessarily an expert but someone who has experiences beyond their own is terribly important. That connection contributes to powerful learning.
B:- And I think the more we learn to connect with each other the power increases exponentially.
G:- Exactly. It allows complexity to be managed or seen through rather than artificially reduced.
B:- Are your students preparing to be teachers?
G:- Generally no. Some have interests in education, and some go into instructional design or training, but most are headed for other types of communication roles in organizations-public relations, employee communications, event planning, multimedia development, and so on. We're housed in a school of communications, not education or business. That's unique for some of the things we do.
B:- So the schools aren't getting the benefit of these people.
G:- Not directly. Perhaps when they become parents, or in cases when they work for schools as communication professionals. As you suggest, I think it would be worthwhile to explore how this designerly approach could be adapted in teacher education programs. Those programs seem to be drowning from the increased requirements for degrees and certification, ironically at the same time that experimental programs are throwing unprepared people into classrooms, people who have no clue as to what they will face and how to help young people learn, but maybe there are opportunities.
Traditionally, we give a great deal of emphasis in education and training to the achievement of particular learning goals expressed with relation to content. This is reasonable to the extent that we can anticipate the knowledge and skills that learners will require in particular contexts and that these goals fully encompass our desires for the educational experience.
B:- But today we really can't anticipate that much. As Stafford Beer says, "The future is not what it used to be."
G:- That's true. In my research I'm attempting to apply a different sort of lens to the issue. I'm stepping back from the criteria of efficiency and effectiveness and asking what is involved in a learning experience being perceived as great or poor. Informally I've asked my students to talk about their best and worst learning experiences for a decade now, providing much groundwork for more formal studies. Recently, I've conducted a couple of studies on what goes into making learning experiences especially "powerful." Ultimately I'd like to be able to not only describe the nature of such experiences but to make some suggestions to educators on how they might make everyday experiences more powerful.
B:- What do your formal studies show?
G:- With the help of two graduate students, Tamara DiVasto and John Hetherington, I've done two studies thus far. The first involved a month-long series of interviews, while the second used surveys. A fairly wide range of college students and working professionals participated. We obtained data on over 150 experiences, and identified dozens of factors or conditions (nearly 400 if we counted each individual's response separately) that participants felt were involved in making an experience powerful. In these studies we operationalized powerful learning experience as one that stands out in memory because of its high quality, its impact on one's thoughts and actions over time, and its application in a wide range of circumstances, and our participants consistently reinforced that definition. Here are some other results:
* powerful learning experiences appear to be unique to individuals, making prediction and prescription difficult
* they typically involve many factors and conditions coming together in a special way (and we see some evidence that this special combination is found by the learner him/herself and/or a teacher who adapts in order to maintain it during the experience)
* personal relationships between the learner and an expert teacher/mentor are very often seen as key
* activity or "doing it" in authentic context is often seen as important
* a majority of experiences thought to be powerful result in a better sense of self in relation to others and the world
* for a large majority of participants, technology either played no role or acted as a detriment to powerful learning
Much more work needs to be done here, but the results raise some interesting questions relevant to a number of current initiatives in education, for example, the focus on "standards" and the move to distance learning.
B:- That is so interesting in view of the conversation I had with Cyberneticist, Steve Sloan who teaches in the School for Designing a Society in Urbana, Illinois. He and his students are actively seeking such powerful learning experiences. He's here at the ISSS conference and I hope that you two can meet.
What do you think about Gordan's ideas?
Let us know.
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