Learning passionately

Posted on | August 10, 2007 | No Comments

John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist at Palo Alto Resaarch Center (and now Chief of Confusion, it would seem), in a presentation to an MIT conference back in December of last year, used the phrase: ‘passion-based learning’ to describe a highly collaborative and social mode of learning that he feels we should be moving towards in schools and beyond. He encouraged, “…situations where students who are passionate about specific topics study in groups and participate in online communities.” The social networking tools exploding around us can, he agrees, play a major role in enabling the kind of learning he is describing.

‘Passion-based learning’ is reminiscent of a phrase I have used with a number of audiences over the past few months, a phrase that I originally used to describe the Extreme Learning initiative in East Lothian and that Don Ledingham borrowed to use on the initiative’s wiki:

“…a kind of learning in which young people will be able to bring their passions firmly inside the bounds of their schooling (instead of having to defer their real interests to their lives outside of school, as is so often the case).”

This is a phrase that, no matter where I use it, always generates a nodding of heads as people think back to their own schooling. This has been as true in Costa Rica as it has been in Turkey as it has been in Scotland, and elsewhere.

The best schools, of course, have always been those that find ways to bring passion and enthusiasm and ‘fire in the belly’ into education; people, of any age, learn most deeply when they are engaged in learning about something they regard as critical to them, something they care about profoundly. And the level of understanding to be gained from engaging one’s passions can often (although not always) be enhanced and multiplied by sharing that passion with others, by working in a group that is committed to a collective and communal enthusiasm for the subject.

Final words to John Seely Brown, words that echo Ron Burnett’s thinking on the radical impossibility of teaching (taken from an article: Learning in the Digital Age):

“Learning is a remarkably social process. In truth, it occurs not as a response to teaching, but rather as a result of a social framework that fosters learning.”

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