Panel Participants:

Robert Jensen, Chancellor, Pima County Community College District, Tucson, AZ.
Laurence J. Victor, psych "instructor" at Pima College - principle author of this document.
Bob Cook, strategic planner at Pima College.
Lyndon Taylor, principal in the educational consulting firm of Maas, Rao, Taylor & Associates.

Imagine you are opening a 10,000 piece puzzle, the pattern of links between pieces representing the organization of knowledge relavent to our concerns. Each piece has conceptual links with every other piece, with different types of links and different strengths. You pick up one marked START, and a string of about 100 pieces are pulled up with it. The pieces represent the paragraphs of this document. Had you picked up any other piece to start with, a web of linked pieces would arise, a few (not just one) linked to the initial piece -- and if reached high, all the pieces would have risen from the box. But, had you started with a different piece, a different version of the web would have arisen. If you were accessing the expanded version of this document on the WWW, after this Introduction you would have the option of going three major directions (CHANGE - CONTEXT, LEARNERS for QUALITY EDUCATION, or LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING/EDUCATING) without priority. There is no strong reason for their order in this imposed linear document.

Paradigms, Perspectives, and Barriers

"Paradigm Shift" is a cliché cover, for many, to trivialize the complexity of change. A nice simple line to cross from "primitive" to "enlightened". Because they are able to name-the-shift, many feel themselves to be members of "the chosen". There is a tendency for people to speak of paradigm shifts in the singular; probably because they are so awesome, that to consider one is about all a mind can take. Historically, we may find evidence of singular paradigm shifts. However, today, we are in swirls of networked-nested systems of many different, but interacting paradigm shifts; such that it is probably dangerous to attempt to consider any one in isolation. Paradigm shifts are very real, and very poorly comprehended, by all. The concept of a "culture" may be re-defined in terms of its system of adhered to paradigms. Just as it can be very difficult to communicate between different cultures (in the ordinary anthropological sense), it can be near impossible to communicate between different paradigm systems.

Is it the responsibility of education to facilitate paradigm shifts? In what ways do our contemporary educational paradigms hinder or enable learners to shift paradigms? Can paradigm shifts be "taught"?

The contemporary system of educational paradigms involve the practices (1) of categorizing educational services into curricula of discrete disciplines, degree programs, courses and classes, (2) of scheduling same with fixed time-frames into classtime periods, semesters and academic years, (3) of assigning single dimensional grades for certification, (4) of providing instruction by employed faculty to enrolled students in classrooms, (5) of confusing formative and summative evaluation, and (6) of quantifying student learning as measured by the time a student receives direct instruction (lecture) or its equivalent {the Carnegie Unit}. These six (and we could cite others) hang together as a tight, mutually reinforcing system.

In her keynote speech (titled: "What if ... higher education functioned to maximize learning for each individual") to The League of Innovation for Community Colleges conference in 1978 (where the conference theme was A FOCUS ON LEARNING), K. Patricia Cross pointed out that the primary backbone of contemporary higher education: semesters, classes, and grades "ironically .. must be defended on grounds other than related to student learning; to put it bluntly, they exist to meet administrative and fiscal requirements, not to enhance student learning." In a humorous analogy of a furniture company, releasing chairs at the end of the day, whether completed or not, Pat Cross -- two decades ago was pleading with us to place an Accent on Learning -- proposing that the "chip" gave us the opportunity for the full individualization of educational facilitated learning (and that was before the invention of the Personal Computer). What Pat Cross called our attention to was a contrast of PERSPECTIVES, alternative ways of conceptualizing educating and learning. Until we move away from the six practices cited above and move into practices that focus on optimizing the learning of each learner, we will not have shifted to a Learning Paradigm.

Psychological research tells us that when there is cognitive dissonance, such as between a perspective and a practice, the resolution is usually for the perspective to modify to match the ongoing practice. For new perspectives to bring about shifts of practice, more is needed: education to facilitate the move from new perspectives to paradigm shifts. A third factor, barriers to change must also be considered -- as historically, the availability of new and attractive perspectives have not been sufficient to catalyze paradigm (practice) shifts. [See Paradigms and Barriers, by Howard Margolis.]

On the spectrum of educational objectives, opposite from the simple memorization of data would be facilitating the emergence of new perspectives and the development of systems of paradigms consistent with them. That we cannot find experts to teach us what to do, in itself, points to the need for an educational philosophy that is not dependent on expertise, requiring a bootstrap strategy. [Visit Douglas Englebart's Bootstrap Institute at http://beluga.dc.isx.com/bootstrap/final/about-bi.htm]

Modern to Post-Modern

This seemingly "abstract & philosophical" section is important, in that it sets the context for you to accept that you are ignorant, incompetent, and dysfunctional with a positive (if not cheerful) outlook, as the "modern" either/or logic doesn't hold. From a "postmodern" perspective, we can look honestly at how inadequate the best of education is, without blocking our examination of our awesome and realizable potentials. [See John Truett Anderson's Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, for a readable survey of postmodern perspectives.]

The cluster of new perspectives and paradigms emergent in education are embedded in a much larger system of changing perspectives and paradigms. When the Learning Paradigm is comprehended from "modernism", there is only a shift in gaze from "an instructor's classroom performance in presenting a discipline to a statistical model of student population" to "an individual enrolled student's classroom performance as recipient of instruction". To make the enrolled student our focus is to only modify, not abandon, the Instructional Paradigm, which has many variants. Indeed, the phrase "to produce learning" in this conference's definition of The Learning Paradigm, and our current concern with "Student Outcome Assessment" may imply that we haven't even made the shift to "individual student performance in the study process".

[As an aside, and a practical matter, I believe that if we would shift our focus to assessing "student study processes", the assessment of outcomes (which is fraught with problems as to what outcomes are important, and whether the most important outcomes can be assessed by measures we have the time and resources to use) will take care of itself.]

A major chasm is widening, with roots in antiquity, which gained abstract significance earlier this century in Continental Philosophy, and in the last decades has appeared in the practices of global economics and politics, many of the sciences, and in those who are developing simulated realities online. This chasm is the division of worldviews, labeled "modern" and "postmodern", which cannot be briefly described. What follows should be viewed only as caricature.

From a so-called "modern" perspective - a few centuries old - a person believes in a single, potentially knowable objective reality, with science's purpose to converge on a single, logically consistent explanatory system for that objective reality, with a simple either/or linear logic for Truth or UnTruth. The fact that there are many realities claiming to be the TRUE REALITY, doesn't phase trust in "modernism" because modernists KNOW that they have special access to the TRUE REALITY.

Postmodernism currently is a chaotic system of thinking and acting that questions each of the basic assumptions of modernism. Realities (and selves) are multiple, not singular. No one can have direct access to an external objective reality, so no one can confirm that their constructed reality is "really real". The new physics of reality, quantum physics, established in 1926, proved that a "single logically consistent explanatory system" was insufficient - in Neil Bohr's Principle of Complementarity and the wave/particle duality. In 1931 Kurt Godel demonstrated that linear logic was an insufficient tool for large issues. That these world shattering discoveries are slow in trickling down to become part of our newly emergent "common sense", is no excuse not to include their truths in our practice of designing new educational system for the 21st Century.

Although the emergence of this new and radical perspective on reality and truth may currently be comprehended (if only vaguely) by a small minority, its momentum is great; and it cannot be ignored by those who are planning for the future. There is strong evidence that major global institutions now behave as if in a postmodern world, even though most of their individual human members my still adhere to the modern perspective. These institutions have shifted paradigm before most of their members have even learned of the new perspective. [See: Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle (1995)]

One of the multiple, relative realities of postmodernism is the reality of modernism. Indeed, to conduct a specific project over a moderate time interval may require the temporary adoption of a modernist perspective, for that project. It is when we consider the relationships between projects, and the many consequences of projects, does the postmodern perspective become necessary.

As we move from the perspective of focusing-on-learning to practices incorporating a Learning Paradigm, we will discover that what we come to comprehend in association with the terms "learner" and "learning" will change radically. The major change will be as to who is doing the "focusing" - from the educator attending to the discipline or students to learners (individually and collectively) attending to -- not only their own responsibility for their own learning -- but their responsibility, as learners, for the design, planning, implementation, maintenance, and upgrading of those educational systems they employ. This is what is meant by LEARNERS FOR QUALITY EDUCATION. Some consequences of actually moving to a Learning Paradigm follow:

We will focus on both, the learning/educating process, and the learner/educator.

• Student and teacher as meaningful categories will disappear. Every mature learner will be an active component of educational systems, not clients in an external population to be served by them. All who participate in facilitating learning in others, will be perpetual learners, themselves. The sharp distinction between learning and educating will blur (except, in a few modes, such as training, where maintaining the distinction is important).
• We will all become learners/educators in an emergent Learning Society. This development will begin early in childhood.

As responsible adults, we will need to divide our lives rather equally into three major domains: Working, Sharing, and Learning; although there will be many moments when these domains overlap. Today, educators are compensated only for working (doing tasks assigned by their employer institution, such as teaching or managing); learning and sharing (communicating and collaborating with others -- including functioning as educator for colleagues, and participating in educational R&D projects) often have to be done "after hours". We will focus as much on the processes as those who perform the processes (who will be, in some instances, teams and organizations). [See Seymour Sarason on a deeper perspective re work, in Work, Aging, and Social Change.]

The learners to first feel the learning paradigm will be the contemporary educator

(faculty & administrator), not the conventional student.

Competencies to facilitate learning must be learned. Educators habituated for instruction cannot just shift practice overnight, even if they desire to, and are supported. We have no proven means to facilitate learning to function within a learning paradigm. The first requirement of anyone wishing to participate in the creation of better educational systems is to admit their lack of sufficient knowledge and competence to make any decisions -- other than those required for them to gain the requisite knowledge and competencies. This implies a bootstrap strategy whereby we must be learning and doing concurrently, where WE become the primary focus of our Learning Paradigm. [See Seymour Sarason, The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform.]

Aurelio Peccei - founder of the Club of Rome, in the Club sponsored study published as No Limits to Learning, closes his introduction with the following: "what we need at this point in human evolution, is to learn what it takes to learn what we should learn - and learn it". He calls this a "micro-riddle within a macro-riddle", to be read in two ways: FIRST, we know what we SHOULD learn, but must learn what it takes to learn it; SECOND, we don't even know what we should learn, so we must learn what it takes to "learn what we should learn". I recommend that we work from BOTH interpretations.

PROPOSITION: The fastest way to move into the learning paradigm, will be to give initial emphasis to our own learning -- as educational change agents -- and pilot models of future educational systems for ourselves and others.

COROLLARY: This will be the most rapid way to improve education for enrolled students.

It is not expected that anyone will accept these proposals without study. No single document could make a convincing case. The name, Complementary College, is proposed to label a model that attempts to apply these propositions. Complementary Colleges should be autonomous, but complement established institutions by doing that which they cannot or will not do. Wholly new educational institutions will eventually emerge from the Complementary Colleges, which will network and collaborate with each other across the planet.

A focus on learning requires that we give full respect to the learner, as primary component of the learning paradigm system.

This is not a call to turn our institutions over to students, although many students are as competent as we contemporary educators with learning paradigm skills. Today, more and more learning is not the receiving of expert knowledge, but participating in the creation and refinement of new knowledge. Even where a domain of expert knowledge is to be transmitted, how it is to be presented, and in what contexts, becomes an empirical issue, requiring active participation by the learner. If a person is raised within a learning paradigm, they can early be given participatory responsibility for the design and management of their own learning -- consulting expertise when needed. Content expertise will remain important to insure "validity", but content expertise should no longer determine learning/educating practice. This will eventually lead to alternative organizations of educational curricula beyond the academic disciplines.

Learners will always be aware that they have more to learn about learning, so learning-to-learn and the learning-to-learn-to-learn will develop as collaborative ventures among learners -- because they value greatly what they achieve by working together. With the metaphors of adventure, community, exploration, movement over time into cyberspace domains, Learning Expeditions will replace courses and programs in Learning Paradigm systems. Possibly the greatest difficulty contemporary educators will have in adopting the learning paradigm, will be to resist teaching others and keeping focus on their own learning (and how their own learning interacts with the learning of others, and will be augmented when others learn well).

"Study" Revisited.

I am fully aware that terminology can't be imposed. Yet, I propose that we consider that our focus should be on the "study process" and not on "learning". I want immediately to emphasize that I am not using the term "study" in a narrow and negative sense given it by most students, and ex-students. I propose to elevate the term "study" to label the most "human" of all processes, one that distinguishes us from other life forms. "Study" is the most complex process that a human is asked to perform, and "interestingly" that process most under-facilitated in our educational systems.

I propose to re-define study as "applied cognition", with "cognition" labeling the integration of four fundamental cognitive processes: perceiving, thinking, remembering, and learning. NOTE that "learning" - in the psychological sense, is but one of the component processes involved in "study". Note also, that "learning" is much more than "memorization". [Technically, I define "learning" as a process leading to an irreversible alteration of the biological structure of an organism, resulting in a modification of the repertoire of potential competencies of that organism in both behavioral and mental domains.]

Study, as APPLIED, implies an element of intention and systematics. Incidental learning is not an outcome of study, although it may accompany study. By "intentional" I don't mean to restrict it to explicit conscious control. Our "intentions" may be holistic, deep and "intuitional" -- it is our whole being that exhibits "intention". The same applies to systematics -- we may develop systematic practices without being explicitly conscious of what we are doing.

Also, the bulk of the four cognitive processes integrated in study occur in the whole system -- and only a small part may enter consciousness. By implying that study (in the narrow view of it in contemporary education) is under conscious control, we greatly distort our comprehension of how study "works", and thus generally fail in assisting enrolled students in improving their study practices. [Note, I have not said that study is primarily subconscious, or unconscious, because that sets our "whole" up as being referenced to only a small part, "the consciousness". Also, many people still view "the unconscious" as the repository of repressed negativity -- and not primarily the font of our creativity.]

When we look at "study" from this new perspective, we immediately realize how grossly inadequate all our efforts at assisting students in learning to study have been. Given that our human mind/brains are the most complex systems in the known universe, and that "study" is the most complex process known within such systems, it is "strange" that study (along with teaching, managing, and planning -- the trivialized quartet) is virtually ignored as an "educational objective". Contrary to being depressed by learning how incompetent we are, re studying, we can become energized to begin the long, life-time adventure of improving studying.

The primary motivation to study should be the anticipated enjoyment of the study process itself -- what greater activity to be engaged with than applying such a powerful system (ourselves) to our own growth and development. Study can be a mystical experience, a true high, containing pleasurable moments as strong as any other activity. Utilizing the important distinction between "pleasure" and "enjoyment", study can have its positive frustrating and challenging moments -- when it may not be "pleasurable", but still "enjoyable". WE, ex-students ALL, must adapt this perspective of study, and be willing to again consider ourselves as "STUDENTS" -- anyone who engages in the STUDY PROCESS, as re-defined here.

Advanced Developmental Education for Educators

Augmented Professional Development Programs, where the learning paradigm is researched, developed, and the learning facilitated, should become holistic, autonomous educational systems in their own right. Participation should be open to anyone interested and competent to perform, which includes many of our more "mature" students. Credentials from instructional paradigm institutions should not be a requirement for participation in advanced learning paradigm systems. The new educational technologies will first bear fruit in these Augmented Professional Development Programs. Most of the new educational technologies are being designed for the instructional mode, and need modification before they will optimally facilitate the learning paradigm.

Greater Resources for Educational Development

When we move into Learners for Quality Education paradigm systems, we expand the human resource pool for education by a factor represented by the student/teacher ratio in our current systems. Expand these numbers further as we move into a Learning Society, where everyone becomes learner/educator. It might be shown that quality education is indeed cybernetically impossible if it requires that an elite of educators attempt to control the learning of the majority. With proper planning, these new human resources could become available in only a few years. There are many students, right now, prepared to shift into a Learners for Quality Education paradigm; students who are deeply dissatisfied with both the content and quality of instruction they receive.

LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING/EDUCATING

If we are serious about shifting a focus to learning, a necessary consequence will be to learn more about learning, educating, and organizing.

As you may have noticed, I include "organizing" as a vital process on par with "learning" and "educating", as the latter two are fundamentally social processes, and are greatly dependent upon the dynamics of the social organization within which they occur. In essence, educating is a derivative processes, resulting from an application of organizing principles to facilitate the learning of individuals and teams. In addition, it has become popular to consider social organizations, themselves, as "living systems" capable of "organizational learning".

Well Kept Secrets

• Most educators know less about the processes they attempt to facilitate than an X-year old child knows about the functioning of the space shuttle.
• The R&D budgets of educational institutions are orders of magnitude less (in percent of overall expenditures) than all other organizations that claim to be "professional" and employ sophisticated "techniques".
• There is no science and technology of education. All that masquerades as educational science and technology is non-intentional cover-up in support of contemporary educational practice. Note: the new computer augmented tools, called "educational technology" are not what is meant here by a technology of how to best facilitate learning.
• Educators, (faculty and administrators, alike) in psychological self-defense, believe themselves to be competent in their chosen profession, and are arrogant in defense of their myth. All other professions must support this myth, for to admit that the best of our educational systems are grossly inadequate brings to question the competency of all educated professionals.

There is much we (humans) don't yet know about learning and organizing; and much that we do know is not directly relevant or is in formats that are not useful; but there exists a wealth of valuable information virtually unknown to educators. Most "research" on learning and organizing cited by educators was created to support contemporary educational practice, and not to discover the "realities" of these essential processes. For reasons yet to be explored, educators choose to practice their profession in gross ignorance of the process they chose to facilitate. Indeed, many of the primitive learning theories used by educators are in error. When educators begin to respect and use reliable knowledge about learning and organizing, they will become essential collaborators in continuing action-research into learning and organizing. When this synergy takes fire, the learning paradigm will have arrived. Until then, we only explore the foothills.

Educational Establishments Ignore Relevant Research

"What we have encountered repeatedly during site visits is most curious: an openness to changes that might improve individual or team performance coupled with institutional and organizational reasons why those changes cannot be implemented.. What has become apparent to us is that specifying the techniques and innovations that do and do not have the potential to enhance individual and team performance is only part of the battle. Without an organizational culture that fosters the changes needed to implement those innovations, proposals for change, however credible their source or convincing the evidence, will have little effect." ( Learning, Remembering, Believing, pp295)

These are of some disturbing conclusions from the third report of an eight year comprehensive study (by the National Research Council, at the request of the Army Research Institute) of techniques to enhance human performance. Here are some "hard facts" related to the mission of higher education, virtually unknown within educational establishments and to practicing educators. "The counterproductive attitudes, values, and structures that impede training arise .. from a common root: a misunderstanding of the characteristics and potential of humans as learners. The body of research on the cognitive and social processes that underlie the learning and performance of individuals and teams has grown to a point that it is a far better guide to training than is intuition or standard practice." (pp306)

Contemporary Education is Cybernetically Unsound.

Cybernetics is the science of the management of complex systems. The following quotes from Cybernetics as a Management Tool by Barry Clemson demonstrates the need to apply this science to the design and management of educational systems.

No Feedback on Intended Missions (pp42)

"If we look carefully at human service agencies we see that in no case are there even reasonably well-developed feedback loops on the intended missions. This is most easily seen by asking the following question. "if the university does a great job in achieving its intended mission, who within the institution is thereby rewarded? And if they do a terrible job, who within the institution (with very rare exceptions) is punished?" The answer for all these institutions (with very rare exceptions) is no one at all." "If the university (or school, hospital, etc.) does a great job in developing narrow specialists, fragments knowledge, and dispenses technological fixes, who benefits? And if they fail to train narrow specialists, if they refuse to fragment knowledge, and resist dispensing the quick technological fix, who suffers? The answer, of course, is that the institution begins to lose prestige, the people are replaced, etc. The university behaves very rationally, achieves those goals that it is rewarded for, avoids those things that it is not rewarded for and the gap between what we want it to do and what it actually does grows apace. In the meantime, the individual professor who entered the university because of a love of teaching, service or wisdom becomes either more and more frustrated or more and more cynical."

"The first part of our critique of our institutions then, is to notice that there are massive structural deficiencies in the feedback loops: the goals we intend have no effective loops and another set that we do not want, do have effective loops."

"Efforts to reform these institutions typically change the inputs, e.i., they increase the training requirements for the staff or change some of the procedures the staff is to use. Their reform efforts seldom, if ever, really look at the outputs in a serious way. There are two obvious difficulties with these measures: the feedback law tells us that the inputs are irrelevant over a wide range, so it is unlikely that changing them is going to change the outputs. The self-organizing corollary tells us that there are some configurations that are stable and others that are not. And I might add that there are a lot more unstable configurations than there are stable ones so that considerable caution is called for in designing new arrangements. The third and final part of the critique based on our three laws use the law of requisite variety. Compare the complexity of the intended goals with that of the goals inferred from the actual institutional behavior. The intended goals are, in every case more complex than the inferred goals. Thus it is much easier to evolve/design feedback loops for the inferred goals than the intended goals. This is a serious and real difficulty."

Law of Requisite Variety Limits Teaching (pp64)

"The language of the schools includes 'teaching, individualized educational program, diagnosis, learning styles, meeting the needs of the individual, behavioral objectives, competencies, and survival skills'. This language clearly makes the teacher responsible for doing those things to or for the student that will result in the student's development. The language conspicuously does not include ways to talk about the student's role in guiding his/her own development. Despite our talk about individualization, the fact is, schools are closer to treating everyone the same as they are to individualization."

"The law of requisite variety suggests that individualization is impossible to achieve through the medium of the teacher as the sole or even primary regulator of the student's development. The law of requisite variety says that the degree of regulation attainable by a given control system is absolutely limited by the variety of that controller relative to the system to be regulated. A teacher is quite capable of controlling the physical movements, the progress through workbooks, and so on of thirty students. The teacher is quite incapable of guiding the development of thirty different people individually through the method of detailed diagnosis of each, detailed prescription of goals, detailed prescription of methods, and supervision of the process as the student implements it."

"The teacher is simply not equipped with adequate channel capacity (e.g., she/he can only talk to one at a time, or watch perhaps three at a time, or listen to perhaps two at a time), not equipped with adequate time (e.g., there isn't enough time in the day to prepare all the lessons, correct all the work, etc.) and probably doesn't have adequate intellect to understand the needs of all the students or know all the subject matter that 'meeting the demands of each' would imply. This is definitely not a criticism of the teacher. The law of requisite variety simply points out that one human being can't match the variety of thirty human beings." "There is a way to achieve requisite variety in the classroom's control system - the regulatory capabilities of the students themselves could be added to those of the teacher."

Students as Components of Educational Systems, Not Clients to be Treated

Another serious deficiency of education in terms of general systems analysis is the treatment of students as clients to be served by the educational system, and not vital components of the system. There are many effects of this. One, the human resource of students in designing and managing the educational system is not available. This also severely limits the feedback of the learner into the educational process. Also, by removing the learner from the educational system, the necessary continued learning of educators cannot be given its proper place within the institution. Educational systems which exclude students and learners as components cannot be self-organizing, must remain machines to be controlled from outside. This forces education to be viewed from an industrial management paradigm, and as a "service industry". This economic perspective of education denies it any chance of self-improvement by evolution.

Some fundamental assumptions will be turned on their heads, a few examples:

Advanced Education Breeds Incompetency & Dysfunction.

The more educated a person, the more they need advanced augmentation for their further learning, and the more support they need in their work. Educated persons are competent in doing things others less educated find difficult; but educated people find it difficult doing what their new competencies make as new learning opportunities for them. In a variant of the Peter Principle, increased competency (particularly, in many different domains) leaves a person incompetent in ways to synergize and utilize their newly acquired competencies. Even with their enhanced competencies, the "more educated" need assistance - which often cannot be provided because often there is no one more competent to teach them. Methods whereby teams of (temporarily) less competent can augment the learning of the more competent is a bootstrapping strategy that needs to be developed.

Usually unaware of this, and faced with increasing dysfunction (relative to moving ahead) most people retreat back to levels of activity where they are demonstrably competent and functional. Educators need emotional support to face their (relative) incompetency and dysfunction with a positive perspective. This simply requires one to accept, again, the status of learner (student - in my expanded definition of study). Children continually emerge into awareness of things they don't yet know or comprehend, or can't yet do or appreciate (knowledge of their ignorance, of their potentials). Yet, children are not emotionally disturbed that they have yet to learn. Why do we adults feel threatened by the realization that learning is a perpetual process? The stage of toddling is enviable -- when you can risk, stumble and fall, get up and try again, without the fear-of-failure (and also the concept of success - as we are then process, not goal, oriented).

Many of the new "things" the more competent are prepared to do often requires the cooperation, if not collaboration, of others. Yet, these others, as themselves, have not been prepared for the forms and degrees of cooperation and collaboration required. In practice, the more competent become more and more isolated with respect to what they really want/need to do (even when they have frequent contact with others - in areas that their primitive interactivity skills permit.)

Failure to comprehend this leads to extreme discrimination of the intellectual achiever in contemporary education, which assumes that the more educated a person, the less they are in need of "formal" education. Learning environments for those with terminal degrees are the least developed of all learning environments. The more educated, the less one may need instruction, if one has learned to make learning decisions for oneself. However, this does not imply that one can then "make it alone", nor that they don't require educational environments with greater and greater sophistication.

Perception is the first stage in learning. Vast individual differences lead many people to literally not perceive patterns in their environments clear to others. Contemporary education assumes that all but the severely disabled perceive the same "objective" reality the instructor perceives. Much of this attitude results from the modern perspective that glorifies a knowable, external, objective reality.

There are numerous measures to assess these individual differences, and most learners are excited in learning about their own uniqueness -- even when it represents a handicap that requires them to learn compensation techniques. The concept of "learning disabilities" needs be extended to determining where each learner (including we educators) is "disabled", and where each learner has "developable talents": exploring our diversity.

One example (of many) is the "field dependency/independency" cognitive style. We attend to "things" that we perceptually disembed from a more complex background (or field). Fields can include musical themes embedded in a complex composition, visual components of complex diagrams, discrete instructions embedded in a lecture, etc. Research has demonstrated vast individual difference in our ability to disembed (and thus attend to) simple patterns from complex patterns. Each person has a profile of different fields where they can focus on detail and other fields where "things are out-of-focus" but they are unaware that there even are things to focus on.

The mis-perception of instructions is probably the major cause of student failure in contemporary education; admonitions to "pay attention" don't resolve the problem when what they are to attend to is "literally invisible" to them.

Assessing and accounting for individual differences in mental imagery is also vital, as these relate directly to thinking and imagining. Most people (97%) have some visual imagery (although a much smaller percentage have powerful visual imagery) -- and are astounded to learn that others (3%) have no visual imagery, yet are able to function. Roughly 7% lack auditory imagery. In that reading involves associated thinking (and imagery), imagery styles influence enjoyment and comprehension enormously. Strong visual imagery is an asset when reading descriptive literature and is usually a handicap when read highly conceptual literature (such as this document). Unfortunately, reading instructors and those who develop basic skills assessment, are ignorant of these essential factors.

Adult Developmental Stages.

The cognitive development of "educated" persons can continue to go through stages, throughout life. These stages are analogous to the well known stages of childhood development studied by Freud, Erikson, Piaget and Kohlberg. What is significant here, is that communication between persons at different developmental stages suffers many of the same problems as communication between different paradigms. Robert Kegan, in The Evolving Self, presents a very practical model of adult developmental stages (and has a assessment measure for them) that makes understandable why we humans have such difficult times communicating and cooperating. One major difficulty for this perspective to gain acceptance is that persons currently in lower stages of development are necessarily unaware that there are higher stages -- as you become aware of the possibility of higher stages only when you reach them. At the highest stages one can accept the possibility of even higher stages, but one still cannot comprehend those stages until they emerge. Many persons who work in educational institutions, as in most of our society (according to Kegan's statistics), have yet to advance to the higher stages of cognitive processing. The cluster of perspectives labeled postmodern represent a "higher" stage of cognitive development than modernism. This implies a need for Advanced Developmental Education. Unfortunately, developmental education has been captured by the remedial education faction, and thus gives developmental learning a negative connotation. The primary learning required of educators to shift to a Learning Paradigm is developmental learning.

Re-Organizing Old Knowledge.

The re-organization of old knowledge, usually performed unconsciously and without intention, is an essential process in learning; but is not acknowledged or facilitated by contemporary education. For mature learners, new information is often sought to trigger old knowledge reorganization, rather than to fill up old categories with more data. The structure/practice system of contemporary education assumes that most learning occurs during the input of new information, when it is reinforced. In that many instructors test students only on material that they cover in lecture, attests to this assumption. That learning also occurs when doing homework, is acknowledged -- but homework is also viewed primarily as information input and retention. Few learning exercises are designed to facilitate knowledge synthesis and integration. This practice is reinforced by the relative ease in testing memorized facts and the requirement of supervising agencies that educational institutions demonstrate accountability in terms of measurable student achievement.

Content Expertise is No Qualification for Teaching

More from the study by the National Research Council: "Management personnel, and instructors themselves for that matter, are prone to view teaching not as a craft to be learned, but, rather, as a gift bestowed on certain individuals." The result is that "one will be disinclined to seek advice and feedback, and to explore alternative techniques and methods". (pp304) That many teachers are learning to use computers and developing multi-media instructional packages is no indication that they are seriously re-examining how students (or themselves) learn. Educational technology, in the main, is currently being applied to reinforce existing philosophies and practices of education. "The notion that the ability to each well is an innate talent is remarkably prevalent. Even in university settings .. at lunch and elsewhere, professors talk to each other about research, politics, sports, the weather, and the stock market, among other things, but rarely, if ever, about teaching strategies and techniques. It is as though talking about such matters is off limits - possibly because one is at risk of implying that a colleague has failings as a teacher or that none has an elevated opinion of one's own 'gifts' as a teacher."

"Another consequence of the failure to view teaching itself as a difficult skill is the tendency of organizations to recruit experts in a given domain to be instructors in that domain - without regard to their credentials or experience as teachers". Yet, given the full scope of this issue, one wonders whether "credentials or experience as teachers" has much relevance to a person's ability and openness "to learn what it takes to learn what we should learn - and learn it".

Mountains of Content

Mountains remain relatively unchanged during an expeditions attempt as ascent, even with avalanches and blizzards. Yet, there is much to be learned on how to "conquer" a mountain. The structure of algebra is as unchanging as Everest (although it visual forms may vary). That the structure of algebra is fixed and known to mathematicians, tells us very little about climbing that mountain. The geological structure of mountains is only loosely related to the art/science of mountain climbing. Learners of mathematics, not mathematicians or math teachers must organize Learning Expeditions to scout and explore ways of mastering the mountain. So long as mathematicians and math educators are attempting to control the behavior of learners (which is impossible) , we will never learn-to-learn-to-learn-math.

Thus, for those content domains where we have well established comprehension, Learning Expeditions are still required for us to learn how best to master them. However, for most of the "mountains of content" relevant for the 21st Century, we are also unsure as to the mountain's structure. Those who claim to know, must be highly suspect. The entire domain of content (reflected in "curriculum") must be examined from the beginning, without prejudice.

The Learning Expedition Metaphor

All that has been said, should not be taken as negative. We can personally find it very exciting to be part of an embryonic system, with awesome potentials for future growth, development and evolution - rather than a mature system in decline.

Shifting from passing on tradition to exploring and creating.

It is strange that RESEARCH, DISCOVERY and CREATING are not viewed as LEARNING experiences. Only after the results of research have been published, and then studied, does one "learn". This attitude possibly traces back to the old belief that all knowledge already exists in arcane records, only to be re-discovered. So, in our contemporary paradigm, learning MUST involve passing on WHAT ALREADY EXISTS. This paradigm is DEEPLY engrained in our educational practice.

Expeditions-in-Time

For years, Edmund Hillary organized globally, creating a community/expedition that, eventually converged geographically in Nepal to move - day-by-day, in a sequence of "camps" - from which the final ascent on Mt. Everest was supported. We normally think of this expedition taking place in SPACE, up the mountain. We will comprehend expeditions better when we view them as developing in-time, not across-space.

Expeditions-in-Time, Learning Expeditions, I propose, should be the replacement for programs and courses in educational systems and projects in business systems -- as they are transformed as components in LEARNING SOCIETIES. We might look to the expeditions of discovery of past centuries, such as Darwin's Voyage or more recent scientific projects, such as the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program as models (obviously of varied scales) of Organization for Learning. Successful expeditions have attributes that must be enabled: a strong belief in the mission, a powerful sense of community, an openness to risk and learning, a committment of concentrated time and dedicated effort.

At this point, I will simply leave these SEEDS for your imagination to explore. Join our Learning Expeditions on the WWW to learn specifics. [The term "Learning Expeditions" is useful for promotion, but a better label/ACRONYM may be LORDD Expeditions - for Learning / Organizing / Research / Design / Development -- and we can add more letters to the label if we desire.]

Navigating Contemporary Thickets, Moving Towards our Envisioned Future

Robert Fritz, in The Path of Least Resistance suggests we make a clear distinction between our vision/mission (that we hold in front of us as an ever present attractor) and the real environments we move through (that we see clearly and honestly). When we do this, navigate our real environments moving towards our vision, then our route will be "the path of least resistance". Note, not a path of no resistance. Our vision, from a Learning Paradigm must be made clearer -- but that activity (envisioning) must not cloud our clear recognition of our contemporary dysfunctions and incompetencies (relative to what we must soon be doing). Nor must our attention to contemporary details distract us from our vision.

It may be that, psychologically, we cannot simultaneously focus on fixing things (so as to overcome immediate obstacles to moving ahead) and creating new things. These perspectives may cognitively conflict with each other. But, we can construct systems that force us to alternate between both perspectives, and protect us from locking into any one of them. Metaphor: We are in the midst of a thicket of tangles, which we must attend to in order to move. But we also see a clearing ahead, which motivates us to move through the thicket, and to avoid those regions where new thickets are rapidly growing.

This document has only begun to touch on a multitude of related issues. If you want to participate in an emergent collaborative process related to these issues, please contact Dr. Laurence J. Victor, % Pima Community College, Tucson, AZ 85709 or email at nuu@azstarnet.com. An expanded version of this document, linked to related documents is available on his website, currently http://azstarnet.com/~nuu.

Accent on Learning, K. Patricia Cross (1978) Jossey-Bass.

Cybernetics as a Management Tool, Barry Clemson (1984) Abacus Press.

The Essential Tension, Thomas Kuhn (1977) The University of Chicago Press.

The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, Robert Kegan (1982) Harvard University Press.

Learning, Remembering, Believing: Enhancing Human Performance, National Research Council, Report from the Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance (1994) National Academy Press.

Paradigms and Barriers, Howard Margolis (1993) The University of Chicago Press.

The Path of Least Resistance: Principles for Creating What You Want to Create, Robert Fritz (1984) Stillpoint Publishing.

The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform, Seymour B. Sarason (1990) Jossey-Bass Publishers.

No Limits to Learning: Bridging the Human Gap, James. Botkin, M. Elmandjra, M. Malitza (1979) Pergamon Press.

Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, Walter Truett Anderson (1990) Harper & Row.

Work, Aging, and Social Change, Seymour B. Sarason (1977) The Free Press.