A Single Candle: Self-Directed Learning

     One of my favorite videos is called Into Great Silence which provides a glimpse inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery of the reclusive Carthusian Order in France. There are very few words spoken. Most of the documentary is the camera following around different members of the order as they go through their daily routines. Often we see a monk in his cell, seated at a simple wooden table, studying a manuscript - a single candle burning in front of him to light his academic and spiritual way.

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  Self-Directed Learning  

     While few of us these days work from cloistered cells on remote mountaintops with a single candle being our only intellectual and physical illumination, as the history of education goes, self-directed learning was the primary mode of teaching and learning until organized, public schools became common. Many of the people we most revere were self-educated. In my own personal life, my grandfather, who had to leave school in the eighth grade, as did many of his generation to support their families, was a voracious reader and gave me an indelible picture of self-directed learning (SDL). As Chapter 4 in our text points out, we all continually learn and SDL is an assumed part of that process. Many frameworks and models of SDL have emerged in research in recent years.

The researchers in the Clardy study defined four types of SDL projects: induced, synergistic, voluntary, and scanning. As teachers of adults, our challenge is to design curriculum and pedagogy that embrace these different types along with personal learning styles and other individualistic components. The goals of SDL in many ways fit the characteristics of the adult learner proposed by Knowles in his andragogy construct and others that we have studied and written about in this blog.

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The SSDL Model  

     For my focus in this blog post, however, I am most concerned with one of the myths of SDL that the chapter exposes and that resonates with me as I think back on my grandfather and the monks of the Carthusian Order. "Although learners may engage in periods of intense, individualized learning," Merriam and Bierema point out, " their learning will be enhanced by sharing it with others and inquiring with other adults or instructors about their questions, insights, and reflections" (Merriam & Bierema, 2014)" As the text further establishes, we are not totally one thing or another. - a completely self-directed learner or not. Though I loved him dearly, "Papa" was a bit close-minded. His opinions had been cemented long ago and he was not particularly open to having them re-framed - even by his grandson. Still, I like to think, during the thousands of hours I spent with him tossing a baseball or sitting at his feet, that our engaging dialogue was a kind of conversation and that I, in some small way, added to his thinking. We never worked on projects together and the processes that our special kind of education employed do not easily match up with the ones in the text and others that I have seen. Still, I contend that SDL is an integral component of quality adult learning and teaching. As a teacher and learner myself, I have found that often it is during the SDL "phase", when I take a concept that I am studying back to my "cell" after receiving manuscripts to study in the form of content from an instructor and interactions with my fellow learners, that my learning becomes a part of me and is thus fit for application as John Dewey and others considered essential. I do not believe that my studies would yield the same depth and breadth without the many connections it has to others, yet there is a kind of seasoning that the SDL process supplies.

 

The Teacher I hope to Be

     I did, in some way, however, take some personal responsibility for my own learning - though I did not realize it at the time. I did not just passively sit and listen to Papa, rather, I asked him endless questions for clarity and expansion. He was always willing to oblige, as I think he enjoyed being the wise sage. Still more, he had a genuine desire that I should approach my own learning and take responsibility for it at my earliest developmental opportunity. This mission led us to the island of Robinson Crusoe's exile at an age when I could barely sit and only faintly remember.

     Our text supplies ample fodder for analyzing SDL in various contexts and even ways of assessing SDL - something public education continues to grapple with in a minimal effort to measure the predominantly subjective nature of teaching and learning. The doubters of SDL are concerned about an individual's ability to facilitate SDL goal setting, instructional design, and evaluation "without questioning the validity or worth of it as compared to other opinions" and its possible disregard for "important aspects of culture and context" (Brookfield, 1984).

     At the end of the long academic day, SDL is to me a personal attribute above all else. In order to capture the essence of it, for this blog post and my own evolving educational philosophy, I return to that snowy mountain top in France. Papa never left the country but, somehow, I like to think, as I wander through those candle lit cells in my own imagination, that I might find there my first teacher and the one I hope someday to be - smiling, the broad expanse of his knee awaiting my return.

 

References:

Brookfield, S.D. (1984. Self-directed learning: A critical paradigm. Adult Educational Quarterly, 35, 59-71

Merriam, S. & Bierema, L. (2014). Adult learning: Linking theory and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass