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Behavior in Changing Environments: Learning, Problem Solving, and Seeing the World1 By George E. B. Morren, Jr. INTRODUCTIONWhy do some people accept the authority of scientists and the technological imperative, while others distrust scientists and reject even commonplace technologies? Why are there often large discrepancies between the problems experts worry about and those that ordinary people are concerned about the most? Why is it that some Americans fear change and avoid challenges to normalcy while others monitor their environment and seek innovation? Why do some people seem to live "in their own heads" and value ideas while others are only comfortable with the concrete world? Why are some people at ease with making decisions and act quickly while others avoid closure and take action very slowly, if at all? How is it that some individuals who live in a hazardous environment react with concern, vigilance, even fear while others around them seem to be oblivious or in a state of denial? Why do the folks involved in a situation often disagree among themselves about central issues and possible solutions? These are key questions in the environmental field and mark the place where we will start to explore a myriad of environmental and natural resource problems. Many of you are thinking about professional careers in the environmental field or in an applied science. As professionals, you will spend most of your working life solving problems and trying to improve the situations of your clients. Problem-solving is essentially a learning process. Every individual has his or her own unique way of learning or approaching a problem. Nevertheless, there are some distinct patterns in the ways people learn. These patterns provide a basis for a model that purports to describe how we engage in the learning process to transform experience and ideas into action to affect the environment. This model also provides a starting point for answering questions such as the ones that opened this chapter. The first goal of this chapter is to begin a process of reorientation toward education, learning, experience, inquiry, and problem-solving. The second goal is to take a closer look at how we perceive the world and form opinions and establish priorities. The third goal is to examine how people's ways of perceiving the world affects the way they act (or fail to act) as individuals and in groups — the social dimension. The fourth goal of this chapter is to make sense out of conflict, particular the kinds of disagreements that are generic to the environmental field. The model of the learning/problem-solving process, augmented by some additional concepts, will help us to understand the roots of many disputes and, hence also suggest ways of moving beyond conflict on the road to solving problems and improving people's situations. Many people equate learning with what goes on in schools and classrooms. In their minds, schools are where you go to learn. The role of teachers is to teach, to serve not only as repositories of fact and expertise, but to actively fill the empty heads of students, and hand out grades. Weighty and authoritative — and frequently very expensive — textbooks help too. The complementary and predominant role of students is to sit passively in class, take notes, wait for assignments, read articles and chapters, take exams, and get grades. This integrated pattern of "studenting" and "teachering" has negative consequences for many graduates, for the institution of education, and for society. In particular, it does not prepare students adequately for effective, let alone creative and adventurous, work in the real world. Hence, students and teachers who have followed this traditional model of learning should gain from some kind of reorientation. The alternative is to see learning, not as a `special' activity confined to institutional settings, but as something that goes on everywhere and all the time as people negotiate the contingencies of their every-day lives. According to this view, the primary focus is on the learning person and his or her learning activity rather than on the teacher. As David Kolb (1986), the author of this alternative approach, has pointed out, the phrase problem-solving evokes an entirely different set of associations to that of the conventional concept of learning. Most see problem-solving as active, self-directed, experimental, and not requiring external evaluation (since a "solved problem" speaks for itself to the problem-solving actor). This justifies the claim that learning and problem-solving are the same thing. ACTIVE LEARNINGWe "learn our way through" new experiences both by adapting ourselves to changes and by using new understandings to change the situation we are experiencing. Our environments shape us and we, in turn, shape our environments. Accordingly, learning is a dynamic process of action and adaptation in which we have recurring experiences involving other people and the physical environment. It follows that in learning, our own concrete experience has greater impact on our understanding than does reading about, listening to, or watching someone else's concrete experience, learning, or knowledge generation. Personal knowledge is superior knowledge. Learning involves much more than memorizing facts, acquiring intellectual understanding, and applying values. Because it is an adaptive process, learning includes our ability to act as well as to understand and attribute meanings. In addition, learning must engage our feelings as well as our thoughts and actions. We learn by doing, and we "do" in relation to changes in our environment. We change our environment by our acts; we observe their consequences, absorb their implications, plan further acts, and thereby produce knowledge for ourselves. We also evaluate situations and courses of action — actions that involve moral values as well as so-called objective criteria. Thus, the basis of learning is experience, and the best kind of experience for learning is that which evokes feelings. Of course, feelings may be positive or negative. "Opportunities" are experiences associated with positive feelings. Experiences associated with negative feelings are often called "problems." If you have developed appropriate competencies2, learning becomes a process by which experience is transformed into knowledge. Learning to tackle real world problems is a powerful way for us to discover how to be effective learners in our careers as well as in our daily lives. There are several reasons for emphasizing learning here. First, it focuses on a general process rather than just a set of concepts or topics to be "covered." The kinds of situations that learners might want to explore in the context of how people interact with the environment are unlimited. The first objective, then, is understanding and mastery of a set of procedures for discovering what human adaptation to the environment is all about. The argument is that learning is a template for adaptation. Second, the learning process is made explicit to help you to become self-conscious about it. Ignorance is not bliss in any field. Every person's objective — particularly student's (while there's still a chance) should be autonomy. An autonomous learner is self-motivated and self-directed. This means that he or she sets personal standards and goals and assesses his or her own strengths, weaknesses, and progress. Third, research suggests that individuals develop and use markedly different styles of learning and problem solving in relation to the problems and challenges they face. Because of their preferred styles of learning, people possess different strengths, weaknesses, and excesses. In groups made up of diverse learners, these differences may sometimes be complementary, and at other times they may give rise to conflict. Some major conflicts concerning current environmental or resource problems have come about because the individuals involved have approached a similar issue in differing ways based on their learning styles and associated ways of tackling problems (Miller, 1985). The features of these styles are patterned and measurable, and they reflect much more than just differences of background, attitudes, expertise, or viewpoint. They affect the very ways people apprehend new experiences, how they grasp the issues involved, and how these issues are eventually transformed into knowledge. Succeeding sections of this chapter present and discuss a model in which learning or problem-solving is shown as a cycle of activity involving many dimensions. The most important of these dimensions are specific modes of learning: they are called concrete experience, abstract conceptualization, reflective observation, and active experimentation (Kolb, 1986). This model is particularly useful, even powerful, because it facilitates self-consciousness about one's own learning and awareness of that of others. It also provides a framework for understanding how people adapt to their environment. A related technique called the learning styles inventory is useful in revealing our preferred styles of learning and problem solving. Later you will see that everybody is more or less strongly oriented toward one or more of the four dimensions referred to, and the strength of this orientation describes a person's characteristic learning style. Implied is a marked bias in favor of some kinds of problem-solving activities over others. Our biases not only inhibit learning in general and the development of particular approaches to problem-solving, but they also lead people, as individuals and in groups, into conflict over the interpretation of the meaning of new situations and into disputes over what to do. People can and do change. This change can be self-directed. Individuals can improve their learning styles over time by finding out about their own strengths and weaknesses and by seeking exposure to new kinds of problems, opportunities, and challenges. You can learn investigative, analytical, planning, and action techniques that can serve as effective guides to improving situations regardless of your original preferred approach to problem solving. Perhaps the most important lesson of this chapter so far is that the more one knows about learning and problem solving, the more evident is the need to use all of the competencies found in all the learning styles! As you apply some of the approaches presented subsequently in this book, you soon will find that, while you may be good at one or two learning modes, you will be not as good at other modes. Hence the need to educate yourself to deal with those learning modes that don't come naturally. The four dimensions of learning, describing aspects of people's behavior as they learn, are discussed in the next section of this chapter. The first is the prehension dimension of learning; the second, the transformation dimension. These two dimensions are combined to form a cyclical model of learning that can also be used to describe a person's preferred learning style. The notion of learning style is based on the observation that when individuals approach problem-solving, they emphasize one sector of the learning cycle in preference to the others. There are specific competencies associated with each sector of that cycle. Learning Dimension 1: PrehensionThis dimension is an axis describing how people convert real-world experience into ideas. Two learning modes are involved, learning through concrete experience and learning through abstract conceptualization. Later this will show up in Kolb's learning-cycle model as Concrete Experience (CE) Whenever we confront a new experience, we engage in a "questioning" process that seem to follow a regular path. First, we watch, listen, and obtain information from a variety of sources and people available to us. We may look at it from many angles as we try to understand the situation. The pioneering educator John Dewey (1910; see also Kolb, 1986) called this process apprehending.
The root of the word apprehension is prehension. Prehension means to grasp - in this case, mentally. In this context, prehension is gaining understanding by gathering facts and impressions and then making them your own by incorporating them into your organized memory, or mental map. As we apprehend a situation, we try to discriminate between familiar elements and strange ones. In particular, as we sort out the elements of the situation, we puzzle over the unfamiliar. This reflection occurs internally, although different people puzzle over novelty in different ways. Some talk their way through the giving-it-meaning phase with themselves or with other people. Others think it through privately. This move from apprehended facts and impressions to some kind of understanding is called comprehension (Kolb, 1986). It is a bit like constructing and using a crude map to explore new territory. Often we can use an old map to find our way around new ground successfully. From time to time, however, we need to revise our maps when we get lost or discover new aspects of the territory. On other occasions, the features of a situation are so novel, unprecedented, or widespread that the old maps are quite inadequate and need to be redrawn entirely. It is also true that this replacement process seems too great a challenge to some people, and so they stick with the old guides, no matter how restricted or misleading they are. Inquiry into any kind of situation can thus be seen to involve alternating between apprehending (i.e., perceiving or grasping) basic facts and impressions from our senses or external sources of information and internally comprehending (i.e., conceiving or conceptually mapping) the situation as we care to understand it. Most of you can recall situations in which the apprehending-comprehending process was going on. Something is seen or a dilemma arises, and you use all of your senses to hear, see, feel, smell, and taste it. If other people are present, lots of talking occurs. This is the apprehending process at work. At the same time, the mind is using everything it knows based on past experience and formal or informal learning to give the situation meaning. The apprehending and comprehending process is a constantly recurring flux between exploring reality and mapping it. Exploration is an apt metaphor for how the process of learning begins, in that learning can be seen as a flux between experiences in the real world and abstract interpretation of them. This view of learning is supported by almost a century of research. Over eighty years ago, John Dewey (1910) proposed that "our intellectual processes consist . . . in a rhythm of direct understanding — technically called apprehension, with an indirect mediated understanding technically called comprehension." Experiences are grasped through a continuous cyclic process of perceiving meaning through direct experience and designing or modifying conceptual maps that we carry around internally. This model is expressed in Figure 1. By the late 1970s, brain research had confirmed Dewey`s insights (Edwards, 1979). The right brain and the left brain specialize in the two different modes of knowing about the world that Dewey and his successors, such as David Kolb (1986), call apprehension and comprehension. In summarizing Edwards' work, Kolb (1986: 48) notes the following characteristics of left- and right-brain functions: Left-mode function corresponds to the comprehension process. It is abstract, symbolic, analytical, and verbal. It functions in a linear sequential manner much like a digital computer. The right-mode function, corresponding to the apprehension process, is concrete, holistic, and spatial. Its functioning is analogic and synthetic, drawing together likenesses among things to recognize patterns. Recent brain research has also improved understanding of that mysterious process called intuition. Intuition is the immediate knowing of something without the use of conscious reasoning. Some brain research suggests that intuitive behavior is guided by affective judgment (the apprehension process) rather than cognitive judgment (the comprehension process), as previously thought (Zajonc, 1980). Preferences precede inferences in intuition. When intuitive behaviors are at work, feelings and values seem to dominate our thinking. Thinking it through and feeling it through seem to be fundamentally different (even opposite) modes of grasping the world around us. Neither is good or bad; they are just different processes yielding different results. The apprehension function involves our valuing behaviors, our subjective sense of what is important (or trivial) and good (or evil). This is how we appreciate a situation. It is how we attend to and become interested in various aspects of a circumstance in which we are involved. Elements of a situation must literally capture our attention. We judge the value of things and people in a situation as well as the facts associated with it. This valuing process fuels our selection of facts and influences our actions. Contrastingly, comprehension — Kolb's abstract conceptualization mode of learning — is based on being able to objectify a situation by controlling or selecting that to which we will pay attention. Whereas apprehension of a situation rests on our feelings, values, and impressions, comprehension rests on dispassionate analysis of a situation. While apprehension utilizes our willingness to believe, trust, and have strong convictions, comprehension rests on our criticism, doubt, and skepticism about the reliability and verifiability of critical factors in a situation. Knowledge and truth thus result from the flux between these two modes of learning. Most people have difficulty self consciously distinguishing between their apprehension behavior and their comprehension behavior. For example, much of the conflict between science and technology professionals, on the one hand, and the lay public, on the other hand, involves apprehension. Scientists may even argue that the base elements of apprehension, feelings and values, have no role in the problem-solving process, when in fact they are implicitly claiming that the peculiar values of science are best. Apprehension of a situation is a very personal process, only known to others when we are able or choose to communicate it. What you would be attempting to communicate are your very personal and idiosyncratic assumptions, beliefs, values, and appreciations about people and events. Communicating comprehension of a situation, in contrast, rests on your ability to use socially and culturally meaningful words, symbols, and images to convey understanding. The conceptual maps or models that are the instruments of, or that result from, the comprehension process are merely representations of reality. They may be highly personal and unique to the persons who constructed them, even when they are sufficiently general as to be understood by, and useful to, others. The point to remember, however, is that no two people's conceptual maps of a situation are the same. That is, how you interpret a situation and how another person interprets a situation will be different to some degree or another, even if you share an organized approach to knowledge, such as a particular scientific discipline. It is also possible that the apprehending and comprehending functions can become socially divisive. This is because some people excel at the abstract mental map-making function, while others revel in collecting information from many sources and talking their way through a situation and a course of action. Such preferences inevitably lead to biased behavior, viewpoints, and attitudes about the respective importance of people's contributions. Those who are action oriented are skeptical of abstract thinkers and their perceived inactivity in the face of change. The conceptualists, in their turn, are troubled when changes are made in situations without sufficient forethought. Some individuals develop viewpoints that are so extreme that they completely reject other ways of looking at the world. And if this is true for one extreme position, then it must be equally true of the other extreme position that represents an absolutely opposite stance. So, with respect to the apprehension-comprehension dimension, it is possible to imagine two people who differ vastly in the manner by which they learn to adapt to their changing worlds. In practice, of course, it is rare to find such a simple distinction between extreme ways of doing things. Yet each of us does seem to adopt a position somewhere in between that reflects a bias toward one pole or the other. As we shall see later, this has important implications for learning how to tackle problematic situations in both our personal and professional behavior. Learning Dimension 2: TransformationThis dimension is an axis describing how people extend intentions to actions. Two learning modes are involved, learning through reflective observation and learning through active experimentation. This will appear in Kolb's learning cycle model as Reflective observation (RO) There is another learning dimension that intervenes in the flux between apprehending and comprehending activities. If we only confined our explorations of new experiences to building up perceptions and abstract representations of them, we would not get anything done! And ultimately, action is the issue. At some point in this process, we need to do something with our understandings. This is to change focus from the what and the so what as perceived and conceptualized to the now what of intention. During the now-what process, the appreciations, perceptions, and conceptual maps previously developed are transformed into practical knowledge to be extended to others and used to change situations (Figure 2). In other words, knowledge grasped from experience is transformed into action (Kolb, 1986: 41). On this new axis, knowledge and meaning first arise through active experimentation (AE) and the grounding of our ideas and experiences in the external world through reflection (RO) about their possible meaning and attributes (Kolb, 1986: 52). There are at least four reasons why we extend our understanding of a situation to others (transforming our ideas by extending them): 1. To test our interpretations of a situation against those of others. 2. To present our views as a basis for decisions about acting on a situation. 3. To use our concepts as vehicles for debate about change with others who are involved in a situation. 4. To use our conceptualizations in generating new ideas. Likewise, while reflecting on the values, beliefs, appreciations, and conceptualizations that we have formed, we may watch people and the flow of events in a situation a little longer in order to test whether our notions hold up. Issues to reflect upon include: Are beliefs, values, and concepts worth sharing? Do they contribute to a fuller understanding of the present situation? Can they facilitate the development of a view of an improved future? How do you take action on a new situation? Do you tend to act immediately and work things out through trial and error? Or do you tend to be cautious, move slowly, and choose a course of action only after much thought or consultation? How anxious are you about the possibility of making a mistake or about sharing your beliefs? Do you wish to avoid error at all costs, or do you plunge in, expecting to make mistakes? How much certainty must you have before you begin to take action? Does acting quickly take priority over questing after the ideal, or vice versa? Your answers to these questions begin to show your personal orientation toward transforming ideas, values, and beliefs into action. As discussed previously, apprehending-comprehending capabilities seem to be correlated with right- and left-brain function. There is also evidence that intention - extension capacities are connected with the functions of the front and back of the brain (Edwards, 1979). The psychologist David Kolb has integrated what have been labeled dimensions I and 2 into a single model of the learning process. Drawing particularly on the works of Dewey (1910), Piaget (1970), and Lewin (1951), Kolb displays the learning process as a cycle that involves grasping meaning and transforming it into socially shared knowledge. Thus, as illustrated in Figure 2, the learner alternates between the two modes of prehending new situations through apprehension and comprehension, and the two modes of transforming the resultant perceptions and notions of a situation via intention (watching the world to see if our ideas hold) and extension (actively testing our ideas). The result of the combined prehension and transformation processes is the creation of knowledge and new experience. This conception is called experiential learning because the process is grounded in our responses to transactions with the people and situations we encounter. The learning cycle is not a model of what goes on inside people's heads as they learn, but rather it assimilates the kinds of activities people carry out as they learn. The Learning Cycle and Environmental ChangeIn his study of the impact of chemical contamination on a community, the sociologist Michael Edelstein (1988: 12-13) has described the process of responding to the threat in a way that conforms closely to Kolb's cyclical model of learning and problem solving: Once a threat is recognized, it is appraised .. . to ascertain the potential implications, their severity, . . . susceptibility and corrective measures that can overcome effects. A decision is reached as to whether the threat can be discounted and ignored or whether further attention is demanded. In the latter case, a survey of available alternatives is undertaken. Because appraisal is a subjective analysis, varied interpretations of a given event are likely. While some ... take a threat seriously, others may engage in defensive avoidance. Factors affecting appraisal include the beliefs of the appraisers, their knowledge of the threat, the threat's visibility (e.g., amount and kind of publicity), and the significance of the threat. Learning StylesResearch by Kolb and associates indicates that each of us forms a unique approach to learning. Using the two learning dimensions (which incorporate four major modes of learning), Kolb has developed a Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) consisting of a twelve-item self-description questionnaire. Respondents rank order four words or phrases in each of the twelve item-sets in a way that best describes their approach to learning. One word in each item corresponds to one of the four learning modes — concrete experience (sample word, feeling), reflective observation (sample word, watching), abstract conceptualization (sample word, thinking), and active experimentation (sample word, doing). The LSI measures a person's relative emphasis on each of the four modes of the learning process — concrete experience (CE), reflective observation (RO), abstract conceptualization (AC), and active experimentation (AE) — plus two combination scores that indicate the extent to which a person emphasizes abstractness over concreteness (ACCE) and the extent to which a person emphasizes action over reflection (AERO). (Kolb, 1986: 681) Kolb's team tested men and women of varied background and age. Several patterns developed. First, Kolb found that people tend to have a preferred way of grasping the meaning of situations (learning dimension 1), which is combined with a preferred way of acting on that meaning (learning dimension 2). People's learning styles are calculated by plotting their scores for the two dimensions on a graph. This graph has four quadrants, representing the four learning styles. The quadrant where a person's plot falls identifies the pertinent learning style. Kolb's second finding was that the four modes of learning are related to the possession of definite learning competencies. These findings are further explained here. Prehension AbilitiesHow do people who pursue the meaning of a situation through direct experience operate? They learn by involving themselves fully in new experiences — learning by encounter. They are able to listen empathetically to others (i.e., understand what others believe the situation to be). They don't allow their own beliefs, values, judgments, and appreciations to stand in the way of understanding the viewpoints of others. They seek diverse information, some conflicting and some that doesn't seem to make sense. They tolerate the complexity and ambiguity of situations as they unfold. Those with a predominant orientation toward abstract conceptualization create concepts (mental maps, models, frameworks) that integrate their observations of a situation into logically sound theories. Theory means an abstract conceptual or symbolic framework that integrates information and observations about a situation in order to explain it. This orientation tends not to foster tolerance of conflict or ambiguity. Transformation AbilitiesPeople oriented toward reflective observation as a preferred way of acting are able to compare their ideas about actual situations or events with those of other people. In essence, they can view a situation from many different perspectives. People who are oriented toward active experimentation tend to be intolerant of ambiguity, and to choose a more active form of creating knowledge. Preferred Learning OrientationsA person's learning style is evident, not only when he or she takes the LSI questionnaire, but when that person tries to find out about and take action on a situation. Research also indicates that peoples' career choices are associated with where they place themselves in the LSI along the prehension and transformation dimensions. The intersection of these two dimensions generates four primary learning styles, as illustrated in Table I. While the following descriptions of learning styles are presented as if they were fairly clear-cut, the reader should be warned that there is room for significant variation within each type. For example, distance from the origin along one or both dimensions of the graph is the measure of the strength of an individual's bias or preference. Note also that the LSI should not be used for stereotyping people.
The Convergent Learning StyleConvergers prefer the abstract conceptualization and active experimentation modes of learning. They have particular strengths in problem solving, decision making, and the practical application of abstract principles and ideas. They are most comfortable with problems that have a single correct answer or solution. They reason deductively and are at ease formulating and using hypotheses about the meaning of situations. The process of deduction involves going from the general to the specific and forming propositions. Thus, they extract from the complexity of a real situation only those features they feel (possibly on the basis of the conceptual framework they are using) are most important or valuable in understanding the situation. Convergers tend to exhibit tight emotional control and prefer dealing with technical tasks and problems rather than with social and interpersonal ones. The converger's greatest excess is a tendency to identify the problem or the solution prematurely and, hence, occasionally to be guilty of solving the wrong problem with immense discipline and energy. Divergers prefer the concrete experience and reflective observation modes of learning. They have strengths that are the opposite of those attributed to convergers. Divergers excel in imagination and feelings and in their concern for values. The diverger is able to develop many alternative views of a situation and to weigh the associated values and meanings. These varying meanings, values, and views of the situation are combined into an impression or gestalt. Divergers adapt to situations through carefully watching and observing rather than through taking direct action. Divergers are great idea-generators and can see the range of implications that emerge as a situation unfolds. Moreover, divergers are strongly people-oriented and sensitive to the views and feelings of others. Divergers may experience difficulty with abstractions and appear to others as indecisive. The Assimilative Learning StyleAssimilators prefer the reflective observation and abstract conceptualization modes of learning. They have particular strengths in inductive reasoning, formulating theory, and related activities such as modeling and concept building. As masters of induction, assimilators begin with various observations and logically arrive at a general statement explaining those observations. Like convergers, assimilators are less focused on people as sources and conveyers of knowledge and are more concerned with the development of (their own) ideas and concepts. Assimilators have little interest in action. If the conceptualization of a situation doesn't seem to fit reality, the assimilator will expend great effort to modify or reexamine how that conceptualization was developed in the first place. In other words, assimilators feel more pressure to explain things than to solve problems and to act. Hence, the excess of assimilators is the tendency to build castles in the sky, ornately logical edifices that may have little to do with reality. The Accommodative Learning StyleAccommodators (sometimes referred to as Executors) prefer the active experimentation and concrete experience modes of learning. The strengths of accommodators are the opposite of the assimilators. They are oriented toward doing things, carrying out plans and tasks, and getting involved in new situations. They seek opportunity, take risks, lead, and act! In situations where one must act quickly and adapt to fast-changing circumstances, the accommodator shines. If a theory or plan doesn't fit the situation, the accommodator is apt to throw it out. Accommodators move through life day-by-day through trial and error. They rely heavily on other people for information, ideas, and explanations, rather than on their own observational and analytic abilities. They feel comfortable being around people but may seem impatient or pushy to others. The special idiosyncratic style of learning that each of us possesses is the result of many interacting factors. Evidence is now accruing that genetic inheritance has a role, along with early experience and education and even the relative development and use of different parts of the brain. As a result, each of us develops a style of learning that we prefer to use over all others. And we often hold this preferred style so strongly that it can dictate the types of problem situations that we select to tackle (and the ones we avoid) even influencing the career paths we select. It seems also to affect our interpersonal relations, influencing our choice of friends and also our ability to cooperate with people who share our places of employment and other contexts. Thus on both counts, the individual strengths and weaknesses issue and the interpersonal one, you need to be concerned that individual learning styles resist change. Your long-term ability to operate effectively in the real world as professionals and managers can be strengthened through deliberate exposure to the features of learning styles, objective measurement of your own strengths and weaknesses, willingness to confront your weaknesses and excesses, and acceptance of the preferred learning styles of others. There are techniques for dealing with all of these issues. It is possible to improve your learning style by seeking out situations and experiences that you might otherwise avoid. It is also possible to learn to work in groups consisting of people of diverse learning styles and not only to reduce sources of conflict, but also to take advantage of the diversity of strengths that these diverse styles offer. Closely related to learning style is the notion of world view. Before turning to learning dimensions 3 and 4, the next section introduces this important concept. The case is made that whenever you seek to understand a situation involving how people interact with their environment, the world views of the people involved, including your own, must be identified and accommodated in any plans that finally emerge. One cannot state a problem or formulate an improvement adequately without taking into account the ways in which participants in the situation and process view the world. WHO SHALL LEAD THE GEESE?For more than 20 years wildlife biologists have attempted to reestablish populations of free-ranging water fowl such a whooping cranes and Canada geese that have been reduced to near extinction due to loss of habitat and disruption of migratory patterns. Although conservationists have had some success in restoring water fowl habitats along the north - south flyways, there are very few water fowl of the threatened species, geese, swans, and cranes, that know the routes. In a functioning migratory flock, older birds lead younger ones. One attempt to start a nonmigratory population of whooping cranes from captive birds in Florida has been plagued by bobcat predation. An earlier program in New Mexico sought to seed the nests of natural flocks of sand cranes with 289 whooping crane eggs. Unfortunately, female `foster' whooping cranes became fixated on male sand cranes and would not mate with their own kind. In 1988, Bill Lishman, a sculptor who has a 100 acre private bird sanctuary and an air strip in rural Ontario, Canada, tried to realize a childhood dream to fly with birds. He raised a dozen goslings that adopted him as their parent through a process called imprinting. He then taught them to fly behind his home made ultralight airplane. Lishman proposed to use this technique to reestablish migratory flocks. At first, wildlife authorities in Canada and the U. S. questioned the scientific merit of the scheme and it took some time to clear away the red tape. He made his first long distance flight in October, 1993 bound for a site in Virginia, leading a wedge-shaped formation of 18 Canada geese behind his ultralight plane. Its success was marked by the fact that in April, 1994 16 geese left their winter refuge on their own and 12 made it back to their starting point in Canada. Lishman made a second successful trip leading a larger flock of 36 birds in October 1994. He is preparing for an attempt to duplicate his feat in 1995 with sand hill cranes raised from eggs provided by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If successful, it should lead to trials to reestablish the endangered whooping crane on its migratory route from the prairies of Saskatchewan to the southwestern U. S. 1. If you were to guess, what learning style would you attribute to Mr. Lishman? 3. What facts lead you to these guesses? Learning Style and World ViewYou may have noticed that in various arenas (for example, politics, environmental management, or foreign affairs) different people construe the same events in markedly different ways. It is profoundly important for you, both as a citizen and a professional-in-training, to be able to assess the status of such arguments. To what extent do disputes revolve around matters of substance? Do they involve conflicting ideological or theoretical positions regarding a generic issue? Is it conceivable that sometimes fights are rooted in conflicting learning styles? This possibility may be attractive, or at least worth considering, if you have followed the argument in this chapter so far. It is suggested that because people approach inquiry into situations differently, the way in which knowledge is created and the substance of that knowledge are different. The general point is that when people encounter concrete situations, they view, filter, sort out, and give meaning to their experience using characteristic mental frameworks. A particular mental framework is referred to as Weltanschauung, a German word only partially translatable into English as "world view." By some accounts, Weltanschauungen (the plural) consist of the experiences, feelings, emotions, attitudes, values, morals, beliefs, tastes, and personalities of individuals, as well as their patterns of reasoning (including scientific reasoning) and their store of knowledge. The importance of the concept is signaled by the slogan "How we view the world [partly] determines how we act in the world." The capital letter W will be used throughout as a shorthand label for `Weltanschauung.' A situation viewed by one person as a problem may be seen by another as an opportunity. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. The Ws we hold will markedly influence the types of observations we make of a new experience and thus will also affect the information we collect. Our W will be particularly important as we use information to attribute meaning to our experience, and as we create or recreate abstract models in our minds. Our W will certainly come out when we present ideas about our models of an experience and our acts will also express our Ws. As suggested at the beginning of this section, the components of Ws include (1) the assimilated experience of the individual carrying it and (2) the individual's preferred learning style. A person's experience consists of a mix of uniquely individual events and interactions felt in the past as well as social ones shared with many others. Among other things, experience determines whether we view an event or things as novel or exotic and helps to shape our fears Social scientists talk about socialization or enculturation (near synonyms, for all practical purposes), the process whereby individual members of a society acquire the basics of behavior that permit them to function as normal members. Language is the most obvious and basic cultural pattern we assimilate as infants. It is relevant to the discussion of Ws precisely because language is a system of patterned sound with meaning and is simultaneously a device for communicating with others and a means for individuals to classify their ongoing experience. With regard to the last feature, in other words, language is a more or less ready-made framework for sorting out experience. We play `Name That Tune' every time something changes in our surroundings. If we cannot put a name on something and are thus unable to link it to our existing store of knowledge, we are uneasy. If, by the same token, we too readily identify a novel event as familiar and apply a convenient noun to it, we may have to live with the consequences of an inappropriate or maladaptive act. Language is strongly linked to other social elements of Ws, including our acquired sense of what is "good, true, and beautiful," "fair," "moral" "free," or "natural." Morality refers to beliefs leading to the imposition of meanings about the rightness of acts that affect other people. Freedom refers to a persons sense of autonomy, choice, and control. Natural concerns our ways of interpreting, or attributing meaning and value to, the interconnections between our selves and things, acts, and events around us. While individuals are the carriers of Ws, some of the experiential elements may be characteristic of groups, large and small. This makes sense in relation to the foregoing discussion of language; people who share a language thereby also share important elements of their Ws. Moreover, other elements of national cultures and also the social systems of subgroups in society contribute to the Ws carried by their members. These elements express themselves in every sphere of activity, including politics, communications, and interpersonal relations. The social dimension also comes into play as part of a process of growing awareness which may lead to changing Ws. The Ws of scientists are particularly relevant to professionals in the environmental field. These Ws are often contained in or largely consist of what are called scientific paradigms. Paradigms are the meaningful body of knowledge currently used by a particular group of scientists to explain their observations. In other words, they are part of a group's framework for viewing natural, and sometimes also moral, order. We tend to vest science with a mantle of objectivity, as if somehow it were separate from other aspects of our culture and the way we learn. Scientists do too. Moreover, morality enters the picture when scientists use phrases such as "good science" (versus "bad science"). This is all part of the W in a technological society. In fact, there are cases in which shifts of scientific paradigm have been resisted by some people precisely because the new knowledge was seen to challenge the moral order of society. The widely publicized debate on the teaching of evolution in the schools is a manifestation of such a controversial paradigm shift that has been going on for more than a century. A much broader and more profound issue than the theory of evolution is involved: people's view of humanity's place in nature and the premises for manipulating, as well as understanding, it. Close to home are ongoing debates about our management or manipulation of nature, represented by ecosystems, recombinant DNA, in vitro fertilization, and the like. Individuals come to be members of nations, communities, ethnic groups, families, and professions - groups having characteristic Ws - by chance (e.g., birth), assignment, or choice. By joining a group they also gather some elements of the group's W. You should bear in mind, however, that in practice no two people on the face of the earth have identical Ws. One important source of variability is the learning styles people come to prefer. Learning style is an element of an individual's overall W and influences how people develop the experiential elements as well. Given that each of us develops a characteristic world view partly based on our preferred style of problem-solving, it follows that we will tend to act in ways that reinforce that style rather than challenge it. As we age, this selective reinforcement encourages the conviction that our learning style, our own point of view, and the way in which they were generated are "right" and that all other learning styles, viewpoints, and associated processes of generation are "wrong," seriously flawed, or at least difficult to tolerate! According to the philosopher Hegel, this conviction becomes so strongly held that people may view those who take the opposing stance as their "deadliest enemy." Thus, the mere act of two people with contrasting learning styles joining together to tackle a problem situation may be loaded with tension and conflict. From the moment they start to identify the issues in the problem situation, their opposing world views will become apparent to each other and almost inevitably will result in conflict over the way the problem is even approached, unless one or both has learned how to work with people of differing styles. Note that the degree of incipient conflict depends on the strength of the contrast in learning style. A rule of thumb is that the bearers of opposing learning styles on the LSI graph, specifically the converger-diverger and the assimilator-accommodator sets, will harbor the greatest potential discord because, according to the two dimensions of the model, they have little in common and tend to tackle problems in strikingly different ways. Does this mean that people with differing learning styles and Ws should not try to work with each other? Will they not be at each other's throats - blood on the floor? The answer to both questions is a qualified no. I suggest that each party learn how to approach team or group problem-solving in light of the individual strengths they can bring to it. We all must learn how to appreciate other people's Ws. Furthermore, whenever a number of people attempt to tackle the same problematic situation in a team or in other arenas, the various, and often conflicting, Weltanschauungen must be exposed so that they can be accommodated. At some point, improvements in complex problem situations will also involve confrontation of conflicting Ws and their attempted resolution through the joint adoption of viewpoints that transcend the original differences. This is much easier said than done, of course. Attempts to resolve problems of the "us" versus "them" type by trying to change either or both protagonists' Ws will rarely succeed. At the original level of debate, the differences in world view represent distinctly opposing positions. A transcendent W by definition, is a proposal that breaks through to a viewpoint both parties can accept without abandoning or seriously compromising their original tenets. In a study of the impact of chemical contamination on a community, the sociologist Michael Edelstein (1988: 11) has proposed the term lifescape to refer to the normal framework people have for understanding the environment, including their expectation from it. The lifescape is, in effect, that portion of a person's W that embraces features of the world most closely related to economic security, well-being of family and self and the attractiveness, compatibility with normal activities, and safety of the physical environment. The Cycle of an Inquiry ProcessAn effective inquiry process requires using the competencies associated with all four learning styles. Theoretically, when confronting a situation, we need to cycle through from mode to mode. In the first phase, we involve ourselves fully, without bias, in a new experience and observe that experience from as many viewpoints as possible (diverging competencies), we then (re)create mental maps or models that give some meaning to our observations (assimilation competencies). Next, based on those conceptualizations, we develop plans and make decisions on possible courses of action (convergence competencies). Finally, we test this constructed meaning against the reality of the situation by implementing our plan and taking action (accommodative competencies). This final step, to take action, is intended to change the situation or to "improve" it. Whether or not it is successful, this results in a new or altered situation, which again demands investigation. Even if we don't change the situation, however, a new one will arise. So the process recurs as we are continually driven by an intrinsic need to explore our ever-changing environment by means of appreciating, observing, conceptually mapping, and doing. Like all abstractions, the learning cycle model simplifies complex reality. Learning is fraught with strong feelings, at once exciting and gratifying; yet often it is also filled with frustration, fear, and even anger. It involves us in a cycle of activities between finding out and thinking out, and between reflecting and taking action, and each of these activities seems to demand that we play confusingly different roles in the same situation. At one moment, we are actors heavily immersed in the situation, and at another moment we are remote, analytical observers. At times we crave the facts of the matter, and at other times, we indulge our emotions, feelings, and values. You should be reassured to know that very few people are able to play all of these roles with equal ease. At the heart of this learning model is the notion that effective learning involves alternating between conflicting ways of dealing with things. Like the armature in an electric motor chasing alternating magnetic poles, we seem to "flash" around between different modes of dealing with reality, driven by an internal tension generated between opposing modes. Unlike the armature, however, we are able to deny the drive to continue the entire cycle to completion and may choose instead to stick with one mode or another. In other words, we often resolve the tension associated with opposing ways of dealing with our world by allowing our preferred mode to dominate while suppressing or avoiding the others. Other Dimensions of InquiryBefore pursuing other learning style issues, it is pertinent to explore two additional dimensions of the learning process. These do not describe learning processes in the same way as the prehending and transforming dimensions. Rather, learning dimension 3 describes methodological choices involving a continuum of approaches to problem-solving. Both seem to be important in affecting the ways by which we try to make sense out of and act to improve problematic situations as complicated and dynamic as those we encounter in agriculture and other areas of environmental management (or life in general). They also will bring us closer to understanding the place and role of science outside of the laboratory. Learning Dimension 3: Intellectual Style/Methodological PreferenceAs with the two learning dimensions discussed earlier in this chapter, this dimension, which is concerned with the logic of inquiry (how you go about asking questions), is defined by two poles, reductionist separation and holistic integration. This can be thought of as producing the axis Reductionism
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Abstract Conceptualization (AC)
