Contexts for Independent Learning

Abstract

One major world view that dominates the field of developmental psychology is the organismic world view. This world view depicts individuals, including children, as active agents who know the world in terms of their own operations upon it. Individuals are seen as being in control of their own learning. This control is exercised by individuals initiating and maintaining their own learning opportunities within a responsive social context. The responsive social context is increasingly seen by developmental psychologists (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Wood, 1982) as of fundamental importance for the acquisition of intellectual skills. It is within responsive social contexts that individuals acquire not only specific skills but also generic knowledge about how to learn. It is this generic knowledge that allows individuals a measure of control over, and hence independence in, these social contexts. Educational policy statements, school prospectuses and, more recently, the Core Curriculum, abound with aims and objectives to do with achieving individual autonomy and independence as a learner. Yet there is growing evidence that in many contemporary classrooms at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, we may be providing precisely the wrong contexts for students to become autonomous and independent learners. Too many classroom learning environments simply do not qualify as responsive social contexts. Individual learners have minimal control over learning interactions and hence are excessively dependent on external control by teachers. Theoretical explanations for differences between unskilled and skilled performance are being sought increasingly in terms of characteristics of the specific contexts in which performance occurs and less in terms of qualitative differences in global capacities or in thinking processes between individuals (Wood, 1982). For example, differences in complexity of oral language between three‐year‐old children might be explained by differences in the amount and quality of language exchange with caregivers. They might also be explained by differences in caregiver skills in interpreting and responding to needs signalled by an individual child's use of language in a particular context. If we are genuinely concerned about aims of autonomy and independence in learning, then we need to discover and analyse those characteristics of responsive environments which support and promote independent learning. On the basis of existing research it is possible to specify four such characteristics of responsive learning contexts.

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