Comments on the text Developing self-directed learners
This kind of text is what happens when non-educators write to tell others how to educate. The context on this text have been in question for centuries, think of the word and how it was used to describes individuals accomplished when referred to as self-taught, and, even more to the point, the work of Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed comes to mind. I will also admit, that I feel it is not totally fair the critique this article as an educator as it is directed towards health-care practitioners who want to improve their teaching. Nevertheless, I still feel that if someone is going to put their name to a text and the ideas therein, then it is fair game to pass judgement.1
I want to clarify that I am very much in favor of what the article is addressing, except for one point that I will write about further down this text. I agree that developing self-directed learners is important, but it comes down to how we understand the act and the moment of learning. Depending on who you ask, learning can be doing (I should put a citation here, but nothing specific comes to mind and this is just a Tumblr post), so being able to self-direct one’s own activities could be argued to be engaging in self-directed learning by that logic. It is a stretch to present as I did, but the point stands: as the textbook mentions, there is value in recognizing the continuum of formal and informal learning (p. 29). Furthermore, I can only hope that the suggestions and advice the text presents are not eye-opening for anyone because that is all very basic teacher training.
This brings me to the point I mentioned before: the presentation of the results. In general, the text feels short-sighted because it mentions that some of the results were not great, but fails to recognize that a lot of this is the way we have all been inculcated to learn. Paolo Freire talks about banking education, in which the teacher is in charge of placing, depositing if you will, the knowledge in their students so that they are now at liberty to use it. Again, Paolo Freire wrote this in the 1960’s. To state that these strategies for self-directed learning failed to produce results fails to consider, in this case, the historical context as well as the trends in education such as Taylorism, in which the results need to be quantifiable so as to see numerical or graphical improvement.
This text is a quick, interesting read, but it worries me that this is where the educational principles come from for certain disciplines as it can be so much better.
1 – He writes realizing this applies to him as well.