Learning is Creating Something New in Your Mind
The Science of Learning podcast is about personal transformation, development, innovation, and growth
Learning is the process of creating something new in your mind. That’s why I’ve started a new podcast, The Science of Learning.
I’m a creativity researcher and a learning scientist, and for the past 15 years, I’ve studied how artists and designers teach in BFA and MFA programs.
But my interest in learning goes far beyond art education. I’m interested in creativity and learning for a bigger reason: Because I believe that all learning is creativity. This idea goes back a long way. We associate it today with the French Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, whose name is attached to the theory we call constructivism. It’s “constructivism” meaning that we construct knowledge in our minds. I say we “create” knowledge, so I suppose I might call it “creationism,” but let’s not go there. Piaget never applied his work to teaching or to schooling. He was a philosopher and he referred to himself as a genetic epistemologist. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that explores what knowledge is and how we come to possess knowledge. “Genetic” epistemology is the study of where knowledge comes from, and that’s what Piaget was doing. Piaget started with the assumption that we’re born with nothing in our minds, and then, as adults we have a lot in our minds. He studied babies and children, and developed a theory, grounded in his observations, of what happens from birth and how knowledge emerges in the mind.
Piaget was a brilliant and very well-read scholar. He was aware that other scholars believed that we were born with a lot of things already in our minds; he disagreed with them. He was aware of other scholars that had various theories of how children came to possess knowledge, and he disagreed with pretty much all existing theories, and specifically, behaviorism—the idea that children simply internalize experiences by associating stimulus and response.
My own development of Piaget’s constructivist epistemology is too elaborate to present in one short Substack post. I’ve written several books and articles about it. I’ll say a bit more about this below, for subscribers, but here’s a quick summary. Learning is the process of creating something new in your mind. Learning is not the passive reception of information. Of course, anything that’s in your mind has to originate outside of your mind. You don’t create something out of nothing. At first, the world outside is all that there is. But, once those particles of information, those bits of experience, are inside your head, then a process of combination and construction is enabled.
That process is learning.
That process is improvisational.
And that process doesn’t start only after you leave the world behind and sit in a room, apart from the world. The process of mental creation proceeds while you continue to interact with the world. You are making creative combinations, with the world outside you still being right there, available for your interaction. This is embodied, extended learning. There’s no barrier between the particles of information that are in your mind, and the particles of information that are in the environment, available to you.
Learning is a dialogue with the world. A dialogue of creativity.
How can a teacher help advance this process? By structuring the environment so that this dialogue advances more effectively. I call it disciplined improvisation in my book The Creative Classroom. But it’s not easy for the teacher. It’s a lot easier for a teacher to stand at the front of the class, lecturing, delivering information to a passive student. I call this challenge the teaching paradox.
Learning is creativity. This is why I’ve started a new podcast called The Science of Learning with my first episode a conversation with Harvard professor Chris Dede:
I want to explore the parallels more deeply. A podcast will allow us to get beyond a glib, simplistic claim that “learners construct their own knowledge.” We’ll talk to the world’s leading experts on learning and development. We’re going to find out what this really means. What does constructivism mean? What is learning, really, if it’s not simply absorbing information from the environment? What does it mean to create knowledge in your mind? What does it feel like when it’s happening? How can you make it happen more effectively? When you’re teaching, how can you resolve this teaching paradox for your students?
I say more about how to resolve this paradox below, for paid subscribers.
