When learning is no longer enough.

 

In life, we harbour a range of attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs which are based on relational attachments we form, lived experiences we have, and surrounding environments we grow up in. To define what I mean by attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs (ABBs): attitudes are the ways we think and feel about something (“I hate losing”), behaviours are the ways we act or take action (‘Never taking time off’), and beliefs are the ideas we hold to be true even when irrational or without evidence (“Failing means I’m worthless”). So it is my job as a social justice educator to understand and challenge how our attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs contribute towards status quo inequality and oppression.

What I have seen in my work, however, is that new attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs (ABBs) that are promoted as alternatives to the status quo are not easily sustained in long-term everyday life. What I mean by this is that courses, classes, workshops, trainings, seminars, webinars, conferences, keynotes, panels, international days and months, and hackathons dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion are either not working or not working fast enough because the learning just isn’t sticking. I believe this is because our old attitudes, habitual behaviours, and default beliefs (which are oppressive by nature) are so deeply rooted, embedded, and buried by the entire lifetimes we spend learning them. This makes it a very unrealistic expectation and almost impossible task to permanently override a lifetime of learning within a 4 hour workshop (if you’re lucky to even get 4 hours… most organisations and audiences want a deep learning experience within 1 or 2).

And even if as educators we are able to facilitate deep learning on the ways we see, think about, and participate in the world — as soon as learners return to their everyday lives and contexts — those same old attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs (ABBs) begin to wage war on the learner’s newfound way of being and the countdown on their resilience against relapse is set…

New Year’s Resolutions or Revolutions tend not to last very long… can you think of the last time you learnt a thing and fell straight back into old habits? Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@brookelark

New Year’s Resolutions or Revolutions tend not to last very long… can you think of the last time you learnt a thing and fell straight back into old habits? Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@brookelark

This is not to be all doom and gloom about the impermanence of learning. But rather, to ground ourselves in the reality that oppressive behaviours learnt and perfected over time are still going to be constantly retriggered, reinforced, and rewarded by a world that is yet to catch up to newfound ways and wisdoms. Add ingredients like time pressure, stress, self-interest, discomfort, and risk to the mix and you’ve got yourself a recipe for relapse.

And, just for the record, relapse (which is to be expected in the grand scheme of things mentioned above) has no bearing on the ability or capacity of our learner or their educator. It isn’t a case of if a learner relapses, but rather, when. The learning achieved within the time-and-space constraints of a learning experience is tough to make permanent, even if the moment and magic of learning might feel potent enough to last forever. As humans we are creatures of habit and so without creating the container and conditions for new and improved habits to survive and thrive, we’re just doing the bare minimum and hoping it’s enough. Learning is no longer enough.

When working to create systems change, conventional learning actually ends up doing a few unhelpful things:

1. Piling new knowledge on top of old knowledge even when these knowledge sets are in direct conflict with one another. There is always a higher likelihood that old knowledge will trump or undermine new knowledge because old knowledge is familiar, comfortable, and practiced. Pedagogy that does not make time and space to first clear out the old to make way for the new is not fulfilling its full transformative potential. In other words, you can’t fill a cup that is already full.

2. Processing new information through old cognitive frameworks (or ABBs) without first surfacing, dismantling, and reframing the mental lenses and filters that influence the ways we interpret and interact with the world — while still expecting different results — is close to Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity. Einstein also said that “problems can not be solved with the same mindset that created them”.

3. Ticking boxes which does nothing but create an illusion that the learning has been done and nothing else is required — without ever grasping the root of the problem or embedding the strategy of the solution. This box-ticking mentality is tokenistic at best and tokenistic at worst.

This isn’t to say that learning is completely useless or underwhelming. Quite the opposite in fact. Learning holds an incredible amount of magic and possibility which is why I am so enchanted by it. But as educators we need to continually pay close attention to the alchemy. As educators, we need to remain vigilant to the ways in which systems of oppression reproduce themselves in our ways of teaching because without a committed desire to transcend and transform systemic oppression… one-time-quick-fix-scratch-the-surface education can ultimately function to set learners up for failure and perpetuate the status quo. As a freelance educator, I have seen too many learners scratching their heads trying to make sense of or apply their learning in their everyday context. I’ve also seen, first hand, learners go back to business-as-usual within a matter of weeks.

So what’s the alternative? Well, to overcome these unintended consequences, the answer, for me, lies somewhere in unlearning. Having been on a personal unlearning journey myself, I have witnessed its transformative power. This is why, through my action research project Radicational, I’m investigating how to design and facilitate below-the-surface unlearning that is repeated and revisited over time in order to reduce risk of relapse. I want to understand how we can unlearn old ways of being, thinking, and doing before attempting to relearn new ways of being, thinking, and doing. Through Radicational’s research question: How might we design radical unlearning that enrols humanity in collective liberation?, I’m exploring psychology, cognitive science, pedagogy, and community-building as an interdisciplinary approach to unlearning — specifically, in the spirit of social justice education.

Learning is not enough when there are so many existing oppression-breeding attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs getting in the way. Perhaps unlearning holds one of many pedagogical possibilities to transformative change.

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Want to know what unlearning is..? Stay tuned for my next article: Unlearning as Anti-Oppression Education.

If you would like to contribute wisdom/resources, get interviewed as part of my action research, or keep up to date with how Radicational evolves… you can follow the journey on Medium | Website | Instagram

Written and managed by Vanessa Faloye

 
Vanessa Faloyeunlearning, anti-oppression, pedagogy, social justice, education