My short answer is yes, and this is because reading and thinking are social activities and therefore you can learn by reading.
In an earlier post I said that learning was a social activity of interdependent people. Chris Rodgers in a comment then asks a very natural question that follows on from that – can people learn by reading? By reading a blog perhaps, a book or a document? To me, this is a very logical question to ask because I have asked myself the same question.
lf learning is an activity of interdependent people, where does that leave reading? – which after all is a solitary pursuit. Can one learn from a solitary activity like reading, if learning is a social activity?
I want to start by drawing attention to how the logic of the question contains two hidden assumptions in the above reasoning. The first assumption is that reading is not a social activity and the second is that thinking also is not a social activity. Because these are seen as being non-social activities, it is relevant to question whether learning can occur from the experience of non-social activity of reading.
It assumes that your mind lives inside your head, is somehow separate from your body and is not a social phenomenon, but rather, the mind is a property of the individual.
George Herbert Mead suggested that the mind was not like this at all. He described the activity of thinking as being a silent conversation with oneself. I am a tennis player and I, along with others, can often be heard to be giving ourselves instructions (e.g. "bend your knees," or "swing through the ball," or "focus"). This to me is a visible example of the silent conversation that is always going on. We are always in a process of silent conversation with ourselves, and it is this silent conversation that constitutes the process of thinking, and the mind itself.
Taking this point, it is not hard to see reading as a silent conversation, not with oneself, but between the author and yourself.
Hello!
Just some thoughts on this as I had been thinking about this earlier on in the year.
First I would suggest that the conversation is not with the author but rather it is with the text. Indeed, a conversations with a text will necessarily be qualitatively different from a conversation with its author because of the way that responses in a conversation with a person are invoked mutually. By this I mean to say that the thoughts and responses of one individual trigger thoughts and responses in the other. With a text, however, no matter what we think, the words that are imprinted in front of us remain the same. Importantly, however, this does not mean that the meanings that emerge from these words stay the same.
The interaction that takes place between the reader’s internal conversation and the text – particularly if specific attention is applied to the task – can generate new meanings that potentially transform the pattern of the internal/silent conversation of the reader.
Going along with Stacey’s view of learning as changes in the patterns of relating and meaning-making amongst interdependent individuals it is quite understandable that the text makes things a little confusing. After all, the reading of a text does not bring about changes in the author!
One notion that I have picked up from Stacey’s work, however, is that mind, in and of itself, is a social phenomenon in the sense that it emerges in the individual through interactional processes of meaning-making. However, once mind comes into being i.e. the individual’s mind becomes able to have conversations with itself as a result of having interalised some part of the social, it is automatically a social phenomenon.
I suppose, the apparent challenge that seeing learning as a social process poses to reading as a way of learning can be taken a step further by asking whether an individual can learn through individual reflective practice. But then, going back to the context of all this talk of learning we have to return to the organisation, as this is what led us to all this talk of learning as social process of interdependent individuals to begin with. We may also want to begin to distinguish between different forms of knowledge – practical and propositional, for example since my ability to conceptualise something does not necessarily translate into my being able to do anything (different) about it. How do those changes in the patterning of my internal conversation lead to changes in the way I participate in and respond during conversations with others… and how does this then lead to new patterns of interaction – that is to say learning – in my group or organisational context?
Apologies for the rambling but these are my two rupees worth.
Comment by Andre Ling — June 14, 2009 @ 6:58 pm
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for the follow-up post. The questions I posed in response to your earlier piece on the Social Activity of Learning were partly rhetorical but were triggered by your statement that “… computer based learning falls down because it ignores the fact that learning is a social activity”.
I very much agree that we can all learn by reading – whether hard-copy documents or text on the screen. In a post I wrote a few months back on a relational view of identity (http://informalcoalitions.typepad.com/informal_coalitions/2008/08/a-relational-vi.html), I commented that “… what I believe to be true about organizations … will have arisen from a mixture of ‘live’ relationships and my ‘interaction’ with other people through the texts they have written or other media that they have appeared in.”
In all cases, I see meaning of a text as being co-created by all of those involved, whether in the initial authoring, its subsequent reading or viewing, or subsequent conversations sparked by it.
I think that a useful way of thinking about the ‘interactional’ nature of books and other texts might be to think of the author’s role in the conversation in the same way that Stacey describes the role of a CEO in relation to organization-wide communication. In terms of the gesture-response process, he suggests that the CEO (or similar) can be thought of as making a ‘gesture’ to the organization at large (such as via a video, written announcement or platform speech). This is then taken up (or responded to) in many local conversations (and, by inference, in acts of reading/viewing and personal reflection).
I would suggest that a similar dynamic applies in relation to all written artifacts of organization (such as strategies, structures, policies, processes and procedures) in that each of these has to be taken up and enacted through the everyday give-and-take of local, conversational interaction. So, in practice, strategies and such like are co-created through the myriad of day-to-day interactions, through which the written text is perceived, interpreted, evaluated and acted upon. And these conversations are, at one and the same time, uniquely personal and communally social acts.
Cheers, Chris
Comment by Chris Rodgers — June 14, 2009 @ 11:00 pm
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