Activity 1.3

What is learning?

Learning is the interaction between innate, intrinsic factors and extrinsic factors constantly in flux to produce some change in a human.

The Five Most Intriguing Principles (Alexander, Schallert, and Reynolds, 2009)

• Principle 2: Learning is Inevitable, Essential, and Ubiquitous 
• I was really drawn to this principle and found it to be incredibly true, especially the fact that learning is not only going to happen but it has to happen to be a successful creature. While reading this section it brought to mind something I learned from a PBS special about crows. Crows are truly interesting learners. There was an experiment done in which an  experimenter wore a mask and performed a behavior to seriously scare the crows (such as shooting off a cap gun). Years later when he came back wearing the mask again the offspring of these original crows that the experimenter had scared began a warning call and swooped threateningly at the experimenter. In essence, they had been taught by the generation who had been scared by the experimenter that this was someone to be fearful of. This behavior could be seen as quite necessary; the offspring have learned to be more successful from their predecessors. 
• Principle 3: Learning Can Be Resisted

• Immediately upon reading this passage I began to think of racism in our current society. Many people do not want to learn that racism is still prevalent both implicitly and explicitly in our society for many reasons. Perhaps it is uncomfortable for them or perhaps if they accepted that they were being benefited by someone else's disadvantage they would realize how wrong and unacceptable that is.
• Principle 4: Learning May Be Disadvantageous

• This principle brought to mind something I learned in an Abnormal Psychology class in undergrad. Apparently, the actual addictive chemicals in cigarettes leave the human system rather quickly. What continues to fuel the addiction to smoking is our associations with smoking. Perhaps you smoke when you first wake up, when you drive, after you eat lunch etc. The behavior of smoking so many times and associating with these other behaviors is what makes it truly hard to stop because the moment you sit in the car your hand goes immediately to your pack of cigarettes just out of "habit."
• Principle 5: Learning Can Be Tacit and Incidental as Well as Conscious and Intentional 

•  I think this principle really goes hand-in-hand with the last principle (of course not always). Often the things that we learn that can be disadvantageous seem to be learned incidentally. An example I can think of is forming relationships. Typically, this is not something we go about explicitly learning, perhaps we watch our parents and our siblings and emulate the relationships we have seen in our past. On the flip side; however, I know from working with students that sometimes they never learned these skills incidentally for whatever reason and benefit from being explicitly taught how to form relationships appropriately through Social Skills training.
• Principle 6: Learning is Framed by Our Humanness
• This was another principle I found really interesting not only because of how different humans perceive things but how we perceive how other animals learn or what is considered intelligent. For example, my brother and I both have dogs and are interested in dogs as well. From a dog-related argument with my brother I learned that some researcher or another created a ranking of dog breeds based on intelligence. What I find so interesting about this is that it is framed by our own perception of what we think intelligence is in a dog.