Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

What is Autonomous Learning?

Author: Keith Crome, Ruth Farrar and Patrick O'Connor

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 9

Number: 1

Start page: 111

End page: 126

Return to vol. 9 no. 1 index page

Introduction

This article has its origin in a project sponsored by the Subject Centre for Philosophy and Religious Studies (PRS) in 2008 that set out to examine the experience of tutors and first year undergraduate students at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) with regard to autonomous learning.1 As a result of our initial background research, and the research for the project itself, which consisted of a series of questionnaires and interviews with philosophy students and staff at MMU, we came to think of autonomous learning—by which we mean the capacity to think for oneself—as an acquired habit. Since habitual activities are often regarded as thoughtless and unintelligent— activities that are mindlessly repeated—such a definition might seem, at best, paradoxical. However, once it is accepted that habits are not necessarily unintelligent, we feel that there are good grounds to understand autonomous learning as an acquired habit. In what follows we develop that understanding and its implications in the hope that further reflection and discussion about this issue will be stimulated. We believe the issue to be of some significance firstly because of the role of autonomous learning in Higher Education (HE), and also because of several factors related to the transformation of HE itself, and we intend to begin by making some remarks about both.

The Role of Autonomous Learning in Higher Education

The authors of one paper on the issue of autonomous learning have it that 'the capacity to think, learn and behave autonomously is often claimed as an outcome for students in higher education'.2 However, we suppose that there is good reason to put this claim in stronger terms. The capacity to think, learn and behave autonomously is not simply one outcome among others. It is central to all forms of university education: witness the important claim that any university worth its name is, and should always be, a place of freedom of thought and speech. If that is the case, it is a fortiori true of philosophy, a discipline which is inconceivable in the absence of such a capacity. As it has been expressed in the PRS publication, Doing Philosophy: A Practical Guide for Students, the most distinctive feature of philosophy is not so much what is studied, but how it engages with those things it studies. Doing philosophy, the authors argue, entails taking 'a step back from our everyday thinking', exploring 'the deeper, bigger questions which underpin our thought', identifying 'hidden connections and flawed reasoning' and developing 'our thinking and theories so that they are less prone to such errors, gaps and inconsistencies'.3 Any university programme of philosophy must, therefore, be dedicated to engendering or reinforcing the capacity for autonomous learning in its students. If it fails to do this it will merely serve to inform its students about philosophy, without engaging them in philosophising.

Autonomous Learning and the Transformation of Higher Education

The report of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (the Dearing Report) of 1997 has been central in shaping policy and thinking about the aims and objectives of HE. According to the report, one of the principal aims of university education is to promote autonomy among learners. Among the imperatives it lists, it states that HE must 'sustain a culture which demands disciplined thinking, encourages curiosity, challenges existing ideas and generates new ones.'4 These are skills and attributes that both suppose and contribute to the process of independent, or autonomous, learning.

As has been noted, part of the motivation for Dearing's emphasis on autonomy is instrumental and economic.5 One of the purposes of what Dearing calls 'a learning society' is to inspire individuals to develop their capabilities so that they are 'well-equipped for work'. Here, being well-equipped for work means developing essentially transferable skills and abilities, since:

The pace of change in the work-place will require people to reequip themselves, as new knowledge and new skills are needed for economies to compete, survive and prosper. A lifelong career in one organisation will become increasingly the exception.6

It is no surprise, then, that autonomous learning should figure so highly among the aims of HE in the Dearing Report. For what we are here calling 'autonomy of learning'—the ability to think and act critically and independently, to self-manage study and learning, and realistically to appraise one's strengths and weaknesses as a learner—is not simply one transferable skill among others; rather, it is a disposition towards learning that is integral to the acquisition of all other skills and knowledge.

The overarching emphasis on autonomy of learning in HE is reflected at a subject specific level. On the one hand, this reflects the fact that enabling students to think in independent and critical terms is integral to the discipline of philosophy. 'Philosophy', The Subject Benchmark Statement for Philosophy Benchmark Statement notes, 'seeks to understand, and critically to question, ideas concerning the nature of reality, value and experience that play a pervasive role in understanding the world and ourselves'.7 Elsewhere, the Statement has it that philosophy lays a distinctive 'stress on independent thought' and that it is not 'simply a body of knowledge to be taught'. Furthermore, it is its distinctive stress on independent thought that places philosophy at the heart of 'any university worthy of its name',8 since it provides 'a reflective understanding of the underlying presuppositions of any subject'.9 On the other hand, however, and informed by the Dearing Report, the Benchmark Statement argues that the study of philosophy promotes the development of a range of personal attributes 'that are important in the world of work' and 'that will strengthen the graduate's ability to engage in lifelong learning'.10 These include attributes which are integral aspects of autonomous learning:

Alongside the emphasis on lifelong learning, employability and economic prosperity, we have seen the massification of HE,12 greater managerialism in the governance of universities, increased funding from the Government, the introduction of student fees, and the increased use of IT in learning and teaching. As a result, both lecturers and students are faced with a transformation of the context and nature of teaching in HE, and if standards have not necessarily dropped as is sometimes alleged, they have certainly changed, with more students from a wider diversity of class, racial, cultural and educational backgrounds now attending university, being taught in bigger classes with less opportunity for small group or individual tuition. Students are required to master a range of new skills—often related to the use of IT—for different purposes than hitherto. Consequently, lecturers are increasingly required to teach such skills, irrespective of their original disciplinary expertise. Without wishing to make any polemical points about this transformation, it is nonetheless imperative to recognise that this kind of tectonic shift compels a reconsideration of the challenges of fostering autonomous learning at university, and in particular within the discipline of philosophy.13

The Problem of Autonomous Learning

In the preceding section we argued that systemic changes within HE make it necessary to look at the issue of autonomous learning. However, there is a further reason that necessitates doing so; that is, the perception of a significant number of academics that students coming to university are less capable of autonomous learning than hitherto. Admittedly, there is no objectively verifiable evidence that this is the case, and since it is difficult to see what might constitute such evidence, it is an assertion that will probably always be contested. But, if such a view is difficult to corroborate objectively, it is nevertheless difficult to dismiss, since the academics that hold it are the ones that evaluate students' work, and are deemed competent by their institutions to do so.

One commonly offered reason for the perceived decline in students' intellectual standards is the sweeping changes that have permeated the HE sector over the last forty years.14 Another is the nature of A level tuition. For example, George MacDonald Ross has argued that students:

have mostly been restricted to a narrow range of teaching methods at school, in which they absorb what their teachers tell them in class, and what they read in their textbooks, and then they regurgitate what they have learned in traditional essays.The ones who are most successful at this are the ones who are admitted to university, and they have problems adjusting to the UK ideal (enshrined in the QAA's qualifications frameworks) that university graduates have been educated to become autonomous, critical thinkers.15

MacDonald Ross is not necessarily accusing A level teachers of teaching badly. On the contrary, if we accept that the aim of an A level teacher is to teach students what they need to know in order to get the best Alevel grade possible, in order that the majority can obtain a place at university, then his argument can be construed as implying that they are fulfilling their function, and are in that sense teaching well. As we understand it, MacDonald Ross is simply pointing out that there is an incompatibility between teaching students to pass their A Levels and training them to meet the ideals of HE, to which such students who succeed in their A Levels are admitted.

Perhaps school teachers might consider MacDonald Ross' perceived criticism of the narrowness of teaching methods, and the effectiveness of the teaching methods they use to school their pupils in autonomous critical thinking, to be unjust. Indeed, it would perhaps seem unwise to trust entirely to such claims if they are not reflected by a decrease in marks at least in the first year of an undergraduate degree, if not throughout. However, it would be unwise to dismiss them even if degree students continue to perform as well, if not better, in terms of grades than in the past, for there is persistent talk of grade inflation, a perception reflected by the increasing demand for finer discrimination of results than that provided by the traditional classification of degrees (for example, the issuing of full transcripts of student performance, and the identification of percentage placing within cohorts). In this sense, the problem might be not that students are performing less well in terms of grades and final degree classifications, but that lecturers are unsure how to discriminate between accomplished but essentially unengaged and passive work, and work which manifests a genuine engagement with and understanding of the texts and issues studied. To put it simply, any decline in autonomous critical skills might be masked by the ability of those students who enter university to absorb informa- tion from their teachers or other sources and regurgitate it relatively thoughtlessly, a skill acquired at school, and honed in HE.

Finally, it is important to note that whilst they are not in a position to make comparisons, current philosophy students have acknowledged that secondary education has not adequately prepared them for the challenge of autonomous leaning at university.16 For two reasons, then, autonomous learning at university presents a problem. On the one hand, university students are less equipped with the ability when they come to university; on the other hand, given the changed context within which HE operates, there are numerous new challenges for lecturers to confront in order to nurture this essential skill. In both instances, it is necessary that university lecturers address themselves to the problem, because otherwise they are failing the ideal of HE itself; this is particularly the case in relation to philosophy, the doing of which is impossible without such a habit of mind.

Two Views of Autonomous Learning

Our concern with autonomous learning and the question of how to engender it in undergraduate students emerges from significant current developments in the HE sector, and from the perception of lecturers that students are increasingly lacking in this skill. Both the Dearing Report and the Subject Benchmark Statement for Philosophy assert the importance of engendering autonomy of learning, but understandably both stop short of a clear definition of precisely what this entails.

In one respect at least, the definition of autonomous learning is uncontroversial: it is the exercise of the capacity to think for oneself. Just as there is little contention over the minimal definition of what autonomous learning is, there is little dispute over how it is recognised. It is generally accepted that the capacity for autonomous learning is recognised by its expression in a number of different forms, such as the ability to understand an argument and set it in context; to search for, read, and understand relevant primary and secondary material; to explain and articulate an issue in oral and written form to others; and to demonstrate an awareness of the consequences of what has been learned.

However, the minimal definition of autonomous learning can support two different views about the issue. One view is that autonomous learning simply and solely constitutes learning that students do for themselves. For those that hold such a view, an autonomous learner is someone who, given minimal information, would, for example, go away to the library, find sources for themselves and work by themselves. In the discipline of philosophy such work would amount to the student sitting down with a text and trying to come to an understanding of it on their own. Another view, however, and one that we believe significantly contradicts the first, has it that autonomous learning involves showing the student how to do something in such a way that they are then capable of undertaking a comparable activity by themselves (for example, having been shown how to analyse Descartes, they can then go off to analyse Hume). From this perspective, autonomous learning becomes the habitual exercise of skills, developed and perfected through continuous practice, which come to be second nature.

Significantly, these different views about what autonomous learning is are related to differences in the way in which the practice of autonomous learning is seen to be developed or reinforced. Where it is held that autonomous learning essentially amounts to working on one's own, it follows that fostering autonomous learning simply involves telling students to go away and read secondary texts, in order to find out what other people have found problematic about a particular issue or argument. Lectures, and thus the lecturer, fulfil an obvious function in such a model: they provide the student with minimal introductory information, then send them away to exercise those skills that are the mark of the autonomous learner. Seminars are no less an important aspect of higher education on such a view, but the role of the seminar tutor becomes merely to provoke debate by asking students, 'why do you think that?' On the other hand, where autonomous learning is understood to be an acquired habit or disposition, it follows that it is instilled through practice and exemplification—giving the students a model to copy, showing them how to break down and analyse an argument, how to structure an essay, and seeking to inspire them as a role model. On this view, autonomous learning is a habit that is inculcated.

At the beginning of this article we said that that we think there is good reason to hold to this latter view of autonomous learning. Accepting that autonomous learning is a habit of mind is important in one respect because certain prejudices and assumptions condition us to think of it as an innate ability, which some students have already realised, that others need only to be told about in order to exercise at will, and which still others have only a limited capacity to grasp.

However, it could be objected that what we have said thus far amounts simply to applying a well established distinction between what we might call 'telling that' and 'showing how' methods of teaching to autonomous learning, according to which mere 'telling that' without 'showing how' is nothing more than issuing instructions without instructing, ordering rather than educating. It might also be objected that not only is not much gained by conceiving autonomous learning as an acquired habit, but there is a fundamental incoherence involved in doing so that obscures and confuses things, it being impossible to explain how repetition could instil in a student so vital a capacity as autonomous learning. At the very least, it might be said, the inculcation of the habit of autonomous learning cannot be achieved simply by repetition through practice. Rather, the repetition must itself be undertaken because the student desires to learn independently. In that case, does not conceiving autonomous learning as a habitually acquired disposition at best simply push the problem one stage back, since the student either has the desire to learn independently or does not? In answer to this, it is necessary to recognise that desires and habits are one in the sense that although they are conceptually distinguishable, they are existentially reciprocally dependent: desires inform and motivate habits, whilst habits generate, form, and deform desires. In other words, repetition becomes a habit in the sense that it shapes desire, whilst without the desire the habit will not stick, a point made by Aristotle.

Beyond this, however, it is important to acknowledge that how to stimulate this desire in students is a question to which there are no easy or absolute answers, for the capacity of a teacher to stimulate the desire to learn independently is not itself something that can be taught abstractly. Teaching is a practical art acting upon the moment, and not a theoretical science concerned with the universal, and it requires that the teacher applies his or her particular skills to specific circumstances. Consequently, the principles of teaching are only general truths, and this is something that shapes the points that we will go on to make. For the moment though, we want only to say that engendering autonomous learning is not a matter of producing the desire to learn independently ex nihilo. Although it might be the case that students are increasingly less equipped to learn autonomously when they first enrol at university, and whilst not all students who undertake a degree necessarily do so out of a desire to exercise independence of thought, the majority do. Certainly, this is not an original point17—and in any case, it is a point that is scarcely worth contesting, since to do so would imply that there was no good reason to teach at university, or to be concerned with how we teach what we teach. If, as one of the lecturers we interviewed for our project put it, students are nowadays prone to treat their tutors as repositories of information, whose job is to tell them what they need to know, that is perhaps because they have been habituated to treat teachers in such a way by their prior experience, and is not in itself an indication that they lack the desire to learn independently. Indeed, when interviewed, those students who came directly from A levels recognised that they had not been sufficiently accustomed to autonomous learning—a recognition that presupposes the desire to develop this disposition.18

Conclusion

In this article we have sought to advance a definite conception of what autonomous learning is: a habit of mind, expressed through a range of activities and skills, acquired and developed through practice. We believe this definition to be the most significant outcome of the project we undertook for the Subject Centre, for it provides a basis for understanding and responding to the challenge of instilling independence of learning in students in the current context of HE. In our opinion what is most important about seeing autonomous learning as a habit of mind is that it overcomes the view that promoting autonomous learning entails leaving students to work by themselves. Defined as a habit of mind, autonomous learning is a virtue, but it cannot be classified as what Aristotle terms an intellectual virtue; that is, an excellence of intellection owing its inception and growth to instruction.19 Instead, it is closer in nature to what Aristotle calls a moral virtue; one that is neither engendered by nature nor contrary to nature, but which we are constituted by nature to receive, and which owes its full development to habituation.20

Understood in this sense, the paradox of autonomous learning is the paradox of habit. A habit is not necessarily unintelligent—indeed it can be an expression of the highest intelligence—and yet for all that it is not exercised self-consciously or voluntarily. Autonomous learning—independent thinking—is the highest virtue of the mind, an expression of its freedom, and the necessary condition of all other intellectual virtues, and yet itself is an acquired disposition, a second nature, and therefore is neither voluntary nor involuntary.

It follows then that autonomy of learning is not 'teacherless learning'. Teachers have a decisive role to play in inculcating this habit of mind. Certainly it is correct to claim that autonomous learning is 'thinking for oneself', but to reduce the definition solely to this claim risks obscuring the problem it involves, since it is precisely that expression that promotes the idea that all one has to do is encourage the isolation and separation of students as if that were equivalent to pedagogical self-reliance.

The crucial question remains as to how best to inculcate the disposition of autonomous learning. As Aristotle observes, we acquire a virtue by exercising it—builders learn to build by building, swimmers learn to swim by swimming; similarly, students become autonomous learners through the activity of autonomous learning, and they perfect the exercise of this disposition through repetition and practice. In this way, autonomous learning becomes second nature. It follows from this that best practice, underpinned by a coherent encouragement of autonomous learning, is achieved by fostering good habits. In other words, if 'like activities produce like dispositions',21 then the virtue of autonomous learning is fostered by activities that have the requisite qualities.

As we envisage it, this would entail moving from a knowing that to a knowing how based programme of learning; that is, a programme of learning founded on, or foregrounding, a set of practically based competencies, and at the same time moving away from thinking about and planning learning in terms of what the educationalist Elliott Eisner called 'instructional objectives', and instead recognising the need to think about curriculum activities in terms of 'expressive objectives'.22 For Eisner, instructional objectives are those which are arrived at by breaking down learning into specifiable elements that can then, theoretically, be delivered in a systematic way with the aim that the student would come out of the course of study in a state of knowing; that is to say, they are should 'specify unambiguously the particular behaviour (skill or item of knowledge) the student is to acquire after having completed one or more learning activities'.23 In our experience, it is in these terms that most academics are required to think about and plan their courses. By contrast, what Eisner called 'expressive objectives' are not specifiable in advance.

An expressive objective does not specify the behaviour the student is to acquire after having engaged in one or more learning activities. An expressive objective describes an educational encounter: it identifies a situation in which [students] are to work, a problem with which they are to cope, a task they are to engage in—but it does not specify what from that encounter, situation, problem, or task they are to learn. An expressive objective provides both the teacher and the student with an invitation to explore, defer or focus on issues that are of peculiar interest or import to the enquirer.An expressive objective is evocative rather than prescriptive. 24

In short, expressive objectives are descriptions of situations in which students explore, try to understand, grasp the point of, feel the enthusiasm of other students in the group about what is going on. The point for Eisner is that the expressive objective cannot have its point or value expressed in advance; its value emerges from the encounter with it. For Eisner, expressive objectives have the distinct advantages of being close to the practice of teachers, and of being specific to the situation and to the learner, thereby promoting an active engagement in learning. Such objectives would thus, we think, best serve to inculcate the habit of autonomous learning.

The final question we should like to address is that of how such a process of teaching might best be facilitated. One way of doing so would be to develop a Handbook of Practices. Such a handbook would identify, develop and detail a series of practices appropriate to each stage of a degree programme, building specific competencies through regular practising. Since the development of the skills we have concerned ourselves with is long-term, the handbook would have to reflect the need to integrate these practices developmentally into the gradual span of a student's career.

Bibliography

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson, Rev. H. Tredennick (London: Penguin, 2004).

Crome, K., 'Evaluating the Impact of Teaching Methods Designed to Enhance Academic Achievement among Philosophy Students with Diverse Learning Needs', Discourse Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring 2008, pp. 157-185.

Eisner, E., 'Instructional and Expressive Educational Objectives: Their Formulation and Use in Curriculum', http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/37/e2/25.pdf

Fazey, D and Fazey, J., 'The Potential for Autonomy in Learning: Perception of Competence, Motivation and Locus of Control in 1st Year Undergraduate Students', Higher Education, Vol. 26, No. 3, 2001.

Hanscomb, S., 'Philosophy, Interdisciplinarity, and 'Critical Being': The Contribution of the Crichton Campus' Philosophy-based Core Courses to Personal Development and Authenticity', Discourse, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2007 pp. 159-184.

Lamb, D. and Saunders, C., 'What do our Students Really Think?' Discourse, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 29-44

Lomas, L., 'Does the Development of Mass Education Necessarily Mean the End of Quality?', http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/papers/lomas.pdf

MacDonald Ross, G., 'Electronic MCQs with no Right-or-Wrong Answers as a Means for Developing Dialogic Thinking', Discourse Special Edition–e-learning, Vol. 8, No 3 resources/PrsDiscourseArticles/68

Saunders, C., et al., Doing Philosophy: A Practical Guide for Students (London: Continuum, 2007).

Swain, H., 'Intellectuals Fight "Dumbing Down"', Times Higher Education Supplement, 12th March 1999, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=145416

Endnotes

Return to vol. 9 no. 1 index page

This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.

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The British Association for the Study of Religions
The Religious Studies Project