student learning

There can be no question that understanding (implicit or explicit) learning theory undergirds effective teaching. This is especially true when instructional topics become confusing or diverge from the common experience of students. Many of the topics students encounter as they study theology and religion fall into this category, and it is for this reason that the collection of Knud Illeris’s works, Learning, Development and Education, has value for teachers of theology and religion.

Illeris has spent his career figuring out how learning works and determining how to create authentic, transformative learning experiences. This collection of essays demonstrates the way in which Illeris’s theories developed over time, and shows the breadth of topics that come to bear on the understanding of student learning. Illeris categorizes his selected works into five parts, containing essays that were originally published between the late 1990s and 2015. Some of the essays have not previously appeared in English. The first two sections have the most bearing on the teaching of theology and religion, so they will be the focus of this review.

The three essays in Part One succinctly describe Illeris’s comprehensive theory of learning, articulated more fully in his 2007 monograph How We Learn (New York: Routledge). In brief, Illeris argues that learning has two fundamental processes and three dimensions. The processes are “an external interaction process between the learner and his or her social, cultural, or material environment, and an internal psychological process of elaboration and acquisition” (10). Illeris also identifies three dimensions of learning: the content dimension deals with the material being learned, the incentive dimension considers the motivation and energy necessary for learning, and the interaction dimension categorizes dispositions that provide the genesis of learning. Illeris further identifies several barriers to learning (15-17) after recognizing that education is rife with “non-learning and mislearning” (15).

According to Illeris, there are four types of learning: cumulative, assimilative, accommodative, and significant/transformational learning. Each of these types of learning is connected to a phase in psycho-social development in Part Two, where Illeris lays out his understanding of lifelong learning (48-55) and gives extended treatment to the function of learning at the youth and adult stages. He argues that education during the phase of youth is typified by a quest for what he calls “self-orientation,” which means the “process where one orients oneself with a view to finding oneself, one’s options, ways of functioning, and preferences” (69). In his view, all educational experiences (inside and outside of the classroom) contribute to and are undergirded by the youth’s quest for self-orientation. The situation is different with adult learners, who have already found their orientation, and so accept responsibility for their actions and their learning. In Illeris’ estimation, this different approach to learning requires different foundations for adult education.

Part Three, “Special Learning Issues,” is a compilation of chapters that do not fit in the other sections but provide a theoretical grounding for the arguments Illeris makes in parts one and two. Part Four, “Various Approaches to Education,” includes the oldest of the selected articles, and describes how some of Illeris’s theories were put into practice at Danish universities in the 1970s. The final part concerns learning in working life. Here Illeris applies his comprehensive theory of learning (articulated in Part One) to the workplace.

While there is certainly room for criticism of Illeris’s understanding of learning, and in particular, his connections of types of learning with phases of psycho-social development, Illeris’s comprehensive theory of learning is helpful as a foundation for effective theological education. Three observations, in particular, deserve mention. First, his contention that learning is not merely knowledge transfer, or skills acquisition, but includes a variety of psychological, biological, and social factors is worth keeping in mind as we construct learning experiences for our students. Second, Illeris’s observation that youth and adults have a different foundation for learning is significant, especially as there are now more adults students enrolling in college than ever. Finally, it is incredibly important to consider the various barriers students face as they try to learn. While it is certainly the case that students are responsible for their education, Illeris is right to argue that teachers both create and tear down barriers.

Community Colleges have historically faced numerous challenges, many generated by the very nature of their missions. The three parts of this text flesh out the theory, research, and practice most germane to the history, current state, and future of the American community college, as well as the various student populations community colleges now serve. The three sections ask readers to understand (Part I: “Understanding Today’s Community College Campuses”), support (Part II: “Welcome to Campus: Supporting Today’s Community College Learners”), and look closer at populations often underrepresented in higher education literature (Part III: “A Closer Look: Specialized Populations and Communities on Two-Year Campuses”).

Understanding today’s community college campuses requires a review of the evolution of community colleges since their inception in 1900. Kelsay and Oudenhoven, in “Junior Grows Up: A Brief History of Community Colleges,” trace the origin of the American community college back to Joliet Junior College which is “now recognized as the oldest community college in the nation” (5). With a decade-by-decade overview of education in the community college setting, these authors document the vicissitudes of the life of the community college. From the GI Bill in 1944, increased enrollments of women and minorities in the 1960s, the return of Vietnam Vets, the career-focused students of the 1980s, to reduced financial support from state governments, Kelsay and Oudenhoven explicate how community colleges have risen up to meet the needs of their communities. However, these same schools face increasing pressures and challenges today and in the future.

John L. Jamrogowicz illuminates these challenges in his chapter, “Community College Economic Climate, Policy Landscape, and the American Graduation Initiative.” The AGI (American Graduation Initiative) spearheaded by President Obama “showcased community colleges as potential engines to drive the recovery from the Great Recession and a return of American dominance by increasing the proportion of the population with a college education” (19). Attempting to shoulder such a heavy ideological burden and with only $2 billion of the desired $12 billion for grants allocated, it is not difficult to surmise why community colleges continue to struggle to meet federal expectations.

Other chapters in Part I, such as “College Readiness and the Open-Door Mission” suggest readers look to the issues involved in the open-door mission: primarily, the need for remedial education and helping students persist to the completion of their programs. These authors cite the National Center for Education Statistics from 2011 which found that “more than 70 percent of students who first enroll in community colleges possess at least one factor and 50 percent possess two or more factors that are known to place a student at risk of not succeeding in college” (34). Procter and Uranis’s chapter on the role of technology on the community college campus also demonstrates how these institutions face a variety of resource challenges because they serve more students who may “lack a home computer and rely on the college for access to hardware, software, and Internet connectivity” (48). Financial woes, the necessity of remedial education courses, the challenge of student persistence, and students’ heavy dependence on college resources are just some of the realties those working with and inside community colleges must come to understand.

The authors contributing to Part II demonstrate how imperative it is that faculty and staff know their students and contribute to and foster collaboration between academics, student affairs, and advising professionals, as well as residence life staff. The chapter “Who are Our Students?” presents a fascinating, albeit brief, overview of the diversity of students attending community colleges. Some striking statistics indicate that the average age of a community college student is 28 and, according to the American Association of Community Colleges in 2013, “59 percent of full-time community college students were employed part-time” and “40 percent of part-time community college students were employed full-time” (57-58).

Support is a recurring theme in McFadden and Mazeika’s chapter on the collaboration between academic and student affairs. These authors utilize Student Development Theory (SDT) as a theoretical foundation that assists members of various sectors of the college to collaborate for student success. This chapter addresses how a theoretical foundation, facilitation of student engagement, and a model of shared responsibility among academic and student affairs professionals all contribute to assisting students.

Many community colleges are instituting mandatory orientation sessions. Jessica Hale’s chapter links theories of psychosocial development of students and environmental factors known to influence development with various elements of orientation. While Hale describes the large disparity between various community colleges’ orientation programs (number of sessions, mandatory or voluntary, online or face-to-face), the author also affirms that there is evidence to suggest “that participation in orientation increases persistence from term to term” (86). While residence life may be more commonplace on four-year campuses, Barber and Phelan note that, as of 2013, nearly 25 percent of community colleges “offer on-campus housing” (95). This number is astounding considering the diverse student populations community colleges typically serve. These authors emphasize how much informal learning takes place in communal spaces like campus housing, and suggest ways in which formal learning can be integrated into residence halls (such as “inviting faculty and staff to participate in student life activities”) (97). In order to assist community college students, professionals working with them must know who they are, collaborate with other professional groups on campus, and think creatively about how to help students succeed.

The final part of this text is “A Closer Look: Specialized Populations and Communities on Two-Year Campuses.” This section of the book exemplifies just how varied and complex the community college population truly is. A growing number of older adults are returning to school, especially to community colleges. Some of these “third age” learners are enticed by free tuition, motivated to stay busy and active, interested in an “encore career,” or desire to stay connected to a larger community (115-117). The chapter by Fagan and Dunklin on military veterans presents some unsettling statistics, especially regarding female veterans. One such statistic is that while “female veterans have to deal with the residuals of war” like their male counterparts, “23 to 30 percent of female veterans reported military sexual trauma while on active duty” (130). Dimpal Jain’s chapter challenges the limited scope of previous research involving Student Involvement Theory by expanding on what “leadership” means among nontraditional students, especially among women-of-color who take on leadership roles in the context of community colleges (145-147). The concluding chapter utilizes Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and social capital to explore the complex ways in which particular student populations (adult immigrant ESL learners, student athletes, LGBTQ students, and veteran students) may be marginalized within the normative power structure of higher education.

This book sheds light on multiple areas in which America’s community colleges are being shaped by the multitude of missions (academic, political, social, economic) continually assigned to them. Administrators, faculty, and professional staff at any institution of higher education as well as city, county, state, and federal officials who are invested in higher education in their locale would do well to read this book to learn how to understand, support, and look closer at students in their community.

David Mathew introduces Fragile Learning: The Influence of Anxiety as a “book about barriers to learning.” He adds: “as a selection of what grew to be an interrelated body of published papers, Fragile Learning asks the reader to consider a wide variety of factors that might test a learner’s resilience or make the process of learning precarious and problematic.” These obstacles include “technology, environment, culture, age, disease, and incarceration. . . The book examines anxiety – both learner anxiety and educator anxiety – as both an inevitable and important pedagogic tool” (xv).

In the chapters of the book, Mathew offers case studies of “fragile learners”: learners for whom obstacles like those presented above threaten to derail the learning process entirely. However, the definition of learner and learning is extremely broad, encompassing incarcerated youth engaged in face-to-face learning, diverse learners in online courses, a colleague struggling with physical pain, and workers in a horse stable. The wide range of subjects reminds us that many human behaviors, including academic study, work, and navigation of the medical system, are all examples of learning. However, the diversity of subjects dilutes the degree to which Mathew’s insights are useful for educators engaged with learning in a more traditional sense.

While the range of subjects is very broad, Mathew’s fundamental approach is consistent. In each case, he explores the psychological dimensions of the learners’ experiences and their affects on the learners’ behavior. For example, one case study centers on an adult student in an online course who was situated in a traditional cultural context in which age, maleness, and social status were privileged categories. Mathews describes how assuming the role of student, in a context in which these factors did not automatically convey status or demand respect, was challenging and anxiety-producing for the student. This anxiety was an obstacle to his learning. In another essay, Mathew and his colleague, Susan Sapsed, describe the psychological effects of Sapsed’s ongoing experience of physical pain and unsuccessful medical treatment and the ways in which both the physical and psychic pain impacted her professional and personal life. In his discussions of the cases, Mathew’s brings first-person accounts of the learners’ experiences or his observations of them into conversation with psychoanalytic theory, primarily, but not exclusively, about anxiety.

In the short space of the essays, the introduction of psychoanalytic theory serves to reframe the individual cases as examples of more general psychological experiences. In some of the essays, Mathew describes or proposes pedagogical approaches that help learners tolerate and address the obstacles to their learning. In keeping with his psychoanalytic orientation, the approaches he advocates cast the educator in a therapeutic role – either as pastoral caregiver or as an object of transference for the fragile learner. Mathew’s fundamental argument is an important one. Educators and educational systems need to be attentive to the ways in which the life experiences of many learners catalyze a range of psychological conditions, including anxiety, low self-esteem, inability to trust, and depression, that are often significant obstacles to learning. A psychoanalytic perspective of these obstacles can be a useful element in designing systemic and individual pedagogical supports for these learners. However, the anthological format of the book, and Mathew’s tendency to focus more on the psychoanalytic theory in itself rather than on the cases he presents limit the utility of the book for practitioners dedicated to supporting fragile learners in educational settings.

Thomas Henricks’ Play and the Human Condition provides a valuable guide to the academic study of human play. Henricks has been teaching at Elon University since 1977 as a sociologist. He has been studying human play since his PhD dissertation, which explored the relationship between sports and social stratification, and he has over thirty years of academic publications in play studies. In this volume, Henricks attempts to advance his thesis that “play is fundamentally a sense-making activity and that the broader goal of this process is to construct the subjectively inhabited sphere of operations and understandings called the self” (209).

Henricks organizes this book into an introduction and nine chapters. He begins the introduction with three questions that guide his work: “How do we discover who we are? How do we determine the character of the world in which we live? And how do we decide what we can do in a world so configured?” (1). The introduction provides a rationale for studying play as well as an overview of the book.

The first three chapters explore general models of play. In Chapter I, Henricks explores the difficulties around establishing a definition for play as he reviews several modern definitions. He presents six ways of understanding play: as action, as disposition, as experience, as context, as interaction, and as activity while he connects each model to their major theorists. The next chapter presents how play is different from other patterns of human behaviors including ritual, work, and communitas. The final chapter in this section develops a theory of play that centers upon self-realization. Henricks notes that “play best teaches people how to conceive self-directed lines of action and to mobilize varieties of resources to realize these ambitions” (89).
In the middle of the book, Henricks devotes five chapters to various aspects of play including psychology, the human body, physical environment, social life, and culture. After focusing on the mind in his chapter on the psychology of play, Henricks turns to the human body and play in Chapter Five. While examining animal play, he concludes “play integrates symbolic and physically based meaning systems. . . play is a form of consultation between matters manifest and latent, known and unknown. In consequences, players extend and secure their understanding of themselves” (137). Next, he engages the physical environment and social aspects of play, because as he explains, “play is complicated by the presence of more than one player” (161). Chapter Eight builds upon the foundation of the earlier chapters to explore culture and play. This is an important chapter that engages the work of Geertz, Deerida, and Gadamer to list a few.
Henricks’ final chapter weaves the various themes of the earlier chapters together to support his thesis. He examines the relationship between play and freedom. He concludes that “if play has a legacy, it is its continuing challenge to people of every age to express themselves openly and considerately in the widest human contexts” (227).

Play and the Human Condition is a well-developed and scholarly text. Henricks engages a wide range of disciplines and carefully builds his arguments. The book offers a detailed road map to professional play literature that will be very useful to any scholar researching in this field. Except for a few terms, like communitas, this volume is accessible for the non-specialist. Theologians and graduate students should have no problem understanding and engaging this text in fruitful dialogue.
This volume would be a good addition to major theological libraries. It is especially important for scholars and programs that explore ritual studies and hermeneutics. Chapter Four, on play as therapy, gives a foundation for this important approach to clergy who want to explore this avenue of pastoral care and counseling.