Need Based Learning and Emergence of Meaning

Some days back a colleague and I were discussing about ‘meaning based learning’. He said he disagreed with this concept; the reasons being:

• Many a times we stumble across something useful.
• The moment we decide that we want to learn something, we close ourselves to other learning’s which might have, otherwise, emerged in the process.

My mind wandered back to something I had heard a few years back. A senior had mentioned that his learning retention used to be better when he learnt something which was of importance to him at that point of time. That was the first time I had heard about ‘meaning based learning’ and it had made sense to me then.

I later read about ‘phenomenology (Donald, Snygg, and Combs)’ which give credence to meaning based learning theory.

I must accept that the concept does make sense. Many a things which have stayed with me over a period of time have had some meaning to me at the point of time at which it got inculcated. So be it MBTI, Transactional Analysis, etc……..these had significant meaning for me at the time I focused on them.

But there also have been things which I have stumbled across in my life which have stayed with me e.g.: What matters more – Youth or Youthfulness? Experience or Capacity for Experience?- these are not things which I aimed for but I stumbled across.

But then, even though I had stumbled across these learning’s, they had relevance for me at that point of time. Hence there was meaning associated with them though I was not necessarily looking around for solutions/learning’s.

So the term should be Need based learning (directed or stumbled across- which has relevance/meaning for us) and this would be different from Meaning/direction Oriented Learning (where Learning is an outcome of only ‘directed’ efforts).

I remember another discussion with a different colleague. He was talking of wanting something to happen (getting fixated to one outcome - which would arise from a fear of waiting for a situation to emerge and consequently being uncomfortable with the unknown outcomes which might emerge) vis-a-vis allowing a situation to emerge.

What I can make out from this is that we need to be keyed on to what are our developmental needs at a point of time, and consciously work on addressing these need but also be open to ‘accidental/stumbled upon learning’. At the same time the our mindset should be ‘let things/learnings emerge’ instead of ‘I need answers quick’. In this way we would avoid a major learning disenabler, Cognitive Dissonance, too.

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Sourav