Dear Learner,

I hope you don’t mind me calling you a learner. I call myself one too. This is the first in a series of letters intended to share ideas and stimulate reflection on the role and nature of learning in our lives. 

Lifelong learning is an important topic and it amazes me how often we take it for granted. Our highly developed ability to learn is the most significant characteristic of what it means to be human. Through learning we control our lives and achieve our goals. It stands to reason that insights on how we learn, why we learn and what it means to be competent, can be valuable and empowering.

Throughout my professional career I have been concerned with these questions. For many years I was a college professor and Director of the Centre for Education and Lifelong Learning at the National College of Ireland. Prior to that I worked in the early days of e-learning and in educational television. What I write here comes from that background, and I hope you will find it useful.

For each of us our life experience is a valuable resource that can be harvested for insights on how we can learn better. How do you think of yourself as a learner? You may be a parent, carer, worker or student keen to build your knowledge and develop new skills. You may, like me, have retired from full-time work but are still hungry for fresh ideas and new competences.

Wherever you are in life, the impulse to learn is a vital part of being alive. Most of the time we do not notice it. Learning just seems to happen.

Think back to one year ago and compare how you’ve changed over the intervening time. In a year you will have encountered situations, solved problems, met new people, and known familiar people in new ways.

Through these experiences your mind has adapted and changed. You will certainly have learned a great deal in that time. Learning is inevitable and we learn all the time. Whenever we are conscious, we are learning. When we read a newspaper, listen to the radio, or watch television, there is learning. We learn from conversations, browsing the internet, walking in the woods, or playing a musical instrument. We learn especially well in communities and through collaboration. 

The phrase I use to capture the expansive nature of learning is ‘learning as lifelong, worldwide, and values-deep’.

So, you may ask, what does that mean for me?’ The implications are more significant and useful than you may first imagine. Let me touch briefly on what I mean.

Lifelong is perhaps the easiest to grasp. From our earliest moments until the end of our days, learning is with us. It is bound up with consciousness itself — to be human is to learn.

At different stages of life, the tasks and orientation of learning changes: the child learns through play, the adolescent explores identity, adults tend to focus on the challenges of work and family, while while mature adults may place more value reflection and renewal.

Lifelong learning reminds us that no stage of life is without opportunities to grow.

Seeing learning as a ‘lifelong’ process puts us and others at points on a journey of continuous development. As adults we may doubt ourselves as learners. These negative feelings often stem from our school days. Recognising that learning is a lifelong process allows us to deal with our past and to move away from defining ourselves by what we achieved in school. Lifelong learning acknowledges the on-going quest in each of us to give meaning and purpose to our lives.

Worldwide points beyond our own circle of experience. All too often we are fixed in our perspective. What we experience is a tiny fraction of the world and we often overlook the wide array of contexts in which people grow and learn.

It is easy to assume that our schools, colleges, and workplaces are the template for everyone, everywhere. Yet learning takes many forms across societies. It happens in oral traditions as well as literate ones, in villages as well as cities, in times of conflict as well as peace.

To see learning worldwide is to remember its universality, but also its diversity. The way people learn is shaped by culture, history, and circumstance, and that diversity enriches our understanding and tolerance of others. We cannot really know ourselves as learners unless we appreciate how other people have learned to see the world differently. This is the essence of human collaboration and activity. Importantly, local and community education are part of this worldwide picture. We learn best while collaborating for a common purpose, be that ‘men’s sheds’, ‘tidy towns’ or ‘rural links’.

Values-deep reminds us that while everyday learning builds our knowledge and skills, there is also a form of learning that challenges us at a deeper level. It shifts our values, our assumptions, even our sense of what is right or wrong. This is what education scholars call transformative learning — often triggered by difficult experiences that cause us to question ourselves and see the world differently. Such learning may be described as deep as it reshapes our identity and values.

What does that mean for each of us? Consider your own values and how they’ve come to shape the way you live. Did you always have these same values? We often say we are ‘nurturing our values’ and we try to instil values in young people. So, it is reasonable to argue that values are learned and if so, then surely they can change as a result of new experiences and insights.

I’m not suggesting that values are fickle and easy to change – quite the opposite they are deep convictions that are usually taken for granted and unquestioned. But every so often in our lives, or in the lives of people we know, we face an unexpected problem that challenges our assumptions. These experiences may be disorienting and lead us to question our deepest values. Appreciating that this as a learning process helps us carry through these unsettling transformations.

In this letter I have only touched the surface. I hope it gets you thinking about learning in all its forms: the everyday and the transformative, the personal and the global, the lifelong thread that ties our human story together.

In future letters I intend to provide more details and useful insights from the scholarship of learning and my own experiences. We can regard each letter as a conversation starter, so your comments and responses are especially welcome.

To facilitate this I have prepared a list of Self-Reflection Questions below. I encourage you to take a moment to consider your response to each question; they are designed to develop your critical understanding of learning.

I have also developed a Discussion Space where you can register, comment and engage in constructive dialogue about this topic.

I invite you to walk with me on this journey, as fellow learners, open to whatever the world has yet to teach us.

Your partner in learning,

Leo