CJ Dennis captured this thought perfectly – ‘A rose by any other name would smell the same.’
The name I’m thinking of here is not Julier or Juliet. It is Ecological Psychology or Computationalism. Both of these are trying to explain the phenomena of an ‘inner life’. It turns out that the way we perceive things is a big deal.
So when talking about a theory of learner agency we need to start off by finding our ‘agents’ right where they are at. Educational Psychology would suggest that learners perceive things directly in their learning ecology. That is, they have a way of being that informs their actions through their experience of the physicality of being in their learning environment.
Young people can move around objects, politely knock on doors and do spectacular ‘speckies’ by virtue of their experience of being in the space. They perceive the relationship between things in their lived environment as they move through. In this sense the need for material reductionism or the rejection of an ontological dualism is not so important. Or maybe it is?
Computationism would suggest that the brain responds to the stimulus received and then adds value to the information by processing it in some way – cognition. You can think of this as a student learning to decode an unfamiliar text purely by internal means.
Educational Psychology would suggest that the stimulus is rich and loaded with perceivable contextual information ‘explanations must appeal to laws of interaction between entities and not to intrinsic/ inner features of those entities as the realisers of the target explanandum (Raja et al. 2017)’
If the concept of ‘pirate’ exists for a child, then decoding the word ‘pirate’ without reference to the context in which it occurs is a poverty of stimulus. With a picture of an iconic pirate, and the letter ‘p’ the child can perceive the word as ‘pirate’ without cogitating through non-sylabice-final-e’s and the like!
Cognitive Load Theory talks about biologically primary learning and biologically secondary learning. It might be argued that biologically primary learning relates to hearing words and speaking words. Biologically secondary learning may relate to writing words.
At face value it could appear that the primary learning relates to perception and the secondary learning relates to computationalism.
I would like to argue that all learning is ecological (Just ‘fessing up to my bias here, which I’m not clever enough to elucidate yet) and, after Gibson and Chemero and others, that Computationalism is not sufficient to explain the process of learning and causing learning to happen.
Fundamentally, it seems that computationalism is a material reductionist form of behaviourism – kicking the homunculus problem down the road. How does information about information processing get processed – the notion of some epiphenomoligical projection of self consistent over space and time is just another form of a homunculus running the show. The dualism you have without having dualism.
The same might be said for ecological psychology – except the homunculus is obvious for all to see. Patterns of relationships, and habits of building those patterns and the strategic placement of those things in relationship lead to new knowledge ie: ‘p’ plus pirate picture = the written word ‘pirate’.
I’m not even close to understanding either of these concepts at the 101 level yet. I am tempted to favour the notion of ecological psychology as it relates to learner agency by virtue of the fact that it is about agents actively making connections between external artifacts in their lived world. Yes, those connections are realised internally, but characterised through perception.
Computationalism demands the work of meaning making all be done in the brain behind closed doors and busy mouse wheels.
What’s in a word you ask? The raw materials for the very fabric by which we clothe our identity I say, – they do not all smell the same!