The neoliberal world and the corporate university have made an annoying appropriation of the verb “to learn.” To listen to advertising and infomercials is to “learn” or “learn more.” Training sessions on the use of Moodle and WebCT, or on the newest university policies, are “learning.” Now, my Coursera MOOC “invites” me to “visit” the course so as to “start learning.”
These are such pompous and presumptuous, and manipulative uses of the word. Mostly, we are not “learning” in these instances. We are being proselytized at, or offered information, or manipulated; those who say we will learn, presume they have something to teach which is not always the case.
In the old days when I was a student, professors were not so presumptuous as to claim we would learn. They would teach, say things, organize activities, and present things; and we would study or not and might learn things.
We would not have been expected to say, “I will go to class and learn.” We said: I will go to class and find out what is being said; I will go to class and ask a question on this topic; I will go to class and give my presentation.
Classes were so much more interactive and democratic back then. If you took a lecture course, for instance, you did not “learn the lecture;” you listened to it, considered it, asked questions to it.
That is at least what I did, and my undergraduate GPA was 3.87 in a demanding program at a demanding school, so I do not think I can have been all wrong. Am I the only one objecting to the current cooptation of the verb “to learn”?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I found this interesting in light of what you wrote here.
“aprender(se). Cuando significa ‘adquirir el conocimiento de algo por medio del estudio o la experiencia’, es transitivo si lo que se aprende se expresa mediante un sustantivo, e intransitivo, con un complemento con a, si lo que se aprende se expresa mediante un infinitivo: «David aprende la técnica del retrato» (Marsé Rabos [Esp. 2000]); «Allí aprendimos a pescar» (Montero Tú [Cuba 1995]). Cuando significa ‘memorizar [algo]’, es transitivo y lleva normalmente un pronombre concordado con el sujeto: «Rogelio se aprendió de memoria esa parte del texto» (Olivera Enfermera [Méx. 1991]). Aunque comparte etimología con aprehender, ambos verbos tienen hoy usos diferenciados y no deben confundirse (→ aprehender).”
from the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas ©2005
Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados
Ah! Appropriation of old words in the service of hidden agendas. You’ll like this dictionary of terms used in the new neo-liberal corporate educational system.
http://karenfraid.tumblr.com/
I had not thought about this, but now that you have said it, I agree with you!
I know exactly what you mean.
Yes! I have been increasingly put off by this dichotomy of “learning” vs. “teaching.” I’m all for seeing them as different activities, but to make them so binaristic seems to erase the labor (including emotional/relational labor) involved in teaching. It also seems to imply that professors have no need to learn, which, as anyone who’s ever been assigned a new prep (or started a new research project) knows is not at all the case.
OH WAIT THOUGH. A professor learning might mean changing their course…. which would mean redoing all those videos…. hmm….
What was the news item I saw, where professors revealed inadvertently that their MOOC was intended to be preserved in amber … they could not give out quiz answers, because they would then have to make new quizzes for the next time, that was it!
But yes, that hits the nail on the head, the idea that teaching and learning are not intertwined, and that learning is best done without teaching!
(What is a MOOC? A study group without library resources or access to experts in field.)
Yes, that was the item I was thinking of! Which I thought was telling because, well, it was — such clear evidence that MOOCs really are reproductions of professors reading their yellowed notes. But also because I thought it underscored the perceived irrelevance of research — you can’t possibly have learned (or created!) something new that you could share with students. (Research really needs to be seen as a learning process, not just a writing/creating process, I think).
I mean, one of the good things about face to face classroom interaction is that you can shift gears quickly if you need or want to, throw something in that you read about the night before, slow down or reframe something if the students are confused, do an on-the-spot improvisation if you need to shift what’s going on. That’s all part of teaching, too, or should be.
Yes … and it really is true, people think research has nothing to do with teaching, and too few realize it is about learning. I, of course, have all these rants where I talk about how people call learning “procrastination,” thereby preventing one from producing anything new.
I do agree that a lot of rhetoric misuses the word. A classroom is a community of learners, ideally, but it is perfectly possible to attend a class and NOT learn. In casual conversation I talk about what I do in (and out) of classrooms as teaching, but if I were to be precise with my language I might call it ‘creating learning opportunities’ – back to the gym model of HE, not the bean-counters fake business model.
Yes. Although I would add from my MOOC experience that people go too far with this. Our professor wasn’t prepared in field and did not do much to make up for this — and the excuse was that we were supposed to take responsibility for our own learning, learn from each other, etc. …