HUMANISTIC LEARNING THEORY

HUMANISTIC LEARNING THEORY

Humanistic Concepts

Humanistic concepts in this paper consist of humanistic perspective, the nature of significant learning, the teacher as the facilitator of learning, and students’ contribution to learning.

A Brief History of Humanistic Psychology

During the 1950s, humanistic psychology began as a reaction to psychoanalysis and behaviorism, which dominated psychology at the time. Psychoanalysis was focused on understanding the unconscious motivations that drove behavior while behaviorism studied the conditioning processes that produced behavior. Humanist thinkers felt that both psychoanalysis and behaviorism were too pessimistic, either focusing on the most tragic of emotions or failing to take into account the role of personal choice.

Humanistic psychology was instead focused on each individual's potential and stressed the importance of growth and self-actualization. The fundamental belief of humanistic psychology was that people are innately good, with mental and social problems resulting from deviations from this natural tendency.

In 1962, Abraham Maslow published Toward a Psychology of Being, in which he described humanistic psychology as the "third force" in psychology. The first and second forces were behaviorism and psychoanalysis respectively.

However, it is not necessary to think of these three schools of thought as competing elements. Each branch of psychology has contributed to our understanding of the human mind and behavior. Humanistic psychtology added yet another dimension that took a more holistic view of the individual.

(Summary from Humanistic Psychology by Kendra Cherry)

Humanistic Perspective

The focus of the humanistic perspective is on the self, which translates into "YOU", and "your" perception of "your" experiences. This veiw argues that you are free to choose your own behavior, rather than reacting to environmental stimuli and reinforcers. Issues dealing with self-esteem, self-fulfillment, and needs are paramount. The major focus is to facilitate personal development. Two major theorists associated with this view are Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Carl Rogers feels that each person operates from a unique frame of reference in terms of buliding Self Regard or their self concept. Self Concept is one's own belief about themselves. These beliefs stem, in part, from the notion of Unconditional Postive Regard and Conditional Positive Regard. Unconditional positive regard occurs when individuals, especially parents, demonstrate unconditional love. Conditioned positive regard is when that love seems to only come when certain condtions are met. Rogers theory states that psychologically healthy people enjoy life to the fullest, hence, they are seen as fully functioning people. Abraham Maslow feels that indivduals have certain needs that must be met in an hierarchical fashion, from the lowest to highest. These include basic needs,safety needs, love and belonging needs, achievement needs, and ultimately, Self-Actualization.

According to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the needs must be achieved in order. For instance, one would be unable to fulfill their safety needs if their physiological needs have not been met.

Maslow's Hierarchy Triangle is as follows:

The Nature of Significant Learning

Significant--personal, experiential--learning is learning which makes a difference to the person, in behavior, attitudes, and personality. It is learning which leads to the individual becoming a more fully functioning person. Such learning involves certain principles (or hypotheses) which relate to the theory of human nature and of human behavior presented earlier.

Human beings have a natural propensity for learning. They are by nature curious; exploratory; desirous of discovering, knowing, and experiencing. Yet there is an ambivalence toward learning; significant learning involves some pain, either connected with the learning itself or with having to relinquish earlier learnings. Learning to walk involves bumps and bruises. Learning that some others are better than oneself in some respects is painful. But the gains and satisfactions of learning, of developing one's potentials, are usually greater than the pain, and learning continues.

Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for her or his own purposes. A person learns significantly only those things which are perceived as involving the maintenance and enhancement of the self. Two students of equal ability learn quite different things, or amounts, depending on bow they perceive the material as relating to their needs and purposes. The speed of learning also varies. The time for learning may be reduced by as much as two-thirds to four-fifths when material is perceived as relevant to the learner‘s purposes.

Learning which involves a change in self-organization, or the perception of the self, is threatening, and tends to be resisted. The self includes one's values, beliefs, and basic attitudes, and when these are questioned they are defended. To recognize that something new and different may be better, that one is behind in things or inferior in some way, or inadequate, is defended against.

Those learnings which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum. Pressure, ridicule, shaming, and so on, increase resistance. But an accepting, understanding, supportive environment removes or decreases threat and fear and allows the learner to take a few steps or to try something and experience some success. Teaching machines incorporate this idea.

When threat to the self or self-concept is low, experience can be perceived in a differentiated fashion, and learning can proceed. This is why learning is inhibited by threat and assisted by its lack. Threat disorganizes thinking: It leads to distortion of perception, restriction of the perceptual field (a kind of tunnel vision), even, in strong threat, to paralysis of thinking and action. Freedom from threat to one's security, or ego, frees one to see the total situation and to examine it --to "take it apart," manipulate it, put it together--and to learn. Threats to the organism--even life-or-death threats-- can be handled or responded to with all one's powers; but threats to the self or the self-concept interfere with learning. Another way to view it is that threat to the self leads to all-out efforts to maintain the self as it exists, but not to change or growth in the self.

Much significant learning is acquired through doing. Experiential involvement with practical or real problems promotes learning. Meaningfulness and relevance are inherent in such situations.

Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process. When students choose their own objectives and directions, formulate their own problems, discover their own resources, decide on and follow their own courses of action, and experience and live with the consequences, significant learning is maximized. Selfdirected learning is meaningful and relevant.

Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner--feelings as well as intellect--is the most lasting and pervasive. The learning is the learner's own, and becomes incorporated in her or him; it is not something external or accepted on authority, and thus vulnerable to questioning or another authority.

Independence, creativity, and self -reliance are all facilitated when self -criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance. Creativity needs freedom, freedom to try something unusual, to take a chance, to make mistakes without being evaluated or judged a failure.

The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change. Change is a central fact of current life, and learning must be continuous.

Learning involves the whole person; it combines cognitive and affective experiential elements. It is a unified learning, yet with awareness of the different aspects. It does not separate the mind from the heart, from feelings, as most education attempts to do. Rogers quotes Archibald McLeish in this regard: "We do not feel our knowledge. Nothing could better illustrate the flaw at the heart of our civilization. . . . Knowledge without feeling is not knowledge and can lead only to public irresponsibility and indifference, and conceivably to ruin." (24) Personal meaning, relevance, significance involve feelings, attitudes, and beliefs.

(Summary from Carls Roger and Humanistic Education by Patterson C.H)

The Teacher as the Facilitator of Learning

Teaching, as usually defined and practiced, involves instruction, imparting information, knowledge, or skill; it is "to make to know," "to show, guide, direct." These are activities of the teacher. But are they necessary for learning, or even related to learning as defined earlier? "Teaching," says Rogers, "is a vastly over-rated function."

Function of the teacher is to facilitate learning in the student by providing the conditions which lead to meaningful or significant self-directed learning. The objective is to develop a group, including the teacher, into a community of learners. In such a community, curiosity is freed, the sense of inquiry is opened up, everything is open to questioning and exploration. "Out of such a context arise true students, real learners, creative scientists and scholars and practitioners, the kind of individuals who can live in a delicate but everchanging balance between what is presently known and the flowing, moving, altering problems and facts of the future.”  Such a community facilitates learning, or learning how to learn.

We now have considerable knowledge about how to do so, about how to stimulate self-initiated, significant learning by the whole person. There are three major conditions, or qualities or attitudes, which, when present in an interpersonal relationship, facilitate such learning.

Realness is the facilitator of learning. Learning is facilitated when the teacher is not playing a role prescribed by the educational system but rather is himself or herself, genuine, authentic, honest. Relationships with students are direct personal encounters; the teacher is a real person, with no professional facade. He doesn’t feel one thing and say something else; he doesn't conceal his feelings, either positive or negative. But in expressing his feelings he accepts them as his own, without projecting blame for his negative feelings onto the students. If be is irritated, he says "I feel irritated," not "You irritate me." He can be bored as well as enthusiastic. "He can like or dislike a student product without implying that it is objectively good or bad or that the student is good or bad. He is simply expressing a feeling for the product, a feeling which exists within himself. Thus he is a person to his students, not a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement nor a sterile tube through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.”

Prizing, acceptance, trust . If one is not to express judgments and evaluations, one must not be judgmental in one's attitudes. This is related to the second attitude which facilitates learning. The learner is accepted as a person of worth, a unique individual, and is respected; his or her feelings, opinions, and person are prized. The learner is seen as trustworthy. There is a caring for him or her. And all this is unconditional; there is no demand that the learner be different or conform in some way to be accepted and respected. Fears as well as satisfactions, apathy as well as enthusiasm, anger and resistance as well as pleasantness and cooperation, are all accepted as aspects of an imperfect human being. Underlying this attitude is a trust in the human organism, its capacity for developing its potential, choosing its own directions, given the opportunity. It is a confidence that the direction of change and learning will be toward the fulfillment or actualization of the person's potentialities, toward growth and development.

Empathic understanding. Empathic understanding is not the usual evaluative understanding based on a diagnostic analysis from an external point of view. It is understanding which comes from putting oneself in the place of the student to understand his or her reactions from the inside, to experience the student's perceptions and feelings about what is happening.

(Summary from Carls Roger and Humanistic Education by Patterson C.H)

The Students Contribution to Learning

If the teaching-learning process is a relationship or an encounter between a facilitator and a learner, then the learner must be a participant in the process. There are three conditions involving the learner which are necessary for learning to occur.

Perception of the facilitative conditions. If realness, prizing, and acceptance and empathic understanding are to be effective in facilitating learning, they must be perceived or felt by the student. Students, because of their previous experience, may at first think that the genuineness or realness of the teacher is a new kind of phoniness whose purpose is to manipulate them. But students overcome this disbelief when the teacher is in fact not pretending or trying a new role, and recognize the realness and humanness of the teacher.

Awareness of a problem. Real learning occurs in response to a situation perceived by the student as a problem. Otherwise there is little if any stimulation to learn or to change. This is essentially the problem of relevance. It requires that if real learning is to be facilitated, education must present students with situations they perceive as real, as relevant, meaningful problems and issues regarding their existence which they must resolve.

Motivation. Conceivably, problems can be ignored, avoided, or resisted. But there is a natural motivation for learning in all normal individuals. This motivation is the tendency to fulfillment or toward self -actualization. When faced with a problem, or an obstacle to self-actualization, the natural tendency of the individual is to face it, work on it, and attempt to solve it. Unfortunately, this natural motivation to learn is often suppressed rather than supported in our current educational system. (32) The school and the classroom are highly threatening to many students, and this threat inhibits the natural motivation to learn. The presence of facilitative conditions in the teacher minimizes threat and thus allows the motivation to learn to manifest itself.

When a facilitator creates, even to a modest degree, a classroom climate characterized by all that he can achieve of realness, prizing, and empathy; when he trusts the constructive tendency of the individual and the group; then he discovers that be has inaugurated an educational revolution. Learning of a different quality, proceeding at a different pace, with a greater degree of pervasiveness, occurs. Feelings--positive, negative, confused-become a part of the classroom experience. Learning becomes life, and a very vital life at that. The student is on his way, sometimes excitedly, sometimes reluctantly, to becoming a learning, changing, being.

(Summary from Carls Roger and Humanistic Education by Patterson C.H)

The Implication of Humanistic Learning Theory

Humanistic psychology regards a teacher as a facilitator. Here are the instructions for the teacher as a facilitator:

Facilitator should give attention to creating the beginning of situation, group situation and class experience

Facilitator helps to gain and to explain the individual objectives inside the class and the group objectives as well

Facilitator believes that there is a will from each student to do the objective which benefits themselves as the reinforcement which is hidden in the learning process.

Facilitator organizes and preservers  sources in order to make it easier to the students to reach their  goals

Facilitators must put themselves as the flexible source for students to use.

Facilitator can also be a student who participates.

Facilitator only works as a helper in a group but not giving to much point in demanding and forcing according to his thought.

(summary from Teori Belajar Humanistic by Novina Suprobo)

The Application of Humanistic Theory towards Students’ Learning

Humanistic theory application shows much on spirit in the process of learning which emphasizes on the method used. The role of teacher in learning humanistic is as facilitator. The teacher facilitates students with experience in learning and scaffold students in gaining their objectives.

The purpose of learning focuses more on the learning process than the result. Students act as the main role (student-centered) where they use their own experiences in learning. Students are expected to believe in their own potential, develop their own potential in their own ways and minimizes own potential which is negative.

(summary from Teori Belajar Humanistics by Novina Suprobo)

Figures of Humanistic

Carl Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987)

Carl Rogers is best-known for his nondirective approach to treatment known as client-centered therapy. His concept of the actualizing tendency. Developing the concept of the fully-functioning person.

Abraham Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970)

Abraham Maslow began teaching at Brooklyn College in 1937 and continued to work as a member of the school’s faculty until 1951. During this time, he was heavily influenced by Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer and anthropologist Ruth Benedict. Maslow believed that they were such exceptional people that he began to analyze and take notes on their behavior. This analysis served as the basis for his theories and research on human potential.

During the 1950s, Maslow became one of the founders and driving force behind the school of thought known as humanistic psychology. His theories including the hierarchy of needs, self-actualization and peak experiences became fundamental subjects in the humanist movement.

References

Cherry, Kendra. ____ . Biography of Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), (Online), (http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/abraham-maslow.htm) accessed on September 16^th, 2011

Cherry, Kendra. ____ . Carls Rogers Biography (1902-1987), (Online), (http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/bio_rogers.htm) accessed on September 16^th, 2011

Cherry, Kendra. ____. Humanistic Psychology, (Online), (http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/hist_humanistic.htm) accessed on September 16^th, 2011

Suprobo, Novina. 2008. Teori Belajar Humanistik, (Online), (http://novinasuprobo.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/teori-belajar-humanistik/) accessed on September 16^th, 2011

_____. Carl Rogers and Humanistic Education, (Online), (http://www.sageofasheville.com/pub_downloads/CARL_ROGERS_AND_HUMANISTIC_EDUCATION.pdf) accessed on September 16^th, 2011