Vygotsky and Spontaneous Learning

Vygotsk suggests that schooled learning ought to be an experience in which teachers guide students in the acquisition of knowledge from a built up information pool (the contents of which may span a great many years).  As part of the guidance process, teachers need to find ways of bringing students to the most elemental process of learning - spontaneous learning.

While schooled learning involves a systematic process of being taught a variety of concepts (each built upon ones that came before) at specific times (periods) in a student's educational development, spontaneous learning is, well, spontaneous!  It happens randomly through various environmental stimuli that the student experiences from birth onward.  Therefore, in a given day, an individual can learn a variety of concepts in a random fashion through observation of and interaction with their world, and through basic questions posed to the people around them.  This type of learning is the basis of all knowledge acquisition.  It is the way primitive man learned to eat fruit from trees, learned to make tools, learned to build shelters and so on.

Vygotsky implies that effective teaching should involve a blurring of the lines between both types of learning.  While a teacher is expected to teach the structured curriculum, they should find ways of involving elements of spontaneous learning.  In a way, this goes back to the idea of learning through active engagement and learning through connection to real-world contexts.  What the teacher has to do, is plan lessons in a way that capitalizes on what the student brings to the classroom - what they already know - and what elements of the curriculum can be tied into their environment.  By crafting the lesson around these two factors, teaching can done with 'guided spontaneity' if you will.  That is to say, the teacher takes the structured curriculum, and creates lessons that allow students to arrive at certain conclusions based on their previous knowledge and the stimuli provided by the lesson.

As we have seen, the use of ICT can provide avenues to encourage this by allowing students to escape the four walls of the classroom.  They can collaborate with students studying the same course in various parts of the earth, share experiences and come to a variety of conclusions.  Students are also privy to information available from sources well beyond the limited views of their prescribed textbooks.  Students may also have the luxury (depending on the course) to interact with online models of the concepts they are learning and even communicate with experts in the field.

We therefore arrive at a place where both forms of learning mesh to interest and educate students.  The result is the reduction of rote learning and the molding of students into true sentient beings.