within the person as, in each situation, they stimulate, provoke and weave in
and out of trade-offs and balances with each other (Thelen, ibid., 85)
Understanding human beings as learners with these characteristics means that it is
believed that first, they are able to adapt to different situations and environments;
second, that they can, and are inclined to, participate in group activities and play
different roles and fulfil different functions, and third, that human beings have a sense
not only of being but also of becoming, or transcending. This last feature has been
connected to the term self-realisation which is said to imply the “reconstruction of
meanings” (Thelen,75). In this sense we can understand the difference between
education and training, which means that training does not encompass transcendental
experiences whereas education does. This view articulates with the work of Widdowson
who refers to training and education in the field of language education:
training seeks to impose a conformity to certain established patterns of
knowledge and behaviour....Education, however, seeks to provide for
creativity whereby what is learned is a set of schemata and procedures for
adapting them to cope with problems which do not have a ready-made
formulaic solution (italics in the original,1983,19)
In this sense, creativity and transcendence depend on each other.
8.1.2.2 Conditions for the creation of a learning culture
For some, creating a learning culture, or rather, making educational innovations,
seems just a matter of innovating by “outside change agents” (Shimim,1996, 105), that
is, making authoritarian and imposed decisions at high institutional levels. This approach
is somehow, more concerned with large rather than small cultures. In spite of this, as
Shimim states,
Many of us believe that a teacher-initiated innovation at the grassroots level
of the classroom is more effective as it is often introduced directly in response
to an immediate problem in the specific context in the classroom, (ibid)
However, Shimim admits in her article that her “teacher-initiated innovation at the
grassroots levels” was not effective due to the learner resistance to change. According to
her, one of the reasons for this failure was
incongruity between the assumptions of the proposed methodological
innovation and the cultural orientation of the participants in the classroom
situation, which is essentially a microcosm of the wider community, (ibid, 118)
As I see it, however, at a microcultural level, there are conditions that need to be met. Let
me now refer to two authors, Titchen (1997) and Thelen (1981), who talk about this issue
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