Social Learning Exhibit

What are Social Learning Theories?

The social learning theories focus on the communities, culture, environment, and context in which learners build out their knowledge and understanding. Other members in the learners' communities of practice share their knowledge and expertise to facilitate learning in applicable settings and have the learner participate in meaningful tasks. The label for these relationships and interactions can be described as mentorships, apprenticeships, or internships; where the learner engages in authentic contexts and tasks related to the community of practice's primary purpose or focus.

I think that Bandura's famous Bobo doll experiment highlights something that can be easy to overlook in our everyday lives: the unintended lessons taught. I had trouble ending that last sentence because both as learners and instructors the impact of these unintentional lessons can be deep. As a learner we might be discouraged from asking questions at home or with certain people because they lack the patience to help us understand something, an unintended lesson learned from that situation may be to not ask questions of anyone. As an instructor we may be so focused on the situation at hand that we do not consider important outside factors. 

Content Warning ahead: accidental death

This is a paraphrase and may not be totally accurate to the true story but the key takeaways, I believe, should still come through. In a first-year experience type course at Lake Superior State University, one of the three instructors shared a story of his former colleague, and for storytelling purposes, we'll call this colleague Dr. Jones. Dr. Jones required that her students submit their final papers in person. It being December in a more Northern area, on the last day that the final was due, Dr. Jones had a student ask if she could make an exception, because as a commuter they had a long trek to campus and the incoming storm was already making the roads bad. She said, "No exceptions." So the student managed to make it to campus in time to submit their final paper, then left Dr. Jones's office. The student ended up losing their life in that storm trying to make it home. I could hear the anguish in my instructor's voice, as he shared that cautionary tale with a class of mostly 18 to 20 year-olds. That story haunts him, and now me, to not only be aware of my surroundings but the surroundings and environment we create for our students and communities.

To me, this "no exceptions" mindset is a problem of cultural norms and practices. Having students follow rules to "prepare them" for real-world situations and deadlines when that's not what is actually important to learn while under our guidance, is unnecessary and in some cases, fatal. I think we should be leveraging the technologies we have at our disposal to foster caring, empathetic environments where we can all learn and improve together.

Situative Perspective

For my meme I used the “Is this a pigeon?” template and it has IT students hearing the sentence “I’ll pay you $5 to fix my iPhone” and asking, “Is this a paid internship?” As an IT systems engineer and IT support staff myself I’ve run into issues in the fields of technology with gaining the experience that employers are looking for in their job postings. I once found a job posting that asked for 8 years of experience in a programming language that (at the time) had only existed for 3 years. That made it very obvious when their HR department was not communicating with other department heads to figure out exactly what they need. When it comes to programming, knowing specific languages is less valuable than being able to pick up new languages as they inevitably come out and take over in popularity. These are forms of inter-/mentor-/apprentice- ships that aren’t readily and seriously recognized a lot of the time. I’ve had friends find creative ways to add this type of experience to their resume, not unlike adding skills based off of Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPGs like D&D) like so: "Met with coworkers for twice weekly creativity and conflict resolution exercises", "Gained necessary experience that promoted character skill and growth", and "Learned to quickly assess the proper tools to resolve situations" 

This learning theory doesn’t explain unguided experiential learning very well. Social interactions are so heavily emphasized that novel knowledge development may not be given much credit or merit. I could also see there being cases where the culture and context are not the deciding factors that primarily influence learning. For example, if I have sound to taste synesthesia (lexical–gustatory) and the phrase “rainy day” tastes like an iced matcha latte, it might not register to me why grey rainy weather invokes sadness or ennui in others when I’m imagining my favorite beverage. What’s going on in our heads at any moment can be so wildly different from person to person for a myriad of reasons and I don’t think it’s a failing on the part of the instructors or the pupil if they aren’t able to fully engage and be attentive to a lesson.

Social Cognitive Theory

We divided up one of our readings covering a Bandura and Walters (1971) work and I analyzed a section we had labeled as "Cognitive control of conditioning phenomena". In my section of the reading they provided an example where someone wrote into an advice column about how they have learned not to trust anyone in a bowtie. My illustration to help explain my section comprises three images representing this story. The example letter reads as follows: 

Eyes looking left, bow tie, and "Prohibited" emojis

The reader who submitted this letter took their own anecdotal evidence as objective truths for all and is going so far as to propose that we must ensure that the public is warned about individuals in bowties; which any fan of Bill Nye might argue, is categorically false. While maligning the bowtie is easy enough for us to understand from reading this letter, it does make us wonder how we might help individuals making these generalizations to understand that their influence on their environment and social context may have an impact that perpetuates an incorrect belief or assumption.

References

Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1971). Social learning theory (Vol. 1). General Learning Press.

Official website of Bill Nye the science guy. (n.d.). Bill Nye. Retrieved March 3, 2024, from https://www.billnye.com/

DebateFilms. (2011, May 17). The brain: A secret history - emotions; Bobo doll experiment [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zerCK0lRjp8