The Learning Scenario

To illustrate the various learning theories in practice, I chose one of my favorite hobbies, cold-process soapmaking. Making soap has been a craft for almost 3,000 years now, ever since the ancients discovered that dripping animal fat into the ashes of a fire would yield a soaplike substance that could be used to clean plant and animal fibers. It's a fun and useful craft, but virtually impossible to figure out on one's own without some form of education, whether it be in-person training, reading the steps in a book (which is the way I learned to make the stuff), or watching asynchronous demos and videos. I hope you enjoy my breakdown of how to get started making soap from a cognitive point of view!

Adult learners often bring past experiences and knowledge to new learning scenarios. They are not tabulae rasae. In the above learning scenario, the learners know from prior "off-camera" experiences that lye can be dangerous if mishandled and that some safety precautions need to be followed when handling it, regardless of how one is using it. My role as the instructor is to evoke some of that prior experience and connect it to what I am about to demonstrate in the soap workshop. Several of Gagné's nine events of instruction are present in this little five-minute vignette, as indicated by the underlining above.

In addition, as the designer I have tried to use some other cognitive strategies for learning, since as adults they bring some basic safety knowledge to the scenario but have never actually done the activity (making soap):

• Advance organizers: laying out the equipment to give them an idea of what we will be discussing and also stimulate curiosity

• Signals to give the learners an idea of what's coming: me wearing safety gear (I don't go around dressed like that every day!)

• Activating prior knowledge: asking the learners about the safety precautions gives me an opportunity to ascertain what they already know, enabling me to concentrate on that which they have yet to learn

• Verbalizing knowledge: asking the open-ended question and eliciting their input gives the learners a chance not only to gain confidence in what they are learning, but in case one learner says something another learner doesn't know, they learn from one another, and the knowledge is repeated and reinforced

Some of these behaviors, for example Charlie laying out the equipment the way he likes, also overlap with social learning. We'll see how in the section on social learning theory.