Social Learning Theories

Social Learning Theories are, honestly, frustrating in the beginning of my study. It was a bit of vague to me when I first previewing the learning contents: “Yes, it’s about learning together, and then?” Only when I went deeper into the thoughts of Lev Vygotsky and Albert Bandura did I realize that Social Learning is not a mere combination of former ideas, but a brand-new way to investigate the nature of humans and society.

Prior to Social Learning Theories, environment, behavior, and personal cognitive factors are distinct from each other to some extent – whether Behaviorism or Cognitivism tend to focus on these factors independently. However, through Bandura’s concept of reciprocal causation, these three factors are “interdependent”: we live in an environment shaped by societal and cultural influences, balance our self-efficacy through self-regulation and external guidance, building up our cognitive understanding of our surroundings, societies and eventually the world itself. That’s a reaffirming of human’s subjectivity in learning – we define who we are and what we learn.

Among all the SLT-inspiring instructional theories, the apprenticeship is the one I am most familiar with. The recruitment of new journalists and their very first training are straightly “learn by doing”. I still remembered the first task I took when I became a trainee in the press – a senior journalist took a day off and a vice mayor was going to visit an important hydro project settled in the area our newspaper covered, then I was sent to do the report. That was some apprenticeship I undertook – I followed another senior journalist from another press and coped with what he did, referred to some similar topic report’s structure to finish mine, then waited anxiously until got approved by the editor.

The other two teaching methods – Collaborative Learning and Reciprocal Learning – are frequently mentioned in the “education reform” of China’s higher education system; however, they require a great deal more effort putting in the preparation of the course delivery. I’ve witnessed some lecturers using “flipped classroom” and other similar instructional strategies inspired by reciprocal learning, and some of them misunderstood “reciprocal” to “let students do all the stuff and watch them give a meaningless presentation to smartphone-playing peers”. So, there are still long ways to go before we instructors make up clear mind of “why teaching”, and learners knowing “why learning”.