In Focus: Knowledge Hub as an Enabling Environment for Social Learning?
We talked to Beverly Wenger-Trayner, social learning theorist and consultant. With her husband Etienne they lead the developments within the social learning theory. Beverly has been working with the CEF for a number of years. The latest project that we jointly delivered was a workshop on Training of Trainers (ToT), where experts from line ministries engaged in real-life activities and collective reflections on their performance as learning facilitators.
We have just delivered a workshop aiming to enable professionals to share their knowledge, Training of Trainers. What are your first impressions of the event?
I was struck by the way that people really brought themselves in the event: their mind, their body, their heart; they were proactive, taking initiative, and it was great! I found it moving.
In the workshop we did not simply talk about presentations, but participants planned, practiced and performed them in groups in the CEF semi-safe environment. The groups were open to appreciation and critiques of their performance. This willingness to jump in and work together, to give and receive feedback about what they were doing, and to be reflective about the process, is crucial for learning.
We observed that the participants developed close ties during the event, although they did not know each other and were coming from other institutions, other countries. Why is learning with others special? How does it affect learning?
People are not just meeting each other and exchanging information or business cards, although this too is important. In this workshop we created a space and a process whereby participants, from similar institutions but in different countries, could reach out to each other as learning partners in the process of giving a powerful presentation. A learning partnership means I trust that you and I are struggling with some of the same issues. I can be open about my difficulties and you will understand them. This is what makes learning with others who share the same practice, regardless of whether or not they come from the same institution or country, so powerful.
How can one collect data of an established cooperation and its outcomes?
Well, to start with you need to collect data about the value of the cooperation activities to those who were involved in them. And then to follow up with them to collect data about how they have changed their practice as a result of participating in those activities. You would hope to see that this change in practice has resulted in a positive final outcome for the institutions they came from. Stories about how people have changed their practice as a result of participating in the ToT, or the series of events hosted by the CEF, are called value-creation stories. Part of the CEF’s role as a knowledge hub is twofold: one is to stimulate the kinds of activities that lead to productive relationships, changed practices, and improved outcomes. The other is to collect data and value-creation stories about all of these things. This data will help us make sure that we are designing the right kinds of events for the sorts of outcomes that are required in the region.
You mentioned knowledge hubs. What is their role and do you perceive the CEF being one?
I think it is helpful to think of the metaphor of a landscape with hills and valleys, well-trodden paths, wilderness, barren areas – and so on. Think of the hills as places in the landscape that have been colonized by different practices. These are places where knowledge has already been created. Some hills are high, some are low. As a knowledge hub you are looking strategically across this landscape, looking for places where it might be useful to make an intervention. Perhaps there is a barren area where you could bring people together from different hills to create a new hill as this would help the ecology of the landscape. Maybe you could create a path between hills, or build a bridge across a river that is making hills inaccessible to each other. You could build a ski-lift that helps give some people a view of what others are doing on a hill. The possibilities for generating learning are endless.
Being a knowledge hub means having a very good sense of the landscape and the people who populate it. Your interventions need to align with the vision and the challenges facing people in the landscape. You need to have some legitimacy in that landscape, so that when you make an intervention people will want to engage with it. And, in all this, you need to monitor the value of what you are doing to be able to promote the value of the learning being generated across the landscape.
The difference between being a training organization or a service provider is that a knowledge hub looks strategically at all of its interventions – and the intersection between them – from the landscape perspective. This is different from looking at training or other interventions as discrete and unconnected entities.
Certainly, my experience with the CEF is that this is what you are doing.
Is this then connected to the social learning theory in your area of work?
Very much so. The social learning theory is concerned with providing a language that will enable us to develop the learning capability of landscapes and systems of landscapes. You could see us all as potential knowledge hubs. Imagine how learning would scale and spread! But what would this look like in practice? And how could we develop the capacity of individuals and institutions to become knowledge hubs (or an equivalent name)? These are the kinds of things we are working on.
Can you describe in short what you actually call social learning?
Simply put, you could say that social learning is horizontal learning. In practice, all learning is on a spectrum of horizontal and vertical and a mix between them. Peer-to-peer learning, south-south exchange is a form of social learning. They are learning partnerships between people who share a common concern and who engage in activities together to make progress. In theoretical terms, you could say that it is an ongoing interaction between who we are (becoming) and the socially defined norms of competence and knowledgeability.
Let’s look at someone who did the ToT workshop. They engaged in group activities and in that group they exchanged ideas about how to improve the practice of giving a presentation. They did not simply apply a technique or a recipe; they went through quite a complex process. As they gave a presentation, they were negotiating a number of factors: the “how to…” of giving a powerful presentation, their imagined audience (the people whose opinions they care about), and their own identity. When they go back to their institution and give their next presentation, I am sure they will have the voice in their head of someone or their group who generated an insight for them about what to do – or what not to do. Hopefully they will have a growing sense of being someone who could give a powerful presentation. Perhaps, as they give their presentation, they may feel pleased that they have accomplished something that was defined as competence at the workshop.
Let’s go further and imagine that their good presentation skills now help them in their career – or perhaps it does not. Perhaps something that seemed like a good idea at the workshop now makes them feel uncomfortable when they do it in their institution. This acts as a feedback loop, causing them to revise their thinking about what makes a powerful presentation. All of these things are part of social learning. We say that learning is much more than transferring something that is known to someone who does not know. It is a complex process of engaging in activities, putting them into practice, and paying attention to the results.
Learning is fundamentally social, because human beings are social. Dirk [Jan Kraan], at the CEF, asked me interesting questions. He said that he sits alone in his office, writing papers for publication, but feels that it is where a lot of his learning takes place. “How is this social?” he asked me. “How is it not social?” I replied. You are struggling to find the words that will have meaning to an audience who you care about. Writing a good article will help define you as a competent – or expert – member of a particular community. (And note that if someone from another discipline said they did not like your article, you probably would not care!) There is no guarantee that your article will be published unless it is declared worthy of publication. So, even when learning looks like a solitary act, it is social because you are referencing it in your mind to other people who matter to you. The publication of that paper will probably result in a change to your identity, however subtle. And if it does not get published, or if it does but no-one reads it, you might revise your writing style, your area of focus, or even the types of journal you want to publish in. You respond to feedback and adjust your course. That is very social learning.
Why is social learning gaining momentum?
As I implied before, most models of learning are based on things that are known being transferred to those who do not know. But nowadays things are moving so fast that knowledge quickly becomes out of date. What was relevant yesterday is not relevant tomorrow. Things are more unpredictable. We do not know what we are going to need to know tomorrow. Rather, we have to pay attention to what is happening in practice, adjust what we are doing, and – often – invent a response. Social learning provides a framework for this.
Equally important is the complexity of the kinds of problems facing institutions, countries, individuals… It is not enough to have one perspective. You need multiple voices with different perspectives: people from different sectors, disciplines, cultures. To solve complex problems we need to learn from different voices. Social learning is a model for that.
The explosion of new technologies for connecting people across geography has also accelerated the social learning momentum. Finding and connecting with potential learning partners has never been easier.
How do you see participants are catching up social learning? Where will it take us?
Social learning is pouring through the cracks – whether you like it or not! How many kids today take it for granted that you turn to the internet or your online network to find out how to do things or who to turn to? Even in the most traditional adult environments, people are becoming less tolerant of long one-sided presentations and expect more time to interact with their peers. But, for many people, they went through an education system based on the transmission model and have difficulty in seeing peer interaction as serious learning. Even if they do attend conferences and say that the best bits are the coffee breaks when they can network and talk to each other!
But once you have tasted the power of social learning and felt its effectiveness, it is hard to go back. We have seen a shift in business, government, schools and development agencies in the last twenty years. There are flipped classes at schools (students watch the lesson on video and discuss it during the class time); major companies like Shell, IBM and Proctor & Gamble have it baked into their culture; the World Bank and other development agencies support peer-to-peer learning rather than simply sending in experts.
This means that we need to become more rigorous about how we support social learning and we recognize and reward those people taking leadership in social learning. In our own work we are developing a handbook with a set of disciplines for social learning leaders and a framework for monitoring the value creation of social learning. It needs to become part of the discourse in organizations about how they develop their strategic capability in a complex and fast-changing world.
Your work encompasses consulting as well as research and study of theoretical frameworks. How do you combine these two aspects?
My contribution to the field is working at the intersection of theory-building and practice. The two are dependent on each other. Theory informs practice. But practice – especially my consulting practice – informs theory. My husband (Etienne) and I work together on this.
Has working with the CEF, in any way, influenced your theoretical work? Could you perhaps share an example?
Certainly. As we are in the process of developing our framework for monitoring the value created by social learning, we have shared and used it with different clients. Your colleague, Luka Zupančič, was using it to collect data and he became stuck with something we call applied value. He could not quite fit the data neatly into any of the categories. Etienne and I spent a while thinking about this and it got us thinking of secondary categories for the data. Now when our final framework is published, you will see that these secondary categories are very important. But it was Luka’s insistence that something was not quite right here for him that really triggered this development.
During the workshop you introduced the concept of learning citizenship. Do you see this as the future? What is it?
Definitely I see it as the future. Etienne used to call it learning citizenship, I prefer the term learning ethic. This is probably the term we will be using in our new book.
Being a learning citizen means that you use who you are to enable learning. This could simply refer to the quality of your engagement in a network or a community of practice: the kinds of questions you ask, your responsiveness to questions by others. But it could also be more active. For example, you might see (in your landscape) that there are some conversations missing, or the potential for a problem to be solved lies in having a network or a community of practice and you take the responsibility of convening it. You might become aware that two groups you belong to do not communicate enough and you use your membership in both to bridge the boundary and broker elements of one group into the other. All of these, from the minute to the huge, are signs of a learning ethic, or what it means to be a learning citizen.
You mentioned your next book. Can you share some thoughts what it will address?
We are actually doing a trilogy. One book is going to be about the development of the value creation framework. We want that to be punchy, something that evaluators, community members and project organizers can use for planning, implementing and evaluating social learning.
The second book is a handbook for social learning leaders, laying out the disciplines of social learning leadership. It will be quite practical, with information, stories and tools to support a social learning leader.
The third book is about the theory. It will be setting out a language for social learning in the 21st century.
Any final messages for us?
Yes. Congratulations to the CEF for being such very inspiring organization. I have seen you grow in the last five years, both pioneering and hungry to learn from the best. I often use the CEF as an example of a knowledge hub and a social learning support team. It is a leader of social learning at both ends – at one end by taking a landscape perspective in developing the learning capability of the region; and at the other end by fine-tuning your activities at events to leverage the benefits of social learning among participants. And, throughout it all, rigorously collecting feedback to help build your own learning loops about what generates effective learning.
