How communities learn
I made a cup of tea this morning. I sat down to read the news and something in there triggered a flashback from when I worked at Byjus. A memory of a management consultant telling me that I need to teach drawing1 in the same way another department was teaching math.
I wish I could say I gave him a measured and educative reply.
Anyway, that made me think of the Penciljam community and how social learning is such a contrast to formal, structured learning systems.
I am a fairly experienced educator. I have worked with a diverse group2 of students over the last three decades. I am also the co-founder of what is arguably the oldest on-location drawing community in India, which has taught me a lot on how people learn in informal and unstructured ways.
This community does not ask people to register for drawing events. It charges no fees, proposes no frameworks—it simply announces a new venue each week, and people turn up to draw. This social process of drawing together, it turns out, provides a powerful learning method for members of the community.
One day our community was drawing at a small park. A lady with two children stopped by to see what we were doing and asked if her children could join in next week.
She turns up the following week with her children in tow. The kids drew for a little while, but eventually lost interest but this lady–she was hooked. She began attending our weekly sessions. She would pepper community members with questions. She built connections within the art community. She went on to become a professional children’s book illustrator.
She was also one of the selected artists who displayed her painting at the Drawing Bengaluru art exhibit we conducted at the National Gallery of Modern Art in January this year.
One particularly powerful process I have observed in our community is social-learning by example. At the end of our weekly drawing sessions, people place their sketchbooks down, in a row to display their work. Beginners can see how others have approached the same subject. This offers contrast. A counterpoint. New members can see the gap in skill that is apparent between their own drawing and that of more experienced artists.
For beginners, progress may feel unattainable at first. The process seems inscrutable. Sometimes people console themselves saying “Art is subjective”, or “This is the style I work in” Common and understandable reactions. I have heard them all before. Eventually, through repeated exposure, beginners learn to correct their approach. Learning occurs rapidly in those first few months.
Learning to draw is an exercise in learning to see, and this sort of thing is hard to teach, but easy to learn through observation. It is how master craftsmen taught apprentices in the old days. Educators refer to this as perceptual learning.
Perceptual learning is the way we learn to perceive stimuli through repeated exposure to patterns. It is a way to become sensitive to differences and similarities of stimuli. This effect is visible in daily life. Two bird calls sound the same until you become sensitive to the differences. Two types of Sambar taste the same until the you are sensitised to the taste differences and wonder how you ever managed to mix them up.
In the context of drawing, beginners observe how experienced artists approach a subject. How they compose. How they use drawing media such as watercolour, and in the process reflect over how the approach differs from their own.
The activities that our community hosts are deliberately designed to increase exposure, and induce sensitivity to such similarities and differences. The showcase at the end of each weekend jam is an example.
The community also hosts a bi-monthly event called Sketchbook Saturday, so members of our community can listen to experienced artists describe their process and the ways they think. A weekly online Human Figure Drawing session is designed to start with high drawing speed, going from two minutes gestural drawings to slower, longer poses. The point of the exercise is to force the artist to see and draw all at once, instead of assembling the human figure piecemeal. As a way to accelerate sensitivity to pose and form. None of these activities involves direct and deliberate teaching—people learn through observation and discussion.
I’ve noticed similar patterns in other communities. The really good ones find ways to boost perceptual learning among its members. Writeclub, a fiction writing community that I am a part of, encourages members to read their stories out loud at the end of each session. Another one, IndieWebClub, maintains a RSS feed and blogroll of its member websites.
The idea in each of these cases is exposure to each other’s work helps members identify where they stand and make sense of where they would like to go. What evolves are learning pathways unique to each person, completely self-determined, and self paced.
That is how great communities learn.
Notes
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The story of that flashback goes like this. I was designing a new category centered around art education. Over the course of a few months, my team fleshed out the pedagogic structure, tested the lesson plans and built out the program.
What was special about this program was that it taught art and design through stories. Students played through game-like narratives with choices they had to make to propell the protagonist through the story. Along the way they learned design principles and ways of artistic thinking. We tested the program at each step, eventually working with over a 100 children. The kids loved it.
When it was ready to launch, the top brass decided to hire someone to manage the business. This guy used to be a management consultant. Our art program did very well at first, but we hit a bottleneck with teacher training. The management consultant wanted to re-engineer our workflow to make it optimal and he disagreed with our pedagogic methods.
I tried educating him. I explained that art is a tacit skill. I reminded him that film-makers learn by watching great films, or that writers learn by reading great books. This is common knowledge to people who make things. This guy didn’t make things. He managed people who did.
“No one learns film-making from films” he told me. “People watch movies for pleasure!” I was gobsmacked! I stopped arguing. Soon after, I quit the company and walked away from the product I built. The program was shut down six months later. ↩︎
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and I really do mean diverse. I adapt the way I teach depending on who I am teaching and the value that art will bring them. Off the top of my head, I’ve taught:
- Preschoolers and High School students (Both Autistic and Allistic kids. )
- School and College Teachers
- Tour Guides at tourism destinations
- Senior Managers and the C-Suite
- IAS officers and Government officials and even a mix of random public who walk into the sessions I conduct at museums or at events like the Blr Lit Fest and Blr Hubba.