Humanistic Views on Learning: Kolb, Rogers, Maslow and Gagne

What Humanism Emphasises

Humanism is a psychological approach emphasising the importance of human beings, their nature, and their place in the universe — focusing on human freedom, dignity, and potential. Humanists believe people are inherently good, possess unlimited potential for growth, and have the freedom and responsibility to become what they’re capable of becoming; behaviour is a matter of human choice, and people act with intentionality and values. As a pedagogical approach, humanism treats learning as a personal act to fulfil one’s potential, with the purpose of education being to provide a foundation for lifelong, self-directed personal growth. Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are its most important proponents.

Characteristics of Humanistic Learning

• Considers the human being the central part of learning — supports child-centred learning.
• Organises teaching-learning activities around students’ needs, interests, abilities, age, attitudes, and aptitude.
• Treats learning as a personal act to fulfil potential; aims to develop self-actualised, autonomous people.
• Focuses on developing a child’s self-concept, intrinsic motivation, and self-awareness.
• Believes learning should be need-based and experience-based.
• Treats experience as the primary phenomenon for learning, with the teacher as facilitator.
• Emphasises learning in a natural environment built on human love, peace, cooperation, freedom, and equality, within a democratic classroom.

Kolb’s Experiential Learning

Experiential learning is learning from experience — the process of making meaning from direct experience. It can be defined as an individual’s learning through exploring, experiencing, creating, discovering, relating to, and interacting with the world around them. According to Kolb, experiential learning is a process by which a learner develops meaning and insight from engagement in direct experience, existing when a personally responsible participant cognitively, affectively, and behaviourally processes knowledge, skills, or attitudes in a learning situation marked by high active involvement.

• Characterised by the learner’s direct participation in the learning event.
• Self-initiated — the learner willingly takes the initiative to get involved.
• Active and dynamic, rather than passive.
• Student-centred, as opposed to teacher-centred education.
• Encourages students to create knowledge rather than simply acquire it.
• Often involves student choice, giving students a larger role in class activities.
• Characterised by self-evaluation.
• Often high-context — designed to be as relevant as possible to the ‘real world’ outside the classroom.
• Presents problems for students to solve, rather than lists of facts to memorise.
• Empowers students to take responsibility for their own learning.

Rogers’ Theory of Experiential Learning

For Carl Rogers, experiential learning is equivalent to personal change and growth — also known as the theory of a fully functioning person. He maintained that all human beings have a natural desire to learn, so failure to learn isn’t due to an inability to learn, but to problems with the learning situation itself. Rogers identified two categories of learning:

The key distinction: experiential learning addresses the needs and wants of the learner directly, giving it the qualities of personal involvement, self-initiation, self-evaluation, and long-lasting effects.

Principles of Learning According to Rogers

• Human beings have a natural potential for learning.
• Significant learning occurs when the subject matter is perceived by the student as relevant to their own purposes.
• When a learner has a goal they wish to achieve, and sees material as relevant to that goal, learning proceeds rapidly.
• Learning that’s threatening to the self is more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are minimal.
• Learning that involves a change in self-organisation — in how one perceives oneself — is threatening and tends to be resisted.
• When the threat to self is low, experience can be perceived in a differentiated way and learning can proceed.
• Much significant learning is acquired through doing.
• Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.
• Self-initiated learning that involves the whole person — feeling as well as intellect — is the most lasting and pervasive.
• Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are primary, and evaluation by others is secondary.

Maslow’s Self-Actualisation

The growth of self-actualisation refers to the need for personal growth and discovery present throughout a person’s life. For Maslow, a person is always ‘becoming’ and never remains static — in self-actualisation, a person finds a meaning to life that matters to them, and since each person is unique, the direction self-actualisation takes differs from person to person: through art, sport, the classroom, or a corporate setting. Maslow believed self-actualisation could be measured through peak experiences — moments when a person experiences the world totally for what it is, accompanied by feelings of euphoria, joy, and wonder.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow identified self-actualising people as highly creative individuals who have peak experiences and can resolve dichotomies between opposite contraries — freedom and determinism, the conscious and unconscious, intentionality and its lack — with creativity as a hallmark trait of the self-actualising person.

Gagné’s Hierarchy of Learning

Gagné defined learning as a change in human disposition or capacity that can be retained and isn’t simply attributable to the process of growth. He proposed eight types of learning arranged hierarchically, from simple to complex — where learning any new capability requires prior learning of the subordinate capabilities involved in it (much as learning a higher-order theory requires first learning the simpler theories it’s based on). Gagné called this progression the learning hierarchy.