How We Learn From Eachother
A social learning theory crash course with Travis Tennessen
Story by Sam Whitney
Photo courtesy of Travis Tennessen
It’s why some children come to have the same personality traits or political views as their parents.
It's why someone might start using the word “fire” to describe some good food because they heard their friend do it often enough.
Social learning theory, in short, is the way a person’s habits, traits and actions can be influenced by the people around them.
Since becoming the director of Western’s Center for Community Learning (CCL) in 2015, it has been one of Travis Tennessen’s goals to create spaces where social learning can take place, and be used for good.
Before arriving at Western, Tennessen was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison earning his master’s degree in geography and his Ph.D. in philosophy, which he finished in 2012.
In his early days at Western, through his previous role as assistant director of the CCL, Tennessen stumbled his way into the language to be able to discuss social learning theory.
He led what he called Faculty Engagement Fellows, a space for educators to engage with one another and learn about doing community-based work. It was after one of these spaces that Tennessen was asked by an attendee to explain what the group was doing.
“I started to say that it was a faculty learning community and I realized that that’s not a good explanation,” Tennessen said.
Tennessen went back to the literature for the program and read about Etienne Wenger-Trayner’s Communities of Practice, which was based on social learning theory.
Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Wenger-Trayner is a social learning theorist. He and his wife Beverly developed the theory by consulting in a wide variety of contexts to help people develop the capacity to learn with and from each other.
All of a sudden, Tennessen became aware that the work he’d been doing was scratching the surface of a field that was much more vast than he thought.
Once he realized it was a real psychological field he could read about and engage with, Tennessen’s passion for social learning took off. Tennessen connected with Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, with whom he occasionally compares notes over coffee nowadays.
“Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, I’ve learned a lot from them,” Tennessen said. “I hope they’ve learned something from me along the way.”
It didn’t take long for Tennessen to realize just about anyone could benefit from learning about — and through — social learning.
“If you have a social learning lens, you can start thinking about how you can create spaces where people can have their identity, values, and sense of the landscape nudged in productive directions,” Tennessen said.
In Tennessen’s mind, once someone knows even a little bit about social learning, creating a space conducive to it is relatively simple.
“I think going together to an unfamiliar place is a great way to do things,” Tennessen said.
It could be something as adventurous as checking out the scene at Bellingham Axe on Cornwall Avenue or something as simple as attending a meeting of a club you’re not familiar with yet.
On a college campus like Western’s, such an environment is created naturally. That opportunity to engage with new spaces and people can be a great thing for students looking to explore their newfound independence, but it is not without its pitfalls.
“If you're in a new place, you’re a new college student, and you’re just looking for some sense of connection, falling into the first place where you feel any sense of connection may not be very reflective of what you actually care about.”
Groups can build boundaries in terms of what’s okay, and the way the world is,” Tennessen said. “You get into a certain friend group, and the way that they interact with each other is through playing video games; that’s a pretty narrow field of engagement.”
Not to worry, though. Just as the university setting creates those potential pitfalls, it offers a way out just as naturally. A student’s schedule is likely to change at least a little bit every quarter, and as someone engages with new material and meets new people, they are offered a transition toward making healthier connections.
Tennessen clarified that the colors hold no particular meaning in relation to the word written on them; they just needed to be distinct from one another. | Photo courtesy of Travis Tennessen
“You have a chance to reset and navigate a lot of times in college, which is good, but you have to do it thoughtfully,” Tennessen said.
Ultimately, Tennessen says effectively engaging in social learning boils down to being multidimensional. To teach the concept to others, Tennessen created a visual aid based on Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner’s eight-dimensional learning framework.
The framework is discussed in the first book of the Wenger-Trayners’ “Learning to Make a Difference” book series, “Value Creation in Social Learning Spaces.”
“I try to help people think in a simple way with these lovely little tiles,” Tennessen said. “I wanted to help people think with this framework without reading a whole book or a research article.”
The visual aid consists of eight tiles, each representing one of the eight dimensions in the Wenger-Trayners’ framework.
“Part of the work I’m doing is to teach people how to take the blinders off, look at the whole landscape, and look at your own evolution as a person throughout your life,” Tennessen said.
Collectively, the tiles serve as a reminder of how much is at stake during each and every interpersonal reaction. The more values someone is mindful of during an experience, the more someone is liable to gain from said experience.
“I just want people to talk about their experiences,” Tennessen said. “About how what we’re doing is valuable to us, how it’s impacting our lives, and help us build our muscles for remembering that a bunch of things are at stake all the time.”
That’s what I love about noticing social learning happening,” Tennessen said. “There’s a whole lot that happens in our lives, and we can use that to try to build a better world if we’re conscientiously and ethically using that perspective.”