Informal learning

The formality of learning is a continuum "informal learning is simply learning that comes closer to the informal end...Characteristics of the informal end of the continuum of formality include implicit, unintended, opportunistic and unstructured learning and the absence of a teacher. In the middle come activities like mentoring, while coaching is rather more formal in most settings." A typology of Informal Learning (Eraut, 2005), slightly modified from Eraut's (2000) version, is reproduced in the Figure below. 

"The columns distinguish between three levels of intention. Implicit learning was defined by Reber (1993) as “the acquisition of knowledge independently of conscious attempts to learn and in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was learned”." Eraut later argues that awareness of explicit learning does not necessarily exclude the possibility of implicit learning occurring simultaneously, and consequently most learning from experience has some implicit aspects. "Moreover, outside formal education and training settings, explicit learning is often unplanned."  Hence Eraut divides explicit learning into two distinct types; reactive or opportunistic learning that is near-spontaneous; and deliberative learning that is more considered. Eraut "uses the term “reactive learning” because, although it is intentional, it occurs in the middle of the action, when there is little time to think. In contrast, deliberative learning includes both “deliberate” learning (Tough, 1979), where there is a definite learning goal and time is set aside for acquiring new knowledge, and engagement in deliberative activities such as planning and problem solving, for which there is a clear work-based goal with learning as a probable by-product.  Because most of these latter activities are a normal part of working life, they are rarely regarded as learning activities, even though important learning often occurs."

"The three rows indicate the possible temporal relationships between a learning episode and the experiences that gave rise to it.  Schon (1983) distinguished between reflection during an action and reflection after an action, but tended to confuse the context of reflection with its focus (see Eraut, 1995).  In the Figure above the context in which learning occurs is always the present, but the focus of the learning can be in the past, present or future.  While the planning of future learning opportunities is often informal, the opportunities themselves could be either formal or informal." Eraut acknowledges that aspects of his terminology are open to challenge because he focused on finding appropriate terms to describe reactive learning as a consequence of its previous absence from the literature.  For example, he concedes where ‘discussion’ and ‘review’ are used to describe deliberation on the past, the term ‘reflection’ could have instead been employed, in the form advocated by Dewey (1933).

Learning from experience

In interviews regarding workplace learning respondents will often talk about learning from experience. But what do we actually mean and understand by this term? In order to address this question first we need to consider what counts as experience. However, most of the education literature focuses on the process of the reflection on an experience rather than the nature of an experience itself, and is as such unhelpful to this end. Whilst Kolb & Fry’s (1975) understanding of experience, demonstrated in their frequently cited learning cycle, seems inappropriate for two reasons. Firstly, it refers to “concrete experience”, which therefore excludes more abstract feelings associated with the shortest of episodes which we would nonetheless not want to exclude (Boud, Keogh & Walker, 1985). Secondly, it refers to “observations and reflections” in a manner that appears to inappropriately privilege the meaning of “an observation as an idea” over that of “observation as a process of sensory reception”. Indeed, there has been a real poverty of success in clarifying what counts as an experience, and that is indicative of the difficulty in doing so. An element which is almost certainly in part responsible is the blurred distinction between singular and plural experiences; when we refer to “an experience”, we are probably thinking about a single episode or incident; but when we talk about what we have learned from “experience in general”, we are probably referring to our accumulated learning from a series of episodes. 

So it is probably worth trying to define what counts as an experience from a framework that appreciates this complex subtlety. For example, Schutz (1967) suggested that each of us is embedded in a continuous flow of experience throughout our lives. Discrete experiences are then distinguished from this flow and become meaningful when they are accorded attention and reflected upon. The ‘act of attention’ brings experiences, which would otherwise simply be lived through, into the area of conscious thought; where treatment may vary from actual comprehending to merely noting or hardly noticing. Such attention may be given on a number of occasions, each conferring a different meaning on the experience according to the meaning-context of the moment.

A parallel account might describe a set of impressions being extracted from the flow of experience and committed to long-term memory with or without further reflection. Concurrent or later attention to this set of impressions may treat them as constituting an event or episode and link them to other episodes that are in some way related (or possibly even to other thoughts about those episodes). As Schutz suggests, there are many linkage possibilities for any one episode, each conferring upon it a different meaning and significance. For example an episode forming part of a normal working day may, if given appropriate attention, provide information about a colleague or a work situation that later proves useful; and a succession of such episodes could build up a significant picture of the person or situation under attention. Thus, the very process of having carefully established what it is we count as experience has led us to an idea of what it is to learn from such experience.

Sternberg, Forsythe, Hedlund, Horvath, Wagner, Williams, Snook, and Grigorenko (2000) represent this situation diagrammatically, using Tulving’s (1972, 1995) theory of memory, which distinguishes between episodic, semantic and procedural memory. Episodic memory is for specific, personally experienced events, the episodes that make up one’s experience.  Semantic memory is for explicit verbal knowledge, general information that transcends particular episodes; and can be acquired either through formal teaching or private study (path B), or through reflection on episodes from experience (path A2).  Procedural memory is for “specific condition-action pairings that guide a person’s actions in a given situation”.  These procedures may be acquired by experience alone (e.g. riding a bicycle) or by formal teaching (e.g. multiplication).  After a while, individuals learn to follow such procedures without having to stop and think about what to do next. Sternberg et al define knowledge acquired by paths A1 and C1 as tacit knowledge, which is not readily articulated; and argue that such tacit knowledge confers advantages over taught procedures, because it has already been contextualised.  Taught knowledge, on the other hand, is only based on other people’s experiences and, being decontextualised, is not yet readily available for use.

Tacit knowledge

In order to deconstruct tacit knowledge it is appropriate to begin with a consideration of Sternberg, Forsythe, Hedlund, Horvath, Wagner, Williams, Snook, and Grigorenko’s (2000) representation of Tulving’s (1972, 1995) theory of memory, shown in Figure 1 below. This theory distinguishes between episodic, semantic and procedural memory. Episodic memory is for specific, personally experienced events, the episodes that make up one’s experience.  Semantic memory is for explicit verbal knowledge, general information that transcends particular episodes; and can be acquired either through formal teaching or private study (path B), or through reflection on episodes from experience (path A2).  Procedural memory is for “specific condition-action pairings that guide a person’s actions in a given situation”.  These procedures may be acquired by experience alone (e.g. riding a bicycle) or by formal teaching (e.g. multiplication).  After a while, individuals learn to follow such procedures without having to stop and think about what to do next. Sternberg et al define knowledge acquired by paths A1 and C1 as tacit knowledge, which is not readily articulated; and argue that such tacit knowledge confers advantages over taught procedures, because it has already been contextualised.  Taught knowledge, on the other hand, is only based on other people’s experiences and, being decontextualised, is not yet readily available for use.

Eraut supports Tulving’s theory and the attribution of tacit knowledge to pathways A1 and C1, but not the treatment of tacit knowledge as only a sub-branch of procedural knowledge.  Although Sternberg at al include single decisions and actions within their definition of procedural knowledge, this still leaves the problem of how we classify knowledge acquired from experience that does not lead to rapid decisions or actions?   Eraut’s position is that people may assess situations almost instantly by pattern recognition, less rapidly by drawing on their intuitive understanding of the situation, and finally more deliberatively by using reflection and analysis (as shown later in Figure 4).  Intuitive understanding signifies some familiarity with most or all aspects of the situation; but cannot be described as procedural knowledge because it does not lead to rapid decisions. Such a failure to make a rapid decision could be either because no sensible option readily came to mind, or because the consequences associated with the outcome suggest that the original understanding should be checked before taking any further action. Often this intuitive understanding is not fully recognised until somebody is forced to deliberate between two or more options, and consequently expresses a strong preference for one particular option because they suddenly feel that it fits the situation much better than the alternatives.  This is one good example of tacit knowledge which can be used but not articulated.

There is little obvious resemblance between this intuitive understanding of a complex situation and being able to ride a bicycle.  Thus Eraut does not consider tacit knowledge to be a single type of knowledge, but rather an attribute common to otherwise distinct types of knowledge. Reber’s (1993) research on implicit learning demonstrated that episodes that are not recalled may nevertheless affect later performance.  Hence, it is reasonable to assume that information can be used without the actor being aware of it doing so, even if the episode from within which that information was obtained is itself being explicitly recalled. Such implicit use of information can be cumulatively aggregated in memory across the perceptions of many previous episodes to lead to an intuitive understanding of a situation. Thus, throughout our lives we make assumptions about people, situations and organisations based on aggregated information whose provenance we cannot easily recall and may not even be able to describe.  We instinctively ‘know’ that a particular action is appropriate.  However, because the aggregation process has not been under our conscious control, there is a danger that our selection and interpretation of information from these episodes was biased.

Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge which may be used uncritically because people either believe that it works well for them or lack the time and/or disposition to search for anything better – the latter is a common feature of situations where people are overworked or alienated. But in more technical areas, or where more strategic decisions are involved, tacit knowledge is more likely to be used for generating hypotheses or possible sources of action, which are then checked out against other evidence or discussed with other people. This behaviour is characteristic of medical diagnosis and decision-making in a wide range of naturalistic settings (Klein, Orasanu, Calderwood and Zsambok 1993, Eraut 2004b).

It should also be noted that tacit knowledge does not arise only from the implicit acquisition of knowledge but also from the implicit processing of knowledge. Doctors remember large numbers of individual cases and a few occasions when they deliberately stopped to think about a particular kind of case; but they cannot explain how that accumulated experience enables them to instantly address a new case by recognising a pattern and activating a readily available script, which they never consciously attempted to compile. Indeed, the research literature on expertise consistently finds that the distinguishing feature of experts is not how much they know, but their ability to use their knowledge, because that knowledge has been implicitly organised as a result of considerable experience for rapid, efficient and effective use (Schmidt and Boshuizen, 1993).

Most of the episodes from which tacit knowledge is accrued occur within social contexts, and as such social actors are likely to be participating in these episodes. Consequently, through their actions and discourse, resulting from their own interpretations of events, both during and after the episodes; these actors are likely to influence what is noticed and/or remembered by other actors.  Thus, an individual’s implicit acquisition and processing of tacit knowledge from their episodic memory is influenced by the socialisation process through which norms, values, perspectives and interpretations of events are shaped by the local workplace culture. This is in addition to an individual’s conscious learning from others, and with others, from their engagement in co-operative work and tackling of challenging tasks.