What's this all about?

I had a "Road to Damascus" experience sitting in the loo of the flight VS027 from Gatwick to Orlando on 5th November 2009.  Maybe that should be a "Loo to Orlando" experience.

Many moons ago I was a mature, part-time student at the School of Management, University of Bath, working for a PhD.  Had I completed, the thesis would have been called "Overcoming Learning Blocks in Intelligent Adults".

I stopped for a variety of reasons: the most obvious reason at the time was that the research was supported, both time and money, by my employers at that time, IBM, who made me redundant, so the money stopped, and I needed the time to earn money.

However, one of my major problems (I now see) was that I had no theoretical base for the concept of a "Learning Block".  Such as, what types of block are there, where do they come from, does this relate to anything that anyone already knows about?  I needed a taxonomy of learning blocks, and one that mapped onto some pre-existing theory.

Well, listening to a Radio 4 programme last Wednesday provided me with the key: something called "Attachment Theory".  Basically it looks at what happens to babies depending on how their mums relate to the infants' immediate needs.  It's an interesting theory, backed up, recently, by work that actually uses brain scanning to see what happens to people's physical brains.  Other people have related Attachment Theory to adults.  Turns out that my wife, Susan, knows quite a bit about Attachment Theory, because she studied it for her psychotherapy qualification.  If you're interested, there's a very good overview, by Daniel Sonkin, of Attachment Theory here.  Chris Frayley (U of Illinois) has an excellent article (A Brief Overview of Adult Attachment Theory and Research).

Susan confirmed that Attachment Theory is used a lot to look at the way that clients and therapists relate to each other (Sonkin expands elegantly on that here, and in his blog, here)... but that, as far as she's aware, no-one has looked at it to describe people's experiences at school, and how that affects learning, either as a child, or as an adult.

So, at last, I have a theoretical basis for my concept of learning blocks, and also a practical base for how to deal with them.  Oh, and ... a necessary condition of PhD research is that it contributes something new to the body of learning; I was never convinced (and hence had difficulty convincing others) that what I had previously was anything more than, maybe, a new-ish way of looking at existing material.  I think that the application of Attachment Theory to adult learning would be that necessary "something new".