Alfred North Whitehead's concept of relational learning has been a profound influence on my own development as an educator. I recently re-read The Aims of Education (link) and thought I ought to break down my impressions of some of his pedagogical ideas.
Whitehead's primary advice for educators is to defend his lectures from what he terms 'inert ideas.'
"In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas" -- that is to say, ideas that are merely received in the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations... Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful: corrupto optimi, pessima" (13).
A teacher ought to appreciate his position as the guarantor of a sort of trans-cultural teleology, encouraging in the listener a receptiveness to aesthetic beauty and sensibility. One only achieves success in this context if the information he provides his students is readily accessible and applicable. What Whitehead terms 'irrelevant scraps of information' allow a pupil the simulacrum of education, depriving him of the ability to contextualize information to his own life. Every interaction with a student ought to encourage a dynamic connection of ideas with his own experience and with his pre-existing body of knowledge. Inert ideas resist practical testing or integration into the student's understanding of the world and his own place within it.
Effective teaching, for Whitehead, also includes an interdisciplinary openness which is often neglected in the contemporary classroom.
"Technical education is doomed if we conceive it as a system for catching children young and for giving them one highly specialised mental aptitude... training should be broader than the ultimate specialisation, and the resulting power of adaptation to varying demands is advantageous to the workers, the employers, and to the nation. ...it is impossible to narrow down scientific study to a single thin line of thought" (65).
This seems intuitively obvious. An effective lecture on the declining population of Madagascar's lemur population, one necessarily needs to speak with some authority on history, ecology, statistics, and likely also the sociological factors that drive habitat loss, which may lead to a minimal discussion on economics and urban planning.
A competent educator, in Whitehead's opinion, will encourage what he calls an 'imaginative grasp' of new material which is dynamically integrated into his pre-existing body of knowledge through practical testing or by making mental connections. To some extent, Whitehead repeats himself over-and-over, but he clearly wanted to set imagination as the keystone of effective teaching praxis.
"In a simpler world, business relations were simpler, being based upon immediate contact of man with man and on immediate confrontation with all relevant material circumstances. Today, business organization requires an imaginative grasp of the psychologies of populations engaged in differing modes of occupation; of populations scattered through cities, through mountains, through plains; of populations on the ocean, and of populations in mines, and of populations in forests. It requires an imaginative grasp of conditions in the tropics, and of conditions in temperate zones... It requires an imaginative understanding of laws of political economy... It requires an imaginative vision of the binding forces of human organisation... It requires that discipline of character which can say 'yes' and 'no' to other men, not by reason of blind obstinacy, but with firmness derived from a conscious evaluation of relevant alternatives" (98-99).
So relational learning encourages active imagination and personal engagement with course material, and Whitehead's position is that this is the primary avenue toward the acquisition of useful knowledge. "Unless the pupil is continually sustained by the evocation of interest, the acquirement of technique, and the excitement of success," he warns, "he can never make progress, and will certainly lose heart" (49). Imagination plays the primary role in this conative process that propels students to mastery of new forms of knowledge.
Interspersed in all of his essays, but never explicitly defined, is the presupposition that relational learning is a communal process, which organically develops in the context of the collective.
"The combination of imagination and learning normally requires some leisure, freedom from restraint, freedom from harassing worry, some variety of experiences, and the stimulation of other minds diverse in opinion and diverse in equipment" (102).
New ideas are readily tested in collaboration and argument. This requires interaction with a social group composed of fellow learners.
Whitehead isn't typically considered a pioneer in critical pedagogy, and I think that's a shame, because all of this coheres very well with ideas promoted by contemporary thinkers like Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux. By fostering connections between lived experience and new material, by using imagination, and by fostering an interdisciplinary approach to integrating information, students are inherently empowered to propose new solutions to complex social problems, and to act as thoughtful agents of positive change within complex hierarchal structures. Earlier educational theorists hoped that students would better navigate the world. Whitehead expects them to transform it.
