It is then argued that the content aspect of an experience is what we should turn our attention to in learning.
In addition when we are aware of a content item, Marton says that we are always aware of this content item
in some way. Using Gurwitsch’s (1964) words, we are always aware of something as something.
Experiences thus have a content-aspect and a form-aspect.
It is of crucial importance to understand that the mentioned formaspect of an experience should not be
confused with a psychic act. The phenomenographic form-aspect or the how-aspect of a human experience
has nothing to do with psychic processes (Uljens, 1992a, pp. 97 ff.). Rather,
the how-aspect refers to the
structure constituting an object of experience. The experienced object always has some form organically
intertwined with the content-aspect of an experienced content. The phenomenographic how- or form-aspect
has thus necessarily nothing to do with psychic processes.
Returning to the metaphoric description of what one should pay attention to in learning, I would say that
we can, in fact, focus our attention on both the ball
and
the movement of our arms. In other words, we can
pay special
attention to
what
we are trying to learn and what we are
doing
in trying to learn this something
(Marton, 1974; 1982). But to direct one’s attention to the movement of one’s arms is not to be aware of the
psychic act through which we are aware of how we move our arms. This last point is what cognitivism
argues in favour of and something which I, as well as Marton (1986), argue against.
In line with Marton’s (1981) phenomenographic position, Pramling (1990) has argued for an additional
approach to metacognition compared with Flavell (1979) and Brown (1978). Pramling’s position is not to
increase the subjects’ knowledge
of their own cognition, which Flavell argues for, nor is the idea to focus on
the strategic dimension as such, which Brown argues for. The idea is instead to help the students to pay
attention to how they themselves reflect on some specific subject-matter, i.e. to make the students aware of
how they experience curricular contents in relation to other individuals or in relation to the school’s
intended way of understanding the content.
In a limited respect, Pramling’s (1990) position is supported by Gunstone & Northfield (1994, p. 526) as
they argue that conceptual change and metacognition are closely related to each other, and that it is
consequently not possible to train thinking skills separately from learning tasks:
Any such suggestion is the antithesis of our view of the intertwined nature
of metacognition and
conceptual change. We assert that the development of metacognitive skills and knowledge must be in
the context of learning tasks perceived by learners to be appropriate and valuable.
On the basis of the arguments presented concerning the impossibility of being aware of cognitive processes
as such (if such processes exist), Pramling’s position on metacognition is supported.
A second pedagogical implication is related to the fact that we must be aware of what we are doing and
what we are trying to do in order to reach insight. We may be aware of our study activity, i.e. what we have
done in order to reach some competence. An act of studying is thus something completely different from a
psychic act of learning, which we are, in
principle, not aware of.
The act of studying can be related to a reflective mode of thinking. We can be more or less aware of what
we do in a goal-oriented study process; we can consciously try to apply different approaches or styles
or strategies. A study strategy thus belongs to the cognitive domain. It is metacognitive in the sense that the
student may direct their attention to the way in which they try to reach competence. But a study strategy
does not include awareness of one’s own psychic act of learning.
In addition we, as intentional learners, can be aware of the meaningfulness of either the
content or our
efforts in trying to reach insight. Often the degree of experienced meaningfulness can be understood in
terms of motivation.
7. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
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