A Theory of Learning?

I made some notes in my journal the other day about all this 'method of learning' stuff. I was flicking through the works of Dewey, Lewin, Kolb's 'learning cycle' and the 'stages' of Honey and Mumford and it all just didn't seem entirely comprehensive. It's not that their theories appear 'wrong' exactly, they just seem to be relevant to individual ideas and singular 'skills' or 'ideas' that a person may need to learn – that is to say, their theories don't appear to consider incidental learning.

As a performer I don't feel I draw upon unique lessons learned to enable me to deal with any given situation. The things I do on stage for the company I'm working for now were not informed by identical circumstances from the start of my career but are the summation of skills learnt at college, reactions and emotions from my 'real' life as well as things as yet untested, performance attributes I'm still refining. To consider all these factors within the confines of a 'learning cycle' seems hugely impractical, not to mention the variety and scale of input data would make oversights a certainty.

I also draw from my notes in earlier blogs about lessons learned by newcomers to performance – how some seems to develop necessary skills much faster than others, some not even learning them at all. To deny that the depth of anything learned is heavily informed by the enthusiasm of the teacher/student would be folly. Impetus could be a good word to describe it. The strength of a lesson received by an individual would depend on; how much they wanted to learn it, how much a teacher wanted to teach it or how significant the lesson is to the student's existance.

Just toying around with ideas I hypothesised that maybe a more apt theory of learning would be a 'ripple' effect. The specific 'lesson' would be the epicentre, located directly within the appropriate field (eg. A lesson learned mid-performance would be put under 'stagecraft') with other parts of the student's life in relevant proximity, (eg. A very basic breakdown could show the 'logic' and 'artistic' hemispheres of the brain, or 'work' and 'social' as pects of the student's life, becoming more specific once a singular 'lesson' has been identified. A 'lesson' with a higher Ubiquity would affect more aspects of the student's life and cross more barriers. The second aspect of a 'lesson' would be it's Impetus – the strength with which it was taught or learned. Something learned in an 'on-line' (Kottcamp) environment would have a higher level of impetus, an unenthusiastic teacher would inform a lower level, for example. These two factors, ubiquity and impetus, when combined, would provide a more global picture of how a 'lesson' is not just a singular entity but actually affects more of our life than we may be aware of.

I won't lie, I haven't had any time online to research any other similar theories, so this may be horrible plagiarism, that's something I want to look at as soon as I can. I also acknowledge that attaching scientific values to any of this would be next to impossible. I just like the idea that by looking at it this way, people might be able to see how their thoughts and processes are interwoven and how a more 'pro-active' (I hate that kind of trite jargon) approach could benefit them universally.