How do we make theory practical? When I teach adult learning theory to master’s level students, I am very invested in making sure they see the depth and usefulness of the academic grounding of our field. It can be tough, though, to get them to recall their course in adult learning as more than a litany of big names and fancy-sounding theories. One of the challenges we have in teaching the range of theories in adult learning is helping students to understand the theories in relation to one another.

Depending on which text we use to survey the theoretical landscape, we are likely to discuss the key concepts and implications of behaviorist, humanist, cognitivist, social cognitivist, constructivist, progressive, postmodernist, cognitive information processing, transformative and other approaches that can help categorize ways of thinking about adult learning (or human learning at any age). Students seem to want to think of these theoretical approaches as situational or on a continuum (perhaps from objectivist to subjectivist, or evolutionary from behaviorism to constructivism). I sometimes engage in discussions about the epistemological grounding of these theories which in some cases makes them actually incompatible with one another (e.g. agreeing with both cognitivism and constructivism is problematic because their assumptions are too different). For practical purposes, however, this is a discussion that simply doesn’t resonate with most students.

I’m wondering how you tackle this discussion with your students. I have heard some professors agree with a situational approach – encouraging students to embrace different theories for different kinds of training challenges. I have heard some professors take a strong stand, claiming that only one theoretical strand is right. I myself tend to talk about the debate, and I’ve have discussed that some of the same teaching or development activities would be embraced by theorists in seemingly opposing orientations – they would simply explain why the technique works in very different terms.

What are some of the ways you discuss with your students the contradictions of various theories and the debate on which is most accurate? How do you help them to take away useful insights?