What is social learning

By M. Reed, A. Evely, G. Cundill, I. Fazey, Jayne Glass, A. Laing, J. Newig, Bradley D. Parrish, C. Prell, Christopher M. Raymond and 1 more. 2010

912 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social learning is increasingly becoming a normative goal in natural resource management and policy. However, there remains little consensus over its meaning or theoretical basis. There are still considerable differences in understanding of the concept in the literature, including a number of articles published in Ecology & Society. Social learning is often conflated with other concepts such as participation and proenvironmental behavior, and there is often little distinction made between individual and wider social learning. Many unsubstantiated claims for social learning exist, and there is frequently confusion between the concept itself and its potential outcomes. This lack of conceptual clarity has limited our capacity to assess whether social learning has occurred, and if so, what kind of learning has taken place, to what extent, between whom, when, and how. This response attempts to provide greater clarity on the conceptual basis for social learning. We argue that to be considered social learning, a process must: (1) demonstrate that a change in understanding has taken place in the individuals involved; (2) demonstrate that this change goes beyond the individual and becomes situated within wider social units or communities of practice; and (3) occur through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network. A clearer picture of what we mean by social learning could enhance our ability to critically evaluate outcomes and better understand the processes through which social learning occurs. In this way, it may be possible to better facilitate the desired outcomes of social learning processes.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e03824b62d2772350c5618ab72c33bd7e88e4af9

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In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Social Learning and Natural Resource Management: The Emergence of Three Research Perspectives (2011, methodology): “In their analysis of social learning literature, Reed et al. (2010) identify the need to distinguish between the conditions or methods that facilitate social learning and the potential outcomes of a social learning process.”
An Analytical Framework of Social Learning Facilitated by Participatory Methods (2014, methodology): “This fulfills the first requirement of the definition of social learning proposed by Reed et al. (2010).”
Shared values and deliberative valuation: Future directions (2016, background): “…is intrinsically a social learning process, which they define as a change in understanding that goes beyond the individual to become situated within wider social units or communities of practice through social interactions between actors within social networks (after Reed et al., 2010).”
Transcendental values and the valuation and management of ecosystem services (2016, background): “…people perceive trade-offs, allowing them to be made in a more informed way that also is more reflective of their TVs. Combining consideration of TVs with learning in relation to specific contexts through deliberation may be a particularly potent way to engender social learning (Reed et al. 2010).”
Perception and Interpretation of Climate Change among Quechua Farmers of Bolivia: Indigenous Knowledge as a Resource for Adaptive Capacity (2013, background): “Adaptive capacity further implies social learning through change and an ability to experiment (Armitage and Plummer 2010, Reed et al. 2010).”
How does the context and design of participatory decision making processes affect their outcomes? Evidence from sustainable land management in global drylands (2014, background): “New understandings, attitudes, and positions that arise from this learning process may then diffuse from those directly participating in the process to those in their social network by social learning (Reed et al. 2010).”
Land in balance: The scientific conceptual framework for Land Degradation Neutrality (2018, background): “Ideally both individual and social learning (Reed et al., 2010) are integrated into an overall approach to implementing LDN that encourages “triple-loop learning”, where the first learning loop can lead to incremental changes in routine actions, the second leads to revisiting underlying…”