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Drawing on Dewey’s accounts of learning the Alexander Technique (AT), this chapter explores why he found the process so powerful. As AT teachers, we explain how the technique enables practitioners to become aware of fixed, unconscious habits and to bring them under conscious control. With a new student, work begins with physical habits. However, because physical, cognitive, emotional and social functionings are interdependent, AT lessons typically enable flexibility in each of these spheres. Dewey’s writings show his strong theoretical commitment to the idea of learning as practical and experiential. His AT lessons were truly revelatory in providing him with both direct, embodied experience of the power of habit to drive human behaviour and a practical means of becoming aware of, and resisting, his own habits of thought and action.

Perceptions are shaped by habit in such a way that the senses can be unreliable in working out how to respond in a given situation. Dewey’s practice of the AT revealed to him the dissonance between his habitual self in activity and his conscious view of himself. Dewey was challenged by his AT lessons, which required an open, enquiring attitude and sense of humility. In the AT, Dewey found a means of pursuing an active, critical, self-directed process of discovery and adaptation akin to childhood learning. AT begins with the self, our ‘tool of tools’. Through fundamentally modifying the self, the AT supports the openness and flexible response to the physical and social world that characterize productive experiential learning.

While research has shown reflection is a valuable part of individual learning, developing reflection habits has remained notoriously difficult, particularly for working adults. We explore whether an intervention of being able to review previous reflections will affect employee engagement in future reflection activities and raise their awareness of learning opportunities at work.

We conducted a large-scale field experiment, including 136 employees from an international bank in Europe, in which participants were asked to reflect twice a week for eight weeks. Participants were randomly assigned to either a group that was given access to their previous reflections, or a group that was not.

We found that individuals who were able to see their previous reflections wrote significantly more subsequent reflections than the other group. In addition, those who could see their previous reflections used more words related to learning and cognition.

Often employees may feel they are only learning when they attend formal trainings. However, this paper provides concrete guidance for how human resources management (HRM) managers can boost employees’ informal learning and awareness of the learning opportunities inherent in challenging work.

This study furthers research on using HRM interventions to facilitate informal learning activities, in particular, methods to motivate systematic reflections and raising awareness of learning opportunities. Our findings suggest that developing habits of reflection and improving awareness of learning opportunities encompasses more than simply writing reflections, but should include processing previous writings.

The purpose of this paper is to discover Spanish history students' subjective perception of their information literacy (IL) status in order to find and suggest some academic and individual improvement actions.

The implementation of the IL‐HUMASS survey provides diagnostic data on two IL quantitative dimensions (belief in importance and skills self‐assessment) and a third qualitative dimension (learning habits) deployed along 26 variables, which are grouped into four categories (search, evaluation, processing, and communication‐dissemination of information).

The analysis confirms that variables related to information processing (above all schematising and abstracting information) show high scores of belief in importance and skills self‐assessment among students. By contrast, variables related to technological advances (above all the use of bibliographic reference managers) show the worst results. In sum, there is a lack of subjective digital literacy in a set of skills related to the technologies of search, processing and communication of information. Among the less valued skills, independent learning reaches an excessive priority. However, this is really just an isolated learning.

The help of classrooms and libraries as learning tools would improve these results. Policy makers and instructors need to improve their role in the learning process by means of more extensive planning processes and the promotion of specific courses, above all on skills related to the technologies of information search, processing and communication. The concept of independent learning needs to be clarified and enhanced.

This is a pioneering study that approaches IL from a triple perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to posit that a key sustainability tool can help provide a needed guide for the many forms of new curricula for academic, public and professional learning communities. The authors demonstrate that key sustainability competency (KSC) research can highlight and provide an array of learning outcomes that can be back cast to co-design flexible, detailed curriculum, pedagogy, practice and assessment structures. They also briefly outline the connection of KSC to education for sustainability (EfS) to provide the educational basis for designing and facilitating classrooms that contribute directly to the sustainability movement.

This paper is a review of literature with a specific focus on Glasser's (2018b) promising use of the tree as an analogy and metaphor for KSCs.

Some, for example, Glasser and Hirsh (2016) claim significant progress in identifying a KSC framework (Wiek et al., 2011) However, the authors raise concerns about the impasse that the literature has demonstrated because these stand in the way of the co-creation of sustainable societies by adjusting how we learn and interact with the world. The authors argue that we must realize and disrupt the destructive actions that form their usual approach and replace them with sustainable habits (Glasser, 2018a), and this requires the emergence of a new class of sustainability practitioners with the skills, attitudes and dispositions that are consistent with being wise, future-oriented, interdisciplinary and global decision-makers (Biasutti, 2015; Biasutti and Frate, 2016; Corney and Reid, 2007; McNaughton, 2012; Scoullos, 2013).

Using Glasser’s metaphor, the authors assert a process through which the future sustainability practitioner might shift their values and understanding such that their habits and norms shift to create a new, sustainable way of being. The practitioner might demonstrate the competencies of implementing transformative change, modelling sustainable behaviour and wise decision-making. The competency of “empathy, mindfulness and social learning” implies critical reflection on one’s actions in comparison to their social context. Thus, reflection at this stage (tree branches and fruits) could create transformation that shifts one’s values and commitments (tree roots); the cyclical process could potentially begin again.

An adaptive and flexible framework of KSC could provide learning benefits by building the capacity for learners to think critically and tackle complex sustainability problems in novel ways (Brown, 2017; Glasser and Hirsh, 2016; Sterling et al., 2017; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 2017; Vare and Scott, 2007). Innovation and knowledge generation are possible since the KSC could teach “students how to think, rather than what to think, while letting [them] apply this thinking to real-world sustainability problems” (Wiek and Kay, 2015, p. 29). Through the KSC, people could also learn how to transform knowledge into action in their communities (Sterling et al., 2017, p. 160) and create real-world change. This is important, since unsustainable habits that comprise the “business-as-usual” case must be replaced with life-affirming actions and facilitate a new way of being in the world. After all, “[g]ood ideas with no ideas on how to implement them are wasted ideas” (Scott, 2013, p. 275).

The authors have asserted that the implementation of the KSC could have social benefits because its associated pedagogies aim to actively involve learners in transforming society. The sequence sees the individuals’ reflecting upon and evaluating one’s growth vis-à-vis KSC and promotes the development of learning and other habits that betters ones’ competencies (Rieckmann, 2012). Such reflection and empathy are more likely to be inherent to people who contribute to their own learning about the need to be truly compassionate for each other and the planet (Glasser and Hirsh, 2016). In achieving this level of empathy, it is a relatively simple matter then to understand that technology and policy alone are not adequately able to facilitate large-scale and positive change; unsustainability is a problem created by human action and therefore must be counteracted with theories of and solutions to unsustainable behaviours. Integrating a responsive KSC tool into higher education could help build the capacities, capabilities, competencies and eventually mastery and habits of mind and body that give rise to sustainable well-being societies.

The authors summarize and critique the KSC literature with an eye to creating a flexible and adaptive tool for individuals to chart their own path towards being a sustainability practitioner. The conceptual work herein is the first of its kind, and it will assist program who wish to accentuate contextual factors and individual learning objectives into their design.

This study aims to examine the factors affecting behavioural intention to use E-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study applies the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) to identify the factors that predict intention to use E-learning. Also, the study examines the effect of personal innovativeness in information technology and perceived financial cost on intention to use E-learning.

The study adopted a cross-sectional quantitative study design involving 617 university students. The data was collected through an online survey due to the COVID-19 restrictions. The proposed hypotheses were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

The study found that personal innovativeness in information technology, perceived financial cost, performance expectancy, hedonic motivation and social influence have a significant effect on the intention to use E-learning. Contrary to expectation, habits, effort expectancy and facilitating conditions did not predict intention to use E-learning.

The study was conducted on university students and did not include other school-going students and working professionals. Also, the study sample was not drawn from many universities. The study used a quantitative approach. The use of a mixed-methods approach could provide deeper insights into the factors affecting the intention to use E-learning in developing countries.

The practical implications inform policymakers and educational institutions on how E-learning adoption can be enhanced. In this context, social influence, performance expectancy, hedonic motivation, personal innovativeness and perceived financial cost are identified as predictors of intention to use E-learning. This study has implications for the development of E-learning systems and the promotion of the use of E-learning in the context of developing countries.

The study is amongst the few studies from a developing economy to use the UTAUT2 model to examine students’ intention to use E-learning. The study proposes the inclusion of personal innovativeness in information technology and perceived financial cost as factors predicting intention to use E-learning. Again, the study adopts importance-performance matrix analysis to provide decisional areas where management may improve for successful E-learning acceptance and use.

Considering personality as changeable through a bottom-up process of altering states, habits and traits, constitutes a shift in the predominant paradigm within personality psychology. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider Bateson’s theory of learning and organizational triple-loop learning in light of this recent empirical evidence.

This paper uses a multi-disciplinary conceptual approach. Based on an integrative analysis of literature from recent work in personality psychology, four dimensions (process, content, time and context) are identified that allow linking personality change and triple-loop learning.

Identifying a bottom-up process of changing states, habits and traits as being central to change personality, allows for reconsidering Bateson’s theory of learning as a theory of personality development (Learning II) and personality change (Learning III). Functionally equivalent, organizational triple-loop learning is conceptualized as a change in an organization’s identity over time that may be facilitated through a change in responding to events and a change in the organization’s routines.

Interventions that change how organizations respond to events and that change the routines within an organization may be suitable to facilitate triple-loop learning in terms of changing organizational identity over time.

This paper contributes to the discussion on Bateson’s theory of learning and organizational triple-loop learning. As interest in personality change grows in organization studies, this paper aims to transfer these findings to organizational learning.

In our previous paper we developed a taxonomy of managerial skills and qualities; reported a modest research study giving some evidence for the validity of the taxonomy; and presented some further empirical evidence about the sources from which the managers we have investigated acquired these skills and qualities.