“Conceptual thought demands separation of thinking from feeling, of object from subject.”
-Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind

At the foundation of the 4MAT method are two dimensions of learning: perceiving and processing.
All movement through the learning cycle is effected by the underlying meaning of these two dimensions. This week we will begin with the Perceiving Dimension.

Pull out a blank piece of paper. You can use this for the next eight weeks as we construct the 4MAT Model. Start this week by drawing a vertical line. This line will represent the Perceiving Dimension.

All learning involves the introduction of something new, something that the learner will take away after the learning. We will be referring to that “thing to be learned or experienced” as “it”.

The Perceiving Dimension represents what learners take in.

The top of the line (12 o’ clock)…
Involves direct experience
Involves senses and feelings
Learning is value-centered
Feelings are engaged
Learners are subjective
Learners are “In it”
Learners are Embedded in it
Involves the first person (I)
Learners are caught in it

The bottom of the line (6 o’ clock)…
Involves abstract concepts
Involves concepts and propositions
Learning is fact-centered
Logic is engaged
Learners are objective
Learners are studying it
Learners are separate from it
Involves the third person (it)
Learners are forming it

The Sensing/Feeling 12 o’clock place on the 4MAT Cycle is the place where you live in the moment. And the word moment is quite perfect for it. Because almost immediately we tend to move out of that moment as we begin thinking about it.

We start the process of ordering what just happened, or even what is happening to us and with us, in an attempt to understand, to comprehend, to move down to the 6 o’clock place – the place where we can examine what just happened from a safe distance, where we can own it, rather than be owned by it.

We are fond of saying when we speak of the 6 o’clock place, that we are ordering our experiences to be objective about them. And indeed, that is what we are attempting, it is the most natural way to understand, to move to some kind of order, to come to objectivity and move out of subjectivity. Kegan, and Piaget before him, point out that no learning can take place without this separation, without making what was subject the object. Remember Kolb called the 6 o’clock place “abstract conceptualization”, it is where we abstract the essence, the generalizability of the the experience to a concept that we can name and classify and “have”, rather than be had by it. What I have described here is crucial to all learning.

However there is a caveat. We often stop at the naming, we stop at 6 o’clock. We decide we know what something is. In our conviction that we understand something we limit it, we make it smaller than it is, we project ourselves onto it, rather than being able to see it for itself. In our attempt to be objective, we forget, that we never really are objective. We always bring our subjectivity with us, we see things always from behind our own eyes.

Paolo Freire says, “every naming requires a new naming”. Think about this in terms of decisions we make about people. We say, “Oh, I really know him, and this is what he is like, and he will never change.” Our naming limits, as all language limits.

It is the movement back up to 12 o’clock that helps to save us, because that movement requires that we act, that we check out what we think we have come to understand, and when our actions are confounding in terms of what we thought we knew, we reassess, moving back up to new experiences, new moments with new feelings. Such is the life of a continuous learner, a wonderful way to move through life, the glorious adventure of staying with wonder and newness.