What Does Context Have to Do With Learning?
The circumstances that situate an event or thought in reality are its context. Context is important to adult learning because it provides relevance, and relevance is what gives the information significance and importance to the learner. Context draws our attention to the learning, making it relevant to our work or our life. Context is often confused with situating the learning in the real world. What is important is that the learning is situated in an authentic position for the learner to take it in. It is about positioning circumstances relevant to something the learner can grasp. An authentic framework can be real or imagined as long as it is authentic to the learner, but without context it is difficult for the learner to make associations with the new.
You can use context to draw the learner’s attention to something in one of two ways: you can position the new materials in context or out of context. Positioning the new information in context means putting it in an authentic environment that allows for association with prior knowledge or what is already known. This allows for establishing meaning and importance by relating the new information to events and circumstances that are appropriate and significant.
You can position the new information radically out of context, on the other hand, by creating contrast, and you can position the new information so out of context that it is memorable. If things are very different, or in contrast to one another, we have a tendency to remember them. Excellent examples of positioning information so out of context that it becomes memorable are the GIECO commercials. These television commercials include money that talks, cavemen in bowling alleys and on motor cycles, and a small talking lizard with an adorable accent all trying to sell you insurance. The events become interesting and memorable because they are not what the brain is expecting to see. Another example is the pink elephant in the living room scenario. We cannot help but picture and imagine something so odd, so different or unexpected. Because it is so unusual, we remember it. This technique is used often in advertising because it draws attention to the relevant information by setting it apart from familiar surroundings.
