A learnshop is, to begin with, an invented word: just as a workshop is a place where one works, so learnshop is meant to describe a place where one learns i.e. a place where, as in a workshop, people learn and act productively. This marks a clear distinction between this place and traditional places of academic learning.

Learning sites or learning workshops arose through the attempts of teachers to overcome traditional teaching and learning methods. Such institutions were first founded in the 70's in Berlin and New York and combine with further education seminars in which teachers, especially primary and secondary school teachers, sought to escape from the classroom rituals of one dimensional, conveying of recipe material e.g. by the reception of Freinet and Montessori or by means of open lessons. Today there are hundreds of such institutions in Germany, both in schools and in the field of socio-educational training and further education.

Working in and with a learnshop means, for Productive Learning educationalists, being ready to actively change one's attitude to education and to oneself as an educationalist. The learning workshop can be a place where participants actively make the world a part of themselves, where learning experiences can be made with the most various learning materials, where those learning get to grips, independently and creatively, with themes and problems.

Learning experiences in the learnshop can encourage the participants to risk the step outside when they have developed confidence in their own abilities. Similary, the experiences of activity which they have gained on the outside can be actively further developed and reflected, either alone in the workshop or in the group. Participants learn to assume responsability for their own actions, they discover creative abilities, develop their imagination by coming into contact with and through the use of media and material, and get to know their own active and passive learning strategies.

Various activities can be carried out by young people at the same time, different kinds of learning behaviour can be recognised and developed, various themes can be dealt with in accordance with individual associations. The learnshop can be used as an important place of communication where personal or academic exchanges, individual counselling, group counselling with or without educationalist, can take place in an open situation.

What kind of secret learning places are they then -these learnshops? Why can they be regarded as an important, complementary element to Productive Learning? The text which follows deals with the development of imagination and ideas relating to educational theory and practice in the learnshop.

Every form of learning accompanying productive activity should be worked out methodically in its educational relationship to productive activity, since this is the basis of the educational

process. In the framework of an educational programme or module, components at odds with productive activity e.g. phases of idleness, of artistic spontanely, or the simple urge for movement are conceivable and purposeful, as well as components wich seek to further the educational process deriving from the experience of productivity without, where possible, methodical bridges. The discovery of such opportunities is the task of Productive Learning educational theory and practice. As a rule, our imagination is dominated, more than we care to admit, by the classroom paradigm: learning seems, as soon as it is separated from activity, almost always inevitably to take the form of a seminar.

Productive Learning arises from the experience of productive activity. For this reason its material has two sources: the themes are based on concrete interaction processes between the person learning and his/her environment. Themes are also developed from complex reality from the learning subject in the course of his/her personal development. The rich variety of activities, on the one hand, and the individual perception, as well as personal intervention intentions, on the other, produce the succession of motivations and problems, both of individual activity and the learning results gained through reflecting on the activity as products of the process of reflection.

In Productive Learning projects the stimulation of activity situations should be continued outside of the productive activity. This means, to begin with, that one should have as great a variety of learning media as possible at one's disposal, able to respond to every learning need, and more, media which strenghten or trigger off such impulses whereby the experience of the person learning would lead to his/her (conscious) further development if he/she could only recognise the opportunity.

One example is the writing computer which, experience shows us, most young people regard, at first, as an interesting toy and only aftewards as a stimulus and aid, providing the possibility of written documentation and reflection which can help overcome negative experiences with one's own handwriting and provides the opportunity to reawaken creativity in the field of writing crushed by failure at school.

For this reason a learning site of this kind, equipped with a comprehensive supply of learning instruments from the traditional library and mediathek to the darkroom or comprehensive collection of working material, games and other stimuli for creative and communicative activity, to modern computer equipment an indispensable component of every Productive Learning programme. Wall exhibitions or window displays, in the room or in the corridor, can assist the documentation and transparency of learning process. We would like to term this place the learnshop, even if it has not yet been sufficiently characterised by that which we have said up until now.

Ingrid Böhm & Jens Schneider,
Institute for Productive Learning in Europe (IPLE)
iple@sonett.asfh-berlin.de