A visit to the Historial Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen reminded me of something that years of studying learning design, online education and educational theory can sometimes obscure: learning is an experience before it becomes an outcome.
I had gone in expecting something fairly conventional. Perhaps a guide, perhaps a sequence of exhibits. Instead, the Historial drew me through a carefully staged multimedia, in situ encounter with Jeanne d’Arc, her trial, her rehabilitation, and the later construction of her as an icon. What struck me afterwards was not simply what I had learned about Jeanne. It was how I had been made to want to learn more.
I found myself reducing the experience to a sequence: Enter → encounter → wonder → orientate → investigate → compare → argue → consult expertise → reflect → pursue. That sequence now seems to me more useful than many elaborate descriptions of learning design because it describes what happened to me as a learner.
I entered. I encountered something unexpected. I wondered. Only then did I begin to orient myself within the history. From there I started investigating, comparing explanations and constructing arguments of my own. By the time four historians appeared towards the end of the experience, offering different perspectives in a managed question-and-answer format, I was ready for expertise. Their interventions meant something because I already had questions.
Then came reflection. And, importantly, pursuit.
I wanted the guidebook. I wanted a fuller history of the period. I wanted to know more about the trial documents, medieval religious belief, the politics surrounding Jeanne, and the way she has subsequently been appropriated as a saint, a patriot, a feminist figure, a nationalist symbol, and a cinematic heroine. Nobody had given me an assignment. I simply wanted to continue. For an educator, that is surely one of the most desirable outcomes imaginable.
This brought me back to Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage Model, which I encountered years ago in the context of online learning. What I continue to value in Salmon’s approach is its insistence on scaffolding and progression. You do not begin by throwing difficult content at learners. First they gain access. Then they become comfortable in the environment. Then they begin to participate and exchange information. Only later do they move towards constructing knowledge, taking greater responsibility and reflecting on what has happened.
The Historial followed a remarkably similar logic, although in a completely different medium. At first, the experience took control. Doors opened and closed. We moved from one space to another. Lighting changed. Voices appeared. Music and sound established atmosphere. Manuscript pages turned before us. Actors representing witnesses and participants in the events spoke from the fifteenth century. At this stage, I did not need to understand everything. I merely needed to enter the world.
Only gradually was I invited to make more difficult judgements. Was Jeanne a saint, mystic, political instrument or remarkably perceptive adolescent? How fair was her trial? What did her judges believe they were doing? How reliable were witnesses giving evidence at her rehabilitation twenty-five years later? Why did later generations need to reinvent her? The designers had done something educators sometimes fail to do: they had created a reason for me to need the knowledge before supplying all of it.
That may be the lesson I most want to recover as an educator. We are very good at explaining things. Perhaps we should sometimes delay the explanation. Wonder needs room.
A powerful question, object, place, testimony, contradiction or story can create an intellectual itch. Once that itch exists, information has a purpose. Without it, information can remain merely information.
I might have read on a webpage that Jeanne d’Arc was tried in Rouen in 1431 and rehabilitated in 1456. I could have learned the names, dates and political alignments perfectly well online. But standing in the Archbishop’s Palace changed the nature of that knowledge. The building was not simply where information was being delivered. The building itself was information.
There were old stone stairs, vaulted rooms, passages and windows. Light entered the building at the same angle from which sunlight has entered it for centuries. Through one window I could see the cathedral tower wrapped in modern scaffolding and plastic. The fifteenth and twenty-first centuries existed in the same field of vision. That cannot be reduced to a paragraph in a learning management system.
Online education has enormous strengths. I have spent years involved with it and remain convinced of its value. It offers access, flexibility, repeatability and extraordinary depth. It allows learners to revisit material, follow links, search archives, compare documents, participate asynchronously and engage with people who may be hundreds or thousands of miles apart. A well-designed online course can be intellectually richer than a poorly designed face-to-face one. But the Historial reminded me that learning does not occur in the intellect alone.
I heard voices. I saw faces. I moved physically through spaces. Doors shut behind me. I experienced darkness, light, stone and sound. I had one ear listening to English translation while the other followed the French. I became conscious of the physical proximity of the cathedral and of Rouen itself. Those sensory elements were not decorative additions to the learning. They became part of its structure.
We talk frequently about multimedia in online learning, but there is an important distinction between being shown multiple media and being physically situated within an experience. Online, I can look at a photograph of the room. On site, I am standing in it. Online, I can rotate a 3D reconstruction. On site, I have to climb the stairs. Online, I can hear a reconstructed medieval soundscape through headphones. On site, the sound reverberates against stone around me.
These are not necessarily better sources of factual knowledge. They are different ways of knowing.
There was another feature of the visit that would never appear in a formal statement of learning outcomes. An Italian family went ahead of us at the entrance. A young man who looked like a postgraduate student was on the telephone arranging what sounded like a future group visit. Outside it was approaching 38 degrees. My wife received messages from home about an undelivered vegetable box while I was contemplating what it must have been like to burn to death in the Place du Vieux-Marché. Afterwards we went to Dames Cakes, then walked through old Rouen towards the Musée Flaubert and Musée des Beaux-Arts.
None of this was part of the Historial’s curriculum. Yet together they created the memory of the learning. That phrase has stayed with me. Education frequently concentrates on what learners should retain as knowledge. Perhaps we should think harder about what they will retain as an experience.
Human memory does not file learning tidily under module headings. It attaches ideas to rooms, conversations, weather, embarrassment, excitement, people, journeys, smells, meals and accidents. I can remember teachers partly because I remember classrooms. I remember fieldwork because I remember landscapes. I remember arguments because I remember who was sitting opposite me. The apparently incidental can provide the hooks upon which intellectual memory hangs.
Online education has to work much harder to create such hooks because the learner’s physical context is largely their own rather than the course designer’s. One student may be working at a desk. Another on a train. Another from an iPad on the sofa. Another late at night after putting children to bed. That flexibility is one of online learning’s great advantages, but it also means that the educator has less control over the experiential environment within which memories are being created.
Salmon’s model emphasises the role of the e-moderator, particularly in the early stages. The moderator welcomes, encourages, connects and gradually withdraws as learners become increasingly capable of directing their own learning. The Historial again offered a physical analogy.
At first, its designers were highly present, although invisibly so. They controlled where we went, what appeared, how long we remained and what information was introduced. Gradually, they gave us greater interpretative freedom. By the end, historians were appearing not principally to tell me what to think, but to complicate what I was already thinking.
That is an important distinction. Expertise is most useful when the learner has reached the point where they want it.
We sometimes deliver expert explanation too early. The lecturer speaks before the learner has a question. The reading arrives before there is curiosity. The answer is supplied before the learner has experienced the difficulty of constructing one. The Historial reversed this. It created curiosity first.
One consequence was that I began constructing my own Jeanne d’Arc. Not inventing her without evidence, but trying to reconcile the evidence with what I know about adolescents, psychology, politics, religious belief and human behaviour. I began asking questions the exhibition did not resolve. Where did this young woman’s extraordinary confidence come from? Who shaped her piety? How did an illiterate rural teenager acquire sufficient understanding of the political world to operate within it? How should we understand her voices without simply imposing twenty-first-century diagnostic categories on a fifteenth-century consciousness? Was she being manipulated, or did she understand perfectly well how to inhabit the role being offered to her?
The learning became mine at the point at which the questions stopped belonging solely to the Historial.
This is what I think knowledge construction really means. It is not that every interpretation is equally valid. Evidence still matters. Expertise matters. Historical context matters. But learners should be given sufficient ownership to construct a provisional interpretation and then expose it to evidence, challenge and competing expertise.
Another thing I would now add to Salmon’s staged progression is that reflection should not necessarily be treated as the final destination. There is another stage: pursuit.
The most successful learning experience leaves something deliberately unfinished. It creates an intellectual surplus. I came away feeling that I knew considerably more about Jeanne d’Arc than when I entered, yet I was simultaneously more aware of how much I did not know. That is an excellent educational state.
Poor teaching can make a student think, “I’ve done Joan of Arc.” Good teaching might leave them thinking, “There is far more here than I realised.” Exceptional teaching may prompt one of them to go buy the book.
That voluntary next action matters enormously.
The learner has crossed a boundary. They are no longer following the designed learning experience. They are designing the next stage themselves.
This does not lead me to conclude that physical learning is inherently superior to online learning. Instead, it makes me think about how the two can complement one another. The Historial could create curiosity extraordinarily well. Online resources could then allow me to pursue it: translated trial transcripts, maps of fifteenth-century Rouen, timelines, biographies of the principal participants, competing historical interpretations, material on medieval prophecy and religious belief, film representations of Jeanne, digitised manuscripts, discussion with other visitors, and a bibliography moving from introductory texts to specialist research.
The physical experience provides intensity. The online environment provides extension.
Together they could create something much richer than either alone.
And perhaps that is the lesson I have been reminded of after all these years of thinking about learning design. Learning does not begin with content. It begins with entry. Then encounter. Then wonder. We orient ourselves. We investigate. We compare. We argue. We seek expertise. We reflect. And, if the experience has worked particularly well, we pursue the subject without anybody telling us to.
That is what happened to me in Rouen.
I went into the Historial Jeanne d’Arc as a visitor.
I came out as a student again.
Now it’s your turn:
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