Adult Learning Through the Filters of B.F.

Adult Learning Through the Filters of B.F. Skinner & The Color Purple

Adult Learning as Seen Through B.F. Skinner and The Color Purple

The main character in the novel, musical play, and film The Color Purple is Celie, a fourteen-year-old girl living in rural Georgia between the years 1909 to 1949. Celie has been abused and oppressed by men throughout her life. Her father raped and impregnated her. He took her children away from her and let her think they were dead. Finally, her father gives Celie to Albert in marriage, even though Albert wanted to marry Celie's younger and prettier sister, Nettie. Shug is Albert's mistress who rotates in and out of his life, and in so doing, eventually aligns with Celie, becoming her mentor, protector, and lover. Celie's time with Shug is instructive and fosters many changes in Celie's thinking about religion, her own body, sexual relations, independence and oppression, and -- importantly -- about Celie's own capacity for change. The Color Purple is an epistolary story told through the letters that Celie writes -- first to God for help and in protest of her miserable life, and then to her sister who has been sent to Africa. Shug informs Celie that Albert has hidden away letters written to her by her sister Nettie, who has become a missionary in Africa. A more worldly, wise, and educated Nettie shares her first-hand observations about life in Africa in her letters to Celie. The letters are a poignant counterpoint to Celie's life in the South -- and they help Celie understand that women in Africa are also oppressed by men.

Celie's Character Arc

Celie's life is chock-a-block full of learning opportunities. Most of those learning opportunities involve negative reinforcement and, over time, Celie was able to orchestrate the negative reinforcement to her own benefit and that of others. Certainly Celie's learning was consequential and grounded in the direct, concrete experiences of her life. It is fair to say that the stakes were very high for Celie's capacity to learn from her mistakes and to recognize opportunities when she came upon them. Celie's character arc in the story is based on the changes she makes as a result of her learnings, which eventually enable her to form trust-based relationships again and to garner the strength to be independent.

Shug acts as Celie's muse and mentor. Through her relationship with Shug, Celie receives individual coaching that opens a way for her to reflect on life events, relate them to the expanded story that Shug tells, and generalize from her shared experiences with Shug to the new experiences that open around her. Through the mentoring Celie receives from Shug, she is able to move beyond a basic understanding of her life circumstances. Celie models herself after Shug, whose lifestyle and attitudes are far-flung from the other women who have come in and out of Celie's life. Shug provides a framework for learning, for analysis and synthesis of the learning, and for application and evaluation of the learning. These functions are common to effective small-group adult-learning activities.

The real test of her adult learning experiences with Shug occurs when Celie must transfer that learning in the protected environment of her relationship with Shug to the world beyond the two women. Shug continues to coach Celie, but Celie also constructs her own platform for transferring her learning -- her letters to God increasingly take on more of her own voice over the course of the film. When Celie begins writing to her sister Nettie, she reaches a stage when she can be angry with God because of all the past hurts in her life, and she begins to construct a life that moves further and further away from the hurtful situation. Celie essentially accomplishes transfer of learning and will never again allow herself to be a victim of abuse.

Stimulus-Response Patterns in Celie's Behavior

B.F. Skinner theorized that behavior is a function of the histories of reinforcing consequences in the environment of an organism. In other words, the things that happened to Celie would be of more importance in the shaping of her behavior than Celie's perceptions, thinking, or the emotions that she felt which were not observable.

According to Skinner, behavior is "out of reach of introspection." Rather the observable occurrence of reinforcement is central to an analysis of behavior. Positive reinforcement strengthens behavior through the provision of some event or reward. Negative reinforcement strengthens behavior through the removal or avoidance of some event that is aversive.