Learning Expansivities: Linearities and Multiplicities

This chapter suggests that learning is sometimes thought of as a process that involves breaking from a limiting past—the learner being seen to be a person who inhabits a tense in-between learning space that demands resolution in the present that then functions to propel the transformed or changed learner forward into a more expansive future. The chapter argues that while learning can indeed be understood in this way, in a moving from here to there kind of way, transformation can also be understood in additional ways. Learner transformation might also be understood to involve a process whereby the complex assemblage that is the learner inhabits a pedagogical space and uses what they know to engage with challenging new spaces and venture into unintelligible contexts and, on account of doing so, they become more layered, textured or complex and are transformed. And all of this might be understood to happen, in the same learning space, without the learner necessarily losing contact with or discarding what they were before. Processes of learning can be thought of in linear and less linear ways. And learning and learners can be thought of as involving a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory elements that intersect and that remain distinct in interesting ways. Learning might be thought of as a complex process where the learner moves from here to there and as a complex process where the learner changes and is challenged and becomes more expansive and stays the same.