What Do Learners Do: Where, When and/or How Does Learning Play Out? Some Ideas

In this chapter, the focus is on the territory or space that is ‘the learner’. What it means to be a learner has shifted over time and has been impacted by a variety of contexts. This chapter briefly details and lists a variety of ways that the learner has been constructed in literature and then moves on to focus on some contemporary ways of thinking about what it means to be a learner. In line with historical and contemporary theory, the chapter suggests that the work that learners are engaged in and with is not only to do with engaging with various ways of knowing but also to do with the shaping of or construction of self. Learners are people who are engaging in contextually mediated processes that impact knowing, doing, sensing, being and becoming. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of what might happen in (and characterise) a space within which learning might occur. A key theme that is introduced is that being a learner often involves inhabiting and engaging with a multiplicity of ways of being simultaneously. What it means to be a learner is to inhabit an in-between space that straddles what was known and what is yet to be known. What it means to be a learner is that sometimes you will know, sometimes you will be challenged and sometimes you will have no idea at all and these different states will happen within the same learning space. The chapter also considers the ways that other parts of learner’s lives travel into and become entangled with processes of learning, knowledge products and learner subjectivity.