This blog is created to support conversation generated from and about the learning process for MA Professional Practice (MAPP) in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries (ACI) at Middlesex University.

Friday, 25 October 2013

Emergence and the learning self


This week I have been thinking a lot about transitional spaces. Reading Ellsworth (Ellsworth 2005) she talks about the space we need to leave to ‘becoming…’ for the change from what was known to what is becoming known in the learning process.

She talks about the learning self, exploring,

‘…the concept of the learning self as the sensation of coming into relation with the outside world and to the other selves who inhabit and create that world with us.’ P.117

In module one we are asked to start to locate what the learning self of you is. When it happens (what are the circumstances under which you have noticed your learning self.) In the second module you engage with the learning self opening yourself to new ideas in terms of research methods and terms of inquiry in the particular context of this MA. In the third module you start to look at the learning selves of others your students usually) seeing if you understand them differently through the lens of the learning self in you that you have been working with in the previous modules. 

Interesting. My question to myself is whether I work under the assumption that the learning self is really just the witnessing of self-emergence. Ellsworth distinguishes the learning self in part by looking at the learning environments that create a response of emergence; the pedagogy of places – transitional spaces.

Adesola


Ellsworth, Elizabeth Ann. 2005. Places of learning : media, architecture, pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

2 comments:

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  2. Mmmmmm.....very interesting. I remember in Module one, Adesola, you commented on a statement I had made by asking me where my learning, or experience, ended and another's began. That was the summary of it, I think. I wonder how much we would learn isolated, locked away in a cell with no outside stimulation. Gruesome thought, I know. We grow more self aware, even Robinson Crusoe fashion, on an uninhabited island, learning from the animals, plants, all living things...As did the sailor in Coleridge's 'Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner', when he blessed the sea-serpents 'unaware'.... We even learn from non-living things, the water cycle, the tides of the moon and the sea, our environment. How much more aware to we become when watching or interacting with others. At first we are often fearful, or condemnatory, but as we interact we begin to 'walk in another man's moccasins'. A colleague of mine said she had learned more in her life from her students than any of her teachers. Is it only when we concern ourselves with another's learning that we actually learn more, and of, ourselves.... Allydos

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