Learning pathways

I recently heard a story about the building of a new university campus. Unusually, the architect hadn't designed any pedestrian paths into his plan. When asked why there were no pathways between the buildings, he replied cryptically that he was waiting to see what happened. Soon, over a period of time, as students and staff walked between the buildings, they made their own tracks or 'desire lines' through the grass. Once these tracks had become established as the most natural and preferred routes, the architect ordered the builders in to pave over the tracks. 'Better they create their own pathways', he said, 'than for me build them, and then for them not be used'. Instead of imposing his own ideas onto the community, the architect had crowd sourced his design.

How often do we impose pathways upon students which do not meet their needs, or fit their expectations? How many times have we invested in technology, environments and curricula that is simply a waste of time and resources? The institutional learning platform - the VLE - is a classic case of decisions made about learning without consulting the learner. How can we reach a place in education where students find their own level and make their own pathways through learning?

Deleuze and Guattari's 1980 publication A Thousand Plateaus might offer us some clues. It was hailed by some as a masterpiece of post-modernist 'nomadic' writing. Others criticised it for its dense, pseudo-scientific prose. Whichever way you view this book however, it was notable for introducing rhizome theory as a metaphor for knowledge representation. According to Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes are unlike any other kind of root system, having no beginning and no end. Rhizomes don't follow the rules of normal root systems, because they resist organisational structure and chronology, 'favouring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.' In plain English, the authors are attempting to describe the way ideas spread out naturally to occupy spaces like water finding its level. The rhizome is not linear, but planar they argue - and therefore can spread out in any and all directions, connecting with other systems as it goes. The same might be said about the way communities form, create their preferred ways of communication and decide their priorities.

Rhizome theory is also a useful framework for understanding self-determined learning - the heutagogy described by Hase and Kenyon. Hase and Kenyon contextualise heutagogy with reference to complexity theory, and suggest a number of characteristics including 'recognition of the emergent nature of learning' and 'the need for a living curriculum'. The self-determined pathway to learning is fast becoming familiar to learners in the digital age, and is also the antithesis to the formal, structured learning found in traditional education.

Dave Cormier - one of the foremost contributors to rhizomatic learning theory - takes this concept deeper into digital territory by equating rhizomatic learning to 'community as curriculum'. The advent of social media, mobile communications and digital media facilitate large, unbounded personal learning networks that mimic the characteristics of rhizomes. If we accept that there is a need for a living curriculum, it would be logical to also accept that a self-determined community generates and negotiates its own knowledge, thereby forming the basis of what its members learn. Rhizomatic learning is also premised on an extension of community as curriculum, where: 'knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises'.

Students can, and do, create their own personalised learning pathways. There is also evidence that learning communities informally decide their own priorities, often observed in the emerging folksonomies that result when digital content is organised, shared and curated. These processes often occur in spite of the strictures and rules imposed upon students by the institution. Most are the result of informal learning, achieved outside and beyond the walls of the traditional education environment. Self-determined learning pathways are crucial for individual learners as well as learning communities and they are by their very nature beyond the control of universities and schools. Schools and universities cannot (and should not attempt to) harness these processes, but they can facilitate them. Just like the architect, institutions can refrain from imposing structures and pre-determined tools, wait to see what their students prefer and then provide them with the best possible conditions to support self-determined learning.

Image by justpeace


Learning pathways by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.