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Designing for Learning Across Longer Time Frames

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On Pedagogical Spaces, Multiplicity and Linearities and Learning

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Abstract

In this chapter the focus is on the territory that is ‘designing for learning’ over a longer temporal landscape. What it means to be a teacher who designs for learning has shifted over time—understandings regarding what ‘planning’ is and the purposes of ‘planning’ have been and continue to be impacted by a variety of contexts. This chapter briefly details and lists a variety of ways that ‘planning’ has been constructed in the literature and practice, and then focuses on an assemblage of contemporary ways of thinking about what it means to plan/design. In line with contemporary theory, the chapter suggests that the work of designing for learning should proceed cognisant of the fact that learners are not only engaged with various epistemological projects but also with various ontological projects. If learning occurs in in-between spaces, in spaces that are comprised of elements that are known, that are challenging, and that don’t yet make any sense, this chapter explores what it might mean to design such spaces. The chapter also considers the ways that seemingly external elements come to travel into classroom territories with learners and become part of those learning environments. Finally, in concert with others, the chapter argues that activities might not only be thought of as tasks that are ‘done by learners’ but also as complex pedagogical spaces that learners bring things to, navigate, inhabit, and are produced within in a multiplicity of ways.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I want to note here that I am aware that groups are not only ‘of difference’ but function to generate differentiation. This will be discussed throughout the book and specifically with reference to dialogue later in the book.

  2. 2.

    Designing knowing that pedagogical spaces are complex; Designing knowing that learners bring their backgrounds to such spaces; Designing knowing that learners will be produced in a multiplicity of ways within such spaces; Designing knowing that learners navigate such spaces.

  3. 3.

    Some of the effects of the inhabitation of learning spaces are listed in an earlier chapter.

  4. 4.

    Sections that follow include many definitional and descriptive sections on different methods of design. The reason I’ve included so many is because I imagine these sections might function as a useful summary for pre-service teachers.

  5. 5.

    While combining these principles differs from the normative way that such approaches are usually presented as ideas or as approaches in the literature (as in model ‘x’ or idea will be presented and an applied example that is consistent with this model will then be offered) in the messy space that is the facilitation of learning events over time, it is indeed normative that such ideas are combined. Teachers, as they teach, don’t work through lists in the way that some models imply, rather they inhabit the messy space that is the classroom with some ideas about what might happen in it. They then use the ideas they have at their disposal to navigate and/or sit with/in a pedagogical space. And this is part of the reason why engagements with theoretical narratives about teaching and learning are so important, perhaps more so than participation in practical events, for engagement with theory is what enables a teacher to do the combining work being discussed here. And on this account, I would argue that the current fetish for more placement or more time given over to ‘practical’ tasks, at the expense of engagement with theory and ideas in pre-service teacher education, is deeply flawed.

  6. 6.

    While we can think about an inquiry-based unit of work as involving a series of learning steps that learners move through—we can also think about this series of steps as a series of activity spaces that the learner inhabits, like a series of rooms in a house. Further to this we might think about the inquiry unit as a designed space where the learner is produced in multiple ways within such spaces.

  7. 7.

    The notion that learners are produced in a multiplicity of ways across a unit of work and within single activities will be discussed in more detail at the end of this chapter. To signpost, if we focus in on the seemingly singular activity ‘get into a small group, read paragraph x, discuss as a group, identify and record key points, report back to the whole group’. If we list all of the elements of this routine activity, all of the ways that the learner is produced within this seemingly singular pedagogical space become clear. This common type of activiity example demonstrates how learners are already being produced in multiple ways and are enacting a multiplicity of learner identities within a seemingly singlar activity as well as across a sequence of activities playing out over time.

  8. 8.

    The use of the word ‘entangled’ references Barad as discussed by Harris and Holman Jones (2019). This is intended to imply and speak to how ontological projects (like being a learner) happen in ‘intra-related’ ways. Different elements come together, within spaces, and each becomes part of the other. Culture and subjects aren’t separate each makes and comes to be in the other. Combining and hybridity are used in similar ways in the text. Entanglement here is also used without any specific connection to quantum physics, in the way that Barad does. The writer of this text (me) draws on an eclectic mix of social theories and in particular on writings generated within specifically educationally focused disciplines or genres, accordingly I deploy the word ‘entangled’ because it speaks so economically to the ontological connections that exist between things. In earlier work I have explored the ways that the sound of the voice and cultural contexts are entangled, even though the word entangled doesn’t appear in that chapter (Crowhurst 2001, pp. 154–168). I wish now that I had used the word entanglement however, as it is such an economically poetic way to say what I wanted to say.

  9. 9.

    We are continuing with these venturing inquiries in another project that is being written alongside this one. This book has been produced within a pedagogical space that entails a different set of movements. While this book has been very much about venturing off into the clarification of new ideas and writing spaces the text is also very much about the drawing together and documentation of learnings from teaching work that has been undertaken over a number of years after the doing. This is partially why I’ve included so many definitional and descriptive sections on different methods of design. The other reason I’ve done so is because I imagine these sections might be a useful summary for pre-service teachers.

  10. 10.

    While writing these sections, I was supervising (and working alongside) a PhD student, Kris Redmond (2020). I was co-supervising Kris with Marg Sellars. Kris was using Deleuzean theory and was very interested in moving with various intensities and flows, and during our time working together he developed ‘real time scribbling’. I want to note that while the ideas developed here are entangled with Kris’s ideas, they emerged entirely on their own. Primarily they are informed by Berlant’s work on affectivity as explored in Cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) and Lyotard’s work on ‘gesture’ as explored in ‘postmodern fables’ (Lyotard, 1997). They are also an effect of numerous conversations with Michael Emslie, have been the subject of conference papers, and have come out of my own practice as a painter. Kris hasn’t asked me to note this—he is fine with ‘squigglying’—but I wanted to note this nonetheless.

  11. 11.

    Some of the effects of the inhabitation of learning spaces are listed in an earlier chapter.

  12. 12.

    The technique of returning to sections of text, and using these extracts to build different arguments, is used across all chapters of this book—and builds towards the end.

  13. 13.

    The notion that the ‘always already discursively produced complex and multiple learner subject’ inhabits and navigates pedagogical spaces, brings things to those spaces from their background, and is produced within those spaces, is a key idea that I want to highlight. Pedagogical spaces are ‘moved through’ and contributed to by subjects and are ‘productive of’ subjects. This idea was introduced in earlier work (Crowhurst & Emslie, 2018, pp. 27–37) and I continue to pursue this in current projects with Michael Emslie.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Michael Crowhurst

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  1. Michael Crowhurst
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Correspondence to Michael Crowhurst .

Dialogue with Self

Dialogue with Self

Michael 1:

Yes this chapter is also a pedagogical space

Michael 2:

That I have produced drawing on existing discourses

Michael 3:

And within which I have been produced in a multiplicity of ways

Michael 1:

And it’s been written over time.

Michael 2:

Yes … and at various times even though I thought it was finished

Michael 3:

It wasn’t … there was something still going on

Michael 1:

That I wasn’t even aware of

Michael 2:

The space was still moving

Michael 3:

Still wanting to move beyond the finish line

Michael 1:

And this is what I hope for as a teacher

Michael 2:

And this is what I find … one of the things I find … intriguing about learning

Michael 3:

Yes … it doesn’t finish

Michael 1:

Designing contexts for learning never finishes either

Michael 2:

There’s always another idea that moves through any finished design

Michael 3:

Just like what happens when classes are happening

Michael 2:

Yes … there’s the plan … and then there’s what participants usher into

Michael 3:

And through the space

Michael 1:

Into the fluid assemblage that is a designed learning space/context

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Crowhurst, M. (2022). Designing for Learning Across Longer Time Frames. In: On Pedagogical Spaces, Multiplicity and Linearities and Learning. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9400-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9400-4_6

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