📝 Learning, Space, Technology, Heutagogy

In Tom Barrett’s newsletter, he asked the question, who owns the learning?

I have always been puzzled by the way learning is referred to as something that can be ‘owned’. It is not a possession.

I understand responsibility, but saying, “students owning their learning” seems an odd turn of phrase. Like we are returning a possession.

What do you think?

— Tom Barrett (@tombarrett) November 17, 2020

This left me thinking about ownership and instead wondering about assemblages and systems.

A desiring machine is an assemblage “always in relation to the big social machines and technological machines” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 243). Language, media, literature, education and capitalism for example always orient a body towards a particular way of expressing desire, to produce a desiring subject so to speak. Desire always precedes subjectivity; subjectivity is the codification of ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ desires within a given body.

From that perspective, it feels like learning becomes about components rather than ownership. Maybe it is technology, maybe teachers, maybe heutagogy or maybe space? Maybe it is about the shock?

Learning, for Deleuze, is an experience which cannot be planned or organised, but that all learning is an event that shocks, causing some form of transformation within the body and mind of the learner.