Education versus “learnification” what’s at stake?

Will the effects of pandemic pedagogy accelerate learnification? Gert Biesta, Dutch-born education philosopher who is associated with the reclaiming teaching movement, highlights that the discourse of “education” has become disconnected from “learning.” This shift began during the 1980s, accelerated as a consequence of the proliferation of educational technology over the past twenty years, and is likely to increase with data-gathering and extended reality becoming ubiquitous within educational systems. Biesta makes the point that language constructs reality and that the language of learning has privileged process, but has excluded questions of purpose and content and relationships within dynamic human interrelationships that should define teaching and learning (Biesta, 2012). The sole concern of learnification becomes the individualistic process of learning, rather than the purpose, context, and relationships that are central to education as both a humanistic and holistic experience. Biesta is one voice in a wider education versus learnification debate seeking to reclaim the emancipatory potential of teaching within learner-centered educational discourse. 

The pandemic has exposed a fearful rhetoric that conditions an atmosphere that educational systems are "broken" and require fixing. Here, emancipatory education is marshalled by different constituencies for radically different ends: ed tech companies suggest that technology is the ultimate solution, whereas, both educational progressives and conservatives acknowledge the need for a realignment between teaching and learning that acknowledges interrelationships between these activities as operating within specific contexts, as being deeply relational, and as being purposeful. 

The "learnification" discourse in education positions teaching as problematic and inherently repressive. The broad claim is that traditional learning approaches see learners as "blank slates" and teachers as experts who must impart all the relevant information. By contrast, learner-centered education claims each learner to be unique. Each learner has unbounded potential. Each learner is seen as having an innate desire to learn. It is the role of the education system to unleash that desire (Lawless, 2019). However, the point of education is never that students learn, but that they learn something, that they learn this for particular purposes, and that they learn this from someone. Education needs to engage with the question of the content of the learning or what the learning is used for which speaks to the purpose of education. In the language of learning this question of purpose is either not asked or it’s already answered in a particular way. The language of "learners" and "learning" focuses on process where activities are valued specifically because these represent evidence of learning. However, not everything that is valuable can be measured. Progressive educators and ed-tech advocates argue that emphasis on learning as a liberating process is a much-needed corrective to an uninterrupted history of teacher-centeredness that almost exclusively placed emphasis on the outcomes of learning, nevertheless, the corollary is that it is easy to forget not only about the content, but also its purposes and the social relationships through which this process of learning takes place in the audit culture of education. 

Learnification is accompanied by two related developments: re-imaging learners, not as students, but as consumers of "learning experiences" and the proliferation of digital technologies marketed by ed-tech companies who have adopted the language of progressive education to make the claim that technology liberates the learner by facilitating convenience of access to educational opportunities afforded by educational providers in the marketplace of qualifications. Educational conservatives, and some progressives, see this trend as diminishing the expertise of teaching by privileging the emancipatory potential of the learner without giving equal attention to the context, relations, and purposes of learning. The liberating discourse of learnification shifts responsibility onto the students and so indirectly reinforces the marketised view that the student carries sole responsibility for their learning as a customer who makes a financial investment for personal gain (Gourlay, 11). Online learning, from the perspective of the learner, is often assumed as being synonymous with content-driven self-study, where the advantages are limited to a relative independence of time and space. Cary Campbell highlights connections between learnification and precarious graduate labour. Campbell writes: “I’ve seen firsthand how often the truly educative qualities of schooling can become stripped away through these ‘online learning environments’. Education, and the very idea of ‘school’ itself, is about taking time out of productive life to study with others in a shared world” (Campbell, 2019). A digital learning environment which consists solely of textual files and lecture capture videos shared through a learning management system is very different from a learning environment that is intentionally designed to amplify collaborative knowledge construction and complex, authentic learning. However, the overarching problem still remains that with the discursive shift to “learnification” of education it becomes more difficult for teachers to ask the crucial educational questions about content, purpose, and relationships (Biesta, 2012, 36). 

Biesta conceptually frames teaching at the progressive end of the educational spectrum, where it can be reconnected with the emancipatory ambitions of education. He draws an important distinction between seeing the teacher as simply another resource under the student’s control by "learning from", contrasted with "being taught by" which involves something entering the student’s field of experience from outside of their control. Biesta proposes teaching as a gift, but one which "...depends on the fragile interplay between teacher and student" (2012, 42). He concludes by arguing for a conception of teaching "excellence" as a form of Aristotelian practical wisdom: "the question of the formation of the teacher should be oriented towards a certain 'virtuosity' with regard to making concrete situated judgments about what is educationally desirable" (Biesta, 2012, 45). Lesley Gourlay, UCL Institute of Education, University College London, has welcomed Biesta’s reframing of excellence to include a teacher’s practical wisdom as a rebalancing move, in particular his emphasis on the situated, the unique and the concrete (Gourlay, 2017, 14). Biesta (2012) makes a case for the reinstatement of teaching in a progressive model, arguing for the notion of excellence as practical wisdom. Gourlay (2017) has extended Biesta's progressive conception of teaching by considering a radically distributed nature of human and non-human agency in day-to-day student practices, potentially allowing for a richer and more nuanced range of ways in which we might conceptualise student engagement. The objective of thoughtful learning design should equally acknowledge the teacher as expert and wise practitioner, consider the purpose of learning and scaffolding the learner, construct an intentional feedback loop, not as surveillance, but rather as potential opportunities to ask new questions about the dynamic nature of teaching and learning as contextual, purposeful, and relational. 

A valuable lesson to learn from Biesta is that education as a lived experience is never abstract, but is always situated in the day-to-day experience of messy practice. If we don’t reflect on the implications of this experience then particular definitions of purpose, rhetorically framed, will come to occupy the discursive space. 

References:

Biesta, G. (2012). “Giving Teaching Back to Education: Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher." Phenomenology & Practice, 6 (2): 35-49. Available at [Online] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312388592_Giving_Teaching_Back_to_Education_Responding_to_the_Disappearance_of_the_Teacher 

Campbell, C. (2019). “Learnification and the Attack on Education.” Epoché 20. Available at [Online] https://epochemagazine.org/20/learnification-and-the-attack-on-education/ 

Gourlay, L. (2021). Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. 

Gourlay, L. (2017). "Student engagement, ‘learnification’ and the sociomaterial: critical perspectives on higher education policy." Higher Education Policy 30 (1): 23-34. Available at [Online] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1541228/1/Gourlay_MS476_Gourlay.pdf

Lawless, C. (2019, September 26). "Learner-Centered Approaches: Why They Matter and How to Implement Them." LearnUpon Blog. Available at [Online] https://www.learnupon.com/blog/learner-centered/ 

Teräs, M., Suoranta, J., Teräs, H. et al. (2020). "Post-Covid-19 Education and Education Technology ‘Solutionism’: a Seller’s Market." Postdigital Science and Education 2: 863–878. Available at [Online] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s42438-020-00164-x.pdf

Wood, A. (2015, May 24). “What are schools for? An interview with Gert Biesta on the learnification of school buildings and education.” Architecture and Education Blog. Available at [Online] https://architectureandeducation.org/2015/05/24/what-are-schools-for-gert-biesta-on-the-learnification-of-school-buildings-and-education/amp/?__twitter_impression=true