Learning-As-Corresponding

An important new way to conceptualize learning

Abstract

Human learning is narrowly defined by conventional psychology through the lens of objectivist-rationalist science. Learning is much richer than psychology's framing, however, and better understood as arising via a broad phenomality rooted in subjectivity in which we may perceive our interacting with the worlds within and without. Anthropologist Timothy Ingold has proposed the terms correspondence / co-respondence to reflect the interactions of human cultures with their engulfing worlds and, in this paper, I propose extending this notion to include human learning. Learning-as-corresponding implies a dynamic, holistic and volitional interaction with all aspects of our learning lives, and recent neuroscience research helps confirm this conceptualization.