Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 43 The Practice-Based Learning of Educators: A Co-Emergent Perspective Tara J. Fenwick, University of Alberta Abstract Practice-based or experiential learning has come to be dominated by mentalist models of reflection on experience. The argument here is that these models split mind from body and subject from environment in ways that yield problematic practices. An alternate conception of practice-based learning is offered here, based on the notion of ‘co-emergence.’ According to complexity theory, co-emergence is a key dimension characterizing complex adaptive systems such as classrooms, schools, and communities of practice. Introduction Since the influential work of Donald Schön (1983, 1987), the importance of experiential learning in the uncertain, messy “swamps” of practice has attracted many advocates in education. Development initiatives for educational profession- als over the past 20 years have often emphasized ‘reflective’ practice, focusing on the learning processes unfolding in experience and encouraging formal recognition of knowledge produced through experimentation in educational practice. Descrip- tions of learning in practice tend to be inherently positive, and indeed, its acknowledgment has arguably represented a progressive movement in profession- als’ continuing education. First, most would agree that practice-based learning recognizes and celebrates knowledge generated outside institutions. If learning can be defined as change or transformation, in the sense of expanding human possibili- ties and action (Davis & Sumara, 2000), learning through practice is expansion that A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Volume 2, Number 4 44 Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly challenges the hegemonic logic of expert knowledge: this learning refuses disci- plinary knowledge claims of universal validity, and resists knowledge authority based solely on scientific evidence. Second, this focus on learning in practice has foregrounded the multiple difficulties of theorizing the very nature of experience and knowledge production in different socio-political contexts, difficulties that can be easily overlooked in a rush to privilege ‘experience’ or discuss the purposes of its education. Third, it is well documented that valued personal knowledge of practicing educators derives from lived experience, and thrives on shared stories of experience (Clandinin, 2002; Schubert & Ayers, 1992). This is why, despite the philosophical problems in accepting practiced-based experience as a primary and authoritative source for learning (Norris, 2000; Usher, Bryant, & Johnson, 1997), its significance in educators’ development should not be underestimated. However, as critics (Fraser, 1995; Griffin, 1992; Harris, 2000; Michelson, 1996, 1998; Sawada, 1991; Usher & Solomon, 1999) have contended for over a decade, experiential learning has developed its own unfortunate orthodoxies. These may be argued to stem at least partly from a fundamental separation of body and mind in certain discourses of learning in practice. The body is often overlooked in examinations of learning, along with the body’s enmeshments in its social, material and cultural nets of action. Learning that is harvested from bodies in action through reflective processes is often subjected to measurement according to normalizing categories, commodified, and credentialed: “an object of institutional policy and professional good practice” (Griffin, 1992, p 31). In such cases the purpose of experience is determined by its relevancy to existing standards of practice. An example is when teachers must submit annual professional growth plans to a supervisor documenting specifically how their experience has contributed to their professional competency (Fenwick, 2002). But experience also can reproduce structural inequities and reinforce entrenched beliefs or traditions of practice that may be harmful or repressive. Learning through practice, particularly for educators who typically practice in isolation, may simply naturalize prevailing conditions and dim the potential to recognize alternative possibilities including acting collectively with others for systemic change. But how then shall those wishing to support educators’ development through ongoing learning in practice position themselves within the complex webs of practice and learning? And how can educators’ practice-based knowledge be championed towards widening equitable participation in development opportuni- ties, challenging unitary institutionalized notions of ‘good’ teaching practice and teacher knowledge, and encouraging collective challenges to these? A first step may be to critically examine theoretical assumptions related to experiential learning. Three problems are outlined in the first section below, related to the disembodiment and subsequent rationalization of learning. Then, towards more expansive and embodied understandings of learning, practice-based learning may be theoretically re-configured drawing from concepts offered by complexity Volume 2, Number 4 A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 45 science. What is called here a co-emergent perspective is developed in three themes in the second section. These themes indicate more integrative approaches to enabling practice-based learning among educators, which are described briefly in the final section of this argument. Problems in Current Conceptions of Experiential Learning Reflection is emphasized in treatises about adult experiential learning (i.e., Boud, Keogh & Walker, 1996; Caffarella, Barnet, & Bruce, 1994) and the ubiqui- tously popular ‘reflective practice.’ Both Schön (1983, 1987) and Kolb (1984) popularized the assumption that experience is “concrete” and split from “reflec- tion,” implying that doing and thinking are separate states occurring in linear sequence. In such renderings mentalist reflection is treated as the conduit from event to knowledge, as Sawada (1991) has shown, transforming ‘raw’ experience into worthwhile learning. Theories of action are excavated from experience, becoming objects of knowledge severed from location and embeddedness in the material and social conditions that produced the knowledge. Inseparability of Experience, Reflection, and Knowledge In such mental representations, fluid dynamic events become static and separated from the interdependent commotion of people together in action with objects and language. Experience is cast as a fixed thing, separated from knowledge- making processes. Yet reflection itself is experienced, and experience as event cannot be separated from the imaginative interpretation and re-interpretation of the event. Michelson (1996) asks, “Where, precisely, are we standing when we ‘reflect’, and what kind of self is constructed in the process?” (p. 449). In fact, she argues, experience, reflection and knowledge are mutually determined and in continuous dynamic flux. Experience itself is knowledge-driven and cannot be known outside socially available meanings. What is imagined to be ‘experience’ is rooted in social discourses which influence how problems are perceived and named, which expe- riences become visible, how they are interpreted, and what knowledge they are considered to yield. Usher et al. (1997) write that “to see experience as originary in relation to learning fails to recognize that any approach to using experience will generate its own representations of experience and will itself be influenced by the way experience is conceived or represented, by the framework or interpretive grid which will influence how experience is theorized” (p. 100). Lather (2000) shows how the reflective act itself a performance of remembered experience, rather than a realist representation of it. She writes about the “undecidability” of lived experience, given the interplay of language, audience, purpose, and identity with memory. What we think we see, when we reflect, “is always already distorted”: A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Volume 2, Number 4 46 Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly [Remembrance is] less a repository for what has happened than a production of it: language, writing, a spectacle of replication in an excess of intention. Remembrance is not about taking hold but a medium of experience, a theatre for gathering information. (p. 154) These insights illustrate three problems in conceiving learning as deriving objects of knowledge (whether conceptual or pragmatic) from ‘authentic’ memories of a ‘concrete’ experience. First, these memories depend upon those truths that can be acknowledged within particular cultural values and politics. Second, many slippages between the named and the invisible occur in meaning-making, and further disjunctions occur between the so-called learner and those other readers of experience who allot themselves the authority to do so under the title of educator. Third, concrete experiences do not exist separate from other life experiences, from identity, or from ongoing social networks of interaction. Furthermore, the individual person becomes the central cognizing agent, as though the learning process ultimately is conducted internally within autonomous knowledge-making units. Person is often split from environment in these conceptualizations, with context or situation portrayed almost as an inert container in which a person experiments, interprets the results to construct knowledge, and then applies this acquired knowledge to new situations. Critics such as Edwards (1994), Griffin (1992) and Lather (1991) argue that this valorizing of reflection effectively centers learning in a rational knowledge-making mind, somehow rising above messy bodily dynamics to fix both experience and a singular experiencing self. Politics of Recognizing Experience Assessment processes employed in experiential learning reveal contested politics at play in recognizing and judging complex nets and structures of experience. One example is Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR), a process intended to grant advance credit for experience for purposes of entry to jobs or certificate programs. Critics argue that PLAR creates a disjuncture between private experience and public discourse, which produces a fundamental paradox when the private journey of discovery and learning is brought under public scrutiny and adjudication (Fraser, 1995; Harris, 2000). The assessment process compels adults to construct a self to fit the PLAR dimensions, and celebrates individualistic achievement: “adults are what they have done” (Fraser, 1995). Perhaps more common examples in educational circles are professional port- folios or growth plans. Like the reflective journals often required of pre-service teachers, portfolios and growth plans comprise textual representations of practice- based learning that are often reviewed, even assessed, by a supervisor. Tensions abound in determining worthwhile knowledge and experience, criteria for its adjudication, and language for its representation (Fenwick, 2003). Valuing expe- rience may be a well-intentioned gesture to diminish the power of institutionalized knowledge, but ultimately employs disciplinary mechanisms of language, mea- Volume 2, Number 4 A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 47 surement, and knowledge legitimation to render local knowledge into institutional vocabulary. When experiential learning is thus judged and managed, both ‘expe- rience’ and human subjectivity are translated into calculable resources serving what some have argued are ultimately utilitarian notions of knowledge, whether orga- nizational productivity or school improvement. The experiential learning dis- course, observe Usher and Solomon (1999), “intersects happily with the managerial discourse of workplace reform . . . since both shape subjectivity in ways appropriate to the needs of the contemporary workplace” (p. 8). For individuals too, Michelson (1999) argues, “the management of experience has become a way of regulating how people define themselves and construct an identity” (p. 144). Reflection orders, clarifies, manages and disciplines experi- ence—which internalizes relations of ruling. Perhaps this is precisely why individu- als find refuge in reflective periods, to creating meaning and pattern in chaotic fragments of experiences, through narrative, snapshots, justifications, or causal patterning. As Miller points out (2000), people try to manage the uncertainty and undecidability of their experiences by selectively imposing reflective structures to mentally represent and consider them. Excluded and Invisible Experiences Ultimately practice-based learning emphasizes what is or can be represented as visible experience. In drawing boundaries around experiences to produce this visibility, something important is always excluded. First, only those experiences deemed relevant to culturally-specific notions of ‘good practice’ are under consid- eration. In education, Popkewitz (1998) argues that particular notions of “the good teacher” (activity-oriented instruction, reflective practitioner) combined with particular assumptions about teacher knowledge (celebrating practical wisdom and “recipe knowledge”) and practices that make teachers “visible” (through self- revelation), all work to produce particular teacher identities and behaviours by normalizing teachers’ inner beliefs: teachers’ “thought is organized, perception directed, and action controlled” (p. 56). But even when broader notions of good practice prevail, practice-based learning will be understood according to normative categories that determine which sorts of experiences are educative, developmental, knowledge-producing, and worth enhancing. Those experiences in what Deborah Britzman has called “difficult knowledge” for educators are excluded from consid- eration: deep desires for and resistances to different objects, fantasy, uncomfortable truths about oneself, and contradictory or taboo experiences. Non-conscious or intuitive knowledge, and the ongoing subtle learning of body, emotion, identity and relationship through everyday negotiations in webs of action also tend to remain invisible. In discourses of practice-based learning emphasizing naming and recognition of experience, these unnamed phenomena are non-existent, and therefore, ontologically excluded. Second, experiences depend partly on inhabited environments and bodily A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Volume 2, Number 4 48 Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly capacity. Those who have been socially, physically, economically or politically excluded from particular experiences may be judged as lacking social capital, remedied through expanding their access to ‘rich’ experiences and networks. But this approach colonizes their own knowledge and reifies the normalizing categories of those whose values control the dominant cultural meanings of ‘practice’ and ‘learning,’ This also perpetuates an acquisitive conception of experience, where development is construed as possessing increasingly higher-level orders of expe- rience or objects of knowledge discerned from ‘prior’ experience. Third, as Osberg and Biesta (2003) have argued, conventional conceptions of practice-based learning exclude two important elements: time and chance. The model of an agent experimenting with the environment to produce personal theories of action does not appreciate how meanings become apparent to the agent in the midst of action, in ways that not only continually redefine how both action and intention are perceived, but also continually reshape how the agent acts. A temporal element therefore operates in practice that escapes representation, such that we re- negotiate our actions, theories and place in the world simultaneously with our experimentation. The chance element is also temporal: whether the focus of learning is on a single person or a group of people (a system) experimenting in practice, at each moment it can never be known which, among the possible choices available to the person or system, is selected for the next action. Thus among the elements making up the experience, something is always not present, and therefore not representable. When these elements of time and chance are excluded, practice- based learning remains problematically conceptualized as fixed moments, ratio- nally analysed to produce knowledge objects, without acknowledging the unrepresentable forces that determine them. Feminists such as Michelson (1998) maintain that these conceptual problems in experiential learning are consequent to the Cartesian bifurcation of mind and body in a western epistemological tradition that privileges mental detachment, the observation and calculation of the world from a disembodied and abstract rational- ity. This is what Haraway (1991) calls “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (p. 188). Bai (2001) suggests that it is precisely this problematic illusion of a floating rationality rooted in a fundamental western split of subject and object that produces “the predominance of the conceptual mind sustained by preoccupa- tions with symbolic manipulation and a corresponding eclipse of the nonconceptual, that is, unmediated sensory, consciousness” (p. 86). Michelson (1998) argues that in the movement to rationalize experiential learning the body is not so much transcended as rendered completely invisible. Embodied Learning: A Co-Emergent Perspective Yet the embodiment of experiential learning is an ancient concept: indigenous ways of knowing, for example, have maintained that spirit, mind and body are not Volume 2, Number 4 A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 49 separated in experience, that learning is more focused on being than doing, and that experiential knowledge is produced within the collective, not the individual mind (Castellano, 2000; McIsaac, 2000). Julia Cruikshank’s (1998) research, for ex- ample, shows how the life stories and knowledge development of the Yukon First Nations people are completely entangled with the glaciers around which they live. The glaciers are not inert environment, but alive and moving, rumbling and responding to small human actions. In the collective ways of knowing among these Tlingit and Tagish peoples, the lines between human and non-human, social history and natural history, are fluid. Writers on Africentric knowledge (i.e., Collins, 1990), so named to distinguish it from Eurocentric perspectives that fragment and rationalize experience, have also shown how learning is embodied and rooted in collective historic experiences of oppression, pain and love which are inseparable from the emotional, the spiritual, and the natural. The difference here from mentalist or reflection-dependent understandings of experiential learning is accepting the moment of learning as occurring within action, within and among bodies. An embodied approach understands the sensual body as a site of learning itself, rather than as a raw producer of data that the mind will fashion into knowledge formations. Michelson (1998) shows that the mind’s insight is after all only a late ‘catching up’ to what the body has already learned in the interactive moment of experience. In fact, Observation is embodied—literally so—in human sensory apparatus and techno- artefacts that interact with one another in specific relationships . . . Learning is an active, world-creating process inscribed on the body and at the same time, subject to particular material and discursive conditions that constrain the body within culture and in history. (p. 225) The crucial conceptual shift of an embodied experiential learning is from a learning subject to the larger collective, to the systems of culture, history, social relations and nature in which everyday bodies, subjectivities and lives are enacted. This shift is towards what Davis (2003) calls a “complexified” view of cognition. Complexity science, examining webs of action linking humans and non-humans in complex adaptive systems, is one area of contemporary theory and research that informs a re-embodied view of experiential learning. A second area focuses on dynamics of desire and resistance evolving at subsystem levels, currently being explored in feminist and psychoanalytic learning theory. A third area studies learning as struggle evolving in the body politic, evident in social action movements. These three perspectives are outlined in the following section. All three emphasize fluidity between actions, bodies, identities, objects and environments. They point to complexities and contradictions in experiential learning that can be obscured through paradigms of transparent reality, individual meaning making or domination and oppression. All three share a focus on learning as complex choreography transpiring at different nested levels of complex systems adapting to A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Volume 2, Number 4 50 Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly and affecting one another: bodily subsystems; the person or body biologic; collectivities of social bodies and bodies of knowledge; society or the body politic; and the planetary body (Davis et al., 2000). Co-emergence: Experiential Learning as Collective Participation in Complex Systems Discussions of embodied learning informed by complexity science (Davis & Sumara, 1997; Fenwick, 2003; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) highlight the phenomenon of co-emergence in complex adaptive systems. The first premise is that the systems represented by person and context are inseparable, and the second that change occurs from emerging systems affected by the intentional tinkering of one with the other. Humans are completely interconnected with the systems in which they act through a series of “structural couplings” (Maturana & Varela, 1987). That is, when two systems coincide, the perturbations of one system excites responses in the structural dynamics of the other. The resultant coupling creates a new transcendent unity of action and identities that could not have been achieved independently by either participant. Varela (1999) explains, Perception does not consist in the recovery of a pre-given world, but rather in the perceptual guidance of action in the world that is inseparable from our sensorimotor capacities . . . cognition consists not of representations but of embodied action. (p. 17, italics added) A classroom project, for example, is a collective activity in which interaction both enfolds and renders visible the students and teacher, the objects mediating their actions and dialogue, the problem space that they define together, and the emerging plan or solution they devise. As each person contributes, she changes the interactions and the emerging object of focus; other participants are changed, the relational space among them all changes, and the looping-back changes the contributor’s actions and subject position within the collective activity. This is ‘mutual specification’ (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), the fundamental dynamic of systems constantly engaging in joint action and interaction. The ‘environment’ and the ‘learner’ emerge together in the process of cognition, although this is a false dichotomy: context is not a separate background for any particular system such as an individual actor. Davis, Sumara and Luce-Kapler (2000) describe co-emergence as “a new understanding of cognition”: Rather than being cast as a locatable process or phenomenon, cognition has been reinterpreted as a joint participation, a choreography. An agent’s knowing, in this sense, are those patterns of acting that afford it a coherence—that is, that make it discernible as a unity, a wholeness, identity. The question, ‘Where does cognition happen?’ is thus equivalent to, ‘Who or what is perceived to be acting?’ In this way, a rain forest is cognitive—and humanity is necessarily participating in its cogitations/ Volume 2, Number 4 A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 51 evolutions. That is, our habits of thought are entwined and implicated in unfolding global conditions. (p. 74) Most of this complex joint action leaks out of individual attempts to control behavior through critical reflection. And yet, individual reconstructions of events too often focus on the learning figure and ignore the complex interactions as ‘background.’ Complexity theory interrupts the natural tendency to seek clear lines between figures and grounds, and focuses on the relationships binding humans and non-humans (persons, material objects, mediating tools, environments, ideas) together in multiple fluctuations in complex systems. All complex adaptive systems in which human beings are implicated learn, whether at micro-levels such as immune systems or at macro-levels such as weather patterns, a forest or the stock market. Human beings are part of these larger systems that are continuously learning, and bear characteristics of the larger patterns, like the single fern leaf resembling the whole fern plant. But individuals also participate, contributing through multiple interactions at micro-levels. At the sub-system level, for example, the human immune system, like organs and other sub-human systems, functions as an autonomous learning system that remembers, forgets, hypothesizes, errs, recovers, and adapts (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2000). The outcome of all these dynamic interactions of a system’s parts is unpredictable and inventive. The key to a healthy system—able to adapt creatively to changing conditions— is diversity among its parts, whose interactions form patterns of their own. Learning is thus cast as continuous invention and exploration, produced through the relations among consciousness, identity, action and interaction, objects and structural dynamics of complex systems. New possibilities for action are constantly emerging among the interactions of complex systems, and cognition occurs in the possibility for unpredictable shared action. Knowledge cannot be contained in any one element or dimension of a system, for knowledge is constantly emerging and spilling into other systems. For example when a group of teachers decide to collaborate to develop new instructional units, they form a system as they align their activities around a shared objective. They bring to their dialogue all the perspectives and experiences emanating from their own classrooms, another set of systems. A story shared about a child struggling with punctuation touches off someone else’s story, causing the first story teller to view that child and her own actions differently. Someone recalls a news story about a class sending a teddy bear around the world, which causes a flurry of suggestions about learning activities using teddy bears. The principal wanders in and offers to supply a teddy to each class, suggesting that a day be set aside to play with it and study it in each class. In the subsequent classroom activities throughout the school on that teddy day, children experiment differently in science, language arts, math and music. Many go home to tell family members and even involve them in the new delights of teddies. The day becomes a tradition in the school, and when one of the teachers eventually moves into a career as a teacher educator, she tells others about it, and they carry it with them to use in other classrooms. A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Volume 2, Number 4 52 Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly There is nothing particularly unique about this story, as any educator can attest. The point is that when objects, people and learning are viewed as co-emerging systems rather than as individual parts, the focus moves onto the relationships between the parts and the ways that knowledge circulates through them. Learning begins to appear inseparable from fully embodied nets of ongoing action, inven- tion, social relations and history in complex systems. Desire: Negotiating Sub-System Dynamics Embodied systems of behavior and knowledge also are influenced in part by dynamics of desire, love and hate, according to psychoanalytic theorists of learning. In education, theorists Todd (1997) and Britzman (1998) suggest that analysis of learning should focus less on reported meanings and motivations and more on what is occurring under the surface of daily encounters: things resisted and ignored, the nature of longings and lack, and the slippages among action, intention, perception of self and experience. While not easily aligned with the tenets of complexity theory, psychoanalytic learning theory shares its ontological propositions that relations and interconnections among items nested in systems are central acting phenomena in learning, that experience is not contained in the body, and that the individual mind does not perceive the totality of micro-interactions in which it participates. One particular contribution of psychoanalytic learning theory is highlighting desire for and resistance to different objects (Todd, 1997), which can be argued to occur in both micro-interactions and larger movements of co- emergence. Desire may be manifested in longings to possess or be possessed by another, creating urges to act towards such longings. The complex influence of these urges on consequent actions arguably affects the directions in which systems involving humans co-emerge. For Britzman (1998), desire and learning are conflated in daily, disturbing experiential encounters carried on at psychic levels that individuals manage to ignore using various cognitive strategies. But while these levels can’t be known directly, their interactions interfere with intentions and conscious perception of direct experience. These workings constantly ‘bother’ the (individual and collec- tive) mind, producing breaches between acts and wishes. Despite varied and creative defenses against confronting these breaches, the conscious mind is forced to notice random paradoxes and contradictions of experience, and uncanny slips into sudden awareness of difficult truths about itself. These truths are what Britzman (1998) calls ‘lost subjects,’ those parts of self and its communities that people resist, then try to reclaim and want to explore, but are afraid to. Full knowledge of these lost and perhaps disturbing subjects jeopardizes the conscious sense of identity as self-determined, sensible and knowledgeable. But in learning processes, claims Britzman (1998), individuals and groups notice the breaches between acts, dreams, and responsibility. Learning is coming to tolerate conflicting desires, while Volume 2, Number 4 A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader