At first, it just looks like a wall of rock. Then as you move closer, you spot it: a tiny clump of vibrant purple and green, bursting with life in the cracks between the grey. As you run your eyes across the stone, you begin to spot more of these unplanned flourishes of colour, hiding in plain sight. No one planted them, and yet there they are, emerging from the spaces in between.
When we teach and learn, we can get so fixated on what is certain, visible, predictable and within our individual control, that we forget how to nurture the ‘in-between’ spaces – especially those between learners. But as Paul Hager and David Beckett noted in a recent seminar on complexity theory, these interactions between learners can drive powerful learning.
Learning is not (only) a solo sport
I felt that I had to do everything on my own, because asking for help was a sign that I was not intelligent enough […] I now see how destructive this attitude was, but then I assumed that this was what I had to do.
Martin Chalfie, co-recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
If learning from and with others is good enough for Nobel Prize winners, why do we still cling to the myth of the lone genius? In doing so, we undervalue the learning that happens between people and miss important opportunities to learn and innovate. In We’re all in this together: new principles of co-present group learning, Hager and Beckett use examples including the 2018 Thai cave rescue of a trapped football team to walk through how crucial group learning can be in novel, complex situations. Whilst individual learning is still important, their work suggests that ‘groups provide daily experiences that stimulate distinctive and valuable learning that is other than the learning by the individual group members’.
In my own work, students I’ve interviewed often refer to the people and relationships that help them learn, in both passive and active ways. The materials, lectures, practicals and placements are also important, as are the online and offline spaces where it all happens. But more often than not, humans are the glue that holds it all together; humans are the sources of insight that unlock the assignment riddles and labyrinthine systems of higher education. We just can’t always see it.
Let go of certainty – embrace complexity
This is where complexity theory comes in. Emerging out of several disciplines including physics, biology and more recently the social sciences, complexity theory helps to surface the connections between things, where relationships may not be linear, and cause-and-effect cannot be predicted and reproduced in endless experiments. Whilst learning analytics and data science have their place in education, when messy humans are involved, there’s always part of the process where we have to let go and let learning and creativity happen without trying to control every aspect of it.
Drawing on complexity principles, Hager and Beckett claim that most human knowledge and even individuals’ identities ’emerge’ from systems of relationships. This means that learning can’t be specified beforehand, or necessarily attributed to a single individual, but is ‘distributed’ across groups, such as professions. This may be a challenge indeed for the dominant educational narratives where self-directed, individually-motivated and personalised learning are hailed as drivers of successful outcomes.
Creating spaces for learning ‘in-between’
So how do we nurture such spaces when they can be so intangible and unpredictable? How do we help both learners and educators to recognise how powerful learning together can be, when the examples most of us know (hello, ‘group work‘) are also among our most contentious and challenging?
We can start by being honest and acknowledging the ambiguity in learning processes, admitting that working alone through specified steps may not always result in the knowledge or skills you were hoping for, like programming a robot to perform on demand. We can offer better tools and structures to facilitate collaboration and healthy disagreement, creating opportunities for friction and novelty to arise and challenge learning. We can also design opportunities in subjects and courses for students to reflect on learning processes, to surface and articulate the learning that happens ‘in-between’ when we may have previously let the moment pass us by.
Next time you pass by that group of students, whether they look joyful, confused, loud or quietly getting on with something together, listen more closely: can you hear those seeds of knowledge growing in the spaces in-between?