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

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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

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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”:

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[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-

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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

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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

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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

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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/

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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.
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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

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recovering the subjects that are repressed from the terror of full self-knowledge. As
Bion (1994) observes, the implicit difficulty in learning from experience—forcing
people to tolerate frustration and uncertainty, to reconsider meanings of past
experiences and change their relationship to their past knowledge—is the uncon-
scious ‘hatred of development’ it produces.
Experiential learning is thus posed as the opposite of acquiring transparent
experience—it is entering and working through the profound conflicts of all the
desiring events burbling within experience that comprise what Britzman calls
“difficult knowledge.” Britzman’s (Anna) Freudian influence ultimately produces a
somewhat deterministic conception of humans bifurcated as conscious/unconscious
beings, helplessly controlled by simple drives. Nonetheless, the important effects of
desire in human systems are undeniable. Psychoanalytic theory offers useful analytic
tools that highlight, in human participation in systems of experience, the learning
dynamics of working through psychic conflicts at the fulcrum of desire.

Struggle:
Disequilibrium and Change Emerging in Complex Systems
In critical circles, experience is often understood to be shaped by received
meanings that reproduce existing oppressions and inequalities. From this perspec-
tive education is necessary to free individuals from the norms of practice that may
occlude new possibilities available to them. Certainly many systems, unless
interrupted, continue to produce toxic or exploitive conditions that benefit a few
members at the expense of many. However, as Usher et al. (1997) argue, the
emancipatory position taken up by some to counter these norms and conditions is
patronizing in so far as selves have to be seen as normally in a state of false
consciousness. In stressing the negative and overwhelming effects of social relations
and social structures, persons are made into social ‘victims,’ dupes and puppets,
manipulated by ideology and deprived of agency. (p. 99)
Furthermore, emancipatory learning models that depend upon critical rational
detachment from one’s sociocultural webs of experience appear to overlook the fact
that detachment is never possible even if it were desirable: rational critique of
individuals’ culturally-located beliefs is itself inescapably embedded in their
historical nets of discourse and action.
An alternate perspective notes that complex adaptive systems generate the
seeds of their own transformation. According to complexity theory, learning is the
continuous improvisation of alternate actions and responses to new possibilities
and changing circumstances that emerge, undertaken by the system’s parts. More
sudden transformation can occur in response to a major shock to the system,
throwing it into disequilibrium. A shock might originate in abrasions with external
systems, or through amplification (through feedback loops) of disturbances occur-
ring within a system. Computer-generated images of systems undergoing disequi-

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librium show that they exhibit a phase of swinging between extremes, before self-
organizing gradually into a new pattern or identity that can continue co-habiting
with and adapting to the other systems in their environments. Examples of social
disequilibrium abound in grassroots movements affecting education, ranging from
parental campaigns for smaller classes to teacher strikes, from students’ anti-
globalization movements to gay-straight alliances. In such movements, the diverse
patterns of growth and activity defy explanation limited to notions of educating
consciousness. Multiple interactions at different systemic levels, leading out from
disturbance, are influenced by system shocks, desire, diversity among system parts,
and mediators such as internet communication. In these interactions it is clear that
people are not necessarily docile dupes of their systems, but struggle against forces
that threaten their freedom.
Social action demonstrates processes of collective experiential learning that
emerge through struggle. Foley (1999), speaking from the tradition of historical
materialism, presents case studies that refute notions that conscientization is
rational deliberation reframing ‘distorted understandings’ and ‘false ideology.’
Radical transformation in both social order and consciousness, as praxis or dialectic
of thought and action, are embedded in complex systems that interact, adapt and
influence one another: the body politic, diverse collective bodies, and persons as
body biologic. As people enact solidarity, strategizing and learning together about
unjust social arrangements in a choreography of action, they recognize new
problems and possibilities for action. Each action opens alternate micro-worlds,
while expanding people’s confidence and recognition of the group’s capacity to
influence other systems. This experiential learning is continually inventive, and
also filled with conflict and contradiction.
Then, how is the educator implicated in these processes? Radical action
emerges in social movements in ways that it cannot in educational institutions,
themselves contested spaces of transformative and reproductive impulses, to create
spaces for inventive transgressive knowledge and alternate visions for society.
Taylor, Barr, and Steele (2002) argue that an important catalyst for radical impulse
within education institutions lies in its alliance with social movements: just as
institutions need the political energy and grounded struggle that social action
engenders, social movements need the resources of formal education. Their argu-
ment can be read not just as plea for bilateral collaboration, but also perhaps as a
complexified awareness that struggle and social change is possible when educators
view themselves as diverse parts of the system, not its rescuer, and when mutual
interaction and adaptation is enabled with other system parts.

Enabling Practice-based Learning

These theoretical dimensions of co-emergence, desire and struggle encourage
a view beyond an individual learning subject separated from the objects of her

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Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 55

environment, to understand knowledge as constantly enacted as she moves through

the world. In some ways this discussion is reminiscent of a formulation by Bentz
(2000) of mindful inquiry, drawing upon critical social science (analysing the
history and larger structures of experience), phenomenology (clarifying the mean-
ing and centres of lived experiences), hermeneutics (interpreting texts and one’s
interaction with them), and Buddhism (reflexivity, with awareness of one’s desires
and position). A co-emergent perspective, however, understands one’s reflective
capacity as only a small slice of the systems in which one is participating and in
which one’s body and practices are learning in interconnection with other actors
and objects. The focus is on the relations, not the components, of systems, and on
learning as produced within the evolving relationships among particularities that
are dynamic and unpredictable. They help explain how part and whole co-specify
one another, and how participation in any shared action contributes to the very
conditions that shape these identities. These dimensions also suggest useful
starting points for enabling the practice-based learning of educators. The question
of how to do this might be framed in two questions: How can change be induced
in complex systems? How can we listen to hear the change?
To the first question, complexity research has identified several conditions that
must exist for co-emergent adaptive systems to flourish, which can be applied to
induce co-emergence and thus, learning, in systems like educational institutions.
These conditions include internal diversity, redundancy among agents (sufficient
commonality to ensure communication), interaction, decentralized control, liber-
ating constraints, and structured feedback (Davis, 2003). One important way that
practice-based learning emerges is through occasions that encourage interaction
and that have liberating constraints, or some focus and simple governing rules that
do not strangle emergent possibilities. Not all events naturally offer occasions for
co-emergence. Diversity among members of a school, for example, may be a given
but may not be recognized, and diverse individuals may have too little in common
to interact. Facilitators or supervisors can help amplify diversity, develop sufficient
redundancy for diverse individuals to understand one another, and introduce
guidelines and limitations for activity that promote organization while encourag-
ing diverse expression and improvisation. Also important is feedback within a
system: feedback that amplifies activities which expands a group’s possibilities in
healthy directions, and feedback that challenges negative loops which threaten to
kill a system. The objective is open-ended design but not control: making spaces,
removing barriers, introducing and amplifying disturbances. This conception
resembles the now-popular notions of ‘professional learning communities,’ al-
though a reasonable discussion of these would require critical analysis of their
multiple versions and prescriptions, which is not the purpose here.
To the second question, the importance of listening derives from complexity
research about what supports full and flexible participation in complex systems, but
also feminist/psychoanalytic research about working through difficult knowledge,

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56 Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly

and social action research about learning through struggle. To listen in these
contexts is to be completely attuned: attuned to larger systemic movements, to
psychic conflicts, and to personal entanglements in the fluctuations and perturba-
tions in which the educator is embedded. Too often, educators might be suspected
of approaching others with an anthropologist’s gaze—with external ‘expert’
knowledge attempting to penetrate and represent the internal knowledge of a
community to which they do not belong. A wiser approach might be learning to
listen to the poetics of experience. Clandinin (2000) writes of listening “with a
stance of trying to live within the other’s world” (p. 65). Her stories of learning are
of teachers listening closely to one another’s stories, concentrating on what is said
as well as what is unsaid, to feelings, gaps, and silences, believing rather than
doubting. This is listening without constructing the other in ways the listener
desires, but instead, opening to what the other may be on its own terms, and how
it may construct the listener.
As witnesses, practitioners also listen to interpret interdependencies. Within
organizations, story-making is one way that practitioners listen and interpret a
system’s relationships and activities, and mirror it back to itself. The interpreter
helps trace the complex interactions of actors and objects in expanding spaces.
Some educators listen to encourage others to interpret their oppressive experiences
through dialogue, creating the redundancy or shared understanding that can ensure
interaction and mobilization, while promoting the diversity that enables a group
to improvise actions through which can emerge alternate futures. In writing about
complexity science in education, Karpiak (2000) describes this as ‘attuning.’ She
suggests that educators can help most by attuning students to the patterns and
conflicts emerging among the complex systems of their lives, and to their involve-
ments in these patterns. Most of all, educators might listen to their own entangle-
ments in learning systems. The language brought to groups, the gaze used, and the
interactions promoted all become incorporated into the system’s changing texture.
These countless consequences of educators’ actions within a complex system
cannot be predicted or even observed, but at least awareness of one’s footprints can
be attempted to avoid stepping destructively.
Listening in psychoanalytic learning theory suggests that educators examine
themselves as nested within larger systems of cultural desire, on levels inaccessible
to everyday conscious awareness, asking: What desires configure our practice and our
own experiential learning? What lines do we seek to draw around the world to feel
secure and meaningful in our contribution? Britzman (1998) maintains that educators
ought to listen to what they actively ignore in their own experiences. Rational mind
cannot be relied upon to explore these, only attunement to subtle disturbances:
listening to what bodies do or resist, or to uncanny slips in consciousness, or to
emotional insights that lead into difficult knowledge that may be personally resisted.
The re-embodiment called for here is an expansion: from a mentalist world
privileging reflection and representation, to materially and cognitively co-emer-

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Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 57

gent worlds; from the purely intersubjective to what Davis (2003) portrays as a
beckoning frontier of interobjectivity. Amidst their continual (com)motion, bound-
aries creating bodies, objects, identities and knowledge are highly suspect. Here is
where our theorizing of practice-based or experiential learning should continue,
examining what appears to materialize and when and for whom, what compels
interaction (human and non-human) and its consequences, what ideas are per-
formed, and what is ignored.
The shift to embodied, co-emergent configurations of experiential learning
such as those suggested by complex systems, desire and collective struggle does
not erase pedagogy or dissolve political commitments, nor does it denounce
rationality. Educators are, partly at least, rational systems, inescapably nested
within systems of the body politic, employing creative rationality as part of their
capacity to act within these systems. As active flexible agents educators can resist
the over-rationalizing of learning, and participate as consciously as possible in a
fully embodied and collective pedagogy of practice-based learning: as Sumara and
Davis (1997) suggest, “enlarging the space of the possible” (p. 310).

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About the Author

Tara Fenwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies,
University of Alberta, Canada. Her research and teaching focuses on learning and education
in work, with particular interest in learning processes, identities, equity and knowledge politics
in changing work structures.

A Journal for the Scholar-Practitioner Leader Volume 2, Number 4