Languaging and Learning

                One of the most profound differences in making the shift from language to languaging is what it means to the way we learn.  All of us understand how important language is to the way we learn.  Schools focus on language at every level, trying to help students navigate the habits and protocols of learning.  Most of that attention, however, uses language as transmission and not creation.  That is, schools see language as basically inert and assume the student will learn through imitation and direction to produce mostly predetermined answers.  Finding the ‘right’ answer has become the unintentional mantra of American education.  It’s a process that assumes a static and enforceable language as its base.  Languaging changes this dynamic in critical ways.

                If we see language as the medium or sense through which we coordinate the coordination of behaviors that we use to create ‘reality,’ then Maturana’s idea of ‘bringing forth a world’ starts to make sense.  When we think of languaging as a behavior and not an artifact, it becomes easier to see how sterile our constructions and assumptions about language and learning really are.  We assume students should be passive receptors of information and that they should use that information to produce results we determine.  Only the most advanced and creative people are given the latitude to use language creatively without sanction or reproach.  In many instances, language becomes an enforcement mechanism that limits access to and participation in the generation of knowledge.  We are limiting the idea and role that language plays to a single frequency and mistaking that very simplistic model for the vast resources of languaging.

                Transmission is certainly part of learning, but it is a very limited and basic part.  Neurolinguists have long known that students have to translate what they learn to their own language to move it out of short-term recall into deeper forms of cognition.  Knowing the answer to a question doesn’t necessarily mean that we understand the answer in a complex or embodied way.  We only begin to use what we know in the process of languaging – of engaging with others to coordinate our behaviors and understandings.  Information can contextualize and enrich that process, but it is never an adequate measure of what we intend or mean.  To make meaning, we have to engage beyond what we already know or perceive and try to come to an evolving and dynamic shared meaning. 

                We are, as Maturana and Lloyd Fell, who draws on Maturana in his own work, like to say simultaneously autonomous and connected.  That is, each of is unique but not individual.  To be “human” is to be part of something more complex.  Languaging is the process we use to create a world.  We encounter that world individually, but we understand it collectively.  If what we know was truly individual, we would never understand each other or be able to use our creations and interactions to build relationships, contexts and realities.  Obviously, some people are more creative and unique than others, but without a larger coordination of context and behavior they would simply be thought of as crazy (they may even write a blog confirming it).  Fell and Maturana are careful to say that we can never move everything we experience personally into a collective space, so we always have a residual component to our thoughts and feelings that is typically interpreted as our self or the individual self.  That component is real, but it is not complete without the other connections in our life.

                Languaging and learning are always played out across these boundaries.  In cultures that are mostly stable with a high degree of conformity in the imagined order, languaging and learning are stable and grounded tropes that are well defined and policed.  We don’t live in one of those.  In cultures such as our own, the border between what needs to be preserved and what needs to change is a constantly moving and extremely fragmented activity.  We are in the process of writing a new imagined order.  It is, as it always is, a messy and dangerous process.  Learning in this context is necessarily pushed to more creative and experimental forms and compositions.  We need to understand that as we face the realization that the educational system we thought was so effective crumbles before us.  We need to understand that learning is languaging and students have no choice but to use it to create a new order.

                We cannot possibly know what that order will evolve to include and define.  What we can do is to step back from our well entrenched positions and realize that we are not arguing about facts; we are arguing over different versions of reality.  I have no idea how to talk to someone who believes that Trump is doing a great job.  But they aren’t the ones writing the new order.  They are defending an order that has already died and is threatening to take everything else down with it.  We need to start letting students not just learn but make knowledge.  They need tools of imagination we don’t have.  We aren’t going to live in the world they create.  There is absolutely no guarantee they will succeed.  This is no attempt at optimism.  What it is, is an attempt at pragmatic realism.  At some point the student or child walks out the door on their own and the world becomes theirs, not ours.