LEARNING: a way of becoming
My concern with learning started out as a concern with the learning of others. I have gradually become aware of and am increasingly fascinated by the extent to which one can only effectively interact with someone else's learning by learning oneself.
I define learning as "the disposition of human beings, and of the social entities to which they pertain, to engage in continuous dialogue with the human, social, biological and physical environment, so as to generate intelligent behavior to interact constructively with change." My justification for that definition can be found in the chapter on "Integrity, Completeness and Comprehensiveness of the Learning Environment: Meeting the Basic Learning Needs of All throughout Life" published in 2001 in the International Handbook of Lifelong Learning (Vol 2, Ch. 2), edited by D. N. Aspin, J. D. Chapman, M. J. Hatton and Y. Sawano (Eds.). The publisher is Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. A draft version of that chapter is available on the learndev.org Web site under "papers."
My current research interests are directed at better understanding human learning. This looks like too broad an area for any researcher to engage in, and indeed it is. Part of my efforts are therefore aimed at getting communities of researchers, pertaining to different disciplines, collectively involved in research around significant transdisciplinary themes that serve as an organizing principle for the research effort. My own contributions in this context currently relate to the collection and analysis of people's learning stories and to the development of a descriptive framework that allows learning to be understood as a complex adaptive phenomenon.