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GLOSSARY INQUIRY: LEARNING
A process through which a system, or learner, adapts and expands its space of possible action. Learning is recursive, elaborative process, rather than an accumulative one.
Complex agents, or learners, continuously and actively re-orient their structures in order to maintain coherence in relation to their worlds (for example, a mammal must build new cells to continue living, and the structure of its brain and nervous system alters with each new experience). As they do so, they create new and emergent possibilities for understanding and acting (for instance, learning to walk or use the internet changes a person’s space of possible actions). Indeed, complexity science sees knowing and doing (as well as being, or identity) as inseparable and fundamentally the same process. Complexity science rejects Cartesian mind-body dualities and the notion that knowledge consists in the internal representation of static information or facts.
This conception of learning has important implications for theories of learning in education.
See related terms: Complex System, Adaptation, Dynamic Structure, Recursion, Emergence, Knowledge, Identity.
