Monday, May 10, 2010

A dark night of identity

I have spent the last 24 hours at a conference in Birmingham. Unlike the last conference I attended - this has been a highly stimulating event. Once again, Etienne Wenger was the keynote speaker, but this time he was speaking specifically about the meaning of learning, to an audience of mostly Higher Education academics.

I find Etienne inspiring to listen to. There are many things I could have picked to quote from his keynote today - but this is one that struck me as relevant to the process of reflective learning:

He said:

'Any serious learning will take you through a dark night of your identity'.

I can absolutely relate to this and how this relates to the transformative aspect of deep learning and knowledge being troublesome. According to Etienne, we need to be able to cross a boundary and know how to engage enough on the other side of a boundary.

If anyone 'out there' is reading this - does this stir you as much as it stirs me? I think I will post this to my other blog as well.

Source of image: http://cdn.picapp.com/ftp/Images/0282/404e5d86-9688-479e-9463-ae6ed940e6b1.jpg

1 comment:

roy said...

Jenny, love it!

Etienne has managed to 'talk simply about complex things', as he does! (The inseparabilty of epistemology and ontology, wrapped up in a dark night. Remarkable).

There is a rather stark example of this in the case in the affordances for learning research, of someone who 'learns to become a manager' through the process of firing her best friend. Learning, like love, can be painful.