Situated Selves: Learning to Be a Learner

To view learning and cognition as situated is usually understood to involve rethinking cognitive and learning processes in terms of their framing by context, communication and social practice—in contradistinction to traditional views which focus upon the "isolated, individual subject" in confrontation with a cognitive or learning task. There is, however, a danger in counterposing, in simplistic fashion, the learning situation to the individual learner. The danger is that we either lose sight of the learner altogether, or we fail to challenge the very notion of what it is "to be a learner" which, explicitly or implicitly, underlies traditional views of learning. In this chapter I try to explore how we may better conceptualize the subjectivity of the learner as not only a crucial perspective in the constitution of learning situations, but also as a perspective which itself is discursively constructed.