Building Environing Conditions for Symmathesy in a Networked Project

Abstract

This paper aims to identify some of the “environing conditions” (Dewey, 1902, also cf. 1938) discovered to enable teachers and students from a predominantly teacher-centered, non-digital learning environment to be “willing” (Wood, 1998[1986]: 175) to learn from the new experience of a networked seminar. This is to say, willing to view learning as an exercise in symmathesy (Bateson, 2015): in a “learning together” that encompasses the situation, person, tools, goals, and epistemologies and restores healthy “rigor” (Schön, 1985) to technical rationality by making it situationally dialogic and actionable in the face of complexity and uncertainty. Emphasis here is on coming to networked learning for the first time: a timely issue as it continues to be observed that the potential and experience of networked learning remains limited to a minority of courses across the globe. Although key literature in the field has established an epistemology of practice relevant in even diverse institutional contexts, existing literature lacks the “outing” of some of the difficulties faced by teachers and students. Therefore, through reflective qualitative inquiry, we engage in critical evaluation of our dialogic praxis, roles, and paradigms of growth that frames the initial problem of facing indeterminacy as an opportunity for mutual learning that embraces “real life” complexity as it moves towards strengths and away from weaknesses. This paper is thus not only relevant to “transitional” classrooms but can be further seen to be of benefit in an increasingly automatized, complex, uncertain digital landscape.