Identificación de variables 14

Plumb (2008), draws on a concept developed by Ingold (2000, 2011) and Plumb uses the metaphor of ‘learning as dwelling’ as a ‘powerful way of

characterising human learning processes’ (Plumb 2008 p.62).

Ingold (2000) describes how his thinking, as an anthropologist, about the ways in which humans inhabit the world has moved from considering the

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interrelationships between people and their environment as a ‘building perspective’ to that of a ‘dwelling perspective’ (p.172). He explains this as:

a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of

existence (Ingold 2000 p.153).

Ingold goes on to explain how considering human beings’

interrelationships with their environment as ‘dwelling’ allowed him to move away from a Cartesian duality of humans as biological organisms, and the consequent implications for their relationship with the

environment, but yet intentionally motivated, implying an entirely different relationship.

The building perspective that Ingold critiques encompasses the idea that humans inhabit the world and are capable of reacting to it

deterministically i.e. they are capable of agency. In contrast to this ontology of the rational subject set against an objective world, Ingold’s dwelling perspective adopts Heidegger’s ontology of engagement in which the person already dwells in the world. Plumb (2008) goes on to explain Ingold’s argument that:

the building perspective has us focus on the final products of our making. It is an entifying and objectifying point of view. The dwelling perspective, conversely, has us focus on the ongoing processes of existence that catch us in their thrall at our very conception (and even before). It is a developmental, dialectic point of view. It turns our attention to the processes that shape the ‘temporal interweaving of our lives with one another and with the manifold constituents of our environment’ (Ingold 2000 p.348)

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In relating Ingold’s ideas to learning in his in-depth discussion of ‘learning as dwelling’, Plumb (2008 p.62) explains how learning for dwellers:

is not a process of incorporating external knowledge into their minds. Rather, learning is best conceived as a process through which learners forever weave themselves into the fabric of their natural, social and cultural worlds.

In relation to learning, Plumb uses Ingold’s building perspective to

critique the ‘modernist perspective on learning which is prevalent in adult

learning’ (p.65) citing the acquisition theory of learning as an example of

this. His argument is that the building perspective on learning is

underpinned by an assumption that a ‘context-free body of knowledge

actually exists’ citing Lave and Wenger’s argument that it privileges the ‘sharp dichotomy between inside and outside’ (Lave and Wenger 1991

cited in Plumb 2008 p.47) and therefore that learning is a ‘process that

transpires in heads of individual people’ (Plumb 2008 p.65).

This echoes with Ingold’s (2011) idea of the ‘logic of inversion’ in his later work where he argues that the animic perception of the world involves considering the ‘relational constitution of being’ (p.69). He describes the logic of inversion as the view that a ‘thing or person is converted into an

interior schema of which its manifest appearance and behaviour are outward expressions’ (p.68). Ingold (2011 p.69) uses a diagram to

represent this concept. If an organism is depicted as this:

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The person therefore, in this ontology:

acts and perceives within a nexus of intertwined relationships [and

is] presumed to behave according to the directions of cultural

models or cognitive schemata installed inside his or her head

(Ingold 2011 p.68).

Therefore this idea of inversion is that:

beings originally open to the world are closed in upon themselves, sealed by an outer boundary or shell that protects their inner constitution from the traffic of interactions with their surroundings’

(Ingold 2011 p.68).

He goes on to explain that by using a line to represent the organism:

there is no inside or outside, no boundary and instead there is a trail of movement or growth and therefore we can reverse this logic of inversion. Ingold goes on to argue that doing so allows us to recover an ‘openness

to the world’ (p.68) which other perspectives close down. The acquisition

theory of learning may be likened to Ingold’s concept of logic of inversion where learning occurs inside the individual in response to an external environment.

Plumb adopts Lave and Wenger’s (1991) argument that ‘the

individualistic and overly cognitive view of human learning as a process of acquiring knowledge must be abandoned’ (Plumb 2008 p.66) however

he further argues that Lave and Wenger’s social theory of practice ‘over-

extends the social dimension of learning to occlude important non-social elements’ (p.66). He asserts that adoption of a ‘learning as dwelling’

perspective:

allows us to escape the individualism, objectivism and

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to unpromising critical strategies taken by many postmodernists

(Plumb 2008 p.63).

Plumb goes on to discuss in depth some of the overly relativistic standpoints on learning and argues that these:

result in an untenable relativism that affords little purchase for a non-foundational, substantial practice of adult education (Plumb

2008 p.69).

Ingold (2011 p.72) refers to the primacy of movement in his theorising and that the ‘movement of life is specifically of becoming rather than

being’ and elsewhere describes learning as improvising a movement

along a way of life (Ingold 2010). Following on from Ingold’s assertion that reversal of the logic of inversion allows us to recover openness to the world, since this study is interested in pharmacy students’ journey to becoming pharmacists and as openness to pharmacy students’ world is an underpinning ethos of this project, the concept of ‘learning as

dwelling’ and students’ movement along the way of life appears to offer a resource for thinking otherwise about their learning.

Linking to the methodology of using art to analyse the data, elsewhere in his 2011 work, Ingold uses the concept of drawing and painting as a heuristic to transpose onto social life. He draws on art historian, Bryson’s work (2003 cited in Ingold 2011) which talks about the painter or

draughtsman ‘poised at that inaugural moment when the hand is about

to make its first trace on an initially blank surface’ (Ingold 2011 p.220).

He describes how Bryson argues for the radical difference between painting and drawing and the ‘perceptions of blankness, and of the

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surface to be filled, but one which is ‘bounded by a frame’ which ‘exerts a

pressure’ on the composition. This pressure ‘has to anticipate the reality of the complete picture of which it will eventually form a part’. In contrast

to this, drawing is not ‘compelled to observe this law’ (p.220).

Although the blank surface of the paper is perceptually present, it does not have to be conceived as a surface, as an area that needs to be filled. It becomes rather a ‘reserve’, a kind of insurance against finality and closure (Ingold 2011 p.220).

In drawing, the pencil ‘carries on its way from where the hand is now

positioned, responding only to the present conditions in its vicinity rather than to any imagined future state’ (pp.220-1). This links back to Ingold’s

earlier idea of openness to the world and using this heuristic, he argues

‘allows us to better understand how lives are lived not in closed social worlds but in the open’ (p.221).

These ideas of Ingold’s about painting and drawing will be explored further in Chapter 5 in relation to Bonnard’s style of painting however they create another perspective through which to explore and understand pharmacy students’ learning.