So – It is day two of the new year – 2019. My whole day has been orientied towards the hot sun pushing us around a water park down here near Geelong.
The paper I’m looking at whilst my face cools down and starts to peel off is a nifty piece on Heidegger, Descartes and subject / object dualism.
The important bit to note here is that the author picks up on a theme which is useful for insight into the role of developing learner agency. That is the Heideggerian distinction between ‘ready at hand’ and ‘ready to hand’ (or the varying intrepretations of this). Cucen points out that the self (ego) does not engage the object as ready to hand – but as ready at hand. This is important as it positions the self – as dasien. This means that the ‘self’ has a ‘way of being in the world’ that is informed by that world. That this self is not a stranger to the ‘objects’ in it’s world – rather, the self is an object in the socially constructed world of continuous subjects.
I do wonder if we are playing in the space between ontology and epistemology here.
In so far as I’m interested – the thought that occurs is that we need to recognise that our learners have developed a way of being in the world by the time they step foot in our learning spaces. In fact they are adept at working out the power relations between different actors in the network / structure and what it takes to gain access to that power or avoid undesirable positioning.