Education as site: challenges to evental learning in the ontological turn

Abstract This article looks at learning geographically, conceptualizing transformative learning as a site of gathering-revealing—that is, as a fundamentally relational and deeply affectual coming together of ideas, histories, and doings. Rearticulating the stakes of the recent ontological turn in education in terms of encounters of difference put into play by the event, we outline evental learning, which stands in contrast to traditional models of propositional knowledge transmission and subjectification. With attention to spaces of attunement, hesitation, and dwelling as fundamental to transformative learning, we examine the renewed Finnish curriculum for upper secondary education, arguing that evental learning is foreclosed through two seemingly incongruous ontological horizons: (1) from the perspective of being, where technological thinking reveals a world knowable, orderable, and intendable, and with it a wilful subject that itself remains an available resource, and (2) from the perspective of becoming, where the learner is a subject of perpetual emergence and innovation, always moving on the edge of the event. The curriculum presents a valuable case for probing the tension between latent ideations of education as Bildung, or noninstrumental self-cultivation, and the demands of an increasing economization of education; and, further, the means by which the perspectives of being and becoming are woven together to handle such competing aims.