Learning engagement as lived and refracted relations across learning situations: A perezhivanie-informed reconceptualisation

Learning engagement is widely recognised as central to students' learning, persistence, and achievement. Existing sociocognitive research typically conceptualises learning engagement as psychological states inferred from internal processes while sociocultural accounts offer a contrasting view by theorising learning engagement as participation in socially mediated activity shaped by roles, norms, and identity within practice. However, less attention has been given to how learners live through learning situations as emotionally and cognitively meaningful events, and why the same activity may come to matter differently for different learners. This paper develops a perezhivanie-informed reconceptualisation of learning engagement as an evolving, affectively charged relation between learners and learning situations. Conceptually, the paper draws on Vygotsky's concept of perezhivanie. Using previously published longitudinal cases as analytic illustrations, the paper shows how learning engagement as lived relations is organised through learners' social situations of development and carried forward through in-the-moment experience and beyond-the-moment refraction. The illustrations foreground five interrelated properties of learning engagement: situated person–context relations; unity of emotion, cognition, and action; temporality; affective meaning-making; and developmental organisation. The paper argues that a perezhivanie-informed perspective complements sociocognitive and sociocultural accounts by explaining how shared learning activities become personally significant in divergent ways. It advances a conceptual and methodological basis for examining engagement and disengagement as lived, refracted, and developmentally significant relations across time.