Becoming Learners in Laboratories of Learning: A Rhizomatic Assemblage of Nomadic Pedagogies

The disruption caused by the pandemic to the delivery of our higher education degrees has offered many opportunities for rethinking what it means to learn and what conditions are needed for learning to occur. Our students renewed interest in belonging and coming together has been pivotal to this rethinking process and prompted the emergence of the Laboratories of Learning project as a means of co-designing communities of learning practice, rhizomatically and nomadically. This chapter offers a methodology to test how the emergence of such hybrid eventful spaces affords the process of becoming learners and forming communities of learning practice within wider institutional systems and structures. As an exploratory study underpinned by participatory action research Laboratories of Learning draws on nomadic learning (Semetsky 2008) as a process of collaboration, dialogue and construction, where both staff and students can ask the fundamental question of how they learn. We argue that this approach can create safe and daring spaces where questioning can become fruitful, and the process of learning can be tested and experimented with. This is supported by Deleuze’s idea that ‘pedagogy is ... not something that is “done to one” or “is done by one to others,” but is something that one participates in, it is a mode of co-construction, [where] teaching and learning become fused...’ (Cole 2016). Doing with, and learning from, are key concepts in our thinking about these Laboratories of Learning and how they form and operate, whilst illuminating emergence of communities of learning practice. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, these eventful spaces will create cartographies of learning, new maps, not tracings of the past that perpetuate stubborn myths about how we learn best (Deleuze and Guattari 1980/1994).

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