7.6 Learning in the Rhizome

In his popular novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1983) describes a medieval library, a labyrinth of passages, stairways, and chambers filled with books. The library is a rhizome (as much as any actual existent thing can represent "an inconceivable globality"!), and learning is illustrated by Brother William, the main character of the novel, feeling and groping his way through the library. As Brother William constructs a path (or pattern of connections) through the library, one of only many possible paths, he is transforming his means of participating in the community of scholars, both those using the library (constructing their own paths) and those who have written manuscripts contained therein. Brother William is moving from legitimate peripheral to centripetal participation, learning the activities that will allow him to be effective in that community. In our view, he is not acquiring and internalizing, not building an abstract mental representation of the library and its contents.

Our responsibility as educators and instructional designers has traditionally been conceived of as efficient communication and motivation, as individuals knowledgeable in a subject-matter domain and/or skilled in communicating that content and provoking interest in it. The systematic approaches to design of instruction which dominate our field are disposed to find empirically valid, tried, and true methods for accomplishing those ends. Under the assumptions discussed in this paper, however, educators and instructional designers become guides or supports for students as they struggle with constructing their connections to and with a sociocultural context. Rather than empirically validated generalizations about effective instructional strategies, constructivists look to develop support structures embedded in the problem tasks themselves, tools that may both support and transform participation, and outcomes, the attainment of which are their own reward. As Lakoff (1987) has put it:

How we understand mind ... matters for what we value in ourselves and others--for education, for research, for the way we set up human institutions, and most important for what counts as a humane way to live and act ... If we fully appreciate the role of the imaginative aspects of reason, we will give them full value, investigate them more thoroughly, and provide better education in using them. Our ideas about what people can learn and should be learning, as well as what they should be doing with what they learn, depend on our concept of learning itself. It is important that we have discovered that rational thought goes well beyond the literal and the mechanical. It is important because our ideas about how human minds should be employed depend on our ideas of what a human mind is (Lakoff, 1987, p. xvi).