learning spaces

I've always imaged studying at university was about learning new things, being challenged to consider differently, to shift and change how you think and act. This drive to learn more, understand better, became the impetus, driving my pursuit of learning until I got to the PhD - the pinnacle of academic learning. A year after been deemed successful at achieving this learning 'outcome' I wonder where the true learning spaces are in academia. Are they created in the conferences, symposia, colloquiums and seminars we are encouraged to attend and participate in? Are they found in the classrooms we facilitate and manage? Or maybe they are lurking in the corridors, staff common rooms, colleagues' offices or noisy coffee shops - the informal spaces were fellow academics, researchers or teachers combine personal catch-up stories with reflections and ideas about theories new and old. Increasingly I'm finding the formal university space rather barren and void of learning. While the informal, entanglements of the unlikely, often peripheral spaces where those imagined notions of learning, that brought me to where I now find myself, are becoming the real, the authentic sites.

and now on a more positive note

I haven't been a very active blogger these past few weeks. I'm conscious that a common thread in my narratives has been that of negativity – a discourse of ‘dooms and gloom’. There is some saying that goes something like 'if you don't have something good to say then don't speak'. This felt applicable to me. So I haven't used the blog.

 
But on Sunday I had occasion to feel positive and affirmed about myself as academic, researcher and person. I went out to lunch with both my Masters and PhD supervisors. Two wonderful, thoughtful and supportive women academics and researchers, who have both played, in different ways, such influential roles in my academic becoming. What felt so affirming about sitting alongside both women, while we drank beautifully, blushed wine, and watched the waves in Kalk Bay crash violently and determinedly against the restaurant windows, causing us to respond instinctively as each wave thundered against the window panes - was that I could sit so, 'fretlessly' and talk about everyday things. Our relationships had shifted. A shift that had more significance for me with respect to one of my supervisors. A testament, I thought, to possibly, my capacity to survive and be deeply reflective about what had gone before, rightfully carrying new insights and reframed perspectives. I felt a sense of not being burdened by the past, even though it’s scars act as palpable reminders.