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

This article looks at learning geographically, outlining transformative learning as a site of gathering-revealing that is a fundamentally relational and deeply affectual coming-together of ideas, histories, and doings. Re-articulating 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, contrasting it against traditional models of propositional knowledge transmission and subjectification. Attending 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 upon 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 willful subject that itself remains an available resource, and 2) 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 – that is as non-instrumental self-cultivation – and the demands of an increasing economization of education, and the means by which the perspectives of being and becoming are weaved together to handle such competing aims.