The Learning Development Project

What has philosophy got to do with learning development? And why should learning development be concerned with philosophy? For Jason Eyre – indeed, for all philosophers – philosophy gives us new ways to think about things and new concepts we can work with, to understand not necessarily the answer to a question (such as, What is LD?) but alternative ways we can engage with that question. Jason (with some help from his cat, Peppercorn, who you might hear in this episode) wants LD to consider its tendencies more than its boundaries, its connectedness more than its categories. When we don’t pin something down, we can focus instead on our commonalities. The world is ever changing and higher education changes with it; rather than be left behind in our rigid definitions, by situating ourselves in our contexts we can stay responsive. And by keeping our emphasis on relationality, and the communities in which we work, we can find resilience in each other, boost each other’s agency, and discover joy. Surely such a gift is worth spending some time with Deleuze? Failing that, spend it with Jason; you won’t regret it. 

The resources we mentioned

Dhillon, S. (2025). Book review: Eyre, J. (2025) Learning Development in higher education: crisis, practice, and power in the 21st century university. Singapore: Springer. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (38). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi38.1819

Didion, J. (2021). Why I write. Literary Hub. Available at: https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/ 

Spinoza: a useful introduction is available from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. You might find the section on Virtue and Happiness particularly useful. 

For an introduction to the concept of the virtual vs the actual, as conceived by Bergson and developed by Deleuze, this short article in Epoche Magazine will give you plenty of text to dwell with!

And the publication we talked about

Eyre, J. (2025). Learning Development in Higher Education: Crisis, Practice, and Power in the 21st Century University. Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-8802-9

Belonging is one of those abstract concepts that seems to be something whose meaning we can all relatively easily grasp, but when we come to look at it more closely, actually appears to be much more slippery and elusive. Belonging itself is an objective fact about an individual’s membership of a group or community. A sense of belonging – that mysterious element that occupies us in this conversation – is that individual’s subjective relationship with the group or community to which they belong. So before we can measure or even examine someone’s sense of belonging, we must first ensure we know what we are talking about, and that that person shares that understanding. And what would we do with that measurement, anyway? A lack of sense of belonging is not an easy fix, and not something that everyone would want fixed, anyway; a sense of belonging is not obligatory, nor is its lack necessarily a problem. Why worry about it, then? Because the Venn diagram of sense of belonging and engagement has a large intersection, and therefore, in the eyes of this particular Venn, a problem worth solving.The resources we mentioned

Booth, W.C. (1995). The craft of research. The University of Chicago Press. NB 1st edition recommended - try World of Books!

Kaminski, R. (2025). The gift of not belonging: How outsiders thrive in a world of joiners. Scribe.

Chapters specifically mentioned by Ed from his book are those by:

• Stacey Mottershaw, Rachael O'Connor, Nadine Cavigioli: A collaborative autoethnographic reflection on social class and student belonging in higher education

• Kathleen Quinlan: Belonging and engagement in higher education literature

• Ayoola Johnson: Seeking belonging in higher education

• Terrell Strayhorn: Social engagement and students’ sense of belonging

• Edward Venn, Karen Burland, Boroka Javor: Challenging dominant discourses

And the publication we talked about

Ahn, M.Y, Venn, E. and Lowe, T. (Eds.) (2025). Student Belonging in Higher Education: Perspectives and Practice. Routledge.

How do we make the body not only our partner in learning, but our friend? And why would we even want to? The mind-body dualism espoused by Descartes in the 17th century continues to influence our thinking today, with the body – or more specifically, the emotions it houses – often represented as an obstacle to rational thought and therefore its enemy. This is little more than an enduring misogyny that positions emotions – the body – as feminine, irrational, and undesirable, and thought – the mind – as masculine, rational, and desirable. Yet we are all subject to this discourse, all of us alienated by western culture from our bodies and our emotions. Some of us find our way back, to connect what Lisa Clughen cites as ‘the intelligence of the flesh’ with cognition. Lisa strongly believes we should celebrate our embodiment and recognise its centrality to our learning and thinking processes. How many of us have walked or moved to help ease a thought into consciousness? How many have felt the excitement, the joy, when someone has praised something we have done? Similarly, we can aim to induce feelings of awe, interest, joy, amusement in our students to stimulate an emotional and more memorable response to their learning. And perhaps in doing so we can reconnect with our own bodies and our own emotions, and truly engage with the joy of learning and teaching. The resources we mentioned

Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture and the body. University of California Press. 

Clughen, L. (2002), ‘Lorca's anorexics: hunger strike in the cause of selfhood’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 79: 3, pp. 309-324. https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.79.3.4 

Clughen, L. (2014). ‘Embodied writing support’: the importance of the body in engaging students with writing. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 7(2), pp.283-300. Available from:  https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/embodied-writing-support-lisa-clughen

Dana, D. Rhythm of regulation. Available from https://www.rhythmofregulation.com/glimmers 

Elbow, P.  (2012). Vernacular eloquence: What speech can bring to writing. Oxford University Press. 

Forster, E.M. (1909). The machine stops. Available from: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf 

Fredrickson, B.L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, Biological Sciences 359(1449): 1367-78. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2004.1512

Grosz, E. (1995). Space, time and perversion: The politics of bodies. Routledge. 

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom.  Taylor and Francis.

Immordino‐Yang, M. and Damasio, A. (2007) We feel, therefore, we learn: the relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), pp.3-10.

Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228X.2007.00004.x

Neff, K. Self-compassion on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@NeffKristin 

Orbach, S. (2010). Bodies. Profile Books

Rogers, C. ‘The Interpersonal Relationship in the Facilitation of Learning’, In M. Thorpe, R. Edwards and A. Hanson (eds.), Culture and Processes of Adult Learning, London and New York: Open University, (1993 (first published in 1967)), pp. 228242. 

Shilling, C. (1993). The body and social theory: Theory, culture and society. Sage Publications

Suzuki, W. (2015). Healthy brain, happy life. Dey Street Books.

Woolf, V. (1930). Streethaunting: A London adventure. Available from: https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/street-haunting 

And the article we talked aboutClughen, L. (2025). Eros in the classroom and beyond: cultivating positive emotions for learning, teaching and wellbeing in higher education. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (35). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi35.1348 

Learning does not happen without attention. But in a world so full of distractions, how can we ensure our students are paying attention? For Professor James Lang, the answer lies in deliberating cultivating attention in our students, rather than trying to limit distractions. And how do we do that? Think about what makes you pay attention. How do you help yourself focus? How, then, can you create these conditions for others? The key is to remember that attention is personal: not just in the sense that we all have our own interests, but also in that we need to create space in the subject for the individual. When we can see ourselves, or a connection to ourselves, in what we are learning, it is easier to be drawn into the material. Above all, paying attention brings joy, and as educators there is surely no greater joy than in deliberately creating those moments for others!The resources we mentioned

Germano, W. 2016. Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Lamott, A. 1995. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books.

Jim’s personal website: https://www.jamesmlang.com/ 

Jim’s substack, A General Education: https://jamesmlang.substack.com/ 

Jim’s podcast, Designed for Learning

Miller, M.D. 2024. A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. University of Oklahoma Press.

Sword, H. 2012. Stylish academic writing. Harvard University Press.

Sword, H. 2017. Air & Light & Time & Space. Harvard University Press.

And the publications we talked about

Lang, J. M. (2020) Distracted: Why students can't focus and what you can do about it. Hachette UK.

Lang, J. M. (2025) Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience. University of Chicago Press.

The eruption of generative AI into higher education prompted many educators, worried about the integrity of their courses (and the personal integrity of their students), to redesign their assessments, rejecting essays and other long-form pieces of writing in favour of ‘AI-proof’ reflective pieces or so-called authentic assessment formats instead. Lily Abadal, in contrast, believes not only that writing has deep implicit value in learning, but that it can be meaningfully achieved in a way that circumvents the temptations of AI. Engaging in a topic in depth, mulling over an issue, considering an argument, and then sitting with the discomfort of not having a clear and quick answer can all be difficult and uncomfortable. By learning how to think slowly and deeply, students come to understand that the discomfort is itself a sign of learning; designing these opportunities out serves no one. When we slow down, when we look for the meaning beyond the output, we can reconnect with our thought processes and relish the pleasure of learning. 

The resources we mentioned

Abadal, L.M. (2025) Only the Humanities can save the university from AI. Public Discourse, 21 July. Available from: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2025/07/98429/ 

Lily’s website: https://www.drlilyabadal.com/ 

Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Wiley-Blackwell.

James Lang’s articles on The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Pascal’s Wager

Strunk, W. and White, E.B. (1999) The Elements of Style (4th ed.). Pearson.

Syska, A. (2025). We tried to kill the essay - now let’s resurrect it. The LSE Blog, 27 February. Available from: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereducation/2025/02/27/we-tried-to-kill-the-essay-now-lets-resurrect-it/ 

And the publications we talked about

Abadal, L.M. (2025) Drafted: A Workbook for Slow Thinking in the Age of AI. Available from: https://www.drlilyabadal.com/drafted-workbook.html 

Abadal, L.M. (2024) 'Ensuring genuine assessment in philosophy education: strategies for scaffolding writing assessment in an LLM era', Teaching Philosophy, 47(1), pp. 143-165. doi: 10.5840/teachphil2024422195.

We’ve been thinking about the connections between professional identity and writing in the context of third space for a few years now, and it seems ever more pertinent in these times of uncertainty, transition and change. We see colleagues change roles or leave academia, not always of their own volition, and we experience it ourselves. With change inevitably comes loss, but some of the things we have been thinking and writing about might be of use in this turbulent context. Writing for publication acts as an anchor for identity, a trail of breadcrumbs of our thoughts and of who we were when we committed them to posterity, and writing in third space in particular can be an act of resistance: to the crush of loss, to the absence of identity, to the fear of transition. By choosing what we write, how we write it, and where we publish, we create ourselves again and again in our writing. No matter our role or where change might take us, our writing remains a way for us to hold onto who, at heart, we are. 

The resources we mentioned

The Third Space Symposium

Our Slowposium padlet

And the article we talked about

Buckley, C., Syska, A. and Heggie, L. (2024) ‘Grounded in liquidity: writing and identity in third space’. London Review of Education, 22 (1), 26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.22.1.26.

Sandra's secrets of collaboration:

• Openness to the experience and what it brings

• Recognition of our human nature and the need for being with other

• We can - and must? - make time and space for each other. Hold onto the in-between spaces where we can come together; create meetings without agendas, where things can emerge.

Collaboration is more than simply working with others. It’s more, even, than working successfully with others. It is, rather, a direct pathway towards social justice through its absolute commitment to equality. Universities therefore have a social obligation to do collaboration well, both internally and with external partners, which means raising up marginalised voices and dismantling power relationships. Our students need to experience positive learning experiences with other people. There are undoubtedly challenges: working to a deadline (and bringing others along to it); ensuring space for everyone to contribute; being conscious of our own bias and preconceptions. But these are all within our gift. Reclaim your agency! That way true collaboration lies. If you would like to explore what this means with Sandra, this is your invitation to reach out and have a conversation. 

The resources we mentioned

Devisch, I. (2006). The Sense of Being(-) with Jean-Luc Nancy. Culture Machine vol. 8. Available at: https://culturemachine.net/community/the-sense-of-being/ 

Robertson, N. S. and Neuhaus, F. (2024). The asocial society and urban form in Canada: A scoping study. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 33(1)

And the books we talked about

Abegglen, S., Burns, T., Heller, R., Madhok, R., Neuhaus, F., Sinfield, S. and Gitanjali Singh, U.  (Eds.) (2025) Stories of hope: Reimagining education. Open Book Publishers. Available at: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0462 

Abegglen, S., Burns, T. & Sinfield, S. (Eds.) (2023). Higher education collaboration: A new ecology of practice. Bloomsbury.

What matters to us and what do we value? These are two key questions posed by Karen Gravett as she explores ideas around relational pedagogies and mattering and how they can contribute to creating a more caring university. In a neoliberal HE context laden with metrics-driven performativity, the call to care can feel like another layer of emotional labour, one disproportionately carried by women. Indeed, when the notion of care generally is seen as ‘women’s work’, how can it become part of a system that is overwhelmingly structured and gendered in ways that make it seem impossible? The first step is to critique ideas of care itself, in this context: it is not about happiness or pleasing or affection, but rather more nuanced, complex, ambivalent, and relational. Then we can aim to respond positively to the material challenges: to look beyond broad brush solutions and instead focus at the microlevel, on small changes and ways of relating and engaging that make a difference. 

The resources we mentioned

Gravett, K. (2023) Relational pedagogies: Connections and mattering in higher education. Bloomsbury.

Gravett, K. (2025) Critical practice in higher education. Bloomsbury.

Heron, M., Gravett, K., and Yakovchuk, N. (2020). Publishing and flourishing: writing for desire in higher education. Higher Education Research & Development, 40(3), 538–551. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1773770 

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre professional profile

Woolf, V. (1929/2002) A room of one’s own. Penguin.

And the article we talked about

Gravett, K., Taylor, C.A. and Fairchild, N. (2024) Pedagogies of mattering: re-conceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education, Teaching in Higher Education, 29:2, 388-403, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1989580

What does it mean to liberate learning? Who is doing the liberating, and what do we think someone being liberated from? For Becky Lindner and Martin Compton, the answer to the first question is essentially to find, nurture, and celebrate the inherent joy of learning and teaching. For fifty years (at least), as they point out, we have been having these conversations about rekindling joy and love of learning, which, if nothing else, signals that we have been uncomfortable with some of the absurdities, constraints, and expectations of contemporary higher education for a long time. Yet that sense of hope continues to drive us forward, looking for ‘care-full’ ways of bringing our students and colleagues along with us. And that brings us to the second question: we must be our own liberators. Our role is to enable to liberation of the university by acting with compassion, equity, and humanity, through collaboration, co-creation, and curiosity, one small step at a time. 

The resources we mentioned

Oliver Burkeman (n.d.). The imperfectionist: Seventy per cent. Available from https://ckarchive.com/b/wvu2hghk5m82zf9r552rqtn34kzxxc8 

Kerri-lee Krause (2023). Learner centred leadership in higher education: A practical guide. Routledge

Choose your own impenetrable writer to inversely learn from!

And the issue we talked about

Compton, M. and Lindner, R. (2025) Liberating learning in the empathetic university, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, 35. Available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi35.1576.

As an American transplanted as a young adult to the UK, Jennie Blake knows a lot about what it means to belong somewhere. For her, belonging is an action: it is about having the agency to make choices, and for that to be realised, belonging cannot be something that we do for students; it must be enabled in all of our systems, structures and processes, so that we can recognise it by its presence and not just – as is all too often the case – its absence. And belonging, true ‘belongingness’, is unconditional. We must be prepared to embrace our own vulnerability and question to what extent we are willing to cede space and agency to our students. This can be as simple as building an interactive ‘magic to-do list’ into a pre-arrival resource, as Jennie’s team did, and assuming that students may not want to start university worrying about what they don’t know yet. Of course they don’t know anything yet! But we can embrace and value the conversation with them, and learn from them as much as they do from us. The resources we mentioned

15% solutions: an introductory overview

brown, a.m. (2017) Emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press

Fawns, T. An entangled pedagogy: Looking beyond the pedagogy-technology dichotomy. Postdigital Science and Education 4, 711–728 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7 

Hypothesis annotation tool: https://web.hypothes.is/ 

Life at University: The University of Manchester guide for new students.And the article we talked about

Blake, J. and Pearson, L. (2025) ‘The power of an open door: student partnership and supportive transition to higher education’, Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13603108.2025.2474558