When considering higher education, most European educational research gives priority to teaching, learning, curricula and competences (Teichler, 2015). In this approach, the main topics are student’s performance and satisfaction, and learning issues (Teixeira, 2013). Particularly, the emphasis on quality and learning outcomes, partly motivated by the Bologna process and its impact on universities quasi-corporate practices and entrepreneurial shift (Scott, 2012), has promoted a viewpoint of the student as a customer (Mark, 2013; Woodall, Hiller & Resnick, 2014), or an entrepreneur (Mayhew et al. 2012; Creso & Kretz, 2015). From this perspective, studying is approached as a linear process, where students start with an initial level of knowledge and skills (academic past) and must follow a straight path of learning development (goal-oriented), that will lead them to a desired outcome (potential learning). In that path, students must self-regulate (take control of their learning) to prevent and combat distractions and difficulties that might draw them away of the planned academic success.

In contrast, critical perspectives of these models analyze education under a different light, firstly, questioning the marketization tendency of education and the logic of student-as-customer model (Furedi, 2011). Secondly, they provide a different path that focus on studying as a suspension of the logic of learning and its emphasis on self-actualization, outcomes and potentialities (Simons & Masschelein, 2008; Lewis, 2014). Inspired by these approaches, in this paper we argue that studying is not a straight process, or following Tim Ingold’s work on lines (Ingold, 2007), a fragmented line that goes across between points of rupture. Instead, we explore studying activities by drawing on the notions of wayfaring (Ingold, 2007), and im-potentiality (Lewis, 2013). According to Ingold, “wayfaring is a movement of self-renewal or becoming rather than the transport of already constituted beings from one location to another” (2007, p. 116). Therefore, instead of looking at studying as a linear process that starts in a point A (level of knowledge and skills) towards a point B (learning goals), we argue that studying is constituted by open-ended activities that resemble more the continual ‘moving around’ of wayfaring described by Ingold, than the straight path of learning development that most research focuses on. This claim is supported by Schatzki’s notion that “human activity should be understood as an indeterminate temporalspatial event” (2010, p.x, my italics). According to Schatzki, activity is indeterminate because it is not fixed prior to acting, what determines what a person does (teleological and motivational factors) is fixed only with its happening. Then, what can happen previous to action is ‘open’, it is only settled with the performance of the action. Furthermore, in this paper, we will focus on analyzing studying practices as open-ended activities constituted by spatial-temporal doings and sayings, for instance, taking notes, discussing a text, or using the laptop’s keyboard. However, these actions are not conceived as independent points of activity, instead, according to Schatzki, doings and sayings ‘hang together’ as part of a given practice and are interconnected with material entities, both human and non-human (things and artifacts). Consequently, in this approach, our interest is about how students’ activities and materiality ‘hang together’ as a temporalspatial event, particularly, elaborating in how it is like to study today in the university.

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