The aim of this communication is to show a first approach to the research project called “TRAY AP: Learning trajectories of young university students: concepts, strategies, technologies and context” (PID2019-108696RB-I00) carried out by the consolidated research teams ESBRINA (University of Barcelona) and ELKARRIKERTUZ (University of the Basque Country).

Both research teams have collaborated for more than 10 years on research projects and have a share interest in questions regarding how and where learning takes place. The research project "APRENDO, How teachers learn: educational implications and challenges to face social change" (EDU2015-70912-C2-1-R), served as an interesting starting point towards the search for the answer to the learning-wise questions and enabled the publication of the book “How do teachers learn? Transits between cartographies, experiences, corporeities and affections” (Hernández eta al., 2020). This research showed that learning has a direct relation with “learning trajectories” (Erstad, 2012, 2013) in which embodied, nomadic and affect-related senses of learning converge (something is learned when the learner feels affected). The current project, in which we find ourselves and gives continuity to the previous one, requires focusing the attention on an individualized following up of the learning trajectories of young people, especially those who are in the 3rd and 4th year of their university studies. It is a field little studied and it is of great interest to know how future generations of teachers (among other grades) understand their learning processes.

We rely on the authors Erstad et al. (2016), Erstad and Sefton-Green (2012), Jornet and Erstad (2018) and Sefton-Green and Erstad (2016) with the intention of deepening into what they call “learning lives” and that raises the study of (dis )continuities in learning from the perspective of learners. We think that inquiring with students about their notions of learning related to their contexts and experiences can be of great interest to light the way and places where students learning emerge.

This communication will reveal the prior steps to the first encounters with participants that the research teams (in this specific case, the group from the Basque Country) carried out. During this process, we have sought to jointly reflect on our learning trajectories with the intention of anticipating, or knowing, the problems or issues that may arise the moment we carry out the research with university students, as well as defining jointly what idea of context emerges from our stories.

While the research sample includes students from different fields of knowledge (humanities, social sciences, experiential sciences, educational sciences and engineering), the researchers come from the social sciences and education, as well as from the field of humanities. This difference and the conceptions that exist about university students (regarding the use of technological devices in their learning processes, for example), makes it necessary to reflect on the conjectures around their processes of learning. Likewise, we see it necessary, like Braidotti (2015) said, to fathom into “the social, ethical and discursive schemes of the formation of the subject in order to face the profound changes we face” nowadays in society.

We divide the process prior to the first meetings with university students into 2 parts. In the first part, we created the narration of our own learning trajectories in a multimodal way, understanding multimodality as a representation that goes beyond words, inviting us to incorporate suggestive images, texts or sounds that could represent the ways of learning. Along with this task, it was also proposed to put our prejudices or conjectures around the learning of university students, in order to find common ground for the development of an introduction to students into the research. During a discussion between both universities, it was proposed to create meeting dynamics within each research team in order to share with the rest what had caught our attention from the narratives of the other researchers. The second part of the process tries to deepen the meaning of our university learning journeys (personal and groupal), to identify our tensions and concerns about the learning of university students. We built our personal cartographies through the resonances and through what the learning trajectories in the university of the members of the group has allowed us to think. Cartography allows the emergence of visual representations of physical, mental and emotional territories, as well as concepts, questions and meanings, generating uncertain spaces where writing and reading are visually articulated in continuous change (Hernández, 2020), allowing to problematize naturalized issues (Aberasturi, Correa & Gutierrez-Cabello, Ibidem). We agree with Braidotti (2000) that a cartographic proposal can lead to produce critical spaces of rupture with the established and to experiment and discover other types of relationships previously invisible, since it favors a dialogical exchange (Braidotti, 2018).

The biographical experience as a dimension that should not belong, a priori, to university learning, is a common trigger in most of the narratives. The biographical plays an important role in our learning journeys and generates a doubt as to how to connect the stories that the participants will tell us with their learning. It is something that should be taken into account in future meetings with the participants The doubt about our ability as teachers to be able to link what students learn inside the university with what they do outside of it arises making us reflect on the importance of daily life and their experiences in them as an unequivocal part of their learning context. The relational, understood as pedagogical relationships inside and outside the classroom. We wonder in which extent what we do in class affects them, taking into account that the sense of learning in young people is directly influenced by the emotions and that arise from their own experience in their body, to which their mind gives more or less conscious meaning. We understand the existence of a consumerist sense of the learner that implies learning as studying for an exam. Despite finding more interesting topics to deepen into, what this first steps have generated for us has been more questions about our duties as teachers in education faculties, than answers to the question of how university students learn. If the truth is conceived as an outdated notion, the culture of the fragment dominates in education, and learning is linked to the culture of the image and its consumerist sense, how many margins do we leave to possibility, to those intermediate spaces, which enables a new whole that makes new realities possible?

Aberasturi, E., Correa, J. M., & Gutiérrez-Cabello, A. (2020). La cartografía como estrategia de investigación y formación. Hernandez-Hernandez, F., Apraiz Aberasturi, E., Sancho Gil, J. M. and Correa Gorospe, J. M. (eds.) (2020). ¿Cómo aprenden los docentes? Tránsitos entre cartografías, experiencias, corporeidades y afectos. pp. 137-148. Barcelona, Octaedro Braidotti, R. (2000). Sujetos nómades. Buenos Aires: Paidós Ibérica. Braidotti, R. (2015). Lo posthumano. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa Braidotti, R. (2018). A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities. In Theory, Culture & Society, O(O): 1-31. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10,1177/0263276418771486 Erstad, O. (2012). The learning lives of digital youth-beyond the formal and informal. Oxford Review of Education, 38(1), 25-43. doi: 10.1080/03054985.2011.577940 Erstad, O. (2013). Digital learning lives. New York: NY. Peter Lang Publishing. Erstad, O., Kumpulainen, K., Mäkitalo, A., Schroder, K. C., Pruulm, P., & Jóhannstóttir, T. (2016). Learning across Contexts in the Knowledge Society. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Erstad, O., & Sefton-Green, J. (Eds.) (2012). Identity, Community, and Learning Lives in the Digital Age. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Hernández, F. (2020). El planteamiento de la investigación: transitar desde el no-saber en las trayectorias de aprendizaje de los docentes. In Hernandez-Hernandez, F., Apraiz Aberasturi, E., Sancho Gil, J. M. & Correa Gorospe, J. M. (eds.) (2020). ¿Cómo aprenden los docentes? Tránsitos entre cartografías, experiencias, corporeidades y afectos. Barcelona, Octaedro. pp. 43-60. ISBN: 978-84-17667-91-7 Hernandez-Hernandez, F., Apraiz Aberasturi, E., Sancho Gil, J. M. and Correa Gorospe, J. M. (eds.) (2020). ¿Cómo aprenden los docentes? Tránsitos entre cartografías, experiencias, corporeidades y afectos. Barcelona, Octaedro. 276 páginas. ISBN: 978-84-17667-91-7 Jornet, A., & Erstad, O. (2018). From learning contexts to learning lives: Studying learning (dis)continuities from the perspective of the learners. Digital Education Review, 33, 1-25. Sefton-Green, J., & Erstad, O. (2017). Researching ´learning lives´-a new agenda for learning, media and technology. Learning, Media and Technology, 42, 246-250, doi: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1170034