Learning as Alignment: The Relational Ontology of Education: 1 Learning as Alignment: From Representation to Relation

Education is typically framed as the transfer of something pre-existing: knowledge, skill, or information. In this representational model, the learner is a container, the teacher a dispenser, and assessment the mirror reflecting whether the container accurately reproduces what was given.

But this perspective mislocates learning. Knowledge is not an object. Understanding is not stored. Learning is alignment — the coordinated emergence of meaning across a field composed of learners, teachers, materials, and environment.

1 — Readiness and the Field

Every learner carries a gradient of readiness: tendencies, inclinations, and potentialities that make certain affordances visible and others opaque. The environment itself — the classroom, the discussion, the text — carries its own set of affordances: invitations to act, interpret, and construe.

Learning occurs when these gradients meet: when a learner’s readiness resonates with an affordance, producing a coherent construal. Importantly, this is not an individual act alone; it is a field-level event, in which the system as a whole — learner, peer, teacher, and environment — aligns sufficiently for meaning to emerge.

2 — Alignment as the Core of Understanding

Alignment is relational. It is the moment when multiple potentials converge:

• The learner’s inclination meets a viable pathway.

• The teacher’s design supports but does not prescribe.

• The materials afford action without fixing interpretation.

• Peer interactions amplify or redirect the coherence of construal.

This relational convergence produces understanding — not correctness, not memorisation, not the replication of a standard — but a situationally coherent act of meaning.

3 — Why Representation Fails

Representational models obscure the relational nature of learning in several ways:

• They treat understanding as a property of the individual alone.

• They assume knowledge exists prior to, and independently of, its enactment.

• They privilege correctness over coherence, often penalising exploration, divergence, or novel connection.

By contrast, relational alignment recognises that understanding is emergent, situated, and collectively produced.

4 — Implications for Pedagogy

If learning is alignment, teaching is not transmission. Pedagogy becomes the orchestration of affordances and readiness, the tuning of relational fields to create conditions where alignment can occur. This shifts the role of the teacher from a judge of correctness to a steward of coherence. It shifts assessment from grading discrete answers to sensing how well the field resonates.

Learning, in this sense, is less a product and more a living process — a continuous negotiation of possibility, a dance of inclinations and affordances, a co-individuating ecology of meaning.