Learning as Alignment: The Relational Ontology of Education: 2 Construal as the Mechanism of Understanding: How Learners Enact Meaning Through Relation

If learning is alignment, then construal is its engine. Construal is the active tuning of potential — the way learners perceive, interpret, and organise information within a relational field. It is not passive reception, nor the replication of pre-existing knowledge; it is the moment-by-moment enactment of understanding.

1 — Construal is Relational

Construal emerges at the intersection of readiness and affordance. A learner encounters a problem, text, or discussion prompt. Their prior inclinations, perceptual habits, and attentional focus interact with the affordances present: the language, the tools, the peer contributions. Understanding arises not solely within the learner, nor solely within the environment, but between them.

In this way, learning is a distributed, emergent phenomenon. Each act of construal contributes to the alignment of the broader field, shaping what is possible for others to perceive and understand.

2 — Multiple Construals and Field Coherence

Because construal is active and situational, multiple valid interpretations can coexist. Two learners may approach the same text differently, yet each can participate in the same aligned field of meaning. Coherence arises not from uniformity but from relational resonance — the capacity of diverse construals to harmonise sufficiently for collective understanding.

Pedagogy in this light becomes the facilitation of alignment rather than standardisation: designing affordances that allow multiple pathways of understanding to converge without erasing difference.

3 — Construal Across Scales

Construal operates at multiple scales:

• Individual: A single learner negotiating attention, memory, and inference.

• Dyadic: Two participants co-tuning understanding through dialogue or collaboration.

• Collective: The classroom or learning community enacting a shared field of coherence.

Learning is the aggregation of these scales, a recursive process in which individual construals both shape and are shaped by the larger field.

4 — Pedagogical Implications

Recognising construal as the mechanism of understanding transforms teaching:

• Teachers attend to how learners tune potential, not how they replicate content.

• Materials are designed as flexible affordances, supporting multiple construals rather than dictating a single path.

• Interaction is structured to allow reciprocal adjustment, enabling learners to align their construals with one another and with the evolving field.

Assessment, in turn, should register relational coherence, not rote correctness: it senses whether the field of learners has successfully aligned, rather than whether each individual reproduces a fixed answer.

5 — Construal as Ethical Practice

Because construal is relational, it carries ethical weight. Teachers shape the conditions under which learners can align, which means some construals are amplified while others may be constrained. Ethical pedagogy involves designing spaces and affordances that allow diverse potentials to flourish, expanding the field’s capacity for shared understanding rather than restricting it to the familiar or the privileged.

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Construal is the living mechanism of learning — the dynamic process through which readiness and affordance meet to produce coherent, emergent understanding.