ABSTRACT
The chapter uses the idea of ‘transfer’ to explore relationships between learning to learn, lifelong and lifewide learning. Their portrayal in the New Zealand Curriculum is discussed. We outline how they have been understood by school professionals, drawing in particular on research of the implementation of key competencies. Our synthesis rests on an expansion of focus from acts of learning per se to include the learner as a whole person. From the learner’s perspective, learning to learn is about learning to do and be, not just to know. We argue that students cannot leverage the potential for lifelong or lifewide learning in the absence of a strategic awareness of how to develop, access, and activate resources and practices that support their learning. There are implications here for what the teacher does to support students, mindful of the rich life experiences learners bring and of the fluidity of their possible futures.
Learning to learn and lifelong learning are often conflated in practice. This chapter explains that these twin terms, while obviously related, are differently focused, and each is deserving of explicit attention. It illustrates and amplifies these ideas, with the New Zealand schooling context as a point of reference. The New Zealand Curriculum provides a national framework that points to important outcomes for learning but does not specify precisely how those outcomes ought to be achieved. The chapter reviews these challenges, and draw parallels with issues of meaning-making in relation to learning to learn and lifelong and lifewide learning. It also shows how recent insights from transfer research might be used to deliberately bring them together, along with lifewide learning as a third important variant on the same theme. It then briefly summarizes several of these themes and highlights their implications for deepening insights into the pedagogical challenges of developing and strengthening student's competencies in relation to learning to learn.
