ABSTRACT
As the previous chapters in this book clearly show, there are many possible ways of understanding ‘flexible learning’. This ‘flexibility’ normally refers to curriculum, pedagogy and the organisation and delivery of educational provision. My concern however in this chapter is not to add to the definitions and possibilities or to further describe the variety of practices that are subsumed by the term ‘flexible learning’. My problematic rather is to do with what kind of ‘unspoken’ learning flexible learning involves – or to put it another way, it is about the hidden curriculum of flexible learning – specifically, the relationship, a necessary one, between ‘flexible learning’ and ‘learning flexibility’. I am going to argue that this is a problematic which has been given little or no analytical attention so far in the literature of flexible learning. There is a need therefore to look more closely at how flexible learning is also a means of learning ‘flexibility’ and at what in particular the implications of this are for the contemporary workplace and for the fast growing numbers of learners located in that site, all busy learning flexibly.
