ABSTRACT
Here I trace the history of learning theories beginning by emphasising the early works of Piaget and Vygotsky still with us today. We consider the various compendial collections of theories about learning that typically introduce teachers to the field of educational psychology. A core point is the degree to which an expansive field, having been parsed into manageable but distinct packets of information, remains unwieldy even as it emphasises a false separation between of interrelated aspects of human being. I then turn to a different set of discourses tracing a line of theories of learning from past to present. Here we follow different narrations on the history of learning theory from nineteenth-century studies in brain physiology, through various incarnations of cognitivism and constructivism to arrive at “second-generation embodiment” and still the problem of affect as separately considered from cognition. Finally, we encounter the work of Maturana and Varela and their notions of autopoietic systems as complex dynamic systems that learn. I close by returning to the model, showing how it incorporates what has gone before and arguing for it as a theory applicable across all life systems.
