Avhandlingens - Umeå universitet

could be discerned and focused on at the same time by everyone, everything
would be experienced in exactly the same way. However, only a limited number
of aspects can be discerned and focused on simultaneously. How something
is interpreted depends on the way the parts are discerned from the whole,
and how the parts are related to each other and to the whole. Discerning is
about changing one’s way of seeing something and being able to connect it
to your previous knowledge and experience as a whole. In a learning situation
it is important that the teacher presents the new data in a way that allows
the students to discern it. This means that she has to be aware of how different
people discern different aspects because of their different ways of experiencing
the same situation. One reason for this is that the learners have varying previous
experiences.
The variation theory focuses on the distinction between an enacted object of
learning and a lived object of learning. The enacted object of learning can
be described as a space of learning, which describes what is possible for the
learner to experience and learn from the point of view of what was to be learnt.
The possibilities for learning cannot be brought about by the teacher alone,
or by the learners themselves; they must be jointly constituted by both the
teacher and the learners. If so, you can talk about a shared space of learning.
The object of learning seen from the teacher’s perspective is called the intended
object of learning. The result of the learning situation, the lived object of learning,
can be described as what the students learn depending on what features of
the enacted object of learning they simultaneously discern and focus on.
Essential for the teachers is to recognize that the students will understand
the intended object of learning in different ways, and it is not certain that it
is in the same way as the teacher intended. An assumption is that if the
teacher can help the students to acquire more powerful ways of seeing, it
will be more likely that they are able to achieve the intended teaching. All
aspects necessary for defining an object are called the critical features of the
object, and the critical features have to be found empirically and they must
be found for every specific object of learning.
We are simultaneously aware of what we experience in relation to our previous
experiences. If we, for example, meet a man who we experience as strikingly
tall, we must have encountered other men who have been considerably shorter
than him and the representation of those are in our awareness simultaneously
with the man we actually see. We are always aware of everything, but there are
only a few things that we are focally aware of. Other things are in the background
of our awareness. Discerning something presupposes an experienced variation
of the aspect, thus when something is discerned it is against a background of
a potential variation. A specific colour is seen against a background of other
colours we have seen. For instance, when we talk about red, we are talking
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