Begin
Learning Strategist. Perhaps this, or something similar, is your job-title, your role, your professional identity. Or one you aspire to. Or wonder about. But what does it mean? What exactly is a Learning Strategist? Can it even be defined exactly? What do you need to know and be able to do well to be a good Learning Strategist? How do you acquire and develop these things? How do you yourself define it? Is this a vocation or just a job? Is this a career for you, or just a stepping stone? Is the term “Learning Strategist” the best one? Consider other professions – teacher, dentist, lawyer, artist, social-worker…there is a kind of clarity inherent to these roles, a professional identity that is vivid in some way, easy to articulate. And, although of course people move through their careers in all sorts of ways, these roles feel very much like a chosen field, a declaration that this is what you will be in your professional life. I am a teacher. I am an artist. I am a social-worker. To become a teacher is to say you will always be a teacher, that you will move through the profession and maybe acquire some specialised training, but, for the majority, it is to say that you will retire as a teacher. Ask yourself if any of that fabric of meaning applies to your sense or contemplation of becoming a Learning Strategist? At the time of writing this , there is no Learning Strategy school. There are no truly official associations and codes of practice. It mostly exists in that nebulous world of “student support”, a context in which job movement is common and fluid. For many, a Learning Strategist role feels like a temporary thing – a good job, for a time, while you figure out your next move, or how to better apply your graduate training, or how to distinguish yourself to move up the “ranks” of your wider division. It is not easily recognized as a bona-fide profession, and it remains a difficult thing to even describe. I write this towards clarifying some of these things and to offer some answers to the question: what does a Learning Strategist do and what should they know to be able to do it well?
Obviously, there’s no better place to start than with the game of hockey.
The foundation of hockey isn’t really hockey at all. It’s shinny, a wild melee of kids batting a puck around, with no rules, no organization – nothing but individual effort to grab and hold the puck.
Lester Patrick said that. He’s one of the original “inventors” of organized hockey (disallowed goal because it was kicked in? Thank Lester Patrick for that). It’s an odd opening quote in a learning strategist practitioner guide, but indulge me in the analogy. It’s useful.
Consider shinny hockey, that haphazard clutter of players, spontaneous and ragged organizing themselves into something formed, constrained only by a few rules, some declared, but mostly tacit, stirred together by the joy and love of the game. And consider, by contrast, the greater sophistication of organized hockey, something also excellent, but altogether different in its rigid structure of codes, and gear, and rules and systems. There is something interesting to be explored at this juncture between free-wheeling-ness and rigorous design. The art and practice of hockey.
Now insert Learning Strategy work into that picture. Our work presently exists somewhere at this juncture, a beautiful game of free-wheeling shinny but also, as an increasingly substantial part of the formal structures of higher education, a game in search of its rules and form. The series of ideas contained here is an attempt to shed light there, to explore the contours of a profession poised at this place, ready to be rooted in some rigorous design and structure but hesitant to lose the magic of the spontaneous.
The purpose of that exploration is simple: to elevate what it means to be a Learning Strategist, to illuminate this role as, not simply a job, but a vocation, profound and noble, full of possibility, and integral to an education system rooted in a hopeful vision of what learning and study can be. This is not just a practical guide for Learning Strategists, or a “how-to” book. There are many other great resources for that, perhaps best exemplified in Saundra Yancy McGuire’s Teach Students How To Learn, a volume all learning Strategists should have. Rather, this is something prior to that, something contemplative and abstract as a way to keep alive the more ineffable currents that pulse in the work, the parts that seasoned Learning Strategists just….feel. That may sound pretentious but, as in all vocations that involve humans interacting, there is in our work, both the known and the intuited, the technical and the uncanny, so a humble guide about the artful practice of learning strategists will make room for the poetic, the provocative, the debatable. We’re educators, after all, and educators, perhaps more than anyone, need to be able to stop, and think, and critique, and indulge, and be extravagant in our imaginings. The guide is loosely structured, a bit of scaffolding here and there but it’s really just a beginning, some prompts, provocations, footholds upon which you can do your own further exploration. I imagine it as a companion, on your desktop, digitally dog-eared and frayed, and marked up in the margins, as you come back to it now and then over the course of your career. I hope it’s helpful, but I also hope you’ll find something here that is more than mere usefulness.
You will detect throughout this book several variations on the “what do we do and what is our purpose” question. I don’t have a single pat response to that question. Rather, this book is my longform answer.
