Education as Exduction and Co-Becoming

“What if we were to think of education as opening out into a terrain that is ever-unfolding? What if it were a way of studying with the world we inhabit, rather than making studies of the beings and things we find there?” (Ingold 2022, ii).

From Knowledge Transfer to Co-Becoming: Why Education Needs a Radical Re-Orientation

In a world defined by dynamic uncertainty and rapid change (VUCA world), the traditional foundations of our educational systems are beginning to crack. For decades, we have operated under a “banking model” of education: it is a paradigm where learners are viewed as passive containers to be filled with factual data. However, as explored in our paper “Education as Exduction and Co-Becoming”, this model of simple knowledge transfer is no longer sufficient for navigating a world that is constantly unfolding.
Drawing on the profound insights of anthropologist Tim Ingold (Ingold, 2017) and the latest developments in 4E cognitive science (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive; Gallagher, 2023; Newen, de Burin, and Gallagher, 2018; Ward, Silverman, and Villalobos, 2017), we propose a transformative shift. Instead of learning about the world as a detached observer, we have to shift our attention to how to become with the world as active and co-creative participants. This blog post explores the core arguments of the paper, detailing how the concept of “exduction” and “co-becoming” offer an alternative and new perspective for human development and education.

The Poverty of Propositional Knowing

We argue that modern education is overwhelmingly focused on propositional knowing: the “knowing that” Vienna is the capital of Austria or that water boils at 100°C. While these verifiable facts are essential for logical inference and symbolic manipulation, they are inherently disengaged and decontextualized.

When we rely solely on propositional knowledge, we treat the mind as a computer processing/manipulating symbols (symbolic representations). However, this cognitivist approach lacks an experiential foundation; it remains “detached and self-referential”. Vervaeke and Mastropietro’s (2024) “4P” taxonomy, argues that we have neglected three other vital forms of knowing:

1. Procedural Knowing: The “knowing how” embodied in skillful action, such as riding a bike or building a shelter. This form of knowing is governed by performance and (bodily) interaction with the world rather than truth.
2. Perspectival Knowing: The embodied, context-sensitive awareness of “what it is like” to be in a specific situation. It is about “optimal grip”: the felt sense of being well-aligned with your current environment.
3. Participatory Knowing: The most foundational layer, involving the dynamic coupling between the agent and their environment where both co-create one another. This is “knowing through being”, where the learner is not a spectator but an inhabitant and an active co-creator of a “lifeworld”.

Vervaeke and Mastropietro (2024) (among many others) suggest that meaningful contact with reality must precede formal articulation; therefore, all other forms of knowing emerge from this foundational participatory ground.

Leading Out: Education as Exduction

“One goes not from facts ‘on the ground’ to theories, by in-duction, nor conversely from theories to facts by a reverse process of de-duction, but rather along the sensible path of a continuous variation, that is by ex-duction. One is led out along the way.” (Ingold 2017, 41)

While the “banking model” of education is about in-duction (generalizing facts to “theories”) or de-duction (applying theories to facts), our paper, following Ingold (2017), proposes a third path: Exduction.

The term, used in Ingold’s work, comes from the Latin word “ex-ducere”, meaning “to lead out, to bring forth”. In this view, education is not about transferring a fixed curriculum or body of knowledge into the minds of learners; rather it is about leading them out into the world to attend to its unfolding, diversity, and (still) unknown and undiscovered dynamics and dimensions. In an alternative reading, “leading out” can also be interpreted as bringing the learner’s potentials to life. As stated in the quotation above, “One is led out along the way” through a process of continuous variation and discovery, as well as, of enacting the inner (“mind”) and outer world by overcoming this seeming duality in a process of inter-action and correspondence.

This shifts both the roles of the teacher and learner: The teacher is no longer an "explicator" of existing facts, but becomes a guide in a process of (re-)discovery and shaping of the world. In the paradigm of exduction, the educator does not merely transmit authorized knowledge across generations but participates in a “socio-material-epistemic continuity and co-construction process” where students and teachers alike lead and engage in life together by jointly exploring, understanding, and enacting the world. They become co-creators, in the sense that they collaboratively create knowledge and/by jointly enact/-ing both the world and themselves.

“Attending to” Instead of “Knowing of/about” Things: Educating from Of and About to With and Through

In this context, attention becomes central: While traditional views see attention as a strategic spotlight by selectively concentrating on a specific aspect of the world (and ignoring others), Ingold (2017, p 20ff) suggests to frame it ontologically as stretching toward things (“ad-tendere”) and going along with them. This formative “attentionality” implies a mutual shaping between the self and the environment, functioning as a mode of cognitive niche construction. Educating attention attunes perception to resonate with the world’s becoming and variation, shifting correspondence from mental mirroring of the world to an “enactive dance” of co-responding to, with, and through the world. Instead of pursuing predefined goals, education understood as exduction explores and develops uncharted paths into the “adjacent possible” (Kauffman, 2000) and future potentials, favoring movement, emergence, and perpetual beginning over fixed stand- and endpoints. Knowledge is thus undergone together (Ingold, 2014) rather than explicated, serving to actualize potentials and the as-yet-unthought. This leads to a “pedagogy of presence” in which the educator becomes a guide in shared (re-)discovery and co-creation as well as sensing and actualizing future potentials where both participants are transformed through mutual resonance with and co-enacting an unfolding world.

Education, therefore, is not memorization and replication, it is transformation: it becomes a process of co-becoming and co-creation, (co-)enaction, resonance (Rosa, 2019), correspondence (Ingold, 2013), a kind of growing together between the learner, teacher, and the world. “Growing together” in both the sense of uniting/(co-)becoming one and thriving together.

The Three Dimensions of Co-Becoming

The central thesis of the paper is that knowing and learning are processes of transformative co-becoming. This is not a solely mental act but a relational dynamic that involves the agency of the social, material, and future world:

1. Socio-epistemic practice (co-operation with others): Learning is a social/collective endeavor where meaning is negotiated and co-created. It involves response-ability, the capacity to respond and be responded to. In this social dimension, learners offer their participatory knowing to others and receive theirs in return, leading to a “human becoming” that transcends individual belief revision in a process of participatory sense making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007) and meaning construction.
2. (Socio-)Material practice (co-respondence with an unfolding world): Drawing on the work of Malafouris´ (2013, 2019) Material Engagement Theory and Ingold´s (2013) concept of making and co-respondence, we argue that we do not just think about things; we think with and through them so that thinking becomes a process of “thinging”.
   This involves an engaged epistemology (De Jaegher, 2021) where the knower practices “letting be”. This means reducing epistemic control and respecting the autonomy and creative agency of the world/known. Instead of imposing past structures or expectations onto the world, we enter into an “enactive dance” or resonance with our material environment. Knowledge is thus not a static object but an emergent process of mutual enaction between the learner and the “agency of the world”.
3. Temporal practice (co-becoming with an unfolding future): Finally, the paper argues that learning as exduction becomes an anticipatory act. It is not merely about solving present problems using past knowledge, but about “learning from the future as it emerges” (Scharmer, 2016), being led by and actualizing emerging future potentials.
   This involves engaging with potentiality—what Aristotle referred to as dynamis—rather than just actuality. In this mode, the learner becomes attuned to emergent affordances, adjacent possibles (Kauffman, 2000), and future potentials. We are not just adapting to a pre-set future; we are acting and intervening to co-create novel social and material niches. This is “anticipatory resonance”, where our internal potentials align with the unfolding potentials of the world and by co-enacting each other.

Skills and Mindsets of the Future

Exduction asks us to “take off our armour of control” and meet the world with open arms, rendering ourselves vulnerable to being changed and transformed by what we encounter. This is the beautiful as well as challenging risk of education, the willingness to restore things to their presence rather than consuming them in a repository of the already known.
What does this look like in practice? Our paper outlines several radical reorientations for the modern learner and educator:

• Epistemic humility: Suspending preconceptions and reducing the need for control to remain attuned to unfolding environmental dynamics
• Kairos (patience): Cultivating the necessary patience to wait for meaningful patterns and emerging potentials to reveal themselves as pointers for future activities.
• Resonance (rather than control): Shifting from instrumental problem-solving to “existential participation”: listening to what is emerging and allowing oneself to be transformed by it.
• Perceptual sensitivity: Developing an ear not only for “weak signals”, but, more importantly, for latent potentials in the environment.
• Embodied (co-)enaction: In the enactivist approach, perception and action collapse in a circular process in which both the internal and the external world are mutually shaping each other. This transformation by acting in the world and perceiving these changes in a circular manner always involves the body as a means, enabler and constraint for translating between these two domains.

Conclusion: A Shift Toward Sustainable Innovation

By reimagining education as exduction, we suggest to move beyond the acquisition of facts toward a state of resonant agency. Thus, education can become a ground not only of knowledge acquisition, but of ontological transformation, nurturing learners as resonant agents capable of shaping and being shaped by the futures they help bring forth. This approach aligns with UNESCO's proposals for the reshaping of education:

“...this calls for education to be reimagined and reconfigured around the future survival of the planet… This requires a complete paradigm shift: from learning about the world in order to act upon it, to learning to become with the world around us. Our future survival depends on our capacity to make this shift.” (UNESCO 2021, 2)

As an analogy, one can imagine traditional education as a reservoir or container: a static, contained body of water where “knowledge” is stored and dispensed in controlled measures. Exduction, by contrast, is a river. It has no fixed endpoints; it is a movement that carves its own path through the landscape. To be “educated” in the river is not to possess the water, but to learn to swim within its current, constantly adjusting your stroke to the shifting eddies and stones, becoming part of the river’s own unfolding journey.

In the end, exduction is an invitation to inhabit and co-shape the world as a “multiverse of becoming”, by jointly actualizing and enacting emerging future potentials. This does not only imply a new perspective on education, but also on innovation. Innovation is no longer based primarily on realizing and materializing our own creativity and ideas, but on cooperating with the creative agency of the world. It becomes an emergent process (Peschl, 2020, 2024) resulting in innovation artifacts that contribute to a thriving future and are sustainable, as they are “naturally” aligned with the emergent dynamics of the world.