Turning differently toward learning design, and finding the real gift of slow

Orthodox understandings of learning design cast it as something that we ‘do’ to instrument the future. In this paper I turn
differently toward learning design, seeing it instead as something that we are already existentially ‘in’, grounded through our
stances and our very ‘being’. I offer for reflection the central notion of ‘slow’ with which we might re-orient to and re-value the
places and spaces that we are already in as inherently generative. Practising a philosophy of slow invites us to encounter
ourselves in our designing. It begins with the quietly radical act of seeing goodness in slowness. Slow takes the long-scale view that accepts into itself the many tempos and time scales of university teaching – including at times, the need for fast work. This paper invites you to pause and ponder notions of untangling, opening, loosening, listening, seeing, belonging and trusting as ways that we might come to know slow and benefit from the presence of slow in our design work. But perhaps the deepest gift that slow offers is choice: it opens a space for considered thought and action, and checks the habits and expectations of speed that we have grown so accustomed to.