Toward a Typology of Learning Invitations

Abstract

Learning invitations are strategies that encourage learners to engage with education. Learning invitations take many different forms but the aim is to create these invitations intentionally and systematically. This might be easier if there were some guidance to different styles of learning invitations. The Dharmic typology proposed builds upon ideas from Sāṃkhya—Yoga, particularly the notion of the three qualities of life (Triguṇa), which together are thought to construct everything much as pixels of three primary (RGB) colors create every photograph. Sattva is light, peace, harmony; it evokes a reflective, ethical, and holistic approach and learning invitations based on emulation and spiritual self-realization. Tamas is heavy, veiled and obstructive; it evokes feelings of inertia, lethargy and fearfulness and learning invitations based on disgust, repulsion and the wish for reform. Sattva and Tamas are static but the third quality, Rajas, burns with the fire of action. Rajas is desire, movement, change and energy; it evokes personal passions, material desires, emotion, excitement, ambition, anger and greed and its learning invitations invite change, often using personal gain as their lure. Three Rajasic invitational styles are discussed; those where action (Rajas) itself is the goal, where goodness (Sattva) is the goal, and where the domination of others is the goal (Tamas).