Regnier, Robert. "Learning as Valuing: Toward a Whiteheadian Foundation for Curriculum Reform in China." (Papers of International Conference on Process Thinking & Curriculum Reform, 2007): 5-17.

Abstract

This paper develops the notion of learning as valuing and suggests it as a possible basis for supporting reform in Chinese curriculum that supports the change from teaching as transmission to creative inquiry.  The notion of learning as valuing is developed from the two separate concepts of learning and value in the work of Alfred North Whitehead.  Whitehead proposes learning to be the experience of freedom, self-discipline and new found freedom in the rhythmic cycles of romance, precision and generalization; and he proposes in his process cosmology that value is inherent to, -not externally conveyed, to the emergence of entities constituted through processes of self-creation and is the ultimate purpose of the temporal world.  From these two notions learning as valuing is presented as  the process of selectivity through which learners determinately apprehend, both cognitively and non-cognitively, ideal possibilities into the unactualized potential in their licves and through which learning and learners emerge from past histories into present actualization.  This paper proposes that to change to curriculum that support creative inquiry requires a change to a process cosmology foundation which views the world and learning as constituted by creativity, ideal possibilities, and consistent balance.