Reimagining the Role of the Learning Designer

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” – Brené Brown

Co-create with the Learners

As a learning designer, I know my job is about structuring information clearly, creating engaging content, and ensuring learners met clear objectives. While this remains true, I’ve come to understand, through both study and life, that designing learning experiences is not simply about instruction. It’s about co-creation: to think new pathways, to feel, to act, and to transform.

Having worked through diverse environments such as Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, the UK, the US, I’ve witnessed that learning is never neutral. Culture, power, history, and emotion always shape how knowledge is received and shared. These lived experiences have pushed me to question the role of learning design within broader systems of meaning-making. In doing so, I’ve started to see how being a designer translates in different levels of actions and impacts.

A Socio-Historical Lens on Learning

I love to question and learn about socio-historical roots, to any situations, that we are led to believe are fixed and unshakable. Obviously, education and learning are part of it. Just like design, they didn’t start with digital learning platforms or corporate training programs. Many roots lie in how societies have historically constructed and controlled knowledge. For instance, in broader African or Asian contexts, as Gilbert Rist and Frantz Fanon suggest, development and education have often been tools of domination, shaping what counts as “valid” knowledge, who gets to teach, and who is expected to learn.

One may ask herself: are we simply repackaging dominant narratives, or are we creating space for multiplicity, for difference, for healing?

“Development is a set of practices, not a natural process.” – Gilbert Rist

I grew up in Niger, a historically rich and amazing country and region of deep knowledge: would it be technical, emotional, social and spiritual sources of skills and practices expanded to many others parts of the continent. Yet, many of this informational source has been invisibilised or marginalised from a mainstream, non-chosen form of strandardised practices. From Burkina Faso, the spiritual guide Sobonfu Somé’s reflections on community learning resonates on how knowledge is transmitted through ritual, symbol, and lived experience. This contrasts with technocratic, depersonalized models of instructional design. It reminds us that learning is relational, sensuous, and situated.

The Learning Designer's agility

The transition from instruction to co-creation requires humility and - humility requires self-awareness, which requires a regular compassionate practice of self-checking. We are not only content providers, we are space holders. We are called to cultivate environments where learners feel seen, heard, and empowered to question in order to grow from a specific situation.

“Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.” — Simon Sinek

In today's world, designers operate at the intersection of psychology, sociology, and art. Leadership in this context means practicing deep listening, acknowledging complexity, and making room for multiple truths. It means facilitating rather than controlling, and creating with rather than for.

Vulnerability as Pedagogical Power

From "Dare to Lead" Brené Brown's lecture, I can't help but agree with the fact that our job is not to eliminate failure from learning, but to normalize it. In fact, learning - just like creation - is failure: it is trial, edition, revision. In a very human and natural way, when learners feel safe to risk, they become creative. I believe that when they are trusted with agency, they transform.

Yet, at the same time, here lies a paradox: standard educational systems often reward perfection and conformity. To embrace vulnerability is to resist those norms when they are a blockers and obstacles - and this takes both personal and collective courage.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome.” — Brené Brown

Designing with Sensuous Knowledge

In her book Sensuous Knowledge, Minna Salami put years of research into a broader new narrative about knowledge: “Sensuous knowledge is a kind of knowing that is poetic and political, bodily and intellectual, emotional and rational.”

She invites us to think beyond binary logic and fixed conception. She asks us to embrace a feminist, African-centered way of knowing - one that welcomes emotion, intuition, and embodiment. Knowledge is more than mental, both in its practice and assessment.

This can be an interesting proposition for learning designers: to acknowledge that knowledge is not just in our heads, but in our hands, hearts, and histories. A decolonial approach to learning must begin with this re-centering.

From a personal perspective, I am still unlearning. Still listening. Still making mistakes. Still learning to show up with courage.

And maybe that’s the point: to be a learning designer is to always be in the process of becoming.

“To create is to resist. To resist is to create.” — Stéphane Hessel

Questions for Reflection:

·       Where do your own assumptions about learning come from?

·       What stories have shaped your educational values?

·       What would it mean to design not from authority, but from co-creation?