The focus of phenomenographic research has been the experience of learning. Drawing on our recent research into the process of learning in higher education physics contexts, we present a discussion of the experience and process of learning, and perspectives from which it can be analysed and understood that emerge from a phenomenographic tradition.

Recently, we have taken three different approaches to analysing empirical data gathered in a pedagogical situation where pairs of students engaged with a simulation of the Bohr model of the atom, in order to grasp aspects of their experience and their process of learning from a phenomenographic perspective. In contrast to most traditional phenomenography we collected and analysed the student conversations rather than interviews. One analysis concerned the "focus of awareness", which refers to how elements of the simulation are intertwined in the students' experience and what the simulation's function is taken to be in the pedagogical situation. The second concerned analysing the experienced agency of the computer simulation; or differently put, an analysis of the students' understanding of the primary (pedagogical or intellectual) tool shaping their learning experience. These first two analyses resulted in two sets of qualitatively distinct ways of experiencing the specific aspect of the pedagogical situation - variation as seen by the researcher. The third analysis follows the dynamics of interaction between students, simulation, physics phenomenon and teacher. We made use of theoretical notions from phenomenography (principally variation, object of learning and ways of seeing) to analyse the data on a micro-level for the emergence of ways in which the students themselves experienced variation, depicted in terms of "threads of learning". This was done by linking variation around aspects of the object of learning present in the situation, and attended to by the students, to new ways of seeing - characterised as an expanded and more structurally differentiated awareness, and hence as learning. This is then an exploration of the process of learning over time, carefully following a small event in the scope of the education.

Linking the result of these three studies to each other, we find the need for a more useful description of the process of learning. Learning is often described in phenomenographic work as "a qualitative shift" between qualitatively different ways of seeing, which is not very useful when attempting to follow the process of learning in time. Rather, we could see that the students' learning process was connected to successfully linking an experienced pattern of possible variation to an experienced meaning, attributable to physics. Learning, which has an aspect of contextual appreciation, thus presupposes the experience of structural and referential relevance.

Further it is also clear that learning is not a readily delimited and instantaneous process directed towards a single object of learning - neither on the level of the dynamics of the process, nor on the more overarching level of focus of awareness or simulation agency. It is rather a process directed to a series of evolving and interconnected objects of learning, constituted by the experience of variation of aspects seen as critical within a particular relevance structure. The experienced validity of the object of learning, from the students' point of view, can be seen in the light of the whole field in which the object of learning is seen to have relevance. In this way, our discussion may contribute theoretically to future phenomenographic analyses of learning and more generally to the discussion on student learning in higher education, and offer tools for investigating the process of learning locally and over time.