This article is a response to Haggis's injunction to "know differently" if we are to grow our understandings of student learning. It identifies concerns that have arisen in the course of research into engagement (conceived of as "ideological becoming") in first year lectures in the humanities at a South African university. These issues include: (a) how the co-presence of students and lecturer challenges conventional notions of "student learning" as other; (b) the theoretical and practical challenges related to identifying fleeting "liminal moments" in situations in which students and lecturers are co-present; and (c) what we can learn from a view of academic engagement as distributed across time and place. The tool of entextualisation is used to track participants' "interest" across sites. The article offers a view of learning as embodied, emergent and contested, rather than neatly packaged and predictable.