Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching

Communities, Activites and Networks

Richard Edwards, Gert Biesta, Mary Thorpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134034192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Now that learning is seen as lifelong and lifewide, what specifically makes a learning context? What are the resultant consequences for teaching practices when working in specific contexts? Drawing upon a variety of academic disciplines, Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching explores some of the different means of understanding teaching and learning, both in and across contexts, the issues they raise and their implications for pedagogy and research. It specifically addresses

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• What constitutes a context for learning?

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• How do we engage the full resources of learners for learning?

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• What are the relationships between different learning contexts?
  
  

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• What forms of teaching can most effectively mobilise learning across contexts?
  
  

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• How do we methodologically and theoretically conceptualise contexts for learning?

Drawing upon practical examples and the UK's TLRP, this book brings together a number of leading researchers to examine the assumptions about context embedded within specific teaching and learning practices. It considers how they might be developed to extend opportunity by drawing upon learning from a range of contexts, including schools, colleges, universities and workplaces.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Life as a learning context?

Richard Edwards

Research on everyday practices typically focuses on the activities of persons acting, although there is agreement that such phenomena cannot be analyzed in isolation from the socially material world of that activity. But less attention has been given to the difficult task of conceptualizing relations between persons acting and the social world. Nor has there been sufficient attention to rethinking the ‘social world of activity’ in relational terms. Together, these constitute the problem of context.

(Lave 1996: 5, emphasis in original)

Introduction

Questions of context are not new, but are brought into particularly stark relief by developments promoted through a discourse of lifelong learning. If learning is lifelong and lifewide, what specifically then is a learning context? Are living and learning collapsed into each other? Under the sign of lifelong learning and following work on situated learning (e.g. Lave and Wenger 1991), a great deal of attention is being given to those strata outside educational institutions and other structured learning opportunities wherein people are held to learn. The workplace, the home and the community can all be held to be strata of learning, within which there are specific situations. In this sense, there are learning contexts distributed across the associational order and embedded in practices to such an extent that this order is itself already a learning context, and potentially learning becomes undifferentiated as a practice from other practices. Here the associational order becomes, by definition, a learning order and all contexts are learning contexts.

Insofar as we expand our concept of learning to embrace apparently all strata of life, we might be said to start to lose the conceptual basis for talking specifically of a learning context. This raises important questions.

• What is specific to a learning context which is not to be found in other contexts?
• What characterizes a specifically learning context?
• What is the relationship between learning and context?
• Who names these contexts as learning contexts?

The latter is particularly important insofar as the discourses of educators, policy makers and researchers are not necessarily shared by those who are engaging in practices within the stratum identified as contexts of learning. Thus, for instance, doing family history may be considered a leisure activity by those who are engaging in it, when for many educators this could be considered a form of learning. The meaning and significance of practices can therefore be scaled in various ways. Insofar as people do not identify themselves as learning in different strata, they may not draw upon the artefacts and relationships available to them for learning in other strata. Here it is a question of what can be ascribed as learning by whom, rather than uncovering what is learnt. Learning is a discursive achievement, an effect.

However, insofar as learning is identified as taking place in a range of strata and the learners themselves move in and between them, then issues of transfer are raised, the presumed movement of learning from one activity to another. This may be from task to task within a single stratum or between strata, signifying different distances between contexts. However, even here we have to be cautious, as that notion of learning being transferred from one activity to another already assumes a certain view of learning and context, where learning is taken from one box and put into another. Here learning can be viewed metaphorically as a parcel moving from one mail box to another, an educational version of pass the parcel!

The question then emerges about how we understand a learning context, when the learning is not necessarily bound by a specific set of institutional relationships and structures. Pedagogic approaches may seek to bound the learning and the learner as belonging to a learning context, but there is also the sense in which there is a desire for learning to be mobile, to be for a purpose. This is exemplified, for instance, in the discourses of transferability and transferable skills and those of the recognition of prior experiential learning. In this sense, a context may be considered a bounded container within which the learning takes place or a more fluid and relational set of practices. In the former, there is a sense in which there is closure to contain or structure the learning, which once acquired may, in principle, be poured from one container to another.

In all commonsense uses of the term, context refers to an empty slot, a container, into which other things are placed. It is the ‘con’ that contains the ‘text’, the bowl that contains the soup. As such, it shapes the contours of its contents: it has its effects only at the borders of the phenomenon under analysis … A static sense of context delivers a stable world.

(McDermott, quoted in Lave 1996: 22–3)

The relational framings find expression in theories of learning that emphasize activity and draw upon concepts of communities and networks rather than those of context. Here, rather than a thing, context is an outcome of activity or is itself a set of practices – contextualizing rather than context becomes that upon which we focus (Nespor 2003). Practices are not bounded by context but emerge relationally and are polycontextual, i.e. have the potential to be realized in a range of strata and situations based upon participation in multiple settings (Tuomi-Grohn et al. 2003). Here learning is a specific effect of practices of contextualization rather than simply emerging within a context. To understand context in static and/or relational terms has effects on how we conceptualize the mobilizing of learning across strata and associated pedagogic practices. To reject the notion of context in favour of that of activity or situated practice is one strategy. To change the understanding of context is another. It is the latter that largely informs the chapters in this book.

Framing contexts

Once we look beyond the context of conventional situations for education and training, such as schools, colleges and universities, allowing learning contexts to be extended into the dimension of relationships between people, artefacts and variously defined others mediated through a range of social, organizational and technological factors, then the limitations of much conventional pedagogy comes into sharp focus. Pedagogy has for some been defined as contained within the ‘spaces of enclosure’ of the classroom, the book and the curriculum (Lankshear et al. 1996). Here learners move from one classroom to another, one curriculum area to another, one institution to another in a linear step-by-step way. Learning is linear and cumulative. Identifying pedagogy in specific sites and strata across the life course, however, may require different conceptual framings where, for instance, there is no teacher as such, or teaching is embedded in texts of various sorts or in the peer support of the team.

The interest in lifelong learning has expanded the strata in which learning is now a concern for practitioners and the range of people who might be considered to have an educational role. It is not simply educators or teachers who have an educational role, but, for instance, supervisors, mentors, software designers or architects. Learning and pedagogy therefore have become in principle a part of many if not all aspects of social life. At least potentially, the whole of life becomes pedagogized. This is particularly the case when we take into account the growth of the consumer market in learning opportunities (Field 1996) and the structured, if distributed, opportunities and self-structuring practices provided by the Internet and other technologies (Lea and Nicoll 2002). The growth of e-learning and borderless education (Cunningham et al. 1997) raises significant questions regarding the relationships it can foster across cultures with implications regarding the different cultures of teaching and learning in different contexts and the value placed on different forms of learning. It also raises questions about how the use of computers in one strata – e.g. home, workplace – might be drawn into learning within education.

The relationship between learning in different strata is often framed by notions of informal, non-formal and formal learning and how to mobilize the full resources – e.g. funds of knowledge, literacy practices, experiential learning – of learners within specific situations. From a search of the literature, it is possible to locate a number of areas of debate and conceptual framings relevant to the question of context in the fields of:

• socio-cultural psychology (e.g. Tochon 2000; Edwards 2001);
• applied linguistics (e.g. Barton and Hamilton 1998; Barton et al. 2000, Maybin 2000; Russell and
  
  2003);
• social anthropology (e.g. Lave and Wenger 1991);
• social studies of science (e.g. Bowker and Star 2000); and
• organizational studies (e.g. Boreham et al. 2002).

These complement and contribute to existing work in education on areas such as

• informal and community-based learning;
• learning in the home;
• workplace learning (e.g. Eraut 2004);
• experiential and vicarious learning e.g. (Mayes et al. 2001);
• vertical and horizontal discourse (e.g. Bernstein 1999); and
• tacit knowledge (e.g. Eraut 2000).

There is thus a large multi-disciplinary range of conceptual resources upon which to pull in order to explore questions of learning and context. Some of this work focuses on strata other than educational institutions, e.g. the workplace, some on the relationship between stratum, e.g. home–school relationships, some on the relationships between people and other groups, and some on the transferability of learning from one stratum to another (e.g. Oates 1992; Eraut 2004). This area is enmeshed or rhizomatic in terms of the conceptual borrowings, entwinings and offshoots, which one can follow and that pop up all over the place. It is not a tidy arena or context of debate, thereby reflexively demonstrating the very complexity it is seeking to illuminate. It is thus the case that in bringing together a collection to explore the issue of learning and context, we have not sought to produce a tidy, singular view of the issues, but to illustrate the diversity of conceptual framing available.

What is perhaps significant is that much of the literature on learning is framed within a set of binaries, which separate strata from one another. Thus, broadly within the arena of cultural psychology, there is a distinction made between everyday and formal/scientific learning (see contributions to Murphy and Ivinson 2003). In the realm of applied linguistics, the focus is on vernacular/contextualized and formal/decontextualized literacy practices (Barton and Hamilton 1998) framed within the everyday and educational experiences of learners. In educational research, the debate has become focused around either informal or experiential learning and formal learning.

Each of these binaries identifies that learning is occurring across a range of strata and situations, but that this learning is in some senses situated or contextualized. The range of learning contexts may therefore be extended and what can be identified as learning. However, their very situatedness and pedagogical approaches that assume domains to be discrete – we leave parts of ourselves at the metaphorical door of the classroom – mean that learning from one situation is not necessarily realized in other situations by either teachers or learners. Logically also, if learning occurs in particular situations, why should or how can it be relevant to other contexts?

This is the situation to which each of the areas of research addresses itself. There is the identification of a gap and exploration of how that comes to be and how these gaps might be overcome. This is sometimes in order that learners’ resources can be realized in formal educational sites, but also vice versa, especially where the concern is for the transfer of learning from education to the workplace (Tuomi-Grohn and Engeström 2003a). Certain aspects of these debates might be perceived as a push-pull effect within research. Within the discourses of education there is tendency to centre the learning context within certain institutional sites, while within the discourses of learning there is a decentring of learning contexts, within which there is an identification of diverse but separate strata, e.g. workplace, home, etc.

Learning in different contexts may involve different types of learning, the learning of different somethings, and for different purposes, the value of which might be variable. We might therefore need to question the extent to which, as educational researchers and pedagogic practitioners, we should try to overcome the gaps between learning in different strata. Some practices may best be left where they emerge. Learners themselves might not want to overcome these gaps and may not even identify their practices as learning. It also involves the learning of something particular to each context, even if that something is a form of abstract, generalized knowledge as in parts of the curriculum of education (Lave 1996). Given the contemporary interest in notions of situated learning (Lave and Wenger 1991), there is of course the issue whether that overcoming might be possible at all. The educational rationale for such an approach is often that education is not recognizing or developing the full potential of learners by not mobilizing their full resources in formal sites, or that what is learnt is not relevant to the ‘real world’. However, this has a centring logic to it, which tends also to deny conflict and difference in and through learning. It assumes the inherent worthwhileness and benignness of education that denies the very struggles in and around it, where some people seek to keep a gap between their lives and what is educationally available. Some might argue that education and pedagogy can and should change to be more inclusive, as though inclusion can overcome all gaps and struggles. However, this is to ignore that inclusions can only occur on the basis of exclusions and the constant play of difference (Edwards et al. 2001).

A concern is that in starting with these binaries, a whole discourse is produced as a result that sends us down particular pathways, looking at certain things in certain ways. As a result, we may realize only certain pedagogical issues and, perhaps more importantly, we may frame issues in educational terms when more appropriately they should be framed in other ways. With the above theories, there is a tendency for a slippage from framing literacy/ learning/knowledge as practices, regardless of place, to framing them as spatially located practices in particular ways. As a result, we end up with discourses and practices about the inside and outside, with metaphors of scaffolding, boundary zones, boundary objects and border crossings discourses of parity of esteem and practices such as attempts at the accreditation of prior experiential learning and the production of all-encompassing credit frameworks. Similarly, simulations and boundary zones (Beach 2003, Tuomi-Grohn et al. 2003b) are formulated as mediators between strata within which pedagogy may seek to mobilize a fuller range of resources for learning than in the formal domain of education.

The discussion of informal and formal learning also often ignores the informali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Life as a learning context?
• PART I Conceptualizing contexts of learning
• PART II Cases of learning and context
• PART III Inferences for learning and context