Download Contexts, boundary zones and boundary objects in lifelong learning

Contexts, boundary zones and boundary objects in lifelong learning
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual
Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005
Richard Edwards, Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning, Institute of Education,
University of Stirling
Research on everyday practices typically focuses on the activities of
persons acting, although there is agreement that such phenomena cannot
be analysed in isolation from the socially material world of that activity.
But less attention has been given to the difficult task of conceptualising
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
This paper seeks to explore the question of what we understand to be a learning
context within discourses of lifelong learning. In discourses of lifelong learning, we
write and talk about the contexts of learning all the time. People learning in their
homes, their workplaces, in social movements, etc. But how do we understand the
nature of those contexts and how are they bounded if at all? The problem posed by
Lave in the quotation above is telling here. The question of context is largely left
unexamined. It is like a backcloth against which we act, but to which we give little
sustained attention. Yet it is methodologically and theoretically fundamental to
researching lifelong learning, as how we frame the notion of context impacts upon
what legitimately fashions a unit of inquiry. A classroom and a college may both be
considered learning contexts, but to explain what goes on in them may also require
an understanding of what goes on outside them. It is precisely this relative
invisibility that makes the notion of context worth pursuing. If learning is lifelong
and lifewide, what makes something specifically a learning context rather than one
inscribed with other meanings and what is the relationship between learning and
context? What are the boundaries of a learning context and how are these
established? How do we conceptualise the notion of a learning context and should
we perhaps abandon the notion altogether? And how do people learn across
contexts? Such questions are fundamentally about how we frame our understanding
of learning when we adopt a discourse of lifelong learning. Assumptions are often
made about how people learn in and across contexts, but there is still much explicit
theorising and empirical exploration of this to be done for lifelong learning to be a
substantive concept.
The purpose of this paper is therefore to open a space within which such questions
can be explored. It builds upon work being undertaken within a Thematic Seminar
Series, funded by the ESRC’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (1) (for
more details, see http://crll.gcal.ac.uk/TLRP_ContextSeminars.htm). In the process,
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I want to challenge some of the current framings of a learning context in the
discourses of lifelong learning and the issues to which they give rise. This in itself
is not new. Writers involved in research on socially situated practice have been
concerned about the nature of context for some time (Chaiklin and Lave, 1996).
What is different is my attempt to locate this concern specifically in relation to the
discourses of lifelong learning.
The paper is in three parts. The first critically reviews various aspects of the
literature on learning and context. I am particularly concerned with a range of
binaries that help to fashion our understanding of a learning context and how these
help to frame debates. Central to the discussion is the extent to which context
precedes and helps explain learning or co-emerges through the social practices of
learning. Here I argue for a relational understanding of context, signified through
the concepts of contextualisation and polycontextualisation, suggesting the ways in
which contexts are performed through practices that are always already related to
one another. There is no inside or outside of context as such, only those made
through the practices in which we participate, where these practices are also
mediated by exercises of power. Thus there is always more going on in the context
of a classroom than that which is circumscribed by positioning the classroom as the
context for learning. The second part of the paper addresses the issue of how we
conceptualise learning that might be said to move from one context to another. In
particular, I explore the extent to which a reframing of our understanding of context
raises questions about what has traditionally been referred to as learning transfer
(Tuomi-Grohn and Engestrom, 2003). A relational understanding of context points
to alternative metaphors for the mediation of practices from one setting to another,
in particular the concept of boundary zones and boundary objects. The third part of
the article tries to identify emerging questions which researchers in this arena either
are or could address in considering the nature of a learning context in lifelong
learning. The paper is theoretically driven and exploratory and does not seek a
totalising explanation of context as such.
Lifelong learning contexts?
From a number of sources there has developed increasing interest in learning as a
lifelong and lifewide process (e.g. Edwards, 1997 and Field, 2001). This has
expanded the domains in which learning is now a concern for practitioners and the
range of people who might be considered to have an educational role. Historically,
this learning is not new, but the extent of interest in it from the educational research
community is relatively recent and seemingly expanding. Workplaces in particular
have become a domain of specific interest, as has the role of supervisors and
managers in supporting learning. However, other domains such as the home,
community and social movements are also significant. There is also the influence
of, for instance, the growth of the consumer market in learning opportunities (Field,
1996) and the distributed opportunities and self-structuring practices provided by
the Internet and other technologies (Lea and Nicoll, 2002). The growth of elearning and what some refer to as borderless education (Cunningham, et al. 1997)
raises significant questions regarding the relationships that can be fostered across
cultures with implications regarding the different cultures of teaching and learning
in different domains and the value placed on different forms of knowledge and
knowing. Learning has for many been defined as contained within the ‘spaces of
enclosure’ of the classroom, the book and the curriculum (Lankshear, et al. 1996).
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Identifying learning in diverse domains and settings then requires different
conceptual framings.
There are questions then about the relationships between learning in these different
domains and how people learn in specific settings. By the latter I understand a
particular situation within a domain where learning is occurring. A setting may
therefore be a learning centre in a workplace, a particular example of the workplace
as a domain of learning. Domain and setting may therefore be considered
descriptive concepts. Thus the learning that takes place may be described as taking
place within a workplace learning centre or the domain of the workplace, but this
does not provide an explanation of its occurrence. For the latter I would suggest we
need an explanatory concept of context, embracing the diachronic and synchronic
inter-relationships at play within a particular setting. How best to conceptualise this
view of a learning context as a learning context? Once we look beyond the
conventional settings for learning in education and training institutions, allowing
context to be extended into the dimension of relationships between individual
learners and variously defined others mediated through a range of social,
organisational and technological artefacts, then the limitations of much
conventional understandings of learning and context come into sharp focus.
While this is recognised by many researchers, debates in and around it often
resolves themselves into a set of binaries, 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 literacy
studies, the focus is on vernacular/contextualised and formal/decontextualised
literacy practices (Barton and Hamilton, 1998). In educational research, the debate
has become focused around either informal or experiential learning and formal
learning. Each identifies that learning is occurring in different domains, where
everyday practices are contrasted with those of educational institutions. It is
learning in the latter which are more powerful, as learning within these contexts has
authority through the practices and rituals of assessment and qualification. Indeed
the binaries are often used precisely as a basis through which to critique the power
invested in educational institutions. The range of learning contexts and what can be
identified as learning is therefore extended. However, the contrastive nature of the
formulations often over-simplifies, given that educational practices are everyday for
many, and the everyday itself involves encounters with many more formal practices
than those associated with education alone. What can result from such formulations
is precisely a recentring of education, as the binaries identify a gap, providing a
narrative for an educational discourse of how to overcome or fill it. Thus the
discourse of transfer to which I will return.
Learning in different contexts may involve different types of learning of different
subjects for different purposes, so we might need to question the extent to which, as
educational researchers and pedagogic practitioners, we should try to overcome the
gaps or plug them by the development of, for instance, core/key or transferable
skills. The educational rationale for such an approach is often that education is not
recognising or developing the full potential of learners by not mobilising their
capacities in formal settings. Such is often the argument in relation to the
recognition of prior experiential learning. However, this has a centring logic to it,
which tends also to deny conflict and difference in and through learning. It assumes
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the inherent worthwhileness of education that denies the very struggles in and
around it, where some people precisely seek to keep a gap between their lives and
what is educationally available. In other words, such challenges to conventional
institutional practices can paradoxically merely reinforce the authority of those
institutions. And indeed, it may be the capacity of those institutions to transcend the
everyday, rather than give greater recognition to it, that marks their capacity to do
more than simply reproduce existing exercises of power (Daniels, 2001).
My concern is that in starting with what can be read as certain binaries, a whole
discourse is produced as a result that sends us down particular pathways, looking at
certain things in certain ways. The discourses of lifelong learning here can
reproduce a sense of boundedness, of an inside and outside of learning, even as it
appears to challenge it. There might be everyday learning but there is a sense in
which education is positioned as a context separate from the everyday rather than as
a part of the everyday. Such bounded senses of context therefore remain powerful,
even as they are posed as problematic.
The challenge of lifelong learning entails a framing of context somewhat differently
from that which is often the case. A conventional view of context views it as a
bounded container into which something else is placed.
In all common-sense 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,
1996: 282)
Learning is bounded by context and often explained by it as well. It is a container
within which learning takes place. Conventionally we might view an education
institution such as a college or university as a learning context. What goes on in it is
learning. What goes on outside it is something else. The relationship between the
two is not always and does not need to be strong. Indeed this concept of a context
as a container for learning paradoxically fuels practices in educational institutions
that value precisely decontextualised and generalised knowledge, where we might
say that the degree to which the learning can travel is in proportion to its level of
abstraction. This is the much-critiqued caricature of the educational institution as
‘ivory tower’. In this sense, it is the decontextualisation of knowledge that results in
increased transferability. The context as setting provides a boundary, learning is
separated from that which goes on outside educational institutions and abstraction
and generalised knowledge become valued (Chaiklin and Lave, 1996). We
therefore witness two different ways in which the question of context can be
articulated, as knowledge and as setting.
It is the concept of context as bounded setting or container which has been
problematised by those working with situated theories of learning in attempts to
account for the valuing of decontextualised knowledge within the socially situated
practices of educational institutions. As Lave (1996: 24) suggests, ‘a theoretical
account of (de)contextualisation as situated practice should account for how such
formalist views of the world are sustained in practice’.
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Discourses of lifelong learning trouble the notion of context as container precisely
because it becomes possible for all settings and domains, indeed all social practices,
to be signified as learning contexts. These domains can be conceived as separate
contexts in their own rights of course, e.g. home, workplace, but they trouble the
sense of boundedness in conventional understandings of context and the value
invested in decontextualised knowledge. A range of theories of everyday practices
have emerged within which learning has become a key focus, as ‘participation in
everyday life may be though of as a process of changing understanding in practice,
that is, learning’ (Lave, 1996: 6). Concepts of communities of practice (Lave and
Wenger, 1991, actor-networks (Nespor, 1994) and activity systems (Engestrom, et
al. 1999) have come to the fore to help frame an understanding of learning in
practice. While emerging from the different theoretical traditions of symbolic
interactionism, poststructuralism and Vygotskian psychology, and therefore not
easy bedmates, those working with these conceptualisations share a concern for
practice-based understandings of learning and the need for a reconceptualisation of
the notion of context. Here value is given to relational understandings of contextual
knowing. Despite their theoretical differences, there has been a degree of concept
borrowing from one framing to another. Fundamental to such approaches is a
framing of context as a ‘weaving together of people and their tools in complex
networks. The network is the context’ (Russell and Yanez, 2003: 336, emphasis in
original). With their interest in learning in everyday life, these theories provide
obvious resources for those interested in conceptualising lifelong learning, although
not all give as much attention to questions of power in the weaving that takes place.
What results from this is a focus on contextualisation as an emergent part of
practice, rather than context as a pre-existing container for practice. Here ‘context is
not so much something into which someone is put, but an order of behaviour of
which one is part’ (McDermott, 1996: 290). I take practice to have social,
psychological and semiotic aspects, where given their relational nature, we need to
explore the interactant, intersubjective and intertextual/discursive practices and
their affordances through which contextualisation emerges. I use the notion of
interactant rather than interactive to point to social participation of the human and
non-human in the practising of contextualisation, to address the issues of the
material affordances and exercises of power at play. The relational nature of
practice also points to the ways in which, at an explanatory level, contexts cannot
be simply separated out from one another, despite the many attempts to do this.
Any context therefore has traces of other practices, which, points the their
polycontextuality (Tuomi-Grohn, et al., 2003) and exercises of power inscribed
within them. Thus I am suggesting the attempt to perform a container notion of
context can never be entirely successful, as relational traces are at play in the very
practices of contextualisation. Rather then than work with the contrastive binaries
of, for instance, the formal and informal, we may need to focus on the relational
polycontextualising practices in our discourses of lifelong learning. This involves
significant challenges to many conventional framings of lifelong learning.
We are faced with many theoretical challenges in formulating a discourse of
learning contexts within that of lifelong learning, wherein the very notion of
context as container – the educational institution, the classroom, the curriculum, the
book – becomes insufficient to help explain the learning which takes place in
everyday life across a range of domains and settings. However, the attempts to
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sustain container-like contexts remain powerful, as they are ways of keeping things
and people in their place. This in turn starts to problematise the discourses of
lifelong learning, as inscribing learning into the meaning of diverse practices may
be resisted for all sorts of good reasons.
One issue of particular importance that emerges from the above is that, if context is
relational and learning is integral to everyday practices, how then can we
conceptualise learning across a range of practices? Does mobility entail the
abstraction of knowledge? Does it entail new learning? It is to these questions that I
now turn.
Minding the gap?
There has been much debate over the years about the gap between learning in
different contexts and how to overcome it, informed in many instances by a
container-like view of context, where learning has to escape over the boundary. To
a great extent, this is formulated as an issue of transfer, from classroom to
classroom, course to course, school to school, college to university, college to
work, work to college, etc. Here people move from one container-like context to
another and the extent to which they do or can transfer their learning from one
context to another is a crucial educational issue. The discourses of core skills,
transferable skills, transferability of skills and skills of transfer have been much in
play (Harrison, 1996). A lot of the discourse of transfer draws, often implicitly,
upon work in cognitive psychology. It also tends to assume that context is a
container and work with the contrastive binaries I referred to in the previous
section. The extent to which skills can be simply adapted to new context or involve
higher order cognitive processing has been referred to as ‘low road transfer’ and
‘high road transfer’. The former relates to situations in which there is sufficient
commonality of context for intuitive transfer to be possible. The latter refers to
where the contexts differ sufficiently for more deliberative processes – e.g.
generalisation, drawing of analogies - to be necessary for transfer. In these
conceptions, it is the individual who cognitively makes the relations between
contexts.
However, in the practice-based views of learning upon which I am drawing, with
the questioning of container-like conceptualisations of context, there is also
increased recognition of the complexity of transfer and indeed a view that the very
concept of transfer may not be helpful (Hatano and Greeno, 1999 and Volet, 1999).
In practice-based theories, it is sometimes suggested that, as learning is
situated/contextualised, there is a requirement for
disembedding/decontextualisation and resituating/recontextualisation for learning
across and between practices. The extent to which the decontextualising and
recontextualising involve both setting and knowledge is relevant here, as moving
may or may not involve abstraction in both senses of context.
Eraut (2004: 256) offers one such conceptualisation of learning from one context to
another. It entails the interrelated stages of:
1. the extraction of potential relevant knowledge from the context(s) of its
acquisition and its previous use
2. understanding the new situation – a process that depends on informal
social learning
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3.
4.
5.
recognising what knowledge and skills are relevant
transforming them to fit the new situation
integrating them with other knowledge and skills in order to
think/act/communicate in the new situation.
However, this can be read as another example of high road transfer framed within
an understanding of context as container, where the individual has to do the
cognitive work of transformation. Relationality is gained through the learners’
practices alone. This contrasts with the notion of polycontextualisation with which I
am working, as there can be many aspects to relating learning from one setting to
another, based, for instance, on artefacts, affinity groups, storylines, emotions. So,
for instance, the use of computers for games in the home and learning packages in
the workplace affords certain social practices, which have similarities but differ in
meaning. Similarly, multimedia and music students may do similar practices in
their homes to those they do in their educational institutions, i.e. write computer
programmes, play or write music/songs, but conceive their home activities as
leisure rather than as learning. Polycontextualisation relies on creating spaces for
the relationships between those practices to be articulated more closely rather than
relying on individuals cognitive ability alone. In other words, relating learning
polycontextually involves relational practices and relies to a certain extent on the
affordances of different domains and forms of relationality. It involves making and
following the intersubjective, interactant and intertextual/discursive traces in
practices. This may be resisted by those whom we attempt to inscribe a meaning of
learning into their practices, which they semiotically code in other ways through
their own interrelationships, which may or may not involve setting certain
contextual boundaries. It might also be said to be part of what the pragmatist
philosopher William James referred to as the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’, identifying
certain practices as learning which have alternative meanings for those who are
engaged in them (see Midtgarden 2005). Thus the suggestive comment by
McDermott (1996: 277) that ‘it probably makes more sense to talk about how
learning acquires people more than it makes sense to talk about how people acquire
learning’.
To move away from the cognitive concept of transfer, discourses of boundary
zones, boundary-crossing and boundary objects have emerged (see Tuomi-Grohn
and Engestrom, 2003). This is to make explicit the practices and artefacts through
which learning is mediated, but also to identify that objects may be part of many
contexts, given that the latter are not containers. Rather than focus on transfer of an
existing skills set, the practices themselves, while identifiable as the same at some
level, take on a different significance when networked into a different set of
practices. So, for instance, a literacy event around the use of the computer in the
home and workplace may be similar in terms of describing what someone is doing
e.g. writing an email, but not the same due to the symbolic and material practices
within which that usage is mediated. Conventionally we might focus on what
occurs in one context to the exclusion of others. When we start to question this,
what becomes interesting are the relational polycontextual practices, wherein
people either do or are invited to bring aspects of other parts of their practices into a
different setting or domain. These are not closed contexts but networked practices,
which give rise to alternative framings and metaphors, specifically those that focus
on the boundary as a zone rather than a wall between contexts, and where it is
through mediation rather than abstraction that learning travels. In some senses,
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certain notions of simulations, contextualised learning and authentic learning
attempt to do this relational work within specific settings.
Here the notion of a boundary object is useful to help us conceptualise learning as
relational and polycontextual. The notion of boundary objects was developed in
actor-network theory (ANT) (Star, 1989), but has also been taken up by Wenger
(1998) in his conceptualisation of communities of practice. In ANT, ‘like the
blackboard, a boundary object “sits in the middle” of a group of actors with
divergent viewpoints’ (Star, 1989: 46). Boundary objects circulate through
networks playing different roles in different situations. Thus my use of the example
of the computer above. Boundary objects are not merely material; they can be ‘stuff
and things, tools, artefacts and techniques, and ideas, stories and memories’
(Bowker and Star, 2000: 298). They are what carry the traces to which I have
already referred. They are objects which are not necessarily contained or
containable by context, but are mobile and networked between differing situations,
dependent on the various affordances at play. These can be based upon specific
pedagogic performances which seek to make connections rather than deny them, or
simply take place because they are the tokens through which people relate their
practices from one setting to another. They do not pre-exist practices, but rely on
those practices to make them into boundary objects. Thus for instance, the novel,
The Lord of the Rings, can be read as a fantasy, but also as a metaphor for the
beginning researcher’s trials and travels As such, it demonstrates its
polycontextuality, situated within and related to both literature and educational
research. It performs and is performative as a boundary object.
For Wenger (1998: 107) boundary objects work at the edges of communities of
practice mediating their external relationships; ‘they enable co-ordination, but they
can do so without actually creating a bridge between the perspectives and the
meanings of various communities’. Artefacts act as boundary objects if they have a
number of characteristics:
1) modularity: each perspective can attend to one specific portion of the
boundary object…
2) abstraction: all perspectives at once by deletion of features that are
specific to each perspective…
3) accommodation: the boundary object lends itself to various activities…
4) standardisation: the information contained in a boundary object is in a
prespecified form so that each constituency knows how to deal with it
locally… (Wenger, 1998: 107).
There are some possible pedagogical implications here, not least because ‘using an
artifact as a boundary object requires processes of coordination and translation
between each form of partial jurisdiction’ (Wenger, 1998: 108). This requires
brokers. However, there is a danger that boundary objects in Wenger’s formulation
are re-situated in a concept of context, in his case communities of practice, as
container. The boundary zone is that which exists between rather than that which
sits in the centre. I prefer the actor-network theory view that such objects sit in the
middle of diverse actors rather than sitting at the edge of a community of practice.
Here ‘highlighting intersectionality shifts the philosophical inquiry from entity to
activity, and things, no matter what their name, become the loci of interaction rather
than stable bodies’ (Waltz, 2004: 166).
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What I am suggesting therefore is that discourses of lifelong learning could both
reflect and help to frame a practice-based understanding of polycontextuality and
relationality, but also that such a notion of learning can be better understood
through being situated within such discourses. This leads many of us into
unfamiliar territory and introduces different and troubling conceptualisations.
However, to repeat, if we are to understand learning as lifelong and lifewide, then
we need to be troubled…
Researching lifelong learning
Framing our understanding of context within discourses of lifelong learning begins
to raise some fairly fundamental questions for research, the assumptions upon
which they are built and their consequences. These are not amenable to easy answer
and the above does not provide a firm basis for conclusions regarding what would
be ‘better’. Research and scholarship is often thought of as a settling of things, but
it is equally an unsettling. What I have proposed is designed to be unsettling and
cannot be other than that. The question of context is large and many debates in
different domains might be and are indeed relevant. We may therefore need to ask
questions about the contextualising practices of research, those practices that
fashion certain units of data as meaningful, for example, the classroom, the
workplace, the home.
In the domains of lifelong learning research and practice therefore, there are
significant issues to be addressed and tensions in approaches to practice and
descriptions and explanations of learning. How such framings constitute a learning
context and their implications for learning, teaching and pedagogy across the
lifecourse requires closer attention therefore, as ‘events in the world do not exist for
people independently of the language people use to make sense of them’ (Mehan
1996: 262). Practising container-like contexts for learning may be necessary for
certain purposes, in the valuing of certain forms of knowledge, skills and
understanding and also in resisting them. But any such container is leaky insofar as
the traces of other practices still flow through it.
In attempting to conceptualise a notion of polycontextuality that has pedagogic
significance, we have to consider the different levels of conceptualisation that are
possible and how they might relate to each if at all. So, for instance, what if we
continue to view context as descriptive, as a container within which learning
occurs? What if we consider it explanatory, wherein context explains that which
occurs? What if we view context as complex, co-emerging with the activities with
which it has affordances? What type of metaphors do we use to conceptualise our
notions of polycontextuality – network, activity, mediation, trace? And, if learning
is lifelong and lifewide, then does the notion of learning context lose its
significance by embracing all social practices? In which case, should we rephrase
the question and ask, what constitutes an educative context?
What I think is clear is that a neatly bounded concept of context is no longer
felicitous within discourses of lifelong learning and alternative framings are
necessary. This might entail framing lifelong learning as human and non-human
practises of boundary making, examining the traces that are constantly being
performed, within which contexts are co-emergent with practices. It might entail
displacing the discourse of lifelong learning. Context is not an open backcloth upon
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which we wander, but is made in different ways by different actors through our
wanderings.
Note
1. The ideas explored in this paper have been rehearsed in different forms on a
number of occasions in 2005. I would like to thank the many people who have
engaged with me on the issues raised and the formulations put forward. The paper
is an attempt at a finding/process rather than an articulation of findings/outcomes. It
is based upon work funded by the ESRC’s Teaching and Learning Research
Programme (ref: RES-139-25-0174).
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