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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, 1 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). 2 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 3 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’. 4 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 5 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 6 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, 7 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). 8 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 9 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). References Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (1998) Local Literacies, London: Routledge. Bowker, G. and Star, S. 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