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Beyond the moorland? Contextualising lifelong learning
This article explores the question of what we might understand to be a learning context within discourses of lifelong learning. If we identify learning as both lifelong and lifewide, how then can we frame a meaningful notion of context and what is its relationship to learning? These are important questions that have been explored within work on situated learning and activity theory. However, they have yet to be explored specifically in relation to the notion of lifelong learning. This is the task of this article, which is theoretically driven and speculative.
Keywords lifelong learning; context; transfer; practice; polycontextualisation; boundary objects.
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, p. 5, emphasis in original) Objects need symbolic framings, storylines and human spokespersons in order to acquire social lives; social relationships and practices in turn need to be materially grounded in order to gain spatial and temporal endurance. (Pels et al., 2002, p. 11)
Introduction
In previous work (Edwards, 1997), I argued that the discourse of adult education was being displaced in many parts of the world by a discourse of lifelong learning. I suggested that the bounded nature of adult education as a field of practice, policy, scholarship and research was giving way to a more open moorland of lifelong learning, embracing a wider range of practices and research. Colleagues from around the globe rightly pointed to the UK-centric metaphor of the moorland and suggested that moorlands are also inscribed by exercises of power and are not simply open. Alternative metaphors to that of the moorland, such as desert, tundra and outback were posited. However, the metaphorical connotations of the moorland of lifelong learning seemed to have resonances in many places. A number of years on, it seems to me that the discourse of lifelong learning is both still in play and still attempting to do much of the type of work I outlined in 1997.
There are many issues that arise from conceptualising lifelong learning in this way. At the time that I wrote of the moorland, I was unaware of how reflexively this was in tune with contemporary discussions of space and spatiality and the role of categorisation in ordering the social (Bowker and Star, 2000). Here lifelong learning signifies a different spatialisation of practices from adult education and, as a category, orders the world in a different way. A number of years on, and after much meandering on the moorland, I have explored these issues explicitly elsewhere (Edwards and Usher, 2000; Edwards, 2003) and it has raised important questions, only one of which I wish to focus on here.
This is the question of what we understand as a learning context within a discourse of lifelong learning. This might seem a mundane line of enquiry, or esoteric, not worth pursuing. 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, and so on. The mundane practices of the everyday are re-signified as forms of experiential or informal learning. But how do we understand the nature of those contexts and how are they bounded, if at all? And indeed, what is our understanding of learning in relation to context? The problem posed by Lave in the quotation above is telling here. The question of context is largely left uninvestigated. It is precisely this invisibility that makes the notion of context worth pursuing, as it is in the taken for granted that much work is done. If learning is lifelong and life-wide, what makes something specifically a learning context 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 of this to be done, not least to develop an adequate language of description through which to articulate the practices of lifelong learning.
The purpose of this article is therefore to open a space within which these questions can be explored. In the process, 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. In Pels et al.'s (2002) terms, I am attempting to give different storylines to a particular aspect of lifelong learning. This, in itself, is not new. Writers involved in research on socially situated practice and activity have been concerned about the nature of context for some time (Chaiklin and Live, 1996). What is different is my attempt to locate this concern specifically in relation to the emergence of discourses of lifelong learning.
The article 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 all 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, no inherent boundary between contexts, only those made through practices which create boundaries. 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 article 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 practice across and between contexts, in particular the concept of boundary objects. The third part of the article tries to identify emerging questions which researchers in this arena either are addressing or could address in considering the nature of a learning context in lifelong learning. The article is theoretically driven and, while providing storylines, also attempts to open a space within which others might like to participate.
lifelong learning contexts?
The increasing interest in learning as a lifelong and lifewide process (for example Edwards, 1997; Field, 2001) 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. The mundane practices of the everyday are also open to exploration for the learning within them (Moran, 2005). There is also the influence of, for instance, 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 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 contexts and the value placed on different forms of knowledge and knowing. Learning has, for many, been traditionally defined as contained within the "spaces of enclosure" of the classroom, the book and the curriculum (Lankshear et al., 1996). Identifying learning in diverse domains and sites requires different conceptual framings.
There are questions then about the relationships between learning in these different domains and how people learn in specific situations. I understand the latter to be an example within a domain where learning is occurring. A situation may therefore be a learning centre in a workplace, and thus a particular example of the workplace as a domain of learning. Domain and situation may therefore be considered descriptive concepts. Thus the learning that takes place may he 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 a context, embracing the diachronic and synchronic interrelationships at play within a particular situation. How best to conceptualise this view of a learning context as a learning context then? Once we look beyond the conventional situations for learning in education and training institutions, allowing context to be extended into the dimension of relationships between individuals and variously defined others, mediated through a range of social, organisational and technological artefacts, then the limitations of much conventional understanding of learning and context come into sharp focus.
While this is recognised by many researchers, debates in and around it often resolve 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 on 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. The range of learning contexts is therefore extended and thus what can be identified as learning. However, the contrastive nature of the formulations over-simplifies, given that educational practices are everyday for many, and that the everyday itself involves encounters with many more formal practices than those associated with education. What can result from such formulations is precisely a recentring of education, as the binaries identify a gap, providing a storyline for an educational discourse of how to overcome or fill it. Thus the discourse of transfer emerges to which I will return. Learning in different contexts may involve different types of learning 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 because it foils to mobilise their full capacities in formal sites. Such is often the argument in relation to the recognition of prior experiential learning, for instance. However, this has a centring logic to it, which tends also to deny conflict and difference in and through learning. It assumes that education is inherently worthwhile and benign which denies the very struggles in and around it, where some people seek to keep a gap between their lives and what is valued within education. It is not only educational institutions that set boundaries. For individuals too, there can be important boundaries between one's learning and other identities, despite and sometimes because of the suggested pervasiveness of learning.
My concern is that in starting with those binaries, we provide a narrative footing (Potter, 1996), whereby a whole discourse is produced that sends us down particular pathways, looking at certain things in certain ways. The storylines 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 still positioned as a context separate from the everyday, rather than as a part of it. Such bounded senses of context therefore remain powerful, even as they are posed as problematic.
The challenge entails a framing of context somewhat different from that which is often the case. A conventional version of context views it as a bounded container into which something else is placed, in our case, learning.
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, ft shapes the contours of its contents: it has its effects only at the borders of the phenomenon