Draft 10: The Ecological Turn: Affordances for Learning Research?
Roy Williams
Abstract
This paper is an exploration of the contribution that ecological theory and ecologically informed research can make to learning theory and research. It builds on the contributions of Gibson and the many researchers who have subsequently critiqued and developed his ideas in ecological psychology, and it build on work in semiotics, applied linguistics, neuro-psychology, complex adaptive systems theory, knowledge management, and learning theory.
The aim is to establish a rigorous ‘ecological’ framework for learning research, and to do this by clarifying and resolving a number of related issues in the fields of perception, cognition, learning theory, and the semiotics of engagement with the world. The thesis of the paper is that the notion of ‘affordances’ can be re-defined rigorously and clearly enough for it to play a central role in an ecological theory of learning, and the paper outlines the requirements for that to be the case.
Keywords: affordances, ecology, semiotics, indication, prediction, identity.
Introduction
If we are to get to grips with the ecological turn in learning theory and research, Gibson’s work is an excellent place to start. “Gibson’s ecological approach has much to offer the study of social behaviour. Most significantly, it redirects attention away from hypothesized mental representations and steps of information processing, focusing rather on the discovery of what actually occurs when people interact” (Valenti and Good 1991: 82-83). Costall writes that it “seems appropriate to remind ourselves of what Gibson’s theory of affordances was meant to be for: … a serious attempt to put meaning back into the world, within a relational ontology” (+), (1995). It was also a serious attempt to counter the cultural and linguistic relativism of some of the social psychology of the time.
Gibson is working with issues of human psychology, but he is working against a much broader ecological canvas, including the full range of animal behaviour, and across individual and social psychology. The purpose of this paper is to build on that broader perspective. This resonates with, and builds on a broad and inclusive semiotics, from the most fundamental material semiotic through to the virtual semiotics of the global internet.
We need to place Gibson within his context to understand the range of issues he deals with, and the range of seemingly contradictory statements he sometimes makes as he moves across this broad spectrum. However, the issue in this paper is not Gibson per se, but rather an exploration of what can be called the ecological turn, as it applies to learning, and an attempt to understand learning both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, so that we can embed meaning and learning firmly “back into the world”.
1. Embedded Meaning
It is only within a broader perspective, i.e. within ecological psychology, rather than either individual psychology or social psychology, and with an understanding of the shifts in social psychology at the time, including cultural and linguistic relativism (e.g. Worf 1956), that we can appreciate Gibson’s really useful (even if imperfect) attempts to ‘put meaning back into the world’, and to account for perception and meaning across animal, human/non-linguistic, and human/linguistic behaviour. This is not a ‘wildly ambitious’ project on his part, it’s just a systematic attempt to challenge the comfort zones that divide psychology neatly into animal/ individual/ & social domains, which conveniently avoids ecological issues, particularly the implications of issues arising from phylogenesis for human ontogenesis. Gibson puts meaning ‘back into the world’, but he also puts meaning ‘back into the body’, with its rich residues and repositories of phylogenetic adaptation and ‘learning’, (see Ramachandran 2003).
Gibson “attempts to put meaning back into the world, first by relating meaning to action, and then by addressing the neglected dualism of agent and world … People are animate: they are active in the world, not just in their heads [+], and it is through their activities that they primarily come to know their world. Indeed, many of the relevant informative structures which support perception, and thereby action, become available only through our movements and activities … What, fundamentally, we attend to in our surroundings [is] … the meaning of things for action [+]” (Costall 1995: 486, 470). St Onge (2004), working in knowledge management, comes to similar conclusions: he defines ‘knowledge’ as the “capacity for effective action”.
We need a close reading of Gibson to understand how he intends to integrate the possibility of direct, individual perception with a truly ecological and social theory. Costall points out that even in his later work, Gibson “appeals, in effect, to a [level of] a-linguistic and ultimately a-cultural … human experience, to argue that perception is not necessarily subverted (+) by language … ‘the observer can always observe more properties of the world than he can describe. Observing is thus not necessarily coerced by linguistic labelling’ (1966: 282)” (Costall 1995: 474). It may be ‘coerced’, but it may not be; we cannot assume linguistic coercion is always the case, or even that linguistic coercion could always be the case. We would have to go to the evidence to argue the case either way, such as the evidence is in neuro-psychology, which is embedded in phylogenesis. Ramachandran (2003) certainly makes out a convincing case against the total hegemony of linguistic coercion, while exploring substantial areas of epi-linguistic, proto-linguistic and non-linguistic ‘neuro-semiotics’. He argues for a notion of linguistics (and several modes of perception too) as a meta-semiotic, or even a poly- or inter-semiotic.
Gibson needs an inclusive and broad range of possible perceptual modalities, from a-linguistic modalities to the most complex, linguistically ‘coerced’ modalities, to deal with the full range of perception, behaviour, and affordances – from the social to the individual and from the explicit to the tacit and un-articulated, if not ‘un-articulable’. The notion that we ‘can observe more than we can describe’ is fully supported by current knowledge management literature, which states that ‘we know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi 1983).
These ideas allow us to build on Gibson’s work, and to integrate our notions of linguistic and a-linguistic affordances – not because they are the same, but because they are parts of a continuum: phylogenetically across species, ontogenetically within Homo Sapiens, and psychologically across the tacit and explicit. In this way, we can establish the foundations for a truly ecological approach to affordances, learning, and adaptive behaviour.
Whereas Gibson reminds us of the possibility of a-linguistic perception (of affordances), Costall reminds us of the social nature of affordances, and the semiotic and material nature of affordances, when he speaks of Gibson’s ecological realism: “it is after all living beings which have brought things into life as affordances, and exist in a mutually transformative [+] relation with their material conditions” (op. cit. 478).
Costall’s notion of the sociality of affordances is based on what we could call a ‘social capital of affordances’, both explicit and tacit: “We experience objects in relation to the community within which they have meaning. .. As Leont’ev (1981) has put it, we do not merely encounter things: we are introduced to them … We inhabit a world already ‘transformed by the activity of generations’” (Costall 1995: 471-472).
Learning in particular does not necessarily have pass through the filters of linguistic coercion, and we must keep in mind that “we can also learn the affordances of things though others, without explicit instruction from them” (op. cit. p. 472). Substantial parts of the Montessori kindergarten environment, including the Trinomial cube (a three dimensional rendition of the Trinomial theorem, see Figure 1, below), can be explored and mastered without any specific instruction, beyond an invitation to explore patterns within interactive materials. In the early-years Montessori environment, children are introduced to carefully designed materials and, implicitly, affordances, most often without specific linguistic and cognitive scaffolding, apart from being introduced to ‘what it is to be shown’ a task.
The materials (literally, he blocks of wood, in their multicoloured and plain wood versions, provide the basic ‘material’ scaffolding for complex mathematical patterns and processes, which many of the children will spontaneously go back to (in the classroom space, and at least tacitly in their minds) when they do formal algebra some years later.
Figure 1: The Trinomial Cube
“As Gibson says (1975/18982a) ‘affordances do not cause behaviour but constrain and control it’ (Costall 1995: 411). Learning about affordances, and acquiring affordances “does not simply concern the uses an object happens to afford, but what it is meant to afford. Objects have their proper or ‘preferred’ affordances (Loveland 1991) … there may be sanctions against deviation … [and] social discomfort” (Costall op. cit. p.472). Applying this to the early-years Montessori environment raises interesting and complex issues. Learners are introduced to affordances each of which is a ‘socialised affordance’, many of which are introduced in silence. Children in a Montessori environment are not invited to ‘play’ with the equipment; they are invited to ‘explore’ particular affordances, even though there may be considerable variation in the way they do this. Affordances are not static, and can be created, challenged, and discarded within a dynamic ecology of adaptive behaviour.
Costall raises the issue of whether all affordances are necessarily social, and writes that: “my intension has not been to insist that all affordances are social, but to include the social squarely within the real. The natural and the social constitute a ‘non-disjunctive division’ (Brushlinskii, 1979). They are not in opposition” (op. cit. p.478).
Following Barthes (‘every use becomes a sign of itself’) and Wittgenstein (‘meaning is use’) we can perhaps resolve the issue by saying that all affordances are either already ‘social’, in the sense of being already “transformed by the activity of generations” or they become socialised: ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ affordances become socialised by their use. On the other hand, established affordances and the objects associated with them, may become re-socialised into different affordances, or even de-socialised (in an homologous sense to Deacon’s de-volution (2003). Affordances are then just like any other elements of social capital (words, gestures, discourses, languages, cultures): dynamic, subject to challenge, change, innovation and dissipation.
The landscape, or eco-scape of affordances may usefully be conceptualised as a dynamic, three-dimensional topography of affordances, with many generally socialised affordances in the topographic plains, some deeply embedded ones in the deep troughs, some innovative, and still quite risky and unstable ones in the peaks, and some ‘falling-off the edges’ of the topography, in a process of demise, de-socialisation, or de-volution.
The social world, and its affordances and the objects associated with them, is not just composed of ‘objective’ commodified artefacts, they exist within a moral framework too. As Costall says, “objects do not simply exist, they are maintained. .. We are justified in taking many things for granted … [e.g.] lifts are supposed to be safe … [because] things should be trustworthy … objects exist within a moral order [+] (op. cit. 473). And he continues that invidious constraints may also be built into objects to deliberately exclude access to affordances, of public utilities for instance.
Just as every use becomes a sign of itself, so too every tool/use becomes at one and the same time a means of articulation within a discourse, and a constituent of that discourse: in the sense of ‘being an element of’ and in the sense of ‘contributing to the way in which it is constituted’. Discourses articulate meaning in signs, but conversely signs become critical and embedded elements of those discourses, and constitute Foucault’s capillaries of power. Or as Gibson says: “’The relation between the animal and its environment is not one of interaction in any sense of the word that I understand. ... it’s one of well, reciprocity’s not too bad … affordances are both objective and persisting and at the same time subjective, because they relate to the species or individual for whom something is afforded’ (Gibson 1982b 234, 237). Neither environments nor organisms can be defined outside of the relationship between them” (Costall 1995: 475).
2. Cognitivism
One of the key dualisms that militates against putting meaning and learning ‘back into the world’ is cognitivism: “a distinct approach to study which insists that perception and action can only be explained by appeal to internal representations and the rules and processes by which they are constructed and then transformed so as to ‘generate’ our behaviour” (Costall 1989: 10). Gibson’s ecological approach provides a potential resolution to this dualism, as he “redirects attention away from hypothesized mental representations and steps of information processing, focusing rather on the discovery of what actually occurs when people interact” (Valenti and Good 1991: 82-83).
Gibson’s controversial notion of ‘direct perception’ needs too many codicils and qualifiers to pursue further, but it marked a radical departure from current theory, and he was trying to address some of the critical issues of European history at the time. In 1939 “Gibson … argued that the Germans no longer were relating to the Jews in any immediate way, as actual individuals, but, instead, indirectly through social stereotypes (Costall 1989: 12)”, and he “sought to define an additional mode of perception, literal perception [later direct perception] which might be free of such distorting influence (p.13)” We will move on beyond the controversy around ‘direct perception’ in this discussion, but it is useful to first appreciate the thrust of Gibson’s enterprise within the context of his work.
In broad terms Gibson was “concerned to reconcile the categories of the natural and the social in his theory. … language does indeed make a difference in structuring the ways we attend to our surroundings … language is not necessarily (+) distorting … [but] he claimed that there is still a pre-social and pre-linguistic mode of perceiving still available to us, which persists largely distinct and unchanged, independently of language … we can see more than we can tell” (Costall 1989: 17).
Costall takes the debate even wider, identifying the issue as “Mediationism: [i.e.]… we do not, and could not, have ‘direct’ contact with our surrounding. Something or other is always supposed to be getting in the way. …. The problem is making a fetish of mediation, so that sensible, non-disjunctive distinctions turn instead into troublesome dualisms. Mediationism has … primarily taken the form of representationalism: the appeal to internal rules and representations as a necessary and sufficient basis for explanation within human psychology” (2007: 109-110).