1Introduction
This book addresses a basic question in education: How can students learn to put knowledge, developed in one context, to use in other contexts? This question poses a major challenge for present-day educational systems because of the following conundrum: in contemporary society, people are required to traverse a range of different settings with different competence demands, and they often have to utilise knowledge across these different settings. However, research within situated learning has shown that knowledge is learned situatedly, i.e., it takes on form and content from the context in which it is learned (Dohn, 2017; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986; Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991; SchĂśn, 1983). Transfer of knowledge across settings is therefore no straightforward matter. It involves the transformation of the situatedly learned knowledge. Learning to do so emerges as crucial for todayâs students, and facilitating transformation becomes a key task for many educational systems. The overall question for the book thus reads: How can the implications of a situated knowledge view be developed into learning designs aimed at knowledge transformation?
The book enters debates about the competence demands raised by contemporary society and its defining characteristics of mobility, frequent change and globalisation. These competence demands are often analyzed under the heading of â21st century skillsâ (Chu, Reynolds, Tavares, Notari, & Lee, 2017; Kivunja, 2014; P21, n.d.). However, in a recent book â Designing for Learning in a Networked World (Dohn, 2018) â we argued that such analyses lead to an artificial compartmentalisation of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, information technology use, etc. into separate domains. This fails to do justice to the way people actually cope with a situationâs complex unity of requirements and possibilities. Instead, the book identified participatory skills, understood as the attuning to the demands of a given situation, as decisive for adequately engaging in modern world. In particular, we pointed out the need for a âsituated readinessâ for learners to be able to accommodate to the requirements for transformation of knowledge and patterns of participation across contexts.
The focus of the present book is precisely the elaboration of this issue: what is involved in the processes of situated attunement; the adaptation of knowledge to context; the transfer and transformation across settings; and the resituation of knowledge to fit new requirements? It also asks: how can educators design for others to engage in these processes? Our goal is to provide a theory of design for transfer which is at once empirically informed, philosophically consistent and pragmatically useful. In particular, the theory clarifies design for transfer across subject domains; learnersâ diverging study contexts; and contexts both inside and outside education.
With this goal, our book moves the discussion of situated learning forward. Until now, the literature within this field has primarily been focused on the descriptive documentation of the situated nature of learning and cognition and corresponding lack of transfer (Lave, 1988; Lave & Chaiklin, 1993; Nielsen et al., 2008). Recently, broader issues involved in âboundary crossingâ between contexts have also been investigated, e.g. how traversing contexts may lead to shifts in social relations, identities, accountabilities and values (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Thrysøe, 2011; Tuomi-GrĂśhn & EngestrĂśm, 2003a; Wenger, 1998). This research does not address the question of how to design learning opportunities to overcome the problems of transfer which it documents. Studies which take on this question tend to investigate it at a micro-level, looking e.g. at transfer between specific mathematical problems or between lessons in a course (Engle, Nguyen, & Mendelson, 2011; Lobato, 2012; Wagner, 2010). Such studies are valuable, but in order to generalise, they need to be juxtaposed with other studies investigating transfer between more disparate contexts. We do this in the present book with the aim of informing the larger, societally relevant question of how people can learn to transform knowledge across the divergent contexts of their lives.
The aim of this introductory chapter is to provide a background for the book. We do this in two ways. In the next section, we situate the book societally and academically. We do this by expanding on how the problem of transfer â which our focus on designing for situated knowledge transformation aims to address â has come to the fore with the emergence of the knowledge society and how it has been conceptualised in the research literature. This section thus provides background for the bookâs chapters by indicating the broader landscape within which its questions are placed. In the following section, we introduce the bookâs content, presenting what is in effect an executive summary of the answers that its chapters collectively provide to the bookâs overall question. The summary thus serves as a background for the chapters by providing a Vorgriff (Gadamer, 1990) (i.e. an anticipation) of the whole of the book and indicating the role which each chapter plays in creating it.
