The SAGE Handbook of Learning

David Scott, Eleanore Hargreaves, David Scott, Eleanore Hargreaves, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781446287569
• eBook ISBN: 9781473933606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

"Profound and useful, readers will benefit from the systematic treatment of learning through superb scholarship. Cultural-philosophical-curricular-pedagogical-historical perspectives on learning, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, and learners make this collection unique." - Carol A. Mullen, Professor of Educational Leadership, Virginia Tech

Learning is a fundamental topic in education. Combining traditional views of learning and learning theory with sociocultural and historical perspectives, this Handbook brings together original contributions from respected researchers who are leading figures in the field.

The editors provide a insightful introduction to the topic, and the theories, frameworks, themes and issues discussed in the individual chapters are central to each and every learning episode.

The Handbook is organized into four sections, each beginning with a short introduction:

 

• Philosophical, Sociological and Psychological Theories of Learning
• Models of Learning
• Learning, Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment
• Learning Dispositions, Life-Long Learning and Learning Environments

 

2
Introduction (Part I)

David Scott and Eleanore Hargreaves

This book is divided into four parts: Theories of Learning; Elements of Learning; Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment; and The Learner. The theories, frameworks, schema and perspectives discussed in this first part are central to learning and indeed always refer to something. This form of words avoids the problem of representation, and, indeed, though rarely acknowledged, this is the most pressing issue faced by theorists and framers of learning. As we suggested in the ‘Introduction’ (Scott and Hargreaves, Chapter 1 in this volume) it is possible to organise theories of learning into four categories: behaviourist, phenomenological, constructivist (cf. Chaiklin and Daniels in this volume) and materialist (cf. Fenwick, Edwards and Osberg in this volume), and to distinguish between them in terms of this referential relationship.

Epistemology has traditionally been concerned with what distinguishes different knowledge claims; specifically between legitimate knowledge and opinion and belief. We want to suggest that theorising, and in particular, theorising learning, is a contested activity and this is in part because it is epistemically framed. There are four possible types: positivist/empiricist, interpretivist, critical and postmodernist. When in the nineteenth century the social sciences were beginning to be developed, they did so under the shadow of the physical sciences. Therefore as immature sciences they sought to mirror the procedures and approaches adopted by the natural sciences (or at least by an etiolated version of scientific methodology which rarely equated with how scientists actually behaved).

Such positivist/empiricist approaches can be characterised in the following way. There is a real world out there and a correct way of describing it. This allows us to think that theorising is simply a matter of following the right methods or procedures. What follows from this is that the knowledge produced from this algorithmic process is always considered to be superior to common-sense understandings of the world, by virtue of its systematicity and rigour. Science works by accumulating knowledge, that is, it builds incrementally on previous knowledge. However, it is hard to argue that the social sciences have developed a body of knowledge which presents unequivocal truths about its subject matter. Furthermore, twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy has generally accepted that any observations we make about the world, including those which are central to the research process and can be construed as ‘facts', are always conditioned by prior understandings we have of the world. There are no theory-free facts, and this puts at risk the distinction made by positivists/empiricists between observation and theory.

The positivist/empiricist method equates legitimacy with science (although this is very much an idealised view of scientific activity) and is characterised as a set of general methodological rules. A clear distinction is made between knowers and people and objects in the world. Facts can be identified, free of the values and personal concerns of the observer. Thus, any assertions or statements we make about the world are about observable measurable phenomena, and this implies that two theorists if they apply the correct method would come to the same conclusions. It is the correct application of the method that guarantees certainty and trust in the theories we produce. Although all these assumptions are significant in their own right, they give the impression that positivism and empiricism are simply highly idealised abstruse doctrines; however, such theories have important social consequences and speak as authorities in the world about social and physical matters.

As we have suggested above, this view of theory-development has been disputed by interpretivists, critical theorists and postmodernists, who in their turn have been criticised for not providing a way of developing their theories which fulfils the Enlightenment desire for universal knowledge that is shorn of superstition, personal preference and special pleading. Interpretivists, critical theorists and postmodernists thus sought to provide an alternative to a view of theory-building which prioritised reduction to a set of variables, a separation between the knower and what they sought to know, a means for predicting and controlling the future, and a set of perfectly-integrated descriptions of the world with a view of the social actor as mechanistic and determined. Interpretivist approaches provide one possible alternative. Interpretivists focus on the meanings that social actors construct about their lives and in relation to the world, and argue that human beings negotiate this meaning in their social practices. Human action then cannot be separated from meaning-making, with our experiences organised through pre-formulated interpretive frames. We belong to traditions of thought, and the task of the theorist is to make sense of these interpretations, even though such interpretive activity is mediated by the theorist's own interpretive frame of reference. This is a practical matter for each individual, though of course they cannot make meanings on their own, since all meaning-making is located within culturally and historically located communities of practice. The field of study is therefore the meaningful actions of social actors and the social construction of reality; and one of the consequences is that the social sciences are now thought of as distinct from the natural sciences.

Learning is therefore understood as a practice in the world, primed for investigation, but resistant to algorithmic and mechanistic methods for describing it used in the natural sciences. Critical theorists and critical realists take the interpretivist critique of positivism/empiricism one stage further. In the search for a disinterested universal knowledge, they look for a solution either in communicative competence or in the stratified nature of reality itself (cf. Nunez in this volume). We will focus here on the former, and in particular Habermas's (1987) argument that any claim to theoretical credibility must be able to make the following assertions: this work is intelligible and hence meaningful in the light of the structuring principles of the discourse community it is positioned within; what is being asserted propositionally is true; what is being explained can be justified; and the person who is making these claims is sincere about what they are asserting. These four conditions if they are fulfilled allow a theorist to say something meaningful about learning. The aim above all for a critical theorist is to develop knowledge that is potentially transformative or emancipatory: to detect and unmask those practices in the world that limit human freedom. Its purposes are therefore the direct replacement of one set of values (unjust, muddled and discriminatory) with another (rational, just and emancipatory).

The fourth framework is a postmodernist one, and again it should be noted that it was developed in reaction to positivist and empiricist epistemic frameworks, and in particular to all those epistemologies which posit a real world separate from the activities of the knower. As Lather (2007) suggests, any work or theory should give a voice to those social actors that have been traditionally marginalised (an explicit emancipatory purpose), and in the process undermine and subvert the agendas held by those with more power in the world than others; surface for public discussion those textual devices (both spoken and written) used in conventional theory-development, and suggest ways of countering these powerful knowledge constructions; question how theorists construct their texts and organise their sets of meaning in the world; and re-introduce the theorist into the research text by locating them within those frameworks which act to construct them as theorists and as human beings (cf. Cole in this volume).

All these frameworks cannot be equally correct, and this explains why theorists produce conflicting and contradictory results about important educational and learning matters. However, the situation is more serious than this, since even though theorists may subscribe to the same epistemology, they may still disagree with one another, even if they are focusing on the same set of social problems. The dispute might be about correct and incorrect uses of the method, different views and interpretations of the epistemological tradition to which they claim to belong, or using different interpretive frameworks in relation to the data-set which has been collected. This has been called the crisis of representation, and it is hard to imagine how one can escape from it, since the alternative is to revert back to a pre-Enlightenment time of knowledge being privileged because of who could command the most attention.

However, theorising is too important to simply ignore the problems of representation that we have alluded to above. Indeed, we need to understand how our theories are constructed and how power is ever present in their construction. This is because theory-development is conducted with and through other people (some of them more powerful than others), and the theorist is always in the business of collecting accounts by social actors of their lifeworlds and activities in the world. These accounts are always self-serving, and what we mean by this is not that they are wrong per se, but that they are living documents that enable them to go on in life. They are thus always conditional, and this works in four ways: social actors are unaware of some of the conditions for their actions (every action has a set of conditions underpinning it, for example a speech act requires a language, vocabulary and grammar); they are unlikely to be able to predict all the consequences of their actions, so there are going to be unintended consequences; social actors may not be aware of much of their own knowledge and expertise, in other words, much of their knowledge is tacit, and thus they cannot, except with the greatest of difficulty, surface it in their accounts of their lives; and equally they may be motivated by unconscious forces and impulsions which they find great difficulty in articulating (cf. Sfard in this volume).

In this Part of the book, Deborah Osberg writes on complexity theory and emergentism; Harry Daniels on learning, culture and social interaction; Emma Williams and Paul Standish on learning and philosophy; Iskra Nunez on transcending the dualisms of activity theory from a critical realist perspective; David Cole on Deleuze and learning; Tara Fenwick on socio-materiality and learning; Seth Chaiklin on cultural-historical perspectives on learning; Richard Edwards on post-human and responsible experimentation in learning; David Aldridge on phenomenology and learning; and, finally, Anna Sfard on learning, commognition and mathematics.

References

Habermas, J. (1987) Knowledge and Human Interests, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lather, P. (2007) ‘Validity, qualitative', The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology, George Ritzer (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell Publisher, pp. 5161–5.

3
Learning, Complexity and Emergent (Irreversible) Change

Deborah Osberg

PART 1: BERGSON'S FOLD

Introduction

In this chapter I attempt to map the influence of the ‘field’ of complexity theory on the ‘field’ of learning theory’ in a way that adds something new to the field of ‘complexity and education’ research. However, the task of bringing together the notion of complexity in general and the notion of learning in general is one that is somewhat challenging as both notions are somewhat ‘baggy': that is, they only very loosely ‘fit’ the ideas that they characterise. This is well known in the case of learning which Illeris broadly defines as ‘any process that in living organisms leads to permanent capacity change and which is not solely due to biological maturation or ageing’ (Illeris, 2007: 3). This broad definition calls upon a notoriously complex and diverse array of ideas and renders the problem of learning (what it is as a phenomenon) particularly intractable. Complexity too, however, is a ‘loose-fitting’ notion for it points to a science that is unified only by the notion of ‘emergent’ or ‘irreversible’ change, this being a notion that can be used to describe almost anything. Indeed emergence can be considered to apply not only to physical phenomena such as hurricanes, ecosystems, consciousness, traffic congestion and rock concerts (Corning, 2002) but also to a wide range of human interactions that are underpinned by power, agency and language (Osberg, 2008b; Osberg and Biesta, 2010a). Bearing in mind there are already many well developed scientific and philosophical languages for describing and understanding these phenomena, one question arising from the apparently universal applicability of emergence is whether it is capable of adding anything fundamentally new to already well established philosophical and scientific understandings of the phenomena concerned. In other words, if not simply to colonise existing theorisations of learning, then what is the point of mapping, in a single chapter, the way in which complexity theory relates to learning theory?

A further problem with the task of mapping the influence of the ‘field’ of complexity theory on the ‘field’ of learning theory is that ‘complexity science’ or ‘complexity theory’ and its unifying idea of emergence is not a unified field or theory in the usual sense of the word. Rather, it is a science/theory that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• 1An Introduction and a Theory of Learning
• Part ITheories of Learning
• 2Introduction (Part I)
• 3Learning, Complexity and Emergent (Irreversible) Change
• 4Learning in Relation to Culture and Social Interaction
• 5Learning and Philosophy
• 6A Dialogical Relationship with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory: A Realist Perspective
• 7Deleuze and Learning
• 8Sociomateriality and Learning: A Critical Approach
• 9The Concept of Learning in a Cultural-Historical Perspective
• 10The Post-Human and Responsible Experimentation in Learning
• 11A Phenomenological Perspective on Learning
• 12Learning, Commognition and Mathematics
• Part IIElements of Learning
• 13Introduction (Part II)
• 14Knowledge, Curriculum and Learning: ‘What Did You Learn in School?'
• 15A Social Semiotic Multimodal Approach to Learning
• 16Learners, Politics and Education
• 17Learning, Governance and the European Educational Space
• 18The Elements of a Learning Environment
• Part IIICurriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment
• 19Introduction (Part III)
• 20Formative Assessment: A Success Story?
• 21Professional Development in Dialogic Teaching: Helping Teachers Promote Argument Literacy in Their Classrooms
• 22Interactions between Teaching and Learning Mathematics in Elementary Classrooms1
• 23Violence in Schools: The Role of Authoritarian Learning
• 24Learning, Pedagogy and Assessment
• 25Teaching and Learning in a Global World
• 26Learning in a Professional Learning Community: The Challenge Evolves
• Part IVThe Learner
• 27Introduction (Part IV)
• 28Metacognition and Self-Regulation in Learning
• 29Pedagogy, Fear and Learning
• 30Meta-Learning in Classrooms
• 31Transformative Learning
• 32Learning and Pedagogic Relations
• 33Affective Dimensions of Learning
• 34The Impact of Gender, Race and Class on Learning Dispositions in Schools
• 35Learning and New Media
• 36Harnessing the Power of Knowledge and Beliefs in Teaching and Learning: Interventions that Promote Change
• 37An End-Piece with Some Reflections on Learning
• Author Index
• Index