The class: social networking and the changing practices of learning – Learning outside the school

This was the title of a talk I gave in the Department for Creative and Cultural Arts,   Hong Kong Institute of Education 27th August 2012.

In the talk I reflected  on two linked themes emerging from The Class project.

– I questioned what it means to talk about the home as a site for learning describing the ‘educational bricolage’ that goes on in domestic environments as parents and children negotiate the pressures of commercial interests in opening up these spaces amidst an intensification of the pedagogicization of every-day life.

– I reported on  the processes, patterns and meanings of how some young people learn music outside of formal education.  Music means different things to the young people and they exhibited a range of different modes of learning to play an instrument and become proficient in musicmaking. These modes challenge, complements, supplement and in some cases suborn the practices of musicmaking we observed at the school.

The Class: reflecting on a year- long multi-method project

I shared ongoing thoughts from the current research project, The Class, part of the Connected Learning Research Network funded by The MacArthur Foundation as part of its Digital Media Learning program at a seminar for the new centre for Children, Youh and Media at QUT, Brisbane on 24th August, 2012.

Working with an ‘ordinary’ London school, I have been following the ‘learning ‘networks within and beyond a single class of 13-14 year olds at home, school and elsewhere over the course of an academic year – observing social interactions in and between lessons; conducting interviews with children, parents, teachers and relevant others; and mapping out-of-school engagements with digital networking technologies to reveal both patterns of use and the quality and meaning of such engagements as they shape the learning opportunities of young people.

In the talk I reflected  the range of methods, methodologies and heuristics we have used to collect and make sense of a project of this nature and at this scale. I will describe the range of data we have collected, the different methods we used to collect and access it and how we are working to code and interpret it.

 

Home

I contributed to a keywords seminar at the Centre for Children, Youth and Media and Queensland University of Technology in August 2012. Using The Class project I talked about how the home is now a contested site of learning.

Cultural Pedagogies

I gave a paper at an invitation seminar at the University of Western Sydney on Cultural Pedagogies in August 2012. The seminar aimed to to explore discussion  about what might constitute ‘cultural pedagogies’, and to open up debate across disciplines, theories and empirical focus to explore both what is pedagogical about culture, and what is cultural about pedagogy.

My paper was called:

The problem of pedagogy and everyday life or when is pedagogy not a pedagogy?

I argued that contemporary Education policy and research is dominated by interest in and studies of the penetration of learning as a life-long, life-wide project of the self. Significantly driven by speculation about ways that digital technology may (or may not) be breaking down traditional structures of educational provision there is enormous interest in the ‘pedagogization of everyday life’ and development and meaning of ‘informal learning’. For example, I am currently engaged in a year long ethnographic study of one class of 13-14 year olds in London exploring: in what ways do social networks, including digitally mediated networks, enable or impede young people’s learning and learner identity; how children’s digital media activities, embedded in daily practices and regimes of learning and leisure in and beyond the classroom, enable new forms of connected (or disconnected) learning; and how the wider opportunity structures of peers, school, family and community enable diverse learning outcomes.

In this paper I want use findings from this project – in particular the different ways that participants frame the idea of ‘learning’ in school and in everyday life -to question casual and generalised uses of pedagogy as an analytic category in studies of ‘not-school’ learning. I want to argue that principles of progression, of change over time, and expertise must be central to the term’s usefulness rather than simple (and empirically problematic) ideas about subjectivity and identity. Whilst there is no doubt that we can describe all sorts of frames and ‘opportunity structures’ that construct (and delimit) opportunities for learning, how useful is it to bracket all of these together as forms of pedagogy?

A draft version of the paper can be found  at seftongreen discussion paper2

 

Who ‘designs’ the home as a site for learning?

I gave this talk at the Designs for Learning 2012 conference in Copenhagen in April 2012. The Talk used data drawn from The Class project and explored images of learning from home visits. My argument is that there is intense global interest in learning outside of the school and in this new educational order, the ‘home’ has become a vital ‘new’ terrain for all sorts of learning – formal, informal and semi-formal. Based on on-going research exploring the connected learning lives of a class of young people in London, the presentation  questioned what it means to talk about the home as a site for learning. It  described the ‘educational bricolage’ that goes on in domestic environments as parents and children negotiate the  pressures of commercial interests in opening up these spaces amidst an intensification of the pedagogicization of every-day life.

The talk will be online soon. The Powerpoint is available here.

Researching Learning in Out-of School Environments – Challenges for Theory and Research

Last week I attended the first meting of The Nordic Research Network on Learning Across Contexts (NordLAC). The topic of this meeting was to explore identity and contexts for learning. My talk aimed to: reflect on the current interest in learning out-of-school (politics & policy); explore the intersections of policy and research; raise some methodological issues relating to the challenge of researching out-of-school. I tried to do this by bringing together some recent work  from the Oslo based Learning Lives project , ongoing work on The Class and my MacArthur MacReport on learning in not-school situations (currently in production).

 

Developing & Investigating Methodologies for Researching Connected Learning (DIMRCL)

This week sees the first meeting of a new research network (DIMRCL) based at the LSE and  supported by the MAcArthur Foundation.

This working group brings together a unique set of international researchers, from the UK, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Norway who have been exploring and investigating ways to understand how learners might learn across different sites and locations. These include: learning across institutional frames- between in-, non- and semi- formal locations; learning on- and offline; through and in play; and across a range of cultural and interest driven spaces. The specific objective of the project is to clarify and typologise appropriate and innovative methodologies that have been used to characterise and capture new kinds of ‘connected learning’.

Whilst there is considerable academic and policy and innovation interest in connected learning as ways to harness the energies of learners themselves and to stimulate school reform, it is still a challenge for researchers to describe and know how connected learning takes place. This is significantly because satisfactory or agreed ways to ‘follow’ learners across, and between sites (either physical as in home/school/youth provision/with peers) or virtual (on fora, in gaming, social networks or via mobile technologies) or conceptually (tracing, translating and re-configuring understandings across contexts) is self –evidently complex and difficult. Methodological challenges are simultaneously: practical –  how to track  and physically follow learners; ethical and legal – how to ensure access and trust across social domains; and conceptual – what might constitute evidence of learning?

This working group will enable the sharing of best practice in two directions – firstly, ensuring that the emerging insights from active researchers on digital media learning are incorporated into on-going research (especially important since much of this work is very new and not yet published), and secondly, providing an opportunity for the insights developed within the workshops to be made publicly available for other researchers working on related projects internationally.

Principal Investigators: Sonia Livingstone, Julian Sefton-Green, Kirsten Drotner, Ola Erstad, Kristiina Kumpulainen, Nicoletta Vittadini