Learning: the process of coming to know

In the 1990s considerable innovative work was carried out by psychologists developing new understandings of the process of learning. In addressing the methodological issues relating to researching how knowledge is constructed, I will draw mainly on the work of psychologists like Bruner, Cole, Engeström, Lave, Salomon, Wertsch

150 Research methods for ICT in education and Wenger, all of whom have built upon the work of Vygotsky to develop the new

sub-discipline of cultural psychology. The origins of their work lie in the cognitive psychology that replaced behaviourism in the early 1970s, but they have gone beyond simple ideas of mental schema developed ‘in the head’ to an understanding of mind that is socio-culturally embedded.

A good summary of the approach of cultural psychologists is provided by Lave as ‘four premises concerning knowledge and learning in practice’ that were agreed upon by participants in a two-part conference who later contributed to the book she edited with Chaiklin:

1. Knowledge always undergoes construction and transformation in use.

2. Learning is an integral aspect of activity in and with the world at all times. That learning occurs is not problematic.

3. What is learned is always complexly problematic.

4. Acquisition of knowledge is not a simple matter of taking in knowledge; rather, things assumed to be natural categories, such as ‘bodies of knowledge,’ ‘learners,’ and ‘cultural transmission,’ require reconceptualization as cultural, social products.

(Lave 1996, p. 8) Chaiklin and Lave’s edited book Understanding Practice and Engeström and

Middleton’s (1996) collection Cognition and Communication at Work both build upon and considerably extend the concept of ‘situated learning’ (Brown et al. 1989). The understanding that learning is always either supported or constrained by its context is now reinforced by a considerable body of evidence. In particular, there is strong evidence that schools do not provide supportive environments for learning, but may provide the structures which cause many children to develop a ‘failing’ identity. Lave, in her introduction to Understanding Practice, which separates case studies of learning in the workplace from case studies of learning in formal educational settings, writes: ‘Paradoxically, learning craftwork may appear easy in the chapters in Part II (i.e. the workplace settings) whereas in Part III it often seems nearly impossible to learn in settings dedicated to education’ (my addition in brackets; Lave, op. cit., p. 9). She goes on to say that the case studies in educational settings:

provide evidence of the sociocultural production of failure to learn. … They are about how people learn identities and identify the situated meaning of what is to

be learned, and the speciﬁ c shaping of people’s identities as learners. … Students who fail (and perhaps the most successful as well) are the sacriﬁ cial lambs whose fates give material form to legitimate knowledge.

(Lave, op. cit., pp. 10–11)

Wenger offers the ‘reifi cation’ of knowledge as one explanation of the problems learners face in schools. The stratifi cation and codifi cation of knowledge in a textbook or a curriculum ‘creates an intermediary stage between practices and learners’. He cites the use of grammatical categories to teach language as an example and goes on,

Methodological issues 151 ‘Because of this additional step, making sense of the reiﬁ cation becomes an additional

problem that may not exist in practice. … There is a pedagogical cost to reifying in that it requires additional work – even, possibly, a new practice – to make sense of the reiﬁ cation’ (Wenger 1998, p. 264). In the UK, Lings and Desforges report on research into subject differences in primary children’s application of knowledge to learn and conclude that the classroom creates a context in which the children’s goal becomes ‘the efﬁ cient completion of tasks’ rather than the application of subject knowledge:

Children are not lacking cognitive skills; on the contrary, from an early age children appear to be extremely competent thinkers … and from the fi ndings appear to be adept at managing themselves in relation to the perceived demands of the classroom. But if the view is taken that the application of knowledge should be subject-specifi c in classrooms, then while children appear to adapt to work effi ciently, educational goals may be achieved as a lucky by-product rather than as the result of intentional or deliberate learning.

(Lings and Desforges 1999, p. 218)

In the USA, Page reports on detailed case studies of school science, including one in ‘an academically prestigious high school’ in which he identiﬁ ed ‘a veritable absence of science in science classes’ (Page 1999). He goes some way to explaining what he calls ‘the muddlement of knowledge in US schools’ in terms of:

the extraordinary reach, or complexity, of ordinary school lessons … that move from teacher plans to student responses, beyond events in classrooms to the culture of a school, across contemporary hybrids of divergent curricular rationales to long-past historical debates, while traveling between subject matter knowledge and status politics.

(Page 1999, p. 590)

There are so many different inﬂ uences impacting on the classroom that teachers are unable to focus on clear educational objectives. In particular, Page believes that the general ambivalence in society towards school knowledge, and the sense that school is no more than a transit camp to higher education, has undermined students’ motivation and made the job of the teacher nearly impossible.

Together, these studies of learning in educational settings show that there is little relation between what is speciﬁ ed as the formal curriculum and the actual learning that takes place in educational settings. In the UK today, when curriculum speciﬁ cation is tight and assessment and inspection are used to create a competitive, public system of accountability, at best pupils focus upon ‘task completion’ rather than the acquisition of knowledge. At worst, they become alienated or disruptive of good order in the classroom, leading to the problems we are experiencing in high rates of truancy and exclusion.

One of the features that distinguishes those learning environments where learning ﬂ ourishes is purposeful activity. In activity theory, the word activity has a specialist

152 Research methods for ICT in education meaning. It may refer to actions or to a range of other behaviours, including talk

(inter-mental activity), thought (intra-mental activity), and knowledge construction (likely to involve both inter-mental and intra-mental activity). It always involves the use of mediating tools (Wertsch 1998), either artifacts such as books, pens or computers or cognitive tools such as language, numerical tables, or scientiﬁ c concepts like Newton’s laws. Cognitive tools include representations of the artifacts themselves which Cole, following (Wartofsky 1979), calls ‘secondary artifacts’ that ‘consist of representations both of primary artifacts and of modes of action using them’ (Cole 1999, p. 91). Engeström (e.g. 1991, 1999), with Cole and others, has developed a model of human behaviour, derived from Vygotsky and tested in research settings, that incorporates mind, mediating tools and tasks into an activity system. In this system individuals and/or groups engage in activities with purposeful outcomes, assisted or constrained by the unique features (affordances) of the tools themselves and the rules, structures and divisions of labour that govern the micro and macro social groupings in which the activity occurs. Learning is an integral part of the outcomes which may

be predominantly practical or cognitive but will include elements of both, except in the case of conceptual understanding developed on the basis of reiﬁ ed knowledge.

Engeström illustrates activity theory in a model comprising an extended triangle (Figure 9.1). The elements are linked to form a system or net, so that each constrains or facilitates the operation of the others. If this model is applied to learning in classrooms, it can be seen that the setting of classroom tasks (a code of behaviour) by the teacher (a role) to meet the speciﬁ cations of the National Curriculum (an organisational tool), shapes and constrains the purposes (tasks and outcomes) of individual or group work. (It should be noted that the tasks/outcomes which are the focus of the activity system may not be congruent with classroom tasks which are frequently pre-speciﬁ ed and routine.) Educational transformation, therefore, requires changes in rules, structures and roles which would unlock pupils’ motivation by supporting them in the construction of identities (Wenger, op. cit.) and offering them the opportunity to achieve recognition as autonomous and free agents (Elliott,

Tools and artefacts

Individuals Tasks / and groups

outcomes

Rules and

Roles / division codes of

Community /

of labour behaviour

organizational

structures

Figure 9.1 The activity triangle, adapted from Engeström (1991)

Methodological issues 153 op. cit.). Based on the case studies in Understanding Practice (Chaiklin and Lave, op.

cit.) we can conjecture that, to be effective, the models for new rules, structures and roles would need to be drawn from locations outside formal educational settings, such as the workplace (which offers a wide range of models) and the home.

Another of the features that distinguishes those learning environments where learning ﬂ ourishes is that they support a process of ‘distributed cognition’. Cognition and ability have until recently been seen as located exclusively within the individual. In fact, in the UK, the entire system for assessing ability and the acquisition of knowledge to select those suitable for higher education or employment is predicated on this assumption. Hence assessment normally takes place ‘under examination conditions’ which means in silence, without conferring in any way with others, and with the use of only a limited number of speciﬁ ed tools and resources (primary artifacts). It is now recognised, however, that learning is not usually a fully autonomous process and it is much easier to learn – and to demonstrate knowledgeability – in environments that promote talk, interaction and shared activity (Prawat 1991). The case studies presented in Cognition and Communication at Work (Engeström and Middleton, op. cit.) illustrate this process very explicitly. The chapter by Hutchins and Klausen on ‘Distributed cognition in an airline cockpit’, goes beyond the notion of mutual scaffolding of learning through talk to describe an activity system in which it was impossible for the researchers to locate all the relevant ‘cognitive properties’ by observing or interviewing any one of the individual pilots. Not only was the pilots’ knowledge distributed between themselves with variations in understanding and expertise, they also relied upon the representational instruments that were available for their shared use. The researchers needed ‘a unit of analysis’ that ‘must permit us to describe and explain the cognitive properties of the cockpit system that is composed of the pilots and their informational environment. We call this unit of analysis a system of distributed cognition’ (Hutchins and Klausen 1996, p. 17). In this kind of system, technology becomes an indispensable part of the understanding and decision-making (coming-to-know) of each individual and the group, but is not in itself intelligent since it is only of value when it is used by experts. The integration of ICT tools with the process of learning in a system of distributed cognition is becoming an increasingly important part of coming-to-know. However, Salomon (1993a, p. 135) argues for distributed cognition to be seen as additional to individual cognition rather than replacing it: ‘One should regard situations of distributed cognitions not only as ends in themselves but, more important, as means for improving mastery of solo competencies.’ He retains an important place for those situations, like the writing of an academic paper, in which the individual wrestles with ideas and constructs knowledge autonomously. When it comes to the design of situations in which ICT tools enable distributed cognition, he argues that ‘such situations should

be designed to promote or scaffold, rather than limit, the cultivation of individuals’ competencies’.

There is, however, a kind of knowledge that does not ﬁ t easily into the kind of learning environments which appear to be most supportive of learning. This is the knowledge which forms the foundation for our present-day way of life because, for example, it enables planes to ﬂ y and telephones to function and gives us Shakespeare,

154 Research methods for ICT in education the Beatles and the languages of the world: the science, sociology, philosophy,

psychology – and all the other systematised, formal knowledge that is located in subject disciplines. When philosophers focus upon ways of distinguishing different kinds of knowledge, their different functions and their relative values, they are addressing the fundamental problem of education. What should a society pass on to its next generation? How do we distinguish those cognitive tools and cultural artifacts, including disciplinary knowledge, which will provide our children with the capability of becoming ‘autonomous and free agents capable of shaping the conditions of their existence in civil society’ (Elliott, op. cit.)? And, given their need to negotiate their own identity and their desire for recognition, how can we create formal learning environments (schools of the future) in which pupils will engage with teachers in cognitive apprenticeship, acquiring the valued knowledge of our cultural heritage? It is clearly important that we step back from that very traditional curriculum which privileges only formal, generalisable, de-contextualised knowledge (Lave, op. cit., p. 23), and which gives high status exclusively to literacy, individualism, abstractness and unrelatedness (Young, op. cit., p. 19), but ultimately a socio-cultural analysis of knowing and coming-to-know must include interaction with the knowledge and understanding of our socio-cultural heritage. Shakespeare, for example, must live for our children, but we need an education system that enables them to engage with his work actively, through performance, rather than as de-contextualised text-to-be- struggled-with, without any purpose or desire to understand it. To this, Saljo adds the ‘psychological tools’ (what I have called earlier ‘cognitive tools’) that are essential resources for all kinds of learning and problem-solving. These include language, writing, spelling and number work which are complex for young children to learn and ‘have taken humankind a very long time to develop’. He goes on, ‘Psychological tools in the form of concepts, deﬁ nitions and procedures are not to be opposed to practical knowledge as is commonly done when discussing the alleged conﬂ icts between “theory” and “practice” ’ (Saljo 1999, p. 150).

ICT provides us with a range of new tools that are already making substantial changes to all aspects of communications and information storage and retrieval in the business and commerical world. The economies of the world are moving into new relations with one another and multi-national companies are re-grouping. In particular, media companies are merging to forge new alliances capable of capitalising on the opportunities of merging technologies. In some cases, so-called ‘ordinary people’ have been able to exercise power in unprecedented ways by creative use of the Internet (e.g. in the demonstrations against the G8 meeting in Seattle in 1999 and the defence against the MacDonalds’ law case). In terms of learning, a large number of websites offer open access to expert knowledge and in ﬁ elds like medicine this is having a signiﬁ cant impact on patient–doctor relationships. In higher education the impact of new technology is clear with the development of some specialist on-line universities and several large international co-operative groupings of universities committed to on-line provision of some part of their courses. These very substantial changes to the structures of so many sectors of human activity are easily explained by activity theory. They are the result of the development of new tools which are changing human capabilities by mediating tasks and outcomes in new ways. It is

Methodological issues 155 impossible to believe that schools will not also change in radical ways. Yet, currently

in the UK, despite an ambitious programme of investment by government in ICT resources, infrastructure and teacher training, there is no evidence of change of the radical kind observable in the commercial world. It is almost certainly because the structures, rules of behaviour and division of labour (roles) in schools are rooted in long-standing traditions and authority structures, that the potential for ICT to have

a signiﬁ cant impact on learning has not so far been realised (see Chapter 7 of this book). Researchers have an important role in working in partnership with teachers, pupils, parents and communities to track the impact of changes and provide feedback and evidence to inform and encourage more radical change.

Learning: the process of coming to know