06/01/2010 by lizit.

These notes are based on Jean Lave’s 1996 article “Teaching, as learning, in practice”.

It is an interesting article as it clearly identifies the focus of most learning research is not research on learning but “research on instruction, on depersonalised guidelines for the teaching of specific lesson-like things in school settings in order to improve learning.” Lave draws on her research of the apprenticeship practices of Liberian tailors and on Timothy Mitchell’s observations of the training of Egyptian lawyers, to come to the conclusion that learning rather than teaching is the core concept.

Starting with Scribner and Cole’s (1973) paper drawing a clear distinction between learning in formal settings and in informal settings, Lave shows that a polarity has developed which values formal schooling. This, combined with a psychological model of learning, has led to an increasing marginalisation of those who do not succeed in the school system. Putting this into the 21st century UK context it could be hypothesised that the emphasis on achieving government set targets in schools and the emphasis on increasing the number of young people entering higher education could have had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the development of an underclass amongst those young people who do not meet the targets, leading to the development of the gang culture and criminal behaviours which are increasingly in the public eye.

Lave is clear that learning is about far more than knowledge transfer. In both her examples, the apprentices, or learners, did not only learn a skill or set of concepts, but were enculterated in a multi-layered system of cultural values with their implications. Particularly in the case of the Liberian tailors, the apprenticeship and its completion was accompanied by a strong sense of worth and self-respect in stark contrast to the poverty of the society the tailors were part of.

Lave’s work led her to three changes in perspective from those espoused in traditional education models:

1. a reversal of the polarisation that school and institutional learning is positive and other forms of learning are negative
2. a focus on learners and learning rather than the transmitters of knowledge - teachers, care givers, etc
3. learning is not individual but is socially situated

In her work with Martin Packer, a tentative model to underpin learning theories was developed:

1. Telos or the idea that learning involves some kind of change or movement
2. Subject-world or the relationship between the individual or self and the social world
3. Learning mechanism which focuses on how learning happens

Lave concludes by saying: “The conditions for the transformation of persons are the same whether the telos of learning is movement towards growing up from babyhood, or adolescence, becoming a craftsperson or a philosopher, and/or becoming a marginal person in a world where participation in and thus learning divisions of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual preference, determine strongly who is consigned to the advantaged cores and disadvantaged margins of society.”

I found some the article resonated strongly with me. I have already given some thought to the marginalisation and dis-empowerment of parents of children and young people with autistic spectrum disorders and it may be that part of this stems from the fact that their knowledge of their children’s condition is situated rather than as a result of teaching. Empowerment implies a polarity as for somebody to be empowered somebody else has to be dis-empowered. In the current model, professionals hold the power (and the budgets). Would a recognition of parental learning and knowledge lead to empowerment, partnership and possibly more shared decision making?

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04/01/2010 by lizit.

Finding lots of interesting ideas in papers written some years back. Getting the background seems to involve a constant moving backwards. I can’t possibly read everything ever written, but I can read a lot of stuff and get a sense of big picture.

Brown, Collins & Duguid (1989) present some useful contrasts between different types and contexts of learning in developing their ideas about situated cognition.I find their description of the learning of ‘just plain folk’ (JPF) relates to the questions I am asking about the learning of parents of children and young people with ASDs and how they learn to provide appropriate support and care for their children.

Brown, et al, start from the “distinction between mere acquisition of inert concepts and the development of useful, robust knowledge” citing Whitehead’s 1929 treatise on the aims of education. The implication is that it is possible to possess a tool, or knowledge, and not have a clue how to use it. Similarly it is possible to have good working knowledge of the use of a tool without knowing why it works as it does. In the real world, we learn how to use tools from others and through practice. The same tool may be used differently by different communities of users - example is given of chisel which is used differently by carpenters and cabinet makers, Just as we need to learn how to use physical tools, the same is necessary with conceptual tools. As with physical tools, the conceptual tools only really make sense in the context of practice. It is suggested that learners learn through enculturation or socialisation into a community of practice.

As tools are used in authentic context they gain meaning & relevance. Brown, et al, comment that “the process may appear informal, but it is nonetheless full-blooded, authentic activity that can be deeply informative - in a way that textbook examples and declarative examples are not.” This is illustrated using Lave’s example of the apprenticeship of tailors.

Brown, et al, then consider the learning of JPFs, students and practitioners. When a JPF wants to learn something they can become an apprentice or a student. As the former, they enculturate into the community of practice. As the latter they go to school where “the general strategies for intuitive reasoning, resolving issues, and negotiating meaning (…) are superseded by the precise, well-defined problems, formal definitions, and symbol manipulation of much school activity.” Brown, et al, suggest the JPF is closer to the practitioner in learning & practice than students whose learning & practice is abstracted from real life, implying that contextualisation is vital for learning to be meaningful.

The discussion can be related to the current educational policy debates where politicians are demanding more focus on vocational education in higher education. Brown, et al, suggest that it is only in post graduate study that students begin to become practitioners through an apprenticeship process embedded in the supervisory relationship with an experienced researcher. However, there is no discussion of the thinking and analytical skills developed through the education system.

They suggest more work is needed on understanding the “relationship between explicit knowledge and implicit understanding”.
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18 (1), 32-42.

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24/12/2009 by lizit.

I’ve been struck by the number of articles I seem to be encountering which are discussing workplace learning as informal learning. Very few writers apart from possibly Billett (2002) seem to suggest learning at work can be seen as formal learning. Given the range of learning and training that is undertaken within the workplace this seems odd, and again suggests that the formal and informal labels are less than helpful. Seeing learning in the workplace as a mixture of intentional, incidental and serendipitous seems to make more sense (to me at least).

As an aside, I have been struggling a bit with how to differentiate incidental and serendipitous as I sense they are different. It seems to me that incidental learning is where something is learned while engaged in an activity, so undertaking a word processing task may include discovering how to change default font styles for a particular document. This is not intentional in the sense of being engaged in a learning task and it is not serendipitous in the sense of being stumbled across by chance, but it is a by-product of engagement in a task.

In thinking about workplace learning, I have been thinking about what is meant by workplace. Virtually everything I have read appears to envisage the workplace as a place of paid employment. I have not encountered any articles which recognise the home as the workplace - though this is self-evidently the case for some many parents and for others who are not in paid employment for whatever reason. For some reason, the workplace is seen as somewhere separate from the other environments people engage with during their daily lives.

Some of the work concerned with biography of learners appears to acknowledge the importance of other environments. For example, Hodkinson, et al, (2004) engage in a somewhat complex philosophical discussion about the relationship between the person and their social world, before identifying 4 principles (the comments in italics are mine):

• Workers/learners bring prior knowledge, understanding and skills with them, which can contribute to their future work and learning; (this reminded me of the illustration I often use in training contexts of having a ruc-sac of knowledge, skills and experience garnered from the totality of our life experience which we take with us from place to place and add to and adapt as we go)
• The habitus of workers, including their dispositions towards work, career and learning, influence the ways in which they construct and take advantage of opportunities for learning at work; (why just at work - surely the same applies in other environments people engage in)
• The values and dispositions of individual workers contribute to the co-production and reproduction of the communities of practice and/or organisational cultures and/or activity systems where they work; (again this could apply in other communities and environments people are part of)
• Working and belonging to a workplace community contributes to the developing habitus and sense of identity of the workers themselves. (ditto)

Although workplaces are easily identifiable environments from the perspective of study of learning, the observations drawn from workplace learning appear to be transferable in many circumstances to other environments where people learn, communities of interest being a fairly obvious example. One of the areas I need to consider as I read these various articles on workplace learning is the extent to which the findings are only relevant within the workplace or are equally relevant in other contexts where people learn. Given that people spend much of their time learning in one way or another, this could mean virtually any context.

On the surface at least, it appears that by favouring some forms of learning and some contexts above others, there is a danger that we fail to notice what different forms of learning have in common.

Billett, S. (2002). Critiquing workplace learning discourses: Participation and continuity at work. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(1), 56-67.
Hodkinson, P., Hodkinson, H., Evans, K., Kersh, N., Fuller, A., Unwin, L., et al. (2004). The significance of individual biography in workplacelearning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 36(1), 6-24.

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08/12/2009 by lizit.

Over the last couple of weeks or so, my thoughts about my DPhil research have taken some quite dramatic and unexpected turns but in a way which is making me feel rather excited and very grounded.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a planned meeting with my supervisor and a consultant from Social Sciences. The plan had been to look at methodology and data gathering for the studies I was planning of informal learning in Second Life. But in the time between arranging the meeting and it taking place, my thinking about informal learning had moved considerably as recorded in earlier blogs! We ended up talking about where I currently was, and recognising that I was talking about a very broad area, but one which could be examined in a narrow domain.  The advice accompanying that was that such a domain should ideally be one which I knew well.

It was one of those transforming moments when suddenly things which had not been coming together suddenly made sense. With no difficulty at all, Second Life and other virtual worlds were no longer part of the picture. Instead the very obvious domain which I know best was staring me in the face - people caring for children with an ASD. The whole range of learning styles is covered with the possibility of looking at learning journeys and the mix of learning types involved in a learning journey. Not only that, but I have access to so many potential study subjects - the parent support group I run, online groups, contact with schools and medical specialists…. Not only that but my supervisor has links and an interest in the area… The only question is why did it take so long to see the obvious!

So many of the themes that have been important through my professional life come together with this focus. My anger at the failure to recognise the skills and knowledge of people without appropriate qualifications. Questions about empowerment and change management, who are the experts. Ownership and change agency.  The creation of underclasses where people are stigmatised and disempowered …. Empowerment.

In the fortnight since that meeting, I have begun to think about what my research might involve, I have met another DPhil student who is looking at issues around stigmatisation, a colleague has given me links to references on expert patients, I am being given contacts with senior paediatricians, I have been given a contact with the person leading a major course on ASDs in Birmingham and had a useful formative discussion and the possibility of access to students on the course, I have met somebody working on the problems associated with labelling, I have come across the idea of using critical incident vignettes as a way of examining learning experiences, I have been encouraged to look again at Wenger’s work around boundaries …  I could go on and on, it seems so much has happened and come together in such a short time.

I’m very aware that I have a lot of work to do, not least scoping my studies, but I am feeling absurdly excited by the thought of doing work in an area I both understand and have a long term commitment to. I also know that I would not be where I am now if I had not spent the hours reading around lots of stuff and beginning to appreciate some of the complexity of things which on the surface seemed so simple and straightforward.

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16/10/2009 by lizit.

Trying to catch some of the ideas from this morning’s supervision.

Discussion about whether my DPhil is actually social policy or whether it does rightly belong in informatics.  My last blog had given the impression of moving away from technology, and we examined whether or not this is actually the case or not.

Some key areas I identified a week or two ago are:

• informal learning in virtual communities
• motivation for learning in virtual communities
• understanding motivation for informal learning
• what motivates informal learning

One of my concerns is the real world relevance of what I want to do. I am dis-satisfied for various reasons with the material I have read about informal learning. Much of this dis-satisfaction is related to the problem of what informal learning is and and the way it is measured. All too often, it seems to be more about informal adult education than informal learning - the consultation document produced by the UK government in 2008 is a good example of this. It starts by saying it is about “structured and unstructured adult learning for enjoyment, personal fulfillment and intellectual, creative and physical stimulation” but the focus is more on reducing inequalities and opening new pathways into learning and much of the discussion is about adult learning in general. It is recognised much informal learning is self-directed, but asks, expecting an affirmative, whether the government has a key role in maximising and sustaining current arrangements (arrangements which the government has had no part in establishing or nurturing).

Virtual environments have been used as a petri dish for much research over the past 25 years. Although none of what I have read is specifically about informal learning (and apart from the specifically education based research, little is about learning), informal learning is implicit in most of the accounts of virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are also interesting in the role they cast the user in when they first enter a virtual world.  Although an analogy can be made with a speeded up version of human development, it doesn’t hold together well, but entering a virtual world, as opposed to an interactive game, does present a rapid learning curve. It is necessary to learn how to walk and talk, how to move to new locations, how to alter appearance and a myriad other things before being able to function in the virtual world. Many of these actions are not intuitive. Inadequate technology, eg a low spec graphics card, can compound the difficulties. What is is that keeps the newcomer to the virtual world continuing to learn to use the environment when they have stuck a box on their head 3 times and still don’t know how to extract the hair?

So where does this leave me? I am still wanting to focus on what and how people learn in virtual worlds.  I think this will tell us something about how people learn in real life and about what motivates such learning. It is possible it will assist in refining the definition of informal learning and differentiating this from informal education.

The question remains whether virtual world experiences are transferable to virtual worlds and vice versa.

Technology provides the virtual environment, whether it is one of the early MUD or USENET based communities or the 3-D worlds we are more familiar with now. But virtual communities do not exist in a vacuum - behind  every avatar or nickname is a person who is living in a physical world environment.

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07/09/2009 by lizit.

One of my declared interests is social change. Been musing a bit on informal learning and social change.

In a sense all learning/education is about change. There is a sense in which knowledge is power. I reckon this has particular resonance when related to informal learning and within the context of community development, community action and ’self-help’.  I’ve seen the effect of informal learning in the parent support group I am involved in; parents of children with SENs are frequently at a loss over how to best help their children. Within a parent support group, parents share their experiences of schools and discussions with education officials, learn how to complete forms, etc. Increasingly, parents find out how much they know and have learned through assisting other parents. No longer is it down to somebody like me to act as the fount of wisdom, as I know and others know that they know.

The story, as narrated by Lovett, of Liverpool EPA (a 1970s education initiative) is one of people engaging in learning from a position of being labelled as education failures - people who had left school at 15 with no qualifications and few, if any, aspirations. Through learning, or rather through discussion and gleaning information and taking new levels of responsibility, people were empowered and enabled to make choices and contribute to processes which made decisions about their lives. The same change process is evident in the community development projects of the 1970s and other community initiatives and in the various case studies described by Foley. Reading these accounts reminds me of my own work in the early 70s working with parents to set up holiday play schemes. In one, I recruited members of the neighbourhood social work team as volunteers, and in the post-project review, I recall their amazement at seeing parents they had viewed as inadequate and unable to cope with raising their own children organising large groups of children and volunteers for trips to the swimming pool or to the beach - perhaps wouldn’t be possible now in an age when risk assessment precedes just about any activity.

Although there are other  aspects of informal learning which are beneficial to the individual, the community or society more generally, the social change agenda cannot be ignored. It was that agenda which lay behind the Sunday schools, both christian and socialist, of the early 19th century. It was that which fuelled the development of trades unions and the establishment of Ruskin College. It was that which led to the establishment of the WEA. Even today, education is presented as an agent of social change in creating greater equity of opportunity by admitting more young people to universities where they are the first member of their family to enter higher education. Years ago Michael Young wrote of the rise of the meritocracy. We still haven’t seen it, but perhaps there is hope for those formerly considered failures.

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21/07/2009 by lizit.

In supervision yesterday, Judith suggested I write an abstract of my thesis as though I had already undertaken the research.  I could see the practical value of this as I have been mulling over what I might actually do, rather than think about doing. Although I am working on a draft abstract, there are a couple of issues that are concerning me, both of which I now think I can see a way round or through.

The first is the so what question - and here again yesterday was helpful.  I can now see that what I want to show is very much related to why people engage in informal learning.  Although the government white paper is suggesting that informal learning should be recognised and supported, my position is that this is unnecessary and possibly counter-productive - and not just for the reasons propounded elsewhere in this blog of possibly repeating the errors of the 80s in relation to voluntary action and community care.

The second concern relates to justifying the use of Second Life for my studies.  One clear argument is that there are no inbuilt extrinsic rewards in SL.  Today it struck me that there are elements of SL learning which are not dissimilar to that happening in some of the physical world communities I am part of. For example, if I am monitoring SL mailing lists for evidence of informal learning (probably SLED and one other), I could also monitor arachne.  At about this point my imagination takes off and I have to remind myself that I haven’t got unlimited time and resources…. But if the SL can be shown to be not dissimilar from other communities which engage in informal learning…

Time for a cuppa.

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04/06/2009 by lizit.

It’s so often said that the most important content of conferences goes on outside the formal sessions and that is proving true of these few days in Milton Keynes.  That is not to say there hasn’t been some interesting and stimulating content in the presentations, but it has been useful touching base with a whole lot of people, some old friends and some folk I hadn’t met before.

Out of the various discussions, I’ve got some new leads to follow up in my literature review. There are a number of terms that seem to be spoken about in considering informal learning: social capital, practical intelligence, learning through social action.  Will be useful to put these through some search tools.

I had a chat with one of the OU specialist librarians this morning.  She has suggested I have a look at the British Journal of Sociology, the Community Development Journal and the Social Science citation index.  In looking through some of the material on the shelves, I also came across the International Journal of lifelong education which has references to informal learning.  I also found that an OU colleague had included informal learning in her MSc dissertation and had built on this in her PhD.  I’ve been in touch with her and got copies of the relevant part of her lit review, her dissertation and a paper she has co-authored with references to informal learning.

I’m starting to collect quite a bit of material around informal learning now - and noting most of the things I am reading refer to this as an under-researched area and problematic because of problems with defining what exactly is meant by informal learning.  I still have to start exploring community development in any serious way, but I do know there is a lot in the Sussex library, so I guess I am going to be spending some time there soon.

I must admit I am enjoying myself!

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30/05/2009 by lizit.

I’ve begun to read some of the informal learning texts and I’m finding them fascinating - there is so much that is familiar as well as seeing connections I hadn’t been aware of before.  I’ve just read McGivney, V. (1999). Informal learning in the community: a trigger for change and development. Leicester: NIACE and the whole debate about what is informal learning is there, together with changing perceptions of community, stuff about learning in community groups, etc.  It has triggered reminders of the different sponsorship of different community/voluntary initiatives - education/social services/home office/etc and the different training and career paths of professionals in those areas - although doing similar things very often projects existed in parallel with little communication between departments. Looking at McGivney’s references to numbers of community groups and involvement in them has taken me back to my MSc work and the figures there - and references to other community studies.

It has been interesting too to read of the changing views of the use of the word ‘community’ because of its usage to mean various different things in different contexts - at least 4 different categories of community are identified. That is one of things that makes community fascinating for me, but there is almost a criticism that because some forms of community have no geographical basis, that makes them problematic.

It is also interesting looking at the whole area of pathways into learning.  I am reading about what SLN was about and I didn’t realise it at the time.  The whole widening participation agenda is laid out fairly clearly and questions raised about whether accreditation of learning is always a good thing. There seems to be a tension between learning for its own sake and learning in order to progress - discussion too about progression routes.

It is interesting to note the plethora of NIACE publications at the end of the 1990s before the strong emphasis on work based learning and progression into HE.  Thinking back to what was happening in adult education then, apart from continuing financial pressure and raising the numbers for viability of classes, it was the time when leisure classes where being challenged to have clear learning objectives and progression pathways leading to many classes ceasing or moving out of the formal education arena (I know this happened with lacemaking, but that was no doubt not the only casualty).

It’s quite reassuring to find books saying what I was thinking/feeling which suggests my ideas about informal learning are not completely off the wall.  I still have to get back into the community literature - will be interesting to travel back in time but also to look at community and virtual environments. I’m actually getting quite excited at the moment - how long will this last!?

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24/05/2009 by lizit.

Things can change as I get more into the literature, but the plan for my DPhil at the moment is to do something about informal learning in communities within a virtual world context.

The next task is to put together a proper literature review.  This will be accompanied by making a plan for the next 12 months including what I am actually doing as opposed to just defining areas of interest and reading a lot of stuff.

The areas to be addressed in the literature review will be:

• What makes a community - what is meant by the term community?
  • community development models and literature (looking at the literature from the 60’s and 70’s and possibly earlier as well as more recent stuff)
  • online communities, both 2D and 3D and the sense of place and presence found in these communities - are online communities really communities (thinking of argument we had in my OU tutor group).
  • communities of interest - people bound together out of common interests/hobbies/challenges/disabilities/etc rather than people who live in proximity to each other
  • learning communities - both Wenger’s communities of practice and the community of inquiry model from Athabasca
• What is informal learning? (Might be useful to also look for a working definition of learning per se)
  • Recent government white paper and the preceding consultation process
  • Various older NIACE documents, including the McGivney stuff if I can get hold of it
  • Colley’s work on formality and informality as aspects of all learning
  • Peer group learning
  • possibly child development in some way - could tie into Self Determination Theory and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (which I was thinking about in the Ecolab presentation around competence and achievement focus/drivers)
• What constitutes a virtual world?
  • should be possible to draw on work I’ve done for DELVE and other things I’ve been reading, including the various ethnographic studies in Second Life
  • To include or not to include 2D virtual worlds (interesting thoughts around SLED as a community of peer group learners)

I do need to give some thought to why this matters rather than just being something that interests me.  Initial thoughts include:

• The diatribes on virtual worlds and social networking from Susan Greenfield - are kids brains being fried and kids being turned into anti-social zombies or are they participating in learning experiences.  If the latter, what?
• Government white paper talks about informal learning, but context seems to be as pathway to formal learning or to employment or both, with no real value on informal learning for its own sake.
• There is a lot of formal learning in 3D worlds, but there seems to be an element of informal learning underpinning this some of the time, SLED for example.  that informal learning may be in a variety of places.  If the forms informal learning takes can be identified, it might be possible to use it more formally in scaffolding learning experiences. (This sounds a bit counter to what I think I am interested in if I am saying informal learning should be valued for itself.)
• Informal learning seems to have links to Self Determination theory - competence, autonomy - and community is to do with relatedness. Would be neat to be able to tie this together and say something about the importance of intrinsic motivation.

In the meantime, a couple of possible representations of what I want to look at.  I suspect the second is nearer the mark, but another area for more work.

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