Commentary: Expanding conceptualizations for the study of learning: Implications for theory and research

Abstract

The articles in this special issue provide examples of how conceptions of studying learning need to expand to incorporate new environments and concerns in education. As technology advances the tools available to learners and instructors in synchronous and asynchronous learning environments, theory must meet the new challenges of conceptualizing these spaces and pedagogical approaches that allow for new ways of organizing learning opportunities and supporting learners. The depiction of chronotope, the ecological perspective, and social practice theory convey the need to consider new conceptualizations. Considerations of agency and emotion expand the bounds of learning in ways that are important for the educational futures that we can imagine. These exciting advances have created a need for thinking about learning in a way that reframes existing conceptualizations of how to appropriately analyze learning activities.This collection of articles takes a stridently dynamic view of learning that goes beyond static cognition and recognizes the importance of learner agency. Some perspectives are more or less emergent in terms of their conceptions of learning and context. Although including context is not new for sociocultural theories, being specific about aspects of context is. In particular, most of these articles are concerned with the role of time and space and the relevant interactions among them. New definitions of learning must consider it as a system that looks across what might appear to be natural boundaries of time, space, and context; cognition and emotion; human and artifact: with individual agents, co-constructing groups and institutions (e.g., Engle & Conant, 2002;Lemke, 2000). As in other systems, what emerges (i.e., what knowledge is socially constructed) is different from what might be predicted from those bounded-appearing elements.The chronotope framework presented by Ritella, Ligorio, and Hakkarainen is a conceptual/analytical tool centered on the premise of interdependency between issues of space and time. Education research tends to treat these factors as backdrops where learning occurs instead of focusing on how they interact and present opportunities and constraints that may not occur otherwise. Here, learning is a system of complex interactions with agency at different levels, that may not always be predictable, and are defined by the timespace where the learner is situated. These lines of thinking are similar to Engle, Lam Meyer, & Nix's (2015) ideas about how positioning learners' agency and expansively framing their ideas is a key for learning and transfer. Conceptually, Ritella et al. argue their framework could be used to design instruction while considering how space-time is used, especially in technology-rich learning environments. For example, when we consider how mobile computer-supported collaborative learning environments are used by different collaborators across different spaces and times. We echo Ritella et als. heed to consider how teachers can orchestrate learning in such compl...