Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching Communities, Activites and Networks

Now that learning is seen as lifelong and lifewide, what specifically makes a learning context? What are the resultant consequences for teaching practices when working in specific contexts? Drawing upon a variety of academic disciplines, Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching explores some of the different means of understanding teaching and learning, both in and across contexts, the issues they raise and their implications for pedagogy and research. It specifically addresses What constitutes a context for learning? How do we engage the full resources of learners for learning? What are the relationships between different learning contexts? What forms of teaching can most effectively mobilise learning across contexts? How do we methodologically and theoretically conceptualise contexts for learning? Drawing upon practical examples and the UK’s TLRP, this book brings together a number of leading researchers to examine the assumptions about context embedded within specific teaching and learning practices. It considers how they might be developed to extend opportunity by drawing upon learning from a range of contexts, including schools, colleges, universities and workplaces.

1.Introduction: Life as a learning context? Part1: Conceptualizing Contexts of Learning 2. Two Texts in contexts: Theorizing learning by looking at genre and activity3. Contexts of teaching and learning: an actor-network view of the classroom 4. Beyond ‘mutual constitution’: looking at learning and context from the perspective of complexity theory 5. Pragmatism’s contribution to understanding learning-in-context Part 2: Cases of Learning and Context 6. The textual mediation of learning in college contexts 7. Mediating contexts in classroom practices 8. Worlds within worlds: The relational dance between context and learning in the workplace 9. Technology-mediated learning contexts 10. ‘The boundaries are different out here’: Learning relationships in community-based further education Part 3:Inferences for Learning and Context 11. The implications of learning contexts for pedagogical practice 12. Implications for researching learning contexts

Richard Edwards is Professor of Education at the The Stirling Institute of Education, University of Stirling, UK. Gert Biesta is Professor of Education at The Stirling Institute of Education, University of Stirling, UK and Visiting Professor at Örebro University and Mälardalen University, Sweden. Mary Thorpe is Professor of Educational Technology in the Open University Institute of Educational Technology, UK.