Learning Across Settings

Luis Briseno

Penuel, W. R., Lee, T. R., & Bevan, B. (2014). Designing and building infrastructures to supportequitable STEM learning across settings. Research+Practice Collaboratory Research Synthesis.

PURPOSE

The objective of the paper is to present a conceptual framework to support learning across settings in the domain of STEM.

TOPIC

The authors discuss design principles to consider when organizing learning opportunities to connect people to practice multiple settings. Attending to equity and diversity as the central driver to transform STEM education and broadening participation in STEM.

MAIN IDEA/ARGUMENT

The Importance of Supporting STEM learning Across Settings

The authors discuss the importance of “mentors, who can help a person navigate different institutional settings and structures, and developing a strong identification with disciplinary practices or fields, which entail positioning oneself and being positioned as a future scientist or engineering” (p.2). The paper argues that all designed research aims for some kind of transfer – the process of transfer is not one-way,and a key aim is to foster connections among people, settings, and practices. This is essential to foster connections – “these connections may also help expand learner’s agency to imagine and co-create new possible futures for themselves and for society.” How can agency be expanded when students’ don’t have trusting relationships with role models (there aren’t role models like them?) 

“Learners play an active role in making these connections, though they also can benefit from guidance and structured opportunities to make sense of how different activities relate to one another, and how particular activities in one setting prepare them for participation in another (p.2) To me this closely ties with Bahktin’s work which states “genres of speech” – that each area attends to its own structure and purpose. Meaning that our “funds of knowledge” can be talked about as “genres of speech” and moving across contexts speaks to Bahktin’s framework stating that individuals cannot be expected to participate in another’s speech genre without guidance, or mentors.

STEM Learning as Life-Long, Life-Wide, and Life-Deep 

Attends to formal and informal infrastructures… Life-long - “Learning refers to the ways in which the settings and opportunities that people experience in their life change over their lifespan. ”Life-wide “ highlights the ways that learning is a cross-setting phenomenon at every point in a person’s life.” Life-deep –“values influence the ways in which learning resources in one setting may be recruited in another.” 

“Any given setting sits at an intersection of different value systems defined in part by the values that participants bring from other settings.” (p. 3). I find this point to be essential to the point that designing learning across settings – especially when if the underpinning is made that transfer is no only one way. The authors talk about how “one person’s interest in a given subject matter may manifest itself quite differently than another”. To me this seems to suggest that there are multiple zpd’s that need to be attended to in learning environment. Hence funds of knowledge and prior knowledge and repertoires of practice as useful frameworks to keep in mind when design a learning environment. Particularly, when attempting to design for learning across contexts because one mediating goal may not be sufficient to reach learners.

The authors move on to discuss about the affordance and constraints of informal learning settings, digital badges - online networks provide teachers with the opportunity to gauge a learner’s development. Allowing teachers to check in on their process, comment, and give encouragement. The author’s also attend to policy barriers and talk about the affordances and constraints of evaluation and assessment systems.

What I find particularly interesting is from whose infrastructure knowledge base of “value” are design experience working from. To what extent do they consider equity and diversity in their design? If individuals’ cultural pathway provides them with a matrix of possibilities to work from and influence where they place their value, how will the nature of the design impact or create or recreate boundaries? I ask this because addressing equity and diversity in a learning setting is talked about, but action to broaden the breath of its reach is bordered. At times a subgroup of the community benefits from research and others are left aside. More tools or resources are created, but whom do they serve and for what purpose?

FRAMEWORK

To build infrastructures to support leaning across settings.. .  p 2 

DISCUSSION

For whom and for what purpose is our work directed towards? How do we attend to equity and diversity in our own practices?