Affordances for Learning and Research

Project Report: Affordances for Learning

University of Portsmouth2008

Contents

page

1. Executive summary 5

2. Introduction 11

3. Project outline 12

Aims and outcomes of project

Methodology of the project

Case and Participants

4. Theoretical Framework 16

Affordances

Transitions

Metaphors

5. Findings 28

Negotiating Learning and Identity 30

Articulating and Communicating Learning and Identity 53

6. Conclusions 61

Further research

7. References 63

Acknowledgements

Affordances for Learning and Research

Executive Summary

The Approach

The Affordances for Learning research project developed an approach to researching student experience in which the theoretical framework, the methodology, the analysis and the project management are all based on ecological psychology and complexity theory, best summed up as a ‘digital learning ecology’. This incorporates, particularly in the analysis, theories of transitions and of the role that multimodal media and metaphors play in enabling us to explore tacit understandings of our learning.

The ‘digital learning ecology’ framework sees sense making about learning as being inseparable from sense making about identity, about becoming a student, and becoming a practitioner or professional in a particular field. This provides a sense making ’collaboratory’ that:

· Takes place within events and resources that are specified, even though the outcomes of those events and how they will influence the design of future events is not specified. Structure and constraints are provided by specifying what may not happen, e.g. “New topics may not be introduced by the interviewer during the story telling”

· Welcomes emergent and unexpected properties (‘outcomes’ in the everyday sense of the word) by focusing on retrospective sense making, by self-organising ‘actors’ including students, institutions, or researchers

· Is not part of a conventional PDP process, as no specific ‘outcomes’ are required, and there are no extrinsic criteria for ‘completion’. However, the artefacts that are produced in the sense making process may contain a wealth of material that can be reported on, cited and used within PDP or Portfolio processes, if the story teller wishes to do so.

Essentially, there are two sites of sense making in this approach. The primary site is the story teller and the secondary site is the researcher. They are both participating in a research discourse which enables and affords a sense making “collaboratory”, rather than a research observatory. In other words, the researcher observes the story teller, who observes their own learning and emerging identities. The researcher in a sense just ‘visits’ the story teller’s sense making process, hopefully enables it, and even collaborates with the story teller, and in the process, creates new devices and affordances. Both the researcher and the story teller are engaged in a collaborative process, as the researcher also facilitates the story teller’s sense making. As far as possible, the research is centred on the student’s sense making, rather than the student’s story telling just being data for the research.

In essence, the core of the approach is to:

Enable personal, multimodal, interactive and collaborative sense making, of learning and identity, which:

· Opens up reflective and creative affordances beyond ‘evidence-based reflective-practice’

· Continues, expands, changes, or ends the process depending on its value as a sense making process for the story teller

· Is captured, and where possible is made accessible, in interactive digital media, and

· Produces interactive artefacts, which may or may not be gifted by the story teller to a range of communities and conversations including researchers, colleagues, other students, lecturers, mentors, managers, family, or friends.

The project was carried out from Autumn 2007 to the end of 2008.

Key Findings

The narratives created in this research provide rich accounts of student experience, and of the way students make sense of their learning and of their emergent and shifting identities as ‘professional graduates’. These accounts are indicative of a number of issues that students increasingly have to deal with, as more and more students study and work at the same time, using online and on-site facilities. The results of the research can be summarised as follows:

Learning

Students need to explore, benchmark and preferably master information, skills, competencies, and affordances – i.e. the capacity for effective action within context, and the capacity to weigh up, select, and if necessary create new affordances for new contexts. These affordances are the basis for learning and for developing their identity as professionals.

· Several examples show how the process of learning, and of negotiating transitions into Higher Education (HE) includes not only learning new information, skills, and competencies, but it crucially also involves coming to terms with new affordances that may displace or even conflict with existing affordances.

For example, ‘reading’ turns out to be very frustrating and confusing for one student, largely due to the fact that she knows how to ‘read’ so well as an A-level student, and continues to do this at University, only to find out that this kind of ‘reading’ is not the affordance she needs for HE at all.

Students also need to be able to negotiate and deploy affordances in specific contexts, within different communities. We have, for the purposes of this analysis, included only four types of communities: academic, business, social and professional.

· Several examples, and one story in particular, illustrate the substantial differences between academic and professional communities and their discourses (i.e. the formalised sets of affordances that are required for membership of those communities).

These examples illustrate how challenging it is to reconcile, let alone integrate, academic and professional discourses, in what is broadly called work-integrated-learning to become ‘professional graduates’, i.e. people who have developed high level capacity, or affordances, in both academic and professional work. These stories also illustrate how student experience and motivation can be seriously affected by confusion and conflicts between academic and professional discourses.

· Several examples also illustrate how the process of acquiring professional affordances, and reconciling conflicting discourses in the process, can involve painful decisions and changes – at a professional and personal level, which means that affordances often incorporate affective traces and memories, positive or negative.

However, in some cases what is learnt is a ‘negative’ affordance – something you learn to avoid, for which we probably need a new term, ‘dis-fordance’.

Identity

Students’ emerging identities as professionals are intimately linked to learning new affordances, and managing repertoires of affordances and their relationships to different contexts.

· Most, if not all of the stories show that affordances are inherently ontological: learning a new affordance inevitably involves a shift in identity, and even learning to ‘be’ a HE student involves considerable shifts.

· One of these key shifts is to develop the ability to consider an issue from different perspectives, which is generally taught under the heading of ‘critical thinking’. However, this is more than just a ‘technical skill’ or competence, as the diversity of viewpoints is normally accompanied by a measure of uncertainty, discomfort, or worse. Learning to consider and assess a diversity of view points, and be comfortable with the lack of certainty that results is a major transition for HE students.

Reflective Practice

Sense making, and especially the personal, tacit, multimodal sense making that is the basis of this research, challenges ‘normal’ reflective practice, and attempts to add to it, and take it one or two steps further, to keep the substantial affordances of liminal space that are possible within HE: i.e. space to step back from the demands of day to day work, to disengage, reflect and explore different and even hypothetical perspectives.

· There seems to be a tendency to over-professionalize Reflective Practice, and to restrict it to what we analyse below as reflection tied in: (i.e. tied into efficiency and effectiveness) without also making space for reflection cut loose (i.e. cut loose, creative, hypothetical thinking).

However, several stories illustrate the way students use the liminal spaces that they find in their courses, or create their own opportunities and liminal spaces, to go way beyond the curriculum.

Transitions

Learning new affordances and negotiating access to, and membership of, new communities and their discourses involves a number of specific transitions. These include:

· Learning to manage not only shifts in affordances, confidence and identity, but also the way these are interlinked, and interact with each other.

· Being aware of, and managing the inter-relationships between, current and projected identity, or ‘actual’ and ‘designated’ identity (Sfard & Prusak 2005).

· Using the opportunity to explore new affordances and discourses not only to cover what is in the curriculum, but possibly to go beyond the curriculum, to create new affordances.

· Negotiating the discord between being an expert in some fields (generally, at work) and a novice in others (e.g. academic work).

· The transition between teaching and learning methods outside and inside of HE, often includes confusingly similar affordances, such as: reading as consumption of ideas versus reading as interrogating ideas.

· Working through the confusion and uncertainty of ‘betwixt spaces’ (Palmer et al 2009), between different (and often conflicting) affordances, communities and discourses. This is part of the major transitions involved in becoming an HE student and a ‘graduate professional’, which is to learn to tolerate, and then to embrace a diversity of perspectives as a positive affordance, rather than a negative state of uncertainty: in fact to realise that uncertainty (or systematic scepticism) is a key element of academic discourse and method.

Metaphors and Multi-modality

Metaphors are much more than just interesting ‘figures of speech’. They can be powerful affordances in their own right, i.e. not just embellishments but rather, integral aspects of the way you explore and articulate tacit knowledge, about the intangibles of learning experience and emerging identity.

· Metaphors illustrate the embeddedness and synaesthesia of language and learning.

· Learning is seen as a journey of some kind, and this is a dominant metaphor in the narratives.

· There are particular types of metaphor, each of which contributes slightly differently to the process of exploring learning and identity: metaphors of orientation, subject/ object relationships, embodiment, and specific types of figures of speech.

· Different types of metaphor illustrate the way students relate to what they are learning, the way they articulate the experience of learning itself, and whether this is encouraging and affirming, or discouraging and unsettling, or even undermining of their confidence and their ‘will to learn’ (Barnett 2007).

· Metaphors can indicate the way students experience exclusion, and their attempts to overcome it: this is one of the major challenges that students, and particularly mature students, need to cope with as they enter HE.

The rich information embodied in metaphors links back to the Nested Narratives methodology, which shifts between, and integrates, the cognitive and technical (or ‘academic’) affordances, by its emphasis on the role that the students’ own voice (literally and metaphorically) plays in the articulation of their experience of learning and emergent identity, and in the researchers’ appreciation of the complexity of what they are doing – as students and as sense makers.

Affordances for Learning and Research

Introduction

Over the past few years there has been a surge in research, policy and funding in the UK on learner experience and an interest in personal learning environments and social software (Williams et al, 2009, Sharpe et al 2005,). This focused on resources and their use, and to some extent on how participants make sense of their own experiences (Mayes 2006). Research in the Affordances for Learning (A4L) project at Portsmouth shifted the focus back from technologies, resources and provision, to the process of learning itself, to sense making: of learning, of a range of communities that students engage with, and of students’ emerging identities as practitioners and professionals. It also shifted the emphasis from personal versions of an institution’s virtual learning environment (VLE) or Portfolio to personal sense making, regardless of whether the person uses or doesn’t use specific technologies or software.

One of the tacit assumptions behind this research is that the rapid growth in social networking and virtual networks now provides sufficient diversity in modes of learning for learning to be driven largely by actual learning needs and learning styles, rather than by narrowly defined modes of educational provision. Siemens and Downes ran a fascinating learning experiment, in the their course on Connectivism in the fall of 2008, which put these ideas, and the theory of connectivism itself, to the test.

The shift to personal sense making was achieved by creating space for students to make sense of their learning in their own voice, and then to reflect and build on this within wider conversations, interacting and collaborating with a range of people through a range of media: reflection by doing rather than by instruction. The A4L project is based on the view that learning needs to be placed within a ‘digital learning ecologies’ framework that treats the curriculum, the course and the students as parts of an interlinked and dynamic process of adaptation and change.

This report is based on a collection of narratives from students and it aims to enrich the area of student learning and experience research. The recommendations and claims that are presented here build upon existing research on how students make sense of their professional, personal, and social identities. Although the project focused on specific disciplines and practices, the theoretical and methodological framework that has been developed and used here should be relevant to anyone who is interested in the area of student learning, be they practitioners, researchers, managers, policy-makers or students.

Project Outline

This HEA-funded research project, Affordances for Learning (A4L) at Portsmouth University explored the way students go about their learning, and how they construct their identities as practitioners and professionals, particularly in Foundation Degrees, where they are taught both on-campus and online. The focus was on students’ experience of learning. Students describe their learning in their own voice, with minimal interference from the researchers. A complementary aim was the further development and application of the ‘knowledge ecology’ or ‘digital learning ecology’ framework, based on ecological psychology and the theory of affordances, complexity theory and retrospective coherence, and actor network theory with its emphasis on rich empirical description (see Cilliers 2005, Snowden and Boone 2007, Latour 2005, Williams, 2007, 2008; Williams et al, 2008, 2009)