Understanding Regulated Learning in Situative and Contextual Frameworks

Research on self-regulated learning has focused predominantly on a static individual level to explain various strengths and weaknesses of learners. However, much learning today is highly interactive and technologically enhanced, which an individually oriented perspective to regulated learning does not consider. In this article we discuss regulation by bringing situational and contextual variation of regulated learning into focus. We introduce a situative perspective on regulation of learning and give arguments and examples on how it can offer a way to conceptually and empirically grasp multiple layers of regulated learning in social contexts. We also compare the given perspective with sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives to regulated learning. We conclude that the situative perspective can significantly enrich understanding about individual and group learning as a regulated activity, because it offers a way to examine regulation beyond the individual while not losing sight of learners as individual subjects.     

Using a situative perspective to gain a deeper understanding of how children’s strengths are related to social context

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been an increase in the availability of published checklists and schedules which allow practitioners to identify the strengths of children and young people, including those with special educational needs. While helpful, these assessments are unable to tell us about the nature of contextual factors which support the expression of particular strengths. In this study, we took a situative perspective to explore how specific classroom practices facilitated strengths. A multiple case study design was used to analyse practices nominated by three children/young people with special educational needs. Qualitative analysis revealed how aspects of practice afforded the opportunity for each child to participate in ways which they equated with their strengths. This style of strength-based assessment led to a more sustained examination of supportive practice features than would have been achieved through interview alone.     

Language,institutional identity and integration: lived experiences of ESL teachers in Australia

Globalisation and increased patterns of immigration have turned workplace interactions to arenas for intercultural communication entailing negotiation of identity, membership and ‘social capital’. For many newcomer immigrants, this happens in an additional language and culture – English. This paper presents interaction experiences of four non-native English language teachers with other institutional members. It uses a sociocultural perspective of second language to map their approaches to negotiations of professional and institutional identities in and through these interactions. Their discussions highlight the role of language, cultural practices and the emic socio-political factors embedded within institutional interactions in individuals' identity negotiation and integration.     

Gender Codes at Odds and the Linguistic Construction of a Hybrid Identity

This study traces the ways in which an Arabic-speaking immigrant girl in Cyprus positions herself towards the different gender ideologies that she encounters at home and in school. Through Nadia's linguistic choices and discursive strategies we come to see how competing gender codes, meeting at the crossroads of geographic, linguistic, and cultural transition, lead to the emergence of a hybrid cultural identity. The data also reveal that "passing" is not always the goal of speakers who enter a new culture; instead, social categories such as gender mediate between the ability and the willingness to pass. These findings suggest that L2 users, through their daily linguistic and cultural practices across and within discourse sites, become agents of multiple, dynamic, and flexible identities. The study demonstrates the particular implications of second language learning and use and gender ideologies in the process of identity construction and highlights the complexities of identity work in today's multilingual and multitextual social settings.     

The role of cultural identity as a learning factor in physics: a discussion through the role of science in Brazil

In recent decades, changes in society have deeply affected the internal organization and the main goals of schools. These changes are particularly important in science education because science is one of the major sources of change in peoples’ lives. This research provided the opportunity to investigate how these changes affect the way teachers develop their classroom activities. In this work, we focus on science as part of the cultural identity of a society and how this identity affects the process of teaching and learning inside the classroom. Other works have shown that certain social characteristics such as gender, race, religion, etc., can create a cultural barrier to learning science. This results in an obstacle between those particular students and the science that is taught, hindering their learning process. We first aim to present the notion of identity in education and in other related fields such as social psychology and sociology. Our main purpose is to focus on identity in a school setting and how that identity affects the relationship students have with the science content. Next, we present and analyze an intervention in the subject of Modern and Contemporary Physics composed by a sequence of activities in a private school in the region of Sao Paulo State, Brazil. This intervention serves to illustrate how scientific topics may be explored while considering aspects of cultural differences as an obstacle. The intervention was completed in two steps: first, in the classroom with a discussion concerning scientific works and nationality of scientists, with one being a Brazilian physicist; second, taking students to visit a particle collider at the University of São Paulo. One of the results of our research was realizing that students do not perceive science as something representative of the Brazilian cultural identity. At the same time, the activity gave the students the opportunity to make the connection between doing physical sciences at an international level and the national level in Brazil. The findings of this study suggest that it is possible to reshape the cultural identity of Brazilian students.     

Learning in Equity-Oriented Scale-Making Projects

This article examines how new forms of learning and expertise are made to become consequential in changing communities of practice. We build on notions of scale making to understand how particular relations between practices, technologies, and people become meaningful across spatial and temporal trajectories of social action. A key assumption of our perspective is that the scale relations that give meaning to our actions are not natural but are contested in social, cultural, and political projects. Studying these contentious activities can help us understand the nature of changing participation in dynamic and historically developed practices. Using case materials from 3 groups engaged in the local food justice movement in the western United States, we illustrate their engagement in equity-oriented scale making. Defining features of this work included identifying leverage points within inequitable systems; developing strategies for remediating scale relations to include the perspectives of historically marginalized groups; and coordinating trajectories of practice across settings, activities, and time so that these interventions became increasingly consequential. We conclude with a discussion of the significance of equity-oriented scale making as a lens for organizing design efforts and for studying their implications for nondominant communities.     

Culture,Learning, and Development and the Natural World: The Influences of Situative Perspectives

The study of human learning and development from situative or sociocultural perspectives has had significant impacts on a wide range of scholarship largely driven by the theoretical and methodological focus on understanding the role of activity systems in cognition and development. This article first explores how situative perspectives have advanced fundamental knowledge about how culture and race impact learning and development and works to demonstrate how these understandings have enabled new insights into folk-biological cognition. Traditional cognitive, cross-cultural, and situative perspectives with respect to folkbiology are compared and contrasted to demonstrate how situative perspectives enabled more complete understandings of the complexities of biological cognition. These complexities are conceptualized as the conceptual and epistemological ecologies of activity systems. Implications for education are considered.     

Investigating and theorizing discourse during analogy writing in chemistry

Explanations of the role of analogies in learning science at a cognitive level are made in terms of creating bridges between new information and students' prior knowledge. In this empirical study of learning with analogies in an 11th grade chemistry class, we explore an alternative explanation at the “social” level where analogy shapes classroom discourse. Students in the study developed analogies within small groups and with their teacher. These classroom interactions were monitored to identify changes in discourse that took place through these activities. Beginning from socio‐cultural perspectives and hybridity, we investigated classroom discourse during analogical activities. From our analyses, we theorized a merged discourse that explains how the analog discourse becomes intertwined with the target discourse generating a transitional state where meanings, signs, symbols, and practices are in flux. Three categories were developed that capture how students intertwined the analog and target discourses—merged words, merged utterances/sentences, and merged practices. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 771–792, 2011     

Media as nexus of practice: remaking identities in What Not to Wear

In this conceptual piece, we examine media as a nexus of a traditional schooling pedagogy and performance pedagogy to make visible how their overlapping elements produce media's pervasive educative force but also to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of using media in educational contexts. Nexus analysis examines a fashion makeover television program – What Not to Wear (WNTW) – as an embodied lesson that produces identity revision but also disjunctures and slippages that enable critical responses and productive remakings. WNTW is a dramatization of remediation of one woman's (portrayed) lived practices and clothing choices which are read on her body as personal expression of fashion trends. These globalized lessons with body texts require new ways of reading and responding that allow learners/viewers to see the power relations that construct particular identity performances as errors and cultural practices and ethnicities as unacceptable.     

A situative turn in the conversation on motivation theories

In this commentary I take a situative turn in the theoretical conversation around the question, “Why do people do what they do?” The first section describes in broad strokes what a situative perspective on motivation or engagement entails. Next, I comment on aspects of the five articles as they relate to the history and methods of socio-cognitive and situative approaches to understanding motives to learn. Then, using the central organizing framework of “meaning systems” in situative approaches, I suggest ways that a situative perspective might contribute to ongoing work in the five motivation theories and how some of the authors take steps in that direction.     

Metaphors as expressions of followers’ experiences with academic leadership

Researchers continue to investigate and understand leadership in higher education. However, leadership does not stand alone; it is part of an interactive dyad with followers. Building on a previous study that aimed to unpack academics’ experiences of leadership in higher education with a view to enhancing leadership practices, this paper creatively examines metaphors in order to understand how followers interpret academic leadership, followership and follower–leader interactions. Data were gathered from academics in follower roles through written narratives or face-to-face interviews in accordance with participants’ preferences. Drawing on a social constructionist perspective and a metaphorical conceptual framework, we align with Lakoff and Johnson [1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] who claim that metaphors pervade thought and action. Our findings illuminate followers’ understandings of leadership efficacy; their multifaceted responses to particular encounters with leaders and the complexities of following and leading in university workplaces. We demonstrate how metaphors can explain some of the concerns and constraints shaping follower and leader interactions in academia. Our analysis highlights the importance of framing leadership as a relational and dynamic construct.     

Research on Motivation in Collaborative Learning: Moving Beyond the Cognitive–Situative Divide and Combining Individual and Social Processes

In this article we propose that in order to advance our understanding of motivation in collaborative learning we should move beyond the cognitive–situative epistemological divide and combine individual and social processes. Our claim is that although recent research has recognized the importance of social aspects in emerging and sustained motivation in collaborative learning activities, the social is mainly conceived as a unidirectional source of influence on individual motivation. In the article we examine the significance of motivation in research on collaborative learning. We discuss two characterizations of the role of the social in conceptualizations of motivation, namely, social influence and social construction, and outline our case for moving beyond the cognitive–situative divide and combining individual and social processes in research on motivation. Finally, we present illustrations from recent research on motivation in collaborative learning that has attempted to bridge the cognitive–situative divide across theoretical perspectives or using different methods.     

New girlhood and lost boys: analysing the cultural politics of gender and education through film

The ‘coming of age’ films Bend it like Beckham, Whale Rider and Harry Potter feature distinctive narratives about girlhood and boyhood that provide a perspective on the changing historical and political context of gendered identity construction in the new millennium. The early 2000s represented a particular moment in thinking about the possibilities, risks and threats of gender relations in Western countries. This was overwhelmingly represented by a discourse of crisis and loss in relation to boyhood and a discourse of hope in relation to girlhood. These films reflect the tensions and contradictory readings of the new cultural politics of gender in the early 2000s, drawing on many of the discourses present in academic discussions about young people's gendered identities. We show how an analysis of ‘coming of age’ films offers a lens for examining the cultural politics of gender and education, and for reflecting on social change and the perceptions and anxieties that this brings.     

Does a formal wiki event contribute to the formation of a network of practice? A social capital perspective on the potential for informal learning

Informal learning in blended and online settings plays an increasingly important role in the continuous professional development of individuals. Yet, how do individuals engage into these types of activities? We argue that social capital theory can provide valuable insights into how people behave and decide to take part in (in)formal learning. Using social network analysis, we provide empirical evidence on an informal learning activity, where participants collaboratively created knowledge on wiki sites on a predefined set of topics. Our results show that there are three types of active participants in these types of informal learning activities, namely leaders, collaborators and lone editors. These findings provide valuable insights for other, similar activities that aim at enhancing the professional development of individuals.     

Conceptualizing identity,learning and social justice in community-based learning

This paper explores the process of learning to become a social justice teacher, drawing in particular on Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue in order to theorize pre-service teachers’ identity negotiations. Interpretations of learning and identity are based on the content of pre-service teachers’ narratives about community-based learning. Supported by theoretically-sensitive ways of conceptualizing identity and social justice, the author develops an understanding of the ways pre-service teachers shape their identities through participating in community events. Implications for teacher education, in terms of the design and pedagogic practices, are presented with the intent of enabling the realization of social justice teacher education.     

话语、社交、文化——文化驱动的社会语用视角

本文讨论的是一个社会语用学的话题——话语作为社交言语行为和特定的文化之间的动态关系。在作者看来,社会交往的言行是构成人际社会现实的具体形式,而这种形式要成为社会适合的和有效的形式,必然与文化发生联系;换句话说,只有受到文化的驱使,社交言行的合理性、合适性和有效性才会得到根本的保证。文章分三个主要部分加以讨论：第一部分,文章讨论社交言行的文化合理性、合适性和有效性问题;第二部分,文章讨论社交言行在微观层次上有文化驱动的形式和进程;第三部分,在微观讨论的基础上,文章讨论文化驱动社交言行方式的社会、文化心理建构问题。文章得出了这样的结论：文化和社交言行之间存在着十分紧密的、重要的联系;谈论社交话语如果离开了特定文化的驱动,那就是无本之木、无源之水;因此,把话语、社交和文化结合起来讨论,不仅有利于文化的语用功能解释,更有利于社会语用学的建立和发展。     

Girls' and boys' reasoning on cultural and religious practices: a human rights education perspective

Human rights play a vital role in citizens' political, religious and cultural life (Wang 2002, 171). Due to the prominence of human rights in the everyday life of citizens, including those of South Africa, human rights education has been included in many school curricula. Human rights education aims to develop responsible citizens who inter alia foster an understanding of gender, ethnical, religious and cultural diversities. This, it is hoped will encourage and maintain peace, as outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Departing from a human rights position, a qualitative study commenced in 2009 to explore how girls and boys reason about the cultural and religious practices of girls in their communities and families. Narratives by girls and boys highlighted their views on girls' positioning in their specific communities. From the findings it became evident that the participants were aware of conforming to particular cultural and religious practices. However, some participants also challenged how they perceived these practices and the roles of girls in their communities. The article highlights the necessity of embarking on a gendered perspective towards human rights education.     

Extending the apprenticeship of observation: how mentee experiences shape mentors

Although the importance of mentor teachers in clinical teacher preparation is well established, few researchers explore the social identity development of these individuals. Through our study we contribute to the body of research by exploring mentor teachers’ social identity development through the concept of Apprenticeship of Observation – specifically, how they felt their own mentoring experiences influenced their approaches to mentoring. The multi-case study includes findings about mentoring beliefs and practices during the laboratory school component of an Alternate Route to Licensure program. Incorporating semi-structured interviews and video analysis, the findings demonstrate how four mentor teachers’ prior experiences as mentees – including Alternate Route to Licensure, traditional teacher preparation programs, and inservice teaching – influenced their interactions with teacher candidates as mentors. Recommendations for practice and implications for future research are provided.