Reconceptualizing Learning: A Critical Task for Knowledge-Building and Teaching

Abstract

This symposium takes as central the proposition that understanding peoples’ participation in cultural practices—as they are set within historical, social, and developmental processes—is fundamental to the study of learning. This means understanding that learning unfolds through multiple pathways that occur in relation to expansive and shifting social and contextual conditions, to which humans are constantly adapting. Emerging across relevant fields is an understanding that human learning and development unfolds within complex systems. These include interactions among physiological processes and people’s participation in cultural practices within and across time (phylogenetic time, cultural historical time, ontogenetic time, and microgenetic time) and across spaces. Here, we bring together interdisciplinary perspectives and research methods to elaborate an expansive vision of learning that ignites further inquiry into the cultural foundations of learning—the topic of a new Routledge Handbook. The symposium builds on the volume by engaging participants in roundtable discussions with authors from each of the major sections of the Handbook. Key to this inquiry are fundamental stances about what constitutes and is privileged as human ways of knowing, being, and doing. Without attention to how the question, “what is learning?,” gets understood and changes over time comes the risk of falling into reductionist and problematic views of learning, that are unfounded empirically and further reproduce social inequities, At a time when key concerns about how educational spaces, systems, and teaching should be designed, funded, and assessed, this foundational work on learning is especially critical.