Futures of Learning

Last week was a frenetic one for many of those who write for this blog. As the final report for the Digital Youth project jittered through the media, many of the project’s researchers were navigating the windowless corridors and “imperial ballrooms” of the San Francisco Hilton, home of the 2008 Annual Meeting for the American Anthropological Association.

News of the Digital Youth report first appeared in the media on Wednesday night when the New York Times website posted a story set to appear in their Thursday print edition. Shortly thereafter the websites of several other newspapers and blogs posted stories. Ever since, it has been like watching the game of telephone being played out inside a pinball machine.

For those of us inclined towards sociocultural theories of learning, and theories of social practice more generally, a less noisy sort of news making was happening at the Hilton on Wednesday afternoon. Jean Lave — integral to the development of influential concepts such as “situated learning,” “legitimate peripheral participation,” and “communities of practice” — was receiving a career achievement award from the AAA. Of the intellectual ideas that inspired our report few, if any, were more influential than those developed by Lave, making the dovetailing of her honoring with our release, while coincidental, seem appropriately consequential.

As a way of recognizing Lave, the president of AAA invited her to host a four hour panel. The result, titled “Situating Trans-Formational Practices,” was introduced by Lave as an “intellectual party” featuring some of her favorite thinkers and collaborators over the past 20-30 years. The lineup — scribbled on a torn sheet of paper and taped to the door — read as follows: Dororthy Holland, Paul Duguid, Ole Dreier, Ray McDermott, Helen Verran, Sharon Traweek, Penny Harvey, Lucy Suchman, Discussant: Don Brenneis. Given the star status of these scholars within certain academic domains, this “party” could easily have become occasion for the sort of self-bestowed reverence that tends to give the Academy Awards or multi-day music festivals their navel-gazing feel. Luckily the organizers seemed to have anticipated this possibility and worked to ensure a more down-home informality. Note the wording on the invitation to the after-party, printed via inkjet on generic sticky-labels:

Your’re (sic) invited to a…
PARTY FOR JEAN LAVE!!!
(Dottie Holland & Lucy Suchman)
IMPERIAL BALLROOM A
Saturday 8 pm til 10 or maybe 11

Purposeful or not, intimacy and informality thankfully pervaded the session, giving serious, critical, complex ideas a welcoming demeanor. The talks were varied and rich, too much so for this graduate student to offer a satisfying, accurate, and useful account here. Instead, I’ll quickly recap each talk, telling a bit more about the talks that seemed most relevant to the topic of this blog.

Dorothy (Dottie) Holland kicked off the party with a talk on university relations with community based organizations (CBOs), arguing for an engagement that counts as scholarship and challenging reified distinctions between theory (knowledge production) and application (knowledge in use). Drawing on her own work with members of the local food movement, Holland both advocated for these sorts of practical involvements, and relayed some of the tensions she’s discovered as she’s tried to bring two communities of practice together.

Paul Duguid followed Holland with a historical account of how trademark law emerged in the US at the end of the 19th century. He began by debunking the “grand story” often told in economic and legal discourses. Such a story suggests that strong intellectual property law partially explains the second industrial revolution in the US, which occurred at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In actuality, Duguid said, trademark law didn’t go into effect until 1906. In place of the “grand story,” Duguid suggested that trademark law was a product of longer historical struggles over who owned industrially produced goods — battles over labeling/naming/owning that were played out amongst workers, unions, companies, and associations.

Duguid was followed by Ole Dreier who spoke about his recent book Psychotherapy in Everyday Life . Dreier, a critical psychologist, has been examining the role of professional practices, especially psychotherapy, in the ongoing everyday lives of “clients.” Dreier objects to how therapy, and other professional interventions, are purposely isolated from the ongoing practices of their clients. Dreier noted that therapy takes place in a “secluded site” and increasingly relies on “evidence based” accounting, mechanisms imported from medical practices. Dreier argued that such accounting measures make the faulty assumption that psychological intervention can change behavior in a manner similar to a chemical reaction. He noted that clients must take whatever happens in therapy with them into their everyday lives and pursue changes in behavior across the various contexts in which they live. While focused on therapy, Dreier’s work has many parallels with Lave’s studies of learning and, consequently, is filled with insights for those of us interested in how experts “intervene” in the way young people learn. Of particular relevance to our work is his emphasis on how the intervention is experienced from the point of view of the client/student and, in particular, how the intervening practices fit into the rest of the client/student’s life. As our project explores current and future institutions of learning, it will be critical that we don’t repeat these past mistakes, whether by using institutions to isolate youth from the rest of their lives or by holding learning institutions accountable to systems designed for studying chemistry, not social practice (more on accountability later in this post).

After Dreier, Ray McDermott gave a mesmerizing “performance” that historicized many of the panel’s themes by resurfacing the works of John Dewey and Paul Radin. Delivered with rhythmic cadence, his talk came closest to literally answering Jean’s call for an intellectual party. With quotes suggesting that we move from “kinds of minds to minds in action,” and that “things only exist in relation to each other,” McDermott reminded us of some of the historical roots of ideas that still seem fresh and urgent in 2008.

McDermott’s talk was followed by a break before the second four panelists. Helen Verran led off round two by discussing her work on “ontic politics” which, like McDermott’s reference to Dewey’s “things only exist in relation to each other,” constitutes objects as “clots and expressions of relations.” Her current work focuses on the political processes involved in an effort to “reclaim” a river in Australia, a collective undertaking that has brought together various communities of practice, each of which imagines society and nature differently.

Sharon Traweek spoke after Verran and argued for “theorizing with a middle voice,” one not bound up in conventional markers of subjectivity and objectivity, an attempt to theorize without dichotomies. Traweek’s talk was rich and diverse, drawing on research of high energy physicists and yet equally reflecting on the challenges and limitations of disciplines, especially as they actively reproduce gender hierarchies.

Penelope (Penny) Harvey reported on work she’s currently undertaking with engineers and city planners charged to shape the city and skyline of Manchester, England. Her work focuses on how the production of 3D models is taken up in these engineering efforts. Manchester’s use of models is particularly interesting as the engineers and city planners are using them as a communicative tool with the public, offering citizens a means to participate in the planning process. While the project is still going on, Harvey warned that models can never be universal and will always require some standardization and exclusion. Our focus, then, should be on matters of concern (political) rather than matters of fact (seemingly apolitical).

Finally, Lucy Suchman, who helped organize the panel with Dorothy Holland, gave a talk titled, “Situating Practices of Future Making.” Suchman has been investigating how design and innovation are often treated as specialized sites, governed by experts in “imaginations of entrepreneurism.” In their most fashioned form, such sites can approach a “science of design,” an approach called for by Humbert Simon and many others. Suchman used Margolin’s The Politics of the Artificial to critique Simon’s approach, arguing for an understanding of design as social practice. Clearly Suchman is concerned with attempts to lay claim to innovation, design, and “the new” — that is, change — in institutions governed by experts, whether they be professional designers or scientists. Instead of positioning themselves as the originators of change, she called for professional designers to be one site amongst many, not originators but participants in the circulation and shaping of ideas and change. While focused on the work of computer scientists and engineers, Suchman’s larger theme of “future making” deserves reflection from those working in the space of “futures of learning.” As experts working at the intersection of youth and technology, the work of “future making” is unavoidable. As concepts, both youth and technology are intimately constituted in their relations to the future. The questions of, “whose future?” and “what sort of future?” should be continually asked. Additionally, Suchman’s talk reminds us that our research “participants” should be involved in our work of future making, more so than as just informants.

After Suchman, Donald Brenneis, the discussant, pleased panelists and audience alike with an insightful and imaginative response. Brenneis organized his response around a series of “T-words” the first of which was “trajectory.” Brenneis said he heard in the various talks the theme of “movement across” and the “new,” implying temporality, history, and what people carry between situations, often to be reused and redeployed. Brenneis’ second T-word was “translation,” noting the need to abandon the dream of a common language and, instead, recognize the multiplicity of language, the partiality of knowledge (both as something incomplete but also as something you’re partial towards). Such a recognition needs advocates, especially now as we experience, “a rising hegemony of evidence-based medicine” and centralized accountability. This latter point should perk the ears of those involved in debates over measuring learning outcomes, the need for standards, public accountability, &tc., &tc. Brenneis notes that we clearly need to start advocating other forms of accountability, pointing towards Suchman’s call for localized accountability as one possible alternative. Brenneis’ final T-word was “transcendence,” noting that many of the panelists seemed to have been arguing against it. Common amongst the panelists was the insistence that life is embodied, grounded, complicated, and lateral. The goal, according to Brenneis, should be making lateral voices and relations possible. Finally, Brenneis argued that many had argued that form matters as much as content, noting the trademarks, the 3D models, the recurring concern with forms of recognition, forms of expertise, forms of membership and exclusion, and forms of affordances in software. Drawing on his own studies of hearing, Brenneis closed with the question of whether the problem might not be translation but transduction — processes in which external energy is connected to something we can understand and represent.