Explaining the Significance of Participationist Approaches for Understanding Students' Knowledge Acquisition

Abstract

This article aims to appraise insights from participationist approaches to learning for understanding students' knowledge acquisition. The first part explicates the concepts of positioning, recognition, and identity through presenting a common ground for participationists and discussing different views on (a) the relationship between learning the content domain and positioning, recognition, and identity negotiation; (b) dynamicity of situativity; (c) relation of moment-to-moment situativity to long-term interaction patterns; (d) awareness of positioning, recognition, and identity. This allows an appraisal in the article's second part of a claim inherent to participationist views: It is necessary to adopt a system's view on learning opportunities presented to students in class because of the way positioning, recognition, and identity negotiation influence students' engagement with curricular content. A fifth issue emerges concerning the nature of this influence. Theoretical considerations and empirical evidence combine to support the conclusion that the claim holds some, not all, of the time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank James Greeno and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful reviews of earlier versions of the article. The many valuable comments and criticisms in these reviews have helped me strengthen my focus and argumentation considerably. Most of all, I thank Editor-in-Chief Clark Chinn for his incredible, extended engagement in discussions of the article's aims, claims, and arguments. Without his persistent insistence on explication of points, my aim of appraising the significance of participationist insights for understanding students' knowledge acquisition could not have been achieved.

FUNDING

Research for this article has been partly funded by a research grant from The Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities, Grant No. DFF-4180-00062.

Notes

¹ I do not mean to say that every instance of inquiry-based teaching will lead to negative forms of positioning and identity negotiation. There are examples in the literature (e.g., Greeno & van de Sande, 2007) that show more positive forms. However, the fact that the teacher has prima facie authority over the students, as concerns both subject matter and choice of activities, constitutes a fundamental asymmetric power relation in the classroom. When this is ignored (as it seems to be in von Glasersfeld's example), the risk of negative positioning is high (cf. e.g., Hand, 2010, to be discussed next; Packer & Goicoechea, 2000). The asymmetric power relation can, however, be made positive use of if for example, students are positioned as providers of valuable suggestions, not yet thought of by the teacher (Greeno & van de Sande, 2007).

² On the face of it, Sfard and Prusak's concept of designated identities is similar to the concept of possible future selves advocated by Markus and Nurius (1986). They, too, stressed that “possible selves” are incentives for future behavior as well as a point of reference for evaluating one's current self. However, unlike Sfard and Prusak, Markus and Nurius took the individualist approach to self and identity, elaborated on earlier, and understood self (both current and possible ones) as inner phenomena—more specifically as mental representations.

³ This is not to say that the student will never act in ways contradictory to this self-understanding. The point is just that he would then be acting in ways implicated by another identity, such as “I am a youth like all the others,” leading him to forsake studying one night to party with his classmates.

⁴ For designated identities, this means that the persons see themselves as describing what is really the case about what they desire and fear concerning who they and others are going to be in the future.

⁵ This is not to deny that there are many aspects of who we are that are established in social negotiation. One aspect would be the example provided by Holland et al., of whether a girl is “really pretty” or not (Holland et al., 1998, p. 145). However, there are also fairly clear-cut examples of aspects where this is not the case. For instance, if the blind people in Brueghel's painting The Parable of the Blind (or The Blind Leading the Blind) all expressed understandings of themselves and the others as “persons with exceptionally clear sight,” they would all be in delusion, regardless of the fact that none of them expressed this opinion. Of course, the verdict that this is so depends on there being a viewer to see the painting. But the fact itself does not.

⁶ Analogous examples of this are reported in Solvoll and Heggen (2003) and Thrysøe (2011): Student nurses and newly qualified nurses, respectively, who had a marginalized position in the professional dialogue in the ward, were observed by the researchers to place themselves (and be placed by their colleagues) in peripheral physical positions at the table, both during meetings and during breaks.

⁷ “Participation structure,” in Hand's words.

⁸ In the terminology of the strand, issues of who we are and strive to become are “ontological” issues as compared to issues of what knowledge is and how knowledge is acquired, which are termed “epistemological.” This terminology is not quite in accordance with the way the terms ontology and epistemology are defined and used within philosophy, but this is of minor significance here and I do not discuss the terminology further.

⁹ Packer and Goicoechea claimed that the view they articulated is incipient in sociocultural theories of learning in general. To my mind, this claim neglects important differences within the overall sociocultural approach. Research in distributed cognition (e.g., Hutchins & Klausen, 1996), for instance, is centrally focused on the functioning of a cognitive system and has no obvious bearing on identity issues. The claim also neglects the more specific divergences within participationist views discussed in the preceding section.

¹⁰ As E. Wenger (personal communication, October 20, 2008) has done.

¹¹ As Jackson (1998) put the problem, a bit pointedly: “It is always open to us to stipulate the situations covered by the various descriptive terms, in which case we address subjects of our stipulation rather than the subjects the titles of our books and papers might naturally lead others to expect us to be addressing” (p. 42).

¹² This has been changing over the last years, but the values and practices discussed here have been dominant in Danish preschools for decades. The empirical claims put forward in this example are based on informal conversations with a number of preschool practitioners and on many years of informal observation of preschool practices in several institutions. They are supported by numerous pedagogical discussions with preschool staff of the goals ideally and practically to be set for preschools and preschool children. These discussions were held over several years in the context of participation in preschool boards.