Re‐contextualising learning in second modernity¹

1. Contribution to the SOCSI Foundation Lecture Series, University of Cardiff, 27 February 2008. A contribution under the same title, on which this text is based, is in press as Chapter 2.2.1 in: Bendit, René and Hahn‐Bleibtreu, Marina (eds.) Youth and the future. Processes of social inclusion and patterns of vulnerability in a globalised world. Verlag Barbara Budrich: Leverkusen/Opladen and Barbara Budrich Publishers: Farmington Hills, USA: 2008 (ISBN 978‐3‐86649‐173‐1).

Abstract

Changing boundaries between categories of knowledge, together with changing relations with propositional and experiential knowledge, demand reconsideration of what counts as learning. Such re‐contextualisation processes can be approached from three standpoints: deconstruction‐decoding (learning as a differentiated set of related practices), refocusing‐repositioning (situating learning sites in a life‐course perspective) and reconstruction‐recoding (specifying pedagogic discourse to embrace non‐formal and informal learning). Learning in second modernity might hold emancipatory promise, but this requires fundamental re‐structuring of teaching/learning contexts in all respects, not least in the re‐positioning of all learners as adults, in the sense of being autonomous and responsible shapers of their potentially highly differentiated learning biographies – but it equally heralds an intensification of discipline of the self.

Keywords:

• education and social change
• knowledge societies
• learning and life‐course

Notes

1. Contribution to the SOCSI Foundation Lecture Series, University of Cardiff, 27 February 2008. A contribution under the same title, on which this text is based, is in press as Chapter 2.2.1 in: Bendit, René and Hahn‐Bleibtreu, Marina (eds.) Youth and the future. Processes of social inclusion and patterns of vulnerability in a globalised world. Verlag Barbara Budrich: Leverkusen/Opladen and Barbara Budrich Publishers: Farmington Hills, USA: 2008 (ISBN 978‐3‐86649‐173‐1).