Why Learning on the Move: Intersecting Research Pathways for Mobility, Learning and Teaching

Abstract

Mobility provides the fabric of everyday life but is rarely considered part of learning and is almost never used as relevant, experiential content in teaching. This special issue integrates ideas and efforts across different fields into a more unified framework to study and design for what we call Learning on the Move. Approaches used in these studies reflect various ontological and epistemological standpoints, especially with regard to the role of moving bodies, place, and lands/waters in learning, teaching, and development. The heterogeneity of approaches in this special issue potentially helps us to see the complexity of human, more-than-human, and technological relations across time. The specificity of each project necessarily foregrounds certain aspects of activity and history, while backgrounding others. Rather than casting this as problematic, we see this heterogeneity as an opportunity to generate dialogue across research programs that are guided by frameworks of power, historicity, relationality, respect, reciprocity, and accountability. We also take this as an opportunity to raise questions about historical, present-day, and future relationships to lands/waters, place, socio-ecological systems, and socio-technical arrangements. At a practical level, this means having conversations about the differences and similarities between ontological and epistemological conceptions of time, space, place, and lands/waters when studying or designing for Learning on the Move. We anticipate and acknowledge that at times our conceptions of Learning on the Move may align and at other times may be incommensurable.

Acknowledgments

Many of the issues addressed in the issue were discussed and extended vigorously at the 2017 meetings of the Jean Piaget Society, and in a workshop hosted by the Wond’ry at Vanderbilt University later that year. We thank university, foundation, and industry participants in those meetings, including June Ahn, Corey Brady, Megan Bang, Adam Bell, Corey Brady, Jamie Cohen, Joshua Danish, Colleen Daw, Jean-Mark DeBaud, Doug Fisher, Daniel Furbish, David Gagnon, Mishuana Goeman, Melissa Gresalfi, Maren Hall-Wieckert, Christopher Hoadley, Andrew Hostetler, Susan Jurow, Jennifer Kahn, Remi Kalir, Danielle Kiefert, Kevin Leander, Robb Lindgren, Jasmine Ma, James Matthews, Helen Lubbock, Stuart Lynn, David Owens, Nichole Pinkard, Priya Pugh, Josh Radinsky, Britta Ricker, Lilia Rodriguez, Ben Shapiro (the Elder), Deborah Silvis, Sarah Van Wart, Lauren Vogelstein, Lorenzo Washington, Kären Wieckert, and Heather Toomey Zimmerman. A website developed after that meeting (https://www.lom-meshworking.org/) includes descriptions of selected projects and resources for developing research and teaching around learning on the move.

Additional information

Funding

Work leading to this special issue was supported by a capacity-building grant from the National Science Foundation [1647242].