Re-Envisioning Learning, Re-Engaging the Literature

We are excited to share with you this issue of the Journal of the Learning Sciences, which offers the learning sciences community opportunities to revisit and re-envision some of the core ideas in our field. What does it mean to learn from an experience? How do new understandings develop across body and mind—and across institutions and individuals? What are the roles of feelings and embodied experiences in these learning processes? The four articles in this issue engage seminal theoretical works and offer careful empirical studies with which to address these fundamental questions and revisit some of the central constructs of learning sciences research: transfer, motivation, affect, embodiment, boundary-crossing, and even the nature of experience.

In this issue you will meet two young girls—“Sandra” (in Jaber & Hammer, 2016/this issue) and “Clara” (in Jornet, Roth, & Krange, 2016/this issue)—whose wonder and joy in their learning experiences prompt careful re-examinations of the theoretical bases of our explanations of learning. You will be asked to reconsider the role of affect in learning, both in terms of epistemological agency in science (by Jaber & Hammer), and in terms of the ways “episodic feelings” (Nemirovsky, 2011, p. 308) can help us attend to learners, their environments, and the passage of time within a coherent unit of analysis (by Jornet, Roth, & Krange).

Jaber and Hammer’s article, “Engaging in Science: A Feeling for the Discipline” (2016/this issue), offers a unique case study of a student, “Sandra,” spanning four years of her engagement in elementary school science. The authors build on pioneering work on affect and motivation by Pintrich and colleagues, and ask us to go beyond considering feelings toward science, and instead to examine the feelings learners and scientists experience within the doing of specific scientific practices. They propose that epistemic agency (Scardamalia, 2002) has important affective components, which they identify as epistemic affect and epistemic motivation. Both for researchers and educators, this study suggests “feeling[s] for the discipline” (p. 156) may not only be a conduit toward science learning, but also a site of that learning.

Abrahamson and Sánchez-García’s “Learning Is Moving in New Ways: The Ecological Dynamics of Mathematics Education” (2016/this issue) similarly asks us to re-think the research on embodiment in mathematics learning, with a specific focus on the role of sensorimotor interactions. The authors focus on the emergence of imaginary objects learners introduce into their interactions with an environment, which they call attentional anchors, and the ways symbolic artifacts come to be adopted as tools first in bodily action, and then in semiotic discourse. They introduce the analytical framework of ecological dynamics, and illustrate its utility in “minding the epistemic gap between action and symbol” (p. 225).

Akkerman and Bruining’s article, “Multilevel Boundary Crossing in a Professional Development School Partnership” (2016/this issue), examines boundary crossing as a phenomenon at three levels of analysis: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional. Their case study uses an examination of a familiar educational context—school-university partnerships in the form of professional development schools (PDSs)—as an opportunity to deepen our understanding of boundary crossing. In particular, their analytical framework enables them to examine four modes of learning that are afforded by boundary crossing (identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation), which can occur at each of these three levels of analysis. This provides a rich and detailed view of learning opportunities in PDSs, both realized and missed. They highlight the unique role of brokers in terms of connecting across boundaries, and the ways a “chain of brokers” (p. 273) can experience, promote, and also impede each kind of learning at these three levels of analysis.

This study is one of an emerging family of learning sciences research that takes a longer (multi-year) view of complex learning activities across multiple levels of analysis (e.g., Penuel, Confrey, Maloney, & Rupp, 2014; Roth, 2014). Like other researchers working in this genre, Akkerman and Bruining challenge us to see learning as occurring simultaneously at, and in complex interactions across, these multiple levels, and to consider learning processes at much longer time scales than our field has traditionally considered.

Finally, Jornet, Roth, and Krange’s “A Transactional Approach to Transfer Episodes” (2016/this issue) asks us to re-think not only the construct of transfer, but the nature of experience itself. Their article offers a careful theoretical treatment of Dewey’s and Vygotky’s seminal conceptualizations of experience, each of which emphasized a holistic sense of experience as a dynamic, unfolding encounter between learners and their environment. The authors engage the core learning sciences literature on transfer, and propose an analytical framework and a methodological approach based on a transactional unit of analysis. This approach attempts to overcome dualisms that they point out in much learning sciences resea*rch—i.e., separating the individual cognitive agent from the surrounding environment, or only observing transfer as differences between separate moments in time, rather than observing the unfolding of emergent processes involving learners-in-context.

These articles illustrate the theoretical depth of learning sciences research, while also showing the tight integration of this theorizing with close empirical analysis. We anticipate that these articles will stimulate much reaction and discussion in the field. We eagerly invite you to engage these ideas in your own work, and to continue to push these theoretical advances in the pages of this journal.