Rethinking the boundaries of learning in a digital age

Introduction

Why are boundaries important when studying social and educational practices? Boundaries might be said to define our everyday social and cultural worlds in fundamental ways. Boundaries can be manifested by material objects, such as fences and walls, for example marking borders between countries or properties or marking limits between inside and outside school buildings. In addition, boundaries can be defined in the ways we understand different contexts and practices, and the embedded expected codes and norms of behaviour, for example in classrooms, at home, on the soccer field, or in youth clubs. Still, most of the time we are unaware of boundaries in everyday life and of their impacts and take them more or less for granted.

There has been a growing interest in studying how learners move between settings and contexts and how they are positioned as learners in certain ways (Azevedo and Mann 2022; Bricker and Bell 2014; Leander, Phillips, and Taylor 2010; Nasir et al. 2020). Also, scholars have identified possible continuities and discontinuities in and between contexts of participation and learning (Bronkhorst and Akkerman 2016), and the notion of boundaries is often framed as something that marks certain types of discontinuities in people’s experiences and identities. We deal with boundaries throughout our everyday lives regarding what we can and cannot do in specific situations and settings. We orient ourselves by our understanding of the different roles we are expected to perform in and across these settings, as a family person at home, being with friends at a concert, being a student or teacher at school, or when doing sports in our local communities.

Scholars from different fields have started to address the blurring of social and culturally defined boundaries, and their implication in different spheres of everyday life. One important factor is, of course, the emerging digital culture we live in, which impacts all aspects of our lives, creating new, often unforeseen, practices and interpretations of boundaries (Ehret and Rowsell 2021; Erstad and Silseth 2022; Jandrić et al. 2018; Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch 2020; Sefton-Green and Erstad 2017). Therefore, it becomes crucial to research and explore the experiences that participants in contemporary social practices mobilise as relevant resources in and across specific settings and activities, such as when learning about genetics in school science, playing online computer games with peers, or posting self-created videos on social media. Our thinking about boundaries also enables us to extend our thinking about what learning is, where learning happens, and the kinds of resources that are relevant for successful participation in and across settings and contexts.

This special issue provides the reader with both theoretical explorations and empirical studies from different countries around the world and brings together a unique collection of contributions that address the topic of boundaries in relation to recent developments in the intersection between digital technologies, education, and learning in formal and informal contexts. The authors of the nine papers draw on former theoretical work and empirical studies; however, these contributions aim to bring new understandings and orientations to boundaries and borders between diverse settings and contexts in the digital age. We hope this special issue will stimulate advancements in this field and encourage further studies on how to conceptualise boundaries in the digital age and empirical work on different educational levels and practices.

Boundaries, lines, and learning

The topic of boundaries is, of course, not new and can be found in diverse research fields including geography, sociology, psychology, philosophy, physics, and history. In this special issue we draw especially on developments within the social sciences and humanities, while some authors also draw on theories from other fields. Often, theories within the social sciences and humanities refer to boundaries in indirect and implicit ways, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of ‘distinction’⸺that cultural capital impacts norms of taste and marks boundaries between different social classes; Judith Butler’s (1993) theory about gender as performative⸺gender being a normative category performed in certain ways, creating boundaries between what is expected of persons in different situations and contexts; or Erving Goffman’s (1974) notion of ‘frames’⸺that we collaboratively interpret and make sense of what is going on in an event and, through this, create boundaries between different events.

Of relevance to education are, of course, also scholars such as John Dewey (1959), who was, in his work on democracy and citizenship, preoccupied by the question of how learning in school is, or is not, connected to the outside world as experienced by young people. Sylvia Scribner (1981) was a pioneer in exploring the social context of literacy and the interrelationship between formal and informal ways of learning. She was, together with Michael Cole, fundamental in defining cultural psychology as a field, opening up perspectives on boundaries and learning. Jean Lave (1988) has been crucial in the formation of studies of learning practices in everyday life and the boundaries between activities that people are involved in across different cultural settings. The role of boundaries can also be found among scholars of critical pedagogy in the 1990s. Their relevance for our interpretation of boundaries is their critique of the traditional educational system and its organisation, which embraced alternative approaches influenced by Paolo Freire. Henry Giroux, for example, in his book Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (2007) argues for a radical educational theory and practice in what he calls ‘border pedagogy’. Boundaries are then understood in terms of social classification, human geography, and cultural diversity related to democratic societies (see also Horvath and Steinberg in this special issue).

Also relevant are theories on space and place, often referring to the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre as a key inspiration. Lefebvre (1991) made us aware of the social production of space and its impact on everyday life, also implying how boundaries between spaces create constraints for human action (see, for example, Ahson et al. in this special issue). During the last decades, researchers in different fields have drawn on Lefebvre for ways to understand how spatial theory can be applied within the social sciences and humanities, such as Edward Soja’s notion of ‘Thirdspace’ (1996), indicating how we relate to and move across different spaces in everyday life. Within educational theories, the influence of Lefebvre is expressed, for example, in Jan Nespor’s work (1997) on how students are embedded in flows of experiences across different contexts and critically raising questions about how we draw the boundaries of the school. Further, conceptions of spaces and boundaries are expressed in studies of ‘spatial literacies’ (Leander and Sheehy 2004), where literacy practices are studied across different contexts, or in studies of ‘knowledge in motion’ (Kinloch 2015; Nespor 1994), where knowledge practices are defined according to certain institutional framings.

In his book The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (1991), Eviatar Zerubavel writes about the importance of ‘lines’ and ‘boundaries’ in studying social life. As he writes:

It is boundaries that help us separate one entity from another … Indeed, the word define derives from the Latin word for boundary, which is finis. To define something is to mark its boundaries, to surround it with a mental fence that separates it from everything else … These lines play a critical role in the construction of social reality, since only with them do meaningful social entities (families, social classes, nations) emerge out of the flux of human existence … Boundaries are normally taken for granted and, as such, usually manage to escape our attention. (1991, 2)

From this perspective, we can also say that boundaries can be helpful, and perhaps also necessary, when making meaning of social situations in and across settings. To some extent, people are dependent on separating situations and activities from each other to participate successfully and co-construct a shared space for meaning making and being. What becomes a challenge is when boundaries become barriers that hinder participation and learning. More recently, Tim Ingold (2007) has used the concept of ‘lines’ to draw our orientation to the meaning of separations, using ‘lines’ as a metaphor for how cultural worlds and social practices are manifested and expressed according to socio-material notations in cultural expressions. As such, they imply potential for human expression and meaning making. This represents a different approach than Zerubavel, since Ingold is more interested in the subtle understanding of ‘lines’ and similar metaphors, such as ‘traces’, ‘threads’, and ‘surfaces’, and the interrelationship between ‘lines’ and ‘surfaces’ in the development of texts and writing, while Zerubavel writes more explicitly about social practices and institutions.

Thus, our conception of boundaries and how they are experienced shapes our social lives and the different practices we traverse during our daily lives. Still, we are perhaps often unaware of boundaries in everyday life and their impacts and take them more or less for granted.

Researching educational boundaries

Education, schooling, and learning are of special relevance and importance in studying boundaries. The way schools and the education system are organised is dependent on boundaries—school buildings marked by gates and walls as different from other buildings in the community, classrooms with certain numbers of students, curricula divided into subjects and levels, assessment systems categorising students into groups, and homework as doing schooling but at home. As such, both space and time are of essence in understanding educational boundaries. The spaces that educational institutions are made of are often viewed as different from other spaces that young people encounter in their everyday lives. Schooling and education are structured around specific timescales (Lemke 2000), such as class hours, recess, school year, and progression through levels.

Boundaries can create positive connections, such as when classes in two different countries collaborate on a common project and gain a deeper understanding of each other’s similarities and differences. However, boundaries can often create tensions and conflicts, such as when boundaries are not clear to participants, are misunderstood, or represent diverse positions, for example when students discuss political issues at school and their political beliefs are manifested, or when students do not understand assignments given by teachers, the ways assessment systems create divisions between students, or the division between formal and informal ways of learning.

Within educational research and the learning sciences, the issues of blurring boundaries between experiences from formal and informal learning contexts have become especially salient. Concepts such as ‘funds of knowledge’ (Barton and Tan 2009; Moll et al. 1992), ‘funds of identities’ (Esteban-Guitart and Moll 2014), ‘third space’ (Gutierrez, Rymes, and Larson 1995; Moje et al. 2004), and ‘boundary-crossing’ (Akkerman and Bakker 2011; Akkerman and Eijck 2013) have been used for the purpose of conceptualising and researching to what extent and how resources that are part of students’ everyday lives outside school can be evoked as resources in learning settings in school. This research has been important in showing how students position themselves as learners in different ways in different sites and contexts. Boundaries then become important in identifying connections, or dis-connections, in activities young people are engaged in, and also in how we understand critical media literacies in ways that young people are crossing boundaries and understanding contemporary media cultures (see also de Groot, de Haan & van Dijken 2023). This highlights another increasingly important issue in educational research, that of inclusion and exclusion of students and experiences in the ways school learning is organised and defined.

These developments are also addressed in research carried out in our research group in Oslo during the last decade, referred to as ‘learning lives’ studies (Erstad et al. 2016), which draws attention to the interrelationship between students’ academic and everyday lives within specific communities. In our research, we have also explored how teachers invoke students’ everyday experiences in different educational settings as part of academic work and what this means for students’ learning and their understanding of themselves as learners at the boundaries between formal and informal learning settings (Silseth and Erstad 2018; 2022).

Digital boundaries

Drawing on the research agendas mentioned above, the main focus of this special issue is the impact of digital technology on studying educational boundaries and students’ learning over time and across contexts. Developments in digital media and mobile technologies enable new ways for learners to move in and between settings and have implications for how we conceptualise and study learning (Hillman and Säljö 2016; Potter and McDougall 2017; Sefton-Green and Erstad 2017). The studies in this special issue show how digital developments create new understandings of educational boundaries and represent important theoretical and empirical contributions to this emerging field of research.

New developments in media and technologies (such as social media, apps, big data, and learning analytics) necessitate a critical exploration of how boundaries and borders between different contexts for learning are understood and experienced by learners. In this field of research, we often operate with polarities such as online and offline, formal and informal, in and out of school, and education and work, while the technologies we use are becoming more and more seamless, borderless, and polycontextual (Greenhow and Lewin 2016; Leander and Lovvorn 2006). For instance, smartphones enable young people to engage in social practices that are characterised by ‘anywhere, anytime’ connectivity. Thus, there is a need to theorise and empirically study how ‘boundaries’ can be understood in contemporary learning contexts.

The most immediate boundary, which has been discussed for many years, is between online and offline activities. Such activities represent separate spheres and arenas, but they are also often interconnected in that young people, and adults, today draw on resources from both online and offline worlds when participating in contemporary social practices, a phenomenon referred to as ‘blended’, ‘hybrid’, or ‘connected learning’ (de Haan et al. 2014; Ito et al. 2018). Much research has been carried out to show the potential and possibilities, such as recent studies showing developments of new literacy practices using diverse digital resources to support new understandings of what it means to read and write in contemporary cultures (see also Jiang and Wang; Loh, Sun, and Lim; and Rowsell, Arnseth, and Ruiz-Cabello in this special issue). However, much research has also addressed new challenges, as exemplified by the blurring boundaries between public and private. One recent example is how the COVID-19 pandemic created new understandings of boundaries as students and teachers were isolated at home and were not allowed to attend school (see also Neag and Healy; and Greenhow, Lewin, and Willet in this special issue). Furthermore, recent developments in literacy studies have also explored the concept of ‘postdigital’ as a way of addressing how the digital is always already entangled with children and young people’s non-digital practices (Jandrić et al. 2018; Pettersen, Arnseth, and Silseth 2023).

Recent research has also explored boundaries as the implication of social change brought by platformisation (Kerssens and Dijck 2021; Pangrazio and Sefton-Green 2020; Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal 2018). As new digital infrastructures of social practices, platforms define social life in new ways, for example our use of social media platforms. Emerging digital platforms also have implications for educational institutions and practices, from elementary level to higher education, in ways that young people move between digital platforms and diverse resources in pursuing learning. These developments also challenge formal educational systems in profound ways (see, for example, Moya and Damsa in this special issue).

Movement and connectivity might be understood as physical movement across time and space using diverse mediational means and technologies, as ways of blending online and offline activities, or as ways of drawing on resources across contexts when teachers bring knowledge and practices from students’ everyday lives into the classroom discourse (Bronkhorst and Akkerman 2016; Kumpulainen, Mikkola, and Jaatinen 2014). However, technologies might also contribute to creating new tensions and challenges when moving across such boundaries (Säljö 2010; Selwyn 2006). Furthermore, digital technologies challenge the school as the crux for learning and development, since more informal learning environments—made possible by, for example, computer games, social media, and coding programs—can provide young people with rich communities to develop the competences and knowledge necessary in the twenty-first century (Gilje and Silseth 2019; Ito et al. 2018).

The papers

Our aim with this special issue is to build a collection of theoretical, methodological, and empirical studies that enhances our field. We aim to bring together articles that investigate boundaries in and across both formal and informal settings for learning with new technology. We have invited scholars to contribute with theoretical explorations and empirical studies focusing on what enacts educational boundaries in a digital age, by whom, and for what purposes, and how this is experienced by learners. The contributions provide theoretical, methodological, and empirical developments to this field of research and promise to become key reference contributions for future research in this area. Our call for papers for this special issue generated a lot of interest, and out of the many proposed abstracts, we selected with nine papers that represent quality and diversity in perspectives and studies. We have organised them according to the topic and focus of the study.

The first paper, written by Horvath and Steinberg (2023), is a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the field focusing on the implications of changing boundaries of learning in the digital age for social classification and social sorting in education. The article introduces a conceptual framework for unravelling the dynamics of social sorting that evolve in and between digital learning environments, inspired by French pragmatic sociology. The authors propose classification as analytical anchor point for disentangling the intricate interplays between educational technologies, learning situations, and wider moral and social orders. This article discusses the dynamics of social sorting and patterns of disadvantaging in digital education and the ways boundaries are understood.

The second paper, by Ahson et al. (2023), as with the first paper, employs an explicit theoretical perspective to explore boundaries, drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory to study how health and physical education (HPE) is transformed by the use of digital technologies. By reviewing the field, the authors address the issue of boundaries by studying the interrelationship between how young people use digitised HPE technologies and where they use them and emphasising the spatial dimension in studies of educational boundaries.

The next three papers all deal with reading and writing using digital technologies, studying boundaries between literacy practices. The first of these three, by Jiang and Wang (2023), focuses on how multimodal composing practices support students’ STEM identity explorations. The study is based on a design-based research project investigating how students explore STEM identities in a multimodal composing environment where students create multimodal science fiction stories. The findings suggest that students present a mix of current and future selves in multimodal artifacts, blurring boundaries of learning. The study sheds light on promoting STEM identity by engaging students in presenting their selves through multiple modes of choice.

The paper by Loh, Sun, and Lim (2023) is based on a mobile ethnography study of adolescent girls’ everyday print and digital reading practices. With increased access to technologies for reading, more understanding is needed about how adolescents traverse print and digital reading across in-school and out-of-school contexts. The findings show that as students move between locations, they also transit across devices, platforms, and formats, making use of different print and digital resources for varied ways of reading. The students traverse physical and digital boundaries, cross varied textual terrains, and blend their in-school and out-of-school reading practices with ease. Their ability to ‘style-shift’ flexibly across the boundaries of school and personal spaces and various devices and platforms allows them to independently optimise reading as a resource for their everyday leisure, information seeking, and learning purposes.

Rowsell, Arnseth, and Ruiz Cabello (2023) offer this special issue the notion of entangled stories to consider the assembling and collapsing of boundaries during composition and design processes. They draw on Tim Ingold’s theorising of lines, movement, and storied knowledge to account for the material and immaterial entanglements involved in the process of creating multimodal storied and material worlds by children and young people across three school projects in Canada, Norway, and Chile. They explore how boundaries dissolve and reform when young people design texts/compositions by not only giving equal weight to the materiality of the storytelling productions but also to the agentive crafting of narratives.

The sixth and seventh papers both relate to the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. The sixth, written by Neag and Healy (2023), explores how remote schooling in Hungary during the early stages of the pandemic provided unique insights into networked and technologically mediated learning by showing how parents and teachers responded to the increased porosity, mobility, and visibility of classroom interactions during the pandemic-related school closures of 2020. By using the concept of ‘dispositions’, the authors discuss how the children, teachers, parents, and schools formed affective affinities that primed them to respond to the changing circumstances of schooling in particular ways. The parents and teachers experienced both affective confluence and dissonance when boundaries that conventionally demarcated the who, what, and where of learning were crossed.

The seventh paper, by Greenhow, Lewin, and Staudt Willet (2023), explores British and American teachers’ professional learning spanning social media, place, and time as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted educational systems worldwide, necessitating emergency remote teaching and coinciding with increased social media use. By analysing tweets and interviews with middle and secondary school teachers in the U.K. and U.S, the authors document how contemporary technology-mediated environments expand our conceptualisation of learning contexts and the continuities and tensions between learning and participation in various settings.

The next paper, by Moya and Damşa (2023), investigates how students move between different digital platforms in the context of higher education. The authors explore the realisation of affordances enabled by platform-based resources and agency manifestations during software developments among computer and software engineering students. The findings suggest that multiple interrelated learning affordances are being realised across multiple platforms. Agency was manifested both as distributed and shared, but ultimately it was the students who directed the actions performed across platforms. The study documents the way boundary-crossing between curricular contexts and platforms can enable, motivate, or hinder learning.

The final contribution to this special issue, by de Groot, de Haan, and van Dijken (2023), draws our attention to critical media literacy and algorithms in social media. The authors explore the topic of algorithmic filtering and how it causes unpredictable and invisible boundaries between people. They consider the limitations of a connectivity paradigm and conceptions of crossing boundaries during the last decade, considering the impacts that algorithms and platform logics have on users. They discuss the concepts of algorithmic awareness, imagination, power, and ethical consciousness to analyse how secondary education students make sense of the algorithmic workings of their own social media apps. Further, they discuss how these insights can provide the building blocks for a reformulation of critical media literacy. This paper contributes to the larger debate on how technology that sorts, selects, secludes, and judges in invisible ways can become ‘educative’ again.

We hope this special issue will contribute to the further understanding of the importance of studying boundaries and the implications of boundaries in our societies in general, and especially in relation to the development of digital technologies. Based on the nine papers in this special issue, we believe the following topics are of key importance in future research:

• Boundaries of learning in a digital age, including the tensions, dilemmas, and possibilities created

• Trajectories across different contexts using diverse technologies

• Interrelationships between online and offline learning and participation

• Digital technologies to rethink and expand notions of learning and teaching in schools

• Transcending polarities and borders between communities using digital media

As a field of research, ‘studying boundaries in the digital age’ is emerging in scale and scope; however, so far it has not emerged as a defined field of research. The papers in this special issue show both the diversity and commonalities within this field and contribute to further developments with important conceptual, methodological, and empirical insights.