La performatividad de los materiales en el aprendizaje: el aprendizaje completo en acción

Contemporary educational practices have been calling for pedagogical models that foreground flexibility, agency, ubiquity, and connectedness in learning. These models have, in turn, been stimulating redevelopments of educational infrastructure –with physical contours reconfigured into novel complex learning spaces at universities, schools, museums, and libraries. Understanding the complexity of these innovative learning spaces requires an acknowledgement of the material and digital as interconnected. A ‘physical’ learning space is likely to involve a range of technologies and in addition to paying attention to these ‘technologies’ one must understand and account for their physical sites of use as well. This paper discusses the influence of materiality in learning, using an analytical approach that situates learning activity as an emergent process. Drawing on theories that foreground socio-materiality in learning and on the relational perspective offered by networked learning, we call for a deeper understanding of the interplay between the physical (material and digital), conceptual, and social aspects of learning, and their combined influence on emergent activity. The paper argues that in order to successfully design for innovative learning, educators need to develop their capacity to trace the intricate connections between people, ideas, digital and material tools, and tasks –to see the learning-whole in action.Las prácticas educativas contemporáneas han venido reclamando modelos pedagógicos que pongan en primer plano la flexibilidad, la agencia, la ubicuidad y la conectividad en el aprendizaje. A su vez, estos modelos están fomentando replanteamientos de la infraestructura educativa —con contornos físicos reconfigurados como espacios complejos novedosos en universidades, escuelas, museos y bibliotecas. Para entender la complejidad de estos espacios de aprendizaje innovadores se hace necesario reconocer que lo material y lo digital están interconectados. Es probable que un espacio “físico” de aprendizaje implique el uso de una amplia gama de tecnologías y, además de prestar atención a estas “tecnologías”, se debe comprender y explicar igualmente en qué sitios físicos se utilizan. Este artículo aborda la influencia de la materialidad en el aprendizaje, empleando un enfoque analítico que sitúa la actividad de aprendizaje como un proceso emergente. Tomando como base las teorías que realzan esa socio-materialidad en el aprendizaje y la perspectiva relacional que ofrece el aprendizaje en red, insistimos en la necesidad de adquirir un conocimiento más profundo de la interacción entre los aspectos físicos (materiales y digitales), conceptuales y sociales del aprendizaje, así como su influencia combinada en la actividad emergente. En el artículo se argumenta que, para alcanzar el éxito en el diseño de un aprendizaje innovador, los educadores necesitan desarrollar su capacidad para rastrear las intrincadas conexiones entre las personas, las ideas, las herramientas digitales y materiales y las tareas —a fin de ver el todo del aprendizaje en acción—

Education in the open: Building a network for social action

This paper introduces Fast Food da Politica (FFDP) as a case study of a learning network designed to promote social action in a developing country. Our focus is on exploring FFDP design elements, such as those related to tools, tasks and social organization, and the connections between these elements and valued learning activity. FFDP cleverly (re)purposes popular (board) games as pedagogical tools, which are then customised for the teaching and learning of the mechanisms and functioning of Brazilian political structures. FFDP has taken their political games to game-playing sessions across the country in varied venues – including schools, government organisations, and open sessions at market-street events and public protests. Their games are shared as open learning resources through blueprints and manuals that explain the many ways a game can be played, and which are easily downloadable through their website. FFDP also encourages game users (educators and learners) to come up with and share their own game-playing ideas for reuse. As a result, FFDP has built a repository of games that is constantly evolving, as new ways of using their open resources are captured and packaged for sharing and reuse by others. As a not-for-profit organisation, FFDP has been successfully relying on social media and crowdsourced funding to survive. In this paper, we draw on the ACAD Wireframe to explore the alignment of this network’s design elements at the micro and meso levels, focusing on the ways FFDP combines a strategic educational vision deeply grounded on action for social change, with a curriculum that emphasizes gaming elements and promotes the physicality of materials in learning. At the micro level, the case study examines how the quality of materials support the development of educational innovation, while at the meso level this organization, driven by young women, is building-up a learning network for social action, empowering children, youth and adults to learn about the mechanisms of politics and their civil rights, within the Brazilian context. Overall, this paper offers an inspiring example of a productive learning network in action, where participation and co-creation are fostered through connections between a network of people, ideas, digital and material elements

Cross-cultural adaptation and user-experience validation of the ACAD Toolkit

Design for learning involves the delicate interweaving of knowledge about learning and knowledge about design. This work is often carried out by heterogenous design teams in which members speak of and value different aspects of design, and different methods for evaluating these designs in use. The challenge of reconciling these often-competing demands is critical to the success of these teams. This short paper outlines work breaking new ground translating an educational design method, developed in English speaking contexts, for use in Spanish speaking contexts. Steeped in socio-cultural and socio[1]material awareness this project explores how the ACAD Toolkit—a set of tangible design related resources embodying networked learning ideals—shapes and is (re)shaped in and through the process of translation. Guided by two questions: (i) How can we explore the process of translating not only language but values and forms of practice? and (ii) How can the ACAD Toolkit be validated in new contexts? This qualitative study involves the thematic analysis of multimodal data including video and audio recordings, and artefacts produced during workshops. Our method builds on traditional cross[1]cultural processes of adaptation that involve adapting, expanding and splitting ideas and concepts in two stages: language translation and user-experience testing. Our analysis is, therefore, reported in two stages. In the first we explore the process of reaching agreement on a test set of translated resources, and in the second we explore how these resources are being enrolled in educational design work in new contexts. The newly translated resources have been tested in three workshops in two Spanish speaking educational settings (Spain and Argentina). After analysing the data from these workshops, the initial translation will be corrected, and instructions will be developed—in both languages—to improve future translations of the ACAD Toolkit and in its ongoing use in English contexts. These instructions and the processes through which they will be developed will produce potential research objects for future educational design research. This method, initially developed with educators in Australia and New Zealand, embodies the very heart of networked learning—the movement of people, objects, and ideas across contexts and time

Thinking through ACAD - learning to see theory in action

The Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) has been developed as a meta-theoretical framework for understanding and improving complex networked learning situations (Goodyear et al., 2021; Goodyear & Carvalho, 2014). ACAD helps to foreground two distinct moments related to the design of complex learning situations. The first entails advanced planning – and it involves design time – when an educator may consider the selection of specific tasks, tools, and complementary social arrangements of a learning situation. The second involves learning time – or what happens as a learning activity unfolds. When designing for networked learning educators need to anticipate a certain form of human activity and consider how designable elements may influence what students do (first view). But educators also need to channel what actually happens on the day, as activity unfolds, noticing how designable elements influence (or not) the intended learning activity (second view). One difficulty for teachers or educational designers relates to being able to draw connections between what has been designed (planned) and what learners actually do (learn)

Participating in the Communication of Science: Identifying Relationships Between Laboratory Space Designs and Students’ Activities

Learning spaces can play a powerful role in shaping and supporting the activities of the students and teachers who use them: they can be agents for change when the success of new pedagogical approaches depends on shifting entrenched practices. The laboratory is a key site for science education. It is here that discipline knowledge and generic competences are fused and honed, in the very act of ‘doing science’. This paper focuses on communication of science. It looks at how students learn to participate in science communication, and acquire both scientific and more generic communication skills, while engaged in laboratory-based activities. This paper reports some findings of ethnographic research that involved observing student activity in laboratories. This opportunity to examine differences in patterns of communicative activity arose from a relocation to new purpose-designed laboratory spaces. Ethnographic research is appropriate for gathering data about space usage. It helps trace relations between student activity, characteristics of the spaces in which the activity is unfolding, the social organisation of the work being done, and the disciplinary practices that underpin the tasks that students are set. Our research identifies the importance of sightlines, communication tools and instructor behaviours in promoting students’ communicative activity. Addendum: Figure 2 has been replaced to ensure ethics requirements are followed

Habits and habitats: An ethnography of learning entanglement

Despite an underlying assumption that, at least on some level, our environments influence what we do, a review of the literature on formal education reveals that empirical research on relations between the physical environment and learning is surprisingly sparse. Conducted as ethnography, this study examines learning activity in an open, flexible and digitally connected learning environment. It draws on 549 hours of observation over a nine-month period in a refurbished space designed to accommodate 181 year five and six students and their team of seven teachers, using one-to-one mobile computing. Observation was informed by sociomaterial theories of learning, theories of material ecology from anthropology and archaeology, and the framework for Activity Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) from the learning sciences. Through theoretical reflection, I consider how the qualities of materials participate in teaching and learning practice, and how we might account for their participation in learning activity. The theoretical exposition, housed in Part 1, traverses three scale levels: the qualities and properties of materials, the relational dependences between things and humans, and the notion of emergent, systemic wholeness. Part 1 concludes with the identification of a number of repeating patterns of structure and activity that give rise to wholeness, which are presented in the form of a partial pattern language. All of this draws on ten rich descriptions of learning activity, presented in Part 2. Throughout, I argue that there is an urgent need for a non-deterministic theory of materials in educational research, and that this type of detailed observational work can play a vital role in understanding how vibrant and participatory learning environments function and evolve. As such, this thesis makes both theoretical and practical contributions that have implications for teachers and educational leaders who wish to engage in shaping convivial places for learning

El "origen de la duda" y "la existencia de otras posibilidades": explorando cómo el conjunto de herramientas ACAD apoya el diseño didáctico

The circumstances in which humans live and learn are subject to constant change. Given these cycles of change, educational designers (teachers, instructional designers, and others) often search for new models and frameworks to support their work, to ensure their designs are in alignment with valued forms of learning activity. Our research foregrounds the entanglement of people (the relational), tasks (the conceptual) and tools (the digital and material) in formal and informal learning settings. In this paper, we explore the use of the ACAD toolkit with the aim of understanding how this analytical tool supports design for learning. A thematic analysis of five workshops attended by 40 educators from diverse professional and academic backgrounds in Spain and Argentina, reveals how ACAD supports educational designers in four distinctive ways: encouraging dynamic engagement with key elements and concepts; supporting the visualization of (dis)connections and (in)coherence in designs; prompting critical reflection on past practices and contexts; and stimulating discussion about future teaching practices. A key contribution of this article is the discussion about how the ACAD toolkit helps educators see the ways in which all learning is situated, subject to constraints and affordances at multiple scale levels, and oriented towards certain pedagogical purposes or values.Las circunstancias en las que los seres humanos viven y aprenden están sujetas a cambios constantes. En vista de estos ciclos de cambio, las personas que diseñan situaciones de enseñanza (docentes, diseñadores instruccionales, etc.) buscan a menudo nuevos modelos y marcos de trabajo que respalden su labor para garantizar que sus diseños estén en consonancia con las perspectivas educativas más pertinentes. En este artículo exploramos el uso del conjunto de herramientas basadas en el marco ACAD (ACAD toolkit) con el objetivo de comprender cómo apoyan el diseño didáctico. Un análisis temático de cinco talleres a los que asistieron 40 profesionales pertenecientes a diversos contextos educativos en España y Argentina revela cómo ACAD apoya el diseño didáctico de cuatro formas diferentes: fomentando el compromiso dinámico con elementos y conceptos pedagógicos clave; apoyando la visualización de (des)conexiones e (in)coherencia en los diseños; impulsando la reflexión crítica sobre prácticas y contextos pasados; y estimulando el debate sobre futuras prácticas docentes. Una contribución clave de este artículo es el debate sobre cómo el conjunto de herramientas ACAD ayuda a que la persona que diseña perciba que todo aprendizaje está siempre situado, sujeto a restricciones y posibilidades en múltiples niveles de escala, y orientado hacia unos determinados propósitos o valores educativos

Habits and habitats: Ethnography of a school based learning ecology

Within the field of CSCL, observation customarily follows the design and, or implementation of a new tool, script or digital learning environment. This study sets out to describe a collaborative learning environment with high reliance on ICT's that exists "in the wild". A total of 549 hours of observation will be used to process theories of: materiality, practice and orchestration, in an examination of the relationships between learning activity and the learning environment.</p

Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD): Core purposes, distinctive qualities and current developments

This paper provides a summary account of Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD). ACAD offers a practical approach to analysing complex learning situations, in a way that can generate knowledge that is reusable in subsequent (re)design work. ACAD ha

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