Parchoma (2006) A Proposed e-Learning Policy Field

Parchoma, G. (2006) A Proposed e-Learning Policy Field for the Academy. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 18 (3) pp.230-240.

Field theory states that there are three stages to organisational change:

1. Unfreezing: destabilising the status quo
2. Moving: identifying and evaluating the relative strengths of foces within a social field, considering available options and initiating incremental change
3. Refreezing: process of returning to a sense of stability in the changed environment

Critiques of field theory highlight the following weaknesses in its use as a model for understanding organisational change:

1. It takes a linear, simplistic and mechanistic approach
2. It can only support small-scale, incremental change and is therefore not appropriate for large-scale transformational change is needed
3. It naively excludes issues of power and politics within organisations
4. It constitutes a top-down approach to change management, thus lacking relevance to the culture of contemporary organisations

More recently these critiques have been countered, and Parchoma argues that it is a useful framework for understanding the disruptive potential of e-Learning in the academy.

The Knowledge Economy

As increasing numbers of countries move towards knowledge-based economies, the importance of human capital - shareable knowledge, leadership capacity and creativity of a human involved in creative activity - will continue to grow. In the foreseeable future, workers who create and use knowledge to add new value to products and services will be "a prominent and perhaps the dominant group in the workforce" (Alcaly, 2003, p.9). The growing demand for higher education will therefore place significant physical demands on tertiary institutions in terms of rising enrolments and increasing numbers of adult learners, and the competing responsibilities in the lives of adult learners will lead to increased demand for distance learning options.

Disruptive technologies and organisational failure

A disruptive technology is defined as any technology capable of "overturning the established order" (Norton, 2000, p.129). The "irony" of disruptive technologies is that "in the face of a disruptive technology, good management can contribute to organisational failure" (p.130). The reason for failure is that disruptive technologies:

• do not serve the needs of existing organisatianl structures
• do not support existing business incentives
• do not provide avenues to "increase profit margins on existing products", and 
• do not meet the needs of an organisation's most valued customers (p.130).

Disruptive technologies gain advantage via newcomers’ creations of “bare-bones product[s],” initially distributed to “the low end of the market” (p. 130). The newcomers “then improve the
package over time while still charging a lower price. At some point the over-served established market will start to turn to the minimalist newcomer, and all bets are off for the leaders” (Christensen, p. xvii).

A parallel in Higher Education

To date, Faculty responses to e-Learning competition from the private sector tend to lack a sense of urgency "due to [faculty] belief in the quality and rigor of their own programs" (Olcott & Scmidt, p.269). However, leaders of traditional universities may wish to consider the extent to which e-Learning is driving a "transformational market" within Higher Education (Olcott & Schidt, p.269). The educational sector cannot hope to escape the influence of the new economy, including its disruptive technologies; therefore, universities may need to consider how to adapt to this influence.

Many new players, institutions that specialise in e-Learning (e.g. Phoenix and Athabasca) have focused their attention on the least profitable "customers" in the educational sector: undergraduates. They are the least profitable because they do not contribute to the "most lucrative part of the market addressed by the traditional universities" (Archer, Garrison & Anderson, 1999, p.18). As research is the currency of traditional universities, the predominant source of tenure and promotion for faculty, and as undergraduate students rarely contribute to this currency, emphasis on undergraduate teaching may be less valued. Those who cannot access a conventional university program for geographic, economic or academic reasons are a particularly unprofitable group, but their educational aspirations have created an opportunity for the emergence of distance education as a disruptive technology. As long as distance education almost exculsively served this unprofitable market segment, within traditinoal universities it was marginalised in continuing education and of little interest to the academy at large.

However, a driving force behind the increased emphasis on the development of an entrepreneurial culture with the academy has been accelerated competition among universities. While traditional universities have focused on securing funds for recruiting renowned professors and the most talented students, newcomers in the arena of higher education have focused their efforts on providing access to higher education via e-Learning.

External social forces

Five powerful forces warrant consideration in change management strategies because the currently exert influence on a "variety of social, economic, governmental and legislative activities around the world" (Lincoln, 2001, para 1).

Postmodernism: influences the way complex problems, such as whether or how to embed an e-Learning initiative into the core activity of the academy, are articulated, analyzed and resolved. This enables a deeper sense of the issues to be obtained. A deeper sense of the issues involved in e-Learning initiatives in traditional universities involves an analysis of potential impacts on existing academic culture, as well as their alignment with and attunement to emergent social, cultural, economic, educational and organisational trends.

The Interpretive Turn: is an acknowledgement that "facts are only 'facts' within some theoretical framework, and that much of what passes for science is, in fact, some assertion within a theoretical discourse system" (Lincoln, 2001, para 1). Within theoretical discourse systems, social constructivism posits that two kinds of realities exist side by side, and operate within the same domain:

1. the first reality resides in tangible objects, sites, and events, and is peopled by individuals and groups with specific social interests
2. the second reality is constituted in the minds of...stakeholders, and is driven by the sense-making and meaning-imputation activities of the human minds (The interpretive turn, para 1)

Traditionally the ability to define independent knowledge has been the sole privilege of scientists working in research universities. But "in the wake of postmodernism...the earlier division of scientific knowledge into distinct disciplines is no longer generally accepted" (Tjeldvoll, 1998, para 3). In this reality, the discipline-based organizational structures of the academy may not be well-aligned to meet the knowledge needs of a global learning society. Interdisciplinary-collaborative research, teaching, and learning initiatives, which are enabled by e-learning solutions, may be better aligned to global knowledge construction because these initiatives include multiple perspectives, broader access to current theory, and therefore, wider-ranging critiques.

Identity Politics: issues of identity and ethnicity are deeply connected to issues involving information technologies because both are “social construct[s] that might evolve in one context and change in another” (Zurawski, para. 2). Therefore, it is important to “understand the relationship between cultural identity and information technologies and how the dynamic of the information age affects the collective identities of groups and their modes of self-organization” (Zurawski, para. 3).


Globalisation and the Post-Colonial Critique: While e-learning policy makers need to be cognizant of the potential effects of exporting “Western forms of thinking,” which may “impinge” (Lincoln, Globalization, para. 2) upon learners’ lives in international contexts, it is possible to include opportunities for critique of Western ways of thinking and respect for international contexts, and as a
result, promote East-West, North-South dialogue. However, Variant levels of faculty expertise in cross-cultural issues and awareness of post-colonial critiques regarding “negative impacts on indigenous universities” (Hanna, 2000, p. 343) may be restraining forces in the success of e-learning.

Potentially restraining forces within the Academy

 

• The need to reconsider existing residency requirements (DiPaolo, 2003; Olcott & Schidt, 2004)
• Imbalanced research and teaching reward systems (Archer, Garrison & Anderson, 1999; Boyer, 1990)
• Problematic intellectual property policies (DiPaolo, 2003; Hilton & Neal, 2001; Tallman, 2000)
• Insufficient application of research-based distributed learning strategies (bates, 2000)

A Proposed e-Learning Policy Field

Conclusion

 
The relative strengths of driving and restraining forces remain context-specific and time-sensitive.
Furthermore, existing and emergent forces, which are not identified in this field analysis, may be
particularly formidable in some contexts. Analysis of the context of an individual institution may benefit from the application or adaptation of the posited policy field, but the outcomes of such an analysis at any given time are not predictable.

Why is there such disparity in approaches to teaching and learning?

I wrote this post on the week 3 forum in response to the following suggestion: 'The future is here, it's just not very evenly distributed' (William Gibson):

Perhaps one reason for this is that in education 'nobody dies' - i.e. the worst that can happen is that students learn nothing. In pharmaceutical research, if a drug is found to be harmful it is instantly withdrawn. With car safety testing, a new improvement is quickly made mandatory - or at the very least is implemented by most manufacturers to enable them to argue that their car is as safe as that of their competitors. But in HE it doesn't seem to matter if one teacher is amazing, innovative and produces satisfied students while another stands at the the front and talks at them for an hour.

Perhaps the growth of market forces in the global HE market and arrival of many more private providers will finally tip the balance away from subject specialist knowledge and towards good teaching practice. If students/customers are increasingly able to vote with their feet, universities will need to articulate their value propositions more clearly to respond to their students'/customers' needs and wants.

In the light of the Fullan article about Steve Jobs' approach to product design, another thing springs to mind. Jobs is credited for initiating the revolution in 'consumer tech' - in other words, products driven primarily by what consumers want rather than what companies want to sell them. Jobs' touch of genius was his ability to predict and create something that consumers wanted before they knew what it was. If we were to translate this concept into Higher Education, what would the revolution in 'consumer education' look like?

A large percentage of the current provision could be viewed as constituting the range of average, tried-and-tested products that universities want to sell, rather than the cutting-edge, innovative 'iPad-type' products that consumers really desire. What would these educational products look like? Highly interactive, personalised courses that you could modify and adapt according to your personal tastes? Where the curriculum was negotiated between student and teacher? Where the delivery of the course was tailored to your needs, incorporating whatever blend of technology and face-to-face that you wanted?

Or will it take another Steve Jobs to invent something that we can't currently conceive of wanting, but which will revolutionise Higher Education when it arrives?

Week 3: Fullen (2013) Design Principles and Change Knowledge

The article begins by summarising Steve Jobs' and Apple's approach to design, and the importance of simplicity - or 'simplexity' (making complex things simple). However, despite the apparent ease of use of products such as the iPad by children (and even orangutans), Fullen points out the "the education revolution is not a given" and that "even the most sophisticated technology still needs to e guided by strong pedagogy". Fullen highlights a Canadian study which showed that while children could be technologically adept at using a tool, but "pedagogically clueless with respect to getting the best out of it".

Fullen also draws attention to the seductive power of a technology - such as Apple's iBooks - because of its appealing looks. He points out that the technology (presumably in the context of its application in learning) "never is great unless guided by a wise pedagogue", and that consequently "we need to figure out the new role of teachers in this new learning equation". Fullen also makes the observation that "the scariest part about the new technologies is that they give people the false sense that they are learning something just by using an elegant machine".

Fullen believes that if we can effectively marry great technology with great pedagogy then "we may produce creative learners in vast numbers". He believes that we are in teh early stages of Christensen and Raynor's "disruptive innovation" paradigm - i.e. at the beginning of a new improvement cycle.

Interestingly, he points out that Steve Jobs was dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education. He was more concerned with the practicalities of the iPad solving the need for kids to carry around heavy bags full of textbooks.

Fullen highlights the six common factors of rapidly successful innovations (as stated by Adrian Slywotsky) as:
 

1. magnetic

2. hassle free

3. have strength of backstory

and focus on:

4. trigger

5. trajectory

6. variation

He identifies the biggest obstacles to change as inertia, skepticism and indifference, and that "great demand creators eliminate or reduce the hassles that make most products and services inconvenient, costly, unpleasant and frustrating".

• always try to figure out what people want (before they do)
• make it easy for them to experience it hassle free and as something irresistibly engaging

This article seems to be a little too 'familiar' and conclusive - e.g. 'These days the big need in education is to make it more engaging' - says who? Supported by what evidence?

 

Fullen cites Hattie's argument that technology is much less important than teachers, and that it is teachers who are the main change agents. The main difference in a world of all-pervasive technology it to place increased emphassis on learning as opposed to teaching. In this 'flipped' pedagogy, "students are knowledge workers, learning to learn and think better" and "teachers see assessment as feedback about their impact and engage in dialogue with students about their aspirations and progress" (Fullen, 2013, p.67-68)

Week 2: Cook 7 Brown (1999) Bridging Epistemologies: The Generative Dance between Organisational Knowledge and Organisational Knowing

Organisation Science, Vol. 10, No. 4. pp.381-400.

Epistemology = questions what knowledge is and how it is acquired.

Treating knowledge as something people possess = the "epistemology of possession". But this way of understanding knowledge does not take into account the knowing that resides in the practice  of groups and individuals. Hence the authors argue that "knowing as action calls for an "epistemology of practice"".

The authors argue that there are four different types of knowledge, explicit, tacit, individual and group, each distinctly different from the other and with each fulfilling a function that the others cannot. 'Knowledge' and 'knowing' are also understood as distinctly different, with knowledge positioned as a tool of knowing, and with each enabling the other. If knowing is interpreted as one aspect of the way in which we interact with each other and physical world, then the interaction between knowing and knowledge "can generate new knowledge and new ways of knowing". The authors label this interaction a generative dance, and believe it to be a powerful driver of innovation in organizations.

Of particular significance is the authors' statement that "harnessing this innovation calls for organizational and technological infrastructures that support the interplay of knowledge and knowing". The use of social media tools in organizations can be seen as constituting precisely this sort of infrastructure, as these tools enable employees and managers to access, manage and make use of the "intellectual capital" of the organization. Cook and Brown's work also positions the need to understand knowledge and knowing as core competencies, and it can be argued that effective use of social tools for knowledge management and curation is increasingly a key element in supporting effective work and innovation in organizations.

'Explicit' knowledge can be understood as "knowledge that can be spelled out or formalised"
'Tacit' knowledge is "associated with skills or know-how"
The authors highlight Nonaka's belief that although individuals' tacit knowledge may constitute the centre of the process of knowledge creation, practical benefits are only reaped when individuals externalise this knowledge.

Cook and Brown observe the tendency in the literature around organizational knowledge to privilege 'individual' over 'group' knowledge, and 'explicit' over 'tacit' knowledge, and to treat all knowledge as being the same. Ultimately, they believe that failing to acknowledge the distinctions between different types of knowledge severely limits the ability to assess how individuals and groups acquire, maintain and apply competencies.

The authors give an example in the form of the sentence "Robert is fixing cars". This sentence indicates both a knowledge that Robert possesses and an action informed by that knowledge. In terms of knowledge, an accurate account of what Robert is doing requires acknowledgement of both his knowledge and the actions which stem from this. That which is possessed is referred to by the authors as 'knowledge', and that which constitutes action is labelled 'knowing'. While individuals and groups make use of both explicit and tacit knowledge in what they do, Cook and Brown argue that "not everything they know how to do...is explicable solely in terms of the knowledge they possess".

Cook and brown believe that unpacking the relationship between these two epistemologies enables a clearer understanding of:

• "how individuals and groups can draw on tacit and explicit knowledge simultaneously
• how what individuals know tacitly can be made useful to groups
• how explicit instructions can be made more useful aids for the development of tacit skills"(1999: 383).

They authors also explain the generative aspect of this relationship between possession and practice - what they refer to as the 'generative dance' - by stating that "the source of new knowledge and knowing lies in the use of knowledge as a tool of knowing within situated interaction with the social and physical world" (1999: 383). In other words, the application of knowledge in a given situation and context leads to the creation of new knowledge. The ability to identify and make use of this 'dance' is deemed essential in understanding key aspects of learning, innovation and effectiveness.

Explicit vs Tacit knowledge

Cartesian logic - "I think therefore I am" - has informed the conventional understanding of knowledge and the idea that knowledge "is something that is held in the head of an individual and is acquired, modeled, and expressed most accurately in the most objective and explicit terms possible" (1999: 384). But Cook & Brown argue that the dominance of the traditional Cartesian epistemology has hampered a clearer understanding of the distinction between 'tacit' and 'explicit' knowledge. They give the example of riding a bike, stating that explicit knowledge alone would not enable a person to ride - the person would also need the tacit knowledge acquired from having applied that knowledge in the given situation of trying to ride.

Individual vs knowledge

The importance of real-world problems in teaching professional practice

The article by Donald Schon highlights the problem in professional education whereby 'what aspiring practitioners need most to learn, professional schools seem least able to teach'. This made me think of the Lave article and his argument for the importance of situated learning - i.e the need for learning to take place in the context of real-world problems.

When I write the Professional Practice unit for the MA in Digital Scholarship I think it will essential for the curriculum to be situated within the relevant areas of professional practice of the students. Wherever possible, students must be presented with opportunities to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world problems so that they appreciate the 'higher ground' of solving complex problems using relevant theories and the 'lower ground' of murky, everyday problems that are more difficult to solve.

The Schon article makes me understand and appreciate the significant differences between 'theory' and 'practice'.  There is a need for both in teaching professional practice, and it is important that one is not prioritised over the other.

I also found interesting Schon's observation that in the early years of the 20th century 'professionalisation' meant replacing artistry by systematic, preferably scientific, knowledge. And yet as confidence in professional knowledge has grown, 'educators have begun once again to see artistry as an essential component of professional competence'. There is a clear link to the Lave article here with regard to the notion of apprenticeship. My personal feeling after reading both Schon and Lave is that the benefits of the apprenticeship model identified by Lave - i.e that apprentices learned not only the specific knowledge but also a range of other 'life' skills - seems to provide a more rounded educational experience than the professional, research-driven university model.

Week 2: Schon (1987) Preparing Profesionals for the Demands of Practice

Tension between two areas of professional practice:

1. the 'high ground' of problems that are relatively unimportant to the majority of people and which can be solved by applying research-based theory and technique (rigour), and
2. the swampy lowlands in which lie the messy, confusing problems which defy technical solution but are of the greatest human concern (relevance).

'Technical rationality' suggests that practitioners are problem solvers who solve problems by applying theory and technique derived from systematic, preferably scientific knowledge. But the problems of real-world practice do not present themselves to practitioners as well-formed structures.

Depending on our disciplinary background, organisational roles, past histories, interests and political economic perspectives, we frame problematic situations in different ways. Often a problematic situation presents itself as a unique case which falls outside the categories of existing theory and technique, meaning that the practitioner cannot treat it as an instrumental problem to be solved by applying one of the rules in her store of professional knowledge. Instead she must deal with it competently by a kind of improvisation, inventing and testing in the situation strategies of her own devising.

Some problematic situations are situations of conflict among values (often stemming from differences in people's professional background). Competent practitioners must not only solve technical problems by selecting the means appropriate to clear and self-consistent ends, they must also recognise, integrate, or choose among conflicting appreciations of a situation so as to construct a coherent problem worth solving.

But it is just these indeterminate zones of practice, however, that practitioners and critical observers of the professions have come to see with increasing clarity over the past two decades as central to professional practice. When professionals fail to recognise or respond to value conflicts, when they violate their own ethical standards or seem blind to public problems they have helped to create, they are increasingly subject to expressions of disapproval and dissatisfaction. In defense, professionals themselves argue that it is impossible to met heightened expectations for their performance in an environment that combined increasing turbulence with increasing regulation of professional activity.

 

The crisis of confidence in professional education

If professions are blamed for ineffectiveness and impropriety, their schools are blamed for failing to teach the rudiments of effective and ethical practice. Underlying such criticisms is a version of the rigour-or-relevance dilemma. What aspiring practitioners need most to learn, professional schools seem least able to teach.

The greater one's proximity to basic science, as a rule, the higher one's academic status.

The normative curriculum of the modern research university still embodies the idea that practical competence becomes professional when its instrumental problem solving is grounded in systematic, preferably scientific knowledge. However, the assumption by university-based schools of the professions that academic research yields useful professional knowledge and that the professional knowledge taught in the schools prepares students for the demands of real-world practice are increasingly being called into question.

In recent years there has been a growing perception that researchers...have less and less to say that practitioners find useful. At the same time, professional educators have voiced with increasing frequency their worries about the gap between the schools' prevailing conception of professional knowledge and the actual competencies required of practitioners in the field, e.g. Dean of a school of management: "we need most to teach students how to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, but this is just what we don't know how to teach".

Dissatisfaction with a professional curriculum that cannot prepare students for competence in the indeterminate zones of practice. But: can the prevailing concepts of professional education ever yield a curriculum adequate to the complex, unstable, uncertain, and conflictual worlds of practice?

Turning the problem upside down

The difficulty is not that critics fail to recognise some professional performances as superior to others...but that they cannot assimilate what they recognise to their dominant model of professional knowledge. So outstanding practitioners are not said to have more professional knowledge than others but more "wisdom", "talent", "intuition" or "artistry".

The question of the relationship between practice competence and professional knowledge needs to be turned upside down. We should start not by asking how to make better use of research-based knowledge but by asking what we can learn from a careful examination of artistry, that is, the competence by which practitioners actually handle indeterminate zones of practice - however that competence may relate to technical rationality.

• Inherent in the practice of the professionals we recognise as unusually competent is a core of artistry.
• Artistry is an exercise of intelligence, a kind of knowing, though different in crucial respects from our standard model of professional knowledge. It is not inherently mysterious; it is rigorous in its own terms; and we can learn a great deal about it...by carefully studying the performance of unusually competent performers.
• In the terrain of professional practice, applied science and research-based technique occupy a critically important though limited territory, bounded on several sides by artistry. There are an art of problem framing, an art of implementation, and an art of improvisation - all necessary to mediate the use in practice of applied science and technique.

Just as we should inquire into the manifestations of professional artistry, so we should also examine the various ways in which people actually acquire it.

Learning by doing

Schon makes significant reference to Dewey's philosophy of experiential learning, in which students learn by practicing the making or performing at which they seek to become adept, and they are helped to do so by senior practitioners who...initiate them into the traditions of practice. The student cannot be taught what he needs to know, but he can be coached: "He has to see on his own behalf and in his own way the relations between means and methods employed and results achieved. Nobody else can see for him, and he can't see just by being 'told', although the right kind of telling may guide his seeing and thus help him see what he needs to see" (Dewey, 1974, p.151)

What is great teaching?

In his Teaching as Learning in Practice article Lave makes an observation that "it may be worth inquiring how it is that most of us are able to remember great teachers, but do not have routine ways to talk about what great teaching is".

I found this particularly perceptive as it made me reflect on memories of great teachers from my past and try to identify what made them 'great':

• Matthew Scott: I can hardly remember any of the content he taught us, but he made me feel like I could 'be' a composer.
• Gill Nah: Although I remember some of the content, it is the memories of how she made me feel like I could 'be' a teacher that are most prominent.

Thinking about how teacher colleagues perceive me, my feeling is that they may like me because I try to empower them and make them feel capable of achieving things with technology of which they did not believe themselves capable.

However, there is an interesting tension here because there is also a strong instructional element in teaching staff about e-learning technology. But it strikes me that providing a context to e-learning instruction - i.e. 'situating' it - is important so that tutors understand the 'why' about what they are learning.

Module 5: Professional Practice. Week 1 - Communities of Practice

Wow, I can't believe it's been six months since I posted anything on here! That needs to change...

 

Wenger, E. (1999) Learning as Social Participation

Wenger states that "the concept of learning immediately conjures up images of classrooms, training sessions, teachers, textbooks, homework and exercises. Yet in our everyday experience, learning is an integral part of everyday life. It is part of our participation in our communities and organisations."

He then clarifies that "the problem is not that we do not know this, but rather that we do not have very systematic ways of talking about this familiar experience... We pay attention to what we expect to see, we hear what we can place in our understanding, and we act according to our world views."

To sum up, Wenger suggests that "perhaps more than learning itself, it is our conception of learning that needs urgent attention when we choose to meddle with it on the scale on which we do today".

Lave, J. (1996) Teaching, as Learning, in Practice

Advocates a move away from the perception of learning as an 'individual, psychological phenomenon' towards an understanding of learning as a 'social, collective' phenomenon. Also challenged the assumption that decontextualised, 'formal', classroom learning was 'good' and that informal, contextualised learning (such as apprenticeships) was 'bad'.

Lave has previously argued against the assumption that teaching is a necessary precondition for learning. His research into apprentice tailors also showed that far from just learning how to reproduce existing practices, apprentices "were learning many complex "lessons" at once" - e.g. about social divisions and identities in Liberian society.

Lave's research into apprenticeship suggested that "learning is the more basic concept, and that teaching (transmission) is something else. Indeed, whole apparatuses of explanation for learning become merely cultural artifacts about teaching - in need of explanation - when learning is taken to be the basic concept."

Lave's belief: "if there is no other kind of activity except situated activity, then there is no kind of learning that can be distinguished theoretically by its "de-contextualisation"". Lave suggests three ways to conceptualise learning differently:

1. a need to reverse the 'polar values' of differing educational power for schooling and "other" forms of education (i.e. school is 'good', apprenticeships are 'bad')
2. a reversal of the research into learning to shift the focus from teachers to learners
3. a view of learning as a socially situated activity

 

What is a theory of learning?

Martin Packer proposed that a theory of learning consists of three kinds of stipulations: 

1. Telos: a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as a goal-directed activity). Encourages a focus on the trajectories of learners as they change rather than the educational goals set by societal / cultural authorities. E.g. for apprentice tailors the telos was not simply learning to sew, rather it might be described as becoming a respected, practicing participant among other tailors, ultimately becoming so imbued with the practice that others in turn become part of their practice. The subjects and the world with which they were engaged mutually constituted each other. This might also be defined as "constructing identities in practice".

2. Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the social world (not necessarily to be construed as 'learners' and 'things to be learned').

3. Learning mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about.

Different epistemologically-based theories depend on the variable answers to two questions:

1. Where does reality lie (in the world or in the subject)?
2. How can we come to know it (depending on where "it" is)?

"How is the objective world socially constituted, as human beings are socially produced, in practice?"

Conventional views on learning vs views derived from social practice theory

Conventional views would suggest that learning through apprenticeship creates "marginalised learners, engaged in a disorderly process of rote reproduction of existing practice. But the view derived from social practice theory is that apprentices are engaged in a long term project as persons becoming experts known for their learned practice.

What if...

We took the collective social nature of our existence so seriously that we put it first, so that crafting identities in practice becomes the fundamental project subjects engage in?

Crafting identities is a social process, and becoming more knowledgeably skilled is an aspect of participation in social practice. By such reasoning, who you are becoming shapes crucially and fundamentally what you "know". "What you know" may be better thought of as doing rather than having something - i.e. knowing rather than acquiring or accumulating knowledge of information. This is related to Cook and Brown's separation of 'knowledge' and 'knowing', where the latter constitutes the application of the former.

What is teaching?

If learning, rather than teaching, is taken as the fundamental phenomenon and understood principally as "the identity-making life projects of participants in schools", then teaching is a "cross-context, facilitative effort to make high quality educational resources truly available for communities of learners. Great teaching in schools is a process of facilitating the circulation for school knowledgeable skill into the changing identities of students".

Why is it that most of us are able to remember great teachers, but do not have routine was to talk about what great teaching is?

If teachers teach in order to affect learning, the only way to discover whether they are having effects and if so what those are, is to explore whether, and if so how, there are changes in the participation of learners learning in their various communities of practice.