Expansive Learning as Production of Community

Abstract

This article contributes a framework for analyzing learning as an expansive process (Engeström, 1987) in which persons come to partly transcend marginalization. I understand expansive learning as a dialectic of collective and individual learning. Marginalization is seen as a complex, multilayered process that has restrictive implications for a person's societal position across various action contexts in his or her everyday life. Expansive learning, then, is a kind of learning that partly transcends marginalization through changed participation and recognition by others of participants in their changed communities. In the example I present, this development entails various persons (e.g., youth, social street workers, social workers, official authorities, researchers, media, politicians, and local police) becoming aware of themselves, of their communities, of oppressive life conditions, and of common interests in relation to other communities. Expansive learning involves collaborative change that does not eradicate dilemmas that arise for persons in marginal positions, but presents new dilemmas that emerge from realization of new action possibilities of participants in communities.This article draws on social practice approaches, such as Danish-

Learning as the Organizing of Social Futures

“…In this chapter, we have illustrated just a few of the kinds of work being done to organize trajectories into a social future as a poet for social change. This involves intentional efforts to develop historically new forms of activity (Gutiérrez & Larson, 2007) that diverge from those developed within and rewarded by dominant social groups and that offer new and different possibilities for recognition (see also the following chapters in this volume: Ares, 2010;de Castell & Jenson, 2010;Kirshner, 2010;and Mørck, 2010). We suggest that the organizing processes we have discussed, considered here under conditions in which particular trajectories have not yet been stabilized, bring into focus aspects of learning that we would argue are in place in all learning contexts, though they might perhaps be less visible through being more broadly distributed among people, institutions, and artifacts that continually organize and sustain stabilized practices.…”

Etik i kollektivt biografiarbejde med mødre til ‘børn i vanskeligheder’

“…Det kollektive samarbejde fokuserer på elementer fra de nedskrevne erindringer, der er genkendelige for alle deltagere. Dette baseret på en social praksis teoretisk forståelse (Mørck 2010, Mørck 2006) af at menneskers liv produceres kollektivt (Small, 1999: 3, Haug et al, 1987, og at der i hvert et (empirisk) enkelttilfaelde er forhold, der er specifikke, saerlige og almene, hvilket kaldes almengørelse indenfor kritisk psykologisk praksisforskning (Dreier, 2006;Holzkamp, 2005;Mørck, 2007). I vores projekt analyserede vi både dilemmaer og mulighedsrum (det vil sige oplevede rum af muligheder og begraensninger).…”

Learning Research as a Human Science: Old Wine in New Bottles?

“…Mehan, Hubbard, and Datnow (2010) illustrate how, over time, teachers, district personnel, and reform designers co-construct reforms and adapt to one another's actions in ways that shape the meanings and trajectories of reforms for classrooms, district offices, and intermediary organizations that promote particular reform ideals. Chapters by Stevens (2010), Barron (2010), Mørck (2010), Nasir (2010), and O'Connor and Allen (2010) develop in different ways the idea that people work to organize trajectories into futures, trajectories that require that active work be done across local events (Lemke, 2000;Wortham, 2006) in ways that build meaningful and consequential connections among them (Gee, 2005).…”

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