Re‐contextualising learning in second modernity¹

Abstract

Changing boundaries between categories of knowledge, together with changing relations with propositional and experiential knowledge, demand reconsideration of what counts as learning. Such re-contextualisation processes can be approached from three standpoints: deconstruction-decoding (learning as a differentiated set of related practices), refocusing-repositioning (situating learning sites in a life-course perspective) and reconstruction-recoding (specifying pedagogic discourse to embrace non-formal and informal learning). Learning in second modernity might hold emancipatory promise, but this requires fundamental re-structuring of teaching/learning contexts in all respects, not least in the re-positioning of all learners as adults, in the sense of being autonomous and responsible shapers of their potentially highly differentiated learning biographies -but it equally heralds an intensification of discipline of the self. IntroductionThis contribution represents a train of thinking that I have been working on intermittently for several years and will certainly continue to develop in the future. In essence, I am interested in the ways in which long-established boundaries between categories of knowledge are shifting and loosening. The ways in which propositional and experiential knowledge intersect and are used in everyday life are implicated in these changes. They resonate with renewed interest by social scientists and educationalists in the theoretical capture of more differentiated understandings of what counts as learning, the ways in which people (of all ages) can learn and how learning outcomes can be identified and recognised. We can speak here of a re-contextualisation of learning itself, which is generated by the transition to an increasingly globalised second modernity.To use Delors' (1996,(22)(23) well-known phrasing, (young) people everywhere learn to know, to do, to be and to live together. To achieve these aims, first (western) modernity's mass systems of education and training brought together and legitimated curricula, pedagogy, assessment and certification as highly standardised and formalised structures and processes. These arrangements appear self-evident and almost natural, but only because we have become used to them and we go on to assume that they are basically necessary for culture, economy and society in the future. But perhaps we have not yet grasped the implications of re-contextualisation processes for education and training, for teaching and learning in second modernity. In order to explore such issues, I have started to lay out some of the dimensions we should look at more systematically. So far, I have begun to organise my thinking into three categories relevant for understanding re-contextualisation, and these are what I would like to address today:

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