From ‘Othering’ to incorporation: The dilemmas of crossing informal and formal learning boundaries

Abstract

The argument of this paper is fundamentally sceptical about the prospects for radical educational reform as a consequence of digital technologies. I will begin by suggesting that the past 20 years have seen a paradoxical attitude to the learning experienced by young people as consequence of their engagement and participation in digital culture. On the one hand, research has underwritten a notion of the strangeness or otherness of digital culture, characterising it as fundamentally new and different encompassing changed literacies, as ways of comprehending and manipulating and even understanding knowledge. This position is premised on an argument about an alleged deep structural difference between the digital world and the day-to-day mundanity of schooling. On the other hand, this strangeness has been at the forefront of anxieties about changing childhoods, alienated youth, the penetration of consumerism into make-up of the young and a decline in fundamental education standards. Both of these (contradictory) aspects have, I suggest, been part of a deep process of differentiation from an assumed norm. We are now witnessing a period where the everyday, typified by a construct of average public schooling, is now fighting back; the current period is characterised by a series of interventions where these alleged differences between schooling and digital culture are being recuperated and standardised in ‘normal’ schooling.