Learning Adaptivity Across Contexts

Abstract

Adaptivity across contexts is an important twenty-first century disposition. Schools nurture adaptive domain experts (students) through teacher apprenticeship in Zones of Proximal Development (ZPD). This paper suggests that such interdisciplinary learning may be achieved by deliberate attempts to bridge between formal and informal contexts. The Zone of Adaptivity Development (ZAD) is proposed to illustrate how adaptivity across contexts might be nurtured with the help of a ‘broker-of-learning’. Metacognitive interactions with brokers-of-learning enable learners to analyse learning incidents in the ZPDs. This facilitates the transfer and adaptation of learning strategies across contexts. A case study is described to show how a broker-of-learning used metacognitive brokering and dialoguing to understand a Grade Four pupil’s learning experiences and helped transfer strategies used in bowling to improve grades in Mathematics. Our observations suggest that adaptivity within contexts and metacognitive brokering are useful to appropriate a disposition of adaptivity across contexts. The ZAD is discussed to highlight its preliminary implications for teaching and learning. Although this is an exploratory study, initial observations and implications are significant because they inform how academically weaker students may perform better by being assisted in the recontextualising and transferring of strategies for learning from one context to another.