Studying the discursive construction of learning lives for individuals and the collective

Abstract

In exploring ways of conceptualising ‘learning lives’, Erstad, Gilje, Sefton-Green and Vasbø (2009) argue that to understand learning lives as they are developing requires examining ‘how the individual learner relates to other people and objects, drawing on deeper trajectories or narratives of the self as it exists within and outside the immediate learning contexts’ (p.100). In this chapter, we bring together a range of theoretical arguments from anthropology, sociology and discourse studies to develop a logic of enquiry (Kaplan, 1964/1998) for examining how, in and through collective-individual interactions, learning lives are socially constructed. Our goal is to make visible how a discourse-based ethnographic logic of enquiry provides a way of conceptualising and studying the interactional work of individuals and the collective (social group) in discursively constructing local, situated learning lives within and across times, events and social spaces. Conceptualising a Logic of Enquiry Through Complementary Perspectives. The logic of enquiry that we present brings together a complementary set of epistemological perspectives focusing on the social accomplishment and construction of life within social groups. Three bodies of conceptual arguments will be brought together to form a multifaceted logic of enquiry: arguments about ethnography as a philosophy of enquiry from anthropology, perspectives on social accomplishment of life from sociology and arguments on the discursive construction of everyday life from socio-linguistics and anthropology. As we will demonstrate, each of these perspectives provides a particular angle of vision on the complex work of individual-collective accomplishments of identities, literate practices and everyday life in a social group. Each angle, therefore, will foreground a particular dimension of the processes involved in constructing learning lives across times, events and groups of actors. Although we focus on the logic as applied to education, we argue that this logic of enquiry transcends educational contexts.