Scope of Transactions

Our researchers investigate children and young people's learning, meaning making and identity construction in the information society. We are particularly interested in investigating the interplay and interaction between the different social contexts of children and young people's learning and identity construction, as the term TransAction implies.

One of our aims is to problematise children and young people's knowledge construction as a social practice both inside and outside of school and both formal and informal learning. We aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how the various forms of digital technologies are employed. The interesting question is how children and young people's use of these new technologies may challenge the traditional dividing line between different forms of learning.

Transactions and contexts of learning

The overall objective of Transactions is to increase our knowledge and understanding about key issues of transition between different contexts and levels of learning. Developments within the 'knowledge society', especially due to technological innovation, have intensified interest in the relationship between different contexts of learning, between what is often termed 'formal' and 'informal' learning domains (Livingstone, 2002).

Two dimensions of this transition are central to this project. The first focuses on the relationship between different sites of learning activities: the school, the home/youth clubs, and online communities. The second focuses on key stages of transition within the education system; from entering the school, through transitions between lower secondary and upper secondary schooling, and from school to working life, or higher education.

Together these two dimensions offer new insights into how learners frame and are framed by their learning. They point us to how learners manipulate and are invited to control these frames across different contexts.

Our intention is to help schools and other community-based spaces re-configure how they exclude and/or support learners to maximise their 'funds of knowledge' (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). In research terms we offer an analysis that can support learners' epistemological coherence.

Identity, learning, knowing

Three main issues are explored in the Transactions Group and its projects. These are identity, learning and knowing.

These core concepts as well as those related to them also appear in the list of labels at the base of the screen. Click on an item to see material on that concept aggregated from across the site.

Learning in and out of school

One of the most established traditions exploring the relationship between learning in and out of school lies in the field of literacy studies, which in turn derives from key work at the origins of socio-cultural theory in education, (Scribner & Cole, 1973). In a special issue of Language and Education, Baynham, (2004) introduces the three generations of literacy studies that have either explicitly or implicitly engaged in dialogue with formal education and pedagogy. Street (2003) distinguishes between autonomous and ideological modes of literacy and the conceptualisation of literacy events and practices offer a way of describing and theorising literacy which, as Baynham argues, offers a way of describing initiation into more general types of learning.

Our approach to understanding learning experiences, trajectories and episodes derives from this work. This approach has led to a series of studies of literacy across cultures, settings, modalities and media. Whilst classic studies such as Heath (1983) focus on oral and written language across cultures, supporting Scribner and Cole's essential insight that we can not simply equate learning with schooling, this literacy/learning axis also allows us to broaden the notion of language to incorporate all forms of semiotic and multimodal communication.

Indeed, the most developed study of 'local literacy' Barton & Hamilton (1998) uses an ethnographic approach to create a rich description of the uses of literacy within individuals lives (using a case study approach) to build up a notion of 'local literacy' - that is how literacy processes are deployed within a micro-community and indeed how the uses of literacy both constitute and are constructed by this local frame.

Whilst it might be possible to view this study as a form of social capital, understanding an aggregated use of literacy as social interaction, it also suggests how approaches to learning a literacy offer a way into assessing the texture of a community and the ways that access to literacy support individual trajectories through this 'ecology' (Barton, 2007).

Building on more general socio-cultural approaches to learning in general, research now identifies media culture, especially as it is experienced in the 'digital bedroom' (Livingstone, 2002) as arenas to challenge the school. Studies of these changing sites of learning have particularly focused on video games (Prensky, 2006) or as offering multimodal spaces which radically re-configure the role of the learner (as player) in respect of experimentation, knowledge, the deployment of information, grammar and reflexivity.

Other research in this tradition explores the uses of mobile devices, especially how they re-configure, space, time, location, and social networks (Ito et al, 2006; Ling, 2004). Although some research in this tradition is sociological in orientation, as Sefton-Green (2006) has argued, the conceptualisation of media use as digital literacy gives an educational caste to studies of young people's adoption and use of contemporary media
technologies.

However, in many cases, media and media leisure uses have developed in parallel with the formal education system. Although some countries including Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, and Finland have digital literacy components in their school curricula, it is widely accepted that young peoples' experience of media culture most often develop outside of school learning and often collide with it (as in examples about the reception of mass phenomena, like Pokemon (Buckingham, & Sefton-Green, 2004; Drotner, 2001).

The widespread penetration and use of the internet and other digital technologies have inflected notions of digital literacy to cement the role of commercial and interactive media as possibly offering alternative informal and distinctly new kinds of approaches to learning.

In a recent meta-review of what the OECD are calling 'New Millennium Learners' and basing his argument on constructivist principles, Pedro (2006) has suggested that what began as an interest in alternative modes of non-formal learning has now grown to encompass a generational or even a developmental shift in learning paradigms (Hull & Schultz, 2002).

Yet, whilst this focus on computers and digital technology in general is a relatively new input into the formation of changing paradigms of learning, there remain older models for exploring the relationship of formal and informal learning especially in relation to language development and social class. The current interest in informal learning has not offered a macro-systemic theoretical analysis relating to the form and function of education and learning in general.

Basil Bernstein (2000) offers a holistic study of learning within and between different levels (macro and micro) as well as in formal and informal settings (contexts). His concepts of pedagogic codes (also called knowledge codes) and the concepts of classification and framing have proved to be fruitful tools in analysing learning in and between different contexts, i.e. school, family, spare time.

A key concept relating to different aspects of learning is his concept of pedagogic identity. Originally the concept relates to official knowledge within the curriculum. However, 'pedagogic identities' deserve more attention in order to be further developed and extended to other empirical contexts.

By contrast, studies of young people's learning during leisure time, (e.g. studies of popular music, Fornäs, 1995; Vestel, 2003) builds on an established sociological and socio-anthropological tradition and tends not to prioritise the nature of the learning process over the social nature of the activity and its role in constructing and maintaining identity.

Some key research themes

Four key themes running through a vast literature are pertinent to Transactions:

(1) the attention to the nature and multiple contexts of learning, including physical contexts;
(2) studies of the discourses of learning, the attention to language registers and specialised usage;
(3) the relation of tools (mental, technological and including, language) which learners mobilise and in some case appropriate to support and further develop (Wertsch, 1998); and
(4) the attention to social networks within whose ebb and flow learners position themselves and are positioned.

Using these four axes (which suggest differently weighted data collection and interpretation methods) we aim to compare and contrast learning in and out of school through a range of projects.

Although we acknowledge the social hierarchies of learning modes, we wish to challenge constructions that would lead to marginalising forms of learning valued by young people and within other social frames than the school. By the same token, we do not view school or out-of-school as monolithic categories.

Our challenge is to anatomise learning in a way that can allow us to describe learning in a range of settings along all four axes noted above..