Why is there no word in English for the art of learning? Webster says that pedagogy means the art of teaching. What is missing is the parallel word for learning. In schools of education, courses on the art of teaching are simply listed as “methods.” Everyone understands that the methods of importance in education are those of teaching—these courses supply what is thought to be needed to become a skilled teacher. But what about methods of learning?
Seymour Papert, ‘The Children’s Machine’
Papert’s observation makes a compelling point. We seem to debate and discuss practices of teaching more than principles of learning. Yet such principles do exist: they are just not very prominent in the educational conversation. For example, three North American educationalists explored how six important strategies derived from learning research were represented in text books for intending teachers. They report: “Looking for the six strategies in these textbooks is akin to looking for six needles in a haystack. Even a sentence dedicated to one of the research-based strategies is infrequent.” (Pomerance, Greenberg and Walsh, 2016, p.6). Put aside the Webster definition chosen by Papert and consider instead how pedagogy is defined by the Cambridge dictionary: “study of the methods and activities of teaching”. Surely there is parallel research enterprise committed to studying “the methods and activities of learning”? There is such an enterprise: those three text book researchers drew their examples from it.
But can learning be researched independently of teaching? It can certainly be researched independently of classrooms: because, for better or worse, it is often studied in ‘laboratories’ or in the remote corners of schools reserved for research visitors. Although learning may get studied outside of teaching occasions, it is still always folded into some context. Ideally, the researcher will engage with the particulars of that context. Yet even if they are diligent about that, a challenge remains. The researcher wishing to influence educational practice must worry about how far their findings can be generalised: how far they hold across variations in context.
This book is about findings from learning research, but they will not be presented as if prescribing practice. Knowing whether a given context will respond to research-informed interventions depends upon intimate understanding of that context: history, prospects, participants, resources. Only the individual practitioner working within it can make such judgements confidently. Yet making them also depends upon the practitioner’s confidence over the credibility of research and theory informing an intervention possibility. This book is about making such research and theory more visible. My personal belief that it does deserve to be more visible stems from feeling that learning research was a useful stimulus for my own teaching. Others must find their own way towards practical application!
It is the academic discipline of psychology that should deliver the firmest leads on how to conceptualise human learning. Accordingly, this chapter will start by reviewing how learning has fared as a topic within that discipline. Briefly, we find it was once prominent, then dropped from view, and now has returned refreshed by new ideas. And yet current theory still remains slow to impact professional practice. Against this background, an ‘acts of learning’ framework is proposed here as a stimulant for the conversation between theory and practice. The framework is outlined in the second half of this chapter and fully articulated in the remaining chapters of the book.
1) Learning in Psychology: from behaviourism to learning sciences
Is there a ‘learning’ word to partner ‘pedagogy’ in a way that Papert might welcome? Perhaps the simple phrase ‘learning theory’ will do. It does seem to target the studying of “methods and activities” as suggested in that Cambridge dictionary definition. Moreover, ‘learning theory’ is a phrase with a long history in psychology. Until the 1960s it described almost everything that academic psychology was about. This reflected an early aspiration of the discipline to explain all human activity in terms of a unified theory of how we learned. That unified theory cast learning not as a state-of-being we dropped in and out of, but as something that continuously happened to us. Certainly, this version of learning was not confined to occasions where it felt intentional or deliberate – the learning of schools for example. Of course, such a unified and comprehensive theory needed a universal mechanism. In this early period of psychology, the mechanism proposed was the forming of associations. That entailed the relentless integration of responses (what we do) with stimuli and reinforcements (what is done to us). Moreover, that particular conception had a strong appeal within pedagogy, not least because the principle of association sits easily with common sense ideas about everyday learning. In the everyday world, rewards and punishments surely do affect how people act; and the contiguities between external stimuli surely are registered and remembered by us. In that sense, all human psychological development did seem amenable to explanation within this ‘associationist’ learning theory.
The reach of this approach was certainly bold. But its swagger may partly explain its declining influence. Yes, it was a framework that could be engineered to fit the full range of human action, but the fit was often loose. Its explanations of human action often seemed post hoc or just-so. Even mundane. Plus, there was something uncomfortable about its vision of people as seemingly ‘victims’ of associations – rather than managers of them. So, psychology displaced the associationist model of behaviour with a more compelling alternative: namely, a computational model of the human mind (Minsky, 1986; Newell and Simon, 1972). Historians of the discipline sometimes explain this shift by reference to a parallel growth of electronic control engineering and the related analytic tools of information theory. The previous associationist theorists had resisted references to mental structures – what counted for them was behaviour, not minds (hence the term ‘behaviourist’). This new computational approach was very different. It positively celebrated the human mind: casting mental activity in terms of a hidden flow of information and the individual’s executive management of that traffic. To many, this seemed a richer model of what we are. It certainly offered a fresh object of study in relation to thinking and acting.
The computational metaphor of mind came to underpin what is now termed a ‘cognitive psychology’. That is the general term that will be used here for human faculties of thinking and reasoning – although a more recent preference is ‘cognitive science’ (mainly signalling greater interdisciplinarity). In the early period of its growth, cognitive psychologists never positioned the study of human learning centrally on their agenda. It was more concerned with such mental functions as perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and decision making. While these all seem relevant to learning, they tended to be researched in laboratory studies – the findings from which often resisted integration with the messy conditions of teaching. Nevertheless, the topic of learning has lately had something of a recovery within cognitive psychology. Examples later in this book should illustrate that modern psychology can provide for practitioners a conceptual toolkit (and empirical research to authenticate it). The challenge may be one of communicating it effectively.
This brief historical sketch considers whether academic psychology has voiced ‘learning’ in a manner that meets Papert’s concerns, as they were quoted above. Has it offered the “study of methods and activities” characteristic of learning? Behaviourism emerged early in the history of psychology and did make learning central to its perspective. But it was eclipsed. Unfortunately, the subsequent ‘cognitive turn’ did not immediately deliver a persuasive new conception of learning. That may have been because early cognitive theorising continued to neglect features of the learning experience that seemed – to intuition – obviously important. It is these two that were neglected: our human agency, and our human sociality. Finding space for these has effectively moved cognitive psychology towards a more credible voice in relation to the understanding of learning.
First, human agency (Wen and Imamizu, 2022). This is well addressed by social science theorising around the term ‘constructivism’. Until recently, constructivist thinking was less prominent within psychology than within educational studies – where it was long familiar through the writings of Dewey (1938) and Piaget (1929). Constructivism encourages a distinctive perspective on the nature of knowledge, and how it is best acquired. Briefly put, it is a perspective insisting that knowledge is constructed by the learner and not passively received, that a learner’s encounters with knowledge are strongly shaped by their existing understandings (that are sometimes idiosyncratic), and that the knowledge acquired during learning is represented mentally as conceptual structures, sometimes termed ’schema’. Schema are fluid; being configured and re-configured through the influence of learning. Constructivism is a powerful mindset within pedagogy – although, despite a natural appeal, its faithful implementation is not always straightforward (Hyslop-Margison and Strobel, 2007; McPhail, 2016; Philips, 1995).
The second theme neglected within early cognitive theories was the profoundly social character of human experience. The term ‘sociality’ is an ugly word. Yet it is useful, because it goes beyond a too-narrow conception of what ‘being social’ entails. This narrowness occurs when ‘social’ is taken to mean only our one-to-one engagements with other people: our ‘interpersonal interactions’ (as this might be expressed in psychology). Of course, ‘sociality’ is in part about this but it is also about ‘being in society’ more broadly. Or as suggested by the dictionary (again the Cambridge one), ‘society’ is about “living together in an organised way”. So, sociality in relation to learning should imply two directions of research. In the first place, the narrower sense of how learning occurs through close exchanges with other people: i.e., the social interactions of that “living together” part. Yet those exchanges reside in contexts and those contexts may have a configuring influence on how and what we learn. So, in the second place, ‘sociality’ also requires understanding learning as experience located in the hurly-burly of social structures: i.e., the settings in which person-to-person exchanges are embedded. The “organised way” part of how we live together. Through our induction into the practices of these settings, our learning comes to be shaped by the options that they provide. This is a subtle point and deserves elaboration.
Consider a very simple case: family dinner-time. A young person who is regularly in such a setting may learn many things. Food and its preparation – it’s a meal after all. But much other knowledge may be exchanged and acquired in the course of family conversation. However, the routine is more than just another reservoir of information for the learner. Their participation also involves exposure to certain ways of talking, reasoning, arguing, debating, and so on. Or, put abstractly, exposure to certain forms of discourse. In addition, taking part requires the active reading and interpretation of the motives, emotions and dispositions of those around you. The example is simple, but if scaled up to more complex and pervasive social structures, then the significance of such ‘membership learning’ becomes more obvious. The school is a compelling example of learners also being exposed to not just new knowledge content but modes of discourse, modes of participation.
Recent attention to the sociality of human learning may reflect the growing influence of Vygotsky’s writing (1978, 1986). However, although Vygotsky’s perspective on learning is often termed a “social” one, it is more properly termed “socio-cultural”. This is not a minor semantic point. The term captures an interpretative scheme that treats human behaviour as situated culturally and historically. It does, of course, foreground interpersonal exchanges that are ‘social’. But it also foregrounds the consequences for learning of “living together in an organised way”: our engagement with cultures of learning. This may explain increasing use of the phrase ‘cultural transmission’ in contemporary discussions of learning. The phrase implies more than this interpersonal agency. The paraphernalia of culture – its tools, rituals, designs-for-living – all mediate the exchanges of learning and, thereby, shape the direction it takes.
This book’s concern is with how cognitive psychology, as sketched in this section, defines concepts foundational to human learning: that is, how learning takes place, the circumstances mediating its outcomes, and the psychological functions it recruits. It was suggested above that psychology has recovered its interest in learning as a topic. That revival owes a lot to the liberating impact of accommodating the two issues just discussed: namely, agency and sociality. They have each been married into cognitive psychology, creating a unified approach now often termed ‘the learning sciences’ (Fischer, Hmelo-Silver et al, 2018; Nasir, Lee et al, 2021; Pea and Linn, 2020). Again, the plural form emphasises the multi-disciplinary ambitions of this perspective.
Beneath this broad-brush disciplinary sketch of learning in psychology there exists detail. Detail about how learning takes place, insights drawn from fieldwork and laboratory observations of learning-in-progress. But also detail of a more interpretative kind. That is, more abstract concepts and theories within psychology. These are interpretations that overarch our understanding of learning as a human resource: as if asking “but how does our ‘learning engine’ work”? In the remainder of this chapter something will be said about why a deeper understanding of such things is a worthwhile investment and, then, something more will be said about the strategy adopted in the rest of this book for promoting that understanding.
2) Psychological foundations. Why? Where?
The subtitle of this book refers to learning’s ‘psychological foundations’. So, what sort of things are ‘foundational’ and what might be the motive for identifying them? Perhaps it is easier to position these questions if they are posed for a more familiar aspect of human functioning: for instance, a physiological topic, rather than a psychological one. So, it might be asked “what is foundational to respiration?” and, perhaps, “what is the motive for sharing the answer?”
Foundational matters concern a system’s functionality. In the case of respiration, explaining foundations would involve explaining the components and the workings of a dynamic system: oxygen, carbon dioxide, red blood cells, lungs, the traffic of circulation, etc. This would include acknowledging the varying and sometimes imperfect way in which the system operates. If follows that the reasons for finding out more about such things would be to ensure that a particular system (your own or someone else’s) functioned optimally. How to maintain or tune things so that it does.
It is not a perfect analogy. However, some perspectives (behaviourism in particular) do seem to make learning resemble respiration. They suppose that the underlying system is pervasive and in constant activity. We breathe all the time; we learn all the time. And just as the management of health (personally or professionally) benefits from understanding the respiratory system, so the management of learning must benefit from recognising the operating characteristics of the learning system. In which case, guardians of any such knowledge may design suitable curricula for promoting understandings. So, the guardians of knowledge about learning must ask what should be on a proposed curriculum for learning about learning. This would become a body of understanding that might be welcomed by a parent, a teacher, or indeed anyone concerned for their very own resources of learning.
If there is a political imperative to foster learning-about-learning, it will be pursued most vigorously in relation to formal education. Responsible politicians will naturally wish to serve educational innovation, and so the promotion of research-based ideas about learning will seem a good investment. In the UK, the Education Endowment Foundation is one agency that mediates such ambitions (Edovalk and Nevill, 2021; Higgins, Aguilera et al, 2010; Madgwick, Francis and Kay, 2023). For an insight into which learning processes are judged deserving of closer understanding, it is worth noting what they recommend. These are discussed in a document proposing how cognitive science may be approached in the classroom (Perry, Lea et al, 2021).
In that document, the authors identify a number of ‘core concepts’. These are: spaced learning, interleaving, retrieval practice, schema, multimedia learning and embodied learning. In addition, two other important concepts are found “under the surface”: namely, memory processes (working, long term, retrieval, encoding) and cognitive load. So, this list comprises a mixture of the following: learning practices (classroom activities, such as spaced learning), learning resources (such as new media), cognitive entities (such as short-term memory), cognitive strategies (varieties of encoding) and theoretical perspectives (cognitive load theory). These are all matters captured by the ‘learning theory’ definition invoked earlier in this chapter: that is, they are the “methods and activities of learning” that are studied in research.
To those unfamiliar with theories about learning, the contents of this list may seem daunting. And yet, this is a vocabulary promising to provide greater coherence and depth to everyday understandings of learning. Many experienced commentators have urged that educational practice can only be strengthened by a firm grounding in research-led theory (e.g., Burkhardt and Schoenfeld, 2003; Nagel, Bleck and Liposwky 2023; Nasir, Lee et al, 2021; Nelson and Campbell, 2017). The focus of this advice has recently shifted towards stressing the particular urgency of insights from cognitive psychology (Perry, Lea et al, 2021; Putnam and Roediger, 2018; Richens, 2021). For example, within the UK government, adopting findings from this area of research has been highlighted as an important policy commitment (Department of Education, 2019).
Despite such ambitions, numerous researchers have noted the limited impact of cognitive science concepts on educational practice so far (Weinstein, Madan and Sumeracki, 2018). A survey by Muller and Cook (2024) leads to the conclusion that “…work still needs to be done on developing teachers’ understanding of the theories underlying the different strategies”. There are reasons why such assimilations into practice might be slow. One might be that teaching workloads leave little space for such reflection (Perryman and Calvert, 2020). Although a more widely-cited reason is the feeling among practitioners that the advice flowing from research pays scant attention to the wide contextual variations within settings of educational practice (Cukorova, Luckin and Baines, 2018; Jørgensen, Perry and Lea, 2024). The concern appears to be that general concepts are vivid enough ‘in print’ but they can be undermined by the local demands of context.
This makes for a rather gloomy perspective on relations between educational practice and psychological theory. However, a slow uptake may also reflect the challenge of accessing and grounding the technical vocabulary of learning theory. With that in mind, the present book adopts a mission of articulating some core parts of that theory – in as accessible a way as possible. The aim is to introduce theoretical concepts underpinning learning by illustrating them within familiar examples of learning-in-progress. This may allow meaning to be attached to otherwise rather abstract concepts: bringing them into sharper focus. Put more informally, the present text will illustrate how cognitive psychologists talk to each other about their learning designs, some of which might find their way into curricula – but perhaps decoupled from that conceptual framing by the time they get there. The text cannot have bolder ambitions than that; certainly, it cannot be an encyclopaedic treatment of theory. For example, it will not prioritise individual psychological concepts – say, in terms of their proposed influence on the outcomes of particular teaching practices in which they are prominent. However, enough can be said to judge whether the vocabulary illustrated provides useful tools for personal reflection about the nature of learning. The structure chosen to expand learning theory concepts is described in the next section
3) Acts of learning explained
Through the efforts of the learning sciences (broadly defined) there has evolved a toolkit of concepts intended to make sense of the ways in which learning takes place. Its proper contents and its breadth of application will always be matters of debate. However, the Education Endowment Foundation’s list of core concepts illustrates the kind of items currently acknowledged as useful parts of such a ‘toolkit’. Making accessible a vocabulary for learning is the ambition of subsequent chapters here. There is a challenge in how best to do that – without experiencing the stress of entering a conceptual rabbit hole.
A common text book approach to presenting the scope of a discipline might be termed “top down”. It identifies a family of concepts that comprise the system under scrutiny (e.g., respiration or learning) and unpicks their operation through examples. The approach taken here is rather more bottom up. The starting points are not the concepts explaining learning but the learning that has to be conceptualised. This entails going from the concrete to the abstract, from the familiar to the novel. In short, there will be a series of starting points (chapters), each being a situation of learning and each deserving to be made sense of. One advantage of this approach is that the novice reader can more quickly decide whether this investment of understanding learning theories seems worthwhile. Because the learning situations invoked here will be familiar, so it should be easier for the experienced individual to judge whether they are convincingly characterised by the conceptualising of learning theory.
The framework proposed is built around the phrase ‘acts of learning’. It thereby supposes that learning can be parsed into a number of ‘acts’, each with the potential to support a learner’s effort to build new knowledge or re-configure what is already known. The list of acts is not definitive, final, or in any sense ‘official’. It is certainly not intended as a new taxonomy of learning. It is a vehicle for carrying a set of concepts that deserve attention. Or put another way, it furnishes a set of anchor points for holding difficult theoretical concepts steady – and, then, judging whether those concepts are generative and useful. Here is the list proposed.
1: Tutoring
2: Exposition
3: Participating
4: Collaborating
5: Performing
6: Practicing
7: Constructing
8: Decomposing
9: Browsing
10: Representing
11: Curating
As should be apparent, this is not a list of technical terms; it is a list of recognisable and familiar activities. They all characterise forms of action that might be expected within classrooms, universities, workplaces or homes – anywhere with expectations of inquiry, discovery, invention – including the active practice of what is already known. They exist in all those contexts although that should not imply that learning is directed by them onto the same trajectories (Resnick, 1987). The paragraphs below further articulate what the items in this list have in common. Each point is phrased as if in response to the challenge: “Define these acts of learning!”
a) They are what people do. They get things done.
Learning is an activity. Its activity may be in the head, rather than in the world. Although most of the time it is likely to be both. The social psychologist Michael Billig (2013) has observed that there are too many nouns in psychological explanations. What we need is more verbs. The present approach to learning follows his lead. Accordingly, all the terms used in this list take the gerund form grammatically – they request us to think of learning as doing. The exception might seem to be number 2: exposition. ‘Expositing’ would have been a possible substitute. But it does not suggest the learner as the acting agent; ‘expositing’ shifts our intended focus. It renders the learner more a target of someone else’s action. As will be discussed in that chapter, what is interesting about exposition is how the learner can appropriate it into an activity of their own. It is the response to exposition that is of special interest and that is what will be discussed in that chapter. However, the example raises a very general point about items in this list. It is a learning list and not a teaching list. Of course, many of its terms imply a social relationship, and that relationship could be one of teaching (‘expositing’ of course, but ‘collaborating’ is similarly conducted with others). The treatment here will be learner-centred. It asks what does an individual learner bring to an engagement (including all those joined with other people) that makes it their act of learning.
b) They are cultural practices
The anthropologist’s often-cited definition of ‘practice’ is: “what folks do around here”. Taking the term a little deeper, ‘practice’ in the above list implies activities that are grounded in a shared social and cultural history. Activities that are repeated, situated and shared. That gives them (and their structure) a familiarity. In any chosen example, this is unlikely to be a universally shared history. For instance, many of these acts of learning are grounded in a culture of literacy. Those acts call upon the written word to realise the learner’s communications and representations; they depend upon cultural tools that support that literate practice. Such a culture is certainly not universally shared in some societies.
c) Education can animate acts of learning, and populate them with new content
These acts of learning typically exist within everyday cultural experience and do so from early in life. For example: exposition is in the bedtime story, collaborating permeates peer play, representing is in the child’s drawing, and so on. An achievement of schooling is to recruit the familiarity of these activities and animate them. Directing them towards forms of knowledge and inquiry that are valued by the host culture. Of course, the process of achieving this will often involve new tools to mediate that activity (such as new technologies). And it will involve attracting learners towards new goals and new cultures of practice that these learning practices can serve (Resnick, 1987). Schooling will also provide an audience for the outcomes of learner activity. That may also be part of its achievement of drawing the learner into new inquiries.
d) Education creates opportunities to integrate acts of learning into ‘projects’
A framework such as the present one serves a useful analytic purpose. It helps satisfy a curiosity about learning, giving structure to an exploration of theoretical concepts. But the framework-as-list format risks an implication that acts of learning exist in isolation from each other. As if the experience of schooling (for example) was one of shifting between them in turn. Does this exercise of listing do unacceptable violence to the more dynamic and fluid nature of learning? It is appropriate that the present framework is judged according to whether its items do seem to manifest a coherent singularity. Their sheer familiarity within everyday discourse about problem solving encourages the idea that they do. However, in application, they will typically exist in configurations – patterns that we might term ‘projects’. That is a term familiar in classrooms, where such orchestration frequently is experienced. Certain projects may seem dominated by one particular act of learning but, often, the most successful learning depends on their creative fusion.
e) Effective education equips the learner with awareness of owning a portfolio of such acts
Learning may be most often theorised in relation to schooling, but learning is a lifetime requirement within any knowledge-rich environment. Certainly, in the workplace we must learn. And then, in our leisure, we will find pastimes that invite inquiry and creativity through learning. One of the achievements of schooling should be to foster an awareness of the range of learning solutions available to us in these circumstances: the bricolage of learning. This will empower the individual with wise judgements as to how everyday challenges for learning are most effectively met – met by drawing from a personal portfolio of options. Schooling can thereby foster the powerful identity of ‘being-a-learner’. Such awareness is cultivated at two levels. Consider one act from this list: collaboration. We may often collaborate informally, on-the-fly, and without reflection. But through the explicit orchestration of schooled projects, we are made more conscious of collaborating as a learning choice available to us. A practice to be activated in situations where we recognise it has a fit. But at a coarser level of awareness, we develop a self-consciousness in relation to our ‘portfolio’ of options itself. And, thereby, awareness makes us work its contents more creatively. The cultivation of this ‘portfolio’ and our increasing awareness of it is a great reward of schooling. After all, when we enter a challenging and novel situation beyond school, we are not always armed with confident bodies of knowledge that might guide us (so much school content seems forgotten). But the remnants of what was known can often be quickly activated and enriched– as we judge which of our learning acts to apply to the situation at hand.
f) Acts have a developmental trajectory: evolving from formats cultivated in early life
It has been repeatedly insisted here that these acts are ‘familiar’. This implies they provide for the ways we get through life outside of schooling. That, in turn, implies they are in place and cultivated from an early age: it implies that they are intuitive practices for investigating the world. Prior to schooling, it falls to developmental psychology to track how they are enriched by new mediating tools, as well as how they find new problems for their application. Schooling evidently plays a very important role in this elaboration.
4) How this book works, and for whom
This sub-title of this book promises to identify “psychological foundations” of human learning. However, the nature of foundational elements can be expressed at different levels of granularity. ‘Coarse’ level solutions will invoke overarching theories. These are very general ways to understand teaching and learning: for example, constructivism, socio-cultural theory, connectivism, etc. (Olson and Ramirez, 2020; Stewart, 2021). Accounts at a finer level identify elements of learning common to all situations in which we act – ‘atomic’ theories of learning as it were. Examples are the stimulus-response associations of behaviourism or the neural networks of cognitive neuroscience. The framework adopted in this book is in a middle layer of this sandwich (perhaps a ‘molecular’ layer). Here would reside the so-called ‘acts of learning’. It is for these learning practices that this book’s subtitle promises to define “psychological foundations”.
Perhaps sandwich metaphors offer limited insights into the ambitions of this book or its direction of travel. So, in the remainder of this section, help in navigating such uncertainties is offered. This will take the form of a number of questions that seem reasonable to pose, given what has been said so far.
a) What is the breadth of application for these acts of learning?
The book is grounded in research and theory focussing on societies that are – as anthropologists term them – WEIRD. That is western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. Within that context they are relevant to the full range of settings in which an individual’s knowledge building inquiry may be pursued. Evidently, this includes settings of organised educational practice, but also settings outside: the home, the workplace, and the pastimes of leisure.
b) How thorough is this treatment of learning?
The present treatment inevitably fragments learning by presenting it as a repertoire of ‘acts’. This may seem to violate a common experience of learning as being more project-like than act-like. Therefore, a treatment that is properly ‘thorough’ would need to invest more consideration in how learning acts are integrated. How they thereby become projects. But that would be very ambitious. What is attempted instead is some ‘thoroughness’ in relation to psychological principles that underpin such projects – as apparent at the level of constituent learning acts.
c) Must chapters be read in the order presented?
The order of chapters does not imply a strong narrative unfolding. Although chapters do cross reference each other, because psychological foundations that characterise one learning act are re-visited in making sense of others. In addition, acts of learning that must occur within social structures (i.e., that by their nature must involve partners) are treated in the first four chapters. This may reflect a natural order of things: in that early social interactions furnish the firmest psychological foundations for subsequent learning.
d) How will learning acts be described in these chapters?
The treatment of each act of learning will follow a pattern. That pattern will include a description of the practice as documented within observational studies. This will be complemented by exploration of the psychological concepts proposed to account for how it functions. An account of practice will entail in all cases some consideration of how an act of learning may be mediated. What all this means can be illustrated through the example of collaborating. First, there is some defining to be established: how common sense understands what a practice such as collaborating involves. Then, how this core practice is recruited into learning will involve identifying variety in its mediation. The learner’s collaborative interactions with the world (material and social) will be through the incorporation of various tools and their orientation towards the design of the learning context. For example, collaborating can be mediated by digital technologies (a material tool) and it can also be mediated by how the site of collaborating is configured for partners’ interactions (perhaps a particular spatial design). These considerations underpin a dynamic characteristic of such an act of learning: a dynamic inviting psychological interpretation.
e) How do these descriptions relate to practices of teaching and learning?
An account of underlying processes does not immediately imply interventions, such as might bring about desired learning outcomes. But the vocabulary of psychological interpretation provides tools to think with. So, accounts in the chapters that follow do not impose prescriptions for teaching practice. They are learner-focussed and, in a sense, they are neutral in regard to teaching interventions. Although the text does itself not draw strong links between learning practices and teaching practices, there remain links to be found. As declared at the start of this chapter, how they are implemented is most wisely left to the practitioner (or parent or manager etc.). Because it is they who will have insight into the moderating conditions of the learner’s local setting.
f) How is the authority of what is written established?
No text of an introductory kind can aim to be encyclopaedic in depth or comprehensive in breadth. Yet the present text does endeavour to locate claims about learning in relation to a literature of research. It therefore follows the traditional academic expository style of attaching evidence of theoretical and empirical authority to most claims that are made here. That responsibility is met in the form of citations to research establishing a point: identifying authors and the dates of their publications. A cumulative bibliography is included. This anchoring of authority is selective, although that selection is guided by considerations of source accessibility, credibility, and clarity of presentation. An understanding of substantial points made in the text should not depend on consultation of such sources, but confidence may be increased if that is possible to do.
The comments in this final section risk appearing apologetic. The framework presented is, by open admission, imperfect in several ways. On the other hand, it may furnish a foothold on the matters it concerns. And like all proper footholds, it gets the less-experienced climber started. Some conceptual groundwork is in place, some useful sources have been identified, some methods have been witnessed. It is a modest opening for learning about learning but hopefully it is a useful one.