Abstract:
This paper is concerned with examining how informal learning in communities can be understood as collective accomplishments of learning as becoming, residing in heterogeneous networks of relationships between the social and material world. Traditionally, learning has been viewed as an individualist cognitive acquisition of knowledge which can be separated from other activities and/or as an embodied socially situated practice which occurs in contained places or contexts of learning (education institutions or communities of practice). Consequently most studies of informal learning have been shaped by these understandings which rely on preconceived constructs of learning, and who the learner is, in a purely social world. At the same time there has been a failure to acknowledge and articulate the intangible, the more-than-repesentational (Lorimer, 2005), affect, the tacit, the material and the practised. Alternatively, with reference to empirical data from my doctoral study which focuses on women in everyday settings, I show how learning can be viewed differently by adopting an actor-network theory (ANT) - material semiotic – sensitivity. Socio-material practices are taken to be the units of analysis and learning is the effect of the relationships of actacts (both human and non-human) in actor-networks. The theoretical concept of performativity, which underpins material semiotics, provides the idea that subjectivity and socio-material context are brought into being together, as a co-production or enactment of people, processes and things. Viewed in this way, learning and identity formation are not static, but emerge in a continuing process of becoming. There are three sections to this paper. It begins with a brief description of informal learning, previous research and changing learning theories, including a brief account of their usefulness for framing research in informal learning. Secondly, with reference to my mother’s informal learning in a rural community setting, I use three data vignettes from my doctoral study to demonstrate how an actor-network theory sensitivity to materialities and practices can provide a different way in which to study learning. By focusing on practices it is seen that learning and identity are entangled in everyday mundane activities, and are performed into being as transitory co-productions of people, processes and objects. I conclude with a review of ANT’s potential for focusing up the entanglement of human activity with objects in everyday practices, and how the agentive role that objects play in this activity provides a different way to view the everyday learning and identity of women in mundane activities. They are entangled in the process of becoming.