DP+LS=DPLS

At their core the Learning Sciences and Discursive Psychology appear to be well tuned for methodological co-existence. Ignoring, for a moment, that Discursive Psychology is a theory and method, a crucial task in my scholarship is working toward an LS/DP partnership wherein the whole is greater than the sum of their parts. Broadly speaking, LS has taken up discourse as useful evidence of learning. Whether in clinical and open-ended interviews, interaction analysis, or textual analysis, comparisons of (or changes in) discourse are theorized as measurable changes in knowledge (i.e., learning). Yet a cursory search of “discursive psychology” in the International Journal of the Learning Sciences produces only three hits. Two of which are superficial glances at the existence of DP and the third a call to “join conversations already in progress” on intersubjectivity – proposing that DP specifically can “blow it out of the water” (Cook, 1999). Still, no articles claim to use DP as a method, lens, tool, etc., for the analysis of learning. While fitting DP into LS or LS into DP is out of the scope of this blog post, I do think there is utility in “brain dumping” some of my thoughts on the matter. So, where to begin? From the beginning, I guess.

 In 2004, when Janet Kolodner published “The Learning Sciences: Past, Present, and Future,” the LS field was clearly established with an international conference, a highly competitive journal, and an organization of researchers. Nonetheless, positioning LS research in the crowded landscape of academic psychology was still necessary. The above article’s audience was Instructional Systems Design researchers. In seeking partnership with ISD, Janet (if I can call her Janet) pays particular attention to disciplinary roots and trajectory of LS. In doing so she recalls a time in the late 80s when psychologists began to express disenchantment in the “neat” research of cognitive science that paid little attention to the “scruffiness” of the world outside the laboratory. Essentially, it was a shame that “neat” psychological research ignored the complexity of a “scruffy” social and material world in order to isolate focus on decontextualized and fixed problem solving settings.

It is no surprise that other cognitive scientists shared this sentiment. The troops were rallied and research began to broaden focus and include the ways “just plain folks” think and reason. And so the Learning Sciences left the laboratory and entered the field. Born again cognitive scientists had new venue to promote research of learning in naturalistic contexts. Learning could now be situated in interaction, mediated by access to sociocultural norms, rules, and tools.

Yet, it may be fair to say that research remained grounded by its cognitive roots. This is perhaps most explicit in methodology (e.g., design-based research), which privileges theory and design to action and interaction. That is, it was assumed that we could best understand learning and the promotion of learning through the application and iteration of tools, technologies, and activities designed by experts. Below the emic, participatory, and in vivo methods, the cognitive bias remained undisturbed. To the learning scientist knowing and doing lived first in social and were appropriated or transformed into mental objects or models. In the over a decade since “The Learning Sciences: Past, Present, and Future,” LS has been wrought into a variety of theoretically informed approaches to understand learning in all its “scruffiness.” And while nuances to theory and method remain disputed, it is clear that in its own mind LS has the best of both worlds: the study of learning as it occurs in complex social interactions and the tools to extract and abstract learning as a trends, patterns, and shifts in cognition.

Another flashback to the late 80s: across the pond researchers are becoming dissatisfied with the “neat” cognitivist approaches to understanding the “scruffiness” talk and interaction. The radical idea was that “what we say” might not necessarily be a representation of “what we know” or “how we feel.” Discourse, therefore, should not (can not?) be used as a map to the reveal the hidden structures and processes of human cognition that guide all human action and interaction (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). For example, categorization is a fundamental construct in psychology writ large. Yet, is categorization a mental process or a social accomplishment? Do we adaptively group things into categories based on a perceptual mechanism for simplifying and systematizing the world (a natural product of our cognitive machinery)? Or are categories fluidly called upon for the situated needs of social interactions? If the latter, it demands a methodological shift to naturally occurring talk in everyday and institutional settings.

Discursive Psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992) is one strand of social psychology (composed of many fibers) that originated with the reconceptualization of psychologized phenomena (e.g., categorization). This work continued the critique of mainstream psychological approaches by situating “mental” constructs, such as memory and attribution, outside of the head and in interactional terms (Potter, 2012). As Potter (2000) puts it:

Let me be clear here. I am not, of course, suggesting that psychologists have had no interest in what people do, or in applied or practical questions. Psychologists spend much of their time justifying their activities as relevant to these things. What I am suggesting is that cognitivist assumptions that are so deeply wired into the discipline lead them away from taking practices seriously (p. 35).

Historically, both LS and DP stemmed from a mutual dissatisfaction with cognitive explanations for human interaction and understanding. Naturally, both fields repositioned their research away the laboratory and within naturalistic or “real-world” settings. Yet, the potential irony is that Learning Sciences “in the wild” did little to respecify learning. In other words, LS “looked” for learning in new settings and with new epistemologies, but continued to “look” for the same thing. This leads to the questions: what does a post-cognitive Learning Sciences look like? Does it begin with the respecification of learning as discursive action? And can analysis end with discourse or must it attend to the cognitive (or material)?

Let’s take one popular example from early LS literature on the contextual and situated nature of learning and cognition (Lave, 1988). Imagine you’re following a strict diet. For this meal you are allowed three-quarters of two-thirds cup of cottage cheese. What do you do? Probably not a pencil and paper algorithm; instead you fill a measuring-cup two-thirds full, dump it on the cutting board, mark a cross in it, and scoop away one quadrant. This is a quintessential example in LS, as it clearly demonstrates that the inventiveness of problem solving in authentic activity cannot be represented as abstract procedures or mental models. The big take away: knowledge comes part and parcel with the activity and environment in which it is produced, of which some components are internal and some are external. How might DP differently analyze this example? Would a discursive psychologist even care? From the DP perspective, might you ask: what does “learning” do in this interaction? How is “learning” an interactional achievement? What discursive resources are employed in the performance of “learning?” These questions feel a little funny to me, and I am not sure why. Is it due to a limitation in LS or DP or both? I think one first step would be to investigate how learning and knowledge are explicitly oriented to and used as resources in talk-in-interaction.

DP has a broad scope and LS has already respecified learning under a variety of theoretical approaches. (To be clear, I do not mean respecification in the same sense as DP respecifies the psychological. Here, I mean the numerous ways in which LS has considered “learning as _____.”) Nonetheless, I do think the respecification of learning through a DP lens would necessarily move LS in a post-cognitive direction. Can LS reframe methodologies with a social constructionist epistemology? Or is the epistemological leap between sociocultural and social constructionist too large? Can the Learning Sciences take Sacks’ (1992) advice and not “worry about whether they’re ‘thinking’?” I think so.