Learning as Social Practice (Foundations and Futures of Education)

This book studies learning as a social enterprise, contextually situated, organized and assessed. It gives a broad theoretic grounding for an understanding of learning which goes beyond a common reductionist approach. The book discusses four related approaches to learning which share a social perspective: social semiotics and multimodality; a design-theoretic approach to learning; a socio-cultural perspective; and a perspective of mimetic learning.

Contributing authors consider the theoretical question of how to understand educational systems, learning and social communication as historically situated practices. The chapters in this book analyze key working practices including:

• analyzing what learning, remembering and cognitive work is like in a practice involving different kinds of expertise;
• problem-solving and engaging through collaboration;
• learning and teaching in different formal, semi- and non-formal environments;
• a design-theoretic approach to learning;
• social semiotic perspectives on learning;
• the mimetic and ritual dimension of learning;
• how social learning can be organized to support students;
• how learning has been conceptualized in psychology and neighbouring research areas.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers interested in learning and meaning-making, multimodal representations and communication, designs for learning, education and teaching, and social achievement in different formal and non-formal contexts.

Gunther Kress (1940–2019) was Professor of Semiotics and Education at UCL Institute of Education, UK.

Staffan Selander is Professor Emeritus in Education at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Roger Säljö is Honorary Doctor at the University of Turku, Finland and the University of Agder, Norway and Honorary Professor at the University of Bath, UK.

Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.