Positioning, Situated Learning, and Identity Formation

Situated Learning

Many people automatically associate learning with teaching and schooling, which frames learning as a formal, academic pursuit. A broader view of learning subscribes to the idea that people learn across the range of contexts they frequent. In this view, learners learn with others throughout their lives and within the multitude of settings that they traverse. Learning is influenced by historically shaped cultural and linguistic practices, social and material circumstances of the moment, underlying values for interpreting behavior, affective dimensions, and social expectations. Learning is not located solely within one's head but rather is part of a robust interaction that occurs within and is distributed throughout and across interactions, relationships, and forms of participation with respect to both people and nonhuman actors such as tools.

Those who study human learning through this lens examine specific practices and happenings that demonstrate and highlight the situated characteristics of learning; how learning is distributed across activities, settings, people, tools, and timescales; and the complicated relationship between learning and language. With respect to language, scholars study how various sociocultural, historical linguistic practices such as argumentation afford or hinder learning, and they also study evidence of learning through linguistic constructs such as discourse markers. In addition, scholars study the interdiscursive characteristics of learning, with the associated learning events themselves sometimes being spread across large spans of space and time.

Positioning and Identity

Two constructs that influence learning are positioning and identity. Positioning theory has its historical roots in Lev Vygotsky's conception of public and private cognition as mediated by tools such as language. The act of positioning describes how people assign, reject, accept, and create the rights and duties associated with action and interaction. Positions are typically more dynamic than roles and are shaped and influenced by sociocultural historical story lines, which are usually taken-for-granted frames of activity and settings. Learning environments can be viewed as having a range of story lines and associated positions—which are sometimes durable social categories—available for individuals to become associated with during activity. Depending upon the powers and social hierarchies that are operating, individuals may be able to resist undesirable positionings or they may have to, or can choose to, accept them.

Positioning is closely tied to identification processes. From a sociocultural historical framework, identity can be understood as self-understandings that are socially meaningful for individuals as they [Page 1677]participate in contexts. People have a multitude of identities that coexist and are foregrounded at different times depending on setting, activity, the people who are present, and the positions that are operating. Identities are interactionally emergent and are typically taken to be socially and linguistically constructed. Identities are situated in and shaped by the sociocultural historical milieu of which any given person is part.

...