Social Context

The paramount importance of social context for understanding human learning and development is widely recognized. The term context, with or without a qualifier, appears in the title of numerous publications. However, context is one of those terms, much like culture, that is difficult to define precisely. Indeed, its definition may include the most salient or meaningful aspects of an immediate or distant situation that captures the interdependence of situations, as well as the characteristics and interactions of participants that help constitute a particular context. Hence, the term context can be understood as fluid and multidimensional because it may include both a particular setting—with its history, current conditions, and practices—and the relational dynamics of the participants, with [Page 1984]the significance of context changing as the interactions, the participants, or the activities unfold.

In the social science literature, social context is often represented in two principal ways. One view treats context as background, or as “that which surrounds” the learning experience, typically visualized as a set of concentric circles with the unit of study at the center, usually an individual, dyad, or family, surrounded by increasingly distal circles having differing levels of influence that shape or help determine the dynamics of the center circle. Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecosystem model of human development, highlighting the interdependence between systems or settings, is a well-known example. Here, the emphasis is on analyzing the interconnected circumstances of events under study and highlighting the interdependence between systems or settings. These interconnections may also position individuals unequally regarding the availability and appropriation of material and symbolic resources in their environment, a point of particular significance to the study of diversity in education.

Another view treats context as a relational dynamic, as “that which weaves together,” not only that which surrounds. The emphasis here is on the activity of contextualizing as the unit of study. In this sense, human actions are considered distributed phenomena involving goals, settings, co-participants, and artifacts that mediate thinking, communications, and representations. The emphasis is on human agency—active participants who may both reproduce contexts and change them through their actions and, in doing so, change themselves. This view of context is central, for example, to “practice” approaches in anthropology, in language and literacy studies, and in psychology and education. These approaches posit context as an activity, rather than simply a backdrop or locality. Thus, this view focuses on interactions between humans and their social worlds, as mediated by artifacts or relationships, and affording a multiplicity of meanings and possibilities. Hence, the idea is to understand context in action, or ethnographically, one could say, as constituted through emergent social and discourse practices.

Studies may build on this relational notion of context in understanding how people live and learn across contexts, or in studying the effects of education, health treatments, or psychotherapy across the multiple contexts of people's lives. Other studies may feature an emphasis on “multicontextuality” in their work, by documenting, for example, the same children's engagement in practices within different institutional contexts, such as home, school, and after-school center—each characterized by different practice traditions representing varied social situations of development. Central to the analysis is the mutually constitutive practices of children and contexts.

...