Situated Readiness and Transformation of Learning Across Situations and Settings

Abstract

This short paper introduces the concept of Situated Readiness as a set of skills and dispositions required to participate meaningfully across settings and situations, seeing them as networked and intertwined. Following earlier work within the field, networked learning is here understood as learners' connecting of contexts in which they participate, and as their resituation of knowledge and ways of acting across these contexts (Dohn, 2014). The development of the concept of Situated Readiness is based on a conducted study using a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach to investigate, how student teachers at a Danish Teacher Education Program (TEP) transformed knowledge and ways of participation when transitioning between a course and a public-school class. The findings of the study indicate the needs of socio-epistemic skills and dispositions that enable students to resituate, utilise and transform knowledge from known social contexts to new ones e.g. from a learning situation at the TEP to novel situations in school. Situated Readiness is, in this sense, the ability to attune to the specific social and epistemic requirements and demands, also termed "requirement characteristics", pertaining in these new contexts. To aid the analysis of the skills needed to engage in networked situations, an analytical framework of context levels is presented. The framework points out how requirement characteristics at three interacting levels are posed on the learner. The three levels: 1) the life-setting, 2) the activity-internal level and 3) the domain-internal level form a complex whole and as a learner acting competently in a situation, consists of the ability to respond accordingly to this complex whole. The findings of the DBR study points at challenges towards students’ transformation of knowledge between the two settings, suggesting that the development of Situated Readiness on the learners behalf requires educators to design for learning opportunities, that take into account, how settings and situations are networked and that students are given opportunities and support to recognise these temporally connections as part of their learning trajectories. The lack of explicit articulation of the sameness and differences between the setting leaves the students to realize and attune to these by themselves, which the study shows, is a major challenge to students, who have limited experiences with teaching in practice.