Crossing Polycontextual Boundaries: The role of context in learning

All learning occurs in a context. This context may be physical, social or psychological or, as Illeris (2002) argues, the tension caused by the juxtaposition of all three spheres of human experience. Yet, there is little written in educational literature about how the context shapes the learning and, by extension, how we can increase the potential of individuals to learn in a variety of contexts.This presentation draws on my recently completed PhD research in which I attempted to discover how practitioners understand the transfer of existing competence to new contexts and how this understanding shaped their own and their students' learning. It outlines some of the main findings of the project. In particular, it challenges the concept of generalisation as abstraction, arguing instead for Van Oer's (1998) concept of embedding contexts and looks at changes we need to make to the metaphors of transfer if we are to integrate formal and experiential learning.