Learning in Structures of Social Practice

In the paper I argue for a certain way of theorizing and studying learning. Learning is seen as situated in social practice, and in the pursuit of most learning persons are seen as moving around in social practice. They are involved in personal trajectories across various social contexts of practice. Even more so, these social contexts and the links between them, which persons learning draw on in their pursuit of learning, are institutionally arranged in various ways, and this affects the opportunities and nature of learning processes. These arguments about the nature of learning, theories of learning, and studies of learning are addressed first in the paper. But they really are part of a more general argument that psychology - the psychology of learning too - needs to develop a conception of structures of social practice so that it may capture the impacts of various arrangements on personal psychological functioning, including learning. Hence, the paper has a dual purpose, and as I unfold my analysis of learning, the more general line of argument increasingly comes to the fore. Still, the more specific arguments about learning and the more general arguments about structures of social practice are crafted in such a way that they mutually support each other. These two purposes of the paper are deeply theoretical of nature, but they have sprung from challenges faced in concrete empirical studies of persons learning in various fields of social practice. These challenges are sketched briefly throughout the paper to ground the theoretical arguments and illuminate which phenomena such a conception allows us to capture. My empirical research on these matters has centered on studying persons changing and learning by attending therapy sessions as a secluded part of their everyday lives in structures of social practice (Dreier, 2008). In the paper I occasionally briefly refer to phenomena and findings from this research as particular instances of my general argument.

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