Rethinking the boundaries of learning in a digital age

Abstract

Why are boundaries important when studying social and educational practices? Boundaries might be said to define our everyday social and cultural worlds in fundamental ways. Boundaries can be manifested by material objects, such as fences and walls, for example marking borders between countries or properties or marking limits between inside and outside school buildings. In addition, boundaries can be defined in the ways we understand different contexts and practices, and the embedded expected codes and norms of behaviour, for example in classrooms, at home, on the soccer field, or in youth clubs. Still, most of the time we are unaware of boundaries in everyday life and of their impacts and take them more or less for granted. There has been a growing interest in studying how learners move between settings and contexts and how they are positioned as learners in certain ways (Azevedo and Mann 2022; Bricker and Bell 2014; Leander, Phillips, and Taylor 2010; Nasir et al. 2020). Also, scholars have identified possible continuities and discontinuities in and between contexts of participation and learning (Bronkhorst and Akkerman 2016), and the notion of boundaries is often framed as something that marks certain types of discontinuities in people’s experiences and identities. We deal with boundaries throughout our everyday lives regarding what we can and cannot do in specific situations and settings. We orient ourselves by our understanding of the different roles we are expected to perform in and across these settings, as a family person at home, being with friends at a concert, being a student or teacher at school, or when doing sports in our local communities. Scholars from different fields have started to address the blurring of social and culturally defined boundaries, and their implication in different spheres of everyday life. One important factor is, of course, the emerging digital culture we live in, which impacts all aspects of our lives, creating new, often unforeseen, practices and interpretations of boundaries (Ehret and Rowsell 2021; Erstad and Silseth 2022; Jandrić et al. 2018; Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch 2020; Sefton-Green and Erstad 2017). Therefore, it becomes crucial to research and explore the experiences that participants in contemporary social practices mobilise as relevant resources in and across specific settings and activities, such as when learning about genetics in school science, playing online computer games with peers, or posting self-created videos on social media. Our thinking about boundaries also enables us to extend our thinking about what learning is, where learning happens, and the kinds of resources that are relevant for successful participation in and across settings and contexts. This special issue provides the reader with both theoretical explorations and empirical studies from different countries around the world and brings together a unique collection of contributions that address the topic of boundaries in relation to recent developments in the intersection between digital technologies, education, and learning in formal and informal contexts. The authors of the nine papers draw on former theoretical work and empirical studies; however, these contributions aim to bring new understandings and orientations to boundaries and borders between diverse