Appropriation and Learning

Abstract

This chapter spans the bridge from our discussion of the epistemology of appropriation to user-generated ‘mobile’ contexts and reflexive context awareness. We discuss, at a theoretical level, how the new contexts of mobile and individualised mass communication work like other cultural products, albeit in a more fluid, provisional mode of representation. And, by way of exemplification, we summarise the results of an ethnographic research project. We argue that the appropriation of mobile devices, content and contexts by children and young people offers impulses for their personal development. We consider it to be an urgent educational task to explore the value of these processes of appropriation for child development. With reference to Habermas ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band 1: Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung. Band 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft’ (1995) we argue that mobile, individualised mass communication contributes to a ‘colonialisation’ of children’s development with which education and learning can, and should critically engage by fostering a ‘reflexive relationship with the world through communicative actions’. Following this line of argument we propose a conversational perspective on teaching and learning, based on Laurillard’s ‘Conversational Framework’ (2007), which inter alia enables us to view the variety of media-induced and media-related activity patters of everyday life as conversational elements for learning in informal contexts but also to show their conversational potential for learning in formal contexts. We further discuss how appropriation of mass communication in the form of media reception and media use leads to a variety of activity patterns, which influence learning. A necessary epistemological resource for us is to see these patterns as a result of appropriation with learning as a culturally situated form of meaning-making.