[back to Part II]

Embodied Pedagogies:
Conceptual finding: In the late 1990s it was still a familiar critical refrain that digital environments were impersonal and distancing. Early on in VKP, however, compelling evidence emerged that led us to a very different conclusion. Students working in media-rich primary source archives found themselves particularly moved by photographs and film of the civil rights movement; students engaged in online discussion boards about works of literature found themselves embroiled in heated exchanges about the authority of their experiences in taking a stance on character and plot; students creating multimedia narratives found themselves empowered by the multi-sensory, multi-track tools at their disposal--music, images, timing, graphics--to convey their own complex combination of emotional and intellectual responses to some moving historical incident. VKP faculty found that new media technologies promoted the expansion of what we have come to call embodied pedagogies, inducing learning that engages affective as well as cognitive dimensions, not merely through the role of emotion, but through creativity and intuition, through expressions of self-identity and subjectivity as the foundation of intellectual engagement. 

The importance of affect and the larger category of embodied pedagogies was one of the true surprises of the whole project. And it came to occupy a critical pivotal place in our emerging framework around learning, bridging the traits of adaptive expertise with the broader context of socially situated learning (discussed in the next section). We call these pedagogies embodied because their range of learning dimensions seem to counteract a longstanding Cartesian split between mind and body intrinsic to traditional higher education--a split that neatly compartmentalizes “the body” and the senses to the art or theater or dance or creative writing department, and generally banishes emotion from the classroom altogether. This split also underwrites a longstanding dichotomy, especially in the humanities, between creative and critical thinking.

Of course there are important precedents for forms of embodied pedagogies that have made their appearance in the last thirty years, feminist pedagogies being one of the best-developed examples. Also relevant, though not to be explored at length here, is the growing interest in emotional intelligence and learning styles. Having much in common with these approaches to linking the cognitive and affective in learning, what we saw from our work was a very diverse and almost ubiquitous resurgence of interest among the VKP faculty in emotional, subjective, and creative responses to intellectual and cognitive material. And we saw it emerge in ways that made these responses intrinsic to the digital media environments through which these pedagogies were enacted.

Attention to the affective and the creative disrupts deeply held assumptions and biases in higher education. Many are the skeptics who see attention to emotion (especially through music and media) as pandering to student preferences for popular culture and non-rigorous assignments, or to this generation of students’ interest in themselves. Yet, the evidence we saw across these projects indicates something more nuanced that complexly links the intricate relationship between emotional and epistemological understanding with the nature of new media pedagogies as an extension of a media-rich, post-literate cultural environment.

Gregory Ulmer named this post-literacy period “electracy,” referring to the current moment of history in which “the image” (broadly construed) is our new language apparatus. Just as literacy did not eliminate orality, but merely layered on top of it as the dominant paradigm, so too, Ulmer argues, has “electracy” layered on top of literacy. Nonetheless, he argues that in electracy, the image, not the word, drives our relationship to discourse. The implications of this go far beyond the need for visual literacy or the better education around the protocols of visual media. Ulmer suggests that this changes the relationship of our identities to cognition, the epistemology of the disciplines, and cultural knowledge. As an example, he discusses how we might re-imagine the role of the first year writing course: 

For example, general education writing courses . . . serve at least the following consensus needs, listed in order of current priority--methods for using the language to learn specialized knowledge; practices of rhetoric and logic required for citizenship in a democratic society; models of self-knowledge for living the examined life. We may assume that these needs continue in electracy, but that they will be articulated differently. There will be an inversion of the literate hierarchy; the first communication of an electrate person is reflexive, self-directed. ¹⁶

The classroom inquiry projects of VKP stood at the boundary line of traditional literacies and Ulmer’s “inversion of the literate hierarchy.” In fact, one might say that VKP faculty often had a front-row seat on this transitional territory and read the signs and symptoms of it in the evidence of their inquiries.

At this seam, embodied pedagogies include conceptual findings around three major ideas: 1. The importance of self-knowledge and experience as a primary means of bridging the identity of learners with disciplinary knowledge; 2. The key role of the sensory impact of new media on learning, especially the emotional impact of music and the intimate power of visual, vocal, and video media; and 3. the significance of emotion and embodied cognition in intellectual development for the whole spectrum of expert development--as crucial in initial engagement as in more advanced stages of integrated understanding. These conceptual findings have specific implications in learning designs across the projects.

Design findings: What does it mean to design for embodied pedagogies, to account for the developmental role of affect in learning, and to engage the emotional dimension to activate other highly valued cognitive processes? The challenge here is not only to make room for emotional engagement, but to model how to engage emotion in cognitive and critical thinking. Faculty recognizing the importance of affect in new media pedagogies develop instructional and assessment tools to accommodate these fuller dimensions of learning, rethinking how knowledge construction is connected to self-construction, cognition to affect, and critical thought to creativity.

➢    Designing for embodied learning requires scaffolding ways for students to know more than they think they know--through exploration, invention, and reflection
When Paula Berggren studied her students’ effusive responses to the online discussion about “why people dance,” it reinforced for her the importance of experiential--even bodily--responses for forging connections to academic material. A couple of years later, that insight led her to make a seemingly unrelated innovation in an entirely different course. After many years of teaching Renaissance drama through traditional literary analysis, Berggren introduced an assignment where students developed group interpretations of key scenes, acted them out, videotaped them, then showed the video to their classmates and led a discussion around their peers’ response to their interpretations. Like the informal dialogic social space of the discussion board, this assignment gives students the space to explore and invent their own responses to academic material through their bodily engagement; and video technology enables them make that invention both public (to their peers in this case) and an occasion for their own reflection. Online discussion boards and videotaping dramatic scene interpretation may seem very different, but not if, as in this case, we recognize the embodied connection between them.

VKP’s digital projects were filled with examples of such pedagogies, enacted through some version of a sequence where digital media tools provided a flexible space to engage student interests and attention, a means to make that engagement visible to others, and a framework for students to reflect and make meaning out of their products. For example, using multimedia presentations as a way of teaching early childhood education, Rachel Theilheimer (Borough of Manhattan Community College) found that through the ability to make hyperlinks between their research and their own personal stories, “students were able to see that there was a range of thought on the actions and experiences of children, parents, and teachers, and they could see ways in which their own feelings about their early experiences could help them understand what researchers in the field had found and reported.”¹⁷

We saw this pattern in many variations and with many different kinds of tools and contexts, whether it was students using hypertext to engage associative thinking as a way to develop close reading of texts (O’Connor), keeping public blogs while studying abroad to engage an ongoing sense of community and continuity of intellectual growth (Stephen), developing electronic portfolios to construct a public presentation of themselves as learners (Eynon), or constructing digital stories that connect personal and family history to cultural history (Benmayor; Coventry and Oppermann). Key to these and other pedagogies are the ways that, with the right guidance, new media environments can effectively be both inventive and reflective spaces for students--and must be if we are to see them as essential to the changing landscape in education.

➢    Designing for embodied learning means acknowledging the role of affect in the engagement of ideas and helping students to engage their emotions cognitively in digital environments.
Anne Cross (Metropolitan State) examines the role that “Music Video Projects” played in her Sociology course with topics like “domestic violence”: 

With topics like this--much like with the topic of race--it can be difficult to juggle scientific sociology with the need for students to address the topic in a personal way. Before the MVP [Music Video Project] was introduced, students were either tensely silent about relationship violence, or occasionally one student would talk anecdotally or inspirationally (often for too long) about a friend or relative who was abused and got help. Before the video project, students never seemed particularly interested in connecting the emotional stories with course concepts . . . the videos did what a textbook or a lecture could not. Tears flowed openly in the classroom and experiences were shared as the class discussed the problem as a social issue. The videos provided a neutral emotional release that made the difficult topics easier to discuss in terms of facts and theories.¹⁸

Most faculty can recall isolated anecdotes about emotional days in our classes, especially around volatile topics. Reflecting across our collaborative inquiry, we came to see this as more than anecdotal.  Across multiple classes we saw an intrinsic phenomenon. It pointed to the ways that new media was intimate and visceral, due in large part to the multiple engagements of the senses--through music, color and design, and the immediacy that comes with visual and aural cultural artifacts and video-rich ways of experiencing the world. What emerged was a pattern of findings, framing how new media helps bridge the interior lives of students with intellectual material and the ways that emotion and personal responses becomes the portal through which students accessed new knowledge.

The work by VKP faculty around digital storytelling especially drove this home, including the “meta-study” conducted by Michael Coventry and Matthias Oppermann across a cohort of courses and students engaged in multimedia authoring. As they put it in their study in this volume, “digital storytelling works at the intersection of the emotional and epistemological aspects of learning, bridging story and theory, intellect and affect. For many students an emotional engagement with the topic –or a problem in the most generative sense of the word--is the point of departure that allows them to connect their stories to the relevant theories.” In multimedia authoring--and in many other kinds of pedagogies we saw across the project--emotions are not merely present but are “reclaimed cognitively,” serving a critical bridging function to expertise, as they “enable students to write themselves into existing discourses and to contribute personal perspectives to an academic community.”¹⁹

➢    Designing for embodied learning requires expansive criteria for assessment that accommodates multiple learning dimensions.
As with the greater attention to intermediate processes, we cannot enact a broader definition of embodied learning and then constrain it through traditional summative assessment. If new media pedagogies are to expand, we must reconsider the ways that we assess student work. This is probably the most vexing area of new media pedagogies. Within the project, some VKP faculty developed rubrics that addressed the impact on learning of affect, creativity, and a more holistic sense of engagement. One of the most developed of these is Rina Benmayor’s (CSU Monterey Bay), where she uses digital stories and multimedia authoring as a way of helping students use their “personal experience as the subject of analysis” to facilitate learning in cultural theory. In her multi-dimensional rubric, Benmayor identifies three levels of theorizing--Narrative Theorizing, Applied Theorizing, and Critical Theorizing--representing a progression in sophistication and integration of the course’s ideas. These three areas are applied commonly across two different sets of criteria for evaluating written and multimedia texts: 1. typical cognitive or critical criteria, such as “Relation to larger social structures and ideologies;” and 2. embodied criteria such as “Emotional impact of the digital story.” Benmayor’s sophisticated assessment schema for embodied learning not only addresses learning that has traditionally “colored outside the lines” of higher education. It also recognizes the integrative function of embodied learning in a more holistic sense of intellectual development.

Socially Situated Learning
Conceptual finding: New media pedagogies are largely defined by the ways they can situate students in meaningful communities of fellow learners or practitioners. Socially-defined and communication-intensive, new tools take students outside of artificial classroom situations into conditions for authentic and high impact learning. Used in this way, new media technologies can be powerful in fostering engagement with others through dialogue, collaboration and exchange. What we saw in this regard goes beyond the positive role of social interaction and discussion that classroom teachers have long valued. New media tools and environments make possible socially situated learning in at least three new ways: First, they have the potential to create intellectual communities that all too rarely occur within and around classrooms. Second, they have the potential to connect students to communities of practice outside of the classroom where knowledge and ideas are continuously negotiated. And finally, the public nature of many new media pedagogies fundamentally changes the ways that students engage the full range of cognitive and emotional dimensions of their learning.

Considering these facets of socially situated learning, we felt the influence of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s theories of “situated learning,” and especially their definition of participation “as a way of learning--of both absorbing and being absorbed in--the ‘culture of practice.’”²⁰ Although elaborated in their research on “apprenticeship” contexts outside of schooling situations, there is ample parallel work in educational settings, including the emerging movement around “threshold concepts,” originating in the U.K. through the work of Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept “can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress.” More than just important or building block concepts, threshold concepts are the core ideas in a field that “represent how people ‘think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally).”²¹ Threshold concepts are not merely about knowing something, but about the experience of knowing, and the experience of coming to know. They open up a way of looking at disciplinary knowledge that encompasses a way of thinking, a way of acting or practicing, a way of communicating, and in some cases a sense of identity.

The work on threshold concepts speaks directly to the findings of the Visible Knowledge Project. If adaptive pedagogies change the learners’ relationship to the field of knowledge, and embodied pedagogies affect their sense of identification with it, then socially situated pedagogies bring both together through the learners’ changed relationship to a sense of community within and beyond the classroom. Situating learners within broader communities of dialogue and practice can engage novice and intermediate learners with what is necessarily difficult in fields--what it means to think, act, speak in a field, to shape one’s identity and sense of self within it. As Michael Wesch puts it in this issue, “We are no longer teaching subjects but subjectivities.”²²

The increasingly visible connection between identity and knowledge--this “learning to be”--is a critical bridge between embodied and socially situated learning. Nowhere is this more evident than in experiments with ePortfolios, allowing students to create representations of themselves as learners. LaGuardia Community College is an institution that has adopted ePortfolios broadly, with a student population that is 60 to 70 percent immigrant. In this context, for students who are redefining themselves as learners, the ability to use social tools as representations of identity is particularly trenchant. “The ePortfolio helps LaGuardia students make a direct and powerful connection between their classroom learning and the rest of their changing lives. And as is evidenced from [student testimonials] they place a high value on the ways that the Web-based format allows them to make their embodied learning public.” The ePortfolio enables students to represent themselves on several levels: to see themselves in the present in relation to the past (“Going back and looking at an assignment I did two years ago was difficult in some ways. But in the end . . . it was interesting to see I really did that”; “[It] helps me think about what I learned and what I did not do well on in the past. It also improves my critical thinking so I will not make the same mistake again.”); ePortfolios help students see themselves as whole learners beyond individual assignments (“I learned a lot . . . not just about the career but about myself”; “I was able to think about my experience and that helped me plan what I want to be”); ePortfolios help students present themselves outward to parents and others (“I can show [people], ‘This is what I have done…’ They can see everything. It’s me.”).²³ In so many ways, ePortfolios are the “cognitive and affective synthesis” gone public—but equally importantly, this is a sustained “going public” that circles back to energize the cognitive and affective synthesis. This cycle is critical to understanding the role of identity formation in new knowledge environments. Seen as a pathway to the heart of knowledge practice, socially situated learning encompasses all the dimensions of new learning environments and learning designs.  

Design findings: Across the diverse projects in VKP we found that socially situated learning typically requires that multiple elements and values be present and reinforcing if they are to offer more than casual dialogue and communication. Some of the elements that must be present in combination include:

• An authentic task (drawn from approximations of expert activity), where students can feel a clear sense of purpose;
• The opportunity for students to develop a sense of voice and authority;
• The opportunity to develop a sense of community or audience (inside or outside the classroom);
• A meaningful social situation where feedback is intrinsic and embedded, coming from the situation, from sources other than the teacher.²⁴

Socially situated pedagogies are well suited to support these mutually reinforcing elements. And the operative presence of all of these elements helps each to become more meaningful. Socially situated learning at its most effective leads through engagement to commitment, where students, in small and large ways, come to experience what it means to inhabit their knowledge and the values it implies.

➢    Designing for socially situated learning means emphasizing the development of student voice and authority.
Although difficult to agree upon in exact definition, the concept of student voice loomed large in the VKP classroom inquiries. More often than not, this was accompanied by an emphasis on an emergent sense of authority that comes with intellectual growth. The social media environments of Web 2.0 make the recognition and cultivation of such authority increasingly important as the centerpiece concern of a learning environment. As with other key findings, our inquiries emphasize the need to rethink what we have traditionally meant by “authority” in the classroom, even when held by students. That is, we have to rethink traditional trajectories of accumulation of knowledge that builds to authority; instead we need to rethink authority as something that is socially constructed through the learning situation and that builds in non-linear ways, from a comfort with experiential and personal authority, to knowledge-based authority, to a sense of communal authority that integrates knowledge with experience.

In Heidi Elmendorf and John Ottenhoff’s parallel studies of online asynchronous discussion boards, they found that the emergence of conversational and interpretive authority depends on the integrative presence of freedom to play, safety to take intellectual risks, models of good talk to follow, and a space where venturing ideas and answers is valued as part of the rules of the game.²⁵ Just as Ed Gallagher found in his course designed entirely around online discussion, Elmendorf and Ottenhoff found that “the traits that characterize productive conversations” are identical to highly functioning communities of practice. All too often we devalue “conversation” as peripheral and yet teach (through asocial methods) to an implicit goal that looks remarkably like “conversation” in an expert community of practice. In order to use new media spaces for socially situated pedagogies, we have to value the development of student voice and emerging authority in all its developmental phases.

➢    Designing for socially situated learning requires cultivating intellectual community in and around the classroom.
At the end of her case study, which details a unique experiment in keeping a group of students connected over four years, Betsi Stephen remarks, “An authentic community of scholars is the embodiment of higher education . . .” Indeed, although most faculty value the abstract idea of the classroom as an intellectual community, it is difficult to achieve for many reasons. New media technologies and social tools are the new ubiquitous infrastructure for social networking and community building at all levels. What do we know so far that can help us harness that potential?  First, we know that social spaces can only become communities if students have the opportunity (and space) to listen and respond to each other in ways that feel authentic. In Elmendorf’s study of online conversations in a microbiology course for non-science majors, she found a significant shift over the course of the semester from students “referring heavily to the text” to referring “more often to each other’s comments.” As she observes, “early in the term they talk mainly to the text and to us [the professors] through their postings,” but as the term progresses they start “inviting answers from their peers and respond to/amplify/dispute the postings of classmates.” Importantly, a marker of this richer conversation is as much the kinds of questions they are willing to ask of each other, as the answers or opinions they offer. This conversation works best when the “rules of the game” are actively modeled by the professor. In Elmendorf’s case, this included a weekly in-class reading and discussion of postings. Ottenhoff did a parallel study of the development of “interpretive authority” in a Shakespeare course. He found the development of an intellectual community required him to balance his students’ need for help “learn[ing] how to read and talk about Shakespeare’s plays” with their need for him to “get out of their way.”²⁶

The key here is not merely that socially situated pedagogies are sites of busy talk but that there is a relationship between conversation and knowledge building. For Gallagher, the very definition of intellectual community through conversation depended on evidence that learning was altered by the encounters. As he puts it, “Most students--not all, of course, and some haltingly, for sure--learned to talk to each other and in doing so talked to me in the language of community that I had longed to hear.” He then quotes one student’s reflection:

Normally, other students have very little to do with my own learning process….This is the only class I can think of that makes the other students a learning tool for the class. Listening to and understanding other student comments helped me better understand the books we were working on. Their insight helped me look at things differently.

The value of intellectual community extends beyond conversation. Students engaged in the multimedia authoring, video production, and digital stories typically developed a sense of intellectual community--initially among their peers as fellow shapers of public narratives, but then eventually (and perhaps more profoundly) with their potential audiences. This resonates on nearly every level of the authoring process, from the relatively predictable, such as choices of music or images to evoke audience response, to what Coventry and Oppermann call “argument compression,” students’ developing ability ‘to succinctly evoke ideas, eras, larger cultural discourses. . . .” Or, as one student creator put it, “digital stories require condensation and a very potent blast of powerful message.”²⁷ Teaching courses that engage students in video documentary production, Bernie Cook argues this kind of authoring generates not only a sense of ownership but two key values of documentary production: “ collaboration and shareability.” In order to “expand this signature value of shareability,” says Cook, “I created opportunities for the students to screen and discuss their work,” screening films both in class and in public venues. “The shareability of documentary video enables an expansion of learning beyond the semester, outside of the traditional spaces and boundaries of teaching and learning.”²⁸ Such a statement could easily become the mantra for the whole set of socially situated pedagogies, explored in VKP and emerging with even greater force in Web 2.0 environments.

➢    Designing for socially situated pedagogies redefines classroom activity as “approximations” of expert activity.
The markers of intellectual community in these courses can be thought of in light of the distinction that the cognitive scientists Carl Bereiter and Marlena Scardamalia make between first-order and second-order environments. First-order environments are “the ordinary situations of work and everyday life . . . They present a relatively fixed set of conditions, and learning tapers off as one adapts to those conditions.” Second-order environments are a particular kind of social environment conducive to development of expertise. In this kind of expert sub-culture one “adapts to changes that keep raising the ante, by setting a higher standard of performance, by reformulating problems at more complex levels, or by increasing the amount of knowledge that is presupposed.” In second-order environments, in particular, “the conditions to which people must adapt change progressively as a result of the successes of other people in the environment.”²⁹ Too often, classrooms resemble first-order environments where students adapt to a fixed set of expectations, calibrated by (and represented by) the teacher. Socially situated pedagogies provide prototypes for the creation of second-order environments in classrooms, where students look to other students’ successes and innovations, and the class as a whole looks outside its boundaries to external audiences and parallel communities for progressive markers of learning and assessment.

Considered in this way, socially situated pedagogies provide what Pam Grossman named (in the context of teacher education) “approximations” of expert practice, where enough of the conditions of authentic practice are recreated to enable development along a path to expertise. Through VKP classroom case studies, we saw such “approximations” in all kinds of settings, inside the classroom and bridging outside to sites where knowledge is negotiated, understood, shared, and altered in participatory ways: the digital story student author wrestling with the problem of telling a story of a little known historical event to a naïve audience; the participants in an online discussion who must tool their discourse so as to keep the conversation going and not simply make their claim or state their opinion; the student creating an ePortfolio that manifests emerging competencies for a potential employer or transfer school; the students using a wiki to construct a complex definition of race who must learn how to make individual contributions in a participatory authoring environment. New digital social tools provide an arena for learners to approximate the kinds of knowledge negotiation and construction engaged in by practitioners in a field.

But herein lies a critical dimension of the design problem that is before us. Approximations may situate students in the context of authentic practice--such as how to tell a complex historical story to a public through multiple media, or how to keep a conversation going among peers in meaningful intellectual ways. However, it does not follow that we can expect to see what we normally think of as finished, expert-like products, meeting a traditional standard of critical analysis or knowledge representation. Part of the design challenge of socially-situated learning is trusting the value of putting students in higher order situations but shifting our notions of what kinds of learning evidence we might expect.  In other words, we might be able to raise our expectations only if we change them. 

As faculty, we tend to operate on an implicitly aligned set of beliefs in limited novice understanding, the narrow range of things we ask students to do in the context of received information and authority, and the kinds of work we assess as evidence of learning. Rethinking classrooms in the context of new social media and in turn more as second-order environments will shift these aligned assumptions. Our findings show the need to engage in what Grossman identifies as a critical analog, an approximation of practice: the ability of the teacher to “decompose” practice in ways that component parts can be named, studied, rehearsed, and improved.³⁰ Many VKP projects shine light on some of the parts and processes that constitute an expansive range of learning, making it possible to “decompose” and build on them as parts of a much richer profile of intellectual growth.

In many ways, “decomposing” expert practice is what is going on when Ed Gallagher coaches his students’ "volleys and returns" in online conversations, as methods of knowledge creation. It is evident in the ways digital storytelling and social documentary video courses at CSU Monterey Bay and Georgetown--each in their distinctive ways--slowly build narrative through stages, as students watch the stories of previous years, engaging other students as authors putting theory to practice through production.

Understanding socially situated classroom pedagogies as approximations of expert practice introduces a level of uncertainty into the learning environment itself, as the teacher has to act more speculatively on the ways that students will respond and grow. Rethinking the classroom this way potentially challenges fundamental assumptions about intellectual growth in undergraduate courses in part because of the ways that socially-situated learning makes relevant connections (to people and ideas) outside the boundaries of the classroom. From a learning design standpoint, it suggests the importance of spiral or iterative design, where students are guided through large and challenging problems and, at the same time, guided through reflective activity focused on the critical dimensions of integrative thinking. The imperative might be framed this way: it is vital to help students understand specific and often highly localized intellectual “moves” intrinsic to expert activity; but this can only be accomplished in authentic, messy, and unpredictable contexts where such moves are truly meaningful.³¹ New social media can make those contexts and moves more visible and therefore usable in new and powerful ways.

Looking Back at the Future of Invisible Learning
When the invisible becomes visible it is often disruptive, sometimes in generative and productive ways. Very early in the Visible Knowledge Project we understood that we could not even begin to answer the question about the impact of technology on learning without knowing more about the impact of teaching on learning: the impact of our pedagogical designs on actual student growth and understanding. As faculty, in many ways we regard our impact on learning with a kind of “bounded rationality,” making relatively limited choices as a way of protecting ourselves from the complexity of the possibilities. In this context, new technologies and the scholarship of teaching and learning share a certain revelatory capacity. That is, new digital environments tend to unleash and make visible dimensions of student learning that exceed the bounds of our traditional schema in higher education, problematizing our traditional trajectories of development and challenging, if not confounding, our abilities to assess. Similarly, the scholarship of teaching and learning asks faculty to slow down and look at learning perhaps more carefully or more deeply than the pace and necessities of week-in and week-out teaching typically allow. When that happens, faculty often find student learning that is at least stubbornly resistant to our everyday assumptions about the relationship between exposure and understanding. VKP brought these two revelatory forces together. What this confluence of visibility suggests is that something generative and disruptive is possible (if not inevitable) if we take seriously the synergistic implications of adaptive, embodied and socially situated pedagogies.

The modest classroom research studies that came out of VKP corroborate the bigger claims being made by recent work on the brain and intelligence, as well as by the advocates for more holistic approaches to education. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink lays out the qualities of mind suggested by the most current left- and right-brain research, what he calls the new six senses: Design, Story, Symphony (“synthesis”), Empathy, Play, and Meaning. These are all qualities remarkably resonant with the intimations of new learning revealed in VKP classroom research projects. These senses, says Pink, are the six that are most necessary to cultivate if we are to transition competitively from the “Information Age” to the “Conceptual Age,” an age calling for what he calls “creators and empathizers.” Similarly, Sir Ken Robinson, speaking in behalf of an increased role for creativity in education, critiques the entire set of assumptions behind our educational system that arose “to meet the needs of industrialism.” As Robinson put it, “We have mined our minds the way we have strip mined the earth, for one particular kind of academic commodity. And it won’t serve us any longer. What we need is a new human ecology that enables us to fundamentally change the ways that we educate our children.”³²

The findings and framework that emerge from VKP suggest in small ways what might lead us eventually to this new human ecology. What is perhaps most useful for the next phase of learning experiments is the recognition that the seeds of this revolutionary potential can found in what we value in our current practice. Michael Wesch, like Gregory Ulmer, sees this transition not as a break but as an “inversion”: Says Wesch, “We have had our why's, how's, and what's upside-down, focusing too much on what should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why altogether. In a world of nearly infinite information, we must first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.”³³ The framework we have laid out here, organized around adaptive expertise, embodied learning, and socially situated learning, provides one way that we can re-imagine the “why’s, how’s, and what’s” in such a way that recenters teaching and learning around a holistic notion of expertise, pivoting on disciplinary practice yet expansive enough to engage all the “senses” embodied in experts’ commitment to their knowledge and values.

In this way, these VKP classroom inquiries collectively help us move past what is often portrayed as a binary between traditional, disciplinary knowledge and new forms of knowing. What the VKP studies illuminate is a less a binary than a paradox or tension that marks the path to the future: new forms of social media make possible a reformulation of education that is, we find, an intensification of the kinds of thinking held dear at the center of our disciplinary practices: higher order, synthetic, creative, and inquisitive approaches to thinking within fields of knowledge. Yet to realize this potential, we have to confront our biases about learning and intellectual growth. We have to re-examine our prioritization of particular kinds of knowledge--a prioritization historically embedded in the very epistemologies of our disciplines. The key to resolving this tension, our inquiries suggest, begins with parsing out of the intricacies of the “how” that are so pivotal to the ways disciplinary experts carry out the “what.”

Implications for Next Stage of Faculty Inquiry
Disentangling the epistemology of our disciplines from our biases about intellectual development will not be easy. This makes the call to inquiry of the kind that we did in VKP--and that thousands of faculty are engaged in all over the world--all the more important. Set against the emergence of Web 2.0 tools, our experience from VKP also tells us something about the importance of sustained faculty inquiry in the sometimes breathless rush to incorporate the next new thing. First, it validates the importance of slowing down and taking the time to study carefully the nature of learning in new contexts, and trying to understand the “how” and “why” of changes in learning. Second, we have to recognize the messiness of looking at learning in these contexts. All teaching and learning contexts are complex; new digital and social environments for learning are especially so. The so-called Web 2.0 tools offer us a much richer, totalized environment for change, far beyond examining how the addition of a particular tool gets us to the same goal as before. Taken seriously in all its dimensions, digital media has the potential to enable us to enact the logic of a new learning paradigm, where teachers no longer primarily provide information but rather structure opportunities for students to construct their own learning.

The Visible Knowledge Project was not just a collection of individuals asking similar questions in parallel; it was a community of scholars engaged in a collaborative inquiry. Over the years, through in–person institutes and numerous virtual communication tools, faculty scholars in VKP engaged each other’s questions, methods, and findings. The interactive and collaborative nature of the project was most valuable to each participant in managing the uncertainty and destabilization that came from looking so closely at learning in new contexts. What this suggests to us is that, along with this new paradigm for learning we need perhaps a new paradigm for inquiry, for sharing knowledge about teaching and learning. We need, in short, to begin adapting the kinds of social tools and knowledge-making environments for building knowledge as a community that we seek to integrate into our teaching. Such inquiry would certainly move beyond individualistic paradigms of practice and scholarship to something not only more collaborative but indeed “participatory” in the new embodied sense of the term in Web 2.0 environments. For example, consider the definition of participatory learning in the 2008 MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grants call for proposals:

Participatory Learning includes the ways in which new technologies enable learners (of any age) to contribute in diverse ways to individual and shared learning goals. Through games, wikis, blogs, virtual environments, social network sites, cell phones, mobile devices, and other digital platforms, learners can participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another's projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Participatory learners come together to aggregate their ideas and experiences in a way that makes the whole ultimately greater than the sum of the parts.³⁴

Could we imagine a community of scholars--a small circle or a large-scale network--engaged in a participatory learning project around core curricular issues or ways to teach dimensions of a discipline? Could we imagine an inquiry process that was fluid and collaborative in such a way that enabled ongoing understanding of what is indeed happening in new spaces along all dimensions of learning? Surely the scale of the disruption is such that careful classroom research projects will only get us so far. Such fluid and collaborative inquiry might need students and teachers, practitioners, and partners, and bystanders of all kinds to make sense of new learning while socially networked tools aggregate, sort and re-present pieces of new insights in unpredictable ways. Could we imagine the blend of such a participatory process with the creation of a true intellectual community--a second-order environment--to harness the visible evidence of invisible learning? Slowing down, listening, and making visible what we learn from each stage of development is an essential first step. What is the essential next one?

Notes
16. Gregory L. Ulmer, Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2003. [return to text]
17. Joseph Ugoretz and Rachel Theilheimer, Academic Commons (January 2009). [return to text]
18. Peter Burkholder and Anne Cross, "Video Killed the Term Paper Star," Academic Commons (January 2009), http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/video-killed-term-paper-star-two-views. [return to text]
19. Michael Coventry and Matthias Oppermann, "From Narrative to Database: Protocols and Practices of Collaboration in a Cross-Classroom Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Study" Academic Commons (January 2009, forthcoming). [return to text]
20. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge University Press, 1991). [return to text]
21. Jan Meyer and Ray Land, "Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising Within the Disciplines," ETL Project Occasional Report 4 (May 2003), http://www.ed.ac.uk/etl/docs/ETLreport4.pdf.
[return to text]
22. Michael Wesch, "From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able," Academic Commons (January 2009), http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able. [return to text]
23. Bret Eynon, “It Helped Me See a New Me”: ePortfolio, Learning and Change at LaGuardia Community College," Academic Commons (January 2009), http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/eportfolio-learning-and-change. [return to text]
24. This framework was initially developed and articulated by Randy Bass and Heidi Elmendorf. See “Defining Social Pedagogies and Their Relevance to Liberal Education,” (Web-based project working report, Teagle Foundation), http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=21958734860605&id=39912242945202. [return to text]
25.  Heidi Elmendorf and John Ottenhoff, "The Importance of Conversation in Learning and the Value of Web-based Discussion Tools," Academic Commons (January 2009), http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/importance-conversation-learning. [return to text]
26. Stephen, "Connecting the Dots,"Academic Commons (January 2009), http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/connecting-dots; Elmendorf and Ottenhoff,  "The Importance of Conversation in Learning." [return to text]
27. See Coventry and Oppermann, "From Narrative to Database." [return to text]
28. Bernie Cook, "Producing Audiovisual Knowledge: Documentary Video Production and Student Learning in the American Studies Classroom," Academic Commons (January 2009, forthcoming). [return to text]
29. Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia, 102; 106-07. [return to text]
30. See for example, Pam Grossman, “Unpacking Practice,” lecture on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6s3mZQr_hU  (accessed December 2008); and Lampert, et. al. “The role of rehearsal in learning to do ambitious practice” (presentation at AERA, 2008), http://sitemaker.umich.edu/ltp/files/aera08_rehearsals.pdf . [return to text]
31. Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) [return to text]
32. Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the World (Riverhead, 2005); Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” (TED Talk, February 2006), http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html. [return to text]
33. Michael Wesch, "From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able." [return to text]
34. 2008 MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grants Web site, call for proposals, http://www.dmlcompetition.net/theme.php. [return to text]