Vesa Korhonen

A sociocultural view of learning and literacy

Sociocultural learning theory puts emphasis on the social construction of knowledge and on how learning takes place in distinct social settings (Wertsch, del Rio & Alvarez 1995; Säljö 2001). The sociocultural approach holds that knowledge is a product of social constructions and conventions. Learning means participation in the cultural activities of meaning-making communities. Social practices (such as knowledge building) are constructed around shared goals and through the use of the cultural and technological tools available in the community’s information environment (Bruner 1990; Wertsch, del Rio & Alvarez 1995; Säljö 2001). Human knowing and meaning-making are shaped by culture and history. Knowing and literacy practices are developed further in shared communication processes among humans and within domains of multimodal information.

According to Vygotsky’s theory (1978), learning and development first take place on the social plane and then on the psychological, individual mind plane. Learning first occurs among people as interpsychological interaction and then within the individual as an intrapsychological category. Cultural tools, such as technical artefacts, ways of thinking, ways of acting with and using these tools are learned in social interaction between people and within the prevailing culture. Vygotsky (1987) also emphasized the central role of language in mediating thinking and culture. Language as such is not only oral or written but also includes different resources that humans use in communication, such as gestures, pictures, drawings, maps and other visual information objects. Thinking within the individual mind is also a form of communication that the individual has adopted within a social context and appropriated for use as a resource in future communication situations (Säljö 2001). It is important to recognize that literacy learning (reading, writing, and the use of multimodal information) does not occur separately from other aspects of social and cultural activity.

According to Gee (2003, p. 23), when we participate in a new domain and do it in an active and dialogic way rather than in a passive ‘outsider’ way, we learn to experience the world in a new way. Specific domains are shared by groups of people who carry them on as distinctive social practices. Through active and dialogic participation in a new domain, we gain the potential to join this social group and become affiliated with the kinds of people participating in it, even though we never may meet them face-to-face. At the same time, we acquire resources that prepare us for further learning and knowing in that domain or in related domains. Gee (2003, p. 192) calls groups that operate in particular domains ‘affinity groups’. According to Gee, members of an affinity group bond with each other primarily through shared interests, and only secondarily through affective ties. There are no rigid borders or boundaries around affinity groups and the common endeavour is organized around a shared process. The affinity group concept is very similar to the community of practice concept (Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). Communities of practice are groups whose members share a certain set of goals, beliefs and social practices and within which learning and knowing is fostered. Learning advances through membership in such communities and participation in their joint activities.

Gee (2003) stressed that affinity group members possess both extensive and intensive knowledge. Extensive knowledge develops as members are involved in many or all stages and functions within the common endeavour. It refers to the ability to carry out multiple tasks. In addition, members each have specialist knowledge—intensive knowledge—which they bring from their outside experiences and various sociocultural affiliations. Successful dialogue means a process of meaningful interaction in the group, both between persons and in personal knowing, and, of course, in and out of the affinity group. The difficulty is that much of the knowledge within an affinity group is tacit. Gee describes tacit knowledge as being embodied in members’ mental, social and physical coordination with other members of the group and within various tools and technologies. The same applies to explicit and distributed knowledge. Gee describes the knowledge as dispersed—spread across various members, their sociotechnical practices and their tools and technologies. Dispersed knowledge exists across the different sites and institutions where the knowledge is used. These three knowledge forms (tacit, explicit, distributed) describe the way that knowledge is not first and foremost within individuals’ heads or in books, but in networks of social relationships and cultural artefacts.

A sociocultural view of learning and literacy brings forth the need for dialogic literacy in pedagogic thinking in schooling and curriculums. As we participate as learners in different affinity groups (or communities of practice) in our lives, we need to appreciate and attend to a new kind of literacy that requires us to learn to adopt shared thinking and cognition, creative joint inquiry, collaborative ways of working and joint democratic responsibility (Resnick 1992; Isaacs 1999).

Dialogue has many definitions and interpretations, but literacies—or capabilities and competencies, if one prefers to use these terms—connected to dialogue can be understood as central characteristics and requirements for Information Age professions, professional communities and for the construction of knowledge in those communities (Bereiter 1997; Bereiter & Scardamalia 2005). Dialogic literacy is social capital that enables managing language and discourse practices in a community in socially useful ways (Gee 2003). Dialogic literacy also means a process enabling better understanding of oneself and one’s own interpretations and assumptions (Isaacs 1999).

Multimodal representations and situated learning

Multimodality refers to the interplay between different representational modes, for instance, between images and written/spoken word. Multimodal representations mediate the sociocultural ways in which these modes are combined in the communication process (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001, p. 20). Nowadays, it is difficult to draw lines between reading, speech, watching and writing. Humans are not only targets of messages but also producers of communications and meanings and participants in meaning-making communities and networks (Lankshear & Knobel 2006). Using video games as a research target, Gee (2003) has outlined the relationship between literacy and learning. The domain of video gaming brings up the issue of new literacies. According to Gee, language is not the only important communication system in digital media, since visual symbols and signs are as significant as written or spoken language. The idea of visual literacy as a part of new literacies is an important one. Words and images are integrated in a variety of ways in web pages, newspapers and magazines, as well as in textbooks. Gee stresses that in specific domains, content is generated, debated and transformed via distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting and, often, writing and reading. Gee places importance on situated and embodied learning contexts outside school and institutionalized domains. Sociocultural understandings of learning and literacy (with multimodal information) can be crystallized in some specific learning principles. Among the thirty-six learning principles Gee sees at work in active game-playing are the intertextual, multimodal, intelligence and knowledge principles. These principles widen our understanding of the interplay between learning and multimodal representations. The learning principles describe the multiple facets of literacy and learning.

According to Gee, the intertextual principle accounts for the learner’s understanding of text and how this understanding is embedded in a family of related texts, or ‘genres’. A learner understands texts in relation to other texts in a genre. The multimodal principle refers to the notion that the learner is also aware of knowledge being built up through various modalities, not just through written words. Gee further connects the material intelligence principle to the collective and networked nature of knowledge; thinking and knowing are embodied in material objects and in the environment. The material objects and environment free learners to achieve higher levels of thinking and problem solving. The intuitive knowledge principle refers to tacit knowledge which, according to Gee, is built up through practice and experience. Intuitive knowledge evolves in association with an affinity group. Social acknowledgement by the affinity group rewards these learning efforts.

Becoming literate involves adopting particular ways of understanding a domain and the communication modes and textual genres of that domain. Gee states that images often communicate things other than words. The reading of images does not follow the same linear path as the reading of written text. The interplay between words and images is also complex. Two modes of representation together communicate things that neither of the modes would convey separately. Gee stresses that, although reading and writing seem central to what literacy means, we never just read or write about something. We always read or write about something specific. This means that there are many different ways of reading and writing. We read or write, for example, newspapers, advertisements, poetry or essays in different ways. Each of these genres has its own set of rules and requirements. Each is a culturally and historically distinct mode of representation and, in that sense, a different literacy, which could also be called a domain. According to Gee, different domains involve different symbolic and representational resources. A specific domain (or symbolic or semiotic domain) consists of a set of social practices that recruits one or more modalities—written or spoken language, images, symbols, sounds, gestures, artefacts—to communicate distinctive types of meanings. For example, cellular biology and mathematics are different kinds of domains requiring distinct literacies in comparison to, for instance, high-fashion advertisements. The notion of knowledge-producing schools, as discussed by Lankshear and Knobel (2006, pp. 200-4), seeks to build connections between school practices and out-of-school worlds and communities. Digital media give rise to new domains and transform old ones. It is essential that adolescents have an understanding of how different modalities (visual signs and images) play different parts in different domains.

Challenges of learning in and around schooling

As stressed above, information, knowledge and learning are, when considered from a sociocultural perspective, contextual phenomena. Their contextuality refers to their dependence on societal factors and values, historical traditions and changes, organizational and institutional characteristics, and local/situational cultural norms (Wertsch, del Rio & Alvarez 1995). Affinity groups (or communities of knowledge/practice) appear differently in different human activity contexts. School practices and practices outside school differ considerably in their learning and collaboration practices and in the kinds of knowledge used and produced (Säljö 2001).

The language and teaching–learning dialogue of schools concentrate mainly on educational goals and formal teacher-led practices. They occur within the context of the curriculum and in the context of a specific social order. Usher and Edwards (1994), for instance, point out that education and schooling, as sociocultural processes, are intimately connected with the re-creation and reproduction of the values and hierarchies in society. Sociocultural practices reflect the kind of concrete knowledge that directs action or is constructed in action. School learning is an explicit cognitive and rational process supervised by teachers (Goodson 1997; Säljö 2001). From the viewpoint of dialogic literacy, the problem is that in formal teaching and learning there is no room for reciprocal dialogue (Burbules 1993). Isaacs (1999) points out that increasing our understandings of ourselves and of others should be seen as an important educational aim in teaching. Appreciation of dialogue would require changing the balance between collaboration and individual learning.

Bereiter and Scardamalia (2005) make a distinction between the belief mode and the design mode in practices of knowledge creation. This distinction is essential for the pedagogic development of dialogic literacy. In the belief mode the discourse on knowledge is concentrated around rational arguments and their evidentiary value. Stated arguments are evaluated according to how logical they are. In the design mode, discourses on knowledge foreground collaborative problem-solving and attention is directed towards the usefulness and collective improvement of presented ideas. Bereiter and Scardamalia (2005) state that the design mode is dominant in many knowledge professions and communities, such as research groups, design teams and knowledge-based organizations. They criticize schooling and learning practices as remaining at the conception presentation level (the belief mode), where there is very little room for discourses of knowledge creation. In the structured and institutionalized context of schools, learning practices are concentrated very strongly around learning tasks and facilitation and support of traditional information seeking within teacher-led task forms. In teaching and learning situations, knowledge sharing and creation principles differ radically, depending on whether learners are solving challenging complex tasks that reflect real-world problems or just performing routine school tasks based on ready-made conceptual knowledge. Real-world challenging tasks assume joint, critical and shared progressive inquiry with multimodal information (Kuhlthau 2005; Tierney, Bond & Bresler 2006).

The concept of dialogic literacy underlies meaningful participation in practices of information sharing in and outside school. Collaborative knowledge practices imitate how creative groups synthesize, perceive and communicate shared meanings and interpretations in knowledge creation processes (Bereiter & Scardamalia 2005). The successful communication (discourse) in the developing dialogue will emerge especially in the form of joint knowledge-building and better shared understanding. For example, Hakkarainen and his colleagues (2004) described how new ideas and new knowledge often grow within tight social networks and strong relationships among participants in a discourse and with the help of physical and mental artefacts that participants use in their networked collaboration.

Dialogic literacy and traditional information literacy definitions

Literacies can be seen as cultural constructs. They are closely tied to the development of tools and technologies that both afford and demand their evolution In comparison to traditional literacy definitions, the notion of multiple literacies embraces comprehensively the sets of skills needed by individuals to learn, work, interact and cope with the needs of everyday life (Lemke 2004; Lankshear & Knobel 2006). There is a similar need for new understandings of information literacy when the multiple literacies and collaborative competences of today’s information and communication networks are taken into consideration. In this chapter, two related literacy concepts are examined more closely as interpretations of information literacies—functional and dialogic literacy.

UNESCO defines information literacy, in a capacity-building context, as the skills and capabilities for critical reception, assessment and use of information in peoples’ personal or professional lives (Frau-Meigs & Torrent 2009). A person who is functionally literate can engage in all those domain activities in which literacy is required for effective action. Functional literacy may be defined as the ability to comprehend and use communication media (Bereiter & Scardamalia 2005). It refers to the set of skills of searching, using, adapting, creating and reflectively understanding multimodal information for communication and action in daily life (Rosenblatt 1995, 2005). This definition comes very close to the media or digital literacy concepts used in many contexts, but mainly in textual environments (McBrien 1999; Bawden 2001). Digital literacy represents a person’s ability to perform tasks in the digital environment (Thoman & Jolls 2005); media literacy encompasses abilities in a wider media-culture context. Visual literacy is usually defined as the abilities with visual representations that emerge when seeing and integrating sensory experiences (Chauvin 2003). Visual literacy is also regarded as the key to multimodal literacies. Visually literate individuals have imaginative capabilities to create, amend, re-code and reproduce images (Thoman & Jolls 2005).

As Thoman and Jolls (2005) put it, the most critical abilities are the ability to make educated judgments about information and the ability to re-create it. Functional literacy refers to personal reflection on what textual and visual environments are presuming, whereas dialogic literacy refers to social learning and interaction in a productive way in a specific domain. It is worth noting that dialogue is not only a means for discussion or sharing ideas (Abbey 2005). Dialogue is a structured, extended process leading to new insights and deeper knowledge and understandings and, eventually, to better knowledge practices. Dialogic literacy means the ability to engage productively in discourse, the purpose of which is to generate new knowledge and understandings. In contrast to functional literacy, dialogic literacy is the collaborative ability to comprehend and use communication media to serve the purposes of everyday life (Bereiter & Scardamalia 2005; Abbey 2005). Thus, dialogic literacy refers to operating in the design mode rather than the belief mode (see Figure 10.1). Multimodality and interpretation could be seen as a natural part of the shared understandings and dialogical ability of groups. Modern information and communication technology offers tools for cooperation and dialogue that overcome obstacles of time and place. It offers possibilities for creative, democratic and dynamic dialogue among participants in affinity groups or knowledge-creation communities. Dialogic literacy, as a new literacy concept, can be seen, according to Bereiter and Scardamalia (2005) and Abbey (2005) to underlie the knowledge-creating disciplines and professions. Thus dialogic literacy is a necessary literacy for a ‘knowledge society’. Bereiter and Scardamalia argue further that educational policy needs to be shaped accordingly to make it an important pedagogic objective.

Dialogic literacy, like other literacies, involves many skills and attributes and is context-dependent (Bereiter & Scardamalia 2005). The ability to contribute through conversation to knowledge creation in one context does not ensure that the same ability will suffice in another context. The defining skills of dialogic literacy are those without which one’s ability to contribute to knowledge advancement will be limited in any conversational context. Dialogic literacy is a wider concept and refers to pedagogic practices, whereas collaborative competencies relate to the ability to appreciate others in a dialogic communication process (Burbules 1993; Isaacs 1999). Dialogic literacy also means participation in an affinity group’s meaning-making and communication process and productively making use of the particular domain-related resources that the affinity group shares (Gee 2003). The significance or need for dialogic literacy is presently not well identified in schooling. It is necessary to bring out the significance of dialogic abilities as a pedagogic issue for improving teaching and learning (Burbules 1993). With the help of sociocultural literacy and learning approaches, we are able to understand better the demand and need for dialogic literacy in teaching and learning.

Dialogic literacy and the knowledge-creation paradigm in teaching, learning and schooling

Multimodal and dialogic literacies challenge traditional pedagogy and literacy education in schooling. Learning involves learning multiple literacy practices that are differentially useful in various contexts. Literacy learning and literacy practices are not separate from people’s identities and life worlds; in fact, literacy is among the tools that we use to construct particular identities (Gee 1997; Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001; Bezemer & Kress 2008). It is worth noting that literacy practices are ideological as well. Literacy learning and literacy practices are situated within contexts that involve power; some literacies are valued and others are devalued. Some literacy practices provide access to opportunities and others are marginalized (Lemke 1995).

According to George (2002), for students who have grown up in a technology-saturated and image-rich culture, communication and composition will absolutely include the visual, not as attendant to the verbal but as intricately related to the world around them. It can be said that today’s students arc natives of the new communication media and are digitally savvy, whereas their teachers are mostly digital immigrants (Prensky 2001). The ability to effectively communicate in a multimodal and multiliterate society is becoming central in our everyday lives. The adoption of visually-inclusive communication within conventional media environments and within other traditionally text-reliant electronic media requires a move towards a knowledge-creation pedagogy where knowledge is seen as an artefact of our continuous encounters with the reality and the world (Rantala & Korhonen 2008). This is a real challenge for schools, teachers and, most of all, for teacher education.

Knowledge of various representational modes is not knowledge by itself, but is used as a basis for constructing new knowledge and understandings. The relationship between learner and knowledge has to be looked at in a new light in modern pedagogy. An understanding of our own perceptions of the relations between knowledge, experiences and actions becomes important (Bruner 1990, 1999; Säljö 2001).

Differing conceptions of knowledge in schooling have already been discussed in this chapter. The different traditions can be called the knowledge-transmission pedagogy and the knowledge-creation pedagogy. According to Lipman (2003), the prevailing knowledge conception seems to support the traditional standard knowledge-transmission pedagogy, whereas the knowledge-creation paradigm emphasizes inquiry-based learning practice (see Table 10.1). Schools, as social and cultural sites, have historically operated as institutions that socialize learners into traditional standard practices and social and cultural values. Alternative teaching traditions, such as inquiry-based learning, have not widely found a place in the teaching practices of schools (Pahl & Rowsell 2005; Rantala & Korhonen 2008). Table 10.1 indicates how the knowledge-creation pedagogy differs from the traditional, knowledge-transmission pedagogy. Knowledge-creation pedagogy could be seen as a way to support dialogic literacy principles in schooling and to overcome the old boundaries of knowledge conception.

It is important to ask how everyday learning in schooling can be developed (Rantala & Korhonen 2008). One step could be to shift to a more learner-centred pedagogy—one that encourages learners towards shared meaning-making and understandings in classroom communities. In inquiry-based learning, children and youngsters are encouraged to engage in projects that interest them and connect with an actual phenomenon outside school. Vygotsky (1987) pointed out that interaction and discussion directed by an adult in the classroom facilitates and supports the development of learners’ identities as thinkers and actors. Teachers’ support also gradually dissipates and an understanding of the connections between concepts and matters is supported, so that learners gradually become more independently able to understand knowledge more deeply. These kinds of approaches are alternative solutions to the traditional teaching practices in schooling which emphasize knowledge-transmission pedagogy and the study of disconnected facts.

Towards participatory learning and literacy culture

Traditional conceptions of expertise have emphasized formal education and qualifications. These are challenged by definitions of expertise that are based on shared problem-solving skills and conversational competencies (Bereiter & Scardamalia 2005). The concept of dialogic literacy represents this changed conception of knowledge and expertise, which assumes that facts or disciplinary content are not to be learned and appreciated only as aspects of proper knowing but are to be more widely perceived as knowledge and expertise for life. The world of communication is now constituted in ways that make it imperative to highlight the concept of design (the design mode) of information, rather than concepts such as acquisition, competence and critique of information in learning (Kress 2003).

Today’s media and literacy culture could be called participatory design culture as exemplified by social media (Lankshear & Knobel 2006). The collaborative and participatory culture has developed especially around social and mobile media, which challenge traditional ways of teaching and learning. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy practices from individual achievement and expression to community involvement. The key goal of learning becomes how to share knowledge and experiences in multiple and productive ways (Jenkins et al. 2008). In dialogic learning processes, the goal is not only to understand information content and conventions but also to question, discuss and create new knowledge. According to Jenkins and his colleagues, one of the core aims in schooling is to guide children and adolescents towards democratic participatory culture where action, information sharing and collaborative practices are ethically sustainable. In the relationship between media and youth lies a strong base for supporting dialogic literacy in education. The goal should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture.

Multimodal representations in the world outside school challenge traditional practices of teaching and conventional learning situations in schooling. Pahl and Rowsell (2005) and Rantala and Korhonen (2008) introduce new literacy pedagogies in classrooms from the viewpoint of literacy education. The main idea of new literacy pedagogies is to bring the multimodal out-of-school literacy practices of children and adolescents and their whole communicational landscape into classrooms. This would challenge the traditional models of literacy in schools which favour traditional forms of literacy education. The key concepts of this literacy pedagogy are meaning and identity; literacies are seen as meaning-making practices which children and youngsters use to explore the constraints and possibilities of their worlds. This kind of pedagogy calls for communication in which multimodal products or events are both articulated or produced and interpreted or used (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001). From a teacher’s perspective this kind of pedagogy is about drawing on children’s out-of-school literacies across micro, meso and macro levels of schooling, including, for instance, asking learners for help in order to use a certain media technology, getting the support of school administrators in organizing the time and space to work with digital media, and, at the macro level, recognizing new literacies as part of the curriculum (Pahl & Rowsell 2005, pp. 134-9).

Knowledge-creation pedagogy and the enhancement of dialogic literacy might mean the examination of learning situations as arenas in which learners construct socially their learning culture and relationships with outside reality from within their own authentic experiences (Rantala & Korhonen 2008). Teachers could create projects that encourage students to become agents of social change, actively designing their own futures through the manipulation of (semiotic) resources, discourse and literacies. Kress (2003) argues that it is no longer responsible to let children and young experience school without basing schooling on competent performance in design, which is a fundamental fact of contemporary social and cultural life outside school. The participative and dialogic design process is an essential requirement in a changing world.

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