Introduction: Life as a learning context?

Questions of context are not new, but are brought into particularly stark relief by developments promoted through a discourse of lifelong learning. If learning is lifelong and lifewide, what specifically then is a learning context? Are living and learning collapsed into each other? Under the sign of lifelong learning and following work on situated learning (e.g. Lave and Wenger 1991), a great deal of attention is being given to those strata outside educational institutions and other structured learning opportunities wherein people are held to learn. The workplace, the home and the community can all be held to be strata of learning, within which there are specific situations. In this sense, there are learning contexts distributed across the associational order and embedded in practices to such an extent that this order is itself already a learning context, and potentially learning becomes undifferentiated as a practice from other practices. Here the associational order becomes, by definition, a learning order and all contexts are learning contexts.