ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an overview of different approaches to transfer. It starts by discussing three core concepts of transfer, transformation and resituation: ‘transfer’ refers to the ‘move’ of knowledge from one context to another; ‘resituation’ refers to the process of adapting it to the new context; and ‘transformation’ refers to the resulting change in knowledge itself. It then discusses five approaches to transfer: the behaviourist, the cognitive, the situated cognition, the participationist and the developmental practices. The chapter shows that these approaches differ both on their view of the relative significance of transfer, transformation and resituation, and on their understanding of the relationship between these phenomena. They also differ as regards which forms of knowledge they are able to account for. For each approach, we provide examples and discuss how the issue of design for transfer is viewed. The upshot of the chapter is that none of the transfer approaches take sufficient account of the fact that knowledge has different realisation formats and that the degree of situativity may be dependent on the realisation format. At the end of the chapter, we discuss implications of this for practice.
