ABSTRACT
Jay Lemke takes up the question as to how bodies-in-interaction mutually transform each other in larger-scale person-environment systems and their flows of matter, energy, and information. In doing so, Lemke also demonstrates through empirical analysis reported in his chapter the centrality of media and materials to the learning process and its outcomes. Lemke explores the following questions: How can we conceptualise learning as an outcome of processes which entangle bodies, artefacts, and other affordances of a setting across multiple timescales? And as itself a process which is distributed across multiple persons, artefacts, and features of settings and activities which become linked across time? People and things undergo processes at larger and smaller scales, over longer and shorter terms, nested within and entangled with one another, and emergent from the flows of matter energy and information which constitute their participants. Such phenomena are typical of complex, non-linear dynamical systems but to perceive them at work in familiar settings of learning requires that we de-centre our perspective from one in which individuals are autonomously agentive sources of action and shift to one in which we are co-participants and mediums for flows, processes, and activities which ongoingly constitute us and leave us changed.
Lemke articulates such a “mediums and flows” perspective while examining a number of episodes in the play of both younger and much older students with computers and computer games in an after-school centre. He identifies the importance of emotions, mood, and feelings as indicators of the ways in which participants are undergoing self-organising flows of matter, energy, and information. He further highlights a range of relevant timescales, from the weeks over which skills, practices, habits, stances, and emotional sensibilities in relation to one another and features of the games, computers, and setting develop and become refined, to the momentary joys and actions which show us the tips of great icebergs caught in the currents of life.
A spontaneous birthday celebration provides the nexus where flows supporting skills across different virtual worlds and events in the computer laboratory come together with group relationships and an opportunity for making something fun happen. It also supplies an organising centre for the analysis to reach back in time to trace its antecedents. The participants, in traditional terms, include university undergraduates acting as mentors to elementary school students as part of their coursework in an innovative learning and teaching model that finds itself needing to adapt to this particular setting and circumstances. The undergraduates identify their experiences in this setting as among the best (personally and for learning) in all their college years. Some even returned to the setting after completing the course to act as informal helpers or research assistants. Both they and the research identify the emotional climate and experiences of the setting as crucial for its impact. This analysis seeks to go deeper and formulate a model to understand how this happens.
