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The Ecological Turn: Affordances for Learning Research?
Roy Williams
Roy.williams@port.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper is an exploration of the contribution that ecological theory and
ecologically informed research can make to learning theory and research. It
builds on the contributions of Gibson and the many researchers who have
subsequently critiqued and developed his ideas in ecological psychology, and
it build on work in semiotics, applied linguistics, neuro-psychology, complex
adaptive systems theory, knowledge management, and learning theory.
The aim is to establish a rigorous ‘ecological’ framework for learning
research, and to do this by clarifying and resolving a number of related issues
in the fields of perception, cognition, learning theory, and the semiotics of
engagement with the world. The thesis of the paper is that the notion of
‘affordances’ can be re-defined rigorously and clearly enough for it to play a
central role in an ecological theory of learning, and the paper outlines the
requirements for that to be the case.
Keywords: affordances, ecology, semiotics, indication, prediction, identity.
Introduction
If we are to get to grips with the ecological turn in learning theory and
research, Gibson’s work is an excellent place to start. “Gibson’s ecological
approach has much to offer the study of social behaviour. Most significantly,
it redirects attention away from hypothesized mental representations and
steps of information processing, focusing rather on the discovery of what
actually occurs when people interact” (Valenti and Good 1991: 82-83). Costall
writes that it “seems appropriate to remind ourselves of what Gibson’s theory
of affordances was meant to be for: … a serious attempt to put meaning back into
the world, within a relational ontology” (+), (1995). It was also a serious attempt
to counter the cultural and linguistic relativism of some of the social
psychology of the time.
Gibson is working with issues of human psychology, but he is working
against a much broader ecological canvas, including the full range of animal
behaviour, and across individual and social psychology. The purpose of this
paper is to build on that broader perspective. This resonates with, and builds
on a broad and inclusive semiotics, from the most fundamental material
semiotic through to the virtual semiotics of the global internet.
We need to place Gibson within his context to understand the range of issues
he deals with, and the range of seemingly contradictory statements he
sometimes makes as he moves across this broad spectrum. However, the
issue in this paper is not Gibson per se, but rather an exploration of what can
be called the ecological turn, as it applies to learning, and an attempt to
understand learning both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, so that we
can embed meaning and learning firmly “back into the world”.
Conclusion
Learning can be seen as a process of exploring and establishing affordances,
which requires interaction with, negotiation with, and adaptation to physical,
social and cultural ecologies, as well as the manipulation and transformation
of the environment, for better or for worse. In ecological terms learning, like
language, always involves ‘taking up a position’ or in fact several ‘positions’:
cognitive, social, psychological, emotional, physical, cultural, and ethical
within several ‘communities’, ‘discourses’ or ‘social ecologies’. Gibson
defines an affordance as “something that … implies the complementarity of
the animal and the environment” . An affordance therefore only contributes
to intelligent behaviour as long as the relationship remains complementary;
beyond that it quickly becomes counterproductive, as global energy practices
demonstrate so starkly.
There is ample justification for allocating a special and important role for
‘reason’ and ‘predictive hypotheses’ within formal education, but learning is
based within biological and social ecologies and communities. If we respond
to Derry’s aim, which is to provide a rigorous and long-overdue
epistemological framework for learning, we need to ground learning in the
fundamentals of semiotics, applied linguistics, ecological psychology, and
acquired behaviour within complex adaptive ecologies, across the full range
of linguistic and psychological affordances.
We should keep the ecological thrust of Gibson’s work, namely the idea of an
affordance as the product of an interaction between the organism and the
environment. We can situate this within a rigorous semiotic epistemology, to
arrive at a more nuanced, richer concept of an affordance as the product of the
interaction between the person and the environment, in which each interaction
potentially alters the knowledge, capacity and identity of the person, as well as the
(micro-) environment.
These interactive engagements with the world will be embedded within
social and ecological contexts, and will be informed by, and even ‘infused’ in
part by the most powerful semiotics, including science, the arts, religion and
globalised finance, some of which are based on ‘reason’.
The ‘ecological turn’, based on Gibson’s interventions, adds to and builds on
the semiotic and post-modern turn in the development of social theory, and
the redefined notion of affordances provides a rich framework for exploring
learning across a wide spectrum of contexts.
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