Learning in 'communities of practice' is a new way of describing and investigating how
people learn and has not been applied extensively in research in early childhood or in art
galleries. This thesis is a critical case study undertaken with preschool children as they
prepared for, participated in and followed up a series of excursions to the National Gallery of Australia. The study explores and analyses children's induction into the
practices of the art gallery and their negotiation of the meanings around these practices in
the gallery and in their preschool. Children's engagement in practices is analysed using a
sociocultural framework for learning called 'communities of practice' (Wenger, 1998) in
combination with a multilevel analysis of the artefacts of practice derived from the
philosophical writings of Wartofsky (1979). Multiple data sources included photographs
of children, their drawings, tape recordings of their incidental talk and group discussions,
and results of play activities as children participated in the practices of the art gallery and
the preschool. Data was also collected through semi-structured interviews with gallery
and preschool staff. In a study involving such young children, the use and juxtaposition
of these multiple sources of data was important because it allowed for the inclusion and
privileging of the material and non-verbal resources as well as verbal resources that
children used as they engaged in practices. Outcomes of this research have been used to
illuminate and problematise early childhood as a site for the intersection of multiple
communities of practice. Learning to make sense of experience is portrayed as more than
language-based 'scaffolding' and the representation of experience through child-centred
play activity. The study provides a detailed descriptive account of children's learning and
sees it as a fundamentally unpredictable and emergent process. It shows that relations of
power are always a part of learning and can be seen through an analysis of the resources
available to children, those they took up and were constrained by in the local situation
and those they brought from other communities of practice. In this process, the children,
as well as their teachers, were active negotiators. They participated in complying with
community-constituted views of knowledge as well as shaping, resisting and contesting
what counted as knowledge. This study makes a contribution to understanding children's
learning in early childhood as fundamentally social, unpredictable, productive and
transformative rather than individually constructed, stable, predetermined and
representational of experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218927 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Fasoli, Lyn, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Communication & Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Lyn Fasoli |
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