LAUSR

Efforts to understand the dynamic processes of learning situated across space and time, online and offline, are presently challenging traditional definitions of learning and education. Digitalisation and expanded practices of learning that stretch across space and time are resulting in significant changes in young people’s learning practices and ecologies (Erstad et al., 2016). Here, formal education is loosing much of its control over information and knowledge available to learners (Hillman and Säljö, 2016). The consequences of such changes to the practices and outcomes of learning, including the development of values, skills and identities, clearly deserve closer examination and explanation. Not only is this a pragmatic challenge, that is, how to trace learners across physical contexts but also very much a conceptual and methodological one. This entails how to conceptualize and operationalise the “context” of learning. This theme issue is devoted to addressing conceptual, methodological and empirical questions surrounding educational research on investigating learning across contexts in contemporary tool-rich and expanded settings. It will introduce a set of empirical studies that all focus on researching learning as a complex phenomenon that stretches across space and time, beyond the here and now. All the articles will also direct attention into the role of material artefacts, such as new digital technologies in creating hybrid learning contexts that transform learners’ interactions and engagement across artifacts, participants and time-space contexts. In these studies the authors introduce their conceptual and methodological frameworks in defining ‘a learning context’ and how this framing has guided their inquiries into analyzing and understanding learning in young peoples’ learning lives in formal educational settings and beyond. In their article Authenticity, Agency and Enterprise Education – Studying Learning in and Out of School Øystein Gilje and Ola Erstad analyse enterprise education as an interesting case of a cross-curricular programme that tries to facilitate authenticity and authentic learning as well as agency among students beyond the traditional formal school context. They investigate how five young female students worked with an environmental product for seven months in a mini-company as they moved between school and other settings as part of their project in enterprise education that promote real-life applications of knowledge. The study illustrates how one particular idea in enterprise education develops over time in an open-ended task that results in a product, which relates to a real world practice (being an entrepreneur). The findings demonstrate the value of following learners and artifacts across contexts and time in informing educational research about how identity and learning are brought together by students’ engagement in their activity and about the relationship between the learner and the context. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory on dialogical self-making the article iBecome: iPads as a tool for self-making co-authored by Katherine McLay, Peter Renshaw and Louise Phillips argues for the importance of conceptualising learning not only as an epistemological endeavor but also ontological and ideological. In doing so the authors direct our attention to learning beyond mere mastery of knowledge and skills to how students’ identities shift and transform in response to various mediating influences across space and time. Adopting a reflexive microethnographic research approach, the study portays an in-depth analysis of one student and shows how this student negotiated and traversed the challenges of relational self-making, both in relation to iPads and to others. Overall, the study demonstrates how the dialogic self theory can capture the fluid nature of students’ identity work, as students take up and use digital tools as mediational means in their knowledge-making as well as self-making at school and beyond. The article Heterochrony through moment-to-moment interaction: A micro-analytical exploration of learning as sense making with multiple resources by Ingvill Rasmussen and Crina Damşa illuminates the challenges and their overcomings in