A Toolkit for Analyzing Teaching and Learning Across Contexts

This session explicates a theoretical perspective that addresses the complexities of moving across teaching and learning contexts in everyday life, both in formal settings such as school but also informal settings, and between physical and virtual spaces. While the education research community has made important progress
toward understanding learning in a variety of formal and informal contexts, less emphasis has been placed on understanding how teaching and learning experiences can be connected across these contexts and about the variety of teaching and teachers that are essential to them. We outline an analytic perspective called distributed teaching and learning systems (DTALS), which augments other models of learning by stressing the importance of movements across contexts and foregrounds teaching as a key feature alongside learning. We then provide a set of tools for analyzing pedagogical situations through a DTALS perspective and a brief worked example of the tools in action.