The Relational Habitus: A Lens for Studying Microprocesses of Learning in Context Commentary on Stone, Underwood and Hotchkiss

摘要

Researchers in psychology, education, and anthropology have engaged for several decades in thinking about how to relate persons, tools, speech acts, goals, tasks, culture, and history in dynamic learning settings. The use of the relational habitus, proposed by Stone, Underwood, and Hotchkiss [this issue], provides an analytical lens to examine how people learn in formal and informal settings. Going beyond Bordieu's [1989] notion of habitus, which includes psychological dispositions of individuals developed through interactions, the relational habitus includes the inter-subjective relations of self, tools, tasks, and others. Understanding the relational habitus of a given setting helps explain variations in the social organization of meaning making and variations in learning. The relational habitus includes an orientation to others and mutual perspective taking in communication. Learners are influenced by their own actions with others, with tools, and tasks, and also by affordances of the situation they are learning in. The lens of the relational habitus therefore enables a deep understanding of learning, while at the same time it requires a deep understanding of the local cultural practices, models, and goals. Research that aims to use the relational habitus as an analytical lens will require tools of inquiry and analysis that get at the deep, structural aspects of a setting, as well as the surface structure of what is evident in interactions.